Page:Dead Souls - A Poem by Nikolay Gogol - vol2.djvu/204

194 'Very good. So you write then that the souls are in a certain sense dead.'

'But how can I write dead? One can't write it like that, you know, though they are dead, they must seem as though they were alive.'

'Very good. So you write then: "But it is necessary or it is required, that it should seem as though they are alive."'

What was to be done with the colonel? Tchitchikov decided to go himself and see what these various boards and committees were like, and what he found was not merely astonishing, but was really beyond all conception. The Committee for All Sorts of Petitions existed only on its signboard. The president of it, a former valet, had been transferred to the newly formed Board of Rural Affairs. His place was filled by the counting-house clerk, Timoshka, who had been despatched to make an inquiry—to settle a dispute between a drunken clerk and the village elder, who was a rogue and a thief. There were no officials anywhere.

'But where is one to go then? how is one to get at anything sensible?' said Tchitchikov to his companion, a clerk for special commissions, whom the colonel had sent to escort him.

'You won't get any sense anywhere,' said his escort, 'it's all at sixes and sevens. Everything among us is managed, you see, by the Committee of Rural Construction, they take every one from his work and send him where they like. The only ones who are well off are