Page:Andreyev - The Crushed Flower (Knopf, 1917).djvu/41

Rh already, and yet it seems to me that I am only seventeen, and that I love some one with my first love—a great, boundless love." "What a night!" I said. "It is as if the city were no more. You are right, I have also forgotten how old I am."

"They are knocking, and it sounds to me like music, like singing of which I have always dreamed—all my life. And I did not know whom it was that I loved with such a boundless love, which made me feel like crying and laughing and singing. There is freedom—do not take my happiness away, let me die with those who are working there, who are calling the future so bravely, and who are rousing the dead past from its grave."

"There is no such thing as time."

"What do you say?"

"There is no such thing as time. Who are you? I did not know you. Are you a human being?" She burst into such ringing laughter as though she were really only seventeen years old.

"I did not know you, either. Are you, too, a human being? How strange and how beautiful it is—a human being!"

That which I am writing happened long ago, and those who are sleeping now in the sleep of grey life and who die without awakening—those will not believe me: in those days there was no such thing as time. The sun was rising and setting, and the hand was moving around the dial—but time did not exist. And many other great and wonderful things happened