aves
over the far-away expanse. And to right and to left, and, no doubt,
over the house too, the lightning flashed.

"The storm!" whispered Laevsky; he had a longing to pray to some
one or to something, if only to the lightning or the storm-clouds.
"Dear storm!"

He remembered how as a boy he used to run out into the garden without
a hat on when there was a storm, and how two fair-haired girls with
blue eyes used to run after him, and how they got wet through with
the rain; they laughed with delight, but when there was a loud peal
of thunder, the girls used to nestle up to the boy confidingly,
while he crossed himself and made haste to repeat: "Holy, holy,
holy. . . ." Oh, where had they vanished to! In what sea were they
drowned, those dawning days of pure, fair life? He had no fear of
the storm, no love of nature now; he had no God. All the confiding
girls he had ever known had by now been ruined by him and those
like him. All his life he had not planted one tree in his own garden,
nor grown one blade of grass; and living among the living, he had
not saved one fly; he had done nothing but destroy and ruin, and
lie, lie. . . .

"What in my past was not vice?" he asked himself, trying to clutch
at some bright memory as a man falling down a precipice clutches
at the bushes.

School? The university? But that was a sham. He had neglected his
work and forgotten what he had learnt. The service of his country?
That, too, was a sham, for he did nothing in the Service, took a
salary for doing nothing, and it was an abominable swindling of the
State for which one was not punished.

He had no craving for truth, and had not sought it; spellbound by
vice and lying, his conscience had slept or been silent. Like a
stranger, like an alien from another planet, he had taken no part
in the common life of men, had been indifferent to their sufferings,
their ideas, their religion, their sciences, their strivings, and
their struggles. He had not said one good word, not written one
line that was not useless and vulgar; he had not done his fellows
one ha'p'orth of service, but had eaten their bread, drunk their
wine, seduced their wives, lived on their thoughts, and to justify
his contemptible, parasitic life in their eyes and in his own, he
had always tried to assume an air of being higher and better than
they. Lies, lies, lies. . . .

He vividly remembered what he had seen that evening at Muridov's,
and he was in an insufferable a