YAMA [THE PIT]
Of this edition, intended for private circulation only, and printed
from type on Berkeley Antique laid paper, 950 copies have been printed
for America, and 550 for Great Britain. Also, 55 unnumbered copies, for
the press.
This copy is Number 223
YAMA [THE PIT]
A NOVEL IN THREE PARTS
BY ALEXANDRA KUPRIN
TRANSLATED FROM THE RUSSIAN
BY BERNARD GUILBERT GUERNEY
“All the horror is in just this, that there is no horror ...”
AUTHOR’S DEDICATION
I know that many will find this novel immoral and indecent;
nevertheless, I dedicate it with all my heart to MOTHERS AND YOUTHS—A.
K.
TRANSLATOR’S DEDICATION
I dedicate the labour of translation, in all humility and sincerity, to
K. ANDRAE. B. G. G.
Contents
INTRODUCTION
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE
PART ONE
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER IX
CHAPTER X
CHAPTER XI
CHAPTER XII
PART TWO
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER IX
CHAPTER X
CHAPTER XI
CHAPTER XII
CHAPTER XIII
CHAPTER XIV
CHAPTER XV
CHAPTER XVI
CHAPTER XVII
PART THREE
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER IX
INTRODUCTION
“With us, you see,” Kuprin makes the reporter Platonov, his mouthpiece,
say in Yama, “they write about detectives, about lawyers, about
inspectors of the revenue, about pedagogues, about attorneys, about the
police, about officers, about sensual ladies, about engineers, about
baritones—and really, by God, altogether well—cleverly, with finesse
and talent. But, after all, all these people are rubbish, and their
life is not life, but some sort of conjured up, spectral, unnecessary
delirium of world culture. But there are two singular realities—ancient
as humanity itself: the prostitute and the moujik. And about them we
know nothing, save some tinsel, gingerbread, debauched depictions in
literature...”
Tinsel, gingerbread, debauched depictions... Let us consider some of
the ways in which this monstrous reality has been approached by various
writers. There is, first, the purely sentimental: Prevost’s _Manon
Lescaut_. Then there is the slobberingly sentimental: Dumas’ _Dame aux
Camélias_. A third is the necrophilically romantic: Louys’ _Aphrodite_.
The fertile Balzac has given us no less than two: the purely romantic,
in his fascinating portraits of the Fair Imperia; and the romantically
realistic, in his _Splendeurs et Misères des Courtisanes_. Reade’s _Peg
Woffington_ may be called the literary parallel of the costume drama;
Defoe’s _Moll Flanders_ is honestly realistic; Zola’s _Nana_ is rabidly
so.
There is one singular fact that must be noted in connection with the
vast majority of such depictions. Punk or bona roba, lorette or
drab—put her before an artist in letters, and, lo and behold ye! such
is the strange allure emanating from the hussy, that the resultant
portrait is either that of a martyred Magdalene, or, at the very least,
has all the enigmatic piquancy of a Monna Lisa... Not a slut, but what
is a hetaera; and not a hetaera, but what is well-nigh Kypris herself!
I know of but one depiction in all literature that possesses the
splendour of implacable veracity as well as undiminished artistry;
where the portrait is that of a prostitute, despite all her tirings and
trappings; a depiction truly deserving to be designated a portrait: the
portrait supreme of the harlot eternal—Shakespeare’s Cleopatra.
Furthermore, it will be observed that such depictions, for the most
part, are primarily portraits of prostitutes, and not pictures of
prostitution. It is also a singular fact that war, another scourge has
met with similar treatment. We have the pretty, spotless grenadiers and
cuirassiers of Meissonier in plenty; Vereshchagin is still alone in the
grim starkness of his wind-swept, snow-covered battle-fields, with
black crows wheeling over the crumpled masses of gray...
And, curiously enough, it is another great Russian, Kuprin, who is
supreme—if not unique—as a painter of the universal scourge of
prostitution, per se; and not as an incidental background for
portraits. True, he may not have entirely escaped the strange allure,
aforementioned, of the femininity he paints; for femininity—even though
fallen, corrupt, abased, is still femininity, one of the miracles of
life, to Kuprin, the lover of life. But, even if he may be said to have
used too much of the oil of sentimentality in mixing his colours for
the portraits, his portraits are subordinate to the background; and
there his eye is true and keen, his hand steady and unflinching, his
colours and brushwork unimpeachable. Whether, like his own Platonov—who
may be called to some extent an autobiographical figure, and many of
whose experiences are Kuprin’s own—“came upon the brothel” and gathered
his material unconsciously, “without any ulterior thoughts of writing,”
we do not know, nor need we rummage in his dirty linen, as he puts it.
Suffice it to say here—to cite but two instances—that almost anyone
acquainted with Russia will tell you the full name of the rich, gay,
southern port city of K—; that any Odessite will tell you that
Treppel’s is merely transplanted, for fictional reasons, from his own
city to K—...
Alexandre I. Kuprin was born in 1870; 1909 marked the twenty-fifth
anniversary of his literary activity. He attained his fame only upon
the publication of his amazing, epical novel, “The Duel”—which, just
like “YAMA,” is an arraignment; an arraignment of militaristic
corruption. Russian criticism has styled him the poet of life. If
Chekhov was the Wunderkind of Russian letters, Kuprin is its enfant
terrible. His range of subjects is enormous; his power of observation
and his versatility extraordinary. Gambrinus alone would justify his
place among the literary giants of Europe. Some of his picaresques,
“THE INSULT,” “HORSE-THIEVES,” and “OFF THE STREET”—the last in the
form of a monologue—are sheer tours de force. “Olessiya” is possessed
of a weird, unearthly beauty; “The Shulamite” is a prose-poem of
antiquity. He deals with the life of the moujik in “Back-woods” and
“The Swamp”; of the Jews, in “The Jewess” and “The Coward”; of the
soldiers, in “The Cadets,” “The Interrogation,” “The Night Watch,”
“Delirium”; of the actors, in “How I Was an Actor” and “In Retirement.”
We have circus life in “‘Allez!’” “In The Circus,” “Lolly,” “The
Clown”—the last a one-act playlet; factory life, in “Moloch”;
provincial life, in “Small Fry”; bohemian life, in “Captain Ribnicov”
and “The River of Life”—which no one but Kuprin could have written.
There are animal stories and flower stories; stories for children—and
for neuropaths; one story is dedicated to a jockey; another to a circus
clown; a third, if I remember rightly, to a race-horse... “Yama”
created an enormous sensation upon the publication of the first part in
volume three of the “Sbornik Zemliya”—“The Earth Anthology”—in 1909;
the second part appeared in volume fifteen, in 1914; the third, in
volume sixteen, in 1915. Both the original parts and the last revised
edition have been followed in this translation. The greater part of the
stories listed above are available in translations, under various
titles; the list, of course, is merely a handful from the vast bulk of
the fecund Kuprin’s writings, nor is any group of titles exhaustive of
its kind. “The Star of Solomon,” his latest collection of stories,
bears the imprint of Helsingfors, 1920.
It must not be thought, despite its locale, that Kuprin’s “Yama” is a
picture of Russian prostitution solely; it is intrinsically universal.
All that is necessary is to change the kopecks into cents, pennies,
sous or pfennings; compute the versts into miles or metres; Jennka may
be Eugenie or Jeannette; and for Yama, simply read Whitechapel,
Montmartre, or the Barbary Coast. That is why “Yama” is a “tremendous,
staggering, and truthful book—a terrific book.” It has been called
notorious, lurid—even oleographic. So are, perhaps, the picaresques of
Murillo, the pictorial satires of Hogarth, the bizarreries of Goya...
The best introduction to “Yama,” however, can be given in Kuprin’s own
words, as uttered by the reporter Platonov. “They do write,” he says,
“... but it is all either a lie, or theatrical effects for children of
tender years, or else a cunning symbolism, comprehensible only to the
sages of the future. But the life itself no one as yet has touched...
“But the material here is in reality tremendous, downright crushing,
terrible... And not at all terrible are the loud phrases about the
traffic in women’s flesh, about the white slaves, about prostitution
being a corroding fester of large cities, and so on, and so on... an
old hurdy-gurdy of which all have tired! No, horrible are the everyday,
accustomed trifles; these business-like, daily, commercial reckonings;
this thousand-year-old science of amatory practice; this prosaic usage,
determined by the ages. In these unnoticeable nothings are completely
dissolved such feelings as resentment, humiliation, shame. There
remains a dry profession, a contract, an agreement, a well-nigh honest
petty trade, no better, no worse than, say, the trade in groceries. Do
you understand, gentlemen, that all the horror is in just this—that
there is no horror! Bourgeois work days—and that is all...
