He buried the knife into his left arm above the elbow; the blood spurted out, flowing in a hot stream. In this he soaked his scarf, smoothed it out, tied it to the stick, and hung out his red flag.
He stood waving his flag. The train was already in sight. The driver will not see him—will come close up, and a heavy train cannot be pulled up in a hundred sajenes.
And the blood kept on flowing. Simon kept pressing the sides of the wound together, wanting to close it, but the blood did not diminish. Evidently he had cut his arm very deeply. His head commenced to swim, black spots began to dance before his eyes, and then it became dark. There was a ringing in his ears. He could not see the train or hear the noise. Only one thought possessed him: “I shall not be able to keep standing up. I shall fall and drop the flag; the train will pass over me.... Help me, O Lord!...”
All became quite black before him, his mind became a blank, and he dropped the flag; but the blood-stained banner did not fall to the ground. A hand seized it and held it high to meet the approaching train. The engine-driver saw it, shut the regulator, and reversed steam. The train came to a standstill.
People jumped out of the carriages and collected in a crowd. Looking, they saw a man lying senseless on the footway, drenched in blood, and another man standing beside him with a blood-stained rag on a stick.
Vassili looked around at all; then, lowering his head, said, “Bind me; I have pulled up a rail!”
In “Four Days,” which follows in an original translation for this series, we have another autobiographical story of singular penetration. It must be remembered that Garshin’s convictions of duty led him to unusual length—he enlisted as a private, when his family connections would have warranted something better. So he writes from close to the people—in this respect differing from Tolstoi, with whose memorable Sevastopol sketches Garshin’s “Four Days” has been seriously compared by critics. It was at the engagement of Aislar that Garshin received his incapacitating bullet-wound, after real gallantry in action, and Aislar is the battle of the story.
After recovering from his wound, our author became desperately absorbed in trying to save one of his friends from execution for having attempted the life of Loris Melikov, but Garshin failed, and soon afterward it again became necessary to confine him in an asylum.
From this seizure he recovered, and married a young lady who devoted her life to a beautiful service—that of healing his mind and preventing a recurrence of his malady; but, sadly enough, without success. He never shook off the boding pall of the madhouse. One needs only to read his “Red Flower” to feel the haunting presence of that pathetic colony of abnormal minds and spirits coming to sit with him in hours when he sought happiness in forgetfulness. Half-memories of days of half-self-possession are indeed shapes that haunt the dusk! To quote Waliszewski’s vivid summary: “The story describes a demented person, half-conscious of his condition, who wears himself out in superhuman efforts to gain possession of a red-poppy—reddened, as he imagines, by the blood of all the martyrdoms of the human race. If the flower were only destroyed, he thinks, humanity would be saved.”
In 1887, in physical and mental suffering too combinedly torturing to be borne, Garshin eluded the watchers by his bedside and flung himself down a stone staircase, sustaining injuries from which he never recovered. The consciousness of his act caused him to brood still more painfully over his state, and he died in a hospital the next year, 1888, at the age of only thirty-three.