He was breathless.
“In America you changed your views, and when you came back you wanted to resign. They gave you no answer, but charged you to take over a printing press here in Russia from someone, and to keep it till you handed it over to someone who would come from them for it. I don’t know the details exactly, but I fancy that’s the position in outline. You undertook it in the hope, or on the condition, that it would be the last task they would require of you, and that then they would release you altogether. Whether that is so or not, I learnt it, not from them, but quite by chance. But now for what I fancy you don’t know; these gentry have no intention of parting with you.”
“That’s absurd!” cried Shatov. “I’ve told them honestly that I’ve cut myself off from them in everything. That is my right, the right to freedom of conscience and of thought.… I won’t put up with it! There’s no power which could …”
“I say, don’t shout,” Nikolay Vsyevolodovitch said earnestly, checking him. “That Verhovensky is such a fellow that he may be listening to us now in your passage, perhaps, with his own ears or someone else’s. Even that drunkard, Lebyadkin, was probably bound to keep an eye on you, and you on him, too, I dare say? You’d better tell me, has Verhovensky accepted your arguments now, or not?”
“He has. He has said that it can be done and that I have the right.…”
“Well then, he’s deceiving you. I know that even Kirillov, who scarcely belongs to them at all, has given them information about you. And they have lots of agents, even people who don’t know that they’re serving the society. They’ve always kept a watch on you. One of the things Pyotr Verhovensky came here for was to settle your business once for all, and he is fully authorised to do so, that is at the first good opportunity, to get rid of you, as a man who knows too much and might give them away. I repeat that this is certain, and allow me to add that they are, for some reason, convinced that you are a spy, and that if you haven’t informed against them yet, you will. Is that true?”
Shatov made a wry face at hearing such a question asked in such a matter-of fact tone.
“If I were a spy, whom could I inform?” he said angrily, not giving a direct answer. “No, leave me alone, let me go to the devil!” he cried suddenly, catching again at his original idea, which agitated him violently. Apparently it affected him more deeply than the news of his own danger. “You, you, Stavrogin, how could you mix yourself up with such shameful, stupid, second-hand absurdity? You a member of the society? What an exploit for Stavrogin!” he cried suddenly, in despair.
He clasped his hands, as though nothing could be a bitterer and more inconsolable grief to him than such a discovery.
“Excuse me,” said Nikolay Vsyevolodovitch, extremely surprised, “but you seem to look upon me as a sort of sun, and on yourself as an insect in comparison. I noticed that even from your letter in America.”