“While we were dancing,” said the medical student, as they all three
went out into the street, “I had a conversation with my partner. We
talked about her first romance. He, the hero, was an accountant at
Smolensk with a wife and five children. She was seventeen, and she lived
with her papa and mamma, who sold soap and candles.”
“How did he win her heart?” asked Vassilyev.
“By spending fifty roubles on underclothes for her. What next!”
“So he knew how to get his partner’s story out of her,” thought
Vassilyev about the medical student. “But I don’t know how to.”
“I say, I am going home!” he said.
“What for?”
“Because I don’t know how to behave here. Besides, I am bored,
disgusted. What is there amusing in it? If they were human beings--but
they are savages and animals. I am going; do as you like.”
“Come, Grisha, Grigory, darling...” said the artist in a tearful
voice, hugging Vassilyev, “come along! Let’s go to one more together and
damnation take them!... Please do, Grisha!”
They persuaded Vassilyev and led him up a staircase. In the carpet and
the gilt banisters, in the porter who opened the door, and in the panels
that decorated the hall, the same S. Street style was apparent, but
carried to a greater perfection, more imposing.
“I really will go home!” said Vassilyev as he was taking off his coat.
“Come, come, dear boy,” said the artist, and he kissed him on the neck.
“Don’t be tiresome.... Gri-gri, be a good comrade! We came together,
we will go back together. What a beast you are, really!”
“I can wait for you in the street. I think it’s loathsome, really!”
“Come, come, Grisha.... If it is loathsome, you can observe it! Do
you understand? You can observe!”
“One must take an objective view of things,” said the medical student
gravely.
Vassilyev went into the drawing-room and sat down. There were a number
of visitors in the room besides him and his friends: two infantry
officers, a bald, gray-haired gentleman in spectacles, two beardless
youths from the institute of land-surveying, and a very tipsy man who
looked like an actor. All the young ladies were taken up with these
visitors and paid no attention to Vassilyev.
Only one of them, dressed _a la Aida,_ glanced sideways at him, smiled,
and said, yawning: “A dark one has come....”
Vassilyev’s heart was throbbing and his face burned. He felt ashamed
before these visitors of his presence here, and he felt disgusted and
miserable. He was tormented by the thought that he, a decent and loving
man (such as he had hitherto considered himself), hated these women and
felt nothing but repulsion towards them. He felt pity neither for the
women nor the musicians nor the flunkeys.
“It is because I am not trying to understand them,” he thought. “They
are all more like animals than human beings, but of course they are
human beings all the same, they have souls. One must understand them
and then judge....”
“Grisha, don’t go, wait for us,” the artist shouted to him and
disappeared.
The medical student disappeared soon after.
“Yes, one must make an effort to understand, one mustn’t be like
this....” Vassilyev went on thinking.
And he began gazing at each of the women with strained attention,
looking for a guilty smile. But either he did not know how to read their
faces, or not one of these women felt herself to be guilty; he read on
every face nothing but a blank expression of everyday vulgar boredom and
complacency. Stupid faces, stupid smiles, harsh, stupid voices, insolent
movements, and nothing else. Apparently each of them had in the past a
romance with an accountant based on underclothes for fifty roubles, and
looked for no other charm in the present but coffee, a dinner of three
courses, wines, quadrilles, sleeping till two in the afternoon....
Finding no guilty smile, Vassilyev began to look whether there was not
one intelligent face. And his attention was caught by one pale, rather
sleepy, exhausted-looking face.... It was a dark woman, not very
young, wearing a dress covered with spangles; she was sitting in an
easy-chair, looking at the floor lost in thought. Vassilyev walked from
one corner of the room to the other, and, as though casually, sat down
beside her.
“I must begin with something trivial,” he thought, “and pass to what is
serious....”
“What a pretty dress you have,” and with his finger he touched the gold
fringe of her fichu.
“Oh, is it?...” said the dark woman listlessly.
“What province do you come from?”
“I? From a distance.... From Tchernigov.”
“A fine province. It’s nice there.”
“Any place seems nice when one is not in it.”
“It’s a pity I cannot describe nature,” thought Vassilyev. “I might
touch her by a description of nature in Tchernigov. No doubt she loves
the place if she has been born there.”
“Are you dull here?” he asked.
“Of course I am dull.”
