He remembered having once seen a fly that had fallen into syrup crawling over the floor, dragging its sticky legs and wings along with the utmost difficulty. It was plain that the wretched insect must die, though it still struggled, and made frantic efforts to regain its feet. At the time he had turned away from it in disgust, and now he saw it again, as in a feverish dream. Then he suddenly thought of a fight that he had once witnessed between two peasants, when one, with a terrific blow in the face, felled the other, an elderly, grey-haired man. He got up, wiped his bloody nose on his sleeve, exclaiming with emphasis, “What a fool!”
“Yes, I remember seeing that,” thought Sarudine, “and then they had drinks together at the ‘Crown.’”
The night drew near to its end. In silence so strange, so oppressive, it seemed as if Sarudine were the one living, suffering soul left on earth. On the table the guttering candle was still burning with a faint, steady, flame. Lost in the gloom of his disordered thoughts Sarudine stared at it with glittering, feverish eyes.
Amid the wild chaos of impressions and recollections there was one thing which stood out clearly from all others. It was the sense of his utter solitude that stabbed his heart like a dagger. Millions of men at that moment were merrily enjoying life, laughing and joking; some, it might be, were even talking about him. But he, only he, was alone. Vainly he sought to recall familiar faces. Yet pale, and strange, and cold, they appeared to him, and their eyes had a look of curiosity and malevolent glee. Then, in his dejection, he thought of Lida.
He pictured her as he had seen her last; her large, sad eyes; the thin blouse that lightly veiled her soft bosom; her hair in a single loose plait. In her face Sarudine saw neither malice nor contempt. Those dark eyes gazed at him in sorrowful reproach. He remembered how he had repulsed her at the moment of her supreme distress. The sense of having lost her wounded him like a knife.
“She suffered then far more than I do now…. I thrust her from me…. I almost wanted her to drown herself; wanted her to die.”
As to a last anchor that should save him, his whole soul turned to her. He yearned for her caresses, her sympathy. For an instant it seemed to him as if all his actual sufferings would efface the past; yet he knew, alas! that Lida would never, never come back to him, and that all was at an end. Before him lay nothing but the blank, abysmal void!
Raising his arm, Sarudine pressed his hand against his brow. He lay there, motionless, with eyes closed and teeth clenched, striving to see nothing, to hear nothing, to feel nothing. But after a little while his hand dropped, and he sat up. His head ached terribly, his tongue seemed on fire, and he trembled from head to foot. Then he rose and staggered to the table.
“I have lost everything; my life, Lida, everything!”
It flashed across him that this life of his, after all, had not been either good, or glad, or sane, but foolish, perverted and base. Sarudine, the handsome Sarudine, entitled to all that was best and most enjoyable in life, no longer existed. There was only a feeble, emasculated body left to bear all this pain and dishonour.