The possessed or, The devils
perfectly legally and smoothly, and if it has not been made known till
now, it is simply because the witnesses, Kirillov, Pyotr Verhovensky,
and Lebyadkin (whom I now have the pleasure of claiming as a
brother-in-law) promised to hold their tongues."
"I don't mean that... You speak so calmly... but good! Listen! You
weren't forced into that marriage, were you?"
"No, no one forced me into it." Nikolay Vsyevolodovitch smiled at
Shatov's importunate haste.
"And what's that talk she keeps up about her baby?" Shatov interposed
disconnectedly, with feverish haste.
"She talks about her baby? Bah! I didn't know. It's the first time
I've heard of it. She never had a baby and couldn't have had: Marya
Timofyevna is a virgin."
"Ah! That's just what I thought! Listen!"
"What's the matter with you, Shatov?"
Shatov hid his face in his hands, turned away, but suddenly clutched
Stavrogin by the shoulders.
"Do you know why, do you know why, anyway," he shouted, "why you did all
this, and why you are resolved on such a punishment now!"
"Your question is clever and malignant, but I mean to surprise you too;
I fancy I do know why I got married then, and why I am resolved on such
a punishment now, as you express it."
"Let's leave that... of that later. Put it off. Let's talk of the chief
thing, the chief thing. I've been waiting two years for you."
"Yes?"
"I've waited too long for you. I've been thinking of you incessantly.
You are the only man who could move... I wrote to you about it from
America."
"I remember your long letter very well."
"Too long to be read? No doubt; six sheets of notepaper. Don't speak!
Don't speak! Tell me, can you spare me another ten minutes?... But now,
this minute... I have waited for you too long."
"Certainly, half an hour if you like, but not more, if that will suit
you."
"And on condition, too," Shatov put in wrathfully, "that you take a
different tone. Do you hear? I demand when I ought to entreat. Do you
understand what it means to demand when one ought to entreat?"
"I understand that in that way you lift yourself above all
ordinary considerations for the sake of loftier aims," said Nikolay
Vsyevolodovitch with a faint smile. "I see with regret, too, that you're
feverish."
"I beg you to treat me with respect, I insist on it!" shouted Shatov,
"not my personality--I don't care a hang for that, but something else,
just for this once. While I am talking... we are two beings, and have
come together in infinity... for the last time in the world. Drop your
tone, and speak like a human being! Speak, if only for once in your life
with the voice of a man. I say it not for my sake but for yours. Do you
understand that you ought to forgive me that blow in the face if only
because I gave you the opportunity of realising your immense power.
... Again you smile your disdainful, worldly smile! Oh, when will you
understand me! Have done with being a snob! Understand that I insist
on that. I insist on it, else I won't speak, I'm not going to for
anything!"
His excitement was approaching frenzy. Nikolay Vsyevolodovitch frowned
and seemed to become more on his guard.
"Since I have remained another half-hour with you when time is so
precious," he pronounced earnestly and impressively, "you may rest
assured that I mean to listen to you at least with interest... and I am
convinced that I shall hear from you much that is new."
He sat down on a chair.
"Sit down!" cried Shatov, and he sat down himself.
"Please remember," Stavrogin interposed once more, "that I was about
to ask a real favour of you concerning Marya Timofyevna, of great
importance for her, anyway...."
"What?" Shatov frowned suddenly with the air of a man who has just been
interrupted at the most important moment, and who gazes at you unable to
grasp the question.
"And you did not let me finish," Nikolay Vsyevolodovitch went on with a
smile.
"Oh, nonsense, afterwards!" Shatov waved his hand disdainfully,
grasping, at last, what he wanted, and passed at once to his principal
theme.
VII
"Do you know," he began, with flashing eyes, almost menacingly, bending
right forward in his chair, raising the forefinger of his right hand
above him (obviously unaware that he was doing so), "do you know who are
the only 'god-bearing' people on earth, destined to regenerate and save
the world in the name of a new God, and to whom are given the keys of
life and of the new world... Do you know which is that people and what
is its name?"
"From your manner I am forced to conclude, and I think I may as well do
so at once, that it is the Russian people."
"And you can laugh, oh, what a race!" Shatov burst out.
"Calm yourself, I beg of you; on the contrary, I was expecting something
of the sort from you."
"You expected something of the sort? And don't you know those words
yourself?"
"I know them very well. I see only too well what you're driving at. All
your phrases, even the expression 'god-bearing people' is only a sequel
to our talk two years ago, abroad, not long before you went to America.
... At least, as far as I can recall it now."
"It's your phrase altogether, not mine. Your own, not simply the sequel
of our conversation. 'Our' conversation it was not at all. It was a
teacher uttering weighty words, and a pupil who was raised from the
dead. I was that pupil and you were the teacher."
"But, if you remember, it was just after my words you joined their
society, and only afterwards went away to America."
