“Hang it all, what horrors,” he mutters with a smile.

But the further he gets into the reading, the graver his face becomes.  At last, under the stress of painful memories, he turns terribly pale, he gets up and goes on reading as he stands.  When he has finished he begins pacing from corner to corner.

“How does it end?” I ask him.

“How does it end?  H’m. . . .”

He looks at the room, at me, at himself. . . .  He sees his new fashionable suit, hears the ladies laughing and . . . sinking on a chair, begins laughing as he laughed on that night.

“Wasn’t I right when I told you it was all absurd?  My God!  I have had burdens to bear that would have broken an elephant’s back; the devil knows what I have suffered—­no one could have suffered more, I think, and where are the traces?  It’s astonishing.  One would have thought the imprint made on a man by his agonies would have been everlasting, never to be effaced or eradicated.  And yet that imprint wears out as easily as a pair of cheap boots.  There is nothing left, not a scrap.  It’s as though I hadn’t been suffering then, but had been dancing a mazurka.  Everything in the world is transitory, and that transitoriness is absurd!  A wide field for humorists!  Tack on a humorous end, my friend!”

“Pyotr Nikolaevitch, are you coming soon?” The impatient ladies call my hero.

“This minute,” answers the “vain and fatuous” man, setting his tie straight.  “It’s absurd and pitiful, my friend, pitiful and absurd, but what’s to be done? Homo sum. . . .  And I praise Mother Nature all the same for her transmutation of substances.  If we retained an agonising memory of toothache and of all the terrors which every one of us has had to experience, if all that were everlasting, we poor mortals would have a bad time of it in this life.”

I look at his smiling face and I remember the despair and the horror with which his eyes were filled a year ago when he looked at the dark window.  I see him, entering into his habitual role of intellectual chatterer, prepare to show off his idle theories, such as the transmutation of substances before me, and at the same time I recall him sitting on the floor in a pool of blood with his sick imploring eyes.

“How will it end?” I ask myself aloud.

Vassilyev, whistling and straightening his tie, walks off into the drawing-room, and I look after him, and feel vexed.  For some reason I regret his past sufferings, I regret all that I felt myself on that man’s account on that terrible night.  It is as though I had lost something. . . .

MARI D’ELLE

It was a free night.  Natalya Andreyevna Bronin (her married name was Nikitin), the opera singer, is lying in her bedroom, her whole being abandoned to repose.  She lies, deliciously drowsy, thinking of her little daughter who lives somewhere far away with her grandmother or aunt. . . .  The child is more precious to her than the public, bouquets, notices in the papers, adorers . . . and she would be glad to think about her till morning.  She is happy, at peace, and all she longs for is not to be prevented from lying undisturbed, dozing and dreaming of her little girl.