Short Fiction by Leonid Andreyev (fastest ebook reader TXT) 📕

now rather welcome to him. Death with all its eternal mysteriousness and incomprehensibility was more acceptable to his reason than this strangely and fantastically changed world. What is more, death seemed to have been destroyed completely in this insane world of phantoms and puppets, having lost its great and enigmatic significance, becoming something mechanical and only for that reason terrible. He would be seized, taken, led, hanged, pulled by the feet, the rope would be cut, he would be taken down, carried off and buried.

And the man would have disappeared from the world.

At the trial the nearness of his comrades brought Kashirin to himself. For an instant he imagined he saw real people; they were sitting and trying him, speaking like human beings, listening, apparently understanding him. But as he mentally rehearsed the meeting with his mother he clearly felt with the terror of a man who is beginning to lose his reason and who realizes it, that this old woman in the black little kerchief was only an artificial, mechanical puppet, of the kind that can say “pa-pa,” “ma-ma,” but somewhat better constructed. He tried to speak to her, while thinking at the same time with a shudder:

“O Lord! That is a puppet. A mother doll. And there is a soldier-puppet, and there, at home, is a father-puppet, and this is the puppet of Vasily Kashirin.”

It seemed to him that in another moment he would hear somewhere the creaking of the mechanism, the screeching of unoiled wheels. When his mother began to cry, something human again flashed for an instant, but at the very first words it disappeared again, and it was interesting and terrible to see that water was flowing from the eyes of the doll.

Then, in his cell, when the terror had become unbearable, Vasily Kashirin attempted to pray. Of all that had surrounded his childhood days in his father’s house under the guise of religion only a repulsive, bitter and irritating sediment remained; but faith there was none. But once, perhaps in his earliest childhood, he had heard a few words which had filled him with palpitating emotion and which remained during all his life enwrapped with tender poetry. These words were:

“The joy of all the afflicted⁠ ⁠…”

It had happened, during painful periods in his life, that he whispered to himself, not in prayer, without being definitely conscious of it, these words: “The joy of all the afflicted”⁠—and suddenly he would feel relieved and a desire would come over him to go to some dear friend and question gently:

“Our life⁠—is this life? Eh, my dearest, is this life?”

And then suddenly it would appear laughable to him and he would feel like mussing up his hair, putting forth his knee and thrusting out his chest as though to receive heavy blows; saying: “Here, strike!”

He did not tell anybody, not even his nearest comrades, about his “joy of all the afflicted” and it was as though he himself did not know about it⁠—so deeply was it hidden in his soul. He recalled it but rarely and cautiously.

Now when the terror of the insoluble mystery, which appeared so plainly before him, enveloped him completely, even as the water in high-flood covers the willow twigs on the shore⁠—a desire came upon him to pray. He felt like kneeling, but he was ashamed of the soldier and, folding his arms on his chest, he whispered softly:

“The joy of all the afflicted!”

And he repeated tenderly, in anguish:

“Joy of all the afflicted, come to me, help Vaska Kashirin.”

“Long ago, while he was yet in his first term at the university and used to go off on a spree sometimes, before he had made the acquaintance of Werner and before he had entered the organization, he used then to call himself half-boastingly, half-pityingly, ‘Vaska Kashirin,’⁠—and now for some reason or other he suddenly felt like calling himself by the same name again. But the words had a dead and toneless sound.

“The joy of all the afflicted!”

Something stirred. It was as though someone’s calm and mournful image had flashed up in the distance and died out quietly, without illuminating the deathly gloom. The wound-up clock in the steeple struck. The soldier in the corridor made a noise with his gun or with his saber and he yawned, slowly, at intervals.

“Joy of all the afflicted! You are silent! Will you not say anything to Vaska Kashirin?”

He smiled patiently and waited. All was empty within his soul and about him. And the calm, mournful image did not reappear. He recalled, painfully and unnecessarily, wax candles burning; the priest in his vestments; the icon painted on the wall. He recalled his father, bending and stretching himself, praying and bowing to the ground, while looking sidewise to see whether Vaska was praying, or whether he was planning some mischief. And a feeling of still greater terror came over Vasily than before the prayer.

Everything now disappeared.

Madness came crawling painfully. His consciousness was dying out like an extinguishing bonfire, growing icy like the corpse of a man who had just died, whose heart is still warm but whose hands and feet had already become stiffened with cold. His dying reason flared up as red as blood again and said that he, Vasily Kashirin, might perhaps become insane here, suffer pains for which there is no name, reach a degree of anguish and suffering that had never been experienced by a single living being; that he might beat his head against the wall, pick his eyes out with his fingers, speak and shout whatever he pleased, that he might plead with tears that he could endure it no longer⁠—and nothing would happen. Nothing could happen.

And nothing happened. His feet, which had a consciousness and life of their own, continued to walk and to carry his trembling, moist body. His hands, which had a consciousness of their own, endeavored in vain to fasten the coat which was open at his chest and to warm his trembling, moist body. His body quivered with cold. His