Then, as if forgetting everything, he stretched out on the sofa, put his hands behind his head, and began staring at the ceiling; half a minute later he was sitting at the table again, straight-backed and listening attentively to the babble of the thoroughly excited Lebedev.
"A perfidious and derisive thought, a goading thought," Lebedev eagerly picked up Evgeny Pavlovich's paradox, "a thought uttered with the purpose of inciting the adversaries to fight—but a correct thought!
Because, worldly scoffer and cavalier that you are (though not without ability!), you don't know yourself to what degree your thought is a profound and correct thought!
Yes, sir.
The law of self-destruction and the law of self-preservation are equally strong in mankind!
The devil rules equally over mankind until a limit in time still unknown to us.
You laugh?
You don't believe in the devil?
Disbelief in the devil is a French notion, a frivolous notion.
Do you know who the devil is?
Do you know what his name is?
And without even knowing his name, you laugh at his form, following Voltaire's example,11 at his hoofs, his tail, and his horns, which you yourselves have invented; for the unclean spirit is a great and terrible spirit, and not with the hoofs and horns you have invented for him.
But he's not the point now! . . ."
"How do you know he's not the point now?" Ippolit suddenly cried, and guffawed as if in a fit.
"A clever and suggestive thought!" Lebedev praised. "But, again, that's not the point, but the question is whether the 'wellsprings of life' have not weakened with the increase . . ."
"Of railroads?" cried Kolya.
"Not of railway communications, my young but passionate adolescent, but of that whole tendency, of which railways may serve as an image, so to speak, an artistic expression.
Hurrying, clanging, banging, and speeding, they say, for the happiness of mankind!
'It's getting much too noisy and industrial in mankind, there is too little spiritual peace,' complains a secluded thinker.
'Yes, but the banging of carts delivering bread for hungry mankind may be better than spiritual peace,' triumphantly replies another, a widely traveled thinker, and walks off vaingloriously.
I, the vile Lebedev, do not believe in the carts that deliver bread to mankind!
For carts that deliver bread to all mankind, without any moral foundations for their action, may quite cold-bloodedly exclude a considerable part of mankind from enjoying what they deliver, as has already happened . . ."
"So carts may quite cold-bloodedly exclude?" someone picked up.
"As has already happened," Lebedev repeated, not deigning to notice the question. "There has already been Malthus, the friend of mankind.12 But a friend of mankind with shaky moral foundations is a cannibal of mankind, to say nothing of his vainglory; insult the vainglory of one of these numberless friends of mankind, and he is ready at once to set fire to the four corners of the world out of petty vengeance—the same, however, as any one of us, to speak fairly, as myself, the vilest of all, for I might be the first to bring wood and then run away.
But again, that's not the point!"
"Then what is it, finally?"
"How tiresome!"
"The point is in the following anecdote from olden times, for it's necessary that I tell you this anecdote from olden times.
In our day, in our fatherland, which I hope you love as much as I do, gentlemen, because for my part I'm even ready to spill all my blood . . ."
"Go on!
Go on!"
"In our fatherland, as well as in Europe, mankind is visited by universal, ubiquitous, and terrible famines, by possible reckonings and as far as I can remember, not more often now than once in a quarter century, in other words, once every twenty-five years.
I won't argue about the precise number, but comparatively quite rarely."
"Comparatively to what?"
"To the twelfth century and its neighboring centuries on either side.
For at that time, as writers write and maintain, universal famines visited mankind once every two or three years at least, so that in such a state of affairs man even resorted to anthropophagy, though he kept it a secret.
One of these parasites, approaching old age, announced on his own and without being forced, that in the course of a long and meager life he had personally killed and eaten in deepest secrecy sixty monks and several lay babies—about six, not more, that is, remarkably few compared with the quantity of clergy he had eaten.
Of lay adults, as it turned out, he had never touched any with that purpose."
"That cannot be!" cried the chairman himself, the general, in an all but offended voice. "I often discuss and argue with him, always about similar thoughts, gentlemen; but most often he produces such absurdities that one's ears fall off, not a groatsworth of plausibility!"
"General!
Remember the siege of Kars, and you, gentlemen, should know that my anecdote is the naked truth.
For my own part, I will observe that almost every actuality, though it has its immutable laws, is almost always incredible and implausible.
And the more actual it is, the more implausible it sometimes seems."
"But how can one eat sixty monks?" they laughed all around.
"Though he didn't eat them all at once, which is obvious, but maybe over the course of fifteen or twenty years, which is quite understandable and natural ..."
"And natural?"
"And natural!" Lebedev snapped at them with pedantic persistence. "And besides all that, a Catholic monk is prying and curious by his very nature, and it's quite easy to lure him into a forest or some other secluded place and deal with him in the above-mentioned way—but all the same I don't deny that the quantity of persons eaten comes out as extraordinary, even to the point of intemperance."
"Maybe it's true, gentlemen," the prince suddenly observed.
Up to then he had listened silently to the arguers and had not entered the conversation; he had often laughed heartily following the general outbursts of laughter.
It was obvious that he was terribly glad that it was so merry, so noisy; even that they were drinking so much.