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 never noticed before.
The man was not a thief, he was even honest, and not all that poor as peasant life goes.
But he liked the watch so much and was so tempted by it that he finally couldn't stand it: he pulled out a knife and, while his friend was looking the other way, went up to him cautiously from behind, took aim, raised his eyes to heaven, crossed himself and, after praying bitterly to himself:
'Lord, forgive me for Christ's sake!'—killed his friend with one blow, like a sheep, and took his watch."20
Rogozhin rocked with laughter.
He guffawed as if he was in some sort of fit.
It was even strange to look at this laughter coming right after such a gloomy mood.
"Now that I like!
No, that's the best yet!" he cried out spasmodically, nearly breathless. "The one doesn't believe in God at all, and the other believes so much that he even stabs people with a prayer . . . No, that, brother Prince, couldn't have been made up!
Ha, ha, ha!
No, that's the best yet! . . ."
"The next morning I went out for a stroll about town," the prince went on, as soon as Rogozhin paused, though laughter still twitched spasmodically and fitfully on his lips, "and I saw a drunken soldier staggering along the wooden sidewalk, all in tatters.
He comes up to me: 'Buy a silver cross, master. I'm asking only twenty kopecks. It's silver!'
I see a cross in his hand—he must have just taken it off—on a worn light blue ribbon, only it's a real tin one, you could see it at first glance, big, eight-pointed, of the full Byzantine design.
I took out twenty kopecks, gave them to him, and put the cross on at once—and I could see by his face how pleased he was to have duped the foolish gentleman, and he went at once to drink up his cross, there's no doubt of that.
Just then, brother, I was under the strongest impression of all that had flooded over me in Russia; before I understood nothing of it, as if I'd grown up a dumb brute, and I had somehow fantastic memories of it during those five years I spent abroad.
So I went along and thought: no, I'll wait before condemning this Christ-seller.
God knows what's locked away in these drunken and weak hearts.
An hour later, going back to my hotel, I ran into a peasant woman with a nursing baby.
She was a young woman, and the baby was about six weeks old.
And the baby smiled at her, as far as she'd noticed, for the first time since it was born.
I saw her suddenly cross herself very, very piously.
'What is it, young woman?' I say. (I was asking questions all the time then.)
'It's just that a mother rejoices,' she says, 'when she notices her baby's first smile, the same as God rejoices each time he looks down from heaven and sees a sinner standing before him and praying with all his heart.'
The woman said that to me, in almost those words, and it was such a deep, such a subtle and truly religious thought, a thought that all at once expressed the whole essence of Christianity, that is, the whole idea of God as our own father, and that God rejoices over man as a father over his own child—the main thought of Christ!
A simple peasant woman!
True, she's a mother . . . and, who knows, maybe this woman was that soldier's wife.
Listen, Parfyon, you asked me earlier, here is my answer: the essence of religious feeling doesn't fit in with any reasoning, with any crimes and trespasses, or with any atheisms; there's something else here that's not that, and it will eternally be not that; there's something in it that atheisms will eternally glance off, and they will eternally be talking not about that.
But the main thing is that one can observe it sooner and more clearly in a Russian heart, and that is my conclusion!
That is one of the first convictions I've formed about our Russia.
There are things to be done, Parfyon!
There are things to be done in our Russian world, believe me!
Remember, there was a time in Moscow when we used to get together and talk . . . And I didn't want to come back here at all now!
And this is not at all, not at all how I thought of meeting you! . . .
Well, no matter! . . . Farewell, goodbye!
God be with you!"
He turned and went down the stairs.
"Lev Nikolaevich!" Parfyon cried from above, when the prince had reached the first landing. "That cross you bought from the soldier, are you wearing it?"
"Yes."
And the prince stopped again.
"Show me."
Again a new oddity!
The prince thought a little, went back up, and showed him the cross without taking it from his neck.
"Give it to me," said Rogozhin.
"Why?
Or do you ..."
The prince seemed unwilling to part with this cross.