Page:Ossendowski - From President to Prison.djvu/366

354 another world, strange to all those who surrounded me. I felt that they certainly did not see me, that I was, as it were, an imperceptible shadow.

"You will endure everything, my son," suddenly floated in to me, as though across the thin ether from that other world in which I had once known a mother.

Involuntarily I smiled and said aloud:

"Mother, do you see, I cannot endure, I cannot!"

"What did you say?" asked the young man, looking at me with astonishment.

With difficulty I got up and wandered off, without any aim and without conscious thought. I had no idea where I was going or how long I had been walking away from the answer to that question, and only a puff of unusually cold air brought me to myself again.

I looked around and found myself on a bridge crossing the Neva. I stopped and leaned over the railing. Already the sun had dropped below the horizon, which one never sees in the big towns, and darkness began to crawl out from all the alleyways and the river ends of passages and drains. I felt a disagreeable gnawing of hunger in my stomach and a terrible void in my breast. I felt as though I had no heart or lungs in my chest, only the void left by the consuming ravages of despair.

And then through the railings I saw the river, deep and swift, flowing in mad, angry swirls of protest at being confined by granite walls and split by piers of stone, speeding down to gain the freedom of the sea. Lashing the bridge pillars with loud and foaming splashes, madly it beat against the stones and retreated in whirlpools of foam and a chaos of baffled movement.

Under its influence decision sprang up within me, dictating the last violent act that should relieve me of all pain and suffering, of my hopeless strife against the