Page:Dead Souls - A Poem by Nikolay Gogol - vol2.djvu/288

278 spot till you have mercy on me!' said Tchitchikov, not letting go his hold but pressing the prince's boot to his bosom, and together with it moving over the floor in his coat of the 'smoke and flame of Navarino.'

'Get away, I tell you!' said the prince, with that inexplicable feeling of repulsion which a man experiences at the sight of a hideous insect which he cannot bring himself to stamp upon. He shook himself so violently that Tchitchikov got a kick on his cheek, his agreeably rounded chin and teeth; but he did not let go of the foot, but pressed the boot still more warmly in his embrace. Two stalwart gendarmes dragged him away by force, and taking him under the arms led him through all the rooms. He was pale, shattered, in that numbly terrified condition in which a man is thrown who sees before him the black form of inevitable death, that monster so terrible and alien to our nature. …

Just in the doorway on the stairs he met Murazov. A ray of hope instantly gleamed upon him. In one instant he tore himself with unnatural force out of the hands of the gendarmes and fell at the feet of the astounded old man.

'My good sir, Pavel Ivanovitch, what is the matter?'

'Save me! they are taking me to prison, to death …' The gendarmes seized him and led him away, without letting him have a hearing.

A damp stinking cell, smelling of soldiers' boots and leg wrappers, an unpainted table,