yesterday, on the Schlangenberg, I whispered at your provoca- tion, 'Say the word, and I will leap into that abyss'? If you had said that word I should have jumped in then. Don't you believe that I would have leapt down?"
"What stupid talk!" she cried.
"I don't care whether it is stupid or clever!" I cried. "I know that in your presence I must talk, and talk, and talk—and I do talk. I lose all self-respect in your presence, and I don't care."
"What use would it be for me to order you to jump off the Schlangenberg?" she said in a dry and peculiarly insulting manner. "It would be absolutely useless to me."
"Splendid," I cried; "you said that splendid 'useless' on purpose to overwhelm me. I see through you. Useless, you say? But pleasure is always of use, and savage, unbounded power—if only over a fly—is a pleasure in its way, too. Man is a despot by nature, and loves to be a torturer. You like it awfully."
I remember she looked at me with peculiar fixed attention. My face must have expressed my incoherent and absurd sensations. I remember to this moment that our conversation actually was almost word for word exactly as I have described it here. My eyes were bloodshot. There were flecks of foam on my lips. And as for the Schlangenberg, I swear on my word of honour even now, if she had told me to fling myself down I should have flung myself down! If only for a joke she had said it, with contempt, if with a jeer at me she had said it, I should even then have leapt down!
"No, why? I believe you," she pronounced, as only she knows how to speak, with such contempt and venom, with such scorn that, by God, I could have killed her at the moment.
She risked it. I was not lying about that, too, in what I said to her.
"You are not a coward?" she asked me suddenly.
"Perhaps I am a coward. I don't know…. I have not thought about it for a long time."
"If I were to say to you, 'Kill this man,' would you kill him?"
'Whom?"
"Whom I choose."
"The Frenchman?"
"Don't ask questions, but answer. Whom I tell you to know whether you spoke seriously just now?"
