Short Fiction, Leonid Andreyev [good e books to read .TXT] 📗

fool! It’s the only thing you ever have wanted! Leave me alone!”

Without taking any more notice of her, he addressed himself to the others, rising and holding his closed hands above his head.

“Listen! I’ll show you something! Look here, at my hands!”

Merry and curious, they looked at his hands, and waited obediently, like children, with gaping mouths.

“Here! Here! See?” He shook his hands. “I hold my life in my hands! Do you see?”

“Yes! Yes! Go on!”

“My life was noble, it was! It was pure and beautiful. Yes, it was! It was like those pretty porcelain vases. And now, look! I fling it away.⁠ ⁠…” He let fall his hands, almost with a groan, and all their eyes looked downwards as though there really lay something down there, something delicate and brittle, that had been shattered into fragments⁠—a beautiful human life.

“Trample on it, now, girls! Trample it to pieces until not a bit of it is left!”

Like children enjoying a new game, with a whoop and a laugh, they leapt up and began trampling on the spot where lay the fragments of that invisible dainty porcelain, a beautiful human life. Gradually a new frenzy overcame them. The laughter and shrieks died away, and nothing but their heavy breathing was audible above the continuous stamping and clatter of feet⁠—rabid, unrelenting, implacable.

Liuba, like an affronted queen, watched it a moment over his shoulder with savage eyes; then suddenly, as though she had only just understood and been driven mad, with a wild groan of elation she burst into the midst of the jostling women and joined the trampling in a faster measure. But for the earnestness of the drunken faces, the ferocity of the bleary eyes, the wickedness of the depraved and twisted mouths, it might all have been taken for some new kind of dance without music, without rhythm.

With his fingers gripping into his hard bristly skull, the man looked on, calm and grim.

VI

Two voices were speaking in the dark⁠—Liuba’s, intimate, tentative, sensitive, with delicate intonations of private apprehension such as a woman’s voice always gains in the dark⁠—and his, hard, quiet, distant. He spoke his words too precisely, too harshly⁠—the only sign of intoxication not quite passed away.

“Are your eyes open?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Are you thinking about something?”

“Yes.”

Silence⁠—and the dark. Then again the thoughtful, vigilant voice of the woman.

“Tell me something more about your comrades, will you?”

“What for?⁠ ⁠… They⁠—they were.”

He said were as the living speak of the dead, or as the dead might speak of the living, and through the even course of his calm and almost indifferent narration it resounded like a funeral knell, as though he were an old man telling his children the heroic tale of a long departed past. And, in the darkness, before the girl’s enchanted eyes, there rose the image of a little group of young men, pitifully young, bereft of father and mother, and hopelessly hostile both to the world they were fighting and to the world they were fighting for. Having travelled by dream to the distant future, to the land of brotherly men as yet unborn, they lived their short lives like pale bloodstained shadows or spectres, the scarecrows of humanity. And their lives were stupidly short⁠—the gallows awaited every one of them, or penal servitude, or insanity⁠—nothing else to look forward to but prison, the scaffold, or the madhouse. And there were women among them.⁠ ⁠…

Liuba started and raised herself on her elbows.

“Women? What do you mean, darling?”

“Young, gentle girls, still in their teens. They follow in the steps of the men, manfully, daringly, die with them.⁠ ⁠…”

“Die! Oh my God!” she cried, clutching his shoulder.

“What? Are you touched by this?”

“Never mind, darling. I sometimes.⁠ ⁠… Go on with your story! Go on!”

And he went on with his story, and there happened a wonderful thing. Ice was turned into fire. Through the funeral notes of his requiem speech, suddenly rang for the girl, her eyes wide open now and burning, the gospel of a new, joyous, and mighty life. Tears rose in her eyes and dried there as in a furnace; she was excited to the pitch of rebellion, eager for every word. Like a hammer upon glowing iron, his words were forging in her a new responsive soul. Steadily, regularly, it fell⁠—beating the soul ever to a finer temper⁠—and suddenly, in the suffocating stench of that room, there spoke aloud a new and unknown voice, the voice of a human being.

“Darling, am I not also a woman?”

“What do you mean?”

“I also might go with Them?”

He did not reply, and in his silence he seemed to her so remarkable and so great (he had been Their comrade, had lived with Them) that it felt uncomfortable to be lying beside him, embracing him. She moved away a little and left only a hand touching him, so that the contact might be less; and forgetting her hatred of the Fine, her tears and curses, and the long years of inviolable solitude in the depths⁠—overcome by the beauty and self-denial of Their lives⁠—her face flushed with excitement, and she was ready to weep at the terrible thought that They might not accept her.

“Dear, but will they take me? My God, if they won’t! What do you think? Tell me they’ll take me⁠—they won’t be squeamish! They won’t say: You are impossible, you are vile, you have sold yourself! Answer me!”

Silence⁠—and then a reply that rejoiced.

“Yes, they will! Why not, indeed?”

“Oh, my darling. But.⁠ ⁠…”

“Fine people, they are!” The man’s voice had the finality of a big fat full stop, but the girl triumphantly repeated, with a touching confidence:

“Yes! They are fine!”

And so radiant was her smile that it seemed as if the very darkness smiled in sympathy and some little stars strayed in as well, little blue points of light. For a new truth had reached her⁠—one that brought not fear, but joy.

Then the shy suppliant voice.

“Let us go to them, dear? You’ll take me with you? You won’t be ashamed of having such a