“But you want a hare?”
“Wh-a-t?”
“Your own nasty expression,” Shatov laughed spitefully, sitting down again. “To cook your hare you must first catch it, to believe in God you must first have a god. You used to say that in Petersburg, I’m told, like Nozdryov, who tried to catch a hare by his hind legs.”
“No, what he did was to boast he’d caught him. By the way, allow me to trouble you with a question though, for indeed I think I have the right to one now. Tell me, have you caught your hare?”
“Don’t dare to ask me in such words! Ask differently, quite differently.” Shatov suddenly began trembling all over.
“Certainly I’ll ask differently.” Nikolay Vsyevolodovitch looked coldly at him. “I only wanted to know, do you believe in God, yourself?”
“I believe in Russia. … I believe in her orthodoxy. … I believe in the body of Christ. … I believe that the new advent will take place in Russia. … I believe …” Shatov muttered frantically.
“And in God? In God?”
“I … I will believe in God.”
Not one muscle moved in Stavrogin’s face. Shatov looked passionately and defiantly at him, as though he would have scorched him with his eyes.
“I haven’t told you that I don’t believe,” he cried at last. “I will only have you know that I am a luckless, tedious book, and nothing more so far, so far. … But confound me! We’re discussing you not me. … I’m a man of no talent, and can only give my blood, nothing more, like every man without talent; never mind my blood either! I’m talking about you. I’ve been waiting here two years for you. … Here I’ve been dancing about in my nakedness before you for the last half-hour. You, only you can raise that flag! …”
He broke off, and sat as though in despair, with his elbows on the table and his head in his hands.
“I merely mention it as something queer,” Stavrogin interrupted suddenly. “Everyone for some inexplicable reason keeps foisting a flag upon me. Pyotr Verhovensky, too, is convinced that I might ‘raise his flag,’ that’s how his words were repeated to me, anyway. He has taken it into his head that I’m capable of playing the part of Stenka Razin for them, ‘from my extraordinary aptitude for crime,’ his saying too.”
“What?” cried Shatov, “ ‘from your extraordinary aptitude for crime’?”
“Just so.”
“H’m! And is it true?” he asked, with an angry smile. “Is it true that when you were in Petersburg you belonged to a secret society for practising beastly sensuality? Is it true that you could give lessons to the Marquis de Sade? Is it true that you decoyed and corrupted children? Speak, don’t dare to lie,” he cried, beside himself. “Nikolay Stavrogin cannot lie to Shatov, who struck him in the face. Tell me everything, and if it’s true I’ll kill you, here, on the spot!”
“I did talk like that, but it was not I who outraged children,” Stavrogin brought out, after a silence that lasted too long. He turned pale and his eyes gleamed.
“But you talked like that,” Shatov went on imperiously, keeping his flashing eyes fastened upon him. “Is it true that you declared that you saw no distinction in beauty between some brutal obscene action and any great exploit, even the sacrifice of life for the good of humanity? Is it true that you have found identical beauty, equal enjoyment, in both extremes?”
“It’s impossible to answer like this. … I won’t answer,” muttered Stavrogin, who might well have got up and gone away, but who did not get up and go away.
“I don’t know either why evil is hateful and good is beautiful, but I know why the sense of that distinction is effaced and lost in people like the Stavrogins,” Shatov persisted, trembling all over. “Do you know why you made that base and shameful marriage? Simply because the shame and senselessness of it reached the pitch of genius! Oh, you are not one of those who linger on the brink. You fly head foremost. You married from a passion for martyrdom, from a craving for remorse, through moral sensuality. It was a laceration of the nerves … Defiance of common sense was too tempting. Stavrogin and a wretched, half-witted, crippled beggar! When you bit the governor’s ear did you feel sensual pleasure? Did you? You idle, loafing, little snob. Did you?”
“You’re a psychologist,” said Stavrogin, turning paler and paler, “though you’re partly mistaken as to the reasons of my marriage. But who can have given you all this information?” he asked, smiling, with an effort. “Was it Kirillov? But he had nothing to do with it.”
“You turn pale.”
“But what is it you want?” Nikolay Vsyevolodovitch asked, raising his voice at last. “I’ve been sitting under your lash for the last half-hour, and you might at least let me go civilly. Unless you really have some reasonable object in treating me like this.”
“Reasonable object?”
“Of course, you’re in duty bound, anyway, to let me know your object. I’ve been expecting you to do so all the time, but you’ve shown me nothing so far but frenzied spite. I beg you to open the gate for me.”
He got up from the chair. Shatov rushed frantically after him. “Kiss the earth, water it with your tears, pray for forgiveness,” he cried, clutching him by the shoulder.
“I didn’t kill you … that morning, though … I drew back my hands …” Stavrogin brought out almost with anguish, keeping his eyes on the ground.
“Speak out! Speak out! You came to warn me of danger. You have let me speak. You mean tomorrow to announce your marriage publicly. … Do you suppose
