“You are jesting,” he said, screwing up his eyes.  “Such gentlemen as you and your assistant Nikita have nothing to do with the future, but you may be sure, sir, better days will come!  I may express myself cheaply, you may laugh, but the dawn of a new life is at hand; truth and justice will triumph, and—­our turn will come!  I shall not live to see it, I shall perish, but some people’s great-grandsons will see it.  I greet them with all my heart and rejoice, rejoice with them!  Onward!  God be your help, friends!”

With shining eyes Ivan Dmitritch got up, and stretching his hands towards the window, went on with emotion in his voice: 

“From behind these bars I bless you!  Hurrah for truth and justice!  I rejoice!”

“I see no particular reason to rejoice,” said Andrey Yefimitch, who thought Ivan Dmitritch’s movement theatrical, though he was delighted by it.  “Prisons and madhouses there will not be, and truth, as you have just expressed it, will triumph; but the reality of things, you know, will not change, the laws of nature will still remain the same.  People will suffer pain, grow old, and die just as they do now.  However magnificent a dawn lighted up your life, you would yet in the end be nailed up in a coffin and thrown into a hole.”

“And immortality?”

“Oh, come, now!”

“You don’t believe in it, but I do.  Somebody in Dostoevsky or Voltaire said that if there had not been a God men would have invented him.  And I firmly believe that if there is no immortality the great intellect of man will sooner or later invent it.”

“Well said,” observed Andrey Yefimitch, smiling with pleasure; its a good thing you have faith.  With such a belief one may live happily even shut up within walls.  You have studied somewhere, I presume?”

“Yes, I have been at the university, but did not complete my studies.”

“You are a reflecting and a thoughtful man.  In any surroundings you can find tranquillity in yourself.  Free and deep thinking which strives for the comprehension of life, and complete contempt for the foolish bustle of the world—­those are two blessings beyond any that man has ever known.  And you can possess them even though you lived behind threefold bars.  Diogenes lived in a tub, yet he was happier than all the kings of the earth.”

“Your Diogenes was a blockhead,” said Ivan Dmitritch morosely.  “Why do you talk to me about Diogenes and some foolish comprehension of life?” he cried, growing suddenly angry and leaping up.  “I love life; I love it passionately.  I have the mania of persecution, a continual agonizing terror; but I have moments when I am overwhelmed by the thirst for life, and then I am afraid of going mad.  I want dreadfully to live, dreadfully!”

He walked up and down the ward in agitation, and said, dropping his voice: 

“When I dream I am haunted by phantoms.  People come to me, I hear voices and music, and I fancy I am walking through woods or by the seashore, and I long so passionately for movement, for interests . . . .  Come, tell me, what news is there?” asked Ivan Dmitritch; “what’s happening?”