all about
that great day afterwards, only a short time before that catastrophe
that overwhelmed us all, and in his account there was all the growing
suspicion and horror of disillusion that after-events fostered in him.
But as he told me, sitting through the purple hours of the night,
watching the light break in ripples and circles of colour over the sea,
he regained some of the splendours of that great day, and before he had
finished his tale he was right back in that fantastic world that had
burst at the touch like bubbles in the sun. I will give his account, as
accurately as possible in his own words. I seldom interrupted him, and I
think he soon forgot that I was there. He had come to me that night in a
panic, for reasons which will he given later and I, in trying to
reassure him, had reminded him of that day, when the world was suddenly
Utopia.

"That _did_ exist, that world," I said. "And once having existed it
cannot now be dead. Believe, believe that it will come back."

"Come back!" He shook his head. "Even if it is still there I cannot go
back to it. I will tell you, Ivan Andreievitch, what that day was...
and why now I am so bitterly punished for having believed in it. Listen,
what happened to me. It occurred, all of it, exactly as I tell you. You
know that, just at that time, I had been worrying very much about Vera.
The Revolution had come I suppose very suddenly to every one; but truly
to myself, because I had been thinking of Vera, it was like a
thunder-clap. It's always been my trouble, Ivan Andreievitch, that I
can't think of more than one thing at once, and the worry of it has been
that in my life there has been almost invariably more than one thing
that I ought to think of.... I would think of my invention, you know,
that I ought to get on with it a little faster. Because really--it was
making a sort of cloth out of bark that I was working at; as every day
passed, I could see more and more clearly that there was a great deal in
this particular invention, and that it only needed real application to
bring it properly forward. Only application as you know is my trouble.
If I could only shut my brain up...."

He told me then, I remember, a lot about his early childhood, and then
the struggle that he had had to see one thing at once, and not two or
three things that got in the way and hindered him from doing anything.
He went on about Vera.

"You know that one night I had crept up into your room, an