"Come along, Pyeshkov, let us go to a restaurant and have something to eat. I don't want to go home!"
He hailed a sledge, without haggling about the charge, and said nothing while we were on the way, but in the restaurant, after taking a table in a corner, he began at once in an undertone, looking about him the while, to complain angrily.
"He has thoroughly upset me, that goat; to such a state of melancholy he has driven me! Here you are—you read and think about things—just tell me now, what the devil is the use of it all? One lives; forty years pass by; one has a wife and children, and no one to talk to! There are times when I want to unburden my soul, to talk to some one about all sorts of things, but there is no one I can talk to. I can't talk to my wife; I have nothing in common with her. What is she, after all? She has her children and the house; that's her business. She is a stranger to my soul. A wife is your friend till the first child comes. In fact, she is—on the whole—Well, you can see for yourself she does not dance to my piping. Flesh without spirit, the devil take you! It is a grief to me, Brother."
He drank the cold, bitter beer feverishly, was silent for a time, ruffling his long hair, and then he went on:
"Human creatures are riff-raff for the most part, Brother! There you are, for instance, talking to the workmen. Oh yes, I understand there is a lot of trickery, and baseness; it is true, Brother; they are thieves all of them! But do you think that what you say makes any difference to them! Not an atom! No! They are all—Petr, Osip as well—rogues! They speak about me, and you speak for me, and all—what is the use of it, Brother?"
I was dumb from sheer amazement.
"That's it!" said my master, smiling. "You were right to think of going to Persia. There you would understand nothing; it is a foreign language they speak there! But in your own language you 'll hear nothing but baseness!"
"Has Osip been telling you about me?" I asked.
"Well, yes! But what did you expect? He talks more than any of them; he is a gossip. He is a sly creature, Brother! No, Pyeshkov, words don't touch them. Am I not right? And what the devil is the use of it? And what the devil difference does it make? None! It is like snow in the autumn, falling in the mud and melting. It only makes more mud. You had far better hold your tongue."
He drank glass after glass of beer. He did not get drunk, but he talked more and more quickly and fiercely.