On the Thursday in Easter week Papa, my sister, Katenka, and Mimi went
away into the country, and no one remained in my grandmother’s great
house but Woloda, St. Jerome, and myself. The frame of mind which I
had experienced on the day of my confession and during my subsequent
expedition to the monastery had now completely passed away, and left
behind it only a dim, though pleasing, memory which daily became more
and more submerged by the impressions of this emancipated existence.
The folio endorsed “Rules of My Life” lay concealed beneath a pile of
school-books. Although the idea of the possibility of framing rules, for
every occasion in my life and always letting myself be guided by
them still pleased me (since it appeared an idea at once simple and
magnificent, and I was determined to make practical application of it),
I seemed somehow to have forgotten to put it into practice at once, and
kept deferring doing so until such and such a moment. At the same time,
I took pleasure in the thought that every idea which now entered my
head could be allotted precisely to one or other of my three sections of
tasks and duties--those for or to God, those for or to my neighbour, and
those for or to myself. “I can always refer everything to them,” I said
to myself, “as well as the many, many other ideas which occur to me on
one subject or another.” Yet at this period I often asked myself, “Was I
better and more truthful when I only believed in the power of the
human intellect, or am I more so now, when I am losing the faculty of
developing that power, and am in doubt both as to its potency and as to
its importance?” To this I could return no positive answer.
The sense of freedom, combined with the spring-like feeling of vague
expectation to which I have referred already, so unsettled me that
I could not keep myself in hand--could make none but the sorriest of
preparations for my University ordeal. Thus I was busy in the schoolroom
one morning, and fully aware that I must work hard, seeing that
to-morrow was the day of my examination in a subject of which I had
the two whole questions still to read up; yet no sooner had a breath of
spring come wafted through the window than I felt as though there were
something quite different that I wished to recall to my memory. My hands
laid down my book, my feet began to move of themselves, and to set me
walking up and down the room, and my head felt as though some one
had suddenly touched in it a little spring and set some machine in
motion--so easily and swiftly and naturally did all sorts of pleasing
fancies of which I could catch no more than the radiancy begin coursing
through it. Thus one hour, two hours, elapsed unperceived. Even if I
sat down determinedly to my book, and managed to concentrate my whole
attention upon what I was reading, suddenly there would sound in the
corridor the footsteps of a woman and the rustle of her dress. Instantly
everything would escape my mind, and I would find it impossible to
remain still any longer, however much I knew that the woman could only
be either Gasha or my grandmother’s old sewing-maid moving about in the
corridor. “Yet suppose it should be SHE all at once?” I would say to
myself. “Suppose IT is beginning now, and I were to lose it?” and,
darting out into the corridor, I would find, each time, that it was only
Gasha. Yet for long enough afterwards I could not recall my attention to
my studies. A little spring had been touched in my head, and a strange
mental ferment started afresh. Again, that evening I was sitting alone
beside a tallow candle in my room. Suddenly I looked up for a moment--to
snuff the candle, or to straighten myself in my chair--and at once
became aware of nothing but the darkness in the corners and the blank of
the open doorway. Then, I also became conscious how still the house was,
and felt as though I could do nothing else than go on listening to that
stillness, and gazing into the black square of that open doorway, and
gradually sinking into a brown study as I sat there without moving.
At intervals, however, I would get up, and go downstairs, and begin
wandering through the empty rooms. Once I sat a long while in the small
drawing-room as I listened to Gasha playing “The Nightingale” (with two
fingers) on the piano in the large drawing-room, where a solitary candle
burned. Later, when the moon was bright, I felt obliged to get out of
bed and to lean out of the window, so that I might gaze into the garden,
and at the lighted roof of the Shaposnikoff mansion, the straight
tower of our parish church, and the dark shadows of the fence and the
lilac-bush where they lay black upon the path. So long did I remain
there that, when I at length returned to bed, it was ten o’clock in the
morning before I could open my eyes again.
In short, had it not been for the tutors who came to give me lessons, as
well as for St. Jerome (who at intervals, and very grudgingly, applied
a spur to my self-conceit) and, most of all, for the desire to figure
as “clever” in the eyes of my friend Nechludoff (who looked upon
distinctions in University examinations as a matter of first-rate
importance)--had it not been for all these things, I say, the spring and
my new freedom would have combined to make me forget everything I
had ever learnt, and so to go through the examinations to no purpose
whatsoever.