ch places men have
nothing to look for, nor any knowledge of how to look for anything;
wherefore, they brawl and shout in vain attempts to dissipate
despondency....

I myself was sitting near Gubin, but on the other side of the table.
Yet, this was not because his outbursts and the tradesmen's retorts
thereto were a pleasure to listen to, since to me both the one and the
other seemed about as futile as beating the air.

"To whom are YOU of use?"

"To himself every man can be useful."

"But what good can one do oneself?"...

The windows of the tavern were open, while in the pendent, undulating
cloud of blue smoke that the flames of the lamps emitted, those lamps
looked like so many yellow pitchers floating amid the waters of a
stagnant pond. Out of doors there was brooding the quiet of an August
night, and not a rustle, not a whisper was there to be heard. Hence, as
numbed with melancholy, I gazed at the inky heavens and limpid stars I
thought to myself:

"Surely, never were the sky and the stars meant to look down upon a
life like this, a life like this?"

Suddenly someone said with the subdued assurance of a person reading
aloud from a written document:

"Unless the peasants of Kubarovo keep a watch upon their timber lands,
the sun will fire them tomorrow, and then the Birkins' forest also will
catch alight."

For a moment the dispute died down. Then, as it were cleaving the
silence, a voice said stutteringly:

"Who cares about the significance of the word 'truth'?"

And the words--heavy, jumbled, and clumsy--filled me with despondent
reflections. Then again the voices rose--this time in louder and more
venomous accents, and with their din recalled to me, by some accident,
the foolish lines:

The gods did give men water
To wash in, and to drink;
Yet man has made it but a pool
In which his woes to sink.

Presently I moved outside and, seating myself on the steps of the
veranda, fell to contemplating the dull, blurred windows of the
Archpriest's house on the other side of the square, and to watching how
black shadows kept flitting to and fro behind their panes as the faint,
lugubrious notes of a guitar made themselves heard. And a high-pitched,
irritable voice kept repeating at intervals: "Allow me. Pray, permit me
to speak," and being answered by a voice which intermittently shot into
the silence, as into a bottomless sack, the words: "No, do you wait a
moment, do you wait a moment."

Surro