Then their ranks opened slowly to let them pass, and closed after them, surging round the head official, with the dull angry hum of a furious mob; catching their breaths, cursing low, and one or other of them every now and then uttering such words as these: “Every creature has its own voice; we alone are forbidden our own!” “Always commands, and naught except commands! Obey, and pay, and sweep the ground with your hat, you peasant!” “They’ll make us soon ask leave ... to go behind the barn!” “So mighty a man, let him command swine to sing as nightingales!” Antek cried. They laughed, and he went on, greatly excited: “Or bid geese to low like cows! When they do, we’ll vote the school!” “They tax us, we pay; they recruit us, we go; but beware of....” “Hold your peace, Klemba!—His Majesty the Czar himself has decreed in the clearest words that our schools and law courts are to use Polish! Yes, the Czar himself has decreed it: him shall we obey!” Antek vociferated. “Who are you?” the head official said to him, with eyes intently fixed upon his face. “Who am I?—It stands there in black and white,” Antek replied boldly, pointing to the papers on the table, though he felt his heart throb as he did so. “I am no magpie’s dropping!” he added with bravado. The head spoke to the scrivener, who after a while proclaimed the fact that Antek Boryna, not being yet cleared of a criminal charge, had no right to take any part in the Assembly of the Commune. Antek flushed angrily, but, before he could utter a word, the District Official cried out to him: “Get him out!” indicating him to the gendarmes with a significant look. “Boys, never vote this school! Right is on our side: have no fear!” Antek shouted indomitably. And with slow steps he went out of the village, looking back at the gendarmes following him yet more slowly still, as a wolf might glare at a couple of curs. But the incident had brought disorder into the meeting again. Each man seemed possessed of a devil—screaming, cursing, quarrelling, threatening—no one knew why or wherefore! Their invectives bore, not only on the school and Antek, but on indifferent and wholly irrelevant matters—just as if a sudden madness had seized upon them. Gregory and others of his party strove to calm them, but unavailingly: they were blind and deaf to everything, gobbling one at another furiously, like irritated turkeys in a poultry-yard. At last, one of the Soltyses, seeing an empty barrel that stood under the eaves of the house, had the idea of beating upon it with his stick so frantically, so madly, and with such loud and hollow bombilation, that it partly brought them to their senses again. Thereupon the head official, who was beside himself with rage, exclaimed: “Enough of this prating! Silence! Silence, when I speak!—Obey me.—Vote the school.”