Page:Dead Souls - A Poem by Nikolay Gogol - vol2.djvu/242

232 hand, 'how is it that with your cleverness, your experience, and your knowledge of life, you can't find some way of escape from your difficult position?'

'But I can,' answered Hlobuev, and thereupon he poured out a perfect avalanche of projects. They were all so absurd, so odd, and were so little the result of a knowledge of men and the world that there was nothing for it but to shrug one's shoulders and say: 'Good Lord, what a fathomless gulf there is between knowledge of the world and the capacity for making use of it!' Almost all his projects rested upon the possibility of obtaining at once by some means a hundred or even two hundred thousand roubles. Then, so he fancied, everything could be settled satisfactorily and the estate would be properly run and the rents would be patched, and the revenues would be quadrupled, and it would be in his power to pay all his debts. And he ended his talk by saying: 'But what would you have me do? There isn't any benefactor who would venture to lend me two hundred or even one hundred thousand roubles! It seems it is not God's will.'

'As though God would send two hundred thousand roubles to such a fool!' thought Tchitchikov.

'I have got an aunt, indeed, who is worth three million,' said Hlobuev, 'a devout old lady, she gives to churches and monasteries, but is stingy about helping relations. She is a remarkable old woman—an aunt of the old-fashioned type who is well worth seeing. She has four hundred