The curiosity of a sad sensation prompted George to search for it in an album placed among the pieces of music. He was sure he could find it; he remembered it very clearly. And, in fact, he found it.
It was a single sheet, written in violet ink. The characters had paled and the sheet had become rumpled, yellowish, without consistency, soft as a spider's web. It bore the sadness of pages traced a long time ago by a dear hand, gone henceforth forever.
George, who scarcely recognized the characters, said to himself: "It is I who wrote this page! This writing is mine!" It was a rather timid hand, unequal, almost feminine, recalling a schoolboy's writing, preserving the ambiguity of the recent adolescence, the hesitating delicacy of a soul that dares not yet know all. "What a change in that, too!" And he read again the poet's verse:
Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,
Tears from the depth of some divine despair
Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,
In looking on the happy Autumn-fields,
And thinking of the days that are no more.
Fresh as the first beam glittering on a sail,
That brings our friends up from the underworld.
Sad as the last which reddens over one
That sinks with all we love below the verge;
So sad, so fresh, the days that are no more.
Ah, sad and strange as in dark summer dawns
The earliest pipe of half-awaken'd birds
To dying ears, when unto dying eyes
The casement slowly grows a glimmering square;
So sad, so strange, the days that are no more.
Dear as remember'd kisses after death,
And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feign'd
On lips that are for others; deep as love,
Deep as first love, and wild with all regret;
O Death in Life, the days that are no more.
Demetrius improvised standing, beside the piano, a trifle paler, a trifle more bent; but from time to time he drew himself erect beneath the breath of inspiration, as a bent reed straightens beneath the breath of the wind. He kept his eyes fixed in the direction of the window, where, as if in a frame, appeared an autumn landscape, reddish and misty. According to the vicissitudes of the heavens without, a changeable light flooded at intervals his person, flashed in the humidity of his eyes, gilded his extraordinarily pure brow. And the violin said: "Sad as the last which reddens over one that sinks with all we love below the verge; so sad, so fresh, the days that are no more." And the violin repeated, with sobs: "O Death in Life, the days that are no more."
At the reminiscence, at the vision conjured up, a supreme anguish assailed the survivor. When the images had passed, the silence seemed to him still heavier. The delicate instrument through which Demetrius's soul had sung its loftiest songs had again sunk to sleep, with its four strings still intact, in the velvet-lined case.
George lowered the lid, as on a corpse. Around him the silence was lugubrious. But he still retained, at the bottom of his heart, like a refrain indefinitely prolonged, this sigh: "O Death in Life, the days that are no more."
He remained a few moments before the door which shut off the tragic chamber. He felt that henceforth he was no longer master of himself. His nerves dominated him, imposed on him the disorder and excess of their sensations. He felt about his head a band that contracted and enlarged according to the palpitations of his arteries, as if it were an elastic and cold substance. The same cold chill ran down his spinal column.
With sudden energy, in a sort of rage, he turned the knob and entered. Without looking about him, walking in the ray of light which, projected through the open door, was shed across the floor, he went straight towards one of the balconies, opened the two shutters. He also opened the shutters of the other balcony. After this rapid action, accomplished under the impulse of a sort of horror, turned, agitated, gasping. He felt his flesh creep.
What he saw before anything else was the bed stationed in front of him, with its green counterpane, all of walnut, but simple in form, without carving, without ornaments without curtains. For several moments he saw nothing but the bed, like on that terrible day when, crossing the threshold of the room, he had stopped petrified at the sight of the corpse.