There was a quiet growth of new feelings within me. I felt that each man sent out to me a sharp, thin ray which touched me unseen and imperceptibly reached my heart. And I accepted these hidden rays ever more willingly.
At times the workingmen assembled in Mikhail's rooms, and then I felt that a burning cloud formed from their thoughts, which surrounded me and carried me strangely upward with itself.
Suddenly every one began to understand me more and more. I stood in their circle, and they were my body and I was their soul and their will, and my speech was their voice. And at times it was I that was a part of the body, and I heard the cry of my own soul from other mouths, and it sounded good when I heard it. But when time passed and there was silence I again remained alone and for myself.
I remembered my former communion with God in my prayers. Then I had been glad when I could wipe myself out from my memory and cease to exist. In my relationship with people I did not lose myself; instead I grew larger, taller, and the strength of my soul increased many-fold. In this, too, lay self-forgetfulness, but it did not destroy me. It quenched my bitter thoughts and the anguish of isolation.
I realized this mistily and vaguely. I felt that a new seed was growing in my soul, but I could not understand it. I only knew that it pulled me determinedly toward people.
In those days I worked in the factory for forty kopecks a day, carrying on my shoulders heavy trays of iron, slag and brick. I hated this hellish place, with its dirt and its noise and its hubbub, and its heat which tortured the body.
The factory had fastened itself onto the earth and pressed itself into her and sucked her insatiably night and day. It was out of breath from greed and groaned and spit out of its red-hot jaws fiery blood drawn from the earth. It cooled off, grew black, then again began to melt iron and to boil and thunder, flattening out the red iron and squirting up sparks and trembling in its whole frame, as it pulled out long strips like nerves, from the body of the earth.
The wild labor seemed to me something terrible, something bordering on the insane. This groaning monster, devastating the lap of the earth, was digging an abyss under itself, and knowing that some day it would fall into it, screeched eagerly, with a thousand voices: "Hurry! Hurry! Hurry!"
In fire and noise, under a rain of burning sparks, blackened men worked. It was no place for them. About them everything threatened to burn them by fiery death or to crush them by heavy iron; everything deafened and blinded. The unbearable heat dried up the blood, but they did their work quietly, walking about with a masterly confidence, like devils in hell, fearing nothing and knowing nothing.
They lifted small levers with strong hands, and all around and above them hands and jaws of enormous machines moved quietly and terribly, crumbling the iron. It was hard to know whose mind and whose will reigned here. At times it was man who controlled and governed this factory according to his wishes. But other times it seemed that all the people and the whole factory were subject to the devil and that he laughed aloud, triumphantly and horribly as he saw the mad and difficult rush created by greed.