ALEXIS. Ah, your order against mine, eh? Centuries of pain against centuries of oppression. Well, well! You set aside to-day, do you? You throw your own little pains and penalties out of the scale on one side, and my little tyrannies and floggings and acts of villainy out on the other? You see yourself only as the avenger of a caste against a caste. The right of vengeance and the need of it comes down to you in the blood, does it? You’re exalted by the breath of dead peasants, are you? It’s because of that and only because of it that you take pride in the work you have set your hand to. Huh! Grotesque! You strike the air with a rod of smoke. You’ve stumbled upon the essence of the inane. You’re about to commit a fantastic mockery of Justice.
BORIS. I have held my hand too long!
ALEXIS. Wait! There is still something to be said; something for you to think of in the moment between the time you take my life and the time you take your own. You are about to kill the man you might have been yourself. You are about to—I, and not you, am Boris Ivanovitch.
BORIS. What rubbish are you talking now?
ALEXIS. You are Alexis Alexandrovitch!
BORIS. Why! You are mad!
ALEXIS. Wait! When you were a child, you had a foster-brother. You ran with him in the fields. You slept by his side at night. You fought with him over rough toys and bits of food. When you were seven years old, a man on horse-back came and took him away. You never knew his true parentage and your father flogged you when you cried for him. Can you remember that?
BORIS. Aye, I can remember that well.
ALEXIS. Your father deserted your mother the following year. A little later she died. She told you nothing of the other child. You went to Kieff, to the house of your uncle, and became apprenticed to a bootmaker.
BORIS. Leave off! You can’t mystify me by telling me the story of my own life. It proves nothing. Your agents have ways of knowing such things: what I was, what I am, everything.