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CRIME AND PUNISHMENT 275
"No, I won't believe it!" Raskolnikov cried, with positive
anger.
"What do people generally say?" muttered Svidrigailov,
as though speaking to himself, looking aside and bowing his
head: "They say, 'You are ill, so what appears to you is only
unreal fantasy.' But that's not strictly logical. I agree that
ghosts only appear to the sick, but that only proves that the
are unable to appear except to the sick, not that they dot"
.exist."
"Nothing of the sort," Raskolnikov insisted irritably.
"No? You don't think so?" Svidrigailov went on, looking
at him deliberately. "But what do you say to this argument
(help me with it) : ghosts are as it were shreds and fragments
of other worlds, the beginning of them. A man in health has,
of course, no reason to see them, because he is above all a man
of this earth and is bound for the sake of completeness and
order to live only in this life. But as soon as one is ill, as soon
as the normal earthly order of the organism is broken, one
begins to realise the possibility of another world; and the more
seriously ill one is, the closer becomes one's contact with that
other world, so that as soon as the man dies he steps straight
into that world. I thought of that long ago. If you believe in a
futvu-e life, you could believe in that, too."
"I don't believe in a future life," said Raskolnikov.
Svidrigailov sat lost in thought.
"And what if there are only spiders there, or something of
that sort," he said suddenly.
"He is a madman," thought Raskolnikov.
"We always imagine eternity as something beyond our con-
ception, something vast, vast! But why must it be vast? Instead
of all that, what if it's one little room, like a bathhouse in the
country, black and grimy and spiders in every corner, and that's
all eternity is? I sometimes fancy it like that."
"Can it be you can imagine nothing juster and more comfort-
ing than that?" Raskolnikov cried, with a feeling of anguish.
"Juster? And how can we tell, perhaps that is just, and do
you know it's what I would certainly have made it," answered
Svidrigailov, with a vague smile.
This horrible answer sent a cold chill through Raskolnikov.
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