Текст книги "The Idiot"

Автор книги: Федор Достоевский

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"I recognized your house just now from a hundred paces away, as I was approaching," said the prince.

"Why so?"

"I have no idea. Your house has the physiognomy of your whole family and of your whole Rogozhin life, but ask me why I think that—and I can't explain it. Nonsense, of course. I'm even afraid of how much it disturbs me. It never occurred to me before that this would be the sort of house you lived in, but when I saw it, I thought at once: 'Yes, that's exactly the kind of house he had to have!' "

"See!" Rogozhin smiled vaguely, not quite understanding the prince's unclear thought. "This house was built by my grandfather," he observed. "Castrates used to live here, the Khludiakovs, they rent from us even now."

"So gloomy. You sit in such gloom," said the prince, looking around the study.

It was a big room, high, darkish, cluttered with all sorts of furniture—mostly big desks, bureaus, bookcases in which ledgers and papers were kept. A wide red morocco couch apparently served Rogozhin as a bed. On the table at which Rogozhin had seated him, the prince noticed two or three books; one of them, Solovyov's History, ¹⁵was open and had a bookmark in it. On the walls, in dull gilt frames, hung several oil paintings, dark, sooty, on which it was hard to make anything out. One full-length portrait drew the prince's attention: it depicted a man of about fifty, in a frock coat of German cut but with long skirts, with two medals on his neck, a very sparse and short, grayish beard, a wrinkled and yellow face, and a suspicious, secretive, and somewhat doleful gaze.

"That wouldn't be your father?" asked the prince.

"The man himself," Rogozhin replied with an unpleasant smile, as if readying himself for some immediate, unceremonious joke about his deceased parent.

"He wasn't an Old Believer, was he?" ¹⁶

"No, he went to church, but it's true he used to say the old belief was more correct. He also had great respect for the castrates. This was his study. Why did you ask about the old belief?"

"Will you celebrate the wedding here?"

"Y-yes, here," replied Rogozhin, almost starting at the sudden question.

"Soon?"

"You know yourself it doesn't depend on me!"

"Parfyon, I'm not your enemy and have no intention of hindering you in anything. I repeat it to you now just as I told it to you once before, in a moment almost like this. When your wedding was under way in Moscow, I didn't hinder you, you know that. The first time it was shewho came rushing to me, almost from the foot of the altar, begging me to 'save' her from you. I'm repeating her own words. Then she ran away from me, too, and you found her again and led her to the altar, and now they say she ran away from you again and came here. Is that true? Lebedev informed me and that's why I came. And that you've made it up again here, I learned for the first time only yesterday on the train, from one of your former friends, Zalyozhev, if you want to know. I had a purpose in coming here: I wanted finally to persuade herto go abroad, to restore her health; she's very upset in body and in soul, in her head especially, and, in my opinion, she has great need to be cared for. I didn't want to go abroad with her myself, but I had a view to arranging it without myself. I'm telling you the real truth. If it's completely true that things have been made up again between you, I won't even allow her a glimpse of me, and I'll never come to see you either. You know I'm not deceiving you, because I've always been candid with you. I've never concealed my thoughts about it from you, and I've always said that marrying you means inevitable ruin for her.It also means ruin for you . . . perhaps even more than for her. If you parted again, I would be very glad; but I have no intention of intruding or interfering with you. So be at peace and don't suspect me. And you know for yourself whether I was ever your realrival, even when she ran away from you to me. You're laughing now—I know at what. Yes, we lived separately there, and in different towns, and you know it all for certain.I explained to you before that I love her'not with love, but with pity.' I think I defined it precisely. You told me then that you understood these words of mine; is it true? did you understand? See how hatefully you look at me! I've come to bring you peace, because you, too, are dear to me. I love you very much, Parfyon. And now I'll go and never come again. Farewell."

The prince stood up.

"Stay with me a little," Parfyon said quietly, without getting up from his place and leaning his head on his right hand, "I haven't seen you for a long time."

The prince sat down. They both fell silent again. "When you're not in front of me, I immediately feel spite for

you, Lev Nikolaevich. In these three months that I haven't seen you, I've felt spiteful towards you every minute, by God. So that I could have up and poisoned you with something! That's how it is. Now you haven't sat with me a quarter of an hour, and all my spite is gone, and I love you again like before. Stay with me a little ..."

"When I'm with you, you trust me, and when I'm gone, you immediately stop trusting me and suspect me again. You're like your father!" the prince said with a friendly smile, trying to conceal his emotion.

