The deacon burst into ringing laughter; Samoilenko frowned and wrinkled his face angrily, so as not to laugh, but could not help himself and guffawed.
‘‘That’s all lies!’’ he said, wiping his tears. ‘‘By God, it’s lies!’’
IV
THE DEACON WAS much given to laughter and laughed at every trifle till his sides ached, till he dropped. It looked as though he liked being among people only because they had funny qualities and could be given funny nicknames. Samoilenko he called ‘‘the tarantula,’’ his orderly ‘‘the drake,’’ and he was delighted when von Koren once called Laevsky and Nadezhda Fyodorovna ‘‘macaques.’’ He peered greedily into people’s faces, listened without blinking, and you could see his eyes fill with laughter and his face strain in anticipation of the moment when he could let himself go and rock with laughter.
‘‘He’s a corrupted and perverted subject,’’ the zoologist went on, and the deacon, in anticipation of funny words, fastened his eyes on him. ‘‘It’s not everywhere you can meet such a nonentity. His body is limp, feeble, and old, and in his intellect he in no way differs from a fat merchant’s wife, who only feeds, guzzles, sleeps on a featherbed, and keeps her coachman as a lover.’’
The deacon guffawed again.
‘‘Don’t laugh, Deacon,’’ said von Koren, ‘‘it’s stupid, finally. I’d pay no attention to this nonentity,’’ he went on, after waiting for the deacon to stop guffawing, ‘‘I’d pass him by, if he weren’t so harmful and dangerous. His harmfulness consists first of all in the fact that he has success with women and thus threatens to have progeny, that is, to give the world a dozen Laevskys as feeble and perverted as himself. Second, he’s contagious in the highest degree. I’ve already told you about the vint and the beer. Another year or two and he’ll conquer the whole Caucasian coast. You know to what degree the masses, especially their middle stratum, believe in the intelligentsia, in university education, in highborn manners and literary speech. Whatever vileness he may commit, everyone will believe that it’s good, that it should be so, since he is an intellectual, a liberal, and a university man. Besides, he’s a luckless fellow, a superfluous man, a neurasthenic, a victim of the times, and that means he’s allowed to do anything. He’s a sweet lad, a good soul, he’s so genuinely tolerant of human weaknesses; he’s complaisant, yielding, obliging, he’s not proud, you can drink with him, and use foul language, and gossip a bit... The masses, always inclined to anthropomorphism in religion and morality, like most of all these little idols that have the same weaknesses as themselves. Consider, then, what a wide field for contagion! Besides, he’s not a bad actor, he’s a clever hypocrite, and he knows perfectly well what o’clock it is. Take his dodges and tricks—his attitude to civilization, for instance. He has no notion of civilization, and yet: ‘Ah, how crippled we are by civilization! Ah, how I envy the savages, those children of nature, who know no civilization!’ We’re to understand, you see, that once upon a time he devoted himself heart and soul to civilization, served it, comprehended it thoroughly, but it exhausted, disappointed, deceived him; you see, he’s a Faust, a second Tolstoy... He treats Schopenhauer10 and Spencer like little boys and gives them a fatherly slap on the shoulder: ‘Well, how’s things, Spencer, old boy?’ He hasn’t read Spencer, of course, but how sweet he is when he says of his lady, with a slight, careless irony: ‘She’s read Spencer!’ And people listen to him, and nobody wants to understand that this charlatan has no right not only to speak of Spencer in that tone but merely to kiss Spencer’s bootsole! Undermining civilization, authority, other people’s altars, slinging mud, winking at them like a buffoon only in order to justify and conceal one’s feebleness and moral squalor, is possible only for a vain, mean, and vile brute.’’
‘‘I don’t know what you want from him, Kolya,’’ said Samoilenko, looking at the zoologist now not with anger but guiltily. ‘‘He’s the same as everybody. Of course, he’s not without weaknesses, but he stands on the level of modern ideas, he serves, he’s useful to his fatherland. Ten years ago an old man served as an agent here, a man of the greatest intelligence... He used to say . . .’
‘‘Come, come!’’ the zoologist interrupted. ‘‘You say he serves. But how does he serve? Have the ways here become better and the officials more efficient, more honest and polite, because he appeared? On the contrary, by his authority as an intellectual, university man, he only sanctions their indiscipline. He’s usually efficient only on the twentieth, when he receives his salary, and on the other days he only shuffles around the house in slippers and tries to make it look as if he’s doing the Russian government a great favor by living in the Caucasus. No, Alexander Davidych, don’t defend him. You’re insincere from start to finish. If you actually loved him and considered him your neighbor, first of all you wouldn’t be indifferent to his weaknesses, you wouldn’t indulge them, but would try, for his own good, to render him harmless.’’
‘‘That is?’’
‘‘Render him harmless. Since he’s incorrigible, there’s only one way he can be rendered harmless...’
Von Koren drew a finger across his neck.
‘‘Or drown him, maybe...’ he added. ‘‘In the interests of mankind and in their own interests, such people should be destroyed. Without fail.’’
‘‘What are you saying?’’ Samoilenko murmured, getting up and looking with astonishment at the zoologist’s calm, cold face. ‘‘Deacon, what is he saying? Are you in your right mind?’’
‘‘I don’t insist on the death penalty,’’ said von Koren. ‘‘If that has been proved harmful, think up something else. It’s impossible to destroy Laevsky—well, then isolate him, depersonalize him, send him to common labor...’
‘‘What are you saying?’’ Samoilenko was horrified. ‘‘With pepper, with pepper!’’ he shouted in a desperate voice, noticing that the deacon was eating his stuffed zucchini without pepper. ‘‘You, a man of the greatest intelligence, what are you saying?! To send our friend, a proud man, an intellectual, to common labor!!’’
‘‘And if he’s proud and starts to resist—clap him in irons!’’
Samoilenko could no longer utter a single word and only twisted his fingers; the deacon looked at his stunned, truly ridiculous face and burst out laughing.