“Better?” said Sanine. “A blow’s always a painful thing. And why? For what reason?”
“Oh! do, please, hear me out,” interrupted Soloveitchik, with a pleading gesture. “It might have been better—”
“For Sarudine, certainly,”
“No, for you, too; for you, too.”
“Oh! Soloveitchik,” replied Sanine, with a touch of annoyance, “a truce to that silly old notion about moral victory; and a false notion, too. Moral victory does not consist in offering one’s cheek to the smiter, but in being right before one’s own conscience. How this is achieved is a matter of chance, of circumstances. There is nothing so horrible as slavery. Yet most horrible of all is it when a man whose inmost soul rebels against coercion and force yet submits thereto in the name of some power that is mightier than he.”
Soloveitchik clasped his head with both hands, as one distraught.
“I’ve not got the brains to understand it all,” he said plaintively. “And I don’t in the least know how I ought to live.”
“Why should you know? Live as the bird flies. If it wants to move its right wing, it moves it. If it wants to fly round a tree, it does so.”
“Yes, a bird may do that, but I’m not a bird; I’m a man,” said Soloveitchik with naive earnestness.
Sanine laughed outright, and for a moment the merry sound echoed through the gloomy courtyard.