The Scarlet Flower

THE SCARLET FLOWER 

In the name of his Royal Majesty and Sovereign Monarch King Peter the First I do declare this madhouse open for inspection!" This speech was uttered in a loud raucous voice. The hospital clerk, who was registering the patient in a big dog-eared book that lay on an ink-stained desk, could not help smiling. But the two young attendants did not laugh: after two days and sleepless nights spent alone with the madman, whom they had just brought down by railway, they could barely stand on their feet. At the last station but one he had become so violent that he had had to be put in a strait jacket, for which purpose the assistance of the guards and a policeman had had to be resorted to. Thus bound he was brought to town and delivered at the hospital.

He looked ghastly. Over his grey garment, which had been torn to shreds during his outburst of violence, was a tightly laced jacket of coarse canvas cut low at the neck; the long sleeves pinioned his crossed arms over his chest and were tied behind his back. His bloodshot dilated eyes (he had not slept for ten days) glittered with a feverish blazing light; his lower lip twitched with a nervous spasm; his curly matted hair hung over his forehead like a mane; he paced from corner to corner of the office with swift heavy strides, staring fixedly at the old file cabinets and the oilcloth-covered chairs, and throwing an occasional glance at his companions.

"Take him in. The building on the right."

"I know. I was here last year. We were inspecting the hospital. I know all about it, it will be difficult to deceive me," said the patient.

He turned towards the door. The door-keeper opened it to let him pass through; he walked out of the office with the same swift, heavy, resolute stride, his demented head held high, and made for the mental department on the right almost at a run. His attendants were barely able to keep up with him.

"Ring the bell. I can't do it, you have tied my hands."

The door-keeper opened the door, and the patient and his attendants entered the hospital.

It was a large stone building of old-fashioned construction. Two large halls-one a dining-room, the other a common room for the quiet inmates-a wide passage with a glass door leading into the garden, and about twenty separate rooms where the inmates lived, occupied the ground floor; on the same floor were two dark rooms, one padded, the other boarded, where the violent patients were kept, and a great gloomy room with a vaulted ceiling which was the bath-room. The upper floor was occupied by the women. A confused hum, punctuated by howls and screeches, came from there. The hospital had been built for eighty patients, but as it was the only one serving several adjacent gubernias, it accommodated up to three hundred. The tiny rooms contained as many as four and five beds; in the winter, when the patients were not allowed out into the garden, and all the windows behind their iron bars were shut tight, the air in the hospital became unbearably stuffy.

The new patient was led into the room containing the baths. This room was a depressing sight even to a sane man, and all the more painful was it to a sick disordered mind. It was a large vaulted room with a sticky stone floor illumined by a single corner window; the walls and arches were painted with dark-red oil paint; two built-in stone baths, like two oval holes filled with water, were sunk into the ground on a level with the floor, which was black with dirt. A huge copper stove with a cylindrical boiler for heating the water and a maze of copper pipes and taps occupied a corner facing the window; all this to a sick brain had a sinister fantastic appearance, and the bath attendant himself, a burly, dour-faced, taciturn Ukrainian, only tended to heighten this impression.

When the patient was taken into this sinister room to have his bath, and, in accordance with the system of treatment introduced by the house physician, to have a large blister plaster put on the back of his neck, he was beside himself with terror and fury. Ridiculous thoughts, one more monstrous than the other, whirled in his brain. What was this? The Inquisition? A secret place of execution where his enemies had decided to do away with him? Or was this Hell itself? It then occurred to him that this was a kind of ordeal. He was undressed despite his desperate resistance. With an energy redoubled by sickness he easily wrenched himself out of the hands of the attendants, who fell sprawling on the floor; finally the four of them threw him down, and seizing him by the arms and legs, lowered him into the warm water. It seemed boiling hot to him, and wild crazy thoughts of ordeal by boiling water and red-hot iron thronged his sick head. Choking with water, struggling furiously in the grip of the attendants, he shouted out in a half-strangled voice an incoherent speech, the nature of which one cannot possibly imagine unless one has actually heard it. It was a mixture of prayers and curses. He screamed and fought until he was utterly exhausted, and then quietly, with hot tears pouring down his face, he uttered a phrase that was oddly at variance with his previous speech.

"Holy martyr St. George! Into thy hands I give my body. But my soul-no, oh no!"

