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most elementary politeness.’
‘I ask you for the second time — need I take off my shirt
or not?’ he said, still more sharply and irritably.
‘Don’t trouble yourself. We will tell you what to do,’
Nikolay Parfenovitch said, and his voice was positively pe-
remptory, or so it seemed to Mitya.
Meantime a consultation was going on in undertones
between the lawyers. There turned out to be on the coat, es-
pecially on the left side at the back, a huge patch of blood,
dry, and still stiff. There were bloodstains on the trousers,
too. Nikolay Parfenovitch, moreover, in the presence of the
peasant witnesses, passed his fingers along the collar, the
cuffs, and all the seams of the coat and trousers, obviously
looking for something — money, of course. He didn’t even
hide from Mitya his suspicion that he was capable of sewing
money up in his clothes.
‘He treats me not as an officer but as a thief,’ Mitya mut-
tered to himself. They communicated their ideas to one
another with amazing frankness. The secretary, for in-
stance, who was also behind the curtain, fussing about and
listening, called Nikolay Parfenovitch’s attention to the cap,
which they were also fingering.
‘You remember Gridyenko, the copying clerk,’ observed
the secretary. ‘Last summer he received the wages of the
whole office, and pretended to have lost the money when he
was drunk. And where was it found? Why, in just such pip-
ings in his cap. The hundred-rouble notes were screwed up
in little rolls and sewed in the piping.’
Both the lawyers remembered Gridyenko’s case perfect-