“Why, the moment the gates of Paradise were open and he walked in, before he had been there two seconds, by his watch (though to my thinking his watch must have long dissolved into its elements on the way), he cried out that those two seconds were worth walking not a quadrillion kilometers but a quadrillion of quadrillions, raised to the quadrillionth power! In fact, he sang ‘hosannah’ and overdid it so, that some persons there of lofty ideas wouldn’t shake hands with him at first—he’d become too rapidly reactionary, they said. The Russian temperament. I repeat, it’s a legend. I give it for what it’s worth. So that’s the sort of ideas we have on such subjects even now.”
“I’ve caught you!” Ivan cried, with an almost childish delight, as though he had succeeded in remembering something at last. “That anecdote about the quadrillion years, I made up myself! I was seventeen then, I was at the high school. I made up that anecdote and told it to a schoolfellow called Korovkin, it was at Moscow.... The anecdote is so characteristic that I couldn’t have taken it from anywhere. I thought I’d forgotten it ... but I’ve unconsciously recalled it—I recalled it myself—it was not you telling it! Thousands of things are unconsciously remembered like that even when people are being taken to execution ... it’s come back to me in a dream. You are that dream! You are a dream, not a living creature!”
“From the vehemence with which you deny my existence,” laughed the gentleman, “I am convinced that you believe in me.”
“Not in the slightest! I haven’t a hundredth part of a grain of faith in you!”
“But you have the thousandth of a grain. Homeopathic doses perhaps are the strongest. Confess that you have faith even to the ten‐thousandth of a grain.”
“Not for one minute,” cried Ivan furiously. “But I should like to believe in you,” he added strangely.
“Aha! There’s an admission! But I am good‐natured. I’ll come to your assistance again. Listen, it was I caught you, not you me. I told you your anecdote you’d forgotten, on purpose, so as to destroy your faith in me completely.”
“You are lying. The object of your visit is to convince me of your existence!”
“Just so. But hesitation, suspense, conflict between belief and disbelief—is sometimes such torture to a conscientious man, such as you are, that it’s better to hang oneself at once. Knowing that you are inclined to believe in me, I administered some disbelief by telling you that anecdote. I lead you to belief and disbelief by turns, and I have my motive in it. It’s the new method. As soon as you disbelieve in me completely, you’ll begin assuring me to my face that I am not a dream but a reality. I know you. Then I shall have attained my object, which is an honorable one. I shall sow in you only a tiny grain of faith and it will grow into an oak‐tree—and such an oak‐tree that, sitting on it, you will long to enter the ranks of ‘the hermits in the wilderness and the saintly women,’ for that is what you are secretly longing for. You’ll dine on locusts, you’ll wander into the wilderness to save your soul!”
“Then it’s for the salvation of my soul you are working, is it, you scoundrel?”