"I trust your voice when I'm with you. I know we'll never be equals, you and me . . ."

"Why did you add that? And now you're irritated again," said the prince, marveling at Rogozhin.

"But here, brother, nobody's asking our opinion," the other replied, "it got decided without us. And we love differently, too, I mean there's difference in everything," he went on quietly, after a pause. "You say you love her with pity. I've got no such pity for her in me. And she hates me more than anything. I dream about her every night now: that she's laughing at me with another man. So it is, brother. She's going to marry me, and yet she forgets even to think about me, as if she's changing a shoe. Believe it or not, I haven't seen her for five days, because I don't dare go to her. She'll ask, 'To what do I owe the honor?' She's disgraced me enough . . ."

"Disgraced you? How so?"

"As if he doesn't know! She ran away with you 'from the foot of the altar,' you just said it yourself."

"But you don't believe that she ..."

"Didn't she disgrace me in Moscow, with that officer, that Zemtiuzhnikov? I know for sure she did, and that's after she set the date for the wedding herself."

"It can't be!" cried the prince.

"I know for sure," Rogozhin said with conviction. "What, she's not like that, or something? There's no point, brother, in saying she's not like that. It's pure nonsense. With you she wouldn't be like that, and might be horrified at such a thing herself, but with me that's just what she's like. So it is. She looks at me like the worst scum. The thing with Keller, that officer, the one who boxes, I know for sure, she made it up just to laugh at me . . . But you don't know yet what she pulled on me in Moscow! And the money, the money I spent ..."

"But . . . how can you marry her now! . . . How will it be afterwards?" the prince asked in horror.

Rogozhin gave the prince a heavy and terrible look and made no reply.

"For five days now I haven't gone to her," he went on, after a moment's silence. "I keep being afraid she'll drive me away. 'I'm still my own mistress,' she says, 'if I like, I'll drive you away for good and go abroad' (it was she who told me she'd go abroad," he observed as if in parenthesis and looked somehow peculiarly into the prince's eyes); "sometimes, it's true, she's just scaring me, she keeps laughing at me for some reason. But at other times she really scowls, pouts, doesn't say a word; and that's what I'm afraid of. The other day I thought: I shouldn't come empty-handed—but I just made her laugh and then she even got angry. She gave her maid Katka such a shawl of mine that, even if she lived in luxury before, she maybe never saw the like. And I can't make a peep about the time of the wedding. What kind of bridegroom am I, if I'm afraid even to come for a visit? So I sit here, and when I can't stand it any longer, I go on the sly and slink past her house or hide around the corner. The other day I stood watch by her gates almost till daylight—I imagined something then. And she must have spied me through the window: 'What would you do to me,' she says, 'if you saw me deceive you?' I couldn't stand it and said, 'You know what.'"

"What does she know?"

"How should I know!" Rogozhin laughed spitefully. "In Moscow then I couldn't catch her with anybody, though I tried a long time. I confronted her once and said: 'You promised to marry me, you're entering an honest family, and do you know what you are now? Here's what you are!' "

"You said it to her?"

"Yes."

"Well?"

" 'I might not even take you as my lackey now,' she says, 'much less be your wife.' 'And I,' I say, 'am not leaving like that, once and for all.' 'And I,' she says, 'will now call Keller and tell him to throw you out the gate.' I fell on her and beat her black and blue."

"It can't be!" cried the prince.

"I tell you: it happened," Rogozhin confirmed quietly, but with flashing eyes. "For exactly a day and a half I didn't sleep, didn't eat, didn't drink, didn't leave her room, stood on my knees before her:

