Vassiliev, and he began to examine intently the face of each girl,
looking for the guilty smile. But whether he could not read faces or
because none of these women felt guilty he saw in each face only a dull
look of common, vulgar boredom and satiety. Stupid eyes, stupid smiles,
harsh, stupid voices, impudent gestures--and nothing else. Evidently
every woman had in her past a love romance with a bookkeeper and fifty
roubles'-worth of underclothes. And in the present the only good things
in life were coffee, a three-course dinner, wine, quadrilles, and
sleeping till two in the afternoon....
Finding not one guilty smile, Vassiliev began to examine them to see if
even one looked clever and his attention was arrested by one pale,
rather tired face. It was that of a dark woman no longer young, wearing
a dress scattered with spangles. She sat in a chair staring at the floor
and thinking of something. Vassiliev paced up and down and then sat down
beside her as if by accident.
"One must begin with something trivial," he thought, "and gradually pass
on to serious conversation...."
"What a beautiful little dress you have on," he said, and touched the
gold fringe of her scarf with his finger.
"It's all right," said the dark woman.
"Where do you come from?"
"I? A long way. From Tchernigov."
"It's a nice part."
"It always is, where you don't happen to be."
"What a pity I can't describe nature," thought Vassiliev. "I'd move her
by descriptions of Tchernigov. She must love it if she was born there."
"Do you feel lonely here?" he asked.
"Of course I'm lonely."
"Why don't you go away from here, if you're lonely?"
"Where shall I go to? Start begging, eh?"
"It's easier to beg than to live here."
"Where did you get that idea? Have you been a beggar?"
"I begged, when I hadn't enough to pay my university fees; and even if I
hadn't begged it's easy enough to understand. A beggar is a free man, at
any rate, and you're a slave."
The dark woman stretched herself, and followed with sleepy eyes the
lackey who carried a tray of glasses and soda-water.
"Stand us a champagne," she said, and yawned again.
"Champagne," said Vassiliev. "What would happen if your mother or your
brother suddenly came in? What would you say? And what would they say?
You would say 'champagne' then."
Suddenly the noise of crying was heard. From the next room where the
lackey had carried the soda-water, a fair man rushed out with a red face
and angry eyes. He was followed by the tall, stout madame, who screamed
in a squeaky voice:
"No one gave you permission to slap the girls in the face. Better class
than you come here, and never slap a girl. You bounder!"
Followed an uproar. Vassiliev was scared and went white. In the next
room some one wept, sobbing, sincerely, as only the insulted weep. And
he understood that indeed human beings lived here, actually human
beings, who get offended, suffer, weep, and ask for help. The
smouldering hatred, the feeling of repulsion, gave way to an acute sense
of pity and anger against the wrong-doer. He rushed into the room from
which the weeping came. Through the rows of bottles which stood on the
marble table-top he saw a suffering tear-stained face, stretched out his
hands towards this face, stepped to the table and instantly gave a leap
back in terror. The sobbing woman was dead-drunk.
As he made his way through the noisy crowd, gathered round the fair man,
his heart failed him, he lost his courage like a boy, and it seemed to
him that in this foreign, inconceivable world, they wanted to run after
him, to beat him, to abuse him with foul words. He tore down his coat
from the peg and rushed headlong down the stairs. V
Pressing dose to the fence, he stood near to the house and waited for
his friends to come out. The sounds of the pianos and fiddles, gay,
bold, impudent and sad, mingled into chaos in the air, and this
confusion was, as before, as if an unseen orchestra were tuning in the
dark over the roof-tops. If he looked up towards the darkness, then all
the background was scattered with white, moving points: it was snowing.
The flakes, coming into the light, spun lazily in the air like feathers,
and still more lazily fell. Flakes of snow crowded whirling about
Vassiliev, and hung on his beard, his eyelashes, his eyebrows. The
cabmen, the horses, and the passers-by, all were white.
"How dare the snow fall in this street?" thought Vassiliev. "A curse on
these houses."
Because of his headlong rush down the staircase his feet failed him from
weariness; he was out of breath as if he had climbed a mountain. His
heart beat so loud that he could hear it. A longing came over him to get
out of this street as soon as possible and go home; but still stronger
was his desire to wait for his friends and to vent upon them his feeling
of heaviness.