The attendants were still holding him, although he had calmed down. The warm bath and the ice bag applied to his head had done their work. But when, almost senseless, he was taken out of the water and seated on a stool to have a blister plaster applied, he mustered his last ounce of strength and his crazed brain in a fresh outburst.

"What have I done?" he shrieked. "I was doing no one any harm. Why do you want to kill me? O-o-o! Oh, my God! Oh, the souls of all those tortured before me! Deliver me, I pray. . . ."

The burning touch of the plaster to the nape of his neck made him struggle furiously. The attendants could not manage him and did not know what to do.

"It cannot be helped," said the soldier who was performing the operation, "it will have to be rubbed off."

These simple words, misconstrued by the sick man as "rubbed out," made him shudder. "Rubbed out? Rub what out? Rub who out? Me?" he thought, and shut his eyes in deadly terror. The soldier took a rough towel by its two ends and rubbed it hard across the back of the man's neck, tearing off the blister plaster and leaving a livid patch where the skin had come away with it. The pain of that operation, unbearable even to a calm and sane person, seemed the end of everything to the patient. He wrenched himself free with a frantic effort, and his naked body went rolling over the flagstones. He thought he had had his head cut off. He wanted to cry out but he could not. He was carried senseless to his bed, where, without coming to, he fell into a deep dead sleep. 

He awoke in the night. All was quiet; in the large room next door one could hear the breathing of the sleeping patients. Somewhere far away an inmate of the dark padded room was talking to himself in a strange monotonous voice, while upstairs, in the women's department, a hoarse contralto was singing a wild song. The sick man lay listening to these sounds. He felt terribly weak in all his aching limbs, and his neck was causing him great pain.

"Where am I? What has happened?" he wondered. And suddenly the last month of his life came back to him with extraordinary vividness, and he realized that he was ill and what his illness was. He recalled various crazy thoughts, words, and actions of his, and a shudder ran through his body.

"That is over now. Thank God, that is all over!" he whispered, and fell asleep again.

The iron-barred open window gave upon a small area between the big buildings and the stone fence; no one ever used that area, and it was covered with a rank growth of wild shrubs and lilac bushes, which were in full blossom at that time of the year. On the other side of the shrubbery directly facing the window rose a high dark wall, from behind which peeped the tops of the trees growing in the large garden, all bathed and steeped in moonlight. On the right rose the white building of the hospital, its barred windows lighted up from within; on the left was the blank wall of the mortuary, white under the moon. The moonlight poured into the room through the barred window and lit up part of the bed and the gaunt pallid face of the sick man with closed eyes; there was not a trace of madness in it now. It was the deep heavy sleep of an exhausted man, a sleep without dreams, without the slightest movement, almost without breathing. He awoke for several seconds perfectly sane and seemingly healthy, only to get up in the morning as insane as ever. 

"How do you feel?" the doctor asked him the next day.

The patient, who had just woken up, still lay under his blanket.

"Splendid!" he answered, jumping up, putting on his slippers and snatching his dressing-gown. "Splendid! The only trouble is this!" And he pointed to the back of his head. "I cannot turn my head, it hurts me. But that is nothing. Everything is good when you understand it; and I understand."

"Do you know where you are?"

"Of course I do, doctor! In a madhouse. But once you understand it makes no difference. No earthly difference."

"What are you staring at me for? You will not be able to read my soul," the patient continued, "but I can clearly see into yours! Why are you doing evil? Why have you herded together all these unfortunate people, why do you keep them here? I don't care: I understand what it's all about and so I take it calmly; but they? Why these tortures? To a man who has had a great idea, a common idea, brought home to him, it makes no difference where he lives, what he feels. He does not even care whether he lives or not. . . . Isn't that so?"

"Possibly," the doctor answered, sitting down on a chair in a corner of the room the better to be able to watch the patient, who was pacing swiftly from corner to corner in his huge shuffling horse-hide slippers and his fluttering cotton gown with broad crimson stripes and large flowers. The medical assistant and the attendant accompanying the doctor continued to stand at attention by the door.

"And I have it!" the patient cried. "When I discovered it I felt myself a new man. My senses were sharpened, and my brain functions as never before. What I used to arrive at by a long process of guess-work and inference, I now realize intuitively. I have attained in reality what philosophy has evolved in theory. I experience through myself the great ideas that space and time are but a fiction. I dwell in all the ages. I live beyond space, everywhere or nowhere, as you like. And therefore I do not care whether you keep me here or let me go, whether I am free or bound. I notice that there are one or two more like me here. But for the rest of the crowd such a situation is terrible. Why don't you set them free? Who wants--"

"You said," the doctor interrupted him, "that you live beyond space and time. But surely you will agree with me that you and I are both in this room, and that it is now"-the doctor consulted his watch-"half past ten on May the sixth, eighteen hundred and--- What do you say to that?"

