“Years of gladness,
Days of joy,
Like the torrents of spring
They hurried away.”
—_From an Old Ballad_.
… At two o’clock in the night he had gone back to his study. He had
dismissed the servant after the candles were lighted, and throwing
himself into a low chair by the hearth, he hid his face in both hands.
Never had he felt such weariness of body and of spirit. He had passed
the whole evening in the company of charming ladies and cultivated men;
some of the ladies were beautiful, almost all the men were
distinguished by intellect or talent; he himself had talked with great
success, even with brilliance … and, for all that, never yet had the
_taedium vitae_ of which the Romans talked of old, the “disgust for
life,” taken hold of him with such irresistible, such suffocating
force. Had he been a little younger, he would have cried with misery,
weariness, and exasperation: a biting, burning bitterness, like the
bitter of wormwood, filled his whole soul. A sort of clinging
repugnance, a weight of loathing closed in upon him on all sides like a
dark night of autumn; and he did not know how to get free from this
darkness, this bitterness. Sleep it was useless to reckon upon; he knew
he should not sleep.
He fell to thinking … slowly, listlessly, wrathfully. He thought of the
vanity, the uselessness, the vulgar falsity of all things human. All
the stages of man’s life passed in order before his mental gaze (he had
himself lately reached his fifty-second year), and not one found grace
in his eyes. Everywhere the same ever-lasting pouring of water into a
sieve, the ever-lasting beating of the air, everywhere the same
self-deception—half in good faith, half conscious—any toy to amuse the
child, so long as it keeps him from crying. And then, all of a sudden,
old age drops down like snow on the head, and with it the ever-growing,
ever-gnawing, and devouring dread of death … and the plunge into the
abyss! Lucky indeed if life works out so to the end! May be, before the
end, like rust on iron, sufferings, infirmities come…. He did not
picture life’s sea, as the poets depict it, covered with tempestuous
waves; no, he thought of that sea as a smooth, untroubled surface,
stagnant and transparent to its darkest depths. He himself sits in a
little tottering boat, and down below in those dark oozy depths, like
prodigious fishes, he can just make out the shapes of hideous monsters:
all the ills of life, diseases, sorrows, madness, poverty, blindness….
He gazes, and behold, one of these monsters separates itself off from
the darkness, rises higher and higher, stands out more and more
distinct, more and more loathsomely distinct…. An instant yet, and the
boat that bears him will be overturned! But behold, it grows dim again,
it withdraws, sinks down to the bottom, and there it lies, faintly
stirring in the slime…. But the fated day will come, and it will
overturn the boat.
He shook his head, jumped up from his low chair, took two turns up and
down the room, sat down to the writing-table, and opening one drawer
after another, began to rummage among his papers, among old letters,
mostly from women. He could not have said why he was doing it; he was
not looking for anything—he simply wanted by some kind of external
occupation to get away from the thoughts oppressing him. Opening
several letters at random (in one of them there was a withered flower
tied with a bit of faded ribbon), he merely shrugged his shoulders, and
glancing at the hearth, he tossed them on one side, probably with the
idea of burning all this useless rubbish. Hurriedly, thrusting his
hands first into one, and then into another drawer, he suddenly opened
his eyes wide, and slowly bringing out a little octagonal box of
old-fashioned make, he slowly raised its lid. In the box, under two
layers of cotton wool, yellow with age, was a little garnet cross.
For a few instants he looked in perplexity at this cross—suddenly he
gave a faint cry…. Something between regret and delight was expressed
in his features. Such an expression a man’s face wears when he suddenly
meets some one whom he has long lost sight of, whom he has at one time
tenderly loved, and who suddenly springs up before his eyes, still the
same, and utterly transformed by the years.
He got up, and going back to the hearth, he sat down again in the
arm-chair, and again hid his face in his hands…. “Why to-day? just
to-day?” was his thought, and he remembered many things, long since
past.
This is what he remembered….
But first I must mention his name, his father’s name and his surname.
He was called Dimitri Pavlovitch Sanin.
Here follows what he remembered.
I
It was the summer of 1840. Sanin was in his twenty-second year, and he
was in Frankfort on his way home from Italy to Russia. He was a man of
small property, but independent, almost without family ties. By the
death of a distant relative, he had come into a few thousand roubles,
and he had decided to spend this sum abroad before entering the
service, before finally putting on the government yoke, without which
he could not obtain a secure livelihood. Sanin had carried out this
intention, and had fitted things in to such a nicety that on the day of
his arrival in Frankfort he had only just enough money left to take him
back to Petersburg. In the year 1840 there were few railroads in
existence; tourists travelled by diligence. Sanin had taken a place in
the “_bei-wagon_”; but the diligence did not start till eleven o’clock
in the evening. There was a great deal of time to be got through before
then. Fortunately it was lovely weather, and Sanin after dining at a
hotel, famous in those days, the White Swan, set off to stroll about
the town. He went in to look at Danneker’s Ariadne, which he did not
much care for, visited the house of Goethe, of whose works he had,
however, only read _Werter_, and that in the French translation. He
walked along the bank of the Maine, and was bored as a well-conducted
tourist should be; at last at six o’clock in the evening, tired, and
with dusty boots, he found himself in one of the least remarkable
streets in Frankfort. That street he was fated not to forget long, long
after. On one of its few houses he saw a signboard: “Giovanni Roselli,
Italian confectionery,” was announced upon it. Sanin went into it to
get a glass of lemonade; but in the shop, where, behind the modest
counter, on the shelves of a stained cupboard, recalling a chemist’s
shop, stood a few bottles with gold labels, and as many glass jars of
biscuits, chocolate cakes, and sweetmeats—in this room, there was not a
soul; only a grey cat blinked and purred, sharpening its claws on a
tall wicker chair near the window and a bright patch of colour was made
in the evening sunlight, by a big ball of red wool lying on the floor
beside a carved wooden basket turned upside down. A confused noise was
audible in the next room. Sanin stood a moment, and making the bell on
the door ring its loudest, he called, raising his voice, “Is there no
one here?” At that instant the door from an inner room was thrown open,
and Sanin was struck dumb with amazement.