crowing; but, all the same, the night was still, the world was
sleeping tranquilly. In a field not far from the factory there could
be seen the framework of a house and heaps of building material:

Korolyov sat down on the planks and went on thinking.

"The only person who feels happy here is the governess, and the
factory hands are working for her gratification. But that's only
apparent: she is only the figurehead. The real person, for whom
everything is being done, is the devil."

And he thought about the devil, in whom he did not believe, and he
looked round at the two windows where the fires were gleaming. It
seemed to him that out of those crimson eyes the devil himself was
looking at him--that unknown force that had created the mutual
relation of the strong and the weak, that coarse blunder which one
could never correct. The strong must hinder the weak from living
--such was the law of Nature; but only in a newspaper article or
in a school book was that intelligible and easily accepted. In the
hotchpotch which was everyday life, in the tangle of trivialities
out of which human relations were woven, it was no longer a law,
but a logical absurdity, when the strong and the weak were both
equally victims of their mutual relations, unwillingly submitting
to some directing force, unknown, standing outside life, apart from
man.

So thought Korolyov, sitting on the planks, and little by little
he was possessed by a feeling that this unknown and mysterious force
was really close by and looking at him. Meanwhile the east was
growing paler, time passed rapidly; when there was not a soul