Demons

"You wouldn't... Would you care for some lunch?" the host asked, abandoning his habit this time, but, of course, with an air that clearly prompted a polite refusal. Pyotr Stepanovich at once did care to have lunch. A shadow of hurt amazement darkened his host's face, but only for a moment; he nervously rang for the servant and, in spite of all his good breeding, raised his voice squeamishly as he ordered a second lunch to be served.

"What will you have, a cutlet or coffee?" he inquired once more.

"A cutlet and coffee, and have them bring more wine, I'm hungry," Pyotr Stepanovich replied, studying his host's attire with calm attention. Mr. Karmazinov was wearing a little quilted jerkin, a sort of jacket, with little mother-of-pearl buttons, but much too short, and which was not at all becoming to his rather well fed tummy and the solidly rounded begi

"Are you sick or something?" Pyotr Stepanovich remarked.

"No, not sick, but afraid of becoming sick in this climate," the writer replied in his sharp voice, though with a pleasantly aristocratic lisp, lovingly sca

"But why? I didn't promise."

"No, but you do have my manuscript. Have you... read it?"

"Manuscript? What manuscript?"

Karmazinov was terribly surprised.

"But, anyhow, you did bring it with you?" he suddenly grew so alarmed that he even left off eating and looked at Pyotr Stepanovich with frightened eyes.

"Ah, this Bonjour you mean ..."

"Merci.”

"Well, all right. I completely forgot, and I haven't read it, I have no time. I don't know, really, it's not in my pockets... must be on my desk. Don't worry, it'll turn up."

"No, better if I send to your place for it now. It may disappear, or get stolen, finally."

"But, who needs it! And why are you so frightened? Yulia Mikhailovna says you always have several copies stashed away, one abroad with a notary, another in Petersburg, a third in Moscow, then you send one to the bank, or whatever."

"But Moscow can also burn down, and my manuscript with it. No, I'd better send right now."

"Wait, here it is!" Pyotr Stepanovich took a bundle of writing paper from his back pocket. "It got a bit crumpled. Imagine, it's been there in my back pocket all this time, along with my handkerchief, just as I took it from you then; I forgot."

Karmazinov greedily snatched the manuscript, carefully looked it over, counted the pages, and placed it respectfully beside him for the time being, on a special little table, but so as to keep it in view at all times.

"It seems you don't read so much," he hissed, unable to restrain himself.

"No, not so much."

"And in the line of Russian belles lettres—nothing?"

"In the line of Russian belles lettres? Let me see, I did read something ... On the Way ... or Make Way... or By the Wayside,[137]possibly—I don't remember. I read it long ago, five years or so. I have no time."

Some silence ensued.

"I assured them all, as soon as I arrived, that you are a great mind, and now it seems they've all lost their minds over you."

"Thank you," Pyotr Stepanovich replied calmly.

Lunch was brought. Pyotr Stepanovich fell upon the little cutlet with great appetite, ate it instantly, drank the wine, and gulped down the coffee.

"This ignoramus," Karmazinov studied him pensively out of the corner of his eye as he finished the last little morsel and drank the last little sip, "this ignoramus probably understood all the sharpness of my phrase just now... and he certainly read the manuscript eagerly and is just lying with something in mind. Yet it may also be that he's not lying, but is quite genuinely stupid. I like it when a man of genius is somewhat stupid. Isn't he really some sort of genius hereabouts? Devil take him, anyway."

He got up from the sofa and began pacing the room slowly, from corner to corner, for exercise—something he performed every day after lunch.

"Leaving soon?" Pyotr Stepanovich asked from the armchair, having lighted a cigarette.

"I came to sell my estate, actually, and am now entirely dependent on my manager."

"But it seems you came because an epidemic was expected there after the war?"

"N-no, it wasn't quite that," Mr. Karmazinov continued, sca

"How should I know?"

"Hm. If their Babylon is indeed going to collapse, and great will be its fall[138] (in which I fully agree with you, though I do think it will last my lifetime), here in Russia there is nothing to collapse, comparatively speaking. We won't have stones tumbling down, everything will dissolve into mud. Holy Russia is least capable in all the world of resisting anything. Simple people still hang on somehow by the Russian God; but the Russian God, according to the latest reports, is rather unreliable and even barely managed to withstand the peasant reform; anyway he tottered badly. And what with the railroads, and what with your... no, I don't believe in the Russian God at all."

"And in the European one?"

"I don't believe in any. I've been slandered to the Russian youth. I've always sympathized with every movement of theirs. I was shown these local tracts. They're regarded with perplexity because everyone is frightened by the form, but everyone is nonetheless certain of their power, though they may not be aware of it. Everyone has long been falling, and everyone has long known that there is nothing to cling to. I'm convinced of the success of this mysterious propaganda even owing to this alone, that Russia now is preeminently the place in the whole world where anything you like can happen without the least resistance. I understand only too well why the moneyed Russians have all been pouring abroad, more and more of them every year. It's simple instinct. If a ship is about to sink, the rats are the first to leave it. Holy Russia is a wooden country, a beggarly and... dangerous one, a country of vainglorious beggars in its upper strata, while the vast majority live in huts on chicken legs.[139] She'll be glad of any way out, once it has been explained to her. The government alone still wants to resist, but it brandishes its cudgel in the dark and strikes its own. Everything is doomed and sentenced here. Russia as she is has no future. I've become a German and count it an honor."

"No, but you began about the tracts; tell me everything, how do you look at them?"

"Everyone is afraid of them, which means they're powerful. They openly expose deceit and prove that we have nothing to cling to and nothing to lean on. They speak out, while everyone is silent. The most wi