He had not understood many things in the houses. The souls of the
perishing women were to him a mystery as before; but it was dear to him
that the business was much worse than one would have thought. If the
guilty woman who poisoned herself was called a prostitute, then it was
hard to find a suitable name for all these creatures, who danced to the
muddling music and said long, disgusting phrases. They were not
perishing; they were already done for.
"Vice is here," he thought; "but there is neither confession of sin nor
hope of salvation. They are bought and sold, drowned in wine and torpor,
and they are dull and indifferent as sheep and do not understand. My
God, my God!"
It was so dear to him that all that which is called human dignity,
individuality, the image and likeness of God, was here dragged down to
the gutter, as they say of drunkards, and that not only the street and
the stupid women were to blame for it.
A crowd of students white with snow, talking and laughing gaily, passed
by. One of them, a tall, thin man, peered into Vassiliev's face and said
drunkenly, "He's one of ours. Logged, old man? Aha! my lad. Never mind.
Walk up, never say die, uncle."
He took Vassiliev by the shoulders and pressed his cold wet moustaches
to his cheek, then slipped, staggered, brandished his arms, and cried
out:
"Steady there--don't fall."
Laughing, he ran to join his comrades.
Through the noise the painter's voice became audible.
"You dare beat women! I won't have it. Go to Hell. You're regular
swine."
The medico appeared at the door of the house. He glanced round and on
seeing Vassiliev, said in alarm:
"Is that you? My God, it's simply impossible to go anywhere with Yegor.
I can't understand a chap like that. He kicked up a row--can't you hear?
Yegor," he called from the door. "Yegor!"
"I won't have you hitting women." The painter's shrill voice was audible
again from upstairs.
Something heavy and bulky tumbled down the staircase. It was the painter
coming head over heels. He had evidently been thrown out.
He lifted himself up from the ground, dusted his hat, and with an angry
indignant face, shook his fist at the upstairs.
"Scoundrels! Butchers! Bloodsuckers! I won't have you hitting a weak,
drunken woman. Ah, you...."
"Yegor ... Yegor!" the medico began to implore, "I give my word I'll
never go out with you again. Upon my honour, I won't."
The painter gradually calmed, and the friends went home.
"To these sad shores unknowing"--the medico began--"An unknown power
entices...."
"Behold the mill," the painter sang with him after a pause, "Now fallen
into ruin." How the snow is falling, most Holy Mother. Why did you go
away, Grisha? You're a coward; you're only an old woman."
Vassiliev was walking behind his friends. He stared at their backs and
thought: "One of two things: either prostitution only seems to us an
evil and we exaggerate it, or if prostitution is really such an evil as
is commonly thought, these charming friends of mine are just as much
slavers, violators, and murderers as the inhabitants of Syria and Cairo
whose photographs appear in 'The Field.' They're singing, laughing,
arguing soundly now, but haven't they just been exploiting starvation,
ignorance, and stupidity? They have, I saw them at it. Where does their
humanity, their science, and their painting come in, then? The science,
art, and lofty sentiments of these murderers remind me of the lump of
fat in the story. Two robbers killed a beggar in a forest; they began to
divide his clothes between themselves and found in his bag a lump of
pork fat. 'In the nick of time,' said one of them. 'Let's have a bite!'
'How can you?' the other cried in terror. 'Have you forgotten to-day's
Friday?' So they refrained from eating. After having cut the man's
throat they walked out of the forest confident that they were pious
fellows. These two are just the same. When they've paid for women they
go and imagine they're painters and scholars....
"Listen, you two," he said angrily and sharply. "Why do you go to those
places? Can't you understand how horrible they are? Your medicine tells
you every one of these women dies prematurely from consumption or
something else; your arts tell you that she died morally still earlier.
Each of them dies because during her lifetime she accepts on an average,
let us say, five hundred men. Each of them is killed by five hundred
men, and you're amongst the five hundred. Now if each of you comes here
and to places like this two hundred and fifty times in his lifetime,
then it means that between you you have killed one woman. Can't you
understand that? Isn't it horrible?"
"Ah, isn't this awful, my God?"
