Page:Garshin - A Red Flower (1911).djvu/32

30 break it off and kill it. But this was not all; it was also necessary not to permit it at its death to discharge its evil upon the world. And that is why he put it in his bosom. He hoped that by morning the flower would lose its strength. Its evil would transplant itself to his breast, to his soul, and there it would be vanquished, or else it would vanquish; then he would perish, die, but die like an honest combatant, as the first champion of humanity, because until now no one had yet dared to wrestle at one onset with all the evil of the universe.

"They did not see it. I saw it. Can I permit it to live? Better death."

And he lay there, succumbing to a visionary, non-existing struggle. In the morning the assistant physician found him barely alive. Nothwithstanding this, however, in a short while he seemed to regain his vigor; he jumped out of bed, and as formerly he traversed the hospital, conversing with the inmates and with himself in a louder tone and more incoherently than before. He was not allowed in the garden. The doctor, noticing that his weight was growing less, that he did not sleep and that he walked and walked all the time, prescribed morphine. He did