From that time onwards there began for him a new life. Sometimes, in a confused way, he would see himself condemned to live a sort of inevitable dream—a sort of extraordinary nightmare of bootless strugglings. In his horror he would strive to combat this fatality, but, at the very crisis of the contest, would find himself overthrown by some unknown power. Then he would lose consciousness again, and see gaping before him a fathomless abyss of infinite gloom—an abyss with nothing whatever beyond it—an abyss into which he would cast himself with a cry of anguish and despair. At other times he would experience moments of bliss which were almost too full, too transcendent, to be borne. At such times his body would take on a sort of convulsive suppleness, and the past would lighten behind him, and the future would have to offer him naught but joy and victory. From dreams of this kind he would awaken in unheard-of rapture. Indeed, who has not known such moments—moments when ineffable hope refreshes the soul with a shower of dew, and one could weep for very joy, and, what though the body be a prey to acute pangs, and one may feel that the woof of life is wearing thin, one still rejoices in this new birth, this new resurrection? Again, Ordynov would fall into a trance, and in that trance live over again the events of the last few days—though always with them appearing to him as so many strange, incomprehensible visions. Sometimes, too, the sick youth would lose his sense of memory, and wonder why he was no longer in his old den, under his old landlady. He would wonder why, at dusk, the old woman no longer came to see him—why the stove no longer threw fitful gleams into the dark corners of the room as she chafed her bony, trembling hands, or muttered to herself in a ceaseless monotone and threw glances of astonishment at the lodger whom she conceived to be a madman because of his passion for work. At other times he would recall that he really had changed his abode. Yet how had it come about? What had happened to him? Why had he moved into other lodgings? He did not know. His whole being was now divorced from his personality, as well as held at a constant, an irresistible, tension. Whither, too, was he being called, and who was it that was calling him? Who had fired his blood with the unbearable flame which was now consuming it? He could not think, he had entirely forgotten. Sometimes a shadow seemed to be hovering near him, and he would try to seize it. Often, too, he would think that he could hear the rustle of light footsteps beside his bed, and the murmur of tender, soothing words which seemed to him as sweet as music. Fluttering, damp breath would come sweeping across his face, until his whole being would vibrate with tenderness. Then he would feel hot tears falling upon his fevered cheeks, and a sudden, long kiss would imprint its caressing sweetness upon his lips. At such moments his very life seemed to go out of him—the whole world around him seemed to stop, and to have been dead for centuries and centuries, and to be lying shrouded under a night which had already lasted for a thousand years.