"The devil will no longer be able to use me," murmured he. "One will know nothing more of me; I am growing old!" he gasped out. Suddenly he seized his head and called: "But what does a man like me do when he is old?"
For the first time in his life he asked himself the question. "To grow old without the courage to calmly submit, to be like a languishing spendthrift who drinks repulsive sediment from emptied goblets."
How hateful, how horrible! Would it not be better to break with all, to devote himself to his children, to lead a prudent existence?
He laughed bitterly. A prudent existence--he, whom two hours of solitude brought almost to the boundaries of insanity! There could be no more talk of that; it was too late. To grow old! Vain spectre of fear! People like him never grow old--they die!
Yes, that was the end. To die, to leave nothing behind him, no name in art, no enduring work; to be forgotten, wiped out of the world. A little while longer, sunshine and air, and motion, color, and sound, and then all dark, a great black blur, nothing more--death. Yes, it was that. Perhaps it would come to-morrow, perhaps in a few years. Come it must; he also would not fight against it. But meanwhile--meanwhile he would live with every fibre, live with every drop of blood--live!
Then--around the window crept something like a sad, sighing, ghostly voice. His face took on a strained, listening, thirstily longing expression. It was like the sob of a tormented soul which has forgotten to take the way to heaven because a great love holds her back to earth--a great love and unrest at an unfulfilled task, an unlifted treasure.
Was it an over-excitement of his nerves of hearing, or the beginning of that mysticism to which, at a certain period of life, quite all great Russian minds fall victim? However this may be, he would have sworn that he heard her voice compassionately and tenderly. There, once more. "Boris! Boris!"
He feels something strange, the calming of a loving presence. A passionate, indescribable longing takes possession of him. He stretches out his arms--it is gone! He shakes as with frost, sweat stands upon his brow. He thought of the repellant coldness which had met his lips when he had raised the corpse from the lace-edged pillows of the coffin.
No; death took all, it lets nothing return. Weak-headed nervousness to believe in such a thing! There is nothing but life! And while the longing for the unattainable heavenly still consumes his heart, he murmurs hoarsely: "Yes, to live, to live!"