第11章

"Then if you see him, please tell him that we begin with the poisoning case." Breve was the public prosecutor, who was to read the indictment in this case.

In the corridor the secretary met Breve, who, with up lifted shoulders, a portfolio under one arm, the other swinging with the palm turned to the front, was hurrying along the corridor, clattering with his heels.

"Michael Petrovitch wants to know if you are ready? the secretary asked.

"Of course; I am always ready," said the public prosecutor. "What are we taking first?

"The poisoning case."

"That's quite right," said the public prosecutor, but did not think it at all right. He had spent the night in a hotel playing cards with a friend who was giving a farewell party. Up to five in the morning they played and drank, so he had no time to look at this poisoning case, and meant to run it through now. The secretary, happening to know this, advised the president to begin with the poisoning case. The secretary was a Liberal, even a Radical, in opinion.

Breve was a Conservative; the secretary disliked him, and envied him his position.

"Well, and how about the Skoptzy?" [a religious sect] asked the secretary.

"I have already said that I cannot do it without witnesses, and so I shall say to the Court."

"Dear me, what does it matter?"

"I cannot do it," said Breve; and, waving his arm, he ran into his private room.

He was putting off the case of the Skoptzy on account of the absence of a very unimportant witness, his real reason being that if they were tried by an educated jury they might possibly be acquitted.

By an agreement with the president this case was to be tried in the coming session at a provincial town, where there would be more peasants, and, therefore, more chances of conviction.

The movement in the corridor increased. The people crowded most at the doors of the Civil Court, in which the case that the dignified man talked about was being heard.

An interval in the proceeding occurred, and the old woman came out of the court, whose property that genius of an advocate had found means of getting for his client, a person versed in law who had no right to it whatever. The judges knew all about the case, and the advocate and his client knew it better still, but the move they had invented was such that it was impossible not to take the old woman's property and not to hand it over to the person versed in law.

The old woman was stout, well dressed, and had enormous flowers on her bonnet; she stopped as she came out of the door, and spreading out her short fat arms and turning to her advocate, she kept repeating. "What does it all mean? just fancy!"

The advocate was looking at the flowers in her bonnet, and evidently not listening to her, but considering some question or other.

Next to the old woman, out of the door of the Civil Court, his broad, starched shirt front glistening from under his low-cut waistcoat, with a self-satisfied look on his face, came the celebrated advocate who had managed to arrange matters so that the old woman lost all she had, and the person versed in the law received more than 100,000 roubles. The advocate passed close to the old woman, and, feeling all eyes directed towards him, his whole bearing seemed to say: "No expressions of deference are required."