'I'll die,' I said, 'but I won't leave until you forgive me, and if you order me taken away, I'll drown myself; because what will I be now without you?' She was like a crazy woman all that day, she wept, she wanted to stab me with a knife, she abused me. She called Zalyozhev, Keller, Zemtiuzhnikov, and everybody, pointed at me, disgraced me. 'Gentlemen, let's all go to the theater tonight, let him stay here, since he doesn't want to leave, I'm not tied to him. And you, Parfyon Semyonovich, will be served tea here without me, you must have gotten hungry today.' She came back from the theater alone: 'They're little cowards and scoundrels,' she says, 'they're afraid of you, and they try to frighten me: he won't leave you like that, he may put a knife in you. But I'm going to my bedroom and I won't lock the door: that's how afraid of you I am! So that you know it and see it! Did you have tea?' 'No,' I say, 'and I won't.' 'You had the honor of being offered, but this doesn't suit you at all.' And she did what she said, she didn't lock her bedroom. In the morning she came out—laughing. 'Have you gone crazy, or what?' she says. 'You'll starve to death like this.' 'Forgive me,' I say. 'I don't want to forgive you, and I won't marry you, you've been told. Did you really spend the whole night sitting in that chair, you didn't sleep?' 'No,' I say, 'I didn't sleep.' 'Such a clever one! And you won't have tea and won't eat dinner again?' 'I told you I won't—forgive me!' 'This really doesn't suit you,' she says, 'if only you knew, it's like a saddle on a cow. You're not trying to frighten me, are you? A lot I care if you go hungry; I'm not afraid!' She got angry, but not for long; she began nagging me again. And I marveled at her then, that she felt no spite towards me. Because she does remember evil, with others she remembers evil a long time! Then it occurred to me that she considered me so low that she couldn't even be very angry with me. And that's the truth. 'Do you know,' she says, 'what the pope of Rome is?' 'I've heard of him,' I say. 'Parfyon Semyonych,' she says, 'you never studied world history.' 'I never studied anything,' I say. 'Here, then,' she says, 'I'll give you something to read: there was this one pope who got angry with some emperor, and this emperor spent three days without eating or drinking, barefoot, on his knees, in front of his palace, until the pope forgave him; what do you think this emperor thought to himself for those three days, standing on his knees, and what kind of vows did he make? . . . Wait,' she says, 'I'll read it to you myself!' She jumped up, brought a book: 'It's poetry,' she says, and begins reading verses to me about this emperor swearing to

take revenge on this pope during those three days. ¹⁷'Can it be,' she says, 'that you don't like it, Parfyon Semyonych?' 'That's all true,' I say, 'what you read.' 'Aha, you yourself say it's true, that means you, too, may be making vows that "if she marries me, then I'll remember everything she's done, then I'll have fun at her expense!" ' 'I don't know,' I say, 'maybe that's what I'm thinking.' 'How is it you don't know?' 'I just don't,' I say, 'that's not what I'm thinking about now.' 'And what are you thinking about now?' 'About how you get up from your place, go past me, and I look at you and watch you; your dress rustles, and my heart sinks, and if you leave the room, I remember every little word you've said, and in what voice, and what it was; and this whole night I wasn't thinking about anything, but I kept listening to how you breathed in your sleep, and how you stirred a couple of times ...' 'And perhaps,' she laughed, 'you don't think about or remember how you beat me?' And maybe I do,' I say, 'I don't know.' 'But what if I don't forgive you and don't marry you?' 'I told you, I'll drown myself.' 'Perhaps you'll still kill me before that. . .' She said it and fell to thinking. Then she got angry and left. An hour later she comes out to me so gloomy. 'I'll marry you, Parfyon Semyonovich,' she says, 'and not because I'm afraid of you, but because I'll perish all the same. And which way is better, eh? Sit down,' she says, 'dinner will be served now. And if I marry you,' she added, 'I'll be your faithful wife, don't doubt it and don't worry.' She was silent a minute, then said: 'You're not a lackey after all. Before I used to think you were as complete a lackey as they come.' Then she set a date for the wedding, and a week later she ran away from me here to Lebedev. When I arrived, she said: 'I don't reject you altogether; I only want to wait a little more, as long as I like, because I'm still my own mistress. You wait, too, if you want.' That's how we are now . . . What do you think of all that, Lev Nikolaevich?"

"What do you think yourself?" the prince asked back, looking sadly at Rogozhin.

"As if I think!" escaped him. He was going to add something, but kept silent in inconsolable anguish.

The prince stood up and was again about to leave.

"All the same I won't hinder you," he said quietly, almost pensively, as if responding to some inner, hidden thought of his own.

"You know what I'll tell you?" Rogozhin suddenly became animated and his eyes flashed. "How can you give her up to me

like that? I don't understand. Have you stopped loving her altogether? Before you were in anguish anyway; I could see that. So why have you come galloping here headlong? Out of pity?" (And his face twisted in spiteful mockery.) "Heh, heh!"

"Do you think I'm deceiving you?" asked the prince.

"No, I believe you, only I don't understand any of it. The surest thing of all is that your pity is maybe still worse than my love!"

Something spiteful lit up in his face, wanting to speak itself out at once.

