“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.
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.