He stopped short with a catch in his breath.
“If you suddenly became happy, Mr. Virginsky,” said Pyotr Stepanovitch, stepping up to him, “would you abandon—not giving information; there’s no question of that—but any perilous public action which you had planned before you were happy and which you regarded as a duty and obligation in spite of the risk and loss of happiness?”
“No, I wouldn’t abandon it! I wouldn’t on any account!” said Virginsky with absurd warmth, twitching all over.
“You would rather be unhappy again than be a scoundrel?”
“Yes, yes.… Quite the contrary.… I’d rather be a complete scoundrel … that is no … not a scoundrel at all, but on the contrary completely unhappy rather than a scoundrel.”
“Well then, let me tell you that Shatov looks on this betrayal as a public duty. It’s his most cherished conviction, and the proof of it is that he runs some risk himself; though, of course, they will pardon him a great deal for giving information. A man like that will never give up the idea. No sort of happiness would overcome him. In another day he’ll go back on it, reproach himself, and will go straight to the police. What’s more, I don’t see any happiness in the fact that his wife has come back after three years’ absence to bear him a child of Stavrogin’s.”
“But no one has seen Shatov’s letter,” Shigalov brought out all at once, emphatically.
“I’ve seen it,” cried Pyotr Stepanovitch. “It exists, and all this is awfully stupid, gentlemen.”
“And I protest …” Virginsky cried, boiling over suddenly: “I protest with all my might.… I want … this is what I want. I suggest that when he arrives we all come out and question him, and if it’s true, we induce him to repent of it; and if he gives us his word of honour, let him go. In any case we must have a trial; it must be done after trial. We mustn’t lie in wait for him and then fall upon him.”
“Risk the cause on his word of honour—that’s the acme of stupidity! Damnation, how stupid it all is now, gentlemen! And a pretty part you are choosing to play at the moment of danger!”