“So I feel, old man, exactly so,” he laughed,—­“aren’t all of them the rottenest types one ever saw?  Trash, my dear sir, trash.  And I greet your decision.”

The tension which I felt at the beginning of the dinner disappeared completely, and we began to talk about different things, remembering the time when we met, and recollecting our mutual impressions of 1912-1913, when things and people seemed to be so very different.  I could not help, however, asking Frank at the end of our dinner: 

“Are there any especial reasons to try and be foxy with me, or any reasons to frighten me with mysteries?”

He answered:...

(several lines scratched out)

..."no such things as mysteries.  This is the commonest of all planets and everything is plain and entirely within the old three dimensions.  Some very cautious persons do not see the matter clearly—­or perhaps they are too stubborn to see it right,—­and it makes them suspicious....  You’ll kindly forgive me,” he added, “if I’ll have to be going?"...

After his departure—­it was only about 9:30, as I had nothing to do, I went to the New Club.  No Misha there.  I saw Boris Vlad. drunk as a sailor in company with three or four other rascals; I think the short one was the man from the Red Cross.  In the card room—­a gloomy game of bridge, no word said unless for a real mistake....

So I came home and looked out of the window onto the deserted and neglected streets of my Northern Palmira....

12.

Millions of those who fell for their countries in Europe and Asia paved the way for a general depreciation of life; human existence has no more value.  For years they were killing people on the battle fields.  It is justified....  They were killing lately, in Russia, officers (for the reason that they were such.) It can be understood:  the crazy mob is not responsible.  But what can one think of murders?  For reasons unknown to the murdered, and perhaps to the murderers.  Here are the results of three years of war, the results of three hundred years of slavery.

Maroossia read the news of Mikhalovsky’s accident in the papers in Tula, and came yesterday.

“Nothing could stop me,” she said, crying bitterly, and leaning on me so that I would not be too angry.  “Dearest, everything is so strange!  Misha’s death, and Boris Platonovich’s death!...  Please, let us go away somewhere, I cannot think of you, here alone....”

I told her that I had made arrangements to resign, and why it could not be done yet.  “Then,” I said, “we will go to Gurzoof, where our house is rotting without care”.  I succeeded in calming the poor girl, explaining with all of the eloquence that I had, that Misha’s suicide and Mikhalovsky’s accident in the lift had nothing in common, and that both deaths were not to be put in the same angle of view.

Later she showed me a postal card from Misha, from Vyborg.  He did not sign it, but his characteristic handwriting spoke only too clearly.  “Wanted to send you some fruit,” he wrote, “but here there is no fruit, so you’ll have to get some yourself from the South.”