“More awful than all awful words, a hundredfold more awful—is some such
little prosaic stroke or other as will suddenly knock you all in a
heap, like a blow on the forehead...”
It is in such little prosaic strokes; everyday, accustomed,
characteristic trifles; minute particles of life, that Kuprin excels.
The detailism which crowds his pages is like the stippling of Whistler;
or the enumerations of the Bible; or the chiselling of Rodin, that
endows the back of the Thinker with meaning.
“We all pass by these characteristic trifles indifferently, like the
blind, as though not seeing them scattered about under our feet. But an
artist will come, and he will look over them carefully, and he will
pick them up. And suddenly he will so skillfully turn in the sun a
minute particle of life, that we shall all cry out: ’Oh, my God! But I
myself—myself!—have seen this with my own eyes. Only it simply did not
enter my head to turn my close attention upon it.’ But our Russian
artists of the word—the most conscientious and sincere artists in the
whole world—for some reason have up to this time passed over
prostitution and the brothel. Why? Really, it is difficult for me to
answer that. Perhaps because of squeamishness, perhaps out of
pusillanimity, out of fear of being signalized as a pornographic
writer; finally from the apprehension that our gossiping criticism will
identify the artistic work of the writer with his personal life and
will start rummaging in his dirty linen. Or perhaps they can find
neither the time, nor the self-denial, nor the self-possession to
plunge in head first into this life and to watch it right up close,
without prejudice, without sonorous phrases, without a sheepish pity,
in all its monstrous simplicity and everyday activity... That
material... is truly unencompassable in its significance and
weightiness... The words of others do not suffice—even though they be
the most exact—even observations, made with a little note-book and a
bit of pencil, do not suffice. One must grow accustomed to this life,
without being cunningly wise...”
“I believe, that not now, not soon—after fifty years or so—but there
will come a writer of genius, and precisely a Russian one, who will
absorb within himself all the burdens and all the abominations of this
life and will cast them forth to us in the form of simple, fine, and
deathlessly—caustic images. And we shall all say: ’Why, now, we
ourselves have seen and known all this, but we could not even suppose
that this is so horrible! In this coming artist I believe with all my
heart.”
Kuprin is too sincere, too big, to have written this with himself in
mind; yet no reader of the scathing, searing arraignment called “Yama,”
will question that the great, the gigantic Kuprin has shown “the
burdens and abominations” of prostitution, in “simple, fine, and
deathlessly-caustic images”; has shown that “all the horror is in just
this—that there is no horror...” For it is as a pitiless reflection of
a “singular,” sinister reality that “Yama” stands unsurpassed.
B. G. GUERNEY.
New York City, January, 1922.
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE.
A word must be said of Kuprin’s style. He is by no means a purist; his
pages bristle with neologisms and foreign—or, rather, outlandish—words;
nor has he any hesitancy in adapting and Russianizing such words. He
coins words; he is, at times, actually Borrowesque, and not only does
he resort to colloquialisms and slang, but to dialect, cant, and even
actual argot. Therein is his glory—and, perhaps, his weakness.
Therefore, an attempt has been made, wherever corruptions, slang, and
so forth, appear in the original, to render them through the nearest
English equivalents. While this has its obvious dubieties and
disadvantages, any other course would have smacked of prettification—a
fate which such a book as “Yama” surely does not deserve.
PART ONE
CHAPTER I.
A long, long time ago, long before the railroads, the
stage-drivers—both government and private—used to live, from generation
to generation, at the very farthest confine of a large southern city.
And that is why the entire region was called the Yamskaya Sloboda—the
Stage-drivers’ Borough; or simply Yamskaya, or Yamkas—Little Ditches,
or, shorter still, Yama—The Pit. In the course of time, when hauling by
steam killed off transportation by horses, the mettlesome tribe of the
stage-drivers little by little lost its boisterous ways and its brave
customs, went over into other occupations, fell apart and scattered.
But for many years—even up to this time—a shady renown has remained to
Yama, as of a place exceedingly gay, tipsy, brawling, and in the
night-time not without danger.
Somehow it came about of itself, that on the ruins of those ancient,
long-warmed nests, where of yore the rosy-cheeked, sprightly wives of
the soldiery and the plump widows of Yama, with their black eyebrows,
had secretly traded in vodka and free love, there began to spring up
wide-open brothels, permitted by the authorities, regulated by official
supervision and subject to express, strict rules. Towards the end of
the nineteenth century both streets of Yama—Great Yamskaya and Little
Yamskaya—proved to be entirely occupied, on one side of the street as
well as the other, exclusively with houses of ill-fame.[1] Of the
private houses no more than five or six were left, but even they were
taken up by public houses, beer halls, and general stores, catering to
the needs of Yama prostitution.
[1] “Houses of Suffrance”—i.e., Houses of the Necessary Evil.—Trans.
The course of life, the manners and customs, are almost identical in
all the thirty-odd establishments; the difference is only in the
charges exacted for the briefly-timed love, and consequently in certain
external minutiae as well: in the assortment of more or less handsome
women, in the comparative smartness of the costumes, in the
magnificence of the premises and the luxuriousness of the furnishings.
The most chic establishment is that of Treppel, the first house to the
left upon entering Great Yamskaya. This is an old firm. Its present
owner bears an entirely different name, and fills the post of an
elector in the city council and is even a member of the city board. The
house is of two stories, green and white, built in the debauched
pseudo-Russian style a la Ropetovsky, with little horses, carved
facings, roosters, and wooden towels bordered with lace-also of wood; a
carpet with a white runner on the stairs; in the front hall a stuffed
bear, holding a wooden platter for visiting cards in his out-stretched
paws; a parquet floor in the ballroom, heavy raspberry silk curtains
and tulle on the windows, along the walls white and gold chairs and
mirrors with gilt frames; there are two private cabinets with carpets,
divans, and soft satin puffs; in the bedrooms blue and rose lanterns,
blankets of raw silk stuff and clean pillows; the inmates are clad in
low-cut ball gowns, bordered with fur, or in expensive masquerade
costumes of hussars, pages, fisher lasses, school-girls; and the
majority of them are Germans from the Baltic provinces—large, handsome
women, white of body and with ample breasts. At Treppel’s three roubles
are taken for a visit, and for the whole night, ten.
Three of the two-rouble establishments—Sophie Vassilievna’s, The Old
Kiev, and Anna Markovna’s—are somewhat worse, somewhat poorer. The
remaining houses on Great Yamskaya are rouble ones; they are furnished
still worse. While on Little Yamskaya, which is frequented by soldiers,
petty thieves, artisans, and drab folk In general, and where fifty
kopecks or less are taken for time, things are altogether filthy and
poor-the floor in the parlor is crooked, warped, and full of splinters,
the windows are hung with pieces of red fustian; the bedrooms, just
like stalls, are separated by thin partitions, which do not reach to
the ceiling, and on the beds, on top of the shaken down hay-mattresses,
are scattered torn, spotted bed-sheets and flannel blankets, dark from
time, crumpled any old way, full of holes; the air is sour and full of
fumes, with a mixture of alcohol vapours and the smell of human
emanations; the women, dressed in rags of coloured printed calico or in
sailor costumes, are for the greater part hoarse or snuffling, with
noses half fallen through, with faces preserving traces of yesterday’s
blows and scratches and naively bepainted with the aid of a red
cigarette box moistened with spit.
All the year round, every evening—with the exception of the last three
days of Holy Week and the night before Annunciation, when no bird
builds its nest and a shorn wench does not plait her braid—when it
barely grows dark out of doors, hanging red lanterns are lit before
every house, above the tented, carved street doors. It is just like a
holiday out on the street—like Easter. All the windows are brightly lit
up, the gay music of violins and pianos floats out through the panes,
cabmen drive up and drive off without cease. In all the houses the
entrance doors are opened wide, and through them one may see from the
street a steep staircase with a narrow corridor on top, and the white
flashing of the many-facetted reflector of the lamp, and the green
walls of the front hall, painted over with Swiss landscapes. Till the
very morning hundreds and thousands of men ascend and descend these
staircases. Here everybody frequents: half-shattered, slavering
ancients, seeking artificial excitements, and boys-military cadets and
high-school lads—almost children; bearded paterfamiliases; honourable
pillars of society, in golden spectacles; and newly-weds, and enamoured
bridegrooms, and honourable professors with renowned names; and
thieves, and murderers, and liberal lawyers; and strict guardians of
morals—pedagogues, and foremost writers—the authors of fervent,
impassioned articles on the equal rights of women; and catchpoles, and
spies, and escaped convicts, and officers, and students, and Social
Democrats, and hired patriots; the timid and the brazen, the sick and
the well, those knowing woman for the first time, and old libertines
frayed by all species of vice; clear-eyed, handsome fellows and
monsters maliciously distorted by nature, deaf-mutes, blind men, men
without noses, with flabby, pendulous bodies, with malodorous breath,
bald, trembling, covered with parasites—pot-bellied, hemorrhoidal apes.
