“I don’t understand.”
“Tant mieux; passons. I am very irritable to-day.”
“But why have you been arguing with him, Stepan Trofimovitch?” I asked him reproachfully.
“Je voulais convertir—you’ll laugh of course—cette pauvre auntie, elle entendra de belles choses! Oh, my dear boy, would you believe it. I felt like a patriot. I always recognised that I was a Russian, however … a genuine Russian must be like you and me. Il y a là dedans quelque chose d’aveugle et de louche.”
“Not a doubt of it,” I assented.
“My dear, the real truth always sounds improbable, do you know that? To make truth sound probable you must always mix in some falsehood with it. Men have always done so. Perhaps there’s something in it that passes our understanding. What do you think: is there something we don’t understand in that triumphant squeal? I should like to think there was. I should like to think so.”
I did not speak. He, too, was silent for a long time. “They say that French cleverness …” he babbled suddenly, as though in a fever … “that’s false, it always has been. Why libel French cleverness? It’s simply Russian indolence, our degrading impotence to produce ideas, our revolting parasitism in the rank of nations. Ils sont tout simplement des paresseux, and not French cleverness. Oh, the Russians ought to be extirpated for the good of humanity, like noxious parasites! We’ve been striving for something utterly, utterly different. I can make nothing of it. I have given up understanding. ‘Do you understand,’ I cried to him, ‘that if you have the guillotine in the foreground of your programme and are so enthusiastic about it too, it’s simply because nothing’s easier than cutting off heads, and nothing’s harder than to have an idea. Vous êtes des paresseux! Votre drapeau est un guenille, une impuissance. It’s those carts, or, what was it?… the rumble of the carts carrying bread to humanity being more important than the Sistine Madonna, or, what’s the saying?… une bêtise dans ce genre. Don’t you understand, don’t you understand,’ I said to him, ‘that unhappiness is just as necessary to man as happiness.’ Il rit. ‘All you do is to make a bon mot,’ he said, ‘with your limbs snug on a velvet sofa.’ … (He used a coarser expression.) And this habit of addressing a father so familiarly is very nice when father and son are on good terms, but what do you think of it when they are abusing one another?”
We were silent again for a minute.
“Cher,” he concluded at last, getting up quickly, “do you know this is bound to end in something?”
“Of course,” said I.