"Well, your love is indistinguishable from spite," smiled the prince, "and when it passes, there may be still worse trouble. This I tell you, brother Parfyon ..."

"That I'll put a knife in her?"

The prince gave a start.

"You'll hate her very much for this present love, for all this torment that you're suffering now. For me the strangest thing is how she could again decide to marry you. When I heard it yesterday—I could scarcely believe it, and it pained me so. She has already renounced you twice and run away from the altar, which means she has a foreboding! . . . What does she want with you now? Can it be your money? That's nonsense. And you must have spent quite a bit of it by now. Can it be only to have a husband? She could find someone besides you. Anyone would be better than you, because you may put a knife in her, and maybe she knows that only too well now. Because you love her so much? True, that could be . . . I've heard there are women who seek precisely that kind of love . . . only ..."

The prince paused and pondered.

"Why did you smile again at my father's portrait?" asked Rogozhin, who was observing very closely every change, every fleeting expression of his face.

"Why did I smile? It occurred to me that, if it hadn't been for this calamity, if this love hadn't befallen you, you might have become exactly like your father, and in a very short time at that. Lodged silently alone in this house with your obedient and uncomplaining wife, speaking rarely and sternly, trusting no one, and having no need at all for that, but only making money silently and sullenly. At most you'd occasionally praise some old books or get interested in the two-fingered sign of the cross, ¹⁸and that probably only in old age ..."

"Go on, jeer. And she said exactly the same thing not long ago,

when she was looking at that portrait! Funny how the two of you agree in everything now . . ."

"So she's already been at your place?" the prince asked with curiosity.

"She has. She looked at the portrait for a long time, asked questions about the deceased. 'You'd be exactly like that,' she smiled at me in the end. 'You have strong passions, Parfyon Semyonovich, such passions as would have sent you flying to Siberia, to hard labor, if you weren't also intelligent, because you are very intelligent,' she said (that's what she said, can you believe it? First time I heard such a thing from her!). 'You'd soon drop all this mischief you do now. And since you're a completely uneducated man, you'd start saving money, and you'd sit like your father in this house with his castrates; perhaps you'd adopt their beliefs in the end, and you'd love your money so much that you'd save up not two but ten million, and you'd starve to death on your moneybags, because you're passionate in everything, you carry everything to the point of passion.' That's just how she talked, in almost exactly those words. She'd never spoken with me like that before! Because she always talks about trifles with me, or makes fun of me; and this time, too, she began laughingly, but then turned so grim; she went around looking the whole house over, and seemed to be frightened by something. 'I'll change it all,' I say, 'and do it up, or maybe I'll buy another house for the wedding.' 'No, no,' she says, 'don't change anything here, we'll live in it as it is. When I'm your wife,' she says, 'I want to live near your mother.' I took her to see my mother—she was respectful to her, like her own daughter. Even before, already two years ago, my mother didn't seem quite right in the head (she's sick), but since my father's death she's become like a total infant, doesn't talk, doesn't walk, just sits there and bows to whoever she sees; seems like if you didn't feed her, she wouldn't realize it for three days. I took my mother's right hand, put her fingers together: 'Bless us, mother,' I say, 'this woman is going to marry me.' Then she kissed my mother's hand with feeling: 'Your mother,' she says, 'must have borne a lot of grief.' She saw this book on the table: 'Ah, so you've started reading Russian History?'(And she herself told me once in Moscow: 'You ought to edify yourself at least somehow, at least read Solovyov's Russian History,you don't know anything at all.') 'That's good,' she said, 'that's what you ought to do, start reading. I'll make a little list for you of which books you should read first; want me

to, or not?' And never, never before did she talk to me like that, so that she even surprised me; for the first time I breathed like a living person."

"I'm very glad of it, Parfyon," the prince said with sincere feeling, "very glad. Who knows, maybe God will make things right for you together."

"That will never be!" Rogozhin cried hotly.

"Listen, Parfyon, if you love her so much, how can you not want to deserve her respect? And if you do want to, how can you have no hope? I just said it was a strange riddle for me why she's marrying you. But though I can't answer it, all the same I don't doubt that there's certainly a sufficient, rational reason for it. She's convinced of your love; but she's surely convinced that there are virtues in you as well. It cannot be otherwise! What you just said confirms it. You say yourself that she found it possible to speak to you in a language quite different from her former treatment and way of speaking. You're suspicious and jealous, and so you've exaggerated everything bad you've noticed. Of course, she doesn't think as badly of you as you say. Otherwise it would mean that she was consciously throwing herself into the water or onto the knife by marrying you. Is that possible? Who consciously throws himself into the water or onto the knife?"

