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.