“Why don’t you go away from here if you are dull?”
“Where should I go to? Go begging or what?”
“Begging would be easier than living here.”
“How do you know that? Have you begged?”
“Yes, when I hadn’t the money to study. Even if I hadn’t anyone could
understand that. A beggar is anyway a free man, and you are a slave.”
The dark woman stretched, and watched with sleepy eyes the footman who
was bringing a trayful of glasses and seltzer water.
“Stand me a glass of porter,” she said, and yawned again.
“Porter,” thought Vassilyev. “And what if your brother or mother walked
in at this moment? What would you say? And what would they say? There
would be porter then, I imagine....”
All at once there was the sound of weeping. From the adjoining room,
from which the footman had brought the seltzer water, a fair man with
a red face and angry eyes ran in quickly. He was followed by the tall,
stout “madam,” who was shouting in a shrill voice:
“Nobody has given you leave to slap girls on the cheeks! We have
visitors better than you, and they don’t fight! Impostor!”
A hubbub arose. Vassilyev was frightened and turned pale. In the next
room there was the sound of bitter, genuine weeping, as though of
someone insulted. And he realized that there were real people living
here who, like people everywhere else, felt insulted, suffered, wept,
and cried for help. The feeling of oppressive hate and disgust gave way
to an acute feeling of pity and anger against the aggressor. He rushed
into the room where there was weeping. Across rows of bottles on a
marble-top table he distinguished a suffering face, wet with tears,
stretched out his hands towards that face, took a step towards the
table, but at once drew back in horror. The weeping girl was drunk.
As he made his way though the noisy crowd gathered about the fair man,
his heart sank and he felt frightened like a child; and it seemed to him
that in this alien, incomprehensible world people wanted to pursue him,
to beat him, to pelt him with filthy words.... He tore down his coat
from the hatstand and ran headlong downstairs.
V
Leaning against the fence, he stood near the house waiting for his
friends to come out. The sounds of the pianos and violins, gay,
reckless, insolent, and mournful, mingled in the air in a sort of chaos,
and this tangle of sounds seemed again like an unseen orchestra tuning
up on the roofs. If one looked upwards into the darkness, the black
background was all spangled with white, moving spots: it was snow
falling. As the snowflakes came into the light they floated round lazily
in the air like down, and still more lazily fell to the ground. The
snowflakes whirled thickly round Vassilyev and hung upon his beard,
his eyelashes, his eyebrows.... The cabmen, the horses, and the
passers-by were white.
“And how can the snow fall in this street!” thought Vassilyev.
“Damnation take these houses!”
His legs seemed to be giving way from fatigue, simply from having run
down the stairs; he gasped for breath as though he had been climbing
uphill, his heart beat so loudly that he could hear it. He was consumed
by a desire to get out of the street as quickly as possible and to go
home, but even stronger was his desire to wait for his companions and
vent upon them his oppressive feeling.
There was much he did not understand in these houses, the souls of
ruined women were a mystery to him as before; but it was clear to him
that the thing was far worse than could have been believed. If that
sinful woman who had poisoned herself was called fallen, it was
difficult to find a fitting name for all these who were dancing now to
this tangle of sound and uttering long, loathsome sentences. They were
not on the road to ruin, but ruined.
“There is vice,” he thought, “but neither consciousness of sin nor
hope of salvation. They are sold and bought, steeped in wine and
abominations, while they, like sheep, are stupid, indifferent, and don’t
understand. My God! My God!”
It was clear to him, too, that everything that is called human dignity,
personal rights, the Divine image and semblance, were defiled to their
very foundations--“to the very marrow,” as drunkards say--and that not
only the street and the stupid women were responsible for it.
A group of students, white with snow, passed him laughing and talking
gaily; one, a tall thin fellow, stopped, glanced into Vassilyev’s face,
and said in a drunken voice:
“One of us! A bit on, old man? Aha-ha! Never mind, have a good time!
Don’t be down-hearted, old chap!”
He took Vassilyev by the shoulder and pressed his cold wet mustache
against his cheek, then he slipped, staggered, and, waving both hands,
cried:
“Hold on! Don’t upset!”
And laughing, he ran to overtake his companions.
Through the noise came the sound of the artist’s voice:
“Don’t you dare to hit the women! I won’t let you, damnation take you!
