LOVE

“Three o’clock in the morning.  The soft April night is looking in at my windows and caressingly winking at me with its stars.  I can’t sleep, I am so happy!

“My whole being from head to heels is bursting with a strange, incomprehensible feeling.  I can’t analyse it just now—­I haven’t the time, I’m too lazy, and there—­hang analysis!  Why, is a man likely to interpret his sensations when he is flying head foremost from a belfry, or has just learned that he has won two hundred thousand?  Is he in a state to do it?”

This was more or less how I began my love-letter to Sasha, a girl of nineteen with whom I had fallen in love.  I began it five times, and as often tore up the sheets, scratched out whole pages, and copied it all over again.  I spent as long over the letter as if it had been a novel I had to write to order.  And it was not because I tried to make it longer, more elaborate, and more fervent, but because I wanted endlessly to prolong the process of this writing, when one sits in the stillness of one’s study and communes with one’s own day-dreams while the spring night looks in at one’s window.  Between the lines I saw a beloved image, and it seemed to me that there were, sitting at the same table writing with me, spirits as naively happy, as foolish, and as blissfully smiling as I. I wrote continually, looking at my hand, which still ached deliciously where hers had lately pressed it, and if I turned my eyes away I had a vision of the green trellis of the little gate.  Through that trellis Sasha gazed at me after I had said goodbye to her.  When I was saying good-bye to Sasha I was thinking of nothing and was simply admiring her figure as every decent man admires a pretty woman; when I saw through the trellis two big eyes, I suddenly, as though by inspiration, knew that I was in love, that it was all settled between us, and fully decided already, that I had nothing left to do but to carry out certain formalities.

It is a great delight also to seal up a love-letter, and, slowly putting on one’s hat and coat, to go softly out of the house and to carry the treasure to the post.  There are no stars in the sky now:  in their place there is a long whitish streak in the east, broken here and there by clouds above the roofs of the dingy houses; from that streak the whole sky is flooded with pale light.  The town is asleep, but already the water-carts have come out, and somewhere in a far-away factory a whistle sounds to wake up the workpeople.  Beside the postbox, slightly moist with dew, you are sure to see the clumsy figure of a house porter, wearing a bell-shaped sheepskin and carrying a stick.  He is in a condition akin to catalepsy:  he is not asleep or awake, but something between.

If the boxes knew how often people resort to them for the decision of their fate, they would not have such a humble air.  I, anyway, almost kissed my postbox, and as I gazed at it I reflected that the post is the greatest of blessings.