"Very well."
Kirillov squatted on his heels before the trunk in the corner, which he had never yet unpacked, though things had been pulled out of it as required.
He pulled out from the bottom a palm-wood box lined with red velvet, and from it took out a pair of smart and very expensive pistols.
"I've got everything, powder, bullets, cartridges.
I've a revolver besides, wait."
He stooped down to the trunk again and took out a six-chambered American revolver.
"You've got weapons enough, and very good ones."
"Very, extremely."
Kirillov, who was poor, almost destitute, though he never noticed his poverty, was evidently proud of showing precious weapons, which he had certainly obtained with great sacrifice.
"You still have the same intentions?" Stavrogin asked after a moment's silence, and with a certain wariness.
"Yes," answered Kirillov shortly, guessing at once from his voice what he was asking about, and he began taking the weapons from the table.
"When?" Nikolay Vsyevolodovitch inquired still more cautiously, after a pause.
In the meantime Kirillov had put both the boxes back in his trunk, and sat down in his place again.
"That doesn't depend on me, as you know—when they tell me," he muttered, as though disliking the question; but at the same time with evident readiness to answer any other question.
He kept his black, lustreless eyes fixed continually on Stavrogin with a calm but warm and kindly expression in them.
"I understand shooting oneself, of course," Nikolay Vsyevolodovitch began suddenly, frowning a little, after a dreamy silence that lasted three minutes. "I sometimes have thought of it myself, and then there always came a new idea: if one did something wicked, or, worse still, something shameful, that is, disgraceful, only very shameful and... ridiculous, such as people would remember for a thousand years and hold in scorn for a thousand years, and suddenly the thought comes: 'one blow in the temple and there would be nothing more.'
One wouldn't care then for men and that they would hold one in scorn for a thousand years, would one?"
"You call that a new idea?" said Kirillov, after a moment's thought.
"I... didn't call it so, but when I thought it I felt it as a new idea."
"You 'felt the idea'?" observed Kirillov.
"That's good.
There are lots of ideas that are always there and yet suddenly become new.
That's true.
I see a great deal now as though it were for the first time."
"Suppose you had lived in the moon," Stavrogin interrupted, not listening, but pursuing his own thought, "and suppose there you had done all these nasty and ridiculous things.... You know from here for certain that they will laugh at you and hold you in scorn for a thousand years as long as the moon lasts.
But now you are here, and looking at the moon from here. You don't care here for anything you've done there, and that the people there will hold you in scorn for a thousand years, do you?"
"I don't know," answered Kirillov. "I've not been in the moon," he added, without any irony, simply to state the fact.
"Whose baby was that just now?"
"The old woman's mother-in-law was here—no, daughter-in-law, it's all the same.
Three days.
She's lying ill with the baby, it cries a lot at night, it's the stomach.
The mother sleeps, but the old woman picks it up; I play ball with it.
The ball's from Hamburg.
I bought it in Hamburg to throw it and catch it, it strengthens the spine.
It's a girl."
"Are you fond of children?"
"I am," answered Kirillov, though rather indifferently.
"Then you're fond of life?"
"Yes, I'm fond of life! What of it?"
"Though you've made up your mind to shoot yourself."
"What of it?
Why connect it?
Life's one thing and that's another.
Life exists, but death doesn't at all."
"You've begun to believe in a future eternal life?"
"No, not in a future eternal life, but in eternal life here.
There are moments, you reach moments, and time suddenly stands still, and it will become eternal."
"You hope to reach such a moment?"
"Yes."
"That'll scarcely be possible in our time," Nikolay Vsyevolodovitch responded slowly and, as it were, dreamily; the two spoke without the slightest irony.