Always do your duty like a man, whatever the cost, and never forget that you are a Rumanian!”

When Apostol was in the fifth form, about Christmas time, during a mathematics lesson, he was fetched out of class. In the passage he found their own coachman waiting for him, cap and whip in hand.

“What is it? What has happened?” asked Apostol agitatedly.

“It’s all right, young master, everything is all right—but during the night the master died from heart failure, and the mistress has sent me along to fetch you home for the funeral.…”

Apostol wept unconsciously all the way to Parva. The funeral was imposing. Thousands of people followed the coffin to the grave, and many sorrowful speeches were made. Afterwards, for a few days, Apostol remained at his home. He no longer wept, but he would sit for hours staring at a photograph of his father in a stiff, truculent pose. (It had been taken at Cluj, just after the lawyer had been released from prison.) Up till now this photograph had always intimidated him. Now it filled him with remorse. All round him black-winged questions seemed to hover, and he did not dare to face them. He kept on telling himself that he had failed to appreciate his father, he recalled his severe admonishments, and he was haunted by a fear that something—he didn’t know what or where—should crumble away. On the third day Doamna Bologa, worried by his deep dejection, said to him gently and tenderly:

“You must not grieve so, darling.… It can’t be helped. It was God’s will.”

“Why?” asked Apostol abruptly, staring at her vacantly.

His mother made some answer, but he gave no heed to her words, for even as he uttered that “Why?” something within his soul, some agelong structure with foundations strong as the roots of an oak, collapsed with a terrifying crash.

“I have lost God!” flashed through his mind. He closed his eyes as if by this means he would ward off the catastrophe. He felt clearly that he was slipping down into a bottomless pit and that he could not stop himself; there was nothing to which he could cling. All this took about a moment or even less and left him filled with a paralysing fear such as he might have experienced if he had found himself stranded alone at dead of night in an immense graveyard, without notion of direction.

He returned to Nasaud in a bewildered state of mind. His soul was tom by doubts, and he felt convinced that he had become an outcast. At first he had tried to build up a new house with the wreckage of the old, but he found that from under every stone a painful question would leap forth, a question for which he could find no answer. He soon wearied of these hopeless efforts with their continual torture. But presently there arose above everything else, like a victorious banner, the desire to find true answers to these perturbing questions.

As an undergraduate he spent his holidays arguing and disagreeing with his mother and Protopop Groza, who, remembering the vision he had had, wished to make him enter the Church. But Apostol turned a deaf ear at the bare mention of theology. He was nearly twenty now, tall, very slim, with a white, puckered brow, rather long chestnut-coloured hair brushed back from the face, and there was that in his appearance which brought to one’s mind the young men of the beginning of the last century who had been ready to die for a dream. The more wildly his heart throbbed with eager desire to live, the more his mind tortured itself with unsolvable questions, and he actually suffered physically each time his search for a solution was arrested by the boundaries beyond which human knowledge has not yet penetrated. He became introspective, a dreamer with obstinate determinations. Doamna Bologa was wont to say, with a shade of regret, that he resembled his dead father, at which Apostol felt flattered, for the older he grew the more he admired his father’s wisdom and tried with all his might to emulate him. When he saw that resistance without arguments would not convince his mother, and more especially Groza, he told them bluntly that he had ceased long ago to believe in God, and that consequently he could not possibly choose a profession which would be based on a lie.

The Protopop became very indignant and left the house without shaking hands with him. As for Doamna Bologa, she wept for a whole week, and prayed to the Almighty to turn her boy back again into the right path.

Apostol had determined long ago to take up philosophy. When the Protopop heard this his indignation increased, and in order to overcome the obstinacy of her erring son he advised Doamna Bologa to refuse him the financial means. The young undergraduate fumed. For several days running he had long consultations with his only friend in Parva, Alexandru Palagiesu, who had studied law and was now a full-blown lawyer waiting for the retirement of the old lawyer so that he should take his place. As a direct consequence of these confabulations, Apostol ran over to Nasaud, consulted his quondam host and the head master of his college, with the result that he petitioned the Ministry of Education for a bursary from the State.