They come freely and simply, as to a restaurant or a depot; they sit,
smoke, drink, convulsively pretend to be merry; they dance, executing
abominable movements of the body imitative of the act of sexual love.
At times attentively and long, at times with gross haste, they choose
any woman they like and know beforehand that they will never meet
refusal. Impatiently they pay their money in advance, and on the public
bed, not yet grown cold after the body of their predecessor, aimlessly
commit the very greatest and most beautiful of all universal
mysteries—the mystery of the conception of new life. And the women with
indifferent readiness, with uniform words, with practiced professional
movements, satisfy their desires, like machines—only to receive, right
after them, during the same night, with the very same words, smiles and
gestures, the third, the fourth, the tenth man, not infrequently
already biding his turn in the waiting room.
So passes the entire night. Towards daybreak Yama little by little
grows quiet, and the bright morning finds it depopulated, spacious,
plunged into sleep, with doors shut tightly, with shutters fixed on the
windows. But toward evening the women awaken and get ready for the
following night.
And so without end, day after day, for months and years, they live a
strange, incredible life in their public harems, outcast by society,
accursed by the family, victims of the social temperament, cloacas for
the excess of the city’s sensuality, the guardians of the honour of the
family—four hundred foolish, lazy, hysterical, barren women.
CHAPTER II.
Two in the afternoon. In the second-rate, two-rouble establishment of
Anna Markovna everything is plunged in sleep. The large square parlor
with mirrors in gilt frames, with a score of plush chairs placed
decorously along the walls, with oleograph pictures of Makovsky’s Feast
of the Russian Noblemen, and Bathing, with a crystal lustre in the
middle, is also sleeping, and in the quiet and semi-darkness it seems
unwontedly pensive, austere, strangely sad. Yesterday here, as on every
evening, lights burned, the most rollicking of music rang out, blue
tobacco smoke swirled, men and women careered in couples, shaking their
hips and throwing their legs on high. And the entire street shone on
the outside with the red lanterns over the street doors and with the
light from the windows, and it seethed with people and carriages until
morning.
Now the street is empty. It is glowing triumphantly and joyously in the
glare of the summer sun. But in the parlor all the window curtains are
lowered, and for that reason it is dark within, cool, and as peculiarly
uninviting as the interiors of empty theatres, riding academies and
court buildings usually are in the middle of the day.
The pianoforte glimmers dully with its black, bent, glossy side; the
yellow, old, time-eaten, broken, gap-toothed keys glisten faintly. The
stagnant, motionless air still retains yesterday’s odour; it smells of
perfumes, tobacco, the sour dampness of a large uninhabited room, the
perspiration of unclean and unhealthy feminine flesh, face-powder,
boracic-thymol soap, and the dust of the yellow mastic with which the
parquet floor had been polished yesterday. And with a strange charm the
smell of withering swamp grass is blended with these smells. To-day is
Trinity. In accordance with an olden custom, the chambermaids of the
establishment, while their ladies were still sleeping, had bought a
whole waggon of sedge on the market, and had strewn its long, thick
blades, that crunch underfoot, everywhere about—in the corridors, in
the private cabinets, in the drawing room. They, also, had lit the
lamps before all the images. The girls, by tradition, dare not do this
with their hands, which have been denied during the night.
And the house-porter has adorned the house-entrance, which is carved in
the Russian style, with two little felled birch-trees. And so with all
the houses—the thin white trunks with their scant dying verdure adorn
the exterior near the stoops, bannisters and doors.
The entire house is quiet, empty and drowsy. The chopping of cutlets
for dinner can be heard from the kitchen. Liubka, one of the girls,
barefooted, in her shift, with bare arms, not good-looking, freckled,
but strong and fresh of body, has come out into the inner court.
Yesterday she had had but six guests on time, but no one had remained
for the night with her, and because of that she had slept her
fill—splendidly, delightfully, all alone, upon a wide bed. She had
risen early, at ten o’clock, and had with pleasure helped the cook
scrub the floor and the tables in the kitchen. Now she is feeding the
chained dog Amour with the sinews and cuttings of the meat. The big,
rusty hound, with long glistening hair and black muzzle, jumps up on
the girl—with his front paws, stretching the chain tightly and rattling
in the throat from shortness of breath, then, with back and tail
undulating all over, bends his head down to the ground, wrinkles his
nose, smiles, whines and sneezes from the excitement. But she, teasing
him with the meat, shouts at him with pretended severity:
“There, you—stupid! I’ll—I’ll give it to you! How dare you?”
But she rejoices with all her soul over the tumult and caresses of
Amour and her momentary power over the dog, and because she had slept
her fill, and passed the night without a man, and because of the
Trinity, according to dim recollections of her childhood, and because
of the sparkling sunny day, which it so seldom befalls her to see.
All the night guests have already gone their ways. The most
business-like, quiet and workaday hour is coming on.
They are drinking coffee in the room of the proprietress. The company
consists of five people. The proprietress herself, in whose name the
house is registered, is Anna Markovna. She is about sixty. She is very
small of stature, but dumpy: she may be visualized by imagining, from
the bottom up, three soft, gelatinous globes—large, medium and small,
pressed into each other without any interstices; this—her skirt, torso
and head. Strange, her eyes are a faded blue, girlish, even childish,
but the mouth is that of an old person, with a moist lower lip of a
raspberry colour, impotently hanging down. Her husband—Isaiah
Savvich—is also small, a grayish, quiet, silent little old man. He is
under his wife’s thumb; he was doorkeeper in this very house even at
the time when Anna Markovna served here as housekeeper. In order to be
useful in some way, he has learned, through self-instruction, to play
the fiddle, and now at night plays dance tunes, as well as a funeral
march for shopmen far gone on a spree and craving some maudlin tears.
Then, there are the two housekeepers—senior and junior. The senior is
Emma Edwardovna. She is a tall, full woman of forty-six, with chestnut
hair, and a fat goitre of three chins. Her eyes are encircled with
black rings of hemorrhoidal origin. The face broadens out like a pear
from the forehead down to the cheeks, and is of an earthen colour; the
eyes are small, black; the nose humped, the lips sternly pursed; the
expression of the face calmly authoritative. It is no mystery to anyone
in the house that in a year or two Anna Markovna will go into
retirement, and sell her the establishment with all its rights and
furnishings, when she will receive part in cash, and part on terms—by
promissory note. Because of this the girls honour her equally with the
proprietress and fear her somewhat. Those who fall into error she beats
with her own hands, beats cruelly, coolly, and calculatingly, without
changing the calm expression of her face. Among the girls there is
always a favourite of hers, whom she tortures with her exacting love
and fantastic jealousy. And this is far harder than her beatings.
The other one is called Zociya. She has just struggled out of the ranks
of the common girls. The girls, as yet, call her impersonally,
flatteringly and familiarly, “little housekeeper.” She is spare, spry,
just a trifle squinting, with a rosy complexion, and hair dressed in a
little curly pompadour; she adores actors—preferably stout comedians.
Toward Emma Edwardovna she is ingratiating.
The fifth person, finally, is the local district inspector, Kerbesh.
This is an athletic man; he is kind of bald, has a red beard like a
fan, vividly blue slumbrous eyes, and a thin, slightly hoarse, pleasant
voice. Everybody knows that he formerly served in the secret service
division and was the terror of crooks, thanks to his terrible physical
strength and cruelty in interrogations.
He has several shady transactions on his conscience. The whole town
knows that two years back he married a rich old woman of seventy, and
that last year he strangled her; however, he was somehow successful in
hushing up this affair. But for that matter, the remaining four have
also seen a thing or two in their chequered life. But, just as the
bretteurs of old felt no twinges of conscience at the recollection of
their victims, even so do these people regard the dark and bloody
things in their past, as the unavoidable little unpleasantness of their
professions.
They are drinking coffee with rich, boiled cream—the inspector with
Benedictine. But he, strictly speaking, is not drinking, but merely
conveying the impression that he is doing it to oblige.
“Well, what is it to be, Phoma Phornich?” asks the proprietress
searchingly. “This business isn’t worth an empty eggshell, now... Why,
you have only to say a word...”
Kerbesh slowly draws in half a wine-glass of liqueur, works the oily,
strong, pungent liquid slightly with his tongue over the roof of his
mouth, swallows it, chases it down, without hurrying, with coffee, and
then passes the ring finger of his left hand over his moustaches, to
the right and left.
