Page:The Career of a Nihilist.djvu/36

A fierce gladness flashed in his darkened eyes as he looked straight before him. He rose to his feet; he longed to get away. There was nothing to keep him here. Nature’s beauties had lost the power of producing the slightest impression upon him. Mechanically he returned on his former way through the grey twilight of the grove. His face was pale, but calm and somewhat gloomy, whilst all was trembling within his heaving breast. His widely opened eyes looked wistfully into the darkness, but he scarcely saw anything. If the sharp thorns of some bush had lacerated his body, he would not have noticed it. He was almost beside himself with the violent emotions boiling from the depths of his soul and permeating his whole being.

He could not say this feeling was quite new to him. Now and then he had experienced something similar, though never had he been so wholly under its power. It was rapture, yet it was unutterably sad, as if his soul were filled with wailing, and his heart brimful of tears; but the wailings were melodious, the tears were sweet.

Out of this tumult of emotion—like the cry of an eagle soaring in the eternal calm of the skies, far above the regions of cloud and tempest—there rose in his breast the triumphant, the intoxicating consciousness of the titanic strength of the man, whom no danger, no suffering, nothing on earth, can compel to deviate one hair’s-breadth from his path. He knew that he would make a good and faithful soldier of the legion which fought for the cause of their country. Because this is what gives one man power over another’s heart; this is what imparts the spell of contagion to his zeal; this is what infuses into a word—a mere vibration of the air—the force to overturn and remould the human soul.

The grove through which he had passed lay far behind, and he had been walking for some time upon an open road. In his occasional rambles he had never chanced upon that side of the town. A cornfield attracted his attention. It was a mere patch, a few score yards square, so that on the vast green turf it looked like a lady’s pocket-handkerchief on the carpet of a drawing-room. Yet it struck a foreigner, accustomed to see in Switzerland only mountains and vineyards, as something unexpected.

Andrey had no difficulty in guessing that the road he followed would take him back to his lodgings. But he did not