Chapter 45

I COME TO GRIEF

At length the first examination--on differentials and integrals--
drew near, but I continued in a vague state which precluded me
from forming any clear idea of what was awaiting me. Every
evening, after consorting with Zuchin and the rest, the thought
would occur to me that there was something in my convictions
which I must change - something wrong and mistaken; yet every
morning the daylight would find me again satisfied to be "comme
il faut," and desirous of no change whatsoever.

Such was the frame of mind in which I attended for the first
examination. I seated myself on the bench where the princes,
counts, and barons always sat, and began talking to them in
French, with the not unnatural result that I never gave another
thought to the answers which I was shortly to return to questions
in a subject of which I knew nothing. I gazed supinely at other
students as they went up to be examined, and even allowed myself
to chaff some of them.

"Well, Grap," I said to Ilinka (who, from our first entry into
the University, had shaken off my influence, had ceased to smile
when I spoke to him, and always remained ill-disposed towards
me), "have you survived the ordeal?"

"Yes," retorted Ilinka. "Let us see if YOU can do so."

I smiled contemptuously at the answer, notwithstanding that the
doubt which he had expressed had given me a momentary shock. Once
again, however, indifference overlaid that feeling, and I
remained so entirely absent-minded and supine that, the very
moment after I had been examined (a mere formality for me, as it
turned out) I was making a dinner appointment with Baron Z. When
called out with Ikonin, I smoothed the creases in my uniform, and
walked up to the examiner's table with perfect sang froid.

True, a slight shiver of apprehension ran down my back when the
young professor--the same one as had examined me for my
matriculation--looked me straight in the face as I reached across
to the envelope containing the tickets. Ikonin, though taking a
ticket with the same plunge of his whole body as he had done at
the previous examinations, did at least return some sort of an
answer this time, though a poor one. I, on the contrary, did just
as he had done on the two previous occasions, or even worse,
since I took a second ticket, yet for a second time returned no
answer. The professor looked me compassionately in the face, and
said in a quiet, but determined, voice:

"You will not pass into the second course, Monsieur Irtenieff.
You had better not complete the examinations. The faculty must be
weeded out. The same with you, Monsieur Ikonin."

Ikonin implored leave to finish