What am I to do, what am I to do?" Ivan said through his clenched teeth.
"My dear friend, above all things I want to behave like a gentleman and to be recognised as such," the visitor began in an access of deprecating and simple-hearted pride, typical of a poor relation. "I am poor, but... I won't say very honest, but... it's an axiom generally accepted in society that I am a fallen angel.
I certainly can't conceive how I can ever have been an angel.
If I ever was, it must have been so long ago that there's no harm in forgetting it.
Now I only prize the reputation of being a gentlemanly person and live as I can, trying to make myself agreeable.
I love men genuinely, I've been greatly calumniated!
Here when I stay with you from time to time, my life gains a kind of reality and that's what I like most of all.
You see, like you, I suffer from the fantastic and so I love the realism of earth.
Here, with you, everything is circumscribed, here all is formulated and geometrical, while we have nothing but indeterminate equations!
I wander about here dreaming.
I like dreaming.
Besides, on earth I become superstitious. Please don't laugh, that's just what I like, to become superstitious.
I adopt all your habits here: I've grown fond of going to the public baths, would you believe it? and I go and steam myself with merchants and priests.
What I dream of is becoming incarnate once for all and irrevocably in the form of some merchant's wife weighing eighteen stone, and of believing all she believes.
My ideal is to go to church and offer a candle in simple-hearted faith, upon my word it is.
Then there would be an end to my sufferings.
I like being doctored too; in the spring there was an outbreak of smallpox and I went and was vaccinated in a foundling hospital- if only you knew how I enjoyed myself that day. I subscribed ten roubles in the cause of the Slavs!...
But you are not listening.
Do you know, you are not at all well this evening? I know you went yesterday to that doctor... well, what about your health?
What did the doctor say?"
"Fool!" Ivan snapped out.
"But you are clever, anyway.
You are scolding again?
I didn't ask out of sympathy.
You needn't answer.
Now rheumatism has come in again-"
"Fool!" repeated Ivan.
"You keep saying the same thing; but I had such an attack of rheumatism last year that I remember it to this day."
"The devil have rheumatism!"
"Why not, if I sometimes put on fleshly form?
I put on fleshly form and I take the consequences.
Satan sum et nihil humanum a me alienum puto."* * I am Satan, and deem nothing human alien to me.
"What, what, Satan sum et nihil humanum... that's not bad for the devil!"
"I am glad I've pleased you at last."
"But you didn't get that from me." Ivan stopped suddenly, seeming struck. "That never entered my head, that's strange."
"C'est du nouveau, n'est-ce pas?"* This time I'll act honestly and explain to you.
Listen, in dreams and especially in nightmares, from indigestion or anything, a man sees sometimes such artistic visions, such complex and real actuality, such events, even a whole world of events, woven into such a plot, with such unexpected details from the most exalted matters to the last button on a cuff, as I swear Leo Tolstoy has never invented. Yet such dreams are sometimes seen not by writers, but by the most ordinary people, officials, journalists, priests.... The subject is a complete enigma. A statesman confessed to me, indeed, that all his best ideas came to him when he was asleep.
Well, that's how it is now, though I am your hallucination, yet just as in a nightmare, I say original things which had not entered your head before. So I don't repeat your ideas, yet I am only your nightmare, nothing more." * It's new, isn't it?
"You are lying, your aim is to convince me you exist apart and are not my nightmare, and now you are asserting you are a dream."
"My dear fellow, I've adopted a special method to-day, I'll explain it to you afterwards.
Stay, where did I break off?
Oh, yes! I caught cold then, only not here but yonder."
"Where is yonder?
Tell me, will you be here long. Can't you go away?" Ivan exclaimed almost in despair.
He ceased walking to and fro, sat down on the sofa, leaned his elbows on the table again and held his head tight in both hands.
He pulled the wet towel off and flung it away in vexation. It was evidently of no use.
"Your nerves are out of order," observed the gentleman, with a carelessly easy, though perfectly polite, air. "You are angry with me even for being able to catch cold, though it happened in a most natural way.
I was hurrying then to a diplomatic soiree at the house of a lady of high rank in Petersburg, who was aiming at influence in the Ministry.
Well, an evening suit, white tie, gloves, though I was God knows where and had to fly through space to reach your earth.... Of course, it took only an instant, but you know a ray of light from the sun takes full eight minutes, and fancy in an evening suit and open waistcoat.
Spirits don't freeze, but when one's in fleshly form, well... in brief, I didn't think, and set off, and you know in those ethereal spaces, in the water that is above the firmament, there's such a frost... at least one can't call it frost, you fancy, 150 degrees below zero!