"Not yet, but I will be in a second." "It's bad for you with your sickness." "Whiskey is bad for healthy people, too. Whiskey and the imagination. You, for instance, will soon be an idiot." "I won't. Don't be uneasy." "You will. I know mathematics. I see you are a blockhead." "Everyone has his own mathematics," replied Piotr, disgruntled. "Shut up!" said Sasha, slowly sipping the glass of whiskey and smelling a piece of bread. Having drained the first glass, he immediately filled another for himself. "To-day," he began, bending his head and resting his hands on his knees, "I spoke to the general again. I made a proposition to him. I said, 'Now give me means, and I'll unearth people. I will open a literary club, and trap the very best scamps for you, all of them.' He puffed his cheeks, and stuck out his belly and said--the jackass!--'I know better what has to be done, and how it has to be done.' He knows everything. But he doesn't know that his mistress danced naked before Von Rutzen, or that his daughter had an abortion performed." He drained the second glass of whiskey, and filled the third. "Everybody's a blackguard and a skunk. It's impossible to live! Once Moses ordered 23,000 syphilitics to be killed. At that time there weren't many people, mark you. If I had the power I would destroy a million." "Yourself first?" suggested Piotr smiling. Sasha sniffed without answering, as if in a delirium. "All those liberals, generals, revolutionists, dissolute women--I'd make a large pyre of them and burn them. I would drench the earth with blood, manure it with the ashes of the corpses. There would be a rich crop. Satiated muzhiks would elect satiated officials. Man is an animal, and he needs rich pastures, fertile fields. The cities ought to be destroyed, and everything superficial, everything that hinders me and you from living simply as the sheep and roosters--to the devil with it all!" His viscid rank-smelling words fairly glued themselves to Yevsey's heart. It was difficult and dangerous to listen to them. "Suddenly they will summon me and ask me what he said. Maybe he's speaking on purpose to trap me. Then they'll seize me." He trembled and moved uneasily in his chair. "May I go?" he requested of Piotr quietly. "Where?" "To my room." "Oh, yes, go on." "Got frightened, the donkey!" remarked Sasha without lifting his head. "Go on, go on," repeated Piotr. Klimkov undressed noiselessly without making a light. He groped for the bed in the dark, and rolled himself up closely in the cold, damp sheet. He wanted to see nothing, to hear nothing, he wanted to squeeze himself into a little unnoticeable lump. The snuffled words of Sasha clung in his memory. Yevsey thought he smelt his odor and saw the red band on the yellow forehead. As a matter of fact the irritated exclamations came in to him through the door. "I am a muzhik myself, I know what's necessary."