»Listen! I'll show you something! Look here, at my hands!«
Merry and curious, they looked at his hands, and waited obediently, like children, with gaping mouths.
»Here! Here! See?« He shook his hands. »I hold my life in my hands! Do you see?«
»Yes! Yes! Go on!«
»My life was noble, it was! It was pure and beautiful. Yes, it was! It was like those pretty porcelain vases. And now, look! I fling it away....« He let fall his hands, almost with a groan, and all their eyes looked downwards as though there really lay something down there, something delicate and brittle, that had been shattered into fragments—a beautiful human life.
»Trample on it, now, girls! Trample it to pieces until not a bit of it is left!«
Like children enjoying a new game, with a whoop and a laugh, they leapt up and began trampling on the spot where lay the fragments of that invisible dainty porcelain, a beautiful human life. Gradually a new frenzy overcame them. The laughter and shrieks died away, and nothing but their heavy breathing was audible above the continuous stamping and clatter of feet—rabid, unrelenting, implacable.
Liuba, like an affronted queen, watched it a moment over his shoulder with savage eyes; then suddenly, as though she had only just understood and been driven mad, with a wild groan of elation she burst into the midst of the jostling women and joined the trampling in a faster measure. But for the earnestness of the drunken faces, the ferocity of the bleary eyes, the wickedness of the depraved and twisted mouths, it might all have been taken for some new kind of dance without music, without rhythm.
With his fingers gripping into his hard bristly skull, the man looked on, calm and grim.