Page:Garshin - A Red Flower (1911).djvu/23

become mad once more. He was in a strange state of sound reason mixed with absurdity. He understood that all around him were unwell; at the same time he saw in each one of them some secretly concealed face which he had known, read or heard of before. The asylum was inhabited by people of all ages and all lands. Here were both the living and the dead. Here were celebrities and heroes and the soldiers killed in the recent war. He saw himself in some enchanted sphere, which concentrated in itself the entire power of the earth; in proud enthusiasm he regarded himself as the centre of this sphere. They all, his comrades in the asylum, had gathered there to accomplish a deed, which appeared in his fancy as some giant undertaking toward the extinction of evil on earth. He did not know in what it would consist, but he felt in himself sufficient strength for its execution. He could read the thoughts of other people; he saw in common things all their history; the big elm trees in the garden related to him many legends of the past; the hospital building, indeed an old one, he regarded as a structure of Peter the Great's time, and he was confident that the Czar occupied it at the time