Sanine

He pictured her as he had seen her last; her large, sad eyes; the thin

blouse that lightly veiled her soft bosom; her hair in a single loose

plait. In her face Sarudine saw neither malice nor contempt. Those dark

eyes gazed at him in sorrowful reproach. He remembered how he had

repulsed her at the moment of her supreme distress. The sense of having

lost her wounded him like a knife.

"She suffered then far more than I do now.... I thrust her from me....

I almost wanted her to drown herself; wanted her to die."

As to a last anchor that should save him, his whole soul turned to her.

He yearned for her caresses, her sympathy. For an instant it seemed to

him as if all his actual sufferings would efface the past; yet he knew,

alas! that Lida would never, never come back to him, and that all was

at an end. Before him lay nothing but the blank, abysmal void!

Raising his arm, Sarudine pressed his hand against his brow. He lay

there, motionless, with eyes closed and teeth clenched, striving to see

nothing, to hear nothing, to feel nothing. But after a little while his

hand dropped, and he sat up. His head ached terribly, his tongue seemed

on fire, and he trembled from head to foot. Then he rose and staggered

to the table.

"I have lost everything; my life, Lida, everything!"

It flashed across him that this life of his, after all, had not been

either good, or glad, or sane, but foolish, perverted and base.

Sarudine, the handsome Sarudine, entitled to all that was best and most

enjoyable in life, no longer existed. There was only a feeble,

emasculated body left to bear all this pain and dishonour.

"To live on is impossible," he thought, "for that would mean the entire

effacement of the past. I should have to begin a new life, to become

quite a different man, and that I cannot do!"

His head fell forward on the table, and in the weird, flickering

candlelight he lay there, motionless.