"Nothing. I do not care where I am and when I live. If I do not care, does not that signify that I am everywhere and always?"

The doctor smiled.

"Sound logic," he said. "I daresay you are right. Good day. Would you care for a cigar?"

"Thank you." He stopped, took a cigar, and bit off the tip with nervous impatience. "It helps you to think," he said. "This world is a microcosm. At one end-alkalis, at the other-acids. . . . Such is the equilibrium of the world in which opposite bases are neutralized. Good-bye, doctor!"

The sick man, left alone, continued to pace feverishly from corner to corner. Tea was brought him; without sitting down, he emptied the large cup in two gulps, and ate up the chunk of white bread in the twinkling of an eye. Then he went out, and for several hours in succession, without stopping, he walked from one end of the building to the other with his swift heavy stride. It was a rainy day and the inmates were not allowed out into the garden. When the doctor's assistant looked for the new patient, someone pointed him out at the end of the passage; he was standing there with his face pressed against the glass pane of the garden door, staring at the flower-bed. His attention was attracted by an unusually vivid scarlet flower, a variety of the poppy.

"Please come and be weighed," the doctor's assistant said, touching his shoulder.

When the patient turned his face to him, he recoiled with a stab of fear-such a look of maniacal malignity and hatred was reflected in the patient's blazing eyes. At the sight of the doctor's assistant, however, he instantly changed his expression and followed him meekly without uttering a word, as though sunk deep in thought. They went into the consulting-room; the patient stepped on to the platform of the small decimal balance without waiting to be invited; the doctor's assistant checked his weight, and wrote "109 pounds" against his name in the book. The next day it was 107, and the day after that 106.

"If he keeps on like this he will not last long," the doctor said, and gave orders for him to be fed well.

slept and spent whole days in ceaseless movement. 

in all his limbs, and with a weight of lead in his head, but otherwise perfectly sane. It may have been the absence of impressions induced by the still night and the semi-darkness, or the sluggish work of a brain roused from sleep that made him clearly realize his position at such moments with what seemed to be perfect sanity. Then, with daybreak, the hospital came to life, and a wave of impressions engulfed him; his sick brain could not cope with them, and he succumbed again. His condition was a peculiar mixture of sane reasoning and nonsense. He understood that all these people around him were hospital patients, yet he saw in every one of them some incognito or secretly disguised person whom he had known before, or about whom he had heard or read. The hospital was tenanted by people of all ages and all countries, dead and living. Here, resurrected, were the famous and the strong of all the world, and soldiers killed in the last war. He saw himself in a kind of enchanted circle in which was gathered all the might of the earth, and in a frenzy of pride, believed himself to be the centre of that circle. All his hospital mates had gathered here with him to fulfil a task which he vaguely envisaged as a gigantic enterprise aimed at destroying the evil of the world. He did not know what form it would take, but he felt that he had it in him to carry it out. He could read people's minds; things revealed to him their whole history; the great elms in the hospital garden told him legends of the past; the building, which was really fairly old, he considered to have been erected under Peter the Great, and was convinced that the Tsar had lived in it at the time of the Poltava Battle. He read this on the walls, on pieces of chipped off plaster, on the fragments of bricks and tiles that he found in the garden; the whole history of this house and its garden was written on them. He peopled the small building of the mortuary with scores and hundreds of individuals long since dead, and he stared through its little basement window, seeing in the shadowy light reflected in the old, iridescent and dirty glass the familiar lineaments which he had once seen in life or on portraits.

