go into the drawing-room. Here, as in the first house, a figure in a
black coat, with a sleepy face like a flunkey's, got up from a sofa in
the hall. Looking at this flunkey, at his face and his shabby black
coat, Vassilyev thought: "What must an ordinary simple Russian have gone
through before fate flung him down as a flunkey here? Where had he been
before and what had he done? What was awaiting him? Was he married?
Where was his mother, and did she know that he was a servant here?" And
Vassilyev could not help particularly noticing the flunkey in each
house. In one of the houses--he thought it was the fourth--there was a
little spare, frail-looking flunkey with a watch-chain on his waistcoat.
He was reading a newspaper, and took no notice of them when they went
in. Looking at his face Vassilyev, for some reason, thought that a man
with such a face might steal, might murder, might bear false witness.
But the face was really interesting: a big forehead, gray eyes, a little
flattened nose, thin compressed lips, and a blankly stupid and at the
same time insolent expression like that of a young harrier overtaking a
hare. Vassilyev thought it would be nice to touch this man's hair, to
see whether it was soft or coarse. It must be coarse like a dog's.
III
Having drunk two glasses of porter, the artist became suddenly tipsy and
grew unnaturally lively.
"Let's go to another!" he said peremptorily, waving his hands. "I will
take you to the best one."
When he had brought his friends to the house which in his opinion was
the best, he declared his firm intention of dancing a quadrille. The
medical student grumbled something about their having to pay the
musicians a rouble, but agreed to be his vis-a-vis. They began dancing.
It was just as nasty in the best house as in the worst. Here there were
just the same looking-glasses and pictures, the same styles of coiffure
and dress. Looking round at the furnishing of the rooms and the
costumes, Vassilyev realized that this was not lack of taste, but
something that might be called the taste, and even the style, of S.
Street, which could not be found elsewhere--something intentional in its
ugliness, not accidental, but elaborated in the course of years. After
he had been in eight houses he was no longer surprised at the color of
the dresses, at the long trains, the gaudy ribbons, the sailor dresses,
and the thick purplish rouge on the cheeks; he saw that it all had to be
like this, that if a single one of the women had been dressed like a
human being, or if there had been one decent engraving on the wall, the
general tone of the whole street would have suffered.
"How unskillfully they sell themselves!" he thought. "How can they fail
to understand that vice is only alluring when it is beautiful and
hidden, when it wears the mask of virtue? Modest black dresses, pale
faces, mournful smiles, and darkness would be far more effective than
this clumsy tawdriness. Stupid things! If they don't understand it of
themselves, their visitors might surely have taught them...."
A young lady in a Polish dress edged with white fur came up to him and
sat down beside him.
"You nice dark man, why aren't you dancing?" she asked. "Why are you so
dull?"
"Because it is dull."
"Treat me to some Lafitte. Then it won't be dull."
Vassilyev made no answer. He was silent for a little, and then asked:
"What time do you get to sleep?"
"At six o'clock."
"And what time do you get up?"
"Sometimes at two and sometimes at three."
"And what do you do when you get up?"
"We have coffee, and at six o'clock we have dinner."
"And what do you have for dinner?"
"Usually soup, beefsteak, and dessert. Our madam keeps the girls well.
But why do you ask all this?"
"Oh, just to talk...."
Vassilyev longed to talk to the young lady about many things. He felt an
intense desire to find out where she came from, whether her parents were
living, and whether they knew that she was here; how she had come into
this house; whether she were cheerful and satisfied, or sad and
oppressed by gloomy thoughts; whether she hoped some day to get out of
her present position.... But he could not think how to begin or in what
shape to put his questions so as not to seem impertinent. He thought for
a long time, and asked:
"How old are you?"
"Eighty," the young lady jested, looking with a laugh at the antics of
the artist as he danced.
All at once she burst out laughing at something, and uttered a long
cynical sentence loud enough to be heard by everyone. Vassilyev was
aghast, and not knowing how to look, gave a constrained smile. He was
the only one who smiled; all the others, his friends, the musicians, the
women, did not even glance towards his neighbor, but seemed not to have
heard her.
"Stand me some Lafitte," his neighbor said again.
Vassilyev felt a repulsion for her white fur and for her voice, and
walked away from her. It seemed to him hot and stifling, and his heart
began throbbing slowly but violently, like a hammer--one! two! three!
"Let us go away!" he said, pulling the artist by his sleeve.
"Wait a little; let me finish."
