“I’d be glad of it in a way, because my goal would then be achieved: if it comes to kicks, that means you must believe in my realism, because one doesn’t kick a ghost. Joking aside: it’s all the same to me, abuse me if you like, but still it would be better to be a bit more polite, even with me. Fool, lackey— what sort of talk is that?”
“By abusing you, I’m abusing myself!” Ivan laughed again. “You are me, myself, only with a different mug. You precisely say what I already think ... and you’re not capable of telling me anything new!”
“If my thoughts agree with yours, it only does me honor,” the gentleman said with dignity and tact.
“You just pick out all my bad thoughts, and above all the stupid ones. You are stupid and banal. You are terribly stupid. No, I can’t endure you! What am I to do, what am I to do!” Ivan gnashed his teeth.
“My friend, I still want to be a gentleman, and to be accepted as such,” the visitor began in a fit of some sort of purely spongerish, good-natured, and already-yielding ambition. “I am poor, but ... I won’t say very honest, but ... in society it is generally accepted as an axiom that I am a fallen angel. By God, I can’t imagine how I could ever have been an angel. If I ever was one, it was so long ago that it’s no sin to have forgotten it. Now I only value my reputation as a decent man and get along as best I can, trying to be agreeable. I sincerely love people—oh, so much of what has been said about me is slander! Here, when I move in with people from time to time, my life gets to be somewhat real, as it were, and I like that most of all. Because, like you, I myself suffer from the fantastic, and that is why I love your earthly realism. Here you have it all outlined, here you have the formula, here you have geometry, and with us it’s all indeterminate equations! I walk about here and dream. I love to dream. Besides, on earth I become superstitious—don’t laugh, please: that is precisely what I like, that I become superstitious. Here I take on all your habits: I’ve come to love going to the public baths, can you imagine that? I love having a steam bath with merchants and priests. My dream is to become incarnate, but so that it’s final, irrevocable, in some fat, two-hundred-and-fifty-pound merchant’s wife, and to believe everything she believes. My ideal is to go into a church and light a candle with a pure heart—by God, it’s true. That would put an end to my sufferings. I’ve also come to love getting medical treatment here: there was smallpox going around this spring, so I went to the foundling hospital and had myself inoculated against smallpox—if only you knew how pleased I was that day: I donated ten roubles for our brother Slavs ... ![306] But you’re not listening. You know, you seem rather out of sorts tonight,” the gentleman paused for a moment. “I know you went to see that doctor yesterday ... well, how is your health? What did the doctor say?”
“Fool!”snapped Ivan.
“And aren’t you a smart one! So you’re abusing me again? I’m just asking, not really out of sympathy. You don’t have to answer. And now this rheumatism’s come back ...”
“Fool,” Ivan repeated.
“You keep saying the same thing, but I caught such rheumatism last year that I still remember it.”
“The devil with rheumatism?”
“Why not, if I sometimes become incarnate? Once incarnate, I accept the consequences. Satan
“How’s that? Satan sum
“I’m glad I’ve finally pleased you.”
“And you didn’t get that from me,” Ivan suddenly stopped as if in amazement, “that never entered my head—how strange...”
