The moon still shone brightly, and ever the black shadow followed in their wake.
“My constitution’s done for!” said Semenoff suddenly in quite a different voice, thin and querulous. “If you knew how I dread dying…. Especially on such a bright, soft night as this,” he continued plaintively, turning to Yourii his ugly haggard face and glittering eyes. “Everything lives, and I must die. To you that sounds a hackneyed phrase, I feel certain. ‘And I must die.’ But it is not from a novel, not taken from a work written with ‘artistic truth of presentment.’ I really am going to die, and to me the words do not seem hackneyed. One day you will not think that they are, either. I am dying, dying, and all is over!”
Semenoff coughed again.
“I often think that before long I shall be in utter darkness, buried in the cold earth, my nose fallen in, and my hands rotting, and here in the world all will be just as it is now, while I walk along alive. And you’ll be living, and breathing this air, and enjoying this moonlight, and you’ll go past my grave where I lie, hideous and corrupted. What do you suppose I care for Bebel, or Tolstoi or a million other gibbering apes?” These last words he uttered with sudden fury. Yourii was too depressed to reply.
“Well, good-night!” said Semenoff faintly. “I must go in.” Yourii shook hands with him, feeling deep pity for him, hollow-chested, round- shouldered, and with the crooked stick hanging from a button of his overcoat. He would have liked to say something consoling that might encourage hope, but he felt that this was impossible.
“Good-bye!” he said, sighing.
Semenoff raised his cap and opened the gate. The sound of his footsteps and of his cough grew fainter, and then all was still. Yourii turned homewards. All that only one short half-hour ago had seemed to him bright and fair and calm—the moonlight, the starry heaven, the poplar trees touched with silvery splendour, the mysterious shadows—all were now dead, and cold and terrible as some vast, tremendous tomb.
On reaching home, he went softly to his room and opened the window looking on to the garden. For the first time in his life he reflected that all that had engrossed him, and for which he had shown such zeal and unselfishness was really not the right, the important thing. If, so he thought, some day, like Semenoff, he were about to die, he would feel no burning regret that men had not been made happier by his efforts, nor grief that his life-long ideals remained unrealized. The only grief would be that he must die, must lose sight, and sense, and hearing, before having had time to taste all the joys that life could yield.
He was ashamed of such a thought, and, putting it aside, sought for an explanation.
“Life is conflict.”