“It is not a question of pleasing, it is a matter of fact. If you are made of hard material, they cannot plane you. It is not everybody’s phiz that you can rub off. But some people, when beaten with a hammer, turn into gold. And if the head happens to crack—what can you do? It merely shows it was weak.”
“He also spoke about toil. ‘Everything,’ he says, ‘is done by machinery, and thus are men spoiled.”’
“He is out of his wits!” Mayakin waved his hand disdainfully. “I am surprised, what an appetite you have for all sorts of nonsense! What does it come from?”
“Isn’t that true, either?” asked Foma, breaking into stern laughter.
“What true thing can he know? A machine! The old blockhead should have thought—‘what is the machine made of?’ Of iron! Consequently, it need not be pitied; it is wound up—and it forges roubles for you. Without any words, without trouble, you set it into motion and it revolves. While a man, he is uneasy and wretched; he is often very wretched. He wails, grieves, weeps, begs. Sometimes he gets drunk. Ah, how much there is in him that is superfluous to me! While a machine is like an arshin (yardstick), it contains exactly so much as the work required. Well, I am going to dress. It is time.”
He rose and went away, loudly scraping with his slippers along the floor. Foma glanced after him and said softly, with a frown:
“The devil himself could not see through all this. One says this, the other, that.”
“It is precisely the same with books,” said Lubov in a low voice.
Foma looked at her, smiling good-naturedly. And she answered him with a vague smile.
Her eyes looked fatigued and sad.