o the fact that life always oppressed them with the same
power. Unhopeful of any turn for the better, they regarded every
change as capable only of increasing their burden.

And the workingmen of the suburb tacitly avoided people who spoke
unusual things to them. Then these people disappeared again, going off
elsewhere, and those who remained in the factory lived apart, if they
could not blend and make one whole with the monotonous mass in the
village.

Living a life like that for some fifty years, a workman died.

Thus also lived Michael Vlasov, a gloomy, sullen man, with little eyes
which looked at everybody from under his thick eyebrows suspiciously,
with a mistrustful, evil smile. He was the best locksmith in the
factory, and the strongest man in the village. But he was insolent and
disrespectful toward the foreman and the superintendent, and therefore
earned little; every holiday he beat somebody, and everyone disliked
and feared him.

More than one attempt was made to beat him in turn, but without
success. When Vlasov found himself threatened with attack, he caught a
stone in his hand, or a piece of wood or iron, and spreading out his
legs stood waiting in silence for the enemy. His face overgrown with a
dark beard from his eyes to his neck, and his hands thickly covered
with woolly hair, inspired everybody with fear. People were especially
afraid of his eyes. Small and keen, they seemed to bore through a man
like steel gimlets, and everyone who met their gaze felt he was
confronting a beast, a savage power, inaccessible to fear, ready to
strike unmercifully.

"Well, pack off, dirty vermin!" he said gruffly. His coarse, yellow
teeth glistened terribly through the thick hair on his face. The men
walked off uttering coward abuse.

"Dirty vermin!" he snapped at them, and his eyes gleamed with a smile
sharp as an awl. Then holding his head in an attitude of direct
challenge, with a short, thick pipe between his teeth, he walked behind
them, and now and then called out: "Well, who wants death?"

No one wanted it.

He spoke little, and "dirty vermin" was his favorite expression. It was
the name he used for the authorities of the factory, and the police,
and it was the epithet with which he addressed his wife: "Look, you
dirty vermin, don't you see my clothes are torn?"

When Pavel, his son, was a boy of fourteen, Vlasov was one day seized
with the desire to pull him by the hair once more. But P