“What of it! At last you’ve understood. Yes, indeed, that alone is the whole secret, but is it not suffering, if only for such a man as he, who has wasted his whole life on a great deed in the wilderness and still has not been cured of his love for mankind? In his declining years he comes to the clear conviction that only the counsels of the great and dread spirit could at least somehow organize the feeble rebels, ‘the unfinished, trial creatures created in mockery,’ in a tolerable way. And so, convinced of that, he sees that one must follow the directives of the intelligent spirit, the dread spirit of death and destruction, and to that end accept lies and deceit, and lead people, consciously now, to death and destruction, deceiving them, moreover, all along the way, so that they somehow do not notice where they are being led, so that at least on the way these pitiful, blind men consider themselves happy. And deceive them, notice, in the name of him in whose ideal the old man believed so passionately all his life! Is that not a misfortune? And if even one such man, at least, finds himself at the head of that whole army ‘lusting for power only for the sake of filthy lucre,’ is one such man, at least, not enough to make a tragedy? Moreover, one such man standing at its head would be enough to bring out finally the real ruling idea of the whole Roman cause, with all its armies and Jesuits—the highest idea of this cause. I tell you outright that I firmly believe that this one man has never been lacking among those standing at the head of the movement. Who knows, perhaps such ‘ones’ have even been found among the Roman pontiffs. Who knows, maybe this accursed old man, who loves mankind so stubbornly in his own way, exists even now, in the form of a great host of such old men, and by no means accidentally, but in concert, as a secret union, organized long ago for the purpose of keeping the mystery, of keeping it from unhappy and feeble mankind with the aim of making them happy. It surely exists, and it should be so. I imagine that even the Masons have something like this mystery as their basis,’[180] and that Catholics hate the Masons so much because they see them as competitors, breaking up the unity of the idea, whereas there should be one flock and one shepherd ... However, the way I’m defending my thought makes me seem like an author who did not stand up to your criticism. Enough of that.”
“Maybe you’re a Mason yourself!” suddenly escaped from Alyosha. “You don’t believe in God,” he added, this time with great sorrow. Besides, it seemed to him that his brother was looking at him mockingly. “And how does your poem end,” he asked suddenly, staring at the ground, “or was that the end?”
“I was going to end it like this: when the Inquisitor fell silent, he waited some time for his prisoner to reply. His silence weighed on him. He had seen how the captive listened to him all the while intently and calmly, looking him straight in the eye, and apparently not wishing to contradict anything. The old man would have liked him to say something, even something bitter, terrible. But suddenly he approaches the old man in silence and gently kisses him on his bloodless, ninety-year-old lips. That is the whole answer. The old man shudders. Something stirs at the corners of his mouth; he walks to the door, opens it, and says to him: ‘Go and do not come again ... do not come at all ... never, never!’ And he lets him out into the ‘dark squares of the city.’[181] The prisoner goes away.”
“And the old man?”
“The kiss burns in his heart, but the old man holds to his former idea.”
“And you with him!” Alyosha exclaimed ruefully. Ivan laughed.
“But it’s nonsense, Alyosha, it’s just the muddled poem of a muddled student who never wrote two lines of verse. Why are you taking it so seriously? You don’t think I’ll go straight to the Jesuits now, to join the host of those who are correcting his deed! Good lord, what do I care? As I told you: I just want to drag on until I’m thirty, and then—smash the cup on the floor!”
“And the sticky little leaves, and the precious graves, and the blue sky, and the woman you love! How will you live, what will you love them with?” Alyosha exclaimed ruefully. “Is it possible, with such hell in your heart and in your head? No, you’re precisely going in order to join them ... and if not, you’ll kill yourself, you won’t endure it!”
“There is a force that will endure everything,” said Ivan, this time with a cold smirk.
“What force?”
“The Karamazov force ... the force of the Karamazov baseness.”
“To drown in depravity, to stifle your soul with corruption, is that it?”
“That, too, perhaps ... only until my thirtieth year maybe I’ll escape it, and then ...”
“How will you escape it? By means of what? With your thoughts, it’s impossible.”
“Again, in Karamazov fashion.”
“You mean ‘everything is permitted’? Everything is permitted, is that right, is it?”
Ivan frowned, and suddenly turned somehow strangely pale.
