All my children came to Yasnaya Polyana and called in a specialist on
nervous diseases and had a nurse to be with me. For five days I ate
nothing and did not take a drop of water.
I felt no hunger, but my thirst was acute. In the evening of the fifth
day my daughter Tanya persuaded me to drink a cup of coffee, by saying
that, if father summoned me, I would be so weak that I should be unable
to go.
Next morning we received a telegram from the newspaper _Russkoye Slovo_
that Leo Nikolaevich had fallen ill at Astapovo and that his temperature
was 104. The "intimate" friend had received a telegram before this and
had already left, carefully concealing from his family the place where
the patient was lying. We took a special train at Tula and went to
Astapovo. Our son Serge on his way to his estate had been overtaken by a
telegram from his wife who had sent it at our daughter Alexandra's
request, and he was already with his father.
This was the beginning of new and cruel sufferings for me. Round my
husband was a crowd of strangers and outsiders, and I, his wife who had
lived with him for forty-eight years, was not admitted to see him. The
door of the room was locked, and, when I wanted to get a glimpse of my
husband through the window, a curtain was drawn across it. Two nurses
who were told off to look after me held me firmly by the arms and did
not allow me to move. Meanwhile Leo Nikolaevich called our daughter
Tanya to him and began asking all about me, believing me to be in
Yasnaya Polyana. At every question he cried, and our daughter said to
him: "Don't let us talk about mama, it agitates you too much." "Ah, no,"
he said, "that is more important to me than anything." He also said to
her, but already indistinctly: "A great deal of trouble is falling upon
Sonya; we have managed it badly."
No one ever told him that I had come, though I implored every one to do
so. It is difficult to say who was responsible for this cruelty. Every
one was afraid of accelerating his death by agitating him; that was also
the doctors' opinion.{72} Who can tell? Perhaps our meeting and my ways
of looking after him to which he was accustomed, might have revived him.
In one of his letters to me, which I have recently published, Leo
Nikolaevich writes that he dreads falling ill without me.
The doctors allowed me to see my husband when he was now hardly
breathing, lying motionless on his back, with his eyes already closed. I
whispered softly some tender words in his ear, hoping that he might
still hear how I had been all the time there in Astapovo and how I loved
him to the end. I don't remember what more I said to him, but two deep
sighs, as though the result of a terrible effort, came as an answer to
my words, and then all was still....
All the days and nights that followed, until his body was removed, I
spent by the dead, and in me too life became cold. The body was taken to
Yasnaya Polyana; a multitude of people came there, but I saw and
recognized no one, and the day after the funeral I collapsed with the
same illness, pneumonia, though in a less dangerous form, and I was in
bed for eighteen days.
A great comfort to me at the time was the presence of my sister Tatyana
Andreevna Kuzminskii, and of Leo Nikolaevich's cousin, Varvara
Valeryanovna Nagornaya. My children, tired out, returned to their
families.