Parfyon heard out the prince's ardent words with a bitter smile. His conviction, it seems, was already firmly established.

"How heavily you're looking at me now, Parfyon!" escaped the prince with a heavy feeling.

"Into the water or onto the knife!" the other said at last. "Heh! But that's why she's marrying me, because she probably expects to get the knife from me! But can it be, Prince, that you still haven't grasped what the whole thing is about?"

"I don't understand you."

"Well, maybe he really doesn't understand, heh, heh! They do say you're a bit. . . like that!She loves somebody else—understand? Just the way I love her now, she now loves somebody else. And do you know who that somebody else is? It's you!What, didn't you know?"

"Me!"

"You. She fell in love with you then, ever since that time, that birthday party. Only she thinks it's impossible for her to marry you, because she'd supposedly disgrace you and ruin your whole life. 'I'm you-know-what,' she says. To this day she maintains it

herself. She says it all right in my face. She's afraid to ruin and disgrace you, but me she can marry, meaning it doesn't matter– that's how she considers me, note that as well!"

"But why, then, did she run away from you to me, and . . . from me . . .

"And from you to me! Heh! All sorts of things suddenly come into her head! She's all like in a fever now. One day she shouts to me: 'I'll marry you like drowning myself. Be quick with the wedding!' She hurries herself, fixes the date, and when the time is near—she gets frightened, or has other ideas—God knows, but you've seen her: she cries, laughs, thrashes around feverishly. What's so strange that she ran away from you, too? She ran away from you then, because she suddenly realized how much she loves you. It was beyond her to be with you. You just said I sought her out then in Moscow; that's not so—she came running to me herself: 'Fix the day,' she says, 'I'm ready! Pour the champagne! We'll go to the gypsies!' she shouts! ... If it wasn't for me, she'd have drowned herself long ago; it's right what I'm saying. The reason she doesn't do it is maybe because I'm even scarier than the water. So she wants to marry me out of spite ... If she does it, believe me, she'll be doing it out of spite."

"But how can you . . . how can you! . . ." the prince cried and did not finish. He looked at Rogozhin with horror.

"Why don't you finish?" the other added with a grin. "But if you like, I'll tell you how you're reasoning at this very moment: 'So how can she be with him now? How can she be allowed to do it?' I know what you think . . ."

"I didn't come for that, Parfyon, I'm telling you, that's not what I had in mind . . ."

"Maybe it wasn't for that and that wasn't on your mind, only now it's certainly become that, heh, heh! Well, enough! Why are you all overturned like that? You mean you really didn't know? You amaze me!"

"This is all jealousy, Parfyon, it's all illness, you exaggerate it beyond all measure . . ." the prince murmured in great agitation. "What's the matter?"

"Let it alone," Parfyon said and quickly snatched from the prince's hand the little knife he had picked up from the table, next to the book, and put it back where it had been.

"It's as if I knew, when I was coming to Petersburg, as if I had a foreboding . . ." the prince went on. "I didn't want to come here!

I wanted to forget everything here, to tear it out of my heart! Well, good-bye . . . But what's the matter?"

As he was talking, the prince had again absentmindedly picked up the same knife from the table, and again Rogozhin had taken it from him and dropped it on the table. It was a knife of a rather simple form, with a staghorn handle, not a folding one, with a blade six inches long and of a corresponding width.

Seeing that the prince paid particular attention to the fact that this knife had twice been snatched away from him, Rogozhin seized it in angry vexation, put it in the book, and flung the book onto the other table.

"Do you cut the pages with it?" asked the prince, but somehow absentmindedly, still as if under the pressure of a deep pensiveness.

"Yes, the pages . . ."

"Isn't it a garden knife?"

"Yes, it is. Can't you cut pages with a garden knife?"

"But it's . . . brand-new."

"Well, what if it is new? So now I can't buy a new knife?" Rogozhin, who was getting more and more vexed with every word, finally cried out in a sort of frenzy.

The prince gave a start and gazed intently at Rogozhin.

"Look at us!" he suddenly laughed, recovering himself completely. "Forgive me, brother, when my head's as heavy as it is now, and this illness . . . I've become quite absentminded and ridiculous. This is not at all what I wanted to ask about ... I don't remember what it was. Good-bye . . ."

