Page 326 - the-idiot

sciously.
Towards six o’clock he found himself at the station of the
Tsarsko-Selski railway.
He was tired of solitude now; a new rush of feeling took
hold of him, and a flood of light chased away the gloom,
for a moment, from his soul. He took a ticket to Pavlofsk,
and determined to get there as fast as he could, but some-
thing stopped him; a reality, and not a fantasy, as he was
inclined to think it. He was about to take his place in a car-
riage, when he suddenly threw away his ticket and came out
again, disturbed and thoughtful. A few moments later, in
the street, he recalled something that had bothered him all
the afternoon. He caught himself engaged in a strange oc-
cupation which he now recollected he had taken up at odd
moments for the last few hours—it was looking about all
around him for something, he did not know what. He had
forgotten it for a while, half an hour or so, and now, sud-
denly, the uneasy search had recommenced.
But he had hardly become conscious of this curious
phenomenon, when another recollection suddenly swam
through his brain, interesting him for the moment, ex-
ceedingly. He remembered that the last time he had been
engaged in looking around him for the unknown some-
thing, he was standing before a cutler’s shop, in the window
of which were exposed certain goods for sale. He was ex-
tremely anxious now to discover whether this shop and
these goods really existed, or whether the whole thing had
been a hallucination.
He felt in a very curious condition today, a condition