Chapter 9 - Page 2

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