At Cologne I again came upon the track of Gaguine and his sister. I
learned that they had gone to London. I immediately went to that city;
all researches that I made there were in vain. For a long time I did not
allow myself to be discouraged; for a long time I showed obstinate
persistence, but finally was obliged to give up all hope of meeting them
again.
I never saw them again! I never again saw Annouchka!--Later I heard some
quite vague rumors of her brother; but as to her I have never heard her
spoken of; I do not even know if she still lives.
Some years ago, while travelling, I caught sight for an instant, at the
door of a railway-carriage, of a woman whose face had a little
resemblance to those features that I shall never forget; but this
resemblance was doubtless the result of chance. Annouchka lived in my
memory as the young girl whom I saw at our last interview, pale and
trembling, leaning upon the back of a wooden chair in the dark corner
of a lonely room.
Besides, I must confess that the course of my grief was not of long
duration. Soon I persuaded myself that fate had been favorable to me in
preventing my marriage with her, and that a woman with such a
disposition would certainly not make me happy. I was still young at this
period, and that time so short and limited that they call the future
appeared to me infinite. "That which has happened once to me upon my
travels," I said to myself, "can I not meet it again, more charming and
more delightful?" Since then I have known other women; but that feeling
so tender that Annouchka had once awakened was never again aroused.
No--no glance has ever replaced the glance of those eyes fastened upon
mine; I have never again clasped to my breast a heart to whose throbbing
mine has responded with an ecstacy so joyful. Condemned to the solitary
existence of a wandering man, without a home, I regard those days the
saddest of my life; but I still preserve as a relic two little notes and
a withered sprig of geranium that she once threw me from the window; it
breathes even now a slight fragrance, whilst the hand that gave it to
me, that hand that I pressed upon my lips only once, has, perhaps, long
since returned to dust. And I, what have I become? What is there left in
me of the man of former days, of the restlessness of youth, of my plans,
of my ambitious hopes?--Thus the slight perfume of a blade of grass
outlives all joys, all human griefs,--outlives even man himself.
* * * * *