"Remember, you're obliged to report."
"I spit on your reports, and the devil if I'm obliged to anybody." Shatov saw him out and fastened the door with a hook.
"Snipe!" he said, glancing at me and grinning somehow crookedly.
His face was angry, and I felt it strange that he had begun talking. Usually, whenever I had come to see him before (very rarely, by the way), he would sit glowering in the corner, responding angrily, and only after a long time would become quite animated and begin talking with pleasure. On the other hand, each time he said good-bye, he would unfailingly glower again and let you out as if he were getting rid of a personal enemy.
"I had tea yesterday with this Alexei Nilych," I remarked. "He seems to have gone crazy over atheism."
"Russian atheism has never gone further than a pun," Shatov growled, replacing the burnt-down candle with a new one.
"No, the man doesn't seem to be a punster to me; he seems unable to speak even plainly, to say nothing of punning."
"They're paper people; it all comes from lackeyishness of thinking," [55]Shatov observed calmly, sitting down in the corner on a chair and placing both palms on his knees.
"And there's hatred there, too," he said, after a moment's silence. "They'd be the first to be terribly unhappy if Russia somehow suddenly got reconstructed, even if it was in their own way, and somehow suddenly became boundlessly rich and happy. They'd have no one to hate then, no one to spit on, nothing to jeer at! All that's there is an endless animal hatred of Russia that has eaten into their organism... And there are no tears invisible to the world under the visible laughter! [56]Nothing more false has ever been said in Russia than this phrase about invisible tears!" he cried out, almost with fury.
"Well, God knows what it's all about!" I laughed.
"And you, you're a 'moderate liberal,’” Shatov also grinned. "You know," he suddenly picked up, "maybe that was just silly talk about 'lackeyishness of thinking'; you'll probably say to me at once: 'It's you who were born of a lackey, but I'm no lackey.’”
"Not at all... how could you think such a thing!"
"Don't apologize, I'm not afraid of you. Once I was simply born of a lackey, but now I've become a lackey myself, just like you. Our Russian liberal is first of all a lackey and is only looking for someone's boots to polish."
"What boots? What kind of allegory is that?"
"I wouldn't call it an allegory! You're laughing, I see... Stepan Trofimovich was right to say that I'm lying under a stone, crushed but not crushed to death, I'm just writhing—it's a good comparison."
"Stepan Trofimovich assures us that you've gone crazy over the Germans," I went on laughing. "In fact, we did filch something or other from the Germans and stick it in our pocket."
"We took twenty kopecks, and gave away a hundred roubles of our own."
We were silent for about a minute.
"No, he got it from lying there in America."
"Who? Got what from lying there?"
"Kirillov, I mean. He and I spent four months there, lying on the floor of a hut."
"Have you really been to America?" I was surprised. "You never talk about it."
"What's there to tell? The year before last, three of us went to the American States on an emigrant steamer, on our last pennies, 'in order to try the life of the American worker for ourselves, and thus by personalexperience to test on ourselves the condition of man in his hardest social position. [57]That was the goal we set out with."
"Lord!" I laughed, "but for that it would have been better to go somewhere in our province at harvest time, if you wanted to 'test by personal experience'—why on earth go to America!"
"We got hired to work there for an exploiter; six of us Russians were gathered there in all—students, even landowners from their estates, even officers were there, all with the same grand purpose. So we worked, got wet, suffered, wore ourselves out, and finally Kirillov and I left—got sick, couldn't stand it anymore. Our employer-exploiter cheated us when he paid us off; instead of thirty dollars as agreed, he paid me eight and him fifteen; they also beat us there, more than once.
So, without work then, Kirillov and I spent four months lying side by side on the floor in some little town; he thought of one thing, and I of another."
"Can it be that your employer really beat you? In America? How you must have cursed at him!"
"Not in the least. On the contrary, Kirillov and I decided at once that 'we Russians are mere kids next to Americans, and that one must be born in America, or at least live for long years with Americans, to be on the same level with them.' [58]Not only that: when they asked us to pay a dollar for something worth a penny, we paid it, not just with pleasure, but even with enthusiasm. We praised everything: spiritualism, lynching, six-shooters, hoboes. Once, on a train, a man went into my pocket, took my hairbrush, and began brushing his hair with it; Kirillov and I just looked at each other and decided that it was good and we liked it very much..."
"Strange that with us such things not only enter our heads, but even get carried out," I observed.
"Paper people," Shatov repeated.
"But, all the same, to cross the ocean on an emigrant steamer to an unknown land, even if it's with the purpose of 'learning by personal experience' and so forth, by God, that seems to have some big-hearted staunchness about it... But how did you get out of there?"
"I wrote to a man in Europe, and he sent me a hundred roubles."
All the while he talked, Shatov stared stubbornly at the ground, as was his custom even when excited. But here he suddenly raised his head.
"And do you want to know the man's name?"
"Who was it?"
"Nikolai Stavrogin."
He suddenly rose, turned to his limewood desk, and began rummaging around on it. There was a vague but trustworthy rumor among us that his wife had for some time had a liaison with Nikolai Stavrogin in Paris, and precisely about two years ago, that is, when Shatov was in America—though, true, long after she had left him in Geneva. "If so, what on earth possessed him now to volunteer the name and smear it about?" the thought came to me.
"I still haven't paid him back," he suddenly turned to me again, looked at me intently, went and sat down in his former place in the corner, and asked abruptly, now in a completely different voice:
"You came for something, of course; what do you want?"
I at once told him everything, in exact historical order, and added that though by now I had had time to think better after today's fever, I had become all the more confused: I understood that there was something very important here for Lizaveta Nikolaevna, I greatly wished to help her, but the whole trouble was that I not only did not know how to keep the promise I had given her, but I no longer even understood what precisely I had promised her. Then I repeated to him imposingly that she did not want and had not intended to deceive him, that there had been some misunderstanding there, and that she had been very upset by his remarkable departure today.
He listened very attentively.
"Maybe I did something stupid today, as my custom is... Well, if she herself didn't understand why I left like that, it's ... so much the better for her."
He rose, went to the door, opened it, and began listening on the stairs.