... then, like the cover of a coffin, heavy, dead oblivion fell upon him.
The woman had also forsaken him; she too considered herself deceived.
The fumy, vaporous nights went by, also the mercilessly punishing white days, and often, more often than before ... he lay in his bed ... and whispered:
“My friend, my only friend!”
And his quivering hand fell faintly upon the empty place.
From the foregoing, and even more from that which follows, we may conclude it to be a peculiar property of the sketch-form in fiction that its story may not be told in synopsis. Indeed, in the true sketch there is no story. Atmosphere, character-drawing, swift outlining of a situation, impressions of mood and feeling—all these permeate the sketch, but crises in human lives, complications arising therefrom, and the untangling of the plotted skein—these belong to the short-story and the novel.
For this reason much of Andreev’s shorter work defies our efforts to retell it; one must go to the writer himself for his final phrase, his subtly suggested situation, his almost uncanny evocation of mood. “Valia,” for example, is one of his sketches which baffle the second-hand narrator: as well try to reconstruct an old-time beauty by dressing up a lay-figure in hand-me-downs.
Valia is a sensitive child who is awakened from his unconscious joy in home by the hard, prickling kisses of a thin-lipped, long-necked woman who announces herself to be his mother. Indignantly, yet politely, the lad turns for denial to his supposed mother, rosy and sweet-lipped, but she tearfully confirms the claim—he had been abandoned in babyhood when he was inconvenient, but now that the mother was lonely she claimed the child. The impending separation tears the hearts of foster-father and -mother and the child himself. Valia becomes nervous, fearful of the dark, and pines almost to illness. But joy and new health come to them all when the courts, which have been invoked to aid the unnatural mother, decide against her claim. At length, however, the highest tribunal reverses the lower court, and the child must go away. The final scene leaves the real mother weeping because her stranger-child takes no pleasure in playthings. The situation is symbolical, for that is the only appeal a sordid, self-serving woman knows how to make to a spirituelle child who has drawn his spirituality not from her nature, but—who knows whence, if not from the breast of his foster-mother! And when the child at the last timidly approaches the weeping egoist and with gentle dignity promises to love her “all he can,” we see a triumph of impressionistic sketch-work.
Even more difficult to outline is “The Man Who Found the Truth.” It is the story told by himself of a man who at sixty is released from an unjust imprisonment, after having been convicted years before of murdering several members of his family in order to gain an inheritance. But when he realizes the stress of his old life out in the world, he has his room transformed into a model of his old cell, hires a keeper from his prison, and once more returns to a tranquil life. Its leit-motif is strikingly like that of Pierre Loti’s “The Wall Opposite.”
The last cry in mysticism is Andreev’s “A Story Which Will Never Be Finished.” Seek to lay your finger upon its precise meaning, and it flutters away like a gauzy-winged visitant; and yet every progressing line deepens an impression upon the soul. It is a pervasive, atmospheric thing, full of mysterious movements, potent though nameless—breaths of uncharted freedom whisper of an impinging world where our realities are unreal; sleeping senses, hitherto unsuspected, strangely stir to their awakening; yet they do not actually awaken. Is it war, is it death opening out into life, is it emancipation—one doesn’t quite know; yet it is all of these. Hawthorne was never more vaguely pregnant, and Poe never more perfectly conveyed the sense of an unnamed something which is just about to be.