"Lord Jesus Christ! Do you hear what I am saying, Pasha?"
Pavel apparently had not heard her. Slowly pacing up and down the room with drooping head, he said pensively and with exasperation:
"Andrey won't forgive himself soon, if he'll forgive himself at all! There is life for you, mother. You see the position in which people are placed toward one another. You don't want to, but you must strike! And strike whom? Such a helpless being. He is more wretched even than you because he is stupid. The police, the gendarmes, the soldiers, the spies—they are all our enemies, and yet they are all such people as we are. Their blood is sucked out of them just as ours is, and they are no more regarded as human beings than we are. That's the way it is. But they have set one part of the people against the other, blinded them with fear, bound them all hand and foot, squeezed them, and drained their blood, and used some as clubs against the others. They've turned men into weapons, into sticks and stones, and called it civilization, government."
He walked up to his mother and said to her firmly:
"That's crime, mother! The heinous crime of killing millions of people, the murder of millions of souls! You understand—they kill the soul! You see the difference between them and us. He killed a man unwittingly. He feels disgusted, ashamed, sick—the main thing is he feels disgusted! But they kill off thousands calmly, without a qualm, without pity, without a shudder of the heart. They kill with pleasure and with delight. And why? They stifle everybody and everything to death merely to keep the timber of their houses secure, their furniture, their silver, their gold, their worthless papers—all that cheap trash which gives them control over the people. Think, it's not for their own selves, for their persons, that they protect themselves thus, using murder and the mutilation of souls as a means—it's not for themselves they do it, but for the sake of their possessions. They do not guard themselves from within, but from without."
He bent over to her, took her hands, and shaking them said:
"If you felt the abomination of it all, the disgrace and rottenness, you would understand our truth; you would then perceive how great it is, how glorious!"
The mother arose agitated, full of a desire to sink her heart into the heart of her son, and to join them in one burning, flaming torch.
"Wait, Pasha, wait!" she muttered, panting for breath. "I am a human being. I feel. Wait."
There was a loud noise of some one entering the porch. Both of them started and looked at each other.