a loss what to do with ourselves.  It is strange,—­almost laughable,—­but for a long time I remained in a state of mind in which the most commonplace functions of life seemed irksome and useless, and it took me some time to remember that I used to go to clubs and theatres, shaved, dressed, and dined before I knew her.  The first months I travelled a great deal, straying as far as Iceland.  The sight of Swedish lakes, Norwegian fiords, and Icelandic geysers conveyed to me no direct impressions; I only tried to imagine what Aniela would have felt or said to such a view,—­in short, I saw with her eyes, thought her thoughts, and felt with her heart.  And when presently I remembered that she was Aniela no longer, but Pani Kromitzka, I went straight to the nearest railway station or ship to go somewhere else, as what I looked upon had ceased to interest me.  It did not matter to me in the least that I played a part in one of the so commonly ridiculed dramas where thousands of fools have played the same parts before.  And death is a drama; and those who are entering its gates think the world is coming to an end; and so it is,—­for them.

I do not know, and will not enter into it now, whether my feeling the first few months was one of fathomless despair.  Everything is relative.  I know only that my whole being was absorbed by one woman, and I understood for the first time the void created by the death of a dearly loved being.

But gradually the habit—­not the zest—­of life recovered its vital power.  This is a common enough fact.  I have known people, inwardly intensely sad, without a grain of cheerfulness in their souls, yet keep up an appearance of cheerfulness because they had once been cheerful, and the habit clung to them.  And time dulls the pain, and I found an antidote to the poison.  I read once, in a book of travels by Farini, that the Caffres, when stung by a scorpion, cure themselves by letting the scorpion sting them in the same place.  Such a scorpion,—­such an antidote,—­was for me, and is generally for most people, the word, “It is done; there is no help for it.”

It is done, therefore I suffer; it is done, and I feel relieved.  There is an anodyne in the consciousness that it cannot be helped.  It reminds me of the Indian carried away by the Niagara:  he struggled at first with all his strength against the current; but seeing the hopelessness of his efforts, threw away his oar, laid himself down in the bottom of the canoe, and began to sing.  I am ready to sing now.  The Niagara Falls have that advantage—­they crush the life out of a man; there are others that throw him on a lonely barren shore without water.  This has happened to me.

The evil genius bent upon wrecking my life had not taken in account one thing:  a man crushed and utterly wretched cares less for himself than a happy one.  In presence of that indifference fate becomes more or less powerless.  I was and am still in that frame of mind that, if angry Fortuna came to me in person, and said:  “Go to perdition,” I should reply calmly:  “Be it so,”—­not out of sorrow for the loss of Aniela, but from mere indifference to everything within or without me.