“If you had drowned yourself, what then? The powers of good and evil would have neither gained nor lost thereby. Your corpse, bloated, disfigured, and covered with slime, would have been dragged from the river, and buried. That would have been all!”
Lida had a lurid vision of greenish, turbid water with slimy, trailing weeds and gruesome bubbles floating round her.
“No, no, never!” she thought, turning pale. “I would rather bear all the shame of it … and Novikoff … everything … anything but that.”
“Ah! look how scared you are!” said Sanine, laughing.
Lida smiled through her tears, and her very smile consoled her.
“Whatever happens, I mean to live!” she said with passionate energy.
“Good!” exclaimed Sanine, as he jumped up. “Nothing is more awful than the thought of death. But so long as you can bear the burden without losing perception of the sights and sounds of life, I say live! Am I not right? Now, give me your paw!”
Lida held out her hand. The shy, feminine gesture betokened childish gratitude.
“That’s right … What a pretty little hand you’ve got.”
But Sanine’s words had not proved ineffectual. Hers was a vigorous, buoyant vitality; the crisis through which she had just passed had strained that vitality to the utmost. A little more pressure, and the string would have snapped. But the pressure was not applied, and her whole being vibrated once more with an impetuous, turbulent desire to live. She looked above, around her, in ecstasy, listening to the immense joy pulsating on every side; in the sunlight, in the green meadows, the shining stream, the calm, smiling face of her brother, and in herself. It was as if she now could see and hear all this for the first time. “To be alive!” cried a gladsome voice within her.
“All right!” said Sanine. “I will help you in your trouble, and stand by you when you fight your battles. And now, as you’re such a beauty, you must give me a kiss.”
Lida smiled; a smile mysterious as that of a wood-nymph. Sanine put his arms round her waist, and, as her warm supple form thrilled at his touch, his fond embrace became almost vehement. A strange, indefinable sense of joy overcame Lida, as she yearned for life ampler and more intense. It mattered not to her what she did. She slowly put both arms round her brother’s neck and, with half-closed eyes, set her lips tight to give the kiss.