Sanine by Mikhail Artsybashev (ebook pdf reader for pc .TXT) 📕

the sinister shadow imitated his gesture. This time Semenoff also noticed it.

“Do you see?” said he bitterly. “There, behind me, stands Death, watching my every movement. What’s Bebel to me? Just a babbler, who babbles about this. And then some other fool will babble about that. It is all the same to me! If I don’t die today, I shall die tomorrow.”

Yourii made no answer. He felt confused and hurt.

“You, for instance,” continued Semenoff, “you think that it’s very important, all this that goes on at the University, and what Bebel says. But what I think is that, if you knew for certain, as I do, that you were going to die you would not care in the least what Bebel or Nietzsche or Tolstoy or anybody else said.”

Semenoff was silent.

The moon still shone brightly, and ever the black shadow followed in their wake.

“My constitution’s done for!” said Semenoff suddenly in quite a different voice, thin and querulous. “If you knew how I dread dying.⁠ ⁠… Especially on such a bright, soft night as this,” he continued plaintively, turning to Yourii his ugly haggard face and glittering eyes. “Everything lives, and I must die. To you that sounds a hackneyed phrase, I feel certain. ‘And I must die.’ But it is not from a novel, not taken from a work written with ‘artistic truth of presentment.’ I really am going to die, and to me the words do not seem hackneyed. One day you will not think that they are, either. I am dying, dying, and all is over!”

Semenoff coughed again.

“I often think that before long I shall be in utter darkness, buried in the cold earth, my nose fallen in, and my hands rotting, and here in the world all will be just as it is now, while I walk along alive. And you’ll be living, and breathing this air, and enjoying this moonlight, and you’ll go past my grave where I lie, hideous and corrupted. What do you suppose I care for Bebel, or Tolstoy or a million other gibbering apes?” These last words he uttered with sudden fury. Yourii was too depressed to reply.

“Well, good night!” said Semenoff faintly. “I must go in.” Yourii shook hands with him, feeling deep pity for him, hollow-chested, round-shouldered, and with the crooked stick hanging from a button of his overcoat. He would have liked to say something consoling that might encourage hope, but he felt that this was impossible.

“Goodbye!” he said, sighing.

Semenoff raised his cap and opened the gate. The sound of his footsteps and of his cough grew fainter, and then all was still. Yourii turned homewards. All that only one short half-hour ago had seemed to him bright and fair and calm⁠—the moonlight, the starry heaven, the poplar trees touched with silvery splendour, the mysterious shadows⁠—all were now dead, and cold and terrible as some vast, tremendous tomb.

On reaching home, he went softly to his room and opened the window looking on to the garden. For the first time in his life he reflected that all that had engrossed him, and for which he had shown such zeal and unselfishness was really not the right, the important thing. If, so he thought, some day, like Semenoff, he were about to die, he would feel no burning regret that men had not been made happier by his efforts, nor grief that his lifelong ideals remained unrealized. The only grief would be that he must die, must lose sight, and sense, and hearing, before having had time to taste all the joys that life could yield.

He was ashamed of such a thought, and, putting it aside, sought for an explanation.

“Life is conflict.”

“Yes, but conflict for whom, if not for one’s self, for one’s own place in the sun?”

Thus spake a voice within. Yourii affected not to hear it and strove to think of something else. But his mind reverted to this thought without ceasing; it tormented him even to bitter tears.

V

When Lida Sanine received Lialia’s invitation, she showed it to her brother. She thought that he would refuse; in fact, she hoped as much. She felt that on the moonlit river she would again be drawn to Sarudine, and would again experience that sensation at once delicious and disquieting. At the same time she was ashamed that her brother should know that it was Sarudine, of all people, whom he cordially despised.

But Sanine at once accepted with pleasure.

The day was an ideal one; bright sunlight and a cloudless sky.

“No doubt there will be some nice girls there, whose acquaintance you may care to make,” said Lida, mechanically.

“Ah! that’s good!” said Sanine. “The weather is lovely, too; so let’s go!”

At the time appointed, Sarudine and Tanaroff drove up in the large lineika belonging to their squadron with two big regimental horses.

“Lidia Petrovna, we are waiting for you,” cried Sarudine, looking extremely smart in white, and heavily scented.

Lida in a light gauzy dress with a collar and waistband of rose-coloured velvet ran down the steps and held out both her hands to Sarudine. For a moment he grasped them tightly, as he glanced admiringly at her person.

“Let us go, let us go,” she exclaimed, in excitement, and confusion, for she knew the meaning of that glance.

Very soon the lineika was swiftly rolling along the little-used road across the steppes. The tall stems of the grass bent beneath the wheels; the fresh breeze as it lightly touched the hair, made the grasses wave on either side. Outside the town they overtook another carriage containing Lialia, Yourii, Riasantzeff, Novikoff, Ivanoff and Semenoff. They were cramped and uncomfortable, yet all were merry and in high spirits. Only Yourii, after last night’s talk, was puzzled by Semenoff’s behaviour. He could not understand how the latter could laugh and joke like the others. After all that he had told him, such mirth seemed strange. “Was it all put on?” he thought, as he furtively glanced at Semenoff. He