No one can know what a wealth of soul had been mine; through her, and with her, I had felt myself moving in a higher spiritual sphere. But now I felt so broken, so bereft, as if my entire intellectual possessions had gone to naught. The children are yet here; but they are for themselves. My wife alone was here for me--was indeed my other self.
Before that, when I awakened of a morning it was always a pleasure to feel conscious of life itself; but now with every morrow I had to begin anew and try to learn how to reconcile myself to my loss. But that is a lesson I shall never learn. My sun had gone down; I did not care to live any longer, because all that I experienced seemed to come in between her and me, and I did not wish to live but in thoughts of her.
I looked at her lamp, her table, her work-basket--all these had survived her, are still here, and will remain. The one clock was never wound up afterward. From that day, there was but one clock heard in our room.
I can now understand why the ancients buried the working implements with their dead.
I looked out of the window. The neighbors' children were in the street; their noise grated on my ears. I could not but think how she once said to me, "Why should it annoy us? Is it anything more than the singing of the birds? The children are like so many innocent birds."
All things remind me of her. I could sit by the window for hours and look at the chickens running back and forth, picking up crumbs, and watching the strutting cock.
I must have been like a little child that, for the first time, begins to take notice of the objects that surround it.
I seemed as if awaking from darkness, as if dreaming with my eyes open. Everything seemed new and strangely mysterious to me, although I had nearly attained my seventieth year.
When, after many weeks, I again saw my face in the mirror, I was surprised at the saddened, sunken features of the old man. Could that be I!
I had gone to the neighboring village to order a gravestone. On my way home, night overtook me. Suddenly a storm burst upon the valley. Like a child, I counted the interval between the lightning and the thunder. At first I could count up to thirty-two, afterwards only to seven; and then I stopped counting. I saw the houses by the roadside, and knew who lived in them here and there, I might have found shelter, but what should I do in a strange house, wet to the skin as I was? I kept in the middle of the road, on the broken stone. When I came to where the little bridge was, I had to wade through the water.