“Arrest us all!” they yelled. “We all say the same thing.”
“Yes, Alexandre Alexandrovich is the best man in the world. There!”
“A better man than Novikoff!”
“Novikoff is a hypocrite and a rogue!”
In the commotion the gendarmes lost sight of the girl they were about to arrest. She could not have left the room, but then it was not easy to tell her from any of the other girls. The gendarmes had seen her at a distance, and all they could say was that she was blonde. In their eagerness to pick her out, they were rudely scanning every young woman in the waiting-room. Had she been arrested it would have gone hard with her. As good luck would have it, however, Major Safonoff, the officer in command of the railroad gendarmes, was the brother of one of the girls present. He was a plump, good-natured bachelor, and his devotion to his sister, who had been under his care since she was a year old, was a source of jests and anecdotes. When it occurred to him that the conflict, which was beginning to look like a serious affair, was likely to cause trouble to his sister, he hastened to make light of it.
“Go home, ladies and gentlemen,” he said, in a remonstrative amicable voice, taking the matter in his own hands.
His friendly tone and his smiling fat face, added to the tacit understanding that the girl who had made the speech was not to be persecuted, acted as a balm; but the flattering notion that the gendarmes had surrendered kindled new fighting blood.
“Your men have hit ladies. They’ve no right to hit anybody. They’re a lot of brutes. All we wanted was to say good-bye to Alexandre Alexandrovich.”
“But that’s impossible, so what’s the use getting excited, gentlemen? Better go home.”