Short Fiction, Vsevolod Garshin [howl and other poems .txt] 📗

I was sleeping soundly, curled up on the little sofa, when I was awakened by someone touching my shoulder.

“Get up! get up!” said Mary Petrovna.

I jumped up instantly, without at first understanding anything. Mary Petrovna whispered something rapidly in a frightened manner to me.

“Spots! new spots!” I gathered at last.

“What spots, and where?”

“Oh dear, dear! he does not understand,” she wailed. “New spots have appeared on Kuzma Thomich. I have already sent for the doctor.”

“But perhaps it is nothing,” said I, with the indifference of a just-awakened man.

“How nothing? Look for yourself.”

Kuzma was wrapped in a heavy, restless sleep. He kept tossing his head from side to side, and sometimes groaned deeply. His chest was bare, and I saw on it, an inch or so below the bandaged wound, two new little black spots. The gangrene had penetrated further under the skin, and spreading under it, had come to the surface in two places. Although before this I had little hope of his recovery, these new unmistakable symptoms of death made me turn pale.

Mary Petrovna sat in a corner of the room with her hands on her knees, and silently gazed at me with despairing eyes.

“You must not despair,” I said to her. “The doctor will be here directly, and will examine him. Perhaps it is not yet all over, and perhaps we shall yet pull him round.”

“No, he will die,” she whispered.

“Well, if he dies,” I answered, also quietly, “it will, of course, be a great grief to all of us, but you must not wear yourself out in this manner. You look half dead.”

“You do not understand what tortures I suffer these days. I cannot myself explain why I did not love him, and even now do not love him, in the way he does me. But if he dies my heart will break. I shall always remember his steady, open glance, his persistent silence when near me, although he liked talking, and could talk well. I shall always reproach myself that I did not take pity on him, did not appreciate his cleverness, his love, his devotion. Perhaps this seems ridiculous to you, but the thought is a constant torture to me now that if I had loved him⁠—we should have lived quite differently. All would have happened differently, and this awful and stupid business would not have happened. One thinks and thinks, excuses and justifies oneself, but all the time at the bottom of one’s mind something keeps saying⁠—Your fault, your fault, your fault!”

At that moment I glanced at the patient, fearing that our whispering would awaken him, and saw a change in his face. He had awaked, and was listening to what Mary Petrovna was saying, but did not wish to show he was. His lips trembled, his cheeks burned, his whole face was lighted up literally as if by the sun, just as a wet, sombre-looking field is brightened up when the clouds above it open and allow a ray of sunshine to peep through. He had evidently forgotten about his sickness and fear of death. Only one feeling filled him, and two tears trickled from his closed and trembling eyelids. Mary Petrovna looked at him for a second or two half-frightenedly, and then blushed. A soft expression flashed into her face, and, bending over the poor half-corpse, she kissed him.

Then he opened his eyes. “My God, how I do not want to die!” he murmured. And suddenly strange, quiet sobbing sounds filled the room⁠—sounds quite new to me, who had never seen this man cry. I left the room, I was almost breaking down myself.

I also do not want to die, and all these thousands do not want to die. Kuzma at least has found consolation in his last moments⁠—but there at the war! Kuzma, for all his fear of death and his physical suffering, would scarcely change these present moments for any others of his life. No, it is not that at all! Death will always be death, but to die amidst those near and dear to one, and falling into the mud and one’s own blood, momentarily expecting someone will come up and finish you off, or that guns will ride over you and crush you like a worm.

“I tell you frankly,” said the doctor to me in the passage, as he put on his shuba and galoshes, “that with similar cases in hospitals ninety-nine out of one hundred are fatal. I can only hope on the attentive nursing, the wonderful spirits of the patient, and his burning desire to recover.”

“Every sick person longs to recover, doctor.”

“Of course, but your friend has certain vivifying circumstances,” said the doctor, with a smile. “And so this evening we shall operate again, and hope for the best.”

He shook my hand, and went off on his rounds, leaving behind him the smell of his bearskin shuba. In the evening he came with his instruments.

“Perhaps you would like, my embryo colleague, to operate for practice,” said he, turning to Lvoff. Lvoff nodded his head in assent, turned up his sleeves, and with a serious, gloomy expression on his face, began. I saw how he inserted some wonderful-looking, three-edged instrument into the wound, and saw how Kuzma, as the keen edge pierced his body, clutched the bedstead with his hands and clenched his teeth with the pain.

“Don’t be an old woman,” said Lvoff to him gruffly, placing a tampon into the new wound.

“Does it hurt very much?” asked Mary Petrovna tenderly.

“Not so very much, dearie, but I have grown weak, and am worn out.”

They bandaged him, gave him some wine, and he calmed down. The doctor left, and I, with Mary Petrovna, began to put the room in order.

“Put the clothes right,” murmured Kuzma in an even, dull voice. “There is a draught.”

I commenced to readjust his pillows and bedclothes according to his directions, which he gave very irritably, declaring that somewhere about his left