10 The Brothers Karamazovin you only a tiny grain of faith and it will grow into an oak-
tree — and such an oak-tree that, sitting on it, you will long
to enter the ranks of ‘the hermits in the wilderness and the
saintly women,’ for that is what you are secretly longing for.
You’ll dine on locusts, you’ll wander into the wilderness to
save your soul!’
‘Then it’s for the salvation of my soul you are working, is
it, you scoundrel?’
‘One must do a good work sometimes. How ill-humoured
you are!’
‘Fool! did you ever tempt those holy men who ate locusts
and prayed seventeen years in the wilderness till they were
overgrown with moss?’
‘My dear fellow, I’ve done nothing else. One forgets the
whole world and all the worlds, and sticks to one such saint,
because he is a very precious diamond. One such soul, you
know, is sometimes worth a whole constellation. We have
our system of reckoning, you know. The conquest is price-
less! And some of them, on my word, are not inferior to
you in culture, though you won’t believe it. They can con-
template such depths of belief and disbelief at the same
moment that sometimes it really seems that they are within
a hair’s-breadth of being ‘turned upside down,’ as the actor
Gorbunov says.’
‘Well, did you get your nose pulled?’
‘My dear fellow,’ observed the visitor sententiously, ‘it’s
better to get off with your nose pulled than without a nose
at all. As an afflicted marquis observed not long ago (he
must have been treated by a specialist) in confession to