Let me see, I have read something....
'On the Way' or
'Away!' or
'At the Parting of the Ways'— something of the sort; I don't remember.
It's a long time since I read it, five years ago.
I've no time."
A silence followed.
"When I came I assured every one that you were a very intelligent man, and now I believe every one here is wild over you."
"Thank you," Pyotr Stepanovitch answered calmly.
Lunch was brought in.
Pyotr Stepanovitch pounced on the cutlet with extraordinary appetite, had eaten it in a trice, tossed off the wine and swallowed his coffee.
"This boor," thought Karmazinov, looking at him askance as he munched the last morsel and drained the last drops—"this boor probably understood the biting taunt in my words... and no doubt he has read the manuscript with eagerness; he is simply lying with some object.
But possibly he is not lying and is only genuinely stupid.
I like a genius to be rather stupid.
Mayn't he be a sort of genius among them? Devil take the fellow!"
He got up from the sofa and began pacing from one end of the room to the other for the sake of exercise, as he always did after lunch.
"Leaving here soon?" asked Pyotr Stepanovitch from his easy chair, lighting a cigarette.
"I really came to sell an estate and I am in the hands of my bailiff."
"You left, I believe, because they expected an epidemic out there after the war?"
"N-no, not entirely for that reason," Mr. Karmazinov went on, uttering his phrases with an affable intonation, and each time he turned round in pacing the corner there was a faint but jaunty quiver of his right leg.
"I certainly intend to live as long as I can." He laughed, not without venom.
"There is something in our Russian nobility that makes them wear out very quickly, from every point of view.
But I wish to wear out as late as possible, and now I am going abroad for good; there the climate is better, the houses are of stone, and everything stronger.
Europe will last my time, I think.
What do you think?"
"How can I tell?"
"H'm. If the Babylon out there really does fall, and great will be the fall thereof (about which I quite agree with you, yet I think it will last my time), there's nothing to fall here in Russia, comparatively speaking.
There won't be stones to fall, everything will crumble into dirt.
Holy Russia has less power of resistance than anything in the world.
The Russian peasantry is still held together somehow by the Russian God; but according to the latest accounts the Russian God is not to be relied upon, and scarcely survived the emancipation; it certainly gave Him a severe shock.
And now, what with railways, what with you... I've no faith in the Russian God."
"And how about the European one?"
"I don't believe in any.
I've been slandered to the youth of Russia.
I've always sympathised with every movement among them.
I was shown the manifestoes here.
Every one looks at them with perplexity because they are frightened at the way things are put in them, but every one is convinced of their power even if they don't admit it to themselves.
Everybody has been rolling downhill, and every one has known for ages that they have nothing to clutch at.
I am persuaded of the success of this mysterious propaganda, if only because Russia is now pre-eminently the place in all the world where anything you like may happen without any opposition.
I understand only too well why wealthy Russians all flock abroad, and more and more so every year.
It's simply instinct.
If the ship is sinking, the rats are the first to leave it.
Holy Russia is a country of wood, of poverty... and of danger, the country of ambitious beggars in its upper classes, while the immense majority live in poky little huts.
She will be glad of any way of escape; you have only to present it to her.
It's only the government that still means to resist, but it brandishes its cudgel in the dark and hits its own men.
Everything here is doomed and awaiting the end.
Russia as she is has no future.
I have become a German and I am proud of it."
"But you began about the manifestoes. Tell me everything; how do you look at them?"
"Every one is afraid of them, so they must be influential.