"There is nothing out there. We searched everywhere!"
"Well, of course!" exclaimed the officer, laughing. "I knew it! There's an experienced man here, it goes without saying."
The mother listened to his thin, dry voice, and looking with terror into the yellow face, felt an enemy in this man, an enemy without pity, with a heart full of aristocratic disdain of the people. Formerly she had but rarely seen such persons, and now she had almost forgotten they existed.
"Then this is the man whom Pavel and his friends have provoked," she thought.
"I place you, Mr. Andrey Onisimov Nakhodka, under arrest."
"What for?" asked the Little Russian composedly.
"I will tell you later!" answered the officer with spiteful civility, and turning to Vlasova, he shouted:
"Say, can you read or write?"
"No!" answered Pavel.
"I didn't ask you!" said the officer sternly, and repeated: "Say, old woman, can you read or write?"
The mother involuntarily gave way to a feeling of hatred for the man. She was seized with a sudden fit of trembling, as if she had jumped into cold water. She straightened herself, her scar turned purple, and her brow drooped low.
"Don't shout!" she said, flinging out her hand toward him. "You are a young man still; you don't know misery or sorrow——"
"Calm yourself, mother!" Pavel intervened.
"In this business, mother, you've got to take your heart between your teeth and hold it there tight," said the Little Russian.
"Wait a moment, Pasha!" cried the mother, rushing to the table and then addressing the officer: "Why do you snatch people away thus?"
"That does not concern you. Silence!" shouted the officer, rising.
"Bring in the prisoner Vyesovshchikov!" he commanded, and began to read aloud a document which he raised to his face.
Nikolay was brought into the room.
"Hats off!" shouted the officer, interrupting his reading.
Rybin went up to Vlasova, and patting her on the back, said in an undertone:
"Don't get excited, mother!"
"How can I take my hat off if they hold my hands?" asked Nikolay, drowning the reading.
The officer flung the paper on the table.
"Sign!" he said curtly.
The mother saw how everyone signed the document, and her excitement died down, a softer feeling taking possession of her heart. Her eyes filled with tears—burning tears of insult and impotence—such tears she had wept for twenty years of her married life, but lately she had almost forgotten their acid, heart-corroding taste.
The officer regarded her contemptuously. He scowled and remarked:
"You bawl ahead of time, my lady! Look out, or you won't have tears left for the future!"
"A mother has enough tears for everything, everything! If you have a mother, she knows it!"
The officer hastily put the papers into his new portfolio with its shining lock.
"How independent they all are in your place!" He turned to the police commissioner.
"An impudent pack!" mumbled the commissioner.
"March!" commanded the officer.
"Good-by, Andrey! Good-by, Nikolay!" said Pavel warmly and softly, pressing his comrades' hands.
"That's it! Until we meet again!" the officer scoffed.
Vyesovshchikov silently pressed Pavel's hands with his short fingers and breathed heavily. The blood mounted to his thick neck; his eyes flashed with rancor. The Little Russian's face beamed with a sunny smile. He nodded his head, and said something to the mother; she made the sign of the cross over him.
"God sees the righteous," she murmured.
At length the throng of people in the gray coats tumbled out on the porch, and their spurs jingled as they disappeared. Rybin went last. He regarded Pavel with an attentive look of his dark eyes and said thoughtfully: "Well, well—good-by!" and coughing in his beard he leisurely walked out on the porch.
Folding his hands behind his back, Pavel slowly paced up and down the room, stepping over the books and clothes tumbled about on the floor. At last he said somberly:
"You see how it's done! With insult—disgustingly—yes! They left me behind."
Looking perplexedly at the disorder in the room, the mother whispered sadly:
"They will take you, too, be sure they will. Why did Nikolay speak to them the way he did?"
"He got frightened, I suppose," said Pavel quietly. "Yes—It's impossible to speak to them, absolutely impossible! They cannot understand!"
"They came, snatched, and carried off!" mumbled the mother, waving her hands. As her son remained at home, her heart began to beat more lightly. Her mind stubbornly halted before one fact and refused to be moved. "How he scoffs at us, that yellow ruffian! How he threatens us!"
"All right, mamma!" Pavel suddenly said with resolution. "Let us pick all this up!"
He called her "mamma," the word he used only when he came nearer to her. She approached him, looked into his face, and asked softly:
"Did they insult you?"
"Yes," he answered. "That's—hard! I would rather have gone with them."
It seemed to her that she saw tears in his eyes, and wishing to soothe him, with an indistinct sense of his pain, she said with a sigh:
"Wait a while—they'll take you, too!"
"They will!" he replied.
After a pause the mother remarked sorrowfully:
"How hard you are, Pasha! If you'd only reassure me once in a while! But you don't. When I say something horrible, you say something worse."
He looked at her, moved closer to her, and said gently:
"I cannot, mamma! I cannot lie! You have to get used to it."
CHAPTER VII
The next day they knew that Bukin, Samoylov, Somov, and five more had been arrested. In the evening Fedya Mazin came running in upon them. A search had been made in his house also. He felt himself a hero.
"Were you afraid, Fedya?" asked the mother.
He turned pale, his face sharpened, and his nostrils quivered.
"I was afraid the officer might strike me. He has a black beard, he's stout, his fingers are hairy, and he wears dark glasses, so that he looks as if he were without eyes. He shouted and stamped his feet. He said I'd rot in prison. And I've never been beaten either by my father or mother; they love me because I'm their only son. Everyone gets beaten everywhere, but I never!"
He closed his eyes for a moment, compressed his lips, tossed his hair back with a quick gesture of both hands, and looking at Pavel with reddening eyes, said:
"If anybody ever strikes me, I will thrust my whole body into him like a knife—I will bite my teeth into him—I'd rather he'd kill me at once and be done!"
"To defend yourself is your right," said Pavel. "But take care not to attack!"
"You are delicate and thin," observed the mother. "What do you want with fighting?"
"I will fight!" answered