to
get tired from work to drink a glass of vodka and eat fat cabbage soup,
prepared by the stout, sprightly matron of the company.

"Quicker, boys, quicker!" rang out beside him someone's unpleasant,
hoarse voice.

Foma turned around. A stout man, with an enormous paunch, tapped on the
boards of the landing bridge with his cane, as he looked at the carriers
with his small eyes and said:

"Bawl less and work faster."

His face and neck were covered with perspiration; he wiped it off every
now and then with his left hand and breathed heavily, as though he were
going uphill.

Foma cast at the man a hostile look and thought:

"Others are working and he is sweating. And I am still worse than he.
I'm like a crow on the fence, good for nothing."

From each and every impression there immediately stood out in his mind
the painful thought of his unfitness for life. Everything that attracted
his attention contained something offensive to him, and this something
fell like a brick upon his breast. At one side of him, by the freight
scales, stood two sailors, and one of them, a square-built, red-faced
fellow, was telling the other:

"As they rushed on me it began for fair, my dear chap! There were four
of them--I was alone! But I didn't give in to them, because I saw that
they would beat me to death! Even a ram will kick out if you fleece
it alive. How I tore myself away from them! They all rolled away in
different directions."

"But you came in for a sound drubbing all the same?" inquired the other
sailor.

"Of course! I caught it. I swallowed about five blows. But what's the
difference? They didn't kill me. Well, thank God for it!"

"Certainly."

"To the stern, devils, to the stern, I'm telling you!" roared the
perspiring man in a ferocious voice at two carriers who were rolling a
barrel of fish along the deck.

"What are you yelling for?" Foma turned to him sternly, as he had
started at the shout.

"Is that any of your business?" asked the perspiring man, casting a
glance at Foma.

"It is my business! The people are working and your fat is melting away.
So you think you must yell at them?" said Foma, threateningly, moving
closer toward him.

"You--you had better keep your temper."

The perspiring man suddenly rushed away from his place and went into his
office. Foma looked after him and also went away from the wharf; filled
with a desire to abuse some one, to do something, just to divert his
thoughts from