and I am nauseated to infinity with these petty liars, these cowards and gluttons!  Beggar women! ...  Man is born for great joy, for ceaseless creation, in which he is God; for a broad, free love, unhindered by anything,—­love for everything:  for a tree, for the sky, for man, for a dog, for the dear, benign, beautiful earth,—­oh, especially for the earth with its beatific motherhood, with its mornings and nights, with its magnificent everyday miracles.  But man has lied himself out so, has become such an importunate beggar, and has sunk so low! ...  Ah, Lichonin, but I am weary!”

“I, as an anarchist, partly understand you,” said Lichonin thoughtfully.  It was as though he heard and yet did not hear the reporter.  Some thought was with difficulty, for the first time, being born in his mind.  “But one thing I can not comprehend.  If humanity has become so malodorous to you, then how do you stand—­ and for so long, too,—­all this,—­” Lichonin took in the whole table with a circular motion of his hand,—­“the basest thing that mankind could invent?”

“Well, I don’t even know myself,” said Platonov with artlessness.  “You see, I am a vagabond, and am passionately in love with life.  I have been a turner, a compositor; I have sown and sold tobacco—­ the cheap Silver Makhorka kind—­have sailed as a stoker on the Azov Sea, have been a fisherman on the Black—­on the Dubinin fisheries; I have loaded watermelons and bricks on the Dnieper, have ridden with a circus, have been an actor—­I can’t even recall everything.  And never did need drive me.  No, only an immeasurable thirst for life and an insupportable curiosity.  By God, I would like for a few days to become a horse, a plant, or a fish, or to be a woman and experience childbirth; I would like to live with the inner life, and to look upon the universe with the eyes of every human being I meet.  And so I wander care-free over towns and hamlets, bound by nothing; know and love tens of trades and joyously float wherever it suits fate to set my sail...  And so it was that I came upon the brothel, and the more I look at it, the more there grows within me alarm, incomprehension, and very great anger.  But even this will soon be at an end.  When things get well into autumn—­away again!  I’ll get into a rail-rolling mill.  I’ve a certain friend, he’ll manage it ...  Wait, wait, Lichonin ...  Listen to the actor ...  That’s the third act.”

Egmont-Lavretzki, who until this had been very successfully imitating now a shoat which is being put into a bag, now the altercation of a cat with a dog, was beginning little by little to wilt and droop.  Upon him was already advancing the stage of self-revelation, next in order, in the paroxysm of which he several times attempted to kiss Yarchenko’s hand.  His lids had become red; around the shaven, prickly lips had deepened the tearful wrinkles that gave him an appearance of weeping; and it could be heard by his voice that his nose and throat were already overflowing with tears.