While the artist and the medical student were finishing the quadrille,
to avoid looking at the women, Vassilyev scrutinized the musicians. A
respectable-looking old man in spectacles, rather like Marshal Bazaine,
was playing the piano; a young man with a fair beard, dressed in the
latest fashion, was playing the violin. The young man had a face that
did not look stupid nor exhausted, but intelligent, youthful, and fresh.
He was dressed fancifully and with taste; he played with feeling. It was
a mystery how he and the respectable-looking old man had come here. How
was it they were not ashamed to sit here? What were they thinking about
when they looked at the women?
If the violin and the piano had been played by men in rags, looking
hungry, gloomy, drunken, with dissipated or stupid faces, then one could
have understood their presence, perhaps. As it was, Vassilyev could not
understand it at all. He recalled the story of the fallen woman he had
once read, and he thought now that that human figure with the guilty
smile had nothing in common with what he was seeing now. It seemed to
him that he was seeing not fallen women, but some different world quite
apart, alien to him and incomprehensible; if he had seen this world
before on the stage, or read of it in a book, he would not have believed
in it....
The woman with the white fur burst out laughing again and uttered a
loathsome sentence in a loud voice. A feeling of disgust took possession
of him. He flushed crimson and went out of the room.
"Wait a minute, we are coming too!" the artist shouted to him.
IV
"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."
VI
At home he lay on his bed and said, shuddering all over: "They are
alive! Alive! My God, those women are alive!"
He encouraged his imagination in all sorts of ways to picture himself
the brother of a fallen woman, or her father; then a fallen woman
herself, with her painted cheeks; and it all moved him to horror.
It seemed to him that he must settle the question at once at all costs,
and that this question was not one that did not concern him, but was his
own personal problem. He made an immense effort, repressed his despair,
and, sitting on the bed, holding his head in his hands, began thinking
how one could save all the women he had seen that day. The method for
attacking problems of all kinds was, as he was an educated man, well
known to him. And, however excited he was, he strictly adhered to that
method. He recalled the history of the problem and its literature, and
for a quarter of an hour he paced from one end of the room to the other
trying to remember all the methods practiced at the present time for
saving women. He had very many good friends and acquaintances who lived
in lodgings in Petersburg.... Among them were a good many honest and
self-sacrificing men. Some of them had attempted to save women....
"All these not very numerous attempts," thought Vassilyev, "can be
divided into three groups. Some, after buying the woman out of the
brothel, took a room for her, bought her a sewing-machine, and she
became a semptress. And whether he wanted to or not, after having bought
her out he made her his mistress; then when he had taken his degree, he
went away and handed her into the keeping of some other decent man as
though she were a thing. And the fallen woman remained a fallen woman.
Others, after buying her out, took a lodging apart for her, bought the
inevitable sewing-machine, and tried teaching her to read, preaching at
her and giving her books. The woman lived and sewed as long as it was
interesting and a novelty to her, then getting bored, began receiving
men on the sly, or ran away and went back where she could sleep till
three o'clock, drink coffee, and have good dinners. The third class, the
most ardent and self-sacrificing, had taken a bold, resolute step. They
had married them. And when the insolent and spoilt, or stupid and
crushed animal became a wife, the head of a household, and afterwards a
mother, it turned her whole existence and attitude to life upside down,
so that it was hard to recognize the fallen woman afterwards in the wife
and the mother. Yes, marriage was the best and perhaps the only means."
"But it is impossible!" Vassilyev said aloud, and he sank upon his bed.
"I, to begin with, could not marry one! To do that one must be a saint
and be unable to feel hatred or repulsion. But supposing that I, the
medical student, and the artist mastered ourselves and did marry
them--suppose they were all married. What would be the result? The result
would be that while here in Moscow they were being married, some
Smolensk accountant would be debauching another lot, and that lot would
be streaming here to fill the vacant places, together with others from
Saratov, Nizhni-Novgorod, Warsaw.... And what is one to do with the
hundred thousand in London? What's one to do with those in Hamburg?"
The lamp in which the oil had burnt down began to smoke. Vassilyev did
not notice it. He began pacing to and fro again, still thinking. Now he
put the question differently: what must be done that fallen women should
not be needed? For that, it was essential that the men who buy them and
do them to death should feel all the immorality of their share in
enslaving them and should be horrified. One must save the men.
"One won't do anything by art and science, that is clear..." thought
Vassilyev. "The only way out of it is missionary work."
And he began to dream how he would the next evening stand at the corner
of the street and say to every passer-by: "Where are you going and what
for? Have some fear of God!"