"Here one must reckon in a special way." The words of the merchant Strogany returned to Ilya's mind. "If there is one honest man to nine rogues, no one is any the better, and the one goes to the wall—it is the majority that is right."
Ilya laughed involuntarily. Through his heart glided a cold, evil feeling of anger against men, like an adder. Well-known pictures rose before him—big, fat Matiza turned in the mud in the midst of the court and groaned:
"A—ah! my dearest mother—my darling mother—if only you would forgive me."
Perfishka, quite drunk, was standing by, swaying to and fro, and said reproachfully:
"How drunk she is! the pig!"
And Petrusha, healthy and red-cheeked, stood on the steps and laughed contemptuously.
Ilya thought of all these things, and his heart contracted, and became even more sober, more hardened.
The disturbance was over in the bar room. Three voices, those of two women and a man, were attempting to sing a song, but without great success. Some one had brought a harmonica; he played a little, very badly, then stopped. By the wall against Ilya's bed, two people conversed half aloud with frequent heavy sighs. Ilya listened with a strange sense of enmity:
"One lives, and works, and toils all one's life; there isn't any sense in it, and all the others live, and our sort goes hungry; we can't stand fast, brother, for all we straddle our legs."
"It's a fact."