"If you had drowned yourself, what then? The powers of good and evil
would have neither gained nor lost thereby. Your corpse, bloated,
disfigured, and covered with slime, would have been dragged from the
river, and buried. That would have been all!"
Lida had a lurid vision of greenish, turbid water with slimy, trailing
weeds and gruesome bubbles floating round her.
"No, no, never!" she thought, turning pale. "I would rather bear all
the shame of it ... and Novikoff ... everything ... anything but
that."
"Ah! look how scared you are!" said Sanine, laughing.
Lida smiled through her tears, and her very smile consoled her.
"Whatever happens, I mean to live!" she said with passionate energy.
"Good!" exclaimed Sanine, as he jumped up. "Nothing is more awful than
the thought of death. But so long as you can bear the burden without
losing perception of the sights and sounds of life, I say live! Am I
not right? Now, give me your paw!"
Lida held out her hand. The shy, feminine gesture betokened childish
gratitude.
"That's right ... What a pretty little hand you've got."
Lida smiled and said nothing.
But Sanine's words had not proved ineffectual. Hers was a vigorous,
buoyant vitality; the crisis through which she had just passed had
strained that vitality to the utmost. A little more pressure, and the
string would have snapped. But the pressure was not applied, and her
whole being vibrated once more with an impetuous, turbulent desire to
live. She looked above, around her, in ecstasy, listening to the
immense joy pulsating on every side; in the sunlight, in the green
meadows, the shining stream, the calm, smiling face of her brother, and
in herself. It was as if she now could see and hear all this for the
first time. "To be alive!" cried a gladsome voice within her.
"All right!" said Sanine. "I will help you in your trouble, and stand
by you when you fight your battles. And now, as you're such a beauty,
you must give me a kiss."
Lida smiled; a smile mysterious as that of a wood-nymph. Sanine put his
arms round her waist, and, as her warm supple form thrilled at his
touch, his fond embrace became almost vehement. A strange, indefinable
sense of joy overcame Lida, as she yearned for life ampler and more
intense. It mattered not to her what she did. She slowly put both arms
round her brother's neck and, with half-closed eyes, set her lips tight
to give the kiss.