Short Fiction Vsevolod Garshin (best e reader for epub .txt) 📖

and bleeding hands and knees he began to search for a suitable place. A few bricks had become detached from the wall where it met the wall of the Mortuary, and making use of the hollows thus formed, the patient climbed on to the wall, seized hold of the branches of an elm growing on the other side, and quietly let himself down the tree on to the ground.

He rushed to the well-known spot near the flight of steps. The blossom with its closed petals showed up clearly and darkly in the dewy grass.

“The last!” whispered the patient⁠—“the last! Today is victory or death! But it is all the same to me. Wait,” said he, gazing up to the starry sky, “I will soon be with you.”

He rooted up the plant, tore it to pieces, and holding it crushed in his clenched hand, he returned to his room the same way he had left it. The old warder still slept. The patient, barely reaching the bed, fell on to it senseless.

In the morning they found him dead. His face was calm and serene. The tired features, with the thin lips and deeply sunken closed eyes, wore an expression of proud happiness. When they had laid him on a stretcher they attempted to open his clenched hand and remove the scarlet blossom. But it was too late, and he carried his trophy to the grave.

A Toad and a Rose

Once upon a time in this world there lived a rose and a toad.

The bush on which the rose bloomed grew in a not very big crescent-shaped flowerbed in front of a country house in a village. The flowerbed was in a very neglected state. Grass and weeds grew thickly over its sunken surface, and along the paths, which no one had cleaned or sprinkled with sand for a long time. A wooden trellis, which had once been painted green, was now quite bare of any such decoration, had rotted, and was falling to pieces. Most of the long stakes of which the trellis-work was composed had been pulled up by the boys of the village for playing at soldiers, or by peasants coming to the house to defend themselves from a savage yard-dog.

But the flowerbed itself was none the worse for this desolation. Climbing hop tendrils entwined themselves amongst the debris of the trellis-work, mingling with the large white flowers of convolvuli. Broom hung from it in pale green clusters, dotted with lilac-tinted bunches of bloom. Prickly thistles grew so freely in the rich moist soil (the flowerbed was surrounded by a large shady garden), that they almost resembled trees. Yellow mullen raised blossom-covered shoots even higher. Nettles had taken possession of a whole corner of the bed. Of course they stung, but, from a distance, one could admire their dark foliage, especially when this foliage served as a background for the delicate, lovely pale blossom of a rose.

It burst into bloom on a beautiful May morning. When it had opened its petals, the early dew, before taking flight, had left on them a few transparent teardrops, which made it look as if the rose was weeping. But all around was so beautiful, so clean and bright on this glorious morning when the rose first saw the blue sky and felt the caress of the morning zephyr, and the rays of a brilliant sun, giving a pinkish tint to its thin petals. All in the flowerbed was so peaceful and calm that had the rose really been able to cry, it would not have been from grief, but from the very joy of living. It could not talk; it could only diffuse around, with lowered head, a delicate fresh perfume, and this perfume was at once its words, tears, and prayers. But below it, amongst the roots of the rosebush on the damp soil, as if glued to it by its flat belly, there sat a decidedly fat old toad, which used to hunt all night for worms and midges, and when morning came, would sit and rest from his labours, having first chosen the shadiest and dampest spot. He used to sit there, his toad’s eyes, with their membranous lids, tightly closed, his scarcely perceptible breathing expanding his dirty-grey barbed and sticky sides, with one shapeless paw outstretched, too lazy to tuck it in. He was not rejoicing either in the brilliant morning sun or the beautiful weather. He had fed and meant to have a rest. But when the breeze chanced to die away for a minute, and the perfume of the rose was not borne to one side, the toad noticed it, and this caused him a vague uneasiness. However, for a long time he was too lazy to look and see whence this scent was coming.

It was a long time since anyone had come to the bed in which the rose was growing and the toad used to sit. In the autumn of the past year, on the very day that the toad, having discovered an excellent chink under one of the stones forming the basement of the house, had decided to take up his winter quarters therein, a small boy had come for the last time to this flowerbed in which he had sat every fine day throughout the summer. A lady, his grownup sister, used to sit at the window reading or sewing, and from time to time used to look at her brother. He was a little fellow of seven, with large eyes and a large head on a thin little body. He was very fond of his flowerbed. It was his because only he used to go to this deserted part of the garden, and he would sit in the sunshine on a little old wooden seat standing on a dry, once-sanded path, which ran round the house itself, and along which servants used to go to shut the shutters, and he would commence to read the book he