The Scarlet Blossom by Vsevolod Garshin

He understood that he was in a madhouse. He knew even that he was ill. Sometimes, as during the first night, he would awake in the quietness after a whole day of violent exercise, feeling exhaustion in every limb and a dreadful heaviness in his head, but fully conscious. Perhaps it was the absence of impressions in the stillness of the night and half-light. Perhaps it was the feeble working of the brain of a but just awakened being that caused him during such moments to understand fully his position, and made him apparently sane. But when morning arrived with the light and awakening of life in the Asylum, delusions again engulfed him as in a wave. The diseased brain could not grapple with them, and he once more became insane. His condition was a strange mixture of correct reasoning and nonsense. He understood that all around him were lunatics, but at the same time he saw in each of them somebody mysterious, a person hiding or hidden whom he had known previously, or of whom he had read or heard. The Asylum was inhabited by persons of all ages and nationalities, dead and living. Here there were the famed and strong of the world, and soldiers killed in the last war, but now resurrected. He saw himself in some magic enchanted circle, having collected to himself all the forces of the earth, and in proud delirium he deemed himself the centre of this circle. All his comrades in the Asylum were gathered there to perform a duty which, in a confused manner, appeared to him as a gigantic enterprise directed towards the extinction of evil on earth. He did not know in what the task would consist, but felt himself possessed of sufficient strength to execute it. He could read the thoughts of others. He saw in things their whole history. The large elms in the Asylum garden revealed whole legends of the past to him. The building, which really was of old construction, he considered a structure of Peter the Great, and was convinced that that Tsar had lived in it at the time of the Poltava battle. He read this in the walls, the plaster which had fallen, in the pieces of brick and Dutch tiles found by him in the garden. The whole history of the house and garden was written in them. He peopled the little building which did duty as a mortuary with tens and hundreds of persons long since dead, and fixedly gazed into the little window of its cellar, which looked into the garden, seeing in the uneven reflection of light on the old rainbow-tinted and dirty glass familiar features encountered by him at some period in life or seen in portraits.

In the meanwhile there came a period of bright fine weather. The patients spent the whole day out of doors in the garden. Their part of the garden, small and thickly overgrown with trees, was, wherever possible, planted with flowers. The Superintendent insisted that all who were capable of so doing should work in the garden. Every day they swept and sprinkled the paths with sand, weeded and watered the flowerbeds, vegetables, and fruit which they themselves had planted. In a corner of the garden was an overgrown cherry orchard. Alongside it stretched an avenue of elms, in the centre of which, on a small artificial mound, there was laid out the prettiest flowerbed in the garden. Bright-coloured flowers grew along the edges of the upper space, whilst the centre was adorned by a large full and rare yellow dahlia with red spots. It formed the centre of the whole garden, rising above it, and it was noticeable that many of the patients invested it with some secret significance. To the new patient it also appeared to be something out of the common, some palladium of the garden and building. All around the paths had also been planted by the patients. Here there was every possible flower met with in the gardens of "Little" Russia: high-growing roses, bright petunias, groups of tall tobacco-plants with small rose-coloured bloom, mint, nasturtiums, pinks, and poppies. Here, too, not far from a flight of steps, grew three small clusters of a particular kind of poppy. It was much smaller than the ordinary variety, and differed in its extraordinarily brilliant blood-red blossom.