The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoyevsky (reading an ebook TXT) 📗

gossip. What a nightmare to have! But I am not afraid of

you. I’ll get the better of you. I won’t be taken to a madhouse!”

 

“C’est charmant, poor relation. Yes, I am in my natural shape. For

what am I on earth but a poor relation? By the way, I am listening

to you and am rather surprised to find you are actually beginning to

take me for something real, not simply your fancy, as you persisted in

declaring last time-”

 

“Never for one minute have I taken you for reality,” Ivan cried

with a sort of fury. “You are a lie, you are my illness, you are a

phantom. It’s only that I don’t know how to destroy you and I see I

must suffer for a time. You are my hallucination. You are the

incarnation of myself, but only of one side of me… of my thoughts

and feelings, but only the nastiest and stupidest of them. From that

point of view you might be of interest to me, if only I had time to

waste on you-”

 

“Excuse me, excuse me, I’ll catch you. When you flew out at

Alyosha under the lamp-post this evening and shouted to him, ‘You

learnt it from him! How do you know that he visits me?’ You were

thinking of me then. So for one brief moment you did believe that I

really exist,” the gentleman laughed blandly.

 

“Yes, that was a moment of weakness… but I couldn’t believe in

you. I don’t know whether I was asleep or awake last time. Perhaps I

was only dreaming then and didn’t see you really at all-”

 

“And why were you so surly with Alyosha just now? He is a dear;

I’ve treated him badly over Father Zossima.”

 

“Don’t talk of Alyosha! How dare you, you flunkey!” Ivan laughed

again.

 

“You scold me, but you laugh-that’s a good sign. But you are ever

so much more polite than you were last time and I know why: that great

resolution of yours-”

 

“Don’t speak of my resolution,” cried Ivan, savagely.

 

“I understand, I understand, c’est noble, c’est charmant, you

are going to defend your brother and to sacrifice yourself… C’est

chevaleresque.”

 

“Hold your tongue, I’ll kick you!”

 

“I shan’t be altogether sorry, for then my object will be

attained. If you kick me, you must believe in my reality, for people

don’t kick ghosts. Joking apart, it doesn’t matter to me, scold if you

like, though it’s better to be a trifle more polite even to me. ‘Fool,

flunkey!’ what words!”

 

“Scolding you, I scold myself,” Ivan laughed again, “you are

myself, myself, only with a different face. You just say what I am

thinking… and are incapable of saying anything new!”

 

“If I am like you in my way of thinking, it’s all to my credit,”

the gentleman declared, with delicacy and dignity.

 

“You choose out only my worst thoughts, and what’s more, the

stupid ones. You are stupid and vulgar. You are awfully stupid. No,

I can’t put up with you! 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 simplehearted 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

simplehearted 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! You know the game the village girls play-they

invite the unwary to lick an axe in thirty degrees of frost, the

tongue instantly freezes to it and the dupe tears the skin off, so

it bleeds. But that’s only in 30 degrees, in 150 degrees I imagine

it would be enough to put your finger on the axe and it would be the

end of it… if only there could be an axe there.”

 

“And can there be an axe there?” Ivan interrupted, carelessly

and disdainfully. He was exerting himself to the utmost not to believe

in the delusion and not to sink into complete insanity

 

“An axe?” the guest interrupted in surprise.

 

“Yes, what would become of an axe there?” Ivan cried suddenly,

with a sort of savage and insistent obstinacy.

 

“What would become of an axe in space? Quelle idee! If it were

to fall to any distance, it would begin, I think, flying round the

earth without knowing why, like a satellite. The astronomers would

calculate the rising and the setting of the axe; Gatzuk would put it

in his calendar, that’s all.”

 

“You are stupid, awfully stupid,” said Ivan peevishly. “Fib more

cleverly or I won’t listen. You want to get the better of me by

realism, to convince me that you exist, but I don’t want to believe

you exist! I won’t believe it!”

 

“But I am not fibbing, it’s all the truth; the truth is

unhappily hardly ever amusing. I see you persist in expecting

something big of me, and perhaps something fine. That’s a great

pity, for I only give what I can-”

 

“Don’t talk philosophy, you ass!”

 

“Philosophy, indeed, when all my right side is numb and I am

moaning and groaning. I’ve tried all the medical faculty: they can

diagnose beautifully, they have the whole of your disease at their

finger-tips, but they’ve no idea how to cure you. There was an

enthusiastic little student here, ‘You may die,’ said he, ‘but

you’ll know perfectly what disease you are dying of!’ And then what

a way they have of sending people to specialists! ‘We only

diagnose,’ they say, ‘but go to such-and-such a specialist, he’ll cure

you.’ The old doctor who used to cure all sorts of disease has

completely disappeared, I assure you, now there are only specialists

and they all advertise in the newspapers. If anything is wrong with

your nose, they send you to Paris: there, they say, is a European

specialist who cures noses. If you go to Paris, he’ll look at your

nose; I can only cure your right nostril, he’ll tell you, for I

don’t cure the left nostril, that’s not my speciality, but go to

Vienna, there there’s a specialist who will cure your left nostril.

What are you to do? I fell back on popular remedies, a German doctor

advised me to rub myself with