Easter of the year when I entered the University fell late in April, so
that the examinations were fixed for St. Thomas’s Week, [Easter week.]
and I had to spend Good Friday in fasting and finally getting myself
ready for the ordeal.
Following upon wet snow (the kind of stuff which Karl Ivanitch used to
describe as “a child following, its father”), the weather had for three
days been bright and mild and still. Not a clot of snow was now to be
seen in the streets, and the dirty slush had given place to wet, shining
pavements and coursing rivulets. The last icicles on the roofs were fast
melting in the sunshine, buds were swelling on the trees in the little
garden, the path leading across the courtyard to the stables was soft
instead of being a frozen ridge of mud, and mossy grass was showing
green between the stones around the entrance-steps. It was just that
particular time in spring when the season exercises the strongest
influence upon the human soul--when clear sunlight illuminates
everything, yet sheds no warmth, when rivulets run trickling under one’s
feet, when the air is charged with an odorous freshness, and when the
bright blue sky is streaked with long, transparent clouds.
For some reason or another the influence of this early stage in the
birth of spring always seems to me more perceptible and more impressive
in a great town than in the country. One sees less, but one feels more.
I was standing near the window--through the double frames of which the
morning sun was throwing its mote-flecked beams upon the floor of what
seemed to me my intolerably wearisome schoolroom--and working out a
long algebraical equation on the blackboard. In one hand I was holding a
ragged, long-suffering “Algebra” and in the other a small piece of chalk
which had already besmeared my hands, my face, and the elbows of my
jacket. Nicola, clad in an apron, and with his sleeves rolled up, was
picking out the putty from the window-frames with a pair of nippers, and
unfastening the screws. The window looked out upon the little garden. At
length his occupation and the noise which he was making over it arrested
my attention. At the moment I was in a very cross, dissatisfied frame of
mind, for nothing seemed to be going right with me. I had made a mistake
at the very beginning of my algebra, and so should have to work it out
again; twice I had let the chalk drop. I was conscious that my hands and
face were whitened all over; the sponge had rolled away into a corner;
and the noise of Nicola’s operations was fast getting on my nerves. I
had a feeling as though I wanted to fly into a temper and grumble at
some one, so I threw down chalk and “Algebra” alike, and began to
pace the room. Then suddenly I remembered that to-day we were to go to
confession, and that therefore I must refrain from doing anything
wrong. Next, with equal suddenness I relapsed into an extraordinarily
goodhumoured frame of mind, and walked across to Nicola.
“Let me help you, Nicola,” I said, trying to speak as pleasantly as I
possibly could. The idea that I was performing a meritorious action in
thus suppressing my ill-temper and offering to help him increased my
good-humour all the more.
By this time the putty had been chipped out, and the screws removed,
yet, though Nicola pulled with might and main at the cross-piece, the
window-frame refused to budge.
“If it comes out as soon as he and I begin to pull at it together,” I
thought, “it will be rather a shame, as then I shall have nothing more
of the kind to do to-day.”
Suddenly the frame yielded a little at one side, and came out.
“Where shall I put it?” I said.
“Let ME see to it, if you please,” replied Nicola, evidently surprised
as well as, seemingly, not over-pleased at my zeal. “We must not leave
it here, but carry it away to the lumber-room, where I keep all the
frames stored and numbered.”
“Oh, but I can manage it,” I said as I lifted it up. I verily believe
that if the lumber-room had been a couple of versts away, and the frame
twice as heavy as it was, I should have been the more pleased. I felt
as though I wanted to tire myself out in performing this service for
Nicola. When I returned to the room the bricks and screws had been
replaced on the windowsill, and Nicola was sweeping the debris, as well
as a few torpid flies, out of the open window. The fresh, fragrant air
was rushing into and filling all the room, while with it came also the
dull murmur of the city and the twittering of sparrows in the garden.
Everything was in brilliant light, the room looked cheerful, and a
gentle spring breeze was stirring Nicola’s hair and the leaves of my
“Algebra.” Approaching the window, I sat down upon the sill, turned my
eyes downwards towards the garden, and fell into a brown study.
Something new to me, something extraordinarily potent and unfamiliar,
had suddenly invaded my soul. The wet ground on which, here and there,
a few yellowish stalks and blades of bright-green grass were to be seen;
the little rivulets glittering in the sunshine, and sweeping clods of
earth and tiny chips of wood along with them; the reddish twigs of the
lilac, with their swelling buds, which nodded just beneath the window;
the fussy twitterings of birds as they fluttered in the bush below; the
blackened fence shining wet from the snow which had lately melted off
it; and, most of all, the raw, odorous air and radiant sunlight--all
spoke to me, clearly and unmistakably, of something new and beautiful,
of something which, though I cannot repeat it here as it was then
expressed to me, I will try to reproduce so far as I understood it.
Everything spoke to me of beauty, happiness, and virtue--as three things
which were both easy and possible for me--and said that no one of them
could exist without the other two, since beauty, happiness, and virtue
were one. “How did I never come to understand that before?” I cried to
myself. “How did I ever manage to be so wicked? Oh, but how good, how
happy, I could be--nay, I WILL be--in the future! At once, at once--yes,
this very minute--I will become another being, and begin to live
differently!” For all that, I continued sitting on the window-sill,
continued merely dreaming, and doing nothing. Have you ever, on a
summer’s day, gone to bed in dull, rainy weather, and, waking just
at sunset, opened your eyes and seen through the square space of the
window--the space where the linen blind is blowing up and down, and
beating its rod upon the window-sill--the rain-soaked, shadowy, purple
vista of an avenue of lime-trees, with a damp garden path lit up by the
clear, slanting beams of the sun, and then suddenly heard the joyous
sounds of bird life in the garden, and seen insects flying to and fro at
the open window, and glittering in the sunlight, and smelt the fragrance
of the rain-washed air, and thought to yourself, “Am I not ashamed to be
lying in bed on such an evening as this?” and, leaping joyously to your
feet, gone out into the garden and revelled in all that welter of
life? If you have, then you can imagine for yourself the overpowering
sensation which was then possessing me.