llock by the road that the sun has just
touched, there is something more. And now here we are nothing ... two
souls come together out of space for an hour ... and it doesn't matter
what I say to you, except that it's true and the truth will be
something for you. Here's what I've come to the war with ... my little
bit of possession, if you like, that I've brought with me, as we've
all brought something. Will you understand me? Perhaps not, and it
really doesn't matter. I know what I have, what I want, but not what I
am. So how should you know if I do not? And I love life, I believe in
God. I wish to meet Death. One can be serious without being absurd at
an early hour like this, when nothing is real except such things....
Andrey Vassilievitch and myself have puzzled you, have we not? I have
seen you watching us very seriously, as though we were figures in a
novel, and that has amazed me, because you must not be solemn about
us. You'll understand nothing about Russian life unless you laugh at
it during at least half the week.

"Almost five years ago I met Andrey Vassilievitch at a friend's house
in Petrograd. He was an acquaintance of mine of some years' duration,
but I had avoided him because he seemed to me the last kind of man
whom I would ever care to know. I had been at this time five years in
Petrograd and had now a good practice there as a surgeon. I was a
successful man and I knew it, but I was also a disappointed man
because my idealism, that was being for ever wounded by my own
actions, would not die. How I wished for it to die! I thought of the
day when I should be without it as the day of liberation, of freedom.
That had become my idea, I must tell you, the dominating idea of my
life: that I should kill my idealism, laugh at the belief in God, lose
faith in every one and everything, and then simply enjoy myself--my
work which I loved and my pleasure which I should love when my
idealism had died.... Sometimes during those years I thought that it
was dying. Women helped to kill it, I believed, and I knew many women,
desperately persistently laughing at them, leaving them or being left
by them; and then, in spite of myself, bitterly, deeply disappointed.
Something always saying to me: 'I am God and you cannot hide from me.'
'I am God and I will not be hidden.'

"And on this night, about five years ago, at the house of a friend, I
met Andrey Vassilievitch. We left the house together, and because it
was a fine nig