"There, I knew it would end like this," said the painter frowning. "We
oughtn't to have had anything to do with this fool of a blockhead. I
suppose you think your head's full of great thoughts and great ideas
now. Devil knows what they are, but they're not ideas. You're staring at
me now with hatred and disgust; but if you want my opinion you'd better
build twenty more of the houses than look like that. There's more vice
in your look than in the whole street. Let's dear out, Volodya, damn
him! He's a fool. He's a blockhead, and that's all he is."
"Human beings are always killing each other," said the medico. "That is
immoral, of course. But philosophy won't help you. Good-bye!"
The friends parted at Trubnoi Square and went their way. Left alone,
Vassiliev began to stride along the boulevard. He was frightened of the
dark, frightened of the snow, which fell to the earth in little flakes,
but seemed to long to cover the whole world; he was frightened of the
street-lamps, which glimmered faintly through the clouds of snow. An
inexplicable faint-hearted fear possessed his soul. Now and then people
passed him; but he gave a start and stepped aside. It seemed to him that
from everywhere there came and stared at him women, only women....
"It's coming on," he thought, "I'm going to have a fit." VI
At home he lay on his bed and began to talk, shivering all over his
body.
"Live women, live.... My God, they're alive."
He sharpened the edge of his imagination in every possible way. Now he
was the brother of an unfortunate, now her father. Now he was himself a
fallen woman, with painted cheeks; and all this terrified him.
It seemed to him somehow that he must solve this question immediately,
at all costs, and that the problem was not strange to him, but was his
own. He made a great effort, conquered his despair, and, sitting on the
side of the bed, his head clutched in his hands, he began to think:
How could all the women he had seen that night be saved? The process of
solving a problem was familiar to him as to a learned person; and
notwithstanding all his excitement he kept strictly to this process. He
recalled to mind the history of the question, its literature, and just
after three o'clock he was pacing up and down, trying to remember all
the experiments which are practised nowadays for the salvation of women.
He had a great many good friends who lived in furnished rooms, Falzfein,
Galyashkin, Nechaiev, Yechkin ... not a few among them were honest and
self-sacrificing, and some of them had attempted to save these women....
All these few attempts, thought Vassiliev, rare attempts, may be divided
into three groups. Some having rescued a woman from a brothel hired a
room for her, bought her a sewing-machine and she became a dressmaker,
and the man who saved her kept her for his mistress, openly or
otherwise, but later when he had finished his studies and was going
away, he would hand her over to another decent fellow. So the fallen
woman remained fallen. Others after having bought her out also hired a
room for her, bought the inevitable sewing-machine and started her off
reading and writing and preached at her. The woman sits and sews as long
as it is novel and amusing, but later, when she is bored, she begins to
receive men secretly, or runs back to where she can sleep till three in
the afternoon, drink coffee, and eat till she is full. Finally, the most
ardent and self-sacrificing take a bold, determined step. They marry,
and when the impudent, self-indulgent, stupefied creature becomes a
wife, a lady of the house, and then a mother, her life and outlook are
utterly changed, and in the wife and mother it is hard to recognise the
unfortunate woman. Yes, marriage is the best, it may be the only,
resource.
"But it's impossible," Vassiliev said aloud and threw himself down on
his bed. "First of all, I could not marry one. One would have to be a
saint to be able to do it, unable to hate, not knowing disgust. But let
us suppose that the painter, the medico, and I got the better of our
feelings and married, that all these women got married, what is the
result? What kind of effect follows? The result is that while the women
get married here in Moscow, the Smolensk bookkeeper seduces a fresh lot,
and these will pour into the empty places, together with women from
Saratov, Nijni-Novgorod, Warsaw.... And what happens to the hundred
thousand in London? What can be done with those in Hamburg?
The oil in the lamp was used up and the lamp began to smell. Vassiliev
did not notice it. Again he began to pace up and down, thinking. Now he
put the question differently. What can be done to remove the demand for
fallen women? For this it is necessary that the men who buy and kill
them should at once begin to feel all the immorality of their rôle of
slave-owners, and this should terrify them. It is necessary to save the
men.
Science and art apparently won't do, thought Vassiliev. There is only
one way out--to be an apostle.
And he began to dream how he would stand to-morrow evening at the corner
of the street and say to each passer-by: "Where are you going and what
for? Fear God!"
