第3章

Suddenly the frame yielded a little at one side, and came out.

"Where shall I put it?" I said.

"Let ME see to it, if you please," replied Nicola, evidently surprised as well as, seemingly, not over-pleased at my zeal.

"We must not leave it here, but carry it away to the lumber-room, where I keep all the frames stored and numbered."

"Oh, but I can manage it," I said as I lifted it up.I verily believe that if the lumber-room had been a couple of versts away, and the frame twice as heavy as it was, I should have been the more pleased.I felt as though I wanted to tire myself out in performing this service for Nicola.When I returned to the room the bricks and screws had been replaced on the windowsill, and Nicola was sweeping the debris, as well as a few torpid flies, out of the open window.The fresh, fragrant air was rushing into and filling all the room, while with it came also the dull murmur of the city and the twittering of sparrows in the garden.

Everything was in brilliant light, the room looked cheerful, and a gentle spring breeze was stirring Nicola's hair and the leaves of my "Algebra." Approaching the window, I sat down upon the sill, turned my eyes downwards towards the garden, and fell into a brown study.

Something new to me, something extraordinarily potent and unfamiliar, had suddenly invaded my soul.The wet ground on which, here and there, a few yellowish stalks and blades of bright-green grass were to be seen; the little rivulets glittering in the sunshine, and sweeping clods of earth and tiny chips of wood along with them; the reddish twigs of the lilac, with their swelling buds, which nodded just beneath the window;

the fussy twitterings of birds as they fluttered in the bush below; the blackened fence shining wet from the snow which had lately melted off it; and, most of all, the raw, odorous air and radiant sunlight--all spoke to me, clearly and unmistakably, of something new and beautiful, of something which, though I cannot repeat it here as it was then expressed to me, I will try to reproduce so far as I understood it.Everything spoke to me of beauty, happiness, and virtue--as three things which were both easy and possible for me--and said that no one of them could exist without the other two, since beauty, happiness, and virtue were one."How did I never come to understand that before?" I cried to myself."How did I ever manage to be so wicked? Oh, but how good, how happy, I could be--nay, I WILL be--in the future!

At once, at once--yes, this very minute--I will become another being, and begin to live differently!" For all that, I continued sitting on the window-sill, continued merely dreaming, and doing nothing.Have you ever, on a summer's day, gone to bed in dull, rainy weather, and, waking just at sunset, opened your eyes and seen through the square space of the window--the space where the linen blind is blowing up and down, and beating its rod upon the window-sill--the rain-soaked, shadowy, purple vista of an avenue of lime-trees, with a damp garden path lit up by the clear, slanting beams of the sun, and then suddenly heard the joyous sounds of bird life in the garden, and seen insects flying to and fro at the open window, and glittering in the sunlight, and smelt the fragrance of the rain-washed air, and thought to yourself, "Am I not ashamed to be lying in bed on such an evening as this?"

and, leaping joyously to your feet, gone out into the garden and revelled in all that welter of life? If you have, then you can imagine for yourself the overpowering sensation which was then possessing me.