Page:Andreyev - The Little Angel (Knopf, 1916).djvu/232

226 "My convictions," he muttered. "My convictions. Everybody knows them, my convictions. For instance——"

He searched his mind. He was grasping in his memory at fragments of conversations, he was looking for something clear, strong, convincing; he found nothing. He recalled absurd phrases such as this: "Ivanov, I am convinced that you have copied the problem from Sirotkin." But is this a conviction? Fragments of newspaper articles passed before him, other people's speeches, quite convincing—but where was that which he had said himself, which he himself had thought? He spoke as everyone else spoke, and thought as everybody else did, and it was just as impossible to find an unmarked grain in a heap of grain. Some people are religious, some are not religious, while he—

"Wait," he said to himself. "Is there a God, or is there not? I don't know. I don't know anything. And who am I—a teacher? Do I exist, I wonder?"

Mitrofan Krilov's hands and feet grew cold.

"Nonsense! Nonsense!" he consoled himself. "My nerves are simply upset. What are convictions after all? Words. A man reads words in a book, and there are his convictions. Acts, these are things that count chiefly. A fine spy who——"

But there were no acts of which he could think. There were school affairs, family affairs, other