ALEXIS. Wait! There is still something to be said; something for you to think of in the moment between the time you take my life and the time you take your own. You are about to kill the man you might have been yourself. You are about to--I, and not you, am Boris Ivanovitch.
ALEXIS. Wait! When you were a child, you had a foster-brother. You ran with him in the fields. You slept by his side at night. You fought with him over rough toys and bits of food. When you were seven years old, a man on horse-back came and took him away. You never knew his true parentage and your father flogged you when you cried for him. Can you remember that?
ALEXIS. Your father deserted your mother the following year. A little later she died. She told you nothing of the other child. You went to Kieff, to the house of your uncle, and became apprenticed to a bootmaker.
BORIS. Leave off! You can’t mystify me by telling me the story of my own life. It proves nothing. Your agents have ways of knowing such things: what I was, what I am, everything.
ALEXIS. Yes! Leave all that! As you say, it proves nothing. Yet we are foster-brothers, you and I.
ALEXIS. Our good mother was endowed with a grim sense of humor. She sent her own boy to be reared as the son of princes, and the little aristocrat, left with her for safety at the time of the Makaroff meeting, she sent to--well, you know to what sort of a life she sent him.
BORIS. Ah, ah! What else? What else have you to tell me?
ALEXIS. I, and not you, am the son of peasants. Do you see now why I call your errand grotesque?
BORIS. Lies! Lies! Lies! What do you expect to gain by telling me such lies?
BORIS. Do you expect me to believe you? Do you expect me to embrace you and clap my hat on my head and toss this pistol out the window and tell you to do what you like with me?
ALEXIS. I expect nothing. I know that I am one dead man talking to another.
BORIS. I can’t fathom you. I know there must be some trick up your sleeve, but I can’t fathom you.
ALEXIS. There is no trick. You asked me why I chose to give you this opportunity to kill me. I’m telling you. That’s all.
ALEXIS. No! Utterly useless truth! Do you think I wish to believe myself Boris Ivanovitch Shamrayeff, born a peasant? I, who have sat in high places and given my life to preserving an order of men to which I do not belong, which my blood ought to cry out against. Do you think I would have believed it if the belief had not been forced upon me? I have ways of knowing truth from falsehood, my friend. You are striking at a man who is dead before you touch him. What I have found out in the past week, others already know. I have come to the end, I tell you. I have been a fantastic dupe. I cannot go on. I would have killed myself to-day, but I have a horror of taking my own life. You have come in time to save me from that.