CHAPTER XVI
In the middle of the winter everything suddenly trembled and shook. People anxiously opened their eyes, gesticulated, disputed furiously, and swore. As though severely wounded and blinded by a blow, they all stampeded to one place.
It began in this way. One evening on reaching the Department of Safety to hand in a hurried report of his investigations, Klimkov found something unusual and incomprehensible in the place. The officials, agents, and clerks appeared to have put on new faces. All seemed strangely unlike themselves. They wore an air of astonishment and rejoicing. They spoke now in very low tones and mysteriously, now aloud and angrily. There was a senseless running from room to room, a listening to one another's words, a suspicious screwing-up of anxious eyes, a shaking of heads and sighing, a sudden cessation of talk, and an equally sudden burst of disputing. A whirlwind of fear and perplexity swept the room in broad circles. Playing with the people's impotence it drove them about like dust, first blowing them into a pile, then scattering them on all sides. Klimkov stationed in a corner looked with vacant eyes upon this state of consternation, and listened to the conversation with strained attention.
He saw Melnikov with his powerful neck bent and his head stuck forward place his hairy hands on different persons' shoulders and demand in his low hollow voice:
"Why did the people do it?"
"What of it? The people must live. Hundreds were killed, eh? Wounded!" shouted Solovyov.
From somewhere came the repulsive voice of Sasha, cutting the ear.
"The priest ought to have been caught. That before everything else. The idiots!"
Krasavin walked about with his hands folded behind his back, biting his lips and rolling his eyes in every direction.
Quiet Viekov took up his stand beside Yevsey, and picked at the buttons of his vest.