He would turn to the indifferent cabmen and say to them:
"Why are you standing here? Why don't you revolt? You do believe in God,
don't you? And you do know that this is a crime, and that people will go
to Hell for this? Why do you keep quiet, then? True, the women are
strangers to you, but they have fathers and brothers exactly the same as
you...."
Some friend of Vassiliev's once said of him that he was a man of talent.
There is a talent for writing, for the theatre, for painting; but
Vassiliev's was peculiar, a talent for humanity. He had a fine and noble
flair for every kind of suffering. As a good actor reflects in himself
the movement and voice of another, so Vassiliev could reflect in himself
another's pain. Seeing tears, he wept. With a sick person, he himself
became sick and moaned. If he saw violence done, it seemed to him that
he was the victim. He was frightened like a child, and, frightened, ran
for help. Another's pain roused him, excited him, threw him into a state
of ecstasy....
Whether the friend was right I do not know, but what happened to
Vassiliev when it seemed to him that the question was solved was very
much like an ecstasy. He sobbed, laughed, said aloud the things he would
say to-morrow, felt a burning love for the men who would listen to him
and stand by his side at the corner of the street, preaching. He sat
down to write to them; he made vows.
All this was the more like an ecstasy in that it did not last. Vassiliev
was soon tired. The London women, the Hamburg women, those from Warsaw,
crushed him with their mass, as the mountains crush the earth. He
quailed before this mass; he lost himself; he remembered he had no gift
for speaking, that he was timid and faint-hearted, that strange people
would hardly want to listen to and understand him, a law-student in his
third year, a frightened and insignificant figure. The true apostleship
consisted, not only in preaching, but also in deeds....
When daylight came and the carts rattled on the streets, Vassiliev lay
motionless on the sofa, staring at one point. He did not think any more
of women, or men, or apostles. All his attention was fixed on the pain
of his soul which tormented him. It was a dull pain, indefinite, vague;
it was like anguish and the most acute fear and despair. He could say
where the pain was. It was in his breast, under the heart. It could not
be compared to anything. Once on a time he used to have violent
toothache. Once, he had pleurisy and neuralgia. But all these pains were
as nothing beside the pain of his soul. Beneath this pain life seemed
repulsive. The thesis, his brilliant work already written, the people he
loved, the salvation of fallen women, all that which only yesterday he
loved or was indifferent to, remembered now, irritated him in the same
way as the noise of the carts, the running about of the porters and the
daylight.... If someone now were to perform before his eyes a deed of
mercy or an act of revolting violence, both would produce upon him an
equally repulsive impression. Of all the thoughts which roved lazily in
his head, two only did not irritate him: one--at any moment he had the
power to kill himself, the other--that the pain would not last more than
three days. The second he knew from experience.
After having lain down for a while he got up and walked wringing his
hands, not from corner to corner as usually, but in a square along the
walls. He caught a glimpse of himself in the glass. His face was pale
and haggard, his temples hollow, his eyes bigger, darker, more immobile,
as if they were not his own, and they expressed the intolerable
suffering of his soul.
In the afternoon the painter knocked at the door.
"Gregory, are you at home?" he asked.
Receiving no answer, he stood musing for a while, and said to himself
good-naturedly:
"Out. He's gone to the University. Damn him."
And went away.
Vassiliev lay down on his bed and burying his head in the pillow he
began to cry with the pain. But the faster his tears flowed, the more
terrible was the pain. When it was dark, he got into his mind the idea
of the horrible night which was awaiting him and awful despair seized
him. He dressed quickly, ran out of his room, leaving the door wide
open, and into the street without reason or purpose. Without asking
himself where he was going, he walked quickly to Sadovaia Street.
Snow was falling as yesterday. It was thawing. Putting his hands into
his sleeves, shivering, and frightened of the noises and the bells of
the trams and of passers-by, Vassiliev walked from Sadovaia to Sukhariev
Tower then to the Red Gates, and from here he turned and went to
Basmannaia. He went into a public-house and gulped down a big glass of
vodka, but felt no better. Arriving at Razgoulyai, he turned to the
right and began to stride down streets that he had never in his life
been down before. He came to that old bridge under which the river
Yaouza roars and from whence long rows of lights are seen in the windows
of the Red Barracks. In order to distract the pain of his soul by a new
sensation or another pain, not knowing what to do, weeping and
trembling, Vassiliev unbuttoned his coat and jacket, baring his naked
breast to the damp snow and the wind. Neither lessened the pain. Then he
bent over the rail of the bridge and stared down at the black, turbulent
Yaouza, and he suddenly wanted to throw himself head-first, not from
hatred of life, not for the sake of suicide, but only to hurt himself
and so to kill one pain by another. But the black water, the dark,
deserted banks covered with snow were frightening. He shuddered and went
on. He walked as far as the Red Barracks, then back and into a wood,
from the wood to the bridge again.
