Ivanoff angrily pulled him along, but Soloveitchik shook him off with surprising vehemence, and he then clung to the trunk of a tree, as if he wished to resist being dragged away by main force.
“Oh! why, why, did you do that?” he whimpered.
“What a blackguardly thing to do!” shouted Yourii in Sanine’s face.
“Yes, blackguardly!” rejoined Sanine, with a scornful smile. “Would it have been better, do you suppose, to have let him hit me?”
Then, with a careless gesture, he walked rapidly along the avenue. Ivanoff looked at Yourii in disdain, lit a cigarette, and slowly followed Sanine. Even his broad back and smooth hair told one plainly how little such a scene as this affected him.
“How stupid and brutal man can be!” he murmured to himself.
Sanine glanced round once, and then walked faster.
“Just like brutes,” said Yourii, as he went away. He looked back, and the garden which he had always thought beautiful, and dim, and mysterious, seemed now, after what had happened, to have been shut off from the rest of the world, a sombre, dreary place.
Schafroff breathed hard, and looked nervously over his spectacles in all directions, as if he thought that at any moment, something equally dreadful might again occur.