“Think it over for yourself, Madam Shoibes,” he says, looking down at
the table, spreading out his hands and screwing up his eyes. “Think of
the risk to which I’m exposed! The girl through means of deception was
enticed into this... what-you-may-call-it... well, in a word, into a
house of ill-fame, to express it in lofty style. Now the parents are
searching for her through the police. Ve-ery well. She gets into one
place after another, from the fifth into the tenth... Finally the trail
is picked up with you, and most important of all—think of it!—in my
district! What can I do?”
“Mr. Kerbesh, but she is of age,” says the proprietress.
“They are of age,” confirms Isaiah Savvich. “They gave an
acknowledgment, that it was of their own will...”
Emma Edwardovna pronounces in a bass, with cool assurance:
“Honest to God, she’s the same here as an own daughter.”
“But that’s not what I am talking about,” the inspector frowns in
vexation. “Just consider my position... Why, this is duty. Lord,
there’s no end of unpleasantnesses without that!”
The proprietress suddenly arises, shuffles in her slippers to the door,
and says, winking to the inspector with a sleepy, expressionless eye of
faded blue:
“Mr. Kerbesh, I would ask you to have a look at our alterations. We
want to enlarge the place a bit.”
“A-ah! With pleasure...”
After ten minutes both return, without looking at each other. Kerbesh’s
hand is crunching a brand-new hundred rouble note in his pocket. The
conversation about the seduced girl is not renewed. The inspector,
hastily finishing his Benedictine, complains of the present decline in
manners.
“I have a son, now, a schoolboy—Paul. He comes to me, the scoundrel,
and declares: ’Papa, the pupils swear at me, because you are a
policeman, and because you serve on Yamskaya, and because you take
bribes from brothels.’ Well, tell me, for God’s sake, Madam Shoibes, if
that isn’t effrontery?”
“Ai, ai, ai! ... And what bribes can there be? Now with me...”
“I say to him: ’Go, you good-for-nothing, and let the principal know,
that there should be no more of this, otherwise papa will inform on all
of you to the governor.’ And what do you think? He comes to me and
says: ’I am no longer a son to you—seek another son for yourself.’ What
an argument! Well, I gave him enough to last till the first of the
month! Oho-ho! Now he doesn’t want to speak with me. Well, I’ll show
him yet!”
“Ah, you don’t have to tell us,” sighs Anna Markovna, letting her
lower, raspberry-coloured lip hang down and with a mist coming over her
faded eyes. “We keep our Birdie—she is in Fleisher’s high school—we
purposely keep her in town, in a respectable family. You understand, it
is awkward, after all. And all of a sudden she brings such words and
expressions from the high school that I just simply turned all red.”
“Honest to God, Annochka turned all red,” confirms Isaiah Savvich.
“You’ll turn red, all right!” warmly agrees the inspector. “Yes, yes,
yes, I understand you fully. But, my God, where are we going! Where are
we only going? I ask you, what are these revolutionaries and all these
various students, or... what-you-may-call-’ems? ... trying to attain?
And let them put the blame on none but themselves. Corruption is
everywhere, morality is falling, there is no respect for parents. They
ought to be shot.”
“Well, now, the day before yesterday we had a case,” Zociya mixes in
bustlingly. “A certain guest came, a stout man...”
“Drop it!” Emma Edwardovna, who was listening to the inspector, piously
nodding with her head bowed to one side, cuts her short in the jargon
of the brothels. “You’d better go and see about breakfast for the young
ladies.”
“And not a single person can be relied upon,” continues the
proprietress grumblingly. “Not a servant but what she’s a stiff, a
faker. And all the girls ever think about is their lovers. Just so’s
they may have their own pleasure. But about their duties they don’t
even think.”
There is an awkward silence. Some one knocks on the door. A thin,
feminine voice speaks on the other side of the door:
“Housekeeper, dear, take the money and be kind enough to give me the
stamps. Pete’s gone.”
The inspector gets up and adjusts his sabre.
“Well, it’s time I was going to work. Best regards, Anna Markovna. Best
wishes, Isaiah Savvich.”
“Perhaps you’ll have one more little glass for a stirrup cup?” the
nearly blind Isaiah Savvich thrusts himself over the table.
“Tha-ank you. I can’t. Full to the gills. Honoured, I’m sure! ...”
“Thanks for your company. Drop in some time.”
“Always glad to be your guest, sir. Au revoir!”
But in the doorway he stops for a minute and says significantly:
“But still, my advice to you is—you’d better pass this girl on to some
place or other in good time. Of course, it’s your affair, but as a good
friend of yours I give you warning.”
He goes away. When his steps are abating on the stairs and the front
door bangs to behind him, Emma Edwardovna snorts through her nose and
says contemptuously:
“Stool-pigeon! He wants to take money both here and there...”
Little by little they all crawl apart out of the room. It is dark in
the house. It smells sweetly of the half-withered sedge. Quiet reigns.
CHAPTER III.
Until dinner, which is served at six in the evening, the time drags
endlessly long and with intolerable monotony. And, in general, this
daily interval is the heaviest and emptiest in the life of the house.
It remotely resembles in its moods those slothful, empty hours which
are lived through during the great holidays in scholastic institutes
and other private institutions for females, when all the friends have
dispersed, when there is much leisure and much indolence, and a
radiant, agreeable tedium reigns the whole day. In only their
petticoats and white shifts, with bare arms, sometimes barefooted, the
women aimlessly ramble from room to room, all of them unwashed,
uncombed; lazily strike the keys of the old pianoforte with the index
finger, lazily lay out cards to tell their fortune, lazily exchange
curses, and with a languishing irritation await the evening.
Liubka, after breakfast, had carried out the leavings of bread and the
cuttings of ham to Amour, but the dog had soon palled upon her.
Together with Niura she had bought some barberry bon-bons and sunflower
seeds, and now both are standing behind the fence separating the house
from the street, gnawing the seeds, the shells of which remain on their
chins and bosoms, and speculate indifferently about those who pass on
the street: about the lamp-lighter, pouring kerosene into the street
lamps, about the policeman with the daily registry book under his arm,
about the housekeeper from somebody else’s establishment, running
across the road to the general store.
Niura is a small girl, with goggle-eyes of blue; she has white, flaxen
hair and little blue veins on her temples. In her face there is
something stolid and innocent, reminiscent of a white sugar lamb on a
Paschal cake. She is lively, bustling, curious, puts her nose into
everything, agrees with everybody, is the first to know the news, and,
when she speaks, she speaks so much and so rapidly that spray flies out
of her mouth and bubbles effervescence on the red lips, as in children.
Opposite, out of the dram-shop, a servant pops out for a minute—a
curly, besotted young fellow with a cast in his eye—and runs into the
neighbouring public house.
“Prokhor Ivanovich, oh Prokhor Ivanovich,” shouts Niura, “don’t you
want some?—I’ll treat you to some sunflower seeds!”
“Come on in and pay us a visit,” Liubka chimes in.
Niura snorts and adds through the laughter which suffocates her:
“Warm your feet for a while!”
But the front door opens; in it appears the formidable and stern figure
of the senior housekeeper.
“Pfui![2] What sort of indecency is this!” she cries commandingly. “How
many times must it be repeated to you, that you must not jump out on
the street during the day, and also—pfui!—only in your underwear. I
can’t understand how you have no conscience yourselves. Decent girls,
who respect themselves, must not demean themselves that way in public.
It seems, thank God, that you are not in an establishment catering to
soldiers, but in a respectable house. Not in Little Yamskaya.”
[2] A German exclamation of disgust or contempt, corresponding to the
English fie.—Trans.
The girls return into the house, get into the kitchen, and for a long
time sit there on tabourets, contemplating the angry cook Prascoviya,
swinging their legs and silently gnawing the sunflower seeds.
In the room of Little Manka, who is also called Manka the Scandaliste
and Little White Manka, a whole party has gathered. Sitting on the edge
of the bed, she and another girl—Zoe, a tall handsome girl, with arched
eyebrows, with grey, somewhat bulging eyes, with the most typical,
white, kind face of the Russian prostitute—are playing at cards,
playing at “sixty-six.” Little Manka’s closest friend, Jennie, is lying
behind their backs on the bed, prone on her back, reading a tattered
book, The Queen’s Necklace, the work of Monsieur Dumas, and smoking. In
the entire establishment she is the only lover of reading and reads
intoxicatingly and without discrimination. But, contrary to
expectation, the forced reading of novels of adventure has not at all
made her sentimental and has not vitiated her imagination. Above all,
she likes in novels a long intrigue, cunningly thought out and deftly
disentangled; magnificent duels, before which the viscount unties the
laces of his shoes to signify that he does not intend to retreat even a
step from his position,[3] and after which the marquis, having spitted
the count through, apologizes for having made an opening in his
splendid new waistcoat; purses, filled to the full with gold,
carelessly strewn to the left and right by the chief heroes; the love
adventures and witticisms of Henry IV—in a word, all this spiced
heroism, in gold and lace, of the past centuries of French history. In
everyday life, on the contrary, she is sober of mind, jeering,
practical and cynically malicious. In her relation to the other girls
of the establishment she occupies the same place that in private
educational institutions is accorded to the first strong man, the man
spending a second year in the same grade, the first beauty in the
class—tyrannizing and adored. She is a tall, thin brunette, with
beautiful hazel eyes, a small proud mouth, a little moustache on the
upper lip and with a swarthy, unhealthy pink on her cheeks.
