"Yes."
"A son—that'll just do, father can stick him behind the bar, and I can do what I like. That'll suit me."
And he smacked his lips as with a foretaste of his longed-for freedom. Ilya looked at him with pity, then said, mockingly:
"The proverb is right, 'Give the stupid child a piece of bread if he wants a carrot.' You! I can't imagine how you're going to live."
Jakov pricked up his ears, looked at Ilya with big eyes starting out of his head, then said in a hurried whisper:
"I know how I shall live! I've thought about it! Before everything, one must get one's soul in order; must understand what God wants one to do. Now I see one thing; the ways of men are all confused, like tangled threads, and they are drawn in different directions, and no one knows what to hold to or where to let himself be drawn. Now a man is born—no one knows why—and lives—I don't know why—and death comes and blows out the light. Before anything else I must know what I'm in the world for, mustn't I?"
"You—you've tied yourself up in your cobwebs," said. Ilya with some heat. "I'd like to know what's the sense of that?"
He felt that Jakov's dark sayings gripped his heart more strongly than of old, and waked very strange thoughts in him. He felt as though there were a being in his mind, the same that always opposed his clear, simple conception of a clean, comfortable life, that listened to Jakov with strange curiosity, and moved in his soul like a child in the mother's womb.
This troubled Ilya, confused him, and seemed to him undesirable, and therefore he avoided conversation with Jakov; but it was not easy to get rid of him once he had begun.
"What's the sense? It's very simple. Not to be clear where you're going's like trying to burn without fire, isn't it? You must know where you're going, and why, and if it's the right road."