Chapter XXII

On reaching his room, narrow and stuffy as a prison-cell, Yourii found life as dreary as ever, and his little love-episode seemed to him thoroughly commonplace.

"I stole a kiss from her! What bliss! How heroic of me! How exquisitely romantic! In the moonlight the hero beguiles the fair maid with burning words and kisses! Bah! what rubbish! In such a cursed little hole as this one insensibly becomes a shallow fool."

When he lived in a city, Yourii imagined that the country was the real place for him where he could associate with peasants and share in their rustic toil beneath a burning sun. Now that he had the chance to do this, village life seemed insufferable to him, and he longed for the stimulus of a town where alone his energies could have scope.

"The stir and bustle of a city! The thrill of passionate eloquence!" so he rapturously phrased it to himself; yet he soon checked such boyish enthusiasm.

"After all, what does it mean? What are politics and science? Great as ideals in the distance, yes! But in the life of each individual they're only a trade, like anything else! Strife! Titanic efforts! The conditions of modern existence make all that impossible. I suffer, I strive, I surmount obstacles! Well, what then? Where's the end of it? Not in my lifetime, at any rate! Prometheus wished to give fire to mankind, and he did so. That was a triumph, if you like! But what about us? The most we do is to throw faggots on a fire that we have never kindled, and which by us will never be put out."

It suddenly struck him that if things were wrong it was because he, Yourii, was not a Prometheus. Such a thought, in itself most distressing, yet gave him another opportunity for morbid self-torture.

"What sort of a Prometheus am I? Always looking at everything from a personal, egotistic point of view. It is I, always I; always for myself. I am every bit as weak and insignificant as the other people that I heartily Despise."

This comparison was so displeasing to him that his thoughts became confused, and for a while he sat brooding over the subject, endeavouring to find a justification of some kind.

"No, I am not like the others," he said to himself, feeling, in a sense, relieved, "because I think about these things. Fellows like Riasantzeff and Novikoff and Sanine would never dream of doing so. They have not the remotest intention of criticising themselves, being perfectly happy and self-satisfied, like Zarathustra's triumphant pigs. The whole of life is summed up in their own infinitesimal ego; and by their spirit of shallowness it is that I am infected. Ah, well! when you are with wolves you've got to howl. That is only natural."

Yourii began to walk up and down the room, and, as often happens, his change of position brought with it a change in his train of thought.

"Very well. That's