“Poets, sir, are those who use such phrases as ‘the silvery distance,’ ‘accord,’ or ‘onward, onward, to the fight with the powers of darkness’!”
“You are sad to-night, Anton Pavlovitch,” I said, looking at his kind and beautiful face, pale in the moonlight.
He was thoughtfully digging up little pebbles with the end of his stick, with his eyes on the ground. But when I said that he was sad, he looked across at me, humorously.
“It is you who are sad,” he answered. “You are sad because you have spent such a lot on the cab.”
Then he added gravely:
“Yes, I shall only be read for another seven years; and I shall live for less—perhaps for six. But don't go and tell that to the newspaper reporters.”
He was wrong there: he did not live for six years….
He died peacefully without suffering in the stillness and beauty of a summer's dawn which he had always loved. When he was dead a look of happiness came upon his face, and it looked like the face of a very young man. There came to my mind the words of Leconte de Lisle:
Moi, je l'envie, au fond du tombeau calme et noir
D'être affranchi de vivre et de ne plus savoir