



Produced by Jarrod Newton








THE CRUSHED FLOWER AND OTHER STORIES


By Leonid Andreyev

Translated by Herman Bernstein





CONTENTS

     The Crushed Flower
     A Story Which Will Never Be Finished
     On the Day of the Crucifixion
     The Serpent's Story
     Love, Faith and Hope
     The Ocean
     Judas Iscariot and Others
     "The Man Who Found the Truth"





THE CRUSHED FLOWER




CHAPTER I


His name was Yura.

He was six years old, and the world was to him enormous, alive and
bewitchingly mysterious. He knew the sky quite well. He knew its deep
azure by day, and the white-breasted, half silvery, half golden clouds
slowly floating by. He often watched them as he lay on his back upon the
grass or upon the roof. But he did not know the stars so well, for he
went to bed early. He knew well and remembered only one star--the green,
bright and very attentive star that rises in the pale sky just before
you go to bed, and that seemed to be the only star so large in the whole
sky.

But best of all, he knew the earth in the yard, in the street and in the
garden, with all its inexhaustible wealth of stones, of velvety grass,
of hot sand and of that wonderfully varied, mysterious and delightful
dust which grown people did not notice at all from the height of their
enormous size. And in falling asleep, as the last bright image of the
passing day, he took along to his dreams a bit of hot, rubbed off stone
bathed in sunshine or a thick layer of tenderly tickling, burning dust.

When he went with his mother to the centre of the city along the large
streets, he remembered best of all, upon his return, the wide, flat
stones upon which his steps and his feet seemed terribly small, like
two little boats. And even the multitude of revolving wheels and horses'
heads did not impress themselves so clearly upon his memory as this new
and unusually interesting appearance of the ground.

Everything was enormous to him--the fences, the dogs and the people--but
that did not at all surprise or frighten him; that only made everything
particularly interesting; that transformed life into an uninterrupted
miracle. According to his measures, various objects seemed to him as
follows:

His father--ten yards tall.

His mother--three yards.

The neighbour's angry dog--thirty yards.

Their own dog--ten yards, like papa.

Their house of one story was very, very tall--a mile.

The distance between one side of the street and the other--two miles.

Their garden and the trees in their garden seemed immense, infinitely
tall.

The city--a million--just how much he did not know.

And everything else appeared to him in the same way. He knew many
people, large and small, but he knew and appreciated better the little
ones with whom he could speak of everything. The grown people behaved
so foolishly and asked such absurd, dull questions about things that
everybody knew, that it was necessary for him also to make believe that
he was foolish. He had to lisp and give nonsensical answers; and, of
course, he felt like running away from them as soon as possible.
But there were over him and around him and within him two entirely
extraordinary persons, at once big and small, wise and foolish, at once
his own and strangers--his father and mother.

They must have been very good people, otherwise they could not have been
his father and mother; at any rate, they were charming and unlike other
people. He could say with certainty that his father was very great,
terribly wise, that he possessed immense power, which made him a person
to be feared somewhat, and it was interesting to talk with him about
unusual things, placing his hand in father's large, strong, warm hand
for safety's sake.

Mamma was not so large, and sometimes she was even very small; she was
very kind hearted, she kissed tenderly; she understood very well how he
felt when he had a pain in his little stomach, and only with her could
he relieve his heart when he grew tired of life, of his games or when he
was the victim of some cruel injustice. And if it was unpleasant to cry
in father's presence, and even dangerous to be capricious, his tears
had an unusually pleasant taste in mother's presence and filled his soul
with a peculiar serene sadness, which he could find neither in his games
nor in laughter, nor even in the reading of the most terrible fairy
tales.

It should be added that mamma was a beautiful woman and that everybody
was in love with her. That was good, for he felt proud of it, but that
was also bad--for he feared that she might be taken away. And every time
one of the men, one of those enormous, invariably inimical men who were
busy with themselves, looked at mamma fixedly for a long time, Yura felt
bored and uneasy. He felt like stationing himself between him and mamma,
and no matter where he went to attend to his own affairs, something was
drawing him back.

Sometimes mamma would utter a bad, terrifying phrase:

"Why are you forever staying around here? Go and play in your own room."

There was nothing left for him to do but to go away. He would take a
book along or he would sit down to draw, but that did not always help
him. Sometimes mamma would praise him for reading but sometimes she
would say again:

"You had better go to your own room, Yurochka. You see, you've spilt
water on the tablecloth again; you always do some mischief with your
drawing."

And then she would reproach him for being perverse. But he felt worst of
all when a dangerous and suspicious guest would come when Yura had to
go to bed. But when he lay down in his bed a sense of easiness came
over him and he felt as though all was ended; the lights went out, life
stopped; everything slept.

In all such cases with suspicious men Yura felt vaguely but very
strongly that he was replacing father in some way. And that made him
somewhat like a grown man--he was in a bad frame of mind, like a grown
person, but, therefore, he was unusually calculating, wise and serious.
Of course, he said nothing about this to any one, for no one would
understand him; but, by the manner in which he caressed father when he
arrived and sat down on his knees patronisingly, one could see in the
boy a man who fulfilled his duty to the end. At times father could not
understand him and would simply send him away to play or to sleep--Yura
never felt offended and went away with a feeling of great satisfaction.
He did not feel the need of being understood; he even feared it. At
times he would not tell under any circumstances why he was crying; at
times he would make believe that he was absent minded, that he heard
nothing, that he was occupied with his own affairs, but he heard and
understood.

And he had a terrible secret. He had noticed that these extraordinary
and charming people, father and mother, were sometimes unhappy and
were hiding this from everybody. Therefore he was also concealing his
discovery, and gave everybody the impression that all was well. Many
times he found mamma crying somewhere in a corner in the drawing room,
or in the bedroom--his own room was next to her bedroom--and one night,
very late, almost at dawn