[3] Probably a sly dig at Gautier’s Captain Fracasse.—Trans.
Without letting the cigarette out of her mouth and screwing up her eyes
from the smoke, all she does is to turn the pages constantly with a
moistened finger. Her legs are bare to the knees; the enormous balls of
the feet are of the most vulgar form; below the big toes stand out
pointed, ugly, irregular tumours.
Here also, with her legs crossed, slightly bent, with some sewing, sits
Tamara—a quiet, easy-going, pretty girl, slightly reddish, with that
dark and shining tint of hair which is to be found on the back of a fox
in winter. Her real name is Glycera, or Lukeria, as the common folk say
it. But it is already an ancient usage of the houses of ill-fame to
replace the uncouth names of the Matrenas, Agathas, Cyclitinias with
sonorous, preferably exotic names. Tamara had at one time been a nun,
or, perhaps, merely a novice in a convent, and to this day there have
been preserved on her face timidity and a pale puffiness—a modest and
sly expression, which is peculiar to young nuns. She holds herself
aloof in the house, does not chum with any one, does not initiate any
one into her past life. But in her case there must have been many more
adventures besides having been a nun: there is something mysterious,
taciturn and criminal in her unhurried speech, in the evasive glance of
her deep and dark-gold eyes from under the long, lowered eyelashes, in
her manners, her sly smiles and intonations of a modest but wanton
would-be saint. There was one occurrence when the girls, with well-nigh
reverent awe, heard that Tamara could talk fluently in French and
German. She has within her some sort of an inner, restrained power.
Notwithstanding her outward meekness and complaisance, all in the
establishment treat her with respect and circumspection—the
proprietress, and her mates, and both housekeepers, and even the
doorkeeper, that veritable sultan of the house of ill-fame, that
general terror and hero.
“I’ve covered it,” says Zoe and turns over the trump which had been
lying under the pack, wrong side up. “I’m going with forty, going with
an ace of spades—a ten-spot, Mannechka, if you please. I’m through.
Fifty-seven, eleven, sixty-eight. How much have you?”
“Thirty,” says Manka in an offended tone, pouting her lips; “oh, it’s
all very well for you—you remember all the plays. Deal ... Well, what’s
after that, Tamarochka?” she turns to her friend. “You talk on—I’m
listening.”
Zoe shuffles the old, black, greasy cards, allows Manya to cut, then
deals, having first spat upon her fingers.
Tamara in the meanwhile is narrating to Manya in a quiet voice, without
dropping her sewing.
“We embroidered with gold, in flat embroidery—altar covers, palls,
bishops’ vestments... With little grasses, with flowers, little
crosses. In winter, you’d be sitting near a casement; the panes are
small, with gratings, there isn’t much light, it smells of lamp oil,
incense, cypress; you mustn’t talk—the mother superior was strict. Some
one from weariness would begin droning a pre-Lenten first verse of a
hymn ... ‘When I consider thy heavens ...’ We sang fine, beautifully,
and it was such a quiet life, and the smell was so fine; you could see
the flaky snow out the windows—well, now, just like in a dream...”
Jennie puts the tattered novel down on her stomach, throws the
cigarette over Zoe’s head, and says mockingly:
“We know all about your quiet life. You chucked the infants into
toilets. The Evil One is always snooping around your holy places.”
“I call forty. I had forty-six. Finished!” Little Manka exclaims
excitedly and claps her palms. “I open with three.”
Tamara, smiling at Jennie’s words, answers with a scarcely perceptible
smile, which barely distends her lips, but makes little, sly, ambiguous
depressions at their corners, altogether as with Monna Lisa in the
portrait by Leonardo da Vinci.
“Lay folk say a lot of things about nuns ... Well, even if there had
been sin once in a while ...”
“If you don’t sin—you don’t repent,” Zoe puts in seriously, and wets
her finger in her mouth.
“You sit and sew, the gold eddies before your eyes, while from standing
in the morning at prayer your back just aches, and your legs ache. And
at evening there is service again. You knock at the door of the mother
superior’s cell: ‘Through prayers of Thy saints, oh Lord, our Father,
have mercy upon us.’ And the mother superior would answer from the
cell, in a little bass-like ‘A-men.’”
Jennie looks at her intently for some time, shakes her head and says
with great significance:
“You’re a queer girl, Tamara. Here I’m looking at you and wondering.
Well, now, I can understand how these fools, on the manner of Sonka,
play at love. That’s what they’re fools for. But you, it seems, have
been roasted on all sorts of embers, have been washed in all sorts of
lye, and yet you allow yourself foolishness of that sort. What are you
embroidering that shirt for?”
Tamara, without haste, with a pin refastens the fabric more
conveniently on her knee, smooths the seam down with the thimble, and
speaks, without raising the narrowed eyes, her head bent just a trifle
to one side:
“One’s got to be doing something. It’s wearisome just so. I don’t play
at cards, and I don’t like them.”
Jennie continues to shake her head.
“No, you’re a queer girl, really you are. You always have more from the
guests than all of us get. You fool, instead of saving money, what do
you spend it on? You buy perfumes at seven roubles the bottle. Who
needs it? And now you have bought fifteen roubles’ worth of silk. Isn’t
this for your Senka, now?”
“Of course, for Sennechka.”
“What a treasure you’ve found, to be sure! A miserable thief. He rides
up to this establishment like some general. How is it he doesn’t beat
you yet? The thieves—they like that. And he plucks you, have no fear?”
“More than I want to, I won’t give,” meekly answers Tamara and bites
the thread in two.
“Now that is just what I wonder at. With your mind, your beauty, I
would put such rings-around-a-rosie about a guest like that, that he’d
take me and set me up. I’d have horses of my own, and diamonds.”
“Everyone to his tastes, Jennechka. You too, now, are a very pretty and
darling girl, and your character is so independent and brave, and yet
you and I have gotten stuck in Anna Markovna’s.”
Jennie flares up and answers with unsimulated bitterness:
“Yes! Why not! All things come your way! ...You have all the very best
guests. You do what you want with them, but with me it’s always either
old men or suckling babies. I have no luck. The ones are snotty, the
others have yellow around the mouth. More than anything else, now, I
dislike the little boys. He comes, the little varmint; he’s cowardly,
he hurries, he trembles, but having done the business, he doesn’t know
what to do with his eyes for shame. He’s all squirming from disgust. I
just feel like giving him one in the snout. Before giving you the
rouble, he holds it in his pocket in his fist, and that rouble’s all
hot, even sweaty. The milksop! His mother gives him a ten kopeck piece
for a French roll with sausage, but he’s economized out of that for a
wench. I had one little cadet in the last few days. So just on purpose,
to spite him, I say: ‘Here, my dearie, here’s a little caramel for you
on your way; when you’re going back to your corps, you’ll suck on it.’
So at first he got offended, but afterwards took it. Later I looked
from the stoop, on purpose; just as soon as he walked out, he looked
around, and right away into his mouth with the caramel. The little
swine!”
“But with old men it’s still worse,” says Little Manka in a tender
voice, and slyly looks at Zoe. “What do you think, Zoinka?”
Zoe, who had already finished playing, and was just about to yawn, now
cannot in any way give rein to her yawns. She does not know whether she
wants to be angry or to laugh. She has a steady visitor, some little
old man in a high station, with perverted erotic habits. The entire
establishment makes fun of his visits to her.
Zoe at last succeeds in yawning.
“To the devil’s dam with all of you,” she says, with her voice hoarse
after the yawn; “may he be damned, the old anathema!”
“But still, the worst of all,” Jennie continues to discourse, “worse
than your director, Zoinka, worse than my cadet, the worst of all—are
your lovers. What can there be joyous in this: he comes drunk, poses,
makes sport of you, wants to pretend there’s something in him—only
nothing comes of it all. Wha-at a lad-die, to be sure! The scummiest of
the scum, dirty, beaten-up, stinking, his whole body in scars, there’s
only one glory about him: the silk shirt which Tamarka will embroider
for him. He curses one’s mother, the son of a bitch, always aching for
a fight. Ugh! No!” she suddenly exclaimed in a merry provoking voice,
“The one I love truly and surely, for ever and ever, is my Mannechka,
Manka the white, little Manka, my Manka-Scandalistochka.”
