Page:Andreyev - The Crushed Flower (Knopf, 1917).djvu/40

38 I know that she did not stir from her place, but I felt distinctly that she was going away, that she was far—far away. I began to feel so cold, I stretched out my hands—but she pushed them aside.

"People have such a holiday once in a hundred years, and you want to deprive me of it. Why?" she said.

"But they may kill you there. And our children will perish." "Life will be merciful to me. But even if they should perish—"

And this was said by her, my wife—a woman with whom I had lived for ten years. But yesterday she had known nothing except our children, and had been filled with fear for them; but yesterday she had caught with terror the stern symptoms of the future. What had come over her? Yesterday—but I, too, forgot everything that was yesterday. "Do you want to go with me?"

"Do not be angry"—she thought that I was afraid, angry—"Don't be angry. To-night, when they began to knock here, and you were still sleeping, I suddenly understood that my husband, my children—all these were simply temporary . . . I love you, very much"—she found my hand and shook it with the same new, unfamiliar grasp—"but do you hear how they are knocking there? They are knocking, and something seems to be falling, some kind of walls seem to be falling—and it is so spacious, so wide, so free. It is night now, and yet it seems to me that the sun is shining. I am thirty years of age, and I am old