"Get away! You can work yet. Go to my dvornik and help him to
remove the dung. I'll pay you for it."

Whenever he had been carried away by his work he regarded people
morosely and piteously, nor did he give himself rest while
hunting for roubles. And suddenly--it usually happened in spring,
when everything on earth became so bewitchingly beautiful and
something reproachfully wild was breathed down into the soul from
the clear sky--Ignat Gordyeeff would feel that he was not the
master of his business, but its low slave. He would lose himself
in thought and, inquisitively looking about himself from under
his thick, knitted eyebrows, walk about for days, angry and
morose, as though silently asking something, which he feared to
ask aloud. They awakened his other soul, the turbulent and
lustful soul of a hungry beast. Insolent and cynical, he drank,
led a depraved life, and made drunkards of other people. He went
into ecstasy, and something like a volcano of filth boiled within
him. It looked as though he was madly tearing the chains which he
himself had forged and carried, and was not strong enough to tear
them. Excited and very dirty, his face swollen from drunkenness
and sleeplessness, his eyes wandering madly, and roaring in a
hoarse voice, he tramped about the town from one tavern to
another, threw away money without counting it, cried and danced
to the sad tunes of the folk songs, or fought, but found no rest
anywhere--in anything.

It happened one day that a degraded priest, a short, stout little
bald-headed man in a torn cassock, chanced on Ignat, and stuck to
him, just as a piece of mud will stick to a shoe. An impersonal,