still in the hay at the
Zemstvo hut, hearing the subdued voices of the witnesses; he fancied
that Lesnitsky was close by, not fifteen paces away. In his dreams he
remembered how the insurance agent, black-haired and pale, wearing
dusty high boots, had come into the bookkeeper's office. "This is our
insurance agent...."

Then he dreamed that Lesnitsky and Loshadin the constable were walking
through the open country in the snow, side by side, supporting each
other; the snow was whirling about their heads, the wind was blowing on
their backs, but they walked on, singing: "We go on, and on, and
on...."

The old man was like a magician in an opera, and both of them were
singing as though they were on the stage:

"We go on, and on, and on!... You are in the warmth, in the light
and snugness, but we are walking in the frost and the storm, through the
deep snow.... We know nothing of ease, we know nothing of joy....
We bear all the burden of this life, yours and ours.... Oo-oo-oo! We
go on, and on, and on...."

Lyzhin woke and sat up in bed. What a confused, bad dream! And why did
he dream of the constable and the agent together? What nonsense! And now
while Lyzhin's heart was throbbing violently and he was sitting on his
bed, holding his head in his hands, it seemed to him that there really
was something in common between the lives of the insurance agent and the
constable. Don't they really go side by side holding each other up? Some
tie unseen, but significant and essential, existed between them, and
even between them and Von Taunitz and between all men--all men; in this
life, even in the remotest desert, nothing is accidental, everything
is full of one common idea, everything has one soul, one aim, and to
understand it it is not enough to think, it is not enough to reason, one
must have also, it seems, the gift of insight into life, a gift which is
evidently not bestowed on all. And the unhappy man who had broken
down, who had killed himself--the "neurasthenic," as the doctor called
him--and the old peasant who spent every day of his life going from one
man to another, were only accidental, were only fragments of life for
one who thought of his own life as accidental, but were parts of one
organism--marvelous and rational--for one who thought of his own life as
part of that universal whole and understood it. So thought Lyzhin, and
it was a thought that had long lain hidden in his soul, and only now it
was unfolded broa