“No, thank you.”
Kirillov, who had not sat down till then, seated himself facing him, and inquired:
“Why have you come?”
“On business. Here, read this letter from Gaganov; do you remember, I talked to you about him in Petersburg.”
Kirillov took the letter, read it, laid it on the table and looked at him expectantly.
“As you know, I met this Gaganov for the first time in my life a month ago, in Petersburg,” Nikolay Vsyevolodovitch began to explain. “We came across each other two or three times in company with other people. Without making my acquaintance and without addressing me, he managed to be very insolent to me. I told you so at the time; but now for something you don't know. As he was leaving Petersburg before I did, he sent me a letter, not like this one, yet impertinent in the highest degree, and what was queer about it was that it contained no sort of explanation of why it was written. I answered him at once, also by letter, and said, quite frankly, that he was probably angry with me on account of the incident with his father four years ago in the club here, and that I for my part was prepared to make him every possible apology, seeing that my action was unintentional and was the result of illness. I begged him to consider and accept my apologies. He went away without answering, and now here I find him in a regular fury. Several things he has said about me in public have been repeated to me, absolutely abusive, and making astounding charges against me. Finally, to-day, I get this letter, a letter such as no one has ever had before, I should think, containing such expressions as 'the punch you got in your ugly face.' I came in the hope that you would not refuse to be my second.”
“You said no one has ever had such a letter,” observed Kirillov, “they may be sent in a rage. Such letters have been written more than once. Pushkin wrote to Hekern. All right, I'll come. Tell me how.”
Nikolay Vsyevolodovitch explained that he wanted it to be to-morrow, and that he must begin by renewing his offers of apology, and even with the promise of another letter of apology, but on condition that Gaganov, on his side, should promise to send no more letters. The letter he had received he would regard as unwritten.
“Too much concession; he won't agree,” said Kirillov.
“I've come first of all to find out whether you would consent to be the bearer of such terms.”
“I'll take them. It's your affair. But he won't agree.”
“I know he won't agree.”
“He wants to fight. Say how you'll fight.”
“The point is that I want the thing settled to-morrow. By nine o'clock in the morning you must be at his house. He'll listen, and won't agree, but will put you in communication with his second — let us say about eleven. You will arrange things with him, and let us all be on the spot by one or two o'clock. Please try to arrange that. The weapons, of course, will be pistols. And I particularly beg you to arrange to fix the barriers at ten paces apart; then you put each of us ten paces from the barrier, and at a given signal we approach. Each must go right up to his barrier, but you may fire before, on the way. I believe that's all.”
“Ten paces between the barriers is very near,” observed Kirillov.
“Well, twelve then, but not more. You understand that he wants to fight in earnest. Do you know how to load a pistol?”
“I do. I've got pistols. I'll give my word that you've never fired them. His second will give his word about his. There'll be two pairs of pistols, and we'll toss up, his or ours?”
“Excellent.”
“Would you like to look at the pistols?”
“Very well.”
Kirillov squatted on his heels before the trunk in the corner, which he had never yet unpacked, though things had been pulled out of it as required. He pulled out from the bottom a palm-wood box lined with red velvet, and from it took out a pair of smart and very expensive pistols.
“I've got everything, powder, bullets, cartridges. I've a revolver besides, wait.”
He stooped down to the trunk again and took out a six-chambered American revolver.
“You've got weapons enough, and very good ones.”
“Very, extremely.”
Kirillov, who was poor, almost destitute, though he never noticed his poverty, was evidently proud of showing precious weapons, which he had certainly obtained with great sacrifice.
“You still have the same intentions?” Stavrogin asked after a moment's silence, and with a certain wariness.
“Yes,” answered Kirillov shortly, guessing at once from his voice what he was asking about, and he began taking the weapons from the table.
“When?” Nikolay Vsyevolodovitch inquired still more cautiously, after a pause.
In the meantime Kjrillov had put both the boxes back in his trunk, and sat down in his place again.
“That doesn't depend on me, as you know — when they tell me,” he muttered, as. though disliking the question; but at the same time with evident readiness to answer any other question. He kept his black, lustreless eyes fixed continually on Stavrogin with a calm but warm and kindly expression in them.
“I understand shooting oneself, of course,” Nikolay Vsyevolodovitch began suddenly, frowning a little, after a dreamy silence that lasted three minutes. “I sometimes have thought of it myself, and then there always came a new idea: if one did something wicked, or, worse still, something shameful, that is, disgraceful, only very shameful and . . . ridiculous, such as people would remember for a thousand years and hold in scorn for a thousand years, and suddenly the thought comes: 'one blow in the temple and there would be nothing more.' One wouldn't care then for men and that they would hold one in scorn for a thousand years, would one?”
“You call that a new idea?” said Kirillov, after a moment's thought.
“I ... didn't call it so, but when I thought it I felt it as a new idea.”
“You 'felt the idea'?” observed Kirillov. “That's good. There are lots of ideas that are always there and yet suddenly become new. That's true. I see a great deal now as though it were for the first time.”
“Suppose you had lived in the moon,” Stavrogin interrupted, not listening, but pursuing his own thought, “and suppose there you had done all these nasty and ridiculous things. . . . You know from here for certain that they will laugh at you and hold you in scorn for a thousand years as long as the moon lasts. But now you are here, and looking at the moon from here. You don't care here for anything you've done there, and that the people there will hold you in scorn for a thousand years, do you?”
“I don't know,” answered Kirillov. “I've not been in the moon,” he added, without any irony, simply to state the fact.
“Whose baby was that just now?”
“The old woman's mother-in-law was here — no, daughter-in-law, it's all the same. Three days. She's lying ill with the baby, it cries a lot at night, it's the stomach. The mother sleeps, but the old woman picks it up; I play ball with it. The ball's from Hamburg. I bought it in Hamburg to throw it and catch it, it strengthens the spine. It's a girl.”
“Are you fond of children?”
“I am,” answered Kirillov, though rather indifferently.
“Then you're fond of life?”
“Yes, I'm fond of life! What of it?”
“Though you've made up your mind to shoot yourself.”
“What of it? Why connect it? Life's one thing and that's another. Life exists, but death doesn't at all.”
“You've begun to believe in a future eternal life?”
“No, not in a future eternal life, but in eternal life here. There are moments, you reach moments, and time suddenly stands still, and it will become eternal.”
“You hope to reach such a moment?”
“Yes.”
“That'll scarcely be possible in our time,” Nikolay Vsyevolodovitch responded slowly and, as it were, dreamily; the two spoke without the slightest irony. “In the Apocalypse the angel swears that there will be no more time.”