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

“Ho, ho, ho!” roared I, splashing about.

“What is the matter with you?” asked my brother, growing pale and full of fear.

“Nothing. I am glad to be home.”

He smiled at me as one smiles at a child or on one younger than oneself, although I was three years older than he, and grew thoughtful, like a grownup person or an old man who has great, burdensome old thoughts.

“Where can one fly to?” he asked, shrugging his shoulders. “Every day, at about the same hour, the papers close the circuit, and all mankind gets a shock. This simultaneousness of feelings, tears, thoughts, sufferings and horror deprives me of all stay, and I am like a chip of wood tossing about on the waves, or a bit of dust in a whirlwind. I am forcibly torn away from all that is habitual, and there is one terrible moment every morning, when I seem to hang in the air over the black abyss of insanity. And I shall fall into it, I must fall into it. You don’t know all, brother. You don’t read the papers, and much is held back from you⁠—you don’t know all, brother.”

I took all his words for rather a gloomy joke⁠—the usual attitude towards all those who, being touched by insanity, have an inkling of the insanity of war, and gave us a warning. I considered it as a joke, as if I had forgotten for the moment, while I was splashing about in the hot water, all that I had seen over there. “Well, let them hold things back from me, but I must get out of the bath, anyway,” said I lightly, and my brother smiled and called my man, and together they lifted me out of my bath and dressed me. Afterwards I had some fragrant tea, which I drank out of my cut-glass tumbler, and said to myself that life was worth living even without a pair of legs; and then they wheeled me into the study up to my table and I prepared for work.

Before the war I was on the staff of a journal, reviewing foreign literature, and now, disposed within my reach, lay a heap of those dear, sweet books in yellow, blue and brown covers. My joy was so great, my delight so profound, that I could not make up my mind to begin reading them, and I merely fingered the books, passing my hand caressingly over them. I felt a smile spread over my face, most probably a very silly smile, but I could not keep it back, as I contemplated admiringly the type, the vignettes, the severe beautiful simplicity of the drawings. How much thought and sense of beauty there was in them all! How many people had to work and search, how much talent and taste were needed to bring forth that letter, for instance, so simple and elegant, so clever, harmonious and eloquent in its interlaced lines.

“And now I must set to work,” said I, seriously, full of respect for work.

And I took up my pen to write the heading and, like a frog tied to a string, my hand began plunging about the paper. The pen stuck into the paper, scratched it, jerked about, slipped irresistibly aside, and brought forth hideous lines, broken, crooked, devoid of all sense. And I did not cry out or move, I grew cold and still as the approaching terrible truth dawned upon me; while my hand danced over the brightly illuminated paper, and each finger shook in such hopeless, living, insane horror, as if they, those fingers, were still at the front and saw the conflagrations and blood, and heard the groans and cries of undescribable pain. They had detached themselves from me, those madly quivering fingers, they were alive, they had become ears and eyes; and, growing cold from horror, without the strength to move or cry out, I watched their wild dance over the clean, bright white page.

And all was quiet. They thought I was working, and had shut all the doors, so as not to interrupt me by any sound⁠—and I was alone in the room, deprived of the power of moving, obediently watching my shaking hands.

“It is nothing,” said I aloud, and in the stillness and loneliness of the study my voice sounded hollow and nasty like the voice of a madman. “It is nothing. I will dictate. Why, Milton was blind when he wrote his Paradise Regained. I can think, and that is the chief thing, in fact it is all.”

And I began inventing a long clever phrase about the blind Milton, but the words got confused, fell away as out of a rotten printing frame, and when I came to the end of the phrase I had forgotten the beginning. Then I tried to remember what made me begin, and why I was inventing that strange senseless phrase about Milton, and could not.

“Paradise Regained, Paradise Regained,” I repeated, and could not understand what it meant.

And then I saw that I often forgot very many things, that I had become strangely absentminded, and confused familiar faces; that I forgot words even in a simple conversation, and sometimes, remembering a word, I could not understand its meaning. And I clearly pictured to myself my daily existence. A strange short day, cut off like my legs, with empty mysterious spaces, long hours of unconsciousness or apathy, about which I could remember nothing.

I wanted to call my wife, but could not remember her name⁠—and this did not surprise or frighten me. Softly I whispered⁠—

“Wife!”

The incoherent, unusual word sounded softly and died away without bringing any response. And all was quiet. They were afraid of disturbing me at my work by any careless sound, and all was quiet⁠—a perfect study for a savant⁠—cosy, quiet, disposing one to meditation and creative energy. “Dear ones, how solicitous they are of me!” I thought tenderly.

… And inspiration, sacred inspiration, came to me. The sun burst forth in