LOVE "THREE o'clock in the morning. The soft April night is looking inat my windows and caressingly winking at me with its stars. I can'tsleep, I am so happy!
"My whole being from head to heels is bursting with a strange,incomprehensible feeling. I can't analyse it just now—I haven'tthe time, I'm too lazy, and there—hang analysis! Why, is a manlikely to interpret his sensations when he is flying head foremostfrom a belfry, or has just learned that he has won two hundredthousand? Is he in a state to do it?"
This was more or less how I began my love-letter to Sasha, a girlof nineteen with whom I had fallen in love. I began it five times,and as often tore up the sheets, scratched out whole pages, andcopied it all over again. I spent as long over the letter as if ithad been a novel I had to write to order. And it was not because Itried to make it longer, more elaborate, and more fervent, butbecause I wanted endlessly to prolong the process of this writing,when one sits in the stillness of one's study and communes withone's own day-dreams while the spring night looks in at one's window.Between the lines I saw a beloved image, and it seemed to me thatthere were, sitting at the same table writing with me, spirits asnaïvely happy, as foolish, and as blissfully smiling as I. I wrotecontinually, looking at my hand, which still ached deliciously wherehers had lately pressed it, and if I turned my eyes away I had avision of the green trellis of the little gate. Through that trellisSasha gazed at me after I had said goodbye to her. When I was sayinggood-bye to Sasha I was thinking of nothing and was simply admiringher figure as every decent man admires a pretty woman; when I sawthrough the trellis two big eyes, I suddenly, as though by inspiration,knew that I was in love, that it was all settled between us, andfully decided already, that I had nothing left to do but to carryout certain formalities.
It is a great delight also to seal up a love-letter, and, slowlyputting on one's hat and coat, to go softly out of the house andto carry the treasure to the post. There are no stars in the skynow: in their place there is a long whitish streak in the east,broken here and there by clouds above the roofs of the dingy houses;from that streak the whole sky is flooded with pale light. The townis asleep, but already the water-carts have come out, and somewherein a far-away factory a whistle sounds to wake up the workpeople.Beside the postbox, slightly moist with dew, you are sure to seethe clumsy figure of a house porter, wearing a bell-shaped sheepskinand carrying a stick. He is in a condition akin to catalepsy: heis not asleep or awake, but something between.
If the boxes knew how often people resort to them for the decisionof their fate, they would not have such a humble air. I, anyway,almost kissed my postbox, and as I gazed at it I reflected that thepost is the greatest of blessings.
I beg anyone who has ever been in love to remember how one usuallyhurries home after dropping the letter in the box, rapidly getsinto bed and pulls up the quilt in the full conviction that as soonas one wakes up in the morning one will be overwhelmed with memoriesof the previous day and look with rapture at the window, where thedaylight will be eagerly making its way through the folds of thecurtain.
Well, to facts. . . .