----
Only one year has passed since that night, and Vassilyev has hardly
had time to wear out the boots in which he tramped through the mud
behind his wife's coffin.
At the present time as I finish this story, he is sitting in my
drawing-room and, playing on the piano, is showing the ladies how
provincial misses sing sentimental songs. The ladies are laughing,
and he is laughing too. He is enjoying himself.
I call him into my study. Evidently not pleased at my taking him
from agreeable company, he comes to me and stands before me in the
attitude of a man who has no time to spare. I give him this story,
and ask him to read it. Always condescending about my authorship,
he stifles a sigh, the sigh of a lazy reader, sits down in an
armchair and begins upon it.
"Hang it all, what horrors," he mutters with a smile.
But the further he gets into the reading, the graver his face
becomes. At last, under the stress of painful memories, he turns
terribly pale, he gets up and goes on reading as he stands. When
he has finished he begins pacing from corner to corner.
"How does it end?" I ask him.
"How does it end? H'm. . . ."
He looks at the room, at me, at himself. . . . He sees his new
fashionable suit, hears the ladies laughing and . . . sinking on a
chair, begins laughing as he laughed on that night.
"Wasn't I right when I told you it was all absurd? My God! I have
had burdens to bear that would have broken an elephant's back; the
devil knows what I have suffered--no one could have suffered more,
I think, and where are the traces? It's astonishing. One would have
thought the imprint made on a man by his agonies would have been
everlasting, never to be effaced or eradicated. And yet that imprint
wears out as easily as a pair of cheap boots. There is nothing left,
not a scrap. It's as though I hadn't been suffering then, but had
been dancing a mazurka. Everything in the world is transitory, and
that transitoriness is absurd! A wide field for humorists! Tack on
a humorous end, my friend!"
"Pyotr Nikolaevitch, are you coming soon?" The impatient ladies
call my hero.
"This minute," answers the "vain and fatuous" man, setting his tie
straight. "It's absurd and pitiful, my friend, pitiful and absurd,
but what's to be done? _Homo sum_. . . . And I praise Mother Nature
all the same for her transmutation of substances. If we retained
an agonising memory of toothache and of all the terrors which every
one of us has had to experience, if all that were everlasting, we
poor mortals would have a bad time of it in this life."
I look at his smiling face and I remember the despair and the horror
with which his eyes were filled a year ago when he looked at the
dark window. I see him, entering into his habitual rôle of intellectual
chatterer, prepare to show off his idle theories, such as the
transmutation of substances before me, and at the same time I recall
him sitting on the floor in a pool of blood with his sick imploring
eyes.
"How will it end?" I ask myself aloud.
Vassilyev, whistling and straightening his tie, walks off into the
drawing-room, and I look after him, and feel vexed. For some reason
I regret his past sufferings, I regret all that I felt myself on
that man's account on that terrible night. It is as though I had
lost something. . . .