And unexpectedly, having embraced Manya by the shoulders and bosom, she
drew her toward herself, threw her down on the bed, and began to kiss
deeply and vigorously her hair, eyes, lips. Manka with difficulty tore
herself away from her, with dishevelled, bright, fine, downy hair, all
rosy from the resistance, and with eyes downcast and moist from shame
and laughter.
“Leave off, Jennechka, leave off. Well, now, what are you doing? Let me
go!”
Little Manya is the meekest and quietest girl in the entire
establishment. She is kind, yielding, can never refuse anybody’s
request, and involuntarily everybody treats her with great gentleness.
She blushes over every trifle, and at such time becomes especially
attractive, as only very tender blondes with a sensitive skin can be
attractive. But it is sufficient for her to drink three or four glasses
of Liqueur Benedictine, of which she is very fond, for her to become
unrecognizable and to create brawls, such, that there is always
required the intervention of the housekeepers, the porter, at times
even the police. It is nothing for her to hit a guest in the face or to
throw in his face a glass filled with wine, to overturn the lamp, to
curse out the proprietress, Jennie treats her with some strange, tender
patronage and rough adoration.
“Ladies, to dinner! To dinner, ladies!” calls Zociya the housekeeper,
running along the corridor. On the run she opens the door into Manya’s
room and drops hurriedly:
“To dinner, to dinner, ladies!”
They go again to the kitchen, all still in their underwear, all
unwashed, in slippers and barefoot. A tasty vegetable soup of pork
rinds and tomatoes, cutlets, and pastry-cream rolls are served. But no
one has any appetite, thanks to the sedentary life and irregular sleep,
and also because the majority of the girls, just like school-girls on a
holiday, had already managed during the day to send to the store for
halvah, nuts, rakkat loukoum (Turkish Delight), dill-pickles and
molasses candy, and had through this spoiled their appetites. Only Nina
alone—a small, pug-nosed, snuffling country girl, seduced only two
months ago by a travelling salesman, and (also by him) sold into a
brothel—eats for four. The inordinate, provident appetite of a woman of
the common people has not yet disappeared in her.
Jennie, who has only picked fastidiously at her cutlet and eaten half
her cream roll, speaks to her in a tone of hypocritical solicitude:
“Really, Pheclusha, you might just as well eat my cutlet, too. Eat, my
dear, eat; don’t be bashful—you ought to be gaining in health. But do
you know what I’ll tell you, ladies?” she turns to her mates, “Why, our
Pheclusha has a tape-worm, and when a person has a tape-worm, he always
eats for two: half for himself, half for the worm.”
Nina sniffs angrily and answers in a bass which comes as a surprise
from one of her stature, and through her nose:
“There are no tape-worms in me. It’s you that has the tape-worms,
that’s why you are so skinny.”
And she imperturbably continues to eat, and after dinner feels herself
sleepy, like a boa constrictor, eructs loudly, drinks water, hiccups,
and, by stealth, if no one sees her, makes the sign of the cross over
her mouth, through an old habit.
But already the ringing voice of Zociya can be heard through the
corridors and rooms:
“Get dressed, ladies, get dressed. There’s no use in sitting
around...To work...”
After a few minutes in all the rooms of the establishment there are
smells of singed hair, boric-thymol soap, cheap eau-de-cologne. The
girls are dressing for the evening.
CHAPTER IV.
The late twilight came on, and after it the warm, dark night, but for
long, until very midnight, did the deep crimson glow of the sky still
smoulder. Simeon, the porter of the establishment, has lit all the
lamps along the walls of the drawing room, and the lustre, as well as
the red lantern over the stoop. Simeon was a spare, stocky, taciturn
and harsh man, with straight, broad shoulders, dark-haired,
pock-marked, with little bald spots on his eye-brows and moustaches
from small-pox, and with black, dull, insolent eyes. By day he was free
and slept, while at night he sat without absenting himself in the front
hall under the reflector, in order to help the guests with their coats
and to be ready in case of any disorder.
The pianist came—a tall, elegant young man, with white eyebrows and
eyelashes, and a cataract in his right eye. The while there were no
guests, he and Isaiah Savvich quietly rehearsed Pas d’Espagne, at that
time coming into fashion. For every dance ordered by the guests, they
received thirty kopecks for an easy dance, and a half rouble for a
quadrille. But one-half of this price was taken out by the
proprietress, Anna Markovna; the other, however, the musicians divided
evenly. In this manner the pianist received only a quarter of the
general earnings, which, of course, was unjust, since Isaiah Savvich
played as one self-taught and was distinguished for having no more ear
for music than a piece of wood. The pianist was constantly compelled to
drag him on to new tunes, to correct and cover his mistakes with loud
chords. The girls said of their pianist to the guests, with a certain
pride, that he had been in the conservatory and always ranked as the
first pupil, but since he is a Jew, and in addition to that his eyes
had begun to trouble him, he had not succeeded in completing the
course. They all treated him carefully and considerately, with some
sort of solicitous, somewhat mawkish, commiseration, which chimes so
well with the inner, backstage customs of houses of ill-fame, where
underneath the outer coarseness and the flaunting of obscene words
dwells the same sweetish, hysterical sentimentality as in female
boarding schools, and, so they say, in penal institutions.
In the house of Anna Markovna everybody was already dressed and ready
for the reception of the guests, and languishing from inaction and
expectation. Despite the fact that the majority of the women
experienced toward men—with the exception of their lovers—a complete,
even somewhat squeamish, indifference, before every evening dim hopes
came to life and stirred within their souls; it was unknown who would
choose them, whether something unusual, funny and alluring might not
happen, whether a guest would not astonish with his generosity, whether
there would not be some miracle which would overturn the whole
life...In these presentiments and hopes was something akin to those
emotions which the accustomed gamester experiences when counting his
ready money before starting out for his club. Besides that, despite
their asexuality, they still had not lost the chiefest instinctive
aspiration of women—to please.
And, in truth, altogether curious personages came into the house at
times and ludicrous, motley events arose. The police would appear
suddenly together with disguised detectives and arrest some seemingly
respectable, irreproachable gentlemen and lead them off, pushing them
along with blows in the neck. At times brawls would spring up between
the drunken, trouble-making company and the porters of all the
establishments, who had gathered on the run for the relief of a fellow
porter—a brawl, during which the window-panes and the decks of
grand-pianos were broken, when the legs of the plush chairs were
wrenched out for weapons, blood ran over the parquet floor of the
drawing room and the steps of the stairs, and people with pierced sides
and broken heads fell down into the dirt near the street entrance, to
the feral, avid delight of Jennka, who, with burning eyes, with happy
laughter, went into the thickest of the melee, slapped herself on the
hips, swore and sicked them on, while her mates were squealing from
fear and hiding under the beds.
There were occurrences when there would arrive, with a pack of
parasites, some member of a workingmen’s association or a cashier, long
since far gone in an embezzlement of many thousands through gambling at
cards and hideous orgies, and now, in a drunken, senseless delirium,
tossing the last money after the other, before suicide or the
prisoner’s box. Then the doors and windows of the house would be
tightly closed, and for two days and nights at a stretch a Russian orgy
would go on—nightmarish, tedious, savage, with screams and tears, with
revilement over the body of woman; paradisaical nights were gotten up,
during which naked, drunken, bow-legged, hairy, pot-bellied men, and
women with flabby, yellow, pendulous thin bodies hideously grimaced to
the music; they drank and guzzled like swine, on the beds and on the
floor, amidst the stifling atmosphere, permeated with spirits, befouled
with human respiration and the exhalations of unclean skins.
Occasionally, there would appear a circus athlete, creating in the
low-ceiled quarters a strangely cumbersome impression, somewhat like
that of a horse led into a room; a Chinaman in a blue blouse, white
stockings, and with a queue; a negro from a cabaret, in a tuxedo coat
and checked pantaloons, with a flower in his button-hole, and with
starched linen, which, to the amazement of the girls, not only did not
soil from the black skin, but appeared still more dazzlingly white.
These rare people fomented the satiated imagination of the prostitutes,
excited their exhausted sensuality and professional curiosity, and all
of them, almost enamoured, would walk in their steps, jealous and
bickering with one another.
