you sorry for that either?"

"For the steamer? It is true, I did feel sorry for the steamer. But
then it is mere foolishness to feel sorry! What's the use? I might have
cried; tears cannot extinguish fire. Let the steamers burn. And even
though everything be burned down, I'd spit upon it! If the soul is but
burning to work, everything will be erected anew. Isn't it so?"

"Yes," said Mayakin, smiling. "These are strong words you say. And
whoever speaks that way, even though he loses all, will nevertheless be
rich."

Regarding losses of thousands of roubles so philosophically, Ignat knew
the value of every kopeika; he gave to the poor very seldom, and only to
those that were altogether unable to work. When a more or less healthy
man asked him for alms, Ignat would say, sternly:

"Get away! You can work yet. Go to my dvornik and help him to remove the
dung. I'll pay you for it."

Whenever he had been carried away by his work he regarded people
morosely and piteously, nor did he give himself rest while hunting for
roubles. And suddenly--it usually happened in spring, when everything on
earth became so bewitchingly beautiful and something reproachfully wild
was breathed down into the soul from the clear sky--Ignat Gordyeeff
would feel that he was not the master of his business, but its low
slave. He would lose himself in thought and, inquisitively looking about
himself from under his thick, knitted eyebrows, walk about for days,
angry and morose, as though silently asking something, which he feared
to ask aloud. They awakened his other soul, the turbulent and lustful
soul of a hungry beast. Insolent and cynical, he drank, led a depraved
life, and made drunkards of other people. He went into ecstasy, and
something like a volcano of filth boiled within him. It looked as though
he was madly tearing the chains which he himself had forged and carried,
and was not strong enough to tear them. Excited and very dirty, his face
swollen from drunkenness and sleeplessness, his eyes wandering madly,
and roaring in a hoarse voice, he tramped about the town from one tavern
to another, threw away money without counting it, cried and danced
to the sad tunes of the folk songs, or fought, but found no rest
anywhere--in anything.

It happened one day that a degraded priest, a short, stout little
bald-headed man in a torn cassock, chanced on Ignat, and stuck to him,
just as a piece of mud will stick to a shoe. An impersonal, deformed and