Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com elling idiot can maintain that. I can’t understand it. Life’s
easy for Rakitin. ‘You’d better think about the extension of
civic rights, or even of keeping down the price of meat. You
will show your love for humanity more simply and directly
by that, than by philosophy.’ I answered him, ‘Well, but you,
without a God, are more likely to raise the price of meat, if
it suits you, and make a rouble on every copeck.’ He lost
his temper. But after all, what is goodness? Answer me that,
Alexey. Goodness is one thing with me and another with a
Chinaman, so it’s a relative thing. Or isn’t it? Is it not rela-
tive? A treacherous question! You won’t laugh if I tell you
it’s kept me awake two nights. I only wonder now how peo-
ple can live and think nothing about it. Vanity! Ivan has
no God. He has an idea. It’s beyond me. But he is silent. I
believe he is a Freemason. I asked him, but he is silent. I
wanted to drink from the springs of his soul- he was silent.
But once he did drop a word.’
‘What did he say?’ Alyosha took it up quickly.
‘I said to him, ‘Then everything is lawful, if it is so?’ He
frowned. ‘Fyodor Pavlovitch, our papa,’ he said, ‘was a pig,
but his ideas were right enough.’ That was what he dropped.
That was all he said. That was going one better than Raki-
tin.’
‘Yes,’ Alyosha assented bitterly. ‘When was he with you?’
‘Of that later; now I must speak of something else. I have
said nothing about Ivan to you before. I put it off to the last.
When my business here is over and the verdict has been
given, then I’ll tell you something. I’ll tell you everything.
We’ve something tremendous on hand.... And you shall be