"I am a blonde with blue eyes. Who are you? Come, I am waiting."
Directly I had written those words, I felt ashamed. I could not stay in the cinema. I wandered about between the benches, went out into the little village, walked round its chapels--every window of which was smashed; and gathered a bunch of forget-me-nots from a ditch by the cemetery. On returning to the crowded cinema I noticed that the box in which I had been sitting was empty; presently an officer entered it; sat down leisurely to enjoy the pictures; read what I had written; and all at once became a different man. I had injected a deadly poison, he left the box. I walked out after him. He went straight in the direction of the chapel. Ah, I had done a cruel thing!
I had written of a blonde with blue eyes; and I went out, saw her, and awaited her--I who had written the message. It seemed as though hundreds of instruments were making music within me, yet my heart was sad and weighed down with oppresion--it felt crushed. More than anything, more than anything in the whole world, I loved and awaited a blonde who did not exist, to whom I would have surrendered all that was most beautiful within me.
I could not stay in the cinema, but crawled through the trenches. On the hill towered the two huge crosses; sitting down beneath their shadow, I clenched my hands, and murmured:
"Darling, darling, darling! Beloved and tender one! I am waiting."
Far in the distance, the green rockets soared skyward, the same as those we used to send up over the river Oka. Then the gargantuan fingers of a searchlight began to sweep the area, my uniform appeared white in its gleam, and all at once a shell fell by the crosses. I had been observed, I had become a target.
The bullets fell zip-zip-zip into the earthworks. I lay in my bunk and buried my head in the pillow. I felt horribly alone as I lay there, murmuring to myself, and breathing all the tenderness I was capable of into my words:
Can one credit the romanticists that--across the seas and hills and years--there is so strange a thing as a single-hearted love, an all- conquering, all-subduing, all-renovating love?
In the train at Budslav--where the staff-officers were billeted--it was known that Lieutenant Agrenev had such a single, overmastering, life-long love.