There was one incident when Simeon had let into the room an elderly
man, dressed like a bourgeois. There was nothing exceptional about him;
he had a stern, thin face, with bony, evil-looking cheek-bones,
protruding like tumours, a low forehead, a beard like a wedge, bushy
eyebrows, one eye perceptibly higher than the other. Having entered, he
raised his fingers, folded for the sign of the cross, to his forehead,
but having searched the corners with his eyes and finding no image, he
did not in the least grow confused, put down his hand, and at once with
a business-like air walked up to the fattest girl in the
establishment—Kitty.
“Let’s go!” he commanded curtly, and with determination nodded his head
in the direction of the door.
During the entire period of her absence the omniscious Simeon, with a
mysterious, and even somewhat proud air, managed to inform Niura, at
that time his mistress, while she, in a whisper, with horror in her
rounded eyes, told her mates, in secret, that the name of the bourgeois
was Dyadchenko, and that last fall he had volunteered, owing to the
absence of the hangman, to carry out the execution of eleven rioters,
and with his own hands had hung them in two mornings. And—monstrous as
it may be—at that hour there was not in the establishment a single girl
who did not feel envy toward the fat Kitty, and did not experience a
painful, keen, vertiginous curiosity. When Dyadchenko was going away
half an hour later—with his sedate and stern air, all the women
speechlessly, with their mouths gaping, escorted him to the street door
and afterwards watched him from the windows as he walked along the
street. Then they rushed into the room of the dressing Kitty and
overwhelmed her with interrogations. They looked with a new feeling,
almost with astonishment, at her bare, red, thick arms, at the bed,
still crumpled, at the old, greasy, paper rouble, which Kitty showed
them, having taken it out of her stocking. Kitty could tell them
nothing. “A man like any man, like all men,” she said with a calm
incomprehension; but when she found out who her visitor had been, she
suddenly burst into tears, without herself knowing why.
This man, the outcast of outcasts, fallen as low as the fancy of man
can picture, this voluntary headsman, had treated her without rudeness,
but with such absence of even a hint at endearment, with such disdain
and wooden indifference, as no human being is treated; not even a dog
or a horse, and not even an umbrella, overcoat or hat, but like some
dirty, unclean object, for which a momentary, unavoidable need arises,
but which, at the passing of its needfulness, becomes foreign, useless,
and disgusting. The entire horror of this thought the fat Kate could
not embrace with her brain of a fattened turkey hen, and because of
that cried—as it seemed even to her—without cause and reason.
There were also other happenings, which stirred up the turbid, foul
life of these poor, sick, silly, unfortunate women. There were cases of
savage, unbridled jealousy with pistol shots and poisoning;
occasionally, very rarely, a tender, flaming and pure love would
blossom out upon this dung; occasionally the women even abandoned an
establishment with the help of the loved man, but almost always came
back. Two or three times it happened that a woman from a brothel would
suddenly prove pregnant—and this always seemed, on the face of it,
laughable and disgraceful, but touching in the profundity of the event.
And no matter what may have happened, every evening brought with it
such an irritating, strained, spicy expectation of adventures that
every other life, after that in a house of ill-fame, would have seemed
flat and humdrum to these lazy women of no will power.
CHAPTER V.
The windows are opened wide to the fragrant darkness of the evening,
and the tulle curtains stir faintly back and forth from the
imperceptible movement of the air. It smells of dewy grass from the
consumptive little garden in front of the house, and just the least wee
bit of lilac and the withering birch leaves of the little trees placed
near the entrance because of the Trinity. Liuba, in a blue velvet
blouse with low cut bosom, and Niura, dressed as a “baby,” in a pink,
wide sacque to the knees, with her bright hair loose and with little
curls on her forehead, are lying embraced on the window-sill, and are
singing in a low voice a song about the hospital, which song is the
rage of the day and exceedingly well known among prostitutes. Niura,
through her nose, leads in a high voice.
Liuba seconds her with a stifled alto:
“Monday now is come again,
They’re supposed to get me out;
Doctor Krasov won’t let me out ...”
In all the houses the windows are brightly lit, while hanging lanterns
are burning before the entrances. To both girls the interior in the
establishment of Sophia Vasilievna, which is directly opposite, is
distinctly visible—the shining yellow parquet, draperies of a dark
cherry colour on the doors, caught up with cords, the end of a black
grand-piano, a pier glass in a gilt frame, and the figures of women in
gorgeous dresses, now flashing at the windows, now disappearing, and
their reflections in the mirrors. The carved stoop of Treppel, to the
right, is brightly illuminated by a bluish electric light in a big
frosted globe.
The evening is calm and warm. Somewhere far, far away, beyond the line
of the railroads, beyond some black roofs and the thin black trunks of
trees, down low over the dark earth in which the eye does not see but
rather senses the mighty green tone of spring, reddens with a scarlet
gold the narrow, long streak of the sunset glow, which has pierced the
dove-coloured mist. And in this indistinct, distant light, in the
caressing air, in the scents of the oncoming night, was some secret,
sweet, conscious mournfulness, which usually is so gentle in the
evenings between spring and summer. The indistinct noise of the city
floated in, the dolorous, snuffling air of an accordeon, the mooing of
cows could be heard; somebody’s soles were scraping dryly and a
ferruled cane rapped resoundingly on the flags of the pavement; lazily
and irregularly the wheels of a cabman’s victoria, rolling at a pace
through Yama, would rumble by, and all these sounds mingled with a
beauty and softness in the pensive drowsiness of the evening. And the
whistles of the locomotives on the line of the railroad, which was
marked out in the darkness with green and red lights, sounded with a
quiet, singing caution.
“Now the nurse is co-oming in,
Bringing sugar and a roll,
Bringing sugar and a roll,
Deals them equally to all.”
“Prokhor Ivanich!” Niura suddenly calls after the curly waiter from the
dram-shop, who, a light black silhouette, is running across the road.
“Oh, Prokhor Ivanich!”
“Oh, bother you!” the other snarls hoarsely. “What now?”
“A friend of yours sent you his regards. I saw him today.”
“What sort of friend?”
“Such a little good-looker! An attractive little brunet ...No, but
you’d better ask—where did I see him?”
“Well, where?” Prokhor Ivanovich comes to a stop for a minute.
“And here’s where: nailed over there, on the fifth shelf with old hats,
where we keep all dead cats.”
“Scat! You darn fool!”
Niura laughs shrilly over all Yama, and throws herself down on the
sill, kicking her legs in high black stockings. Afterward, having
ceased laughing, she all of a sudden makes round astonished eyes and
says in a whisper:
“But do you know, girlie—why, he cut a woman’s throat the year before
last—that same Prokhor. Honest to God!”
“Is that so? Did she die?”
“No, she didn’t. She got by,” says Niura, as though with regret. “But
just the same she lay for two months in the Alexandrovskaya Hospital.
The doctors said, that if it were only this teen-weeny bit higher—then
it would have been all over. Bye-bye!”
“Well, what did he do that to her for?”
“How should I know? Maybe she hid money from him or wasn’t true to him.
He was her lover—her pimp.”
“Well, and what did he get for it?”
“Why, nothing. There was no evidence of any kind. There had been a
free-for-all mix-up. About a hundred people were fighting. She also
told the police that she had no suspicions of any sort. But Prokhor
himself boasted afterwards: ‘I,’ says he, ‘didn’t do for Dunka that
time, but I’ll finish her off another time. She,’ says he, ‘won’t get
by my hands. I’m going to give her the works.’”
A shiver runs all the way down Liuba’s back.
“They’re desperate fellows, these pimps!” she pronounces quietly, with
horror in her voice.
“Something terrible! I, you know, played at love with our Simeon for a
whole year. Such a Herod, the skunk! I didn’t have a whole spot on me.
I always went about in black and blue marks. And it wasn’t for any
reason at all, but just simply so—he’d go in the morning into a room
with me, lock himself in, and start in to torture me. He’d wrench my
arms, pinch my breasts, grab my throat and begin to strangle me. Or
else he’d be kissing, kissing, and then he’d bite the lips so that the
blood would just spurt out ... I’d start crying—but that’s all he was
looking for. Then he’d just pounce an me like a beast—simply shivering
all over. And he’d take all my money away—well, now, to the very last
little copper. There wasn’t anything to buy ten cigarettes with. He’s
stingy, this here Simeon, that’s what, always into the bank-book with
it, always putting it away into the bank-book... Says when he gets a
thousand roubles together—he’ll go into a monastery.”
“Go on!”
“Honest to God. You look into his little room: the twenty-four hours
round, day and night, the little holy lamp burns before the images.
He’s very strong for God ... Only I think that he’s that way because
there’s heavy sins upon him. He’s a murderer.”
“What are you saying?”
“Oh, let’s drop talking about him, Liubochka. Well, let’s go on
further:
“I’ll go to the drug store, buy me some poison, And I will poison then
meself.”
