“I recognized the letter she held out to me as the one I wrote for her to Boless. Humph!
“I recognized the letter she held out to me as the one I wrote for her to Boless. Humph!
“‘Look here, Teresa,’ I said to her. ‘Will you please explain to me what it all means? Why do you ask people to write letters for you when you do not find it necessary even to post them?’
“‘Post them? Where to?’
“‘Why, to this Boless, of course.’
“‘But he does not exist!’
“I really could not understand a word. There was nothing left for me to do but to spit and walk out of the room. But she explained herself.
“‘Well, what of it?’ she began in an offended voice. ‘He does not exist. He does not, so,’ and she extended her hands as if she could not herself clearly understand why he did not exist in reality. ‘But I want him to. Am I not as much of a human being as the others? Of course I—I know.—But it does no harm to any one, that I am writing to him.—’
“‘Allow me—to whom?’
“‘To Boless, of course.’
“‘But he does not exist.’
“‘Oh, Mother of God! What if he does not exist? He does not; still to me he does. And Teresa—this is myself, and he replies to my letters, and I write to him again.’
“I understood. I felt so sick at heart, so ashamed of myself to know that alongside of me, only three paces removed, lived a human being who had no one in thewhole world to love and sympathize with her, and that this being had to invent a friend for herself.
“‘Here you have written a letter from me to Boless, and I gave it to another to read, and when I hear it read it really begins to seem to me as if there is a Boless. And then I ask that a letter be written from Boless to Teresa—that is to me. And when such a letter is written and is read to me then I am almost entirely convinced that there is a Boless, and that makes my life easier.’
“Yes, the devil take it all,” continued my acquaintance. “To make a long story short I began from that time on to write with the greatest punctuality twice a week letters to Boless and vice versa. I wrote splendid replies to her. She used to listen to my reading of those epistles and to weep in her bass voice. In return for this she used to mend my clothes and darn my socks.
“Three months later she was thrown into prison for some reason or other and by now she must surely be dead.”
My acquaintance blew the ashes from his cigarette, looked thoughtfully at the sky, and concluded:
“Y-e-s, the more a human being has drunk of the cup of bitterness the more ardently he longs for sweetness. And we, enveloped in our worn-out virtues and gazing at each other through the haze of self-sufficiency and convinced of our righteousness, fail to understand it.
“And the whole affair turns out very stupid, and very cruel. Fallen people we say—but who and whatare those fallen ones? First of all they are human beings of the very same bone and blood, of the very same flesh and nerves as ourselves. We have been told the very same thing for whole ages, day in and day out. And we listen and—and the devil alone knows how stupid it all is! In reality we, too, are but fallen people and more deeply fallen too, probably—into the abyss of self-sufficiency, convinced of our own sinlessness and superiority, the superiority of our own nerves and brains over the nerves and brains of those who are only less crafty than we are, and who can not, as we can, feign a goodness they do not possess—but enough of this. It is all so old and stale—so old and stale indeed that one is ashamed to speak of it—”