“You!”
“Why, I can kill you!” said Foma, angrily, clenching his fist.
“Eh, you scarecrow!” said Yozhov, convincingly and pitifully, with a shrug of the shoulder. “Is there anything in that? Why, I am anyway half dead already from my wounds.”
And suddenly inflamed with melancholy malice, he stretched himself and said:
“My fate has wronged me. Why have I lowered myself, accepting the sops of the public? Why have I worked like a machine for twelve years in succession in order to study? Why have I swallowed for twelve long years in the Gymnasium and the University the dry and tedious trash and the contradictory nonsense which is absolutely useless to me? In order to become feuilleton-writer, to play the clown from day to day, entertaining the public and convincing myself that that is necessary and useful to them. Where is the powder of my youth? I have fired off all the charge of my soul at three copecks a shot. What faith have I acquired for myself? Only faith in the fact that everything in this life is worthless, that everything must be broken, destroyed. What do I love? Myself. And I feel that the object of my love does not deserve my love. What can I accomplish?”
He almost wept, and kept on scratching his breast and his neck with his thin, feeble hands.
But sometimes he was seized with a flow of courage, and then he spoke in a different spirit:
“I? Oh, no, my song is not yet sung to the end! My breast has imbibed something, and I’ll hiss like a whip! Wait, I’ll drop the newspaper, I’ll start to do serious work, and write one small book, which I will entitle ‘The Passing of the Soul’; there is a prayer by that name, it is read for the dying. And before its death this society, cursed by the anathema of inward impotence, will receive my book like incense.”
Listening to each and every word of his, watching him and comparing his remarks, Foma saw that Yozhov was just as weak as he was, that he, too, had lost his way. But Yozhov’s mood still infected Foma, his speeches enriched Foma’s vocabulary, and sometimes he noticed with joyous delight how cleverly and forcibly he had himself expressed this or that idea. He often met in Yozhov’s house certain peculiar people, who, it seemed to him, knew everything, understood everything, contradicted everything, and saw deceit and falsehood in everything. He watched them in silence, listened to their words; their audacity pleased him, but he was embarrassed and repelled by their condescending and haughty bearing toward him. And then he clearly saw that in Yozhov’s room they were all cleverer and better than they were in the street and in the hotels. They held peculiar conversations, words and gestures for use in the room, and all this was changed outside the room, into the most commonplace and human. Sometimes, in the room, they all blazed up like a huge woodpile, and Yozhov was the brightest firebrand among them; but the light of this bonfire illuminated but faintly the obscurity of Foma Gordyeeff’s soul.
One day Yozhov said to him: