Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 11 der Vater’... ‘Gott der Sohn.’ He laughed again and lisped
‘Gott der Sohn.’ ‘Gott der heilige Geist.’ Then he laughed
and said as best he could, ‘Gott der heilige Geist.’ I went
away, and two days after I happened to be passing, and he
shouted to me of himself, ‘Uncle, Gott der Vater, Gott der
Sohn,’ and he had only forgotten ‘Gott der heilige Geist.’
But I reminded him of it and I felt very sorry for him again.
But he was taken away, and I did not see him again. Twenty-
three years passed. I am sitting one morning in my study,
a white-haired old man, when there walks into the room
a blooming young man, whom I should never have recog-
nised, but he held up his finger and said, laughing, ‘Gott der
Vater, Gott der Sohn, and Gott der heilige Geist. I have just
arrived and have come to thank you for that pound of nuts,
for no one else ever bought me a pound of nuts; you are
the only one that ever did.’ then I remembered my happy
youth and the poor child in the yard, without boots on his
feet, and my heart was touched and I said, ‘You are a grate-
ful young man, for you have remembered all your life the
pound of nuts I bought you in your childhood.’ And I em-
braced him and blessed him. And I shed tears. He laughed,
but he shed tears, too... for the Russian often laughs when
he ought to be weeping. But he did weep; I saw it. And now,
alas!..’
‘And I am weeping now, German, I am weeping now, too,
you saintly man,’ Mitya cried suddenly.
In any case the anecdote made a certain favourable im-
pression on the public. But the chief sensation in Mitya’s
favour was created by the evidence of Katerina Ivanovna,