She had lied. She did not come, and I waited for her in vain. The grey,
uniform, frozen semi-darkness descended from the lightless sky, and I
was not conscious of when the twilight passed into evening, and when
the evening passed into night—to me it was all one long night. I kept
walking backwards and forwards with the same even, measured steps of
hope deferred. I did not come close up to the tall house, where my
beloved dwelt, nor to its glazed door which shone yellow at the end of
the iron covered way, but I walked on the opposite side of the street
with the same measured strides—backwards and forwards, backwards and
forwards. In going forward I did not take my eye off the glazed door,
and when I turned back I stopped frequently and turned my head round,
and then the snow pricked my face with its sharp needles. And so long
were those sharp cold needles that they penetrated to my very heart,
and pierced it with grief and anger at my useless waiting. The cold
wind blew uninterruptedly from the bright north to the dark south, and
whistled playfully on the icy roofs, and rebounding cut my face with
sharp little snow-flakes, and softly tapped the glasses of the empty
lanterns, in which the lonely yellow flame, shivering with cold, bent
to the draught. And I felt sorry for the lonely flame which lived only
by night, and I thought to myself, when I go away all life will end in
this street, and only the snowflakes will fly through the empty space;
but still the yellow flame will continue to shiver and bend in
loneliness and cold.
I waited for her, but she came not. And it seemed to me that the lonely
flame and I were like one another, only that my lamp was not empty, for
in that void, which I kept measuring with my strides, there did
sometimes appear people. They grew up unheard behind my back, big and
dark; they passed me, and like ghosts suddenly disappeared round the
corner of the white building. Then again they would come out from round
the corner, come up alongside of me and then gradually melt away in the
great distance, obscured by the silently falling snow. Muffled up,
formless, silent, they were so like to one another and to myself that
it seemed as if scores of people were walking backwards and forwards
and waiting, as I was, shivering and silent, and were thinking their
own enigmatic sad thoughts.
I waited for her, but she came not. I know not why I did not cry out
and weep for pain. I know not why I laughed and was glad, and crooked
my fingers like claws, as though I held in them that little venomous
thing which kept hissing like a snake: a lie! It wriggled in my hands,
and bit my heart, and my head reeled with its poison. Everything was a
lie! The boundary line between the future and the present, the present
and the past, vanished. The boundary line between the time when I did
not yet exist, and the time when I began to be, vanished, and I thought
that I must have always been alive, or else never have lived at all.
And always, before I lived and when I began to live, she had ruled over
me, and I felt it strange that she should have a name and a body, and
that her existence should have a beginning and an end. She had no name,
she was always the one that lies, that makes eternally to wait, and
never comes. And I knew not why, but I laughed, and the sharp needles
pierced my heart, and right into my ear some one unseen laughed:
“Ho! ho! ho!”
Opening my eyes I looked at the lighted windows of the lofty house, and
they quietly said to me in their blue and red language:
“Thou art deceived by her. At this very moment whilst thou art
wandering, waiting, and suffering, she, all bright, lovely, and
treacherous, is there, listening to the whispers of that tall, handsome
man, who despises thee. If thou wert to break in there and kill her,
thou wouldst be doing a good deed, for thou wouldst slay a lie.”
I gripped the knife I held in my hand tighter, and answered laughingly:
“Yes, I will kill her.”
But the windows gazed at me mournfully, and added sadly: “Thou wilt
never kill her. Never! because the weapon thou holdest in thy hand is
as much a lie as are her kisses.”
The silent shadows of my fellow-watchers had disappeared long ago, and
I was left alone in the cold void, I—and the lonely tongues of fire
shivering with cold and despair. The clock in the neighbouring
church-tower began to strike, and its dismal metallic sound trembled
and wept, flying away into the void, and being lost in the maze of
silently whirling snowflakes. I began to count the strokes, and went
into a fit of laughter. The clock struck 15! The belfry was old, and
so, too, was the clock, and although it indicated the right time, it
struck spasmodically, sometimes so often that the grey, ancient
bell-ringer had to clamber up and stop the convulsive strokes of the
hammer with his hand. For whom did those senilely tremulous, melancholy
sounds, which were embraced and throttled by the frosty darkness, tell
a lie? So pitiable and inept was that useless lie.
With the last lying sounds of the clock the glazed door slammed, and a
tall man made his way down the steps.
I saw only his back, but I recognized it as I had seen it only last
evening, proud and contemptuous. I recognized his walk, and it was
lighter and more confident than in the evening: thus had I often left
that door. He walked, as those do, whom the lying lips of a woman have
just kissed.