XI
“You look as though you were coming to arrest me,” said Von Koren, seeing Samoylenko coming in, in his full-dress uniform.
“I was passing by and thought: ‘Suppose I go in and pay my respects to zoology,’” said Samoylenko, sitting down at the big table, knocked together by the zoologist himself out of plain boards. “Good-morning, holy father,” he said to the deacon, who was sitting in the window, copying something. “I’ll stay a minute and then run home to see about dinner. It’s time. . . . I’m not hindering you?”
“Not in the least,” answered the zoologist, laying out over the table slips of paper covered with small writing. “We are busy copying.”
“Ah! . . . Oh, my goodness, my goodness! . . .” sighed Samoylenko. He cautiously took up from the table a dusty book on which there was lying a dead dried spider, and said: “Only fancy, though; some little green beetle is going about its business, when suddenly a monster like this swoops down upon it. I can fancy its terror.”
“Yes, I suppose so.”
“Is poison given it to protect it from its enemies?”
“Yes, to protect it and enable it to attack.”
“To be sure, to be sure. . . . And everything in nature, my dear fellows, is consistent and can be explained,” sighed Samoylenko; “only I tell you what I don’t understand. You’re a man of very great intellect, so explain it to me, please. There are, you know, little beasts no bigger than rats, rather handsome to look at, but nasty and immoral in the extreme, let me tell you. Suppose such a little beast is running in the woods. He sees a bird; he catches it and devours it. He goes on and sees in the grass a nest of eggs; he does not want to eat them—he is not hungry, but yet he tastes one egg and scatters the others out of the nest with his paw. Then he meets a frog and begins to play with it; when he has tormented the frog he goes on licking himself and meets a beetle; he crushes the beetle with his paw . . . and so he spoils and destroys everything on his way. . . . He creeps into other beasts’ holes, tears up the anthills, cracks the snail’s shell. If he meets a rat, he fights with it; if he meets a snake or a mouse, he must strangle it; and so the whole day long. Come, tell me: what is the use of a beast like that? Why was he created?”
“I don’t know what animal you are talking of,” said Von Koren; “most likely one of the insectivora. Well, he got hold of the bird because it was incautious; he broke the nest of eggs because the bird was not skilful, had made the nest badly and did not know how to conceal it. The frog probably had some defect in its colouring or he would not have seen it, and so on. Your little beast only destroys the weak, the unskilful, the careless—in fact, those who have defects which nature does not think fit to hand on to posterity. Only the cleverer, the stronger, the more careful and developed survive; and so your little beast, without suspecting it, is serving the great ends of perfecting creation.”