"Yes, and I wrote to you from America about that. I wrote to you about
everything. Yes, I could not at once tear my bleeding heart from what
I had grown into from childhood, on which had been lavished all the
raptures of my hopes and all the tears of my hatred.... It is difficult
to change gods. I did not believe you then, because I did not want to
believe, I plunged for the last time into that sewer.... But the seed
remained and grew up. Seriously, tell me seriously, didn't you read all
my letter from America, perhaps you didn't read it at all?"
"I read three pages of it. The two first and the last. And I glanced
through the middle as well. But I was always meaning..."
"Ah, never mind, drop it! Damn it!" cried Shatov, waving his hand. "If
you've renounced those words about the people now, how could you have
uttered them then?... That's what crushes me now."
"I wasn't joking with you then; in persuading you I was perhaps
more concerned with myself than with you," Stavrogin pronounced
enigmatically.
"You weren't joking! In America I was lying for three months on straw
beside a hapless creature, and I learnt from him that at the very time
when you were sowing the seed of God and the Fatherland in my heart, at
that very time, perhaps during those very days, you were infecting the
heart of that hapless creature, that maniac Kirillov, with poison... you
confirmed false malignant ideas in him, and brought him to the verge of
insanity.... Go, look at him now, he is your creation... you've seen him
though."
"In the first place, I must observe that Kirillov himself told me that
he is happy and that he's good. Your supposition that all this was going
on at the same time is almost correct. But what of it? I repeat, I was
not deceiving either of you."
"Are you an atheist? An atheist now?"
"Yes."
"And then?"
"Just as I was then."
"I wasn't asking you to treat me with respect when I began the
conversation. With your intellect you might have understood that,"
Shatov muttered indignantly.
"I didn't get up at your first word, I didn't close the conversation,
I didn't go away from you, but have been sitting here ever since
submissively answering your questions and... cries, so it seems I have
not been lacking in respect to you yet."
Shatov interrupted, waving his hand.
"Do you remember your expression that 'an atheist can't be a Russian,'
that 'an atheist at once ceases to be a Russian'? Do you remember saying
that?"
"Did I?" Nikolay Vsyevolodovitch questioned him back.
"You ask? You've forgotten? And yet that was one of the truest statements
of the leading peculiarity of the Russian soul, which you divined. You
can't have forgotten it! I will remind you of something else: you said
then that 'a man who was not orthodox could not be Russian.'"
"I imagine that's a Slavophil idea."
"The Slavophils of to-day disown it. Nowadays, people have grown
cleverer. But you went further: you believed that Roman Catholicism was
not Christianity; you asserted that Rome proclaimed Christ subject to
the third temptation of the devil. Announcing to all the world that
Christ without an earthly kingdom cannot hold his ground upon earth,
Catholicism by so doing proclaimed Antichrist and ruined the whole
Western world. You pointed out that if France is in agonies now it's
simply the fault of Catholicism, for she has rejected the iniquitous God
of Rome and has not found a new one. That's what you could say then! I
remember our conversations."
"If I believed, no doubt I should repeat it even now. I wasn't lying
when I spoke as though I had faith," Nikolay Vsyevolodovitch pronounced
very earnestly. "But I must tell you, this repetition of my ideas in the
past makes a very disagreeable impression on me. Can't you leave off?"
"If you believe it?" repeated Shatov, paying not the slightest attention
to this request. "But didn't you tell me that if it were mathematically
proved to you that the truth excludes Christ, you'd prefer to stick to
Christ rather than to the truth? Did you say that? Did you?"
"But allow me too at last to ask a question," said Nikolay
Vsyevolodovitch, raising his voice. "What is the object of this
irritable and... malicious cross-examination?"
"This examination will be over for all eternity, and you will never hear
it mentioned again."
"You keep insisting that we are outside the limits of time and space."
"Hold your tongue!" Shatov cried suddenly. "I am stupid and awkward, but
let my name perish in ignominy! Let me repeat your leading idea.... Oh,
only a dozen lines, only the conclusion."
"Repeat it, if it's only the conclusion...." Stavrogin made a movement
to look at his watch, but restrained himself and did not look.
Shatov bent forward in his chair again and again held up his finger for
a moment.
"Not a single nation," he went on, as though reading it line by line,
still gazing menacingly at Stavrogin, "not a single nation has ever
been founded on principles of science or reason. There has never been
an example of it, except for a brief moment, through folly. Socialism
is from its very nature bound to be atheism, seeing that it has from the
very first proclaimed that it is an atheistic organisation of society,
and that it intends to establish itself exclusively on the elements of
science and reason. Science and reason have, from the beginning of time,
played a secondary and subordinate part in the life of nations; so it
will be till the end of time. Nations are built up and moved by another
force which sways and dominates them, the origin of which is unknown and
inexplicable: that force is the force of an insatiable desire to go on
to the end, though at the same time it denies that end. It is the force
of the persistent assertion of one's own existence, and a denial of
death. It's the spirit of life, as the Scriptures call it, 'the river of
living water,' the drying up of which is threatened in the Apocalypse.
It's the æsthetic principle, as the philosophers call it, the ethical
principle with which they identify it, 'the seeking for God,' as I call
it more simply. The object of every national movement, in every people
and at every period of its existence is only the seeking for its god,