"Nu vot, batiushka," said he, "I will tell you that this book donnera à penser to the theologians of the bastard forms of Christianity."
The ribald remark that rose to my lips did not pass them. "But why did you not tell me of this before?" I asked instead, endeavouring to infuse a note of reproach into my indifference.
"Ah, father, I did not want you to distress yourself. I knew your affection for me was so great that you might want to stint yourself, and put yourself to trouble to help me to pay the expenses of publication myself. You would have shared my disappointments. I wanted you to share my triumph—as now. It is two years that I have been trying to get it published. I wrote it in the year before mother, whose soul is with the saints, left us. But, eka! I am recompensed at last." And his pale face beamed and his dark eyes flashed with excitement.
Yes, Paul was right. As Paul always is. Brought up, I think wisely, to believe in my comparative poverty, he has become manlier for not having a crutch to lean upon. Was it not enough that he was devoid from the start of the dull, dead weight of Judaism which clogged my own early years? Up to the present, though, he has not done so well as I. Russian provincial journalism scatters few luxuries to its votaries. Paul is so stupidly contented with everything that he is not likely to write anything to make a sensation. He has not invented gunpowder.
Paul's voice broke in curiously on my reflections. "It ought to make some sensation. I have collected a whole series of new arguments, partly textual, partly historical, to show the absolute want of locus standi of any other than the Orthodox Church."
"Indeed," I murmured, "and what is the Orthodox Church?" Paul stared at me.
"I mean," I added hastily, "your conception of the Orthodox Church."
"My conception?" said Paul. "I suppose you mean how do I defend the conception which is embodied in our ceremonies and ritual?" And before I could stop him, he had given me a summary of his arguments under which I would not have kept awake if I had not been thinking of other things. My poor boy! So this wire-drawn stuff about the Sacrament and the Lord's Supper is what has cost you toilsome days and sleepless nights, while to me the thought that I had embraced one variety of Christianity rather than another had never before occurred. All forms were the same to me, from Catholicism to Calvinism; the baptismal water had glided from my back as from a duck's. True, I have lived with all the conventional surroundings of my Christian fellow-countrymen, as I have lived with the language of Russia on my lips, and subservient to Russian customs and manners. But all the while I was neither a Russian nor a Christian. I was a Jew.
Every now and again I roused myself to laudatory assent to one of Paul's arguments when I divined by his tone that it was due. But when he wound up with a panegyric on "our glorious Russian State," and "our little father, the Czar, God's Vicegerent on earth, who alone of European monarchs incarnates and unites in his person Church and State, so that loyalty and piety are one," I could not refrain from pointing out that it was a pure fluke that Russia was "orthodox" at all.
"Suppose," said I, "Wladimir, when he made his famous choice between the Creeds of the world, had picked Judaism? It all turned on a single man's whim."