The Inspector of the police then entered the dining-room. Every one looked guardedly at him. He said solemnly, as if he were announcing the beginning of an important and useful work:
“Gentlemen, now we must subject all those present to a personal examination. One at a time, please. Suppose we begin with you,” said he, turning to the engineer.
The face of the Inspector of the police expressed a consciousness of his personal dignity. His movements were sure and significant. It was evident that he not only was not ashamed of what he was saying and doing, but that he had not the slightest comprehension that there was anything in this to be ashamed of. The engineer, a young and handsome man, shrugged his shoulders, smiled contemptuously and went into the study, being directed there by an awkward motion of the red-palmed paw of the Commissary of the rural police.
The priest’s wife found herself an arm-chair in the dining-room, but she was not any more comfortable in it. Terrified in her arm-chair, she trembled like jelly. With pale lips she whispered to the parish-school girl she had won over to the cause:
“Irinushka, dearest, think of it—they are going to search us!”
The parish-school girl, Irinushka, looking slender, fresh, and red, like a newly washed carrot, moved her ears in her fright—a faculty which her companions envied her intensely—and whispered something to the priest’s wife.
The constable looked savagely at the priest’s wife and at the parish-school girl, and cried out in a shrill, somewhat hoarse voice, which resembled the crowing of a cock:
“I must very humbly ask you not to whisper.”
The constables with the guns pricked up their ears. Their sudden zeal made them perspire. The priest’s wife and the parish-school girl almost fainted from fright, but the girl at once recovered herself and began to get angry; she was now even more angry than she had been frightened a little while ago. Small tears gleamed in her eyes; small drops of perspiration appeared on her cheeks and on her forehead. The angry girl’s face grew even redder, so that now she resembled no longer a carrot but a wet beetroot. The only person in the room to be refreshingly and youthfully indignant, and all aflame with a deep anger, she looked truly beautiful in her ingenuous exasperation.
“Here is something new!” she cried. “Whispering is forbidden! Are you afraid that we will say something against you, that we will hurt you?”