My teacher, I repeat, is a lackey, a characterless and
dumb creature, who must obey the orders of the mayor. While 1 am
a clown in the employ of society. Fame pursues me here in town,
dear. I walk along the street and I hear one driver say to
another: 'There goes Yozhov! How cleverly he barks, the deuce
take him!' Yes! Even this cannot be so easily attained."
Yozhov's face wrinkled into a bitter grimace, and he began to
laugh, noiselessly, with his lips only. Foma did not understand
his words, and, just to say something, he remarked at random:
"You didn't hit, then, what you aimed at?"
"Yes, I thought I would grow up higher. And so I should! So I
should, I say!"
He jumped up from his chair and began to run about in the room,
exclaiming briskly in a shrill voice:
"But to preserve one's self pure for life and to be a free man in
it, one must have vast powers! I had them. I had elasticity,
cleverness. I have spent all these in order to learn something
which is absolutely unnecessary to me now. I have wasted the
whole of myself in order to preserve something within myself.
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