Meanwhile the weather had turned fine and sunny, and the inmates spent all day in the garden. Their part of the garden was a small space, thickly overgrown with trees, which had flowers planted over it wherever possible. The warden made everyone work in it who was at all fit to do anything; day in day out the patients pottered about sweeping the paths, strewing sand on them, weeding and watering the flower-beds, the cucumbers, melons and water-melons, which they had planted with their own hands. The corner of the garden was overgrown with cherry-trees; avenues of elm-trees ran down it; in the middle, on a small artificial mound, a flower-bed had been laid out, the most beautiful flower-bed in the whole garden; bright flowers grew round the borders of the upper ledge, while the centre was adorned by a gorgeous yellow dahlia with red spots. It was the centre piece of the whole garden, which it dominated, and it was to be observed that many of the inmates attached a kind of mysterious significance to it. It struck the new patient, too, as being rather remarkable, a palladium of the garden and building, as it were. All the garden walks, too, had been planted by the inmates with all kinds of flowers such as are usually met with in Ukrainian homes: tall roses, brilliant petunias, clumps of tall tobacco plants with small pink blossoms, mint, marigolds, nasturtiums, and poppies. Right near the doorstep grew three clusters of poppies of some peculiar variety; they were much smaller than the ordinary poppy, from which they were distinguished, however, by their extraordinarily brilliant scarlet hue. It was this flower that had arrested the patient's attention on his first day at the hospital, when he had been found looking out into the garden through the glass door.

On coming out into the garden, the first thing he had done before descending the steps was to look at those brilliant flowers. There were only two of them, growing somewhat apart from the rest on an unweeded spot, half-buried in rank goose-foot and dock.

The inmates came through the door one by one, and the door-keeper gave each of them a thick, white knitted cap with a red cross on the front of it. These caps had been in the war and had been purchased by auction. But the patient, naturally, attached a special mysterious significance to that red cross. He took his cap off and looked at the cross, then at the poppies. The flowers were brighter.

"He is winning," said the patient, "but we shall see."

And he descended the steps. Looking round and not seeing the attendant, who was standing behind him, he stepped over the flower-bed and stretched his hand out towards the flower, but could not bring himself to pluck it. He felt a hot stab of pain in his outstretched arm, and then throughout his body, as though some powerful secret current emanating from the scarlet petals had shot through his body. He went closer, his hand almost touching the flower, but it seemed to him as if the flower was defending itself, exhaling a poisonous deadly breath. His head reeled; making a last desperate effort, he seized it by its stem when suddenly a heavy hand dropped on his shoulder. The attendant had caught him.

"You must not pick the flowers," the old man said. "And you should not walk on the flower-beds. There are a lot of you lunatics here; if every one took a flower there would be nothing left of the garden," he pointed out persuasively, his hand still on the patient's shoulder.

The patient looked him in the face, removed his hand in silence, and walked away down the garden path deeply perturbed. "Poor wretches!" he thought. "You see nothing, you are so blind that you defend it. But come what may, I shall put an end to it. Soon now we shall cross swords. And if I die in the attempt, what does it matter. . . . "

He walked about the garden till late in the evening, striking up acquaintances and starting strange conversations in which each of his interlocutors found only the answers to his own crazy thoughts expressed in absurd mysterious words. The patient walked about first with one companion, then another, and towards the end of the day he was more convinced than ever that "all was ready," as he put it to himself. Soon now, soon, the iron bars would fall apart, and al] the people imprisoned here would be set free and rush to all corners of the earth, and the world, with a shudder, would throw off its shabby old covering and appear in all its glorious and shining new beauty. He had almost forgotten about the flower until he mounted the steps on his way out of the garden, when he saw the two red coals glowing amid the dense, darkened and already dewy grass. The patient lagged behind the crowd, and when the door-keeper's back was turned, he jumped over the flower-bed, snatched the flower and hid it away hastily under his shirt. When the fresh dewy leaves touched his body he grew as pale as death, and his eyes dilated in terror. A cold sweat broke out on his forehead.

the patient with the flower. He walked about with his clasped hands convulsively crossed on his chest as if he would crush and destroy the plant that lay hidden there. He gave everyone he met a wide berth, taking care not to touch them with the hem of his garment. "Keep away, keep away!" he shouted. But such exclamations in the hospital hardly attracted attention. He walked faster and faster, making longer and longer strides; he walked for an hour, two hours, in a kind of frenzy.

"I'll wear you out! I'll strangle you!" he muttered savagely.

At times he gnashed his teeth.

Supper was served in the dining-room. Several painted and gilt wooden bowls containing a thin millet gruel were set out on large bare tables; the patients took their seats on the benches; they were each given a lump of black bread. They ate with wooden spoons, eight men out of one bowl. Some of them-those who were on an improved diet-were served separately. Our patient quickly swallowed his portion, which the attendant had brought him in his room, and not satisfied with this, he went into the common dining-room.

