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

that stabbed his heart like a dagger. Millions of men at that moment were merrily enjoying life, laughing and joking; some, it might be, were even talking about him. But he, only he, was alone. Vainly he sought to recall familiar faces. Yet pale, and strange, and cold, they appeared to him, and their eyes had a look of curiosity and malevolent glee. Then, in his dejection, he thought of Lida.

He pictured her as he had seen her last; her large, sad eyes; the thin blouse that lightly veiled her soft bosom; her hair in a single loose plait. In her face Sarudine saw neither malice nor contempt. Those dark eyes gazed at him in sorrowful reproach. He remembered how he had repulsed her at the moment of her supreme distress. The sense of having lost her wounded him like a knife.

“She suffered then far more than I do now.⁠ ⁠… I thrust her from me.⁠ ⁠… I almost wanted her to drown herself; wanted her to die.”

As to a last anchor that should save him, his whole soul turned to her. He yearned for her caresses, her sympathy. For an instant it seemed to him as if all his actual sufferings would efface the past; yet he knew, alas! that Lida would never, never come back to him, and that all was at an end. Before him lay nothing but the blank, abysmal void!

Raising his arm, Sarudine pressed his hand against his brow. He lay there, motionless, with eyes closed and teeth clenched, striving to see nothing, to hear nothing, to feel nothing. But after a little while his hand dropped, and he sat up. His head ached terribly, his tongue seemed on fire, and he trembled from head to foot. Then he rose and staggered to the table.

“I have lost everything; my life, Lida, everything!”

It flashed across him that this life of his, after all, had not been either good, or glad, or sane, but foolish, perverted and base. Sarudine, the handsome Sarudine, entitled to all that was best and most enjoyable in life, no longer existed. There was only a feeble, emasculated body left to bear all this pain and dishonour.

“To live on is impossible,” he thought, “for that would mean the entire effacement of the past. I should have to begin a new life, to become quite a different man, and that I cannot do!”

His head fell forward on the table, and in the weird, flickering candlelight he lay there, motionless.

XXXII

On that same evening Sanine went to see Soloveitchik. The little Jew was sitting alone on the steps of his house, gazing at the bare, deserted space in front of it where several disused pathways crossed the withered grass. Depressing indeed was the sight of the vacant sheds, with their huge, rusty locks, and of the black windows of the mill. The whole scene spoke mournfully of life and activity that long had ceased.

Sanine instantly noticed the changed expression of Soloveitchik’s face. He no longer smiled, but seemed anxious and worried. His dark eyes had a questioning look.

“Ah! good evening,” he said, as in apathetic fashion he took the other’s hand. Then he continued gazing at the calm evening sky, against which the black roofs of the sheds stood out in ever sharper relief.

Sanine sat down on the opposite side of the steps, lighted a cigarette, and silently watched Soloveitchik, whose strange demeanour interested him.

“What do you do with yourself here?” he asked, after a while.

Languidly the other turned to him his large, sad eyes.

“I just live here, that’s all. When the mill was at work, I used to be in the office. But now it’s closed, and everybody’s gone away except myself.”

“Don’t you find it lonely, to be all by yourself, like this?”

Soloveitchik was silent.

Then, shrugging his shoulders, he said: “It’s all the same to me.”

They remained silent. There was no sound but the rattling of the dog’s chain.

“It’s not the place that’s lonely,” exclaimed Soloveitchik with sudden vehemence. “But it’s here I feel it, and here,” He touched his forehead and his breast.

“What’s the matter with you?” asked Sanine calmly.

“Look here,” continued Soloveitchik, becoming more excited, “you struck a man today, and smashed his face in. Perhaps you have ruined his whole life. Pray don’t be offended at my speaking to you like this. I have thought a great deal about it all, sitting here, as you see, and wondering, wondering. Now, if I ask you something, will you answer me?”

For a moment his features were contorted by his usual set smile.

“Ask me whatever you like,” replied Sanine, kindly. “You’re afraid of offending me, eh? That won’t offend me, I assure you. What’s done is done; and, if I thought that I had done wrong, I should be the first to say so.”

“I wanted to ask you this,” said Soloveitchik, quivering with excitement. “Do you realize that perhaps you might have killed that man?”

“There’s not much doubt about that,” replied Sanine. “It would have been difficult for a man like Sarudine to get out of the mess unless he killed me, or I killed him. But, as regards killing me, he missed the psychological moment, so to speak; and at present he’s not in a fit condition to do me harm. Later on he won’t have the pluck. He’s played his part.”

“And you calmly tell me all this?”

“What do you mean by ‘calmly?’ ” asked Sanine. “I couldn’t look on calmly and see a chicken killed, much less a man. It was painful to me to hit him. To be conscious of one’s own strength is pleasant, of course, but it was nevertheless a horrible experience⁠—horrible, because such an act in itself was brutal. Yet my conscience is calm. I was but the instrument of fate. Sarudine has come to grief because the whole bent of his life was bound to bring about a catastrophe; and the marvel is that others of his sort do not share his fate. These are