«Then it’s for the salvation of my soul you are working, is it, you scoundrel?» «One must do a good work sometimes. How ill-humoured you are!»
«Fool! did you ever tempt those holy men who ate locusts and prayed seventeen years in the wilderness till they were overgrown with moss?»
«My dear fellow, I’ve done nothing else. One forgets the whole world and all the worlds, and sticks to one such saint, because he is a very precious diamond. One such soul, you know, is sometimes worth a whole constellation. We have our system of reckoning, you
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know. The conquest is priceless! And some of them, on my word, are not inferior to you in culture, though you won’t believe it. They can contemplate such depths of belief and disbelief at the same moment that sometimes it really seems that they are within a hair’s-breadth of being ‘turned upside down,’ as the actor Gorbunov says.»
«Well, did you get your nose pulled?»
«My dear fellow,» observed the visitor sententiously, «it’s better to get off with your nose pulled than without a nose at all. As an afflicted marquis observed not long ago (he must have been treated by a specialist) in confession to his spiritual father- a Jesuit. I was present, it was simply charming. ‘Give me back my nose!’ he said, and he beat his breast. ‘My son,’ said the priest evasively, ‘all things are accomplished in accordance with the inscrutable decrees of Providence, and what seems a misfortune sometimes leads to extraordinary, though unapparent, benefits. If stern destiny has deprived you of your nose, it’s to your ad-vantage that no one can ever pull you by your nose.’ ‘Holy father, that’s no comfort,’ cried the despairing marquis. ‘I’d be delighted to have my nose pulled every day of my life, if it were only in its proper place.’ ‘My son,’ sighs the priest, ‘you can’t expect every blessing at once. This is murmuring against Providence, who even in this has not forgotten you, for if you repine as you repined just now, declaring you’d be glad to have your nose pulled for the rest of your life, your desire has already been fulfilled indirectly, for when you lost your nose, you were led by the nose.’
«Fool, how stupid!» cried Ivan.
«My dear friend, I only wanted to amuse you. But I swear that’s the genuine Jesuit casu-istry and I swear that it all happened word for word as I’ve told you. It happened lately and gave me a great deal of trouble. The unhappy young man shot himself that very night when he got home. I was by his side till the very last moment. Those Jesuit confessionals are really my most delightful diversion at melancholy moments. Here’s another incident that happened only the other day. A little blonde Norman girl of twenty- a buxom, unsophisticated beauty that would make your mouth water- comes to an old priest. She bends down and whispers her sin into the grating. ‘Why, my daughter, have you fallen again already?’ cries the priest: ‘O Sancta Maria, what do I hear! Not the same man this time, how long is this going on? Aren’t you ashamed!’ ‘Ah, mon pere,’ answers the sinner with tears of penitence, ‘Ca lui fait tant de plaisir, et a moi si peu de peine!’* Fancy, such an answer! I drew back. It was the cry of nature, better than innocence itself, if you like. I absolved her sin on the spot and was turning to go, but I was forced to turn back. I heard the priest at the grating making an ap-pointment with her for the evening- though he was an old man hard as flint, he fell in an instant! It was nature, the truth of nature asserted its rights! What, you are turning up your nose again? Angry again? I don’t know how to please you-«
- Ah, my father, this gives him so much pleasure, and me so little pain!
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«Leave me alone, you are beating on my brain like a haunting nightmare,» Ivan moaned miserably, helpless before his apparition. «I am bored with you, agonisingly and insufferably. I would give anything to be able to shake you off!»
«I repeat, moderate your expectations, don’t demand of me ‘everything great and noble,’ and you’ll see how well we shall get on,» said the gentleman impressively. «You are really angry with me for not having appeared to you in a red glow, with thunder and lightning, with scorched wings, but have shown myself in such a modest form. You are wounded, in the first place, in your asthetic feelings, and, secondly, in your pride. How could such a vulgar devil visit such a great man as you! Yes, there is that romantic strain in you, that was so derided by Byelinsky. I can’t help it, young man, as I got ready to come to you I did think as a joke of appearing in the figure of a retired general who had served in the Caucasus, with a star of the Lion and the Sun on my coat. But I was positively afraid of doing it, for you’d have thrashed me for daring to pin the Lion and the Sun on my coat, instead of, at least, the Polar Star or the Sirius. And you keep on saying I am stupid, but, mercy on us! I make no claim to be equal to you in intelligence. Mephistopheles declared to Faust that he desired evil, but did only good. Well, he can say what he likes, it’s quite the opposite with me. I am perhaps the one man in all creation who loves the truth and genuinely desires good. I was there when the Word, Who died on the Cross, rose up into heaven bearing on His bosom the soul of the penitent thief. I heard the glad shrieks of the cherubim singing and shouting hosannah and the thunderous rapture of the seraphim which shook heaven and all creation, and I swear to you by all that’s sacred, I longed to join the choir and shout hosannah with them all. The word had almost escaped me, had almost broken from my lips… you know how susceptible and aesthetically impressionable I am. But common sense- oh, a most un-happy trait in my character- kept me in due bounds and I let the moment pass! For what would have happened, I reflected, what would have happened after my hosannah? Everything on earth would have been extinguished at once and no events could have occurred. And so, solely from a sense of duty and my social position, was forced to suppress the good moment and to stick to my nasty task. Somebody takes all the credit of what’s good for Himself, and nothing but nastiness is left for me. But I don’t envy the honour of a life of idle imposture, I am not ambitious. Why am I, of all creatures in the world, doomed to be cursed by all decent people and even to be kicked, for if I put on mortal form I am bound to take such con-sequences sometimes? I know, of course, there’s a secret in it, but they won’t tell me the secret for anything, for then perhaps, seeing the meaning of it, I might bawl hosannah, and the indispensable minus would disappear at once, and good sense would reign supreme throughout the whole world. And that, of course, would mean the end of everything, even of magazines and newspapers, for who would take them in? I know that at the end of all things I shall be reconciled. I, too, shall walk my quadrillion and learn the secret. But till that happens I am sulking and fulfil my destiny though it’s against the grain- that is, to ruin
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thousands for the sake of saving one. How many souls have had to be ruined and how many honourable reputations destroyed for the sake of that one righteous man, Job, over whom they made such a fool of me in old days! Yes, till the secret is revealed, there are two sorts of truths for me- one, their truth, yonder, which I know nothing about so far, and the other my own. And there’s no knowing which will turn out the better…. Are you asleep?»
«I might well be,» Ivan groaned angrily. «All my stupid ideas- outgrown, thrashed out long ago, and flung aside like a dead carcass you present to me as something new!»
«There’s no pleasing you! And I thought I should fascinate you by my literary style. That hosannah in the skies really wasn’t bad, was it? And then that ironical tone a la Heine, eh?»
«No, I was never such a flunkey! How then could my soul beget a flunkey like you?» «My dear fellow, I know a most charming and attractive young Russian gentleman, a
young thinker and a great lover of literature and art, the author of a promising poem entitled The Grand Inquisitor. I was
