People were especially afraid of his eyes. Small and keen,
they seemed to bore through a man like steel gimlets, and everyone
who met their gaze felt he was confronting a beast, a savage power,
inaccessible to fear, ready to strike unmercifully.
"Well, pack off, dirty vermin!" he said gruffly. His coarse, yellow
teeth glistened terribly through the thick hair on his face. The
men walked off uttering coward abuse.
"Dirty vermin!" he snapped at them, and his eyes gleamed with a smile
sharp as an awl. Then holding his head in an attitude of direct
challenge, with a short, thick pipe between his teeth, he walked
behind them, and now and then called out: "Well, who wants death?"
No one wanted it.
He spoke little, and "dirty vermin" was his favorite expression.
It was the name he used for the authorities of the factory, and
the police, and it was the epithet with which he addressed his wife:
"Look, you dirty vermin, don't you see my clothes are torn?"
When Pavel, his son, was a boy of fourteen, Vlasov was one day
seized with the desire to pull him by the hair once more. But Pavel
grasped a heavy hammer, and said curtly:
"Don't touch me!"
"What!" demanded his father, bending over the tall, slender figure
of his son like a shadow on a birch tree.
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