"Not that way," said Rogozhin.

"I forget!"

"This way, this way, come on, I'll show you."

IV

They went through the same rooms the prince had already passed through; Rogozhin walked a little ahead, the prince followed. They came to a big reception room. Here there were several paintings on the walls, all portraits of bishops or landscapes in which nothing could be made out. Over the door to the next room hung a painting rather strange in form, around six feet wide and no more than ten inches high. It portrayed the Savior just taken down from the cross. The prince glanced fleetingly at it, as

if recalling something, not stopping, however, wanting to go on through the door. He felt very oppressed and wanted to be out of this house quickly. But Rogozhin suddenly stopped in front of the painting.

"All these paintings here," he said, "my deceased father bought at auctions for a rouble or two. He liked that. One man who's a connoisseur looked at them all: trash, he said, but that one—the painting over the door, also bought for two roubles—he said, isn't trash. In my father's time somebody showed up offering three hundred and fifty roubles for it, and Savelyev, Ivan Dmitrich, a merchant, a great amateur, went up to four hundred, and last week he offered my brother Semyon Semyonych as much as five hundred. I kept it for myself."

"Yes, it's . . . it's a copy from Hans Holbein," said the prince, having managed to take a look at the painting, "and, though I'm no great expert, it seems to be an excellent copy. I saw the painting abroad and cannot forget it. ¹⁹But . . . what's the matter . . ."

Rogozhin suddenly abandoned the painting and went further on his way. Of course, absentmindedness and the special, strangely irritated mood that had appeared so unexpectedly in Rogozhin might have explained this abruptness; but even so the prince thought it somehow odd that a conversation not initiated by him should be so suddenly broken off, and that Rogozhin did not even answer him.

"But I've long wanted to ask you something, Lev Nikolaich: do you believe in God or not?" Rogozhin suddenly began speaking again, after going several steps.

"How strangely you ask and . . . stare!" the prince observed involuntarily.

"But I like looking at that painting," Rogozhin muttered after a silence, as if again forgetting his question.

"At that painting!" the prince suddenly cried out, under the impression of an unexpected thought. "At that painting! A man could even lose his faith from that painting!"

"Lose it he does," Rogozhin suddenly agreed unexpectedly. They had already reached the front door.

"What?" the prince suddenly stopped. "How can you! I was almost joking, and you're so serious! And why did you ask me whether I believe in God?"

"Never mind, I just did. I wanted to ask you before. Many people don't believe nowadays. And is it true (because you've lived abroad)

what one drunk man told me, that in our Russia, people don't believe in God even more than in other countries? 'It's easier for us than for them,' he said, 'because we've gone further than they have . . .' "

Rogozhin smiled sarcastically; having uttered his question, he suddenly opened the door and, keeping hold of the handle, waited for the prince to go out. The prince was surprised, but went out. Rogozhin followed him out to the landing and closed the door behind him. The two men stood facing each other, looking as if they had forgotten where they had come to and what they were to do next.

"Good-bye, then," said the prince, holding out his hand.

"Good-bye," said Rogozhin, shaking the extended hand firmly but quite mechanically.

The prince went down one step and turned.

"But with regard to belief," he began, smiling (evidently unwilling to leave Rogozhin like that), and also becoming animated under the impression of an unexpected memory, "with regard to belief, I had four different encounters in two days last week. One morning I was traveling on a new railway line and spent four hours talking on the train with a certain S., having only just made his acquaintance. I had heard a good deal about him before and, among other things, that he was an atheist. He's really a very learned man, and I was glad to be talking with a true scholar. Moreover, he's a man of rare courtesy, and he talked with me as if I were perfectly equal to him in knowledge and ideas. He doesn't believe in God. Only one thing struck me: it was as if that was not at all what he was talking about all the while, and it struck me precisely because before, too, however many unbelievers I've met, however many books I've read on the subject, it has always seemed to me that they were talking or writing books that were not at all about that, though it looked as if it was about that. I said this to him right then, but it must be I didn't speak clearly, or didn't know how to express it, because he didn't understand anything ... In the evening I stopped to spend the night in a provincial hotel where a murder had taken place the night before, so that everyone was talking about it when I arrived. Two peasants, getting on in years, and not drunk, friends who had known each other a long time, had had tea and were both about to go to bed in the same little room. But, during the last two days, one of them had spied the silver watch that the other wore on a yellow bead string, which he had evidently