His mouth twitched in a vain effort to smile, but tears flowed from his eyes.
"If one would only die within a little hour, or in sleep, but first there comes sickness to eat one away little by little."
He frowned and his face contracted and looked like mildew. He walked quickly, almost skipping, but the light went out of his eyes, and he kept muttering in a low voice, neither to me nor to himself: "Oh, Lord, let me be a mosquito, only to live on the earth! Do not kill me, Lord; let me be a bug or even a little spider!"
"How pitiable!" I thought.
At the station, among people, he seemed to revive again, and he talked about his mistress, Death, but with courage. He preached to the people. "You will die," he said; "You will be destroyed on an unknown day and in an unknown hour. Perhaps three versts from here the lightning will strike you down."
He made some sad and others angry, and they quarreled with him. One young woman called out: "You have nothing the matter with you, and yet death bothers you."
She said it with such anger that I noticed her, and even the old man stopped his eulogy on death.
All the way to Lubin he comforted me, until he bored me to death. I have seen many such people who run away from death and foolishly play hide-and-seek with it. Even among the young there are some struck by fear, and they are worse than the old. They are all Godless; their souls are black within, like the pipe of a stove, and fear whistles through them even in the fairest weather. Their thoughts are like old pilgrims who patter on the earth, walking without knowing whither and blindly trampling under foot the living things in their path. They have the name of God on their lips, but they love no one and have no desire for anything. They are occupied with only one thing: To pass on their fears to others, so that people will take them up, the beggars, and comfort them.
They do not go to people to get honey, but that they may pour into another soul the deadly poison of their putrid selves. They love themselves and are without shame in their poverty, and resemble crippled beggars who sit on the road on the way to church and disclose their wounds and their sores and their deformities to people, that they may awaken pity and receive a copper.
They wander, sowing everywhere the gloomy seeds of unrest, and groan aloud, with the desire to hear their groans reecho. But around them surges a mighty wave—the wave of humble seekers for God and human suffering surrounds them many colored. For instance, like that of the young woman, the little Russian, who had talked up to the old man. She walked silent, her lips compressed, her face sunburnt and angry, and her eyes burning with a keen fire.. If spoken to she answered sharply, as if she wanted to stick you with a knife.