I am still waiting for your letter. It is an idée fixe with me now, a kind of mental disease.
Yes, it is all very wonderful. There is, of course, no letter. And would you believe it—because there is no letter, no answer from a man whom I have never seen and never shall see, no response to my voice calling to a dream in the unknown distance, I have a feeling of terrible loneliness, of the world being terribly empty, empty, empty!
And again there is rain, fog, the usual workaday weather. And it is a good thing indeed, all is just as it should be. It calms me.
Goodbye, may God forgive you your cruelty. Yes, after all, it is almost cruel.
Three o’clock, but it is quite dusk because of the rain and the fog.
At five we have people coming to tea. They will come in their motors in the rain from the gloomy town, which in wet weather seems blacker than ever, with its wet black asphalt, wet black roofs, and the black granite cathedral whose spire is lost in the rain and the mist.
I am dressed and seem to be waiting to come before the footlights. I am waiting for the moment when I shall be saying all that one is supposed to say, will be kind, solicitous, lively, and only slightly pale—which is natural in this awful weather. In these clothes I seem younger, I feel as though I were my daughter’s eldest sister, and I am ready to burst into tears at any moment. After all, I have been through a strange experience, something like love. For whom? Why? There is no understanding it, but it is so.
Goodbye, I expect nothing now—I say this quite firmly and sincerely.
Goodbye, my unknown friend. I end my unanswered letters as I began them—with gratitude. I thank you for making no response. It would have been worse if you had. What could you have said to me? And at what point could we, without awkwardness, have broken off our correspondence? And what could I have found to say to you, except what I have said already? I have nothing more—I have said everything. In truth, about every human life one can only write two or three lines. Yes, only two or three lines.
With a strange feeling—as though I had lost someone—I remain alone again, with my home, the misty ocean close by, that everyday life of autumn and winter. And I return again to my peaceful diary, though why I need it—or why you need to write—God alone knows.
I dreamt of you a few days ago. You were somehow strange and silent, and I could not see you in the dark corner of the room where you were sitting. And yet I did see you. But even in my sleep I wondered how I could dream of one I have never seen in my waking life. Only God creates out of nothing. And it felt uncanny, and I woke up frightened and with a heavy heart.
In another fifteen or twenty years probably neither you nor I will be in this world. Till we meet in the next! Who can be certain that it does not exist? Why, we do not understand even our own dreams, the creatures of our own imagination. But is it our own imagination—those things which we call our fancies, our inventions, our dreams? Is it our own will we obey when we strive towards this or that soul, as I strove towards yours?
Goodbye. And yet, no—till we meet.
Endnotes
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Blind Alley would be the nearest English equivalent. —B. G. G. ↩
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Wife-of-a-regiment. —B. G. G. ↩
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A great Russian general and a universal military genius and strategist. —B. G. G. ↩
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“Spindle-Shanks! Spindle-Shanks!” —B. G. G. ↩
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“Horse-collar.” —B. G. G. ↩
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“Lenten.” —B. G. G. ↩
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“Made out of matting.” —B. G. G. ↩
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The reference here is to a famous folktale—best known in Pushkin’s version, “The Little Gold Fish.” A fisherman, having caught a little gold fish, is promised the fulfillment of all his wishes for its release. All his demands, instigated by his wife, are granted, beginning with a substitution of a new trough for a broken one, and up to the attainment of rank and wealth; but finally the wife insists upon the fulfillment of a wish so insolent that, upon his return from interviewing his benefactress, the fisherman finds his wife sitting at the same old broken trough, before his former humble hut. —B. G. G. ↩
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A verst is about two-thirds of a mile. —B. G. G. ↩
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Three horses, harnessed abreast. —B. G. G. ↩
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Abrotanum; southern wood. —B. G. G. ↩
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Holy Lake. —B. G. G. ↩
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In midsummer. —B. G. G. ↩
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In English in the original. —B. G. G. ↩
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I.e. There was no family name. The name is Polish, not Russian. ↩
Colophon
Short Fiction
was compiled from short stories and novellas published between 1907 and 1916 by
Ivan Bunin.
They were translated from Russian between 1916 and 1923 by
S. S. Koteliansky, D. H. Lawrence, Leonard Woolf, Bernard Guilbert Guerney and The Russian Review.
This ebook was produced for
Standard Ebooks
by
Robin Whittleton,
and is based on transcriptions produced
