Meanwhile the Meeting had been vociferating in front of the office. The business before them was not a trifling one. Almost all the peasants were present. While the steward was with the proprietress they put on their caps, more voices joined in, and they talked more loudly. The hum of the deep voices, at rare intervals interrupted by breathless hoarse and shrill tones, filled the air, and entering through the windows of the proprietress’s house sounded like the noise of the distant sea, making her feel a nervous agitation resembling that produced by a heavy thunderstorm—a sensation between fear and discomfort. She felt as if the voices might at any moment grow yet louder and faster, and then something would happen.
“As if it could not all be done quietly, peaceably, without disputing and shouting,” she thought, “according to the Christian law of brotherly love and meekness!”
Many voices were speaking at once, but Theodore Resoún, a carpenter, shouted loudest. There were two grown-up young men in his family, and he was attacking the Doútlofs. Old Doútlof was defending himself: he had stepped forward out of the crowd behind which he had at first stood. Now spreading out his arms, now clutching at his little beard, he sputtered and snuffled in such a manner that it would have been hard for himself to understand what he was saying. His sons and nephews—splendid fellows, all of them—stood pressing behind him, and the old man resembled the mother-hen in the game of hawk-and-chickens. The hawk was Resoún; and not only Resoún, but all the men who had two grown lads in their family, were attacking Doútlof. The point was, that Doútlof’s brother had been recruited thirty years before, and that Doútlof wished to be excused therefore from taking his turn with the