"No! Home, home," he thought. "At home I believe it's easier."
And he went back. On returning home he tore off his wet clothes and hat,
began to pace along the walls, and paced incessantly until the very
morning. VII
The next morning when the painter and the medico came to see him, they
found him in a shirt torn to ribbons, his hands bitten all over, tossing
about in the room and moaning with pain.
"For God's sake!" he began to sob, seeing his comrades, "Take me
anywhere you like, do what you like, but save me, for God's sake now,
now! I'll kill myself."
The painter went pale and was bewildered. The medico, too, nearly began
to cry; but, believing that medical men must be cool and serious on
every occasion of life, he said coldly:
"It's a fit you've got. But never mind. Come to the doctor, at once."
"Anywhere you like, but quickly, for God's sake!"
"Don't be agitated. You must struggle with yourself."
The painter and the medico dressed Vassiliev with trembling hands and
led him into the street.
"Mikhail Sergueyich has been wanting to make your acquaintance for a
long while," the medico said on the way. "He's a very nice man, and
knows his job splendidly. He took his degree in '82, and has got a huge
practice already. He keeps friends with the students."
"Quicker, quicker...." urged Vassiliev. Mikhail Sergueyich, a stout
doctor with fair hair, received the friends politely, firmly, coldly,
and smiled with one cheek only.
"The painter and Mayer have told me of your disease already," he said.
"Very glad to be of service to you. Well? Sit down, please."
He made Vassiliev sit down in a big chair by the table, and put a box of
cigarettes in front of him.
"Well?" he began, stroking his knees. "Let's make a start. How old are
you?"
He put questions and the medico answered. He asked whether Vassiliev's
father suffered from any peculiar diseases, if he had fits of drinking,
was he distinguished by his severity or any other eccentricities. He
asked the same questions about his grandfather, mother, sisters, and
brothers. Having ascertained that his mother had a fine voice and
occasionally appeared on the stage, he suddenly brightened up and asked:
"Excuse me, but could you recall whether the theatre was not a passion
with your mother?"
About twenty minutes passed. Vassiliev was bored by the doctor stroking
his knees and talking of the same thing all the while.
"As far as I can understand your questions, Doctor," he said. "You want
to know whether my disease is hereditary or not. It is not hereditary."
The doctor went on to ask if Vassiliev had not any secret vices in his
early youth, any blows on the head, any love passions, eccentricities,
or exceptional infatuations. To half the questions habitually asked by
careful doctors you may return no answer without any injury to your
health; but Mikhail Sergueyich, the medico and the painter looked as
though, if Vassiliev failed to answer even one single question,
everything would be ruined. For some reason the doctor wrote down the
answers he received on a scrap of paper. Discovering that Vassiliev had
already passed through the faculty of natural science and was now in the
Law faculty, the doctor began to be pensive....
"He wrote a brilliant thesis last year...." said the medico.
"Excuse me. You mustn't interrupt me; you prevent me from
concentrating," the doctor said, smiling with one cheek. "Yes, certainly
that is important for the anamnesis.... Yes, yes.... And do you drink
vodka?" he turned to Vassiliev.
"Very rarely."
Another twenty minutes passed. The medico began sotto voce to give his
opinion of the immediate causes of the fit and told how he, the painter
and Vassiliev went to S----v Street the day before yesterday.
The indifferent, reserved, cold tone in which his friends and the doctor
were speaking of the women and the miserable street seemed to him in the
highest degree strange....
"Doctor, tell me this one thing," he said, restraining himself from
being rude. "Is prostitution an evil or not?"
"My dear fellow, who disputes it?" the doctor said with an expression as
though he had long ago solved all these questions for himself. "Who
disputes it?"
"Are you a psychiatrist?"
"Yes-s, a psychiatrist."