The Torrents Of Spring

XXV
Almost running, Sanin returned to his hotel room. He felt, he knew that
only there, only by himself, would it be clear to him at last what was the
matter, what was happening to him. And so it was; directly he had got
inside his room, directly he had sat down to the writing-table, with both
elbows on the table and both hands pressed to his face, he cried in a sad
and choked voice, ‘I love her, love her madly!’ and he was all aglow
within, like a fire when a thick layer of dead ash has been suddenly
blown off. An instant more … and he was utterly unable to understand
how he could have sat beside her … her! – and talked to her and not
have felt that he worshipped the very hem of her garment, that he was
ready as young people express it ‘to die at her feet.’ The last interview in
the garden had decided everything. Now when he thought of her, she
did not appear to him with blazing curls in the shining starlight; he saw
her sitting on the garden-seat, saw her all at once tossing back her hat,
and gazing at him so confidingly … and the tremor and hunger of love
ran through all his veins. He remembered the rose which he had been
carrying about in his pocket for three days: he snatched it out, and
pressed it with such feverish violence to his lips, that he could not help
frowning with the pain. Now he considered nothing, reflected on nothing,
did not deliberate, and did not look forward; he had done with all
his past, he leaped forward into the future; from the dreary bank of his
lonely bachelor life he plunged headlong into that glad, seething, mighty
torrent – and little he cared, little he wished to know, where it would
carry him, or whether it would dash him against a rock! No more the
soft-flowing currents of the Uhland song, which had lulled him not long
ago … These were mighty, irresistible torrents! They rush flying onwards
and he flies with them… .
He took a sheet of paper, and without blotting out a word, almost with
one sweep of the pen, wrote as follows: –
‘DEAR GEMMA, – You know what advice I undertook to give you, what
your mother desired, and what she asked of me; but what you don’t know and
what I must tell you now is, that I love you, love you with all the ardour of a
heart that loves for the first time! This passion has flamed up in me suddenly,
but with such force that I can find no words for it! When your mother came to
me and asked me, it was still only smouldering in me, or else I should certainly,
as an honest man, have refused to carry out her request… . The confession I
make you now is the confession of an honest man. You ought to know whom you
have to do with – between us there should exist no misunderstandings. You see
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