“Is it all over with you? So that’s the line you are taking? You’ll inform against all of us, and go to a monastery yourself, or to the devil.… But I’ll do for you, though you are not afraid of me!”
“Ah! That’s you chattering!” said Stavrogin, noticing him at last. “Run,” he said, coming to himself suddenly, “run after her, order the carriage, don’t leave her.… Run, run! Take her home so that no one may know … and that she mayn’t go there … to the bodies … to the bodies.… Force her to get into the carriage … Alexey Yegorytch! Alexey Yegorytch!”
“Stay, don’t shout! By now she is in Mavriky’s arms.… Mavriky won’t put her into your carriage.… Stay! There’s something more important than the carriage!”
He seized his revolver again. Stavrogin looked at him gravely.
“Very well, kill me,” he said softly, almost conciliatorily.
“Foo. Damn it! What a maze of false sentiment a man can get into!” said Pyotr Stepanovitch, shaking with rage. “Yes, really, you ought to be killed! She ought simply to spit at you! Fine sort of ‘magic boat,’ you are; you are a broken-down, leaky old hulk!… You ought to pull yourself together if only from spite! Ech! Why, what difference would it make to you since you ask for a bullet through your brains yourself?”
Stavrogin smiled strangely.
“If you were not such a buffoon I might perhaps have said yes now.… If you had only a grain of sense …”
“I am a buffoon, but I don’t want you, my better half, to be one! Do you understand me?”
Stavrogin did understand, though perhaps no one else did. Shatov, for instance, was astonished when Stavrogin told him that Pyotr Stepanovitch had enthusiasm.