Page:Andreyev - The Crushed Flower (Knopf, 1917).djvu/44

42 "Will you take your gun?" he asked thoughtfully and earnestly.

"I will."

"It is behind the stove."

"How do you know? Well, kiss me. Will you remember me?"

He jumped up in his bed, in his short little shirt, hot from sleep, and firmly clasped my neck. His arms were burning—they were so soft and delicate. I lifted his hair on the back of his head and kissed his little neck.

"Will they kill you?" he whispered right into my ear.

"No, I will come back."

But why did he not cry? He had cried sometimes when I had simply left the house for a while: Is it possible that it had reached him, too? Who knows? So many strange things happened during the great days.

I looked at the walls, at the bread, at the candle, at the flame which had kept flickering, and took my wife by the hand.

"Well—'till we meet again!"

"Yes—'till we meet again!"

That was all. I went out. It was dark on the stairway and there was the odour of old filth. Surrounded on all sides by the stones and the darkness, groping down the stairs, I was seized with a tremendous, powerful and all-absorbing feeling of the new, unknown and joyous something to which I was going.