I knew nothing of public events, but I was suddenly seized with the desire to go home. I debated whether to go or not. I had finished my book, but as I meant to come back to Russia in August it seemed perhaps foolish to go. I thought I would leave it to chance. I decided to take the Sortes Shakespearianæ. I opened a volume at random, and my pencil fell on the phrase: “Pack and be gone” (Comedy of Errors, iii. 2, 158). I waited another day and repeated the experiment. My pencil again fell on the same line. Then I settled to go. I started one evening, and in the morning when I arrived at the Friedrichsstrasse Station at Berlin, I saw in the newspapers the news of the assassination of the Austrian Archduke. I might have said: “Incipit vita nova,” but I didn’t. I didn’t even think it. I was merely conscious of a small cloud on an otherwise stainless sky.
FOOTNOTES
“Libre, je rends visite à la terre, aux étoiles;
Sur la Tamise en feu je suis ces blanches voiles.”
Les Enfants d’Édouard, Act III. Sc. 1. Casimir Delavigne.
[2] It is by Thackeray.
[3] I have looked up the reference and miraculously found it. My memory after thirty-three years is correct. The phrase occurs in Xenophon’s Anabasis, Book II. v. 27.
[4] When he died at Sofia, he was canonized as a national hero, and his head now appears on some of the Bulgarian postage stamps.