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It was as if they passed between her, and the ikons upon which she held her eyes riveted. And they all looked so simple, so strangely near to one another, yet so lone in life. Early next morning the mother went to Marya Korsunova. The peddler, noisy and greasy as usual, greeted her with friendly sympathy. "You are grieving?" Marya asked, patting the mother on the back. "Now, don't.
It began full of meaning and content, but now it dribbled away into a dismal waste, which stretched before her endlessly. The question swung to and fro in her barren, perplexed mind: "What now?" Korsunova came in. Waving her hands, she shouted, wept, and went into raptures; stamped her feet, suggested this and that, made promises, and threw out threats against somebody.
The mother divined that something was expected of her. She understood that she could be useful to her son, and she hastened to ask: "Well, now? What are we to do?" Samoylov stood in the doorway to answer. "Pelagueya Nilovna, you know Marya Korsunova, the peddler." "I do. Well?" "Speak to her; see if you can't get her to smuggle in our wares." "We could pay her, you know," interjected Yegor.
"I say, the children are our judges," the mother repeated with a sigh. He said something quickly and angrily, but his words buzzed around her without touching her. Marya Korsunova was a witness. She stood beside the mother, but did not look at her; and when the officer turned to her with a question, she invariably answered with a hasty, low bow: "I don't know, your Honor.
One evening Marya Korsunova rapped at the window from the street, and when the mother opened it, she said in a loud whisper: "Now, take care, Pelagueya; the boys have gotten themselves into a nice mess! It's been decided to make a search to-night in your house, and Mazin's and Vyesovshchikov's "
Vlasova's neighbor, Marya Korsunova, the blacksmith's widow, who sold food at the factory, on meeting the mother in the market place also said to her: "Look out for your son, Pelagueya!" "What's the matter?" "They're talking!" Marya tendered the information in a hushed voice. "And they don't say any good, mother of mine!
Marya Korsunova, in a chat with the mother, reflected the opinion of the police, with whom she associated as amicably as with everybody: "How is it possible to find the guilty man? That morning some hundred people met Isay, and ninety of them, if not more, might have given him the blow. During these eight years he has galled everybody." The Little Russian changed considerably.
This lightened her mute pain, which reverberated in her heart like a tight chord. The next day, early in the morning, very soon after Pavel and Andrey had left, Korsunova knocked at the door alarmingly, and called out hastily: "Isay is killed! Come, quick!" The mother trembled; the name of the assassin flashed through her mind. "Who did it?" she asked curtly, throwing a shawl over her shoulders.
"What are you talking about, Marya? Why, who could dream of such a thing about them?" the other ejaculated in fright. "Well, who killed him? Some one from among your people, of course!" said Korsunova, regarding the idea as a matter to be taken for granted. "Everybody knows he spied on them." The mother stopped to fetch breath, and put her hand to her bosom. "What are you going on that way for?
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