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

want of food or of sexual satisfaction? The devil take all workers and nonworkers in this world!”

“I wish somebody would shoot me,” he thought. “Kill me, right out, with a shot aimed from behind, so that I should feel nothing. What nonsense, isn’t it? Why must somebody else do it? and not I myself? Am I really such a coward that I cannot pluck up courage to end this life which I know to be nothing but misery? Sooner or later, one must die, so that⁠ ⁠…”

He approached the drawer in which he kept his revolver, and furtively took it out.

“Suppose I were to try? Not really because I⁠ ⁠… just for fun!”

He slipped the weapon into his pocket and went out on to the veranda leading to the garden. On the steps lay yellow, withered leaves. He kicked them in all directions as he whistled a melancholy tune.

“What’s that you’re whistling?” asked Lialia, gaily, as she came across the garden. “It’s like a dirge for your departed youth.”

“Don’t talk nonsense!” replied Yourii irritably; and from that moment he felt the approach of something that it was beyond his power to prevent. Like an animal that knows death is near, he wandered restlessly hither and thither, to look for some quiet spot. The courtyard only irritated him, so he walked down to the river where yellow leaves were floating, and threw a dry twig into the stream. For a long time he watched the eddying circles on the water as the floating leaves danced. He turned back and went towards the house, stopping to look at the ruined flowerbeds where the last red blossoms yet lingered. Then he returned to the garden.

There, amid the brown and yellow foliage one oak-tree stood whose leaves were green. On the bench beneath it a yellow cat lay sunning itself. Yourii gently stroked its soft furry back, as tears rose to his eyes.

“This is the end! This is the end!” he kept repeating to himself. Senseless though the words seemed to him, they struck him like an arrow in the heart.

“No, no! What nonsense! My whole life lies before me. I’m only twenty-four years old! It’s not that. Then, what is it?”

He suddenly thought of Sina, and how impossible it would be to meet her after that outrageous scene in the wood. Yet how could he possibly help meeting her? The shame of it overwhelmed him. It would be better to die.

The cat arched its back and purred with pleasure, the sound was like a bubbling samovar. Yourii watched it attentively, and then began to walk up and down.

“My life’s so wearisome, so horribly dreary.⁠ ⁠… Besides, I can’t say if⁠ ⁠… No, no, I’d rather die than see her again!”

Sina had gone out of his life forever. The future, cold, grey, void, lay before him, a long chain of loveless, hopeless days.

“No, I’d rather die!”

Just then, with heavy tread, the coachman passed, carrying a pail of water, and in it there floated leaves, dead, yellow leaves. The maidservant appeared in the doorway, and called out to Yourii. For a long while he could not understand what she said.

“Yes, yes, all right!” he replied when at last he realized that she was telling him lunch was ready.

“Lunch?” he said to himself in horror. “To go into lunch! Everything just as before; to go on living and worrying as to what I ought to do about Sina, about my own life, and my own acts? So I’d better be quick, or else, if I go to lunch, there won’t be time afterwards.”

A strange desire to make haste dominated him, and he trembled violently in every limb. He felt conscious that nothing was going to happen, and yet he had a clear presentiment of approaching death; there was a buzzing in his ears from sheer terror.

With hands tucked under her white apron, the maidservant still stood motionless on the veranda, enjoying the soft autumnal air.

Like a thief, Yourii crept behind the oak-tree, so that no one should see him from the veranda, and with startling suddenness shot himself in the chest.

“Missed fire!” he thought with delight, longing to live, and dreading death. But above him he saw the topmost branches of the oak-tree against the azure sky, and the yellow cat that leapt away in alarm.

Uttering a shriek, the maidservant rushed indoors. Immediately afterwards it seemed to Yourii as if he were surrounded by a huge crowd of people. Someone poured cold water on his head, and a yellow leaf stuck to his brow, much to his discomfort. He heard excited voices on all sides, and someone sobbing, and crying out: “Youra, Youra! Oh! why, why?”

“That’s Lialia!” thought Yourii. Opening his eyes wide, he began to struggle violently, as in a frenzy he screamed:

“Send for the doctor⁠—quick!”

But to his horror he felt that all was over⁠—that now nothing could save him. The dead leaves sticking to his brow felt heavier and heavier, crushing his brain. He stretched out his neck in a vain effort to see more clearly, but the leaves grew and grew, till they had covered everything; and what then happened to him Yourii never knew.

XLII

Those who knew Yourii Svarogitsch, and those who did not, those who liked, as those who despised him, even those who had never thought about him were sorry, now that he was dead.

Nobody could understand why he had done it; though they all imagined that they knew, and that in their inmost souls they held of his thoughts a share. There seemed something so beautiful about suicide, of which tears, flowers, and noble words were the sequel. Of his own relatives not one attended the funeral. His father had had a paralytic stroke, and Lialia could not leave him for a moment. Riasantzeff alone represented the family, and had charge of all the burial-arrangements. It was this solitariness that to spectators appeared particularly sad, and gave a certain mournful grandeur to the personality of the deceased.

Many flowers,