Short Fiction Leonid Andreyev (best books to read .txt) 📖

years old. You were young and handsome. What does it all mean? How cruel men are. What is it for? For whom is it necessary? You, my gentle, poor darling, darling.⁠ ⁠…”

At her cry they all ran up⁠—my mother, sister, nurse⁠—and they all began crying and saying something or other, and fell at my feet wailing. While on the threshold stood my brother, pale, terribly pale, with a trembling jaw, and cried out in a high-pitched voice⁠—

“I shall go mad with you all. I shall go mad!”

While my mother grovelled at my chair and had not the strength to cry, but only gasped, beating her head against the wheels. And there stood the clean bed with the well-shaken pillows and turned-down blanket, the same bed that I bought just before our wedding four years ago.⁠ ⁠…

Fragment IX

… I was sitting in a warm bath, while my brother was pacing up and down the small room in a troubled manner, sitting down, getting up again, catching hold of the soap and towel, bringing them close up to his shortsighted eyes and again putting them back in their places. At, last he stood up with his face to the wall and picking at the plaster with his finger, continued hotly.

“Judge for yourself: one cannot teach people mercy, sense, logic⁠—teach them to act consciously for tens and hundreds of years running with impunity. And, in particular, to act consciously. One can become merciless, lose all sensitiveness, get accustomed to blood and tears and pain⁠—for instance butchers, and some doctors and officers do, but how can one renounce truth, after one has learnt to know it? In my opinion it is impossible. I was taught from infancy not to torture animals and be compassionate; all the books that I read told me the same, and I am painfully sorry for all those that suffer at your cursed war. But time passes, and I am beginning to get accustomed to all those deaths, sufferings and all this blood; I feel that I am getting less sensitive, less responsive in my everyday life and respond only to great stimulants, but I cannot get accustomed to war; my brain refuses to understand and explain a thing that is senseless in its basis. Millions of people gather at one place and, giving their actions order and regularity, kill each other, and it hurts everybody equally, and all are unhappy⁠—what is it if not madness?” My brother turned round and looked at me inquiringly with his shortsighted, artless eyes.

“The red laugh,” said I merrily, splashing about.

“I will tell you the truth,” and my brother put his cold hand trustingly on my shoulder, but quickly pulled it back, as if he was frightened at its being naked and wet. “I will tell you the truth; I am very much afraid of going mad. I cannot understand what is happening. I cannot understand it, and it is dreadful. If only anybody could explain it to me, but nobody can. You were at the front, you saw it all⁠—explain it to me.”

“Deuce take you,” answered I jokingly, splashing about.

“There, and you too,” said my brother, sadly. “Nobody is capable of helping me. It’s dreadful. And I am beginning to lose all understanding of what is permissible and what is not, what has sense and what is senseless. If I were to seize you suddenly by the throat, at first gently, as if caressing you, and then firmly, and strangle you, what would that be?”

“You are talking nonsense. Nobody does such things.”

My brother rubbed his cold hands, smiled softly, and continued⁠—

“When you were away there were nights when I did not sleep, could not sleep, and strange ideas entered my head⁠—to take a hatchet, for instance, and go and kill everybody⁠—mother, sister, the servants, our dog. Of course they were only fancies, and I would never do so.”

“I should hope not,” smiled I, splashing about.

“Then, again, I am afraid of knives, of all that is sharp and shining; it seems to me that if I were to take up a knife I should certainly kill somebody with it. Now, is it not true⁠—why should I not plunge it into somebody, if it were sharp enough?”

“The argument is sufficient. What a queer fellow you are, brother! Just open the hot-water tap.”

My brother opened the tap, let in some hot water, and continued⁠—

“Then, again, I am afraid of crowds⁠—of men, when many of them gather together. When of an evening I hear a noise in the street⁠—a loud shout, for instance⁠—I start and believe that⁠ ⁠… a massacre has begun. When several men stand together, and I cannot hear what they are talking about, it seems to me that they will suddenly cry out, fall upon each other, and blood will flow. And you know”⁠—he bent mysteriously towards my ear⁠—“the papers are full of murders⁠—strange murders. It is all nonsense that there are as many brains as there are men; mankind has only one intellect, and it is beginning to get muddled. Just feel my head, how hot it is. It is on fire. And sometimes it gets cold, and everything freezes in it, grows benumbed, and changes into a terrible dead-like piece of ice. I must go mad; don’t laugh, brother, I must go mad. A quarter of an hour has passed, it’s time for you to get out of your bath.”

“A little bit more. Just a minute.”

It was so good to be sitting again in that bath and listening to the well-known voice, without reflecting upon the words, and to see all the familiar, simple and ordinary things around me: the brass, slightly-green tap, the walls, with the familiar pattern, and all the photographic outfit laid out in order upon the shelves. I would take up photography again, take simple, peaceful landscapes and portraits of my son walking, laughing and playing. One could do that without legs. And I would take up my writing again⁠—about clever books, the progress of human thought,