"May I sit here?" he asked the warden.

"Haven't you had your supper yet?" the latter asked as he dished out extra portions of porridge.

"I am very hungry. Besides, I have to keep my strength up. Food is my only support; I don't sleep at all, you know."

"My dear man, you're welcome to it. Taras, give him a spoon and some bread."

He sat down before one of the common bowls and ate a vast quantity of porridge.

"That'll do, now, that'll do," the warden said at length, when all had finished supper while our patient was still sitting over his bowl, eating out of it with one hand, while the other he held clutched to his breast. "You'll overeat yourself."

"Ah, if you only knew what a lot of strength I need! Good-bye, Nikolai Nikolayevich," the patient said, getting up from the table and wringing the warden's hand. "Farewell."

"Where are you off to?" the warden said with a smile.

"I? Nowhere. I am staying here. But tomorrow, perhaps, we shall see each other no more. Thank you for all your kindness."

And he gripped the warden's hand once more. His voice shook and there were tears in his eyes.

"Now, don't upset yourself, my dear," said the warden. "Why these gloomy thoughts? Go and lie down and have a good sleep. You ought to sleep more; if you sleep well, you'll get well quickly."

on his bed in the corner room. He was shivering as if with the fever, clutching convulsively at his breast, which, so it seemed to him, was impregnated with a dread and deadly poison. 

He did not sleep all night. He had plucked that flower because he regarded the act as a deed of valour which he was obliged to perform. The scarlet petals had attracted his attention the moment he had looked through the glass door, and it seemed to him that it was from that very moment that he had come at last to realize what his task was in this world. All the world's evil was concentrated in that brilliant scarlet flower. He knew that opium was obtained from the poppy; it was perhaps this thought, magnified in his mind to grotesque dimensions, that had made him create that grim fantastic spectre. The flower was to him the embodiment of all evil; it had soaked up all the innocently spilt blood (that was why it was so red), all the tears, and all the anguish of humanity. It was a mysterious, sinister creature, the opposite of God, Ahriman in a modest innocent guise. It had to be torn out and slain. More, it had to be prevented, in dying, from spreading its evil through the world. And that is why he had concealed it in his bosom. He hoped that by the morning the flower would have lost all its malign power. The evil that was in it would pass into his breast, his soul, and there it would either be conquered or would conquer-and then he himself would perish, die, but he would die an honest fighter, the first fighter of mankind, because no one up till then had dared single-handed to grapple with all the evil of the world.

"They have not seen it. I have. How can I let it live? Better death."

And he lay fainting, exhausted by the unreal shadowy struggle that he was waging. In the morning the doctor's assistant found him almost half-dead. Nevertheless, excitation presently got the upper hand; he sprang from his bed and began to run about the hospital again, talking to the patients and to himself louder and more wildly than ever. He was not allowed to go out into the garden. Seeing that he was losing weight, not sleeping, and walking about all the time, the doctor ordered him an injection of a large dose of morphium. He offered no resistance: fortunately, his crazy thoughts at the time happened to fit in with this operation. He soon fell asleep; the frenzied movement ceased, and the loud maddening tune produced by the time-beat of his quick nervous steps died out of his ears. He dropped off and no longer thought of anything, not even of the second flower that remained to be plucked.

He plucked it three days later under the eye of the old door-keeper and before the latter could prevent him. The door-keeper ran after him. The patient ran into the hospital with a triumphant yell and dashed into his room where he hid the flower in his bosom.

"Why do you pluck the flowers?" demanded the doorkeeper, running in after him. But the patient, who was now lying on his bed with his arms folded on his chest in his customary pose, began to talk such nonsense that the doorkeeper, saying nothing more, took off his head the cap with the red cross which he had forgotten in his precipitate flight, and went away. And the phantom struggle began again. The sick man felt the evil gushing from the flower in long, wriggling, snake-like jets; they wrapped themselves around him, squeezed and crushed his limbs, sunk their deadly venom into him. Between curses directed against his enemy he wept and prayed to God. By the evening the flower had withered. The sick man trampled on the blackened plant, picked the remnants of it up from the floor and carried them into the bath-room. He threw the squashed shapeless scraps on to the blazing coals of the stove, and stood for a long time watching his enemy hiss and shrivel until he had turned at last into a soft little heap of snow-white ashes. He blew at it, and it all disappeared.

