Page:The Dial (Volume 75).djvu/545



E loved enormousness. In an enormous room, on an enormous writing-table, there stood an enormous inkstand. But there was no ink in it. It would have been useless to dip the enormous pen in it. It was quite dry—"I haven't written anything now for three months," said Leonid Andreyev—"besides The Helmsman I read nothing whatever"

The Helmsman—a paper for sailors. The last number of it lies on the side of the desk; the cover has a picture of a yacht.

Andreyev paces up and down his enormous room and talks about the sea, top-sails, anchors, sails. To-day he is a sailor, a sea wolf. Even his gait has become nautical. Instead of cigarettes he smokes a pipe. He has shaved off his moustache; his throat is bare like a sailor's. His face is sunburnt. On a nail there hangs a pair of nautical binoculars.

You attempt to talk about something else. He listens only out of politeness.

To-morrow we are going aboard Savva, and meanwhile

Savva is his motor yacht. He talks about "averages," submerged rocks, and sand-banks.

Night. Four o'clock. You sit on the sofa and listen, and he walks about and talks in a monologue.

He always talks in a monologue. His language is rhythmical and flowing.

Sometimes he stops, pours himself out a cup of strong, black, cold tea, drinks it at a gulp, as if it were a glass of vodka, feverishly swallows a few caramels—and again begins to talk, talk He talks about God, death, of how all sailors believe in God, of how, surrounded by abysses, they are aware of the proximity of death all their lives: how through contemplating the stars every night they become poets and sages. If they could express what they feel when they stand beneath the enormous stars some-