“A nice mistake,” remarked the director dryly. “Now confess, haven’t you taken by mistake a penknife and a rouble. By mistake, mind you? Look through your pockets, my lad.”
Shura began to cry, and said through his tears: “I haven’t stolen anything.”
The director smiled. It was pleasant to provoke tears. Such beautiful and such large childish tears trickled down the pink cheeks in three separate streams: two streams of tears came from one eye, and only one from the other.
“If you haven’t stolen anything why do you cry?” said the director in a bantering tone. “I don’t even say that you have stolen. I assume that you merely made a mistake: caught hold of something that came into your hand, and then forgot all about it. Suppose you look through your pockets.”
Shura quickly drew from his pockets all the absurd trifles usually found on boys, and then turned both his pockets inside out.
“Nothing,” he said sadly.
The director gave him a searching look.
“You are sure it hasn’t dropped down in your clothes somewhere—the knife might have slipped into your boots, eh?”
He rang. The watchman came.
Shura was crying. And everything round him seemed to float in a rose mist, in the incomprehensible mental void of his degradation. They turned Shura about, felt him all over, searched him. Little by little they undressed him. First they took off his boots and shook them out; they did the same with his stockings. His belt, blouse and breeches followed. Everything was shaken out and searched.