The next day the patient was worse. Deathly pale and haggard, with glittering eyes sunk deep in their sockets, he continued his violent pacing with a reeling stumbling gait and talked and talked without a stop.

"I should not like to resort to force," the head physician told his assistant. "But this activity must be stopped. Today his weight is ninety-three pounds. At this rate he won't last more than two days."

The physician became lost in thought.

"Morphine? Chloral?" he said half-questioningly. "The morphine didn't work yesterday." "Have him bound. I doubt, though, whether he will survive." 

rather than abated. He struggled hard for hours to free himself from his fetters. At last, with a violent wrench, he tore one of the bands, and freed his leg, then, slipping out from under the rest, began to pace the room with arms bound, shouting out wild unintelligible speeches.

"Daze my eyes!" cried the door-keeper coming in. "The devils must ha' been helping you! Gritsko! Ivan! Quick, he's got loose."

The three of them fell upon the patient, and there began a long struggle, a tiring one for the attackers, and an agonizing one for the attacked, who spent the last of his exhausted strength. At last he was overcome, and bound down to his bed more securely than ever.

"You don't understand what you are doing!" the sick man panted. "You are perishing! I saw a third, just beginning to blossom. It's ready now. Let me finish my work! I have to kill it! Kill it! Then it will all be over, everything will be saved. I would send you, but this is a thing I can only do myself. You would die from the mere touch."

"Keep quiet, sir!" said the old door-keeper, who was left to watch at his bedside.

on the floor near the patient's cot and lay down. In a minute he was fast asleep, and the patient fell to work again.

He twisted his whole body over to reach the iron bar that ran lengthwise down the bedstead, and feeling for it with his wrist, which was concealed in the long sleeve of the strait jacket, he began to rub the sleeve hard against the iron bar. In due course the thick canvas gave way and he freed his forefinger. After that things went faster. With a dexterity and suppleness that would have been incredible in a healthy man, he untied the knot behind his back which pinioned the sleeves, and unlaced the jacket, after which he sat for a long time listening to the snores of the caretaker. But the old man slept soundly. The patient took off the strait jacket and untied the bands that strapped him to the bed. He was now free. He tried the door; it was locked from the inside, and the key, no doubt, lay in the caretaker's pocket. He did not dare to search his pockets for fear of wakening him, so he decided to go out through the window.

The night was still, warm, and dark; the window was open; stars shone in the black sky. He looked at them, distinguishing familiar constellations and feeling glad that they seemed to understand him and sympathize with him. Narrowing his eyes, he saw the endless rays which they sent him, and his mad resolve was strengthened. The thing was to bend aside one of the thick rods on the barred window, crawl through the narrow opening into the area, and climb over the high stone wall. There he would fight his last battle, and after that-death might come for all he cared.

He tried to bend the thick bar with his bare hands, but the iron refused to yield. Then he twisted the strong sleeves of the strait jacket into a rope, hitched it to the spearhead hammered out at the bottom of the bar, and threw his whole weight upon it. After desperate efforts, which almost exhausted his last remaining strength, the rod bent, offering a narrow opening. He squeezed himself through it, grazing the skin of his shoulders, elbows and knees, crept through the bushes and stopped before the wall. All was quiet. The windows of the great building were dimly lit up by the night lamps. There was not a soul about. No one had noticed him; the old man set to watch at his bedside was probably fast asleep. The stars twinkled kindly and their rays went straight to his heart.

"I am coming," he whispered, gazing at the sky.

mortuary several bricks were missing. The patient found these holes in the wall and used them for a foothold. He climbed up the wall, seized the branch of an elm growing on the other side, and quietly lowered himself to the ground by means of the tree trunk.

He rushed to the familiar spot near the doorstep. The flower, a dark little patch with folded petals, stood out clearly in the dewy grass.

"The last!" whispered the patient. "The last! Today victory or death. But that does not matter any more. Wait," he said, looking up at the sky, "I shall be with you soon."

He pulled out the plant, crushed it, squashed it, and clutching it in his hand, returned to his room the way he had come. The old man was sleeping. The patient dropped senseless on his bed the moment he reached it.

In the morning he was found dead. His face was calm and serene; the emaciated features with the thin lips and closed sunken eyes expressed a kind of proud elation. When he was placed on the stretcher they tried to unclench his hand to take the crimson flower out, but his hand had stiffened in death, and he carried his trophy away with him to the grave.

1883