"You, Nakhodka, you have been searched for political offenses before?" asked the officer.
"Yes, I was searched in Rostov and Saratov. Only there the gendarmes addressed me as 'Mr.'"
The officer winked his right eye, rubbed it, and showing his fine teeth, said:
"And do you happen to know, Mr. Nakhodka yes, you, Mr. Nakhodka who those scoundrels are who distribute criminal proclamations and books in the factory, eh?"
The Little Russian swayed his body, and with a broad smile on his face was about to say something, when the irritating voice of Nikolay again rang out:
"This is the first time we have seen scoundrels here!"
Silence ensued. There was a moment of breathless suspense. The scar on the mother's face whitened, and her right eyebrow traveled upward. Rybin's black beard quivered strangely. He dropped his eyes, and slowly scratched one hand with the other.
"Take this dog out of here!" said the officer.
Two gendarmes seized Nikolay under the arm and rudely pulled him into the kitchen. There he planted his feet firmly on the floor and shouted:
"Stop! I am going to put my coat on."
The police commissioner came in from the yard and said:
"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 Fedya in a low voice.
When he left, the mother said to Pavel:
"This young man will go down sooner than all the rest."
Pavel was silent.
A few minutes later the kitchen door opened slowly and Rybin entered.
"Good evening!" he said, smiling. "Here I am again. Yesterday they brought me here; to-day I come of my own accord. Yes, yes!" He gave Pavel a vigorous handshake, then put his hand on the mother's shoulder, and asked: "Will you give me tea?"
Pavel silently regarded his swarthy, broad countenance, his thick, black beard, and dark, intelligent eyes. A certain gravity spoke out of their calm gaze; his stalwart figure inspired confidence.
The mother went into the kitchen to prepare the samovar. Rybin sat down, stroked his beard, and placing his elbows on the table, scanned Pavel with his dark look.
"That's the way it is," he said, as if continuing an interrupted conversation. "I must have a frank talk with you. I observed you long before I came. We live almost next door to each other. I see many people come to you, and no drunkenness, no carrying on. That's the main thing. If people don't raise the devil, they immediately attract attention. What's that? There you are! That's why all eyes are on me, because I live apart and give no offense."
His speech flowed along evenly and freely. It had a ring that won him confidence.
"So. Everybody prates about you. My masters call you a heretic; you don't go to church. I don't, either. Then the papers appeared, those leaflets. Was it you that thought them out?"
"Yes, I!" answered Pavel, without taking his eyes off Rybin's face. Rybin also looked steadily into Pavel's eyes.
"You alone!" exclaimed the mother, coming into the room. "It wasn't you alone."
Pavel smiled; Rybin also.
The mother sniffed, and walked away, somewhat offended because they did not pay attention to her words.
"Those leaflets are well thought out. They stir the people up. There were twelve of them, weren't there?"
"Yes."
"I have read them all! Yes, yes. Sometimes they are not clear, and some things are superfluous. But when a man speaks a great deal, it's natural he should occasionally say things out of the way."
Rybin smiled. His teeth were white and strong.
"Then the search. That won me over to you more than anything else. You and the Little Russian and Nikolay, you all got caught!" He paused for the right word and looked at the window, rapping the table with his fingers. "They discovered your resolve. You attend to your business, your honor, you say, and we'll attend to ours. The Little Russian's a fine fellow, too. The other day I heard how he speaks in the factory, and thinks I to myself: that man isn't going to be vanquished; it's only one thing will knock him out, and that's death! A sturdy chap! Do you trust me, Pavel?"
"Yes, I trust you!" said Pavel, nodding.
"That's right. Look! I am forty years old; I am twice as old as you, and I've seen twenty times as much as you. For three years long I wore my feet to the bone marching in the army. I have been married twice. I've been in the Caucasus, I know the Dukhobors. They're not masters of life, no, they aren't!"
The mother listened eagerly to his direct speech. It pleased her to have an older man come to her son and speak to him just as if he were confessing to him. But Pavel seemed to treat the guest too curtly, and the mother, to introduce a softer element, asked Rybin:
"Maybe you'll have something to eat."
"Thank you, mother! I've had my supper already. So then, Pavel, you think that life does not go as it should?"
Pavel arose and began to pace the room, folding his hands behind his back.
"It goes all right," he said. "Just now, for instance, it has brought you here to me with an open heart. We who work our whole life long it unites us gradually and more and more every day. The time will come when we shall all be united. Life is arranged unjustly for us and is made a burden. At the same time, however, life itself is opening our eyes to its bitter meaning and is itself showing man the way to accelerate its pace. We all of us think just as we live."
"True. But wait!" Rybin stopped him. "Man ought to be renovated that's what I think! When a man grows scabby, take him to the bath, give him a thorough cleaning, put clean clothes on him and he will get well. Isn't it so? And if the heart grows scabby, take its skin off, even if it bleeds, wash it, and dress it up all afresh. Isn't it so? How else can you clean the inner man? There now!"
Pavel began to speak hotly and bitterly about God, about the Czar, about the government authorities, about the factory, and how in foreign countries the workingmen stand up for their rights. Rybin smiled occasionally; sometimes he struck a finger on the table as if punctuating a period. Now and then he cried out briefly: "So!" And once, laughing out, he said quietly: "You're young. You know people but little!"
Pavel stopping before him said seriously:
"Let's not talk of being old or being young. Let us rather see whose thoughts are truer."
"That is, according to you, we've been fooled about God also. So! I, too, think that our religion is false and injurious to us."
Here the mother intervened. When her son spoke about God and about everything that she connected with her faith in him, which was dear and sacred to her, she sought to meet his eyes, she wanted to ask her son mutely not to chafe her heart with the sharp, bitter words of his unbelief. And she felt that Rybin, an older man, would also be displeased and offended. But when Rybin calmly put his question to Pavel, she could no longer contain herself, and said firmly: "When you speak of God, I wish you were more careful. You can do whatever you like. You have your compensation in your work." Catching her breath she continued with still greater vehemence: "But I, an old woman, I will have nothing to lean upon in my distress if you take my God away from me."
Her eyes filled with tears. She was washing the dishes, and her fingers trembled.
"You did not understand us, mother!" Pavel said softly and kindly.
"Beg your pardon, mother!" Rybin added in a slow, thick voice. He looked at Pavel and smiled. "I forgot that you're too old to cut out your warts."
"I did not speak," continued Pavel, "about that good and gracious God in whom you believe, but about the God with whom the priests threaten us as with a stick, about the God in whose name they want to force all of us to the evil will of the few."
"That's it, right you are!" exclaimed Rybin, striking his fingers upon the table. "They have mutilated even our God for us, they have turned everything in their hands against us. Mark you, mother, God created man in his own image and after his own likeness. Therefore he is like man if man is like him. But we have become, not like God, but like wild beasts! In the churches they set up a scarecrow before us. We have got to change our God, mother; we must cleanse him! They have dressed him up in falsehood and calumny; they have distorted his face in order to destroy our souls!"
He talked composedly and very distinctly and intelligibly. Every word of his speech fell upon the mother's ears like a blow. And his face set in the frame of his black beard, his broad face attired, as it were, in mourning, frightened her. The dark gleam of his eyes was insupportable to her. He aroused in her a sense of anguish, and filled her heart with terror.