You scoundrels!”
The medical student appeared in the doorway. He looked from side to
side, and seeing Vassilyev, said in an agitated voice:
“You here! I tell you it’s really impossible to go anywhere with Yegor!
What a fellow he is! I don’t understand him! He has got up a scene! Do
you hear? Yegor!” he shouted at the door. “Yegor!”
“I won’t allow you to hit women!” the artist’s piercing voice sounded
from above. Something heavy and lumbering rolled down the stairs. It was
the artist falling headlong. Evidently he had been pushed downstairs.
He picked himself up from the ground, shook his hat, and, with an angry
and indignant face, brandished his fist towards the top of the stairs
and shouted:
“Scoundrels! Torturers! Bloodsuckers! I won’t allow you to hit them! To
hit a weak, drunken woman! Oh, you brutes!...”
“Yegor!... Come, Yegor!...” the medical student began imploring
him. “I give you my word of honor I’ll never come with you again. On my
word of honor I won’t!”
Little by little the artist was pacified and the friends went homewards.
“Against my will an unknown force,” hummed the medical student, “has led
me to these mournful shores.”
“Behold the mill,” the artist chimed in a little later, “in ruins now.
What a lot of snow, Holy Mother! Grisha, why did you go? You are a funk,
a regular old woman.”
Vassilyev walked behind his companions, looked at their backs, and
thought:
“One of two things: either we only fancy prostitution is an evil, and
we exaggerate it; or, if prostitution really is as great an evil as is
generally assumed, these dear friends of mine are as much slaveowners,
violators, and murderers, as the inhabitants of Syria and Cairo, that
are described in the ‘Neva.’ Now they are singing, laughing, talking
sense, but haven’t they just been exploiting hunger, ignorance, and
stupidity? They have--I have been a witness of it. What is the use of
their humanity, their medicine, their painting? The science, art, and
lofty sentiments of these soul-destroyers remind me of the piece of
bacon in the story. Two brigands murdered a beggar in a forest; they
began sharing his clothes between them, and found in his wallet a piece
of bacon. ‘Well found,’ said one of them, ‘let us have a bit.’ ‘What do
you mean? How can you?’ cried the other in horror. ‘Have you forgotten
that to-day is Wednesday?’ And they would not eat it. After murdering a
man, they came out of the forest in the firm conviction that they were
keeping the fast. In the same way these men, after buying women, go
their way imagining that they are artists and men of science....”
“Listen!” he said sharply and angrily. “Why do you come here? Is it
possible--is it possible you don’t understand how horrible it is? Your
medical books tell you that every one of these women dies prematurely of
consumption or something; art tells you that morally they are dead even
earlier. Every one of them dies because she has in her time to entertain
five hundred men on an average, let us say. Each one of them is killed
by five hundred men. You are among those five hundred! If each of you in
the course of your lives visits this place or others like it two hundred
and fifty times, it follows that one woman is killed for every two of
you! Can’t you understand that? Isn’t it horrible to murder, two of you,
three of you, five of you, a foolish, hungry woman! Ah! isn’t it awful,
my God!”
“I knew it would end like that,” the artist said frowning. “We ought not
to have gone with this fool and ass! You imagine you have grand notions
in your head now, ideas, don’t you? No, it’s the devil knows what, but
not ideas. You are looking at me now with hatred and repulsion, but I
tell you it’s better you should set up twenty more houses like those
than look like that. There’s more vice in your expression than in the
whole street! Come along, Volodya, let him go to the devil! He’s a fool
and an ass, and that’s all....”
“We human beings do murder each other,” said the medical student. “It’s
immoral, of course, but philosophizing doesn’t help it. Good-by!”
At Trubnoy Square the friends said good-by and parted. When he was left
alone, Vassilyev strode rapidly along the boulevard. He felt frightened
of the darkness, of the snow which was falling in heavy flakes on the
ground, and seemed as though it would cover up the whole world; he
felt frightened of the street lamps shining with pale light through
the clouds of snow. His soul was possessed by an unaccountable,
faint-hearted terror. Passers-by came towards him from time to time,
but he timidly moved to one side; it seemed to him that women, none but
women, were coming from all sides and staring at him....
“It’s beginning,” he thought, “I am going to have a breakdown.”