Page:Dead Souls - A Poem by Nikolay Gogol - vol2.djvu/273

Rh lazy; and they wouldn't give me more important positions; I am not in their good books, you know. I confess that I wouldn't accept what is called a profitable post. I am a good-for-nothing person and a gambler, perhaps, and anything you like, but I am not going to take bribes. I couldn't get on with the Krasnonosovs and the Samosvitovs!'

'All the same, pardon me, I can't understand how one can exist without some path in life; how can you go forward except on a road; how can you advance without the earth under your feet; how can you float when your boat is not in the water? Life, you know, is a journey. Pardon me, Pyotr Petrovitch, but the gentlemen of whom you were speaking are, anyway, on some sort of a road, at any rate they are working. Well, suppose they have turned aside from the strait way, as happens to every simple mortal; still there is hope that they will wander back again. He who goes forward is bound to arrive; there is hope that he may find the road. But how can he who stands idle come upon any road? The road will not come to me, you know.'

'Believe me, Afanasy Vassilyevitch, I feel that you are perfectly right … but I must tell you that all capacity for action is dead in me; I cannot see that I can be of any service to any one in the world. I feel that I am an absolutely useless log. In old days when I was younger I used to think that it was all a question of money, that if I had had hundreds of