‘I mention this, sir, not from mere curiosity, but for more serious reasons.’ He paused, still fixing Pierre with his eyes, and moved aside on the sofa – an invitation for Pierre to come and sit next to him. Pierre felt reluctant to enter into conversation with this old man, but he complied automatically, came over and sat down beside him.
‘You are unhappy, sir,’ he went on. ‘You are young and I am old. I should like to help you, as far as I am able.’
‘Oh yes,’ said Pierre with another awkward smile. ‘I’m most grateful to you . . . Have you come far?’ The stranger’s face showed no warmth; it was rather frigid and forbidding, but for all that the words and features of this new acquaintance fascinated Pierre beyond resistance.
‘But if for any reason you find conversation with me uncongenial,’ said the old man, ‘please say so, my dear sir.’ And his face suddenly lit up with an unexpected smile of fatherly indulgence.
‘No, no, quite the reverse. I’m very pleased to meet you,’ said Pierre, glancing down again at the stranger’s hands and looking more closely at the ring. There was the death’s head, the symbol of freemasonry.2
‘May I ask you something?’ he said. ‘Are you a mason?’
‘Yes, I do belong to the brotherhood of freemasons,’ said the stranger, plumbing the depths of Pierre’s eyes more and more deeply. ‘In my own name and in theirs I extend a brotherly hand to you.’
‘I’m afraid,’ said Pierre with a smile, vacillating between confidence inspired by the personality of this mason and his usual habit of laughing at masonic beliefs, ‘I’m afraid I’m a long way from understanding – how can I put it? – I’m afraid that my way of thinking about the whole of creation is so opposed to yours that we are not going to understand each other.’
‘I am aware of your way of thinking,’ said the mason, ‘but the way of thinking that you speak of, and which you see as emerging from your own thought processes, is the way of thinking of most men, and invariably the fruit of pride, indolence and ignorance. Forgive me for saying it, my dear sir, but if I had not been aware of it, I should not have spoken to you. Your way of thinking is a sad delusion.’
‘Yes, but I may equally claim that you are deluded,’ said Pierre with a trace of a smile.
‘I would never dare to claim that I know the truth,’ said the mason, whose manner of speaking, with its firmness and preciseness, impressed Pierre more and more. ‘No one person can attain truth. It is only stone by stone, with everyone’s involvement, over millions of generations from our forefather Adam down to our own day, that a temple arises to be a dwelling-place worthy of Almighty God,’ said the freemason, and he closed his eyes.
‘I ought to tell you that I don’t believe, don’t . . . believe in God.’ said Pierre ruefully, feeling himself obliged to make every effort to tell the whole truth.
The mason looked closely at Pierre and smiled the smile of a rich man with millions in his hands beaming at some poor wretch who might have said to him that all he needed as a poor man was five roubles to make him happy.
‘But you do not know Him, sir,’ said the freemason. ‘You cannot know Him. You know Him not, and that is why you are unhappy.’
‘Yes, I am unhappy,’ Pierre agreed, ‘but what can I do about it?’
‘You know Him not, sir, and that’s why you are very unhappy. You know Him not, but He is here, He is within me, He is in my words, He is in thee, and even in those blasphemous words that thou hast uttered,’ said the mason, his sharp voice quavering.
He paused and sighed in an obvious effort to collect himself.
‘If He did not exist,’ he said softly, ‘we should not be speaking of Him, sir. Of what, of whom have we been speaking? Whom hast thou denied?’ he blurted out, with impassioned solemnity and authority in his voice. ‘Who has invented Him, if He does not exist? How was there born in thee any conception that such an ineffable Being could exist? How did it happen that thou and all the world together have postulated the existence of such an inconceivable Being, a Being omnipotent, eternal and infinite in all His qualities? . . .’ He stopped and said nothing more for some time.
Pierre could not and would not interrupt this silence.
‘He exists, but He is not easy to comprehend,’ the mason went on, looking straight ahead, not at Pierre, his old man’s hands fidgeting with inner emotion as he turned the pages of his book. ‘If it were the existence of a man that thou hadst doubted, I could have brought the man before thee, taken him by the hand and shown him to thee. But how can I, a mere mortal, display the omnipotence, the eternity, the blessedness of Him to one who is blind, or to one who closes his eyes so as not to see, not to understand Him, and not to see or understand his own vileness and sinfulness.’
