AT the subsequent examinations, I made several new acquaintances in
addition to the Graps (whom I considered unworthy of my notice) and
Iwin (who for some reason or other avoided me). With some of these new
friends I grew quite intimate, and even Ikonin plucked up sufficient
courage to inform me, when we next met, that he would have to undergo
re-examination in history--the reason for his failure this time being
that the professor of that faculty had never forgiven him for last
year’s examination, and had, indeed, “almost killed” him for it.
Semenoff (who was destined for the same faculty as myself--the
faculty of mathematics) avoided every one up to the very close of the
examinations. Always leaning forward upon his elbows and running his
fingers through his grey hair, he sat silent and alone. Nevertheless,
when called up for examination in mathematics (he had no companion
to accompany him), he came out second. The first place was taken by a
student from the first gymnasium--a tall, dark, lanky, pale-faced fellow
who wore a black folded cravat and had his cheeks and forehead dotted
all over with pimples. His hands were shapely and slender, but their
nails were so bitten to the quick that the finger-ends looked as though
they had been tied round with strips of thread. All this seemed to me
splendid, and wholly becoming to a student of the first gymnasium.
He spoke to every one, and we all made friends with him. To me in
particular his walk, his every movement, his lips, his dark eyes, all
seemed to have in them something extraordinary and magnetic.
On the day of the mathematical examination I arrived earlier than usual
at the hall. I knew the syllabus well, yet there were two questions
in the algebra which my tutor had managed to pass over, and which were
therefore quite unknown to me. If I remember rightly, they were the
Theory of Combinations and Newton’s Binomial. I seated myself on one of
the back benches and pored over the two questions, but, inasmuch as I
was not accustomed to working in a noisy room, and had even less time
for preparation than I had anticipated, I soon found it difficult to
take in all that I was reading.
“Here he is. This way, Nechludoff,” said Woloda’s familiar voice behind
me.
I turned and saw my brother and Dimitri--their gowns unbuttoned, and
their hands waving a greeting to me--threading their way through the
desks. A moment’s glance would have sufficed to show any one that they
were second-course students--persons to whom the University was as a
second home. The mere look of their open gowns expressed at once disdain
for the “mere candidate” and a knowledge that the “mere candidate’s”
soul was filled with envy and admiration of them. I was charmed to think
that every one near me could now see that I knew two real second-course
students: wherefore I hastened to meet them half-way.
Woloda, of course, could not help vaunting his superiority a little.
“Hullo, you smug!” he said. “Haven’t you been examined yet?”
“No.”
“Well, what are you reading? Aren’t you sufficiently primed?”
“Yes, except in two questions. I don’t understand them at all.”
“Eh, what?”--and Woloda straightway began to expound to me Newton’s
Binomial, but so rapidly and unintelligibly that, suddenly reading in my
eyes certain misgivings as to the soundness of his knowledge, he glanced
also at Dimitri’s face. Clearly, he saw the same misgivings there, for
he blushed hotly, though still continuing his involved explanations.
“No; hold on, Woloda, and let me try and do it,” put in Dimitri at
length, with a glance at the professors’ corner as he seated himself
beside me.
I could see that my friend was in the best of humours. This was always
the case with him when he was satisfied with himself, and was one of the
things in him which I liked best. Inasmuch as he knew mathematics well
and could speak clearly, he hammered the question so thoroughly into my
head that I can remember it to this day. Hardly had he finished when St.
Jerome said to me in a loud whisper, “A vous, Nicolas,” and I followed
Ikonin out from among the desks without having had an opportunity of
going through the OTHER question of which I was ignorant. At the table
which we now approached were seated two professors, while before the
blackboard stood a gymnasium student, who was working some formula
aloud, and knocking bits off the end of the chalk with his too vigorous
strokes. He even continued writing after one of the Professors had said
to him “Enough!” and bidden us draw our tickets. “Suppose I get the
Theory of Combinations?” I thought to myself as my tremulous fingers
took a ticket from among a bundle wrapped in torn paper. Ikonin, for
his part, reached across the table with the same assurance, and the
same sidelong movement of his whole body, as he had done at the previous
examination. Taking the topmost ticket without troubling to make further
selection, he just glanced at it, and then frowned angrily.
“I always draw this kind of thing,” he muttered.