"And are you aware of what will follow from all this?" I drily inquired.
"Why, of course! I understand you, and I know that you ought to turn the jest against me. I'll even tell you how you'll do it. Would you like to hear? But better far—chuck it! What harm is there in putting ideas into the heads of these muzhiks? They will be none the wiser for it. And, besides, I've played my game well Look how they've stuffed my knapsack for me!"
"But you may bring them under the stick!"
"Scarcely.... And what if I did? What have I to do with other folks' backs. God grant we may keep our own backs whole, that's all! That's not moral I know, but what do I care whether a thing is moral or not moral. You'll agree that that's nobody's business."
"Come," thought I, "the wolf's about right."
"Assume that they do suffer through my fault—I suppose the sky will still be blue and the sea salt."
"But are you not sorry?"
"Not a bit ... I am a rolling stone, and everything which the wind casts beneath my feet wounds me in the side."
He was serious and intensely wrathful, and his eyes gleamed vindictively.
"I always do like that and sometimes worse. Once I recommended a muzhik to drink constantly olive oil mixed with blackbeetles for a pain in the stomach, because he was a skin-flint. Not a little evil of a humorous sort have I wrought during my earthly pilgrimage. How many stupid superstitions and mystifications have I not introduced into the spiritual parts of the muzhik?... And in general I am never very particular. Why should I be? For the sake of a few statutes, eh? Are there not other laws within myself? This, my confession of faith, has also the sanction of John Chrysostom, who says: 'the true Shekina—is man.'"