Niura starts off in a very high, thin voice.
Jennie walks back and forth in the room, with arms akimbo, swaying as
she walks, and looking at herself in all the mirrors. She has on a
short orange satin dress, with straight deep pleats in the skirt, which
vacillates evenly to the left and right from the movement of her hips.
Little Manka, a passionate lover of card games, ready to play from
morning to morning, without stopping, is playing away at “sixty-six”
with Pasha, during which both women, for convenience in dealing, have
left an empty chair between them, while they gather their tricks into
their skirts, spread out between their knees. Manka has on a brown,
very modest dress, with black apron and pleated black bib; this dress
is very becoming to her dainty, fair little head and small stature; it
makes her younger and gives her the appearance of a high-school
undergraduate.
Her partner Pasha is a very queer and unhappy girl. She should have
been, long ago, not in a house of ill-fame, but in a psychiatric ward,
because of an excruciating nervous malady, which compels her to give
herself up, frenziedly, with an unwholesome avidity, to any man
whatsoever who may choose her, even the most repulsive. Her mates make
sport of her and despise her somewhat for this vice, just as though for
some treason to their corporate enmity toward men. Niura, with very
great versimilitude, mimics her sighs, groans, outcries and passionate
words, from which she can never refrain in the moments of ecstasy and
which are to be heard in the neighbouring rooms through two or three
partitions. There is a rumour afloat about Pasha, that she got into a
brothel not at all through necessity or temptation or deception, but
had gone into it her own self, voluntarily, following her horrible,
insatiable instinct. But the proprietress of the house and both the
housekeepers indulge Pasha in every way and encourage her insane
weakness, because, thanks to it, Pasha is in constant demand and earns
four, five times as much as any one of the remaining girls—earns so
much, that on busy gala days she is not brought out to the more drab
guests at all, or else refused them under the pretext of Pasha’s
illness, because the steady, paying guests are offended if they are
told that the girl they know is busy with another. And of such steady
guests Pasha has a multitude; many are with perfect sincerity, even
though bestially, in love with her, and even not so long ago two,
almost at the same time, offered to set her up: a Georgian—a clerk in a
store of Cakhetine wines, and some railroad agent, a very proud and
very poor nobleman, with shirt cuffs the colour of a cabbage rose, and
with an eye which had been replaced by a black circle on an elastic.
Pasha, passive in everything save her impersonal sensuality, would go
with anybody who might call her, but the administration of the house
vigilantly guards its interests in her. A near insanity already flits
over her lovely face, in her half-closed eyes, always smiling with some
heady, blissful, meek, bashful and unseemly smile, in her languorous,
softened, moist lips, which she is constantly licking; in her short,
quiet laugh—the laugh of an idiot. Yet at the same time she—this
veritable victim of the social temperament—in everyday life is very
good-natured, yielding, entirely uncovetous and is very much ashamed of
her inordinate passion. Toward her mates she is tender, likes very much
to kiss and embrace them and sleep in the same bed with them, but still
everybody has a little aversion for her, it would seem.
“Mannechka, sweetie, dearie,” says Pasha lightly touching Manya’s hand
with emotion, “tell my fortune, my precious little child.”
“We-ell,” Manya pouts her lips just like a child, “let’s play a little
more.”
“Mannechka, my little beauty, you little good-looker, my precious, my
own, my dear...”
Manya gives in and lays out the pack on her knees. A suit of hearts
comes out, a small monetary interest and a meeting in the suit of
spades with a large company in the king of clubs.
Pasha claps her hands joyously:
“Ah, it’s my Levanchik! Well, yes, he promised to come to-day. Of
course, it’s Levanchik.”
“That’s your Georgian!”
“Yes, yes, my little Georgian. Oh, how nice he is. I’d just love never
to let him go away from me. Do you know what he told me the last time?
‘If you’ll go on living in a sporting house, then I’ll make both you
dead, and make me dead.’ And he flashed his eyes at me so!”
Jennie, who had stopped near, listens to her words and asks haughtily:
“Who was it said that?”
“Why, my little Georgian, Levan. ‘Both for you death and for me
death.’”
“Fool! He isn’t any little Georgian at all, but simply a common
Armenian. You’re a crazy fool.”
“Oh no, he isn’t—he’s a Georgian. And it is quite strange on your
part...”
“I’m telling you—a common Armenian. I can tell better. Fool!”
“What are you cursing for, Jennie? I didn’t start cursing you first
off, did I?”
“You just try and be the first to start cursing! Fool! Isn’t it all the
same to you what he is? Are you in love with him, or what?”
“Well, I am in love with him!”
“Well, and you’re a fool. And the one with the badge in his cap, the
lame one—are you in love with him too?”
“Well, what of it? I respect him very much. He is very respectable.”
“And with Nicky the Book-keeper? And with the contractor? And with
Antoshka-Kartoshka?[4] And with the fat actor? Oo-ooh, you shameless
creature!” Jennie suddenly cries out. “I can’t look at you without
disgust. You’re a bitch! In your place, if I was such a miserable
thing, I’d rather lay hands on myself, strangle myself with a cord from
my corset. You vermin!”
[4] Tony the Potato.—Trans.
Pasha silently lowers her eyelashes over her tear-filled eyes. Manya
tries to defend her.
“Really, what are you carrying on like that for, Jennechka? What are
you down on her like that for...”
“Eh, all of you are fine!” Jennie sharply cuts her short. “No
self-respect of any sort! Some scum comes along, buys you like a piece
of meat, hires you like a cabby, at a fixed rate, for love for an hour,
but you go all to pieces: ‘Ah, my little lover! Ah, what unearthly
passion!’ Ugh!” she spat in disgust.
She wrathfully turns her back upon them and continues to promenade on a
diagonal through the room, swinging her hips and blinking at herself in
every mirror.
During this time Isaac Davidovich, the piano player, is still
struggling with the refractory violinist.
“Not that way, not that way, Isaiah Savvich. You throw the fiddle away
for one little minute. Listen a little to me. Here is the tune.”
He plays with one finger and hums in that horrible goatish voice that
all musical directors—for which calling he had been at one time
preparing—possess.
“Ess-tam, ess-tam, ess-tiam-tiam. Well, now, repeat after me the first
part, first time off..... Well..... ein, zwei...”
Their rehearsal is being attentively watched by the grey-eyed,
round-faced, arch-browed Zoe, mercilessly bedaubed with cheap rouges
and whiteners, leaning with her elbows on the pianoforte, and the
slight Vera, with drink-ravaged face, in the costume of a jockey—in a
round little cap with straight brim, in a little silk jacket, striped
blue and white, in tightly stretched trunks and in little patent
leather boots with yellow facings. And really, Vera does resemble a
jockey, with her narrow face, in which the exceedingly sparkling blue
eyes, under a smart bob coming down on the forehead, are set too near
the humped, nervous, very handsome nose. When, at last, after long
efforts the musicians agree, the somewhat small Verka walks up to the
large Zoe, in that mincing, tethered walk, the hind part sticking out,
and elbows spread as though for flight, with which only women in male
costume can walk, and makes a comical masculine bow to her, spreading
her arms wide and lowering them. And, with great enjoyment, they begin
careering over the room.
The nimble Niura, always the first to announce all the news, suddenly
jumps down from the window sill, and calls out, spluttering from the
excitement and hurry:
“A swell carriage...has driven up...to Treppel ...with electricity...
Oi, goils...may I die on the spot...there’s electricity on the shafts.”
All the girls, save the proud Jennie, thrust themselves out of the
windows. A driver with a fine carriage is indeed standing near the
Treppel entrance. His brand-new, dashing victoria glistens with new
lacquer; at the ends of the shafts two tiny electric lights burn with a
yellow light; the tall white horse, with a bare pink spot on the septum
of its nose, shakes its handsome head, shifts its feet on the same
spot, and pricks up its thin ears; the bearded, stout driver himself
sits on the coach-box like a carven image, his arms stretched out
straight along his knees.
“Oh, for a ride!” squeals Niura. “Oh, uncle! Oh you swell coachman!”
she cries out, hanging over the window sill. “Give a poor little girlie
a ride... Give us a ride for love.”
But the swell coachman laughs, makes a scarcely noticeable movement
with his fingers, and immediately the white horse, as though it had
been waiting just for that, starts from its place at a goodly trot,
handsomely turns around and with measured speed floats away into the
darkness together with the victoria and the broad back of the coachman.
“Pfui! What indecency!” the indignant voice of Emma Edwardovna sounds
in the room. “Well, where did you see that respectable girls should
allow themselves to climb out of the windows and holler all over the
street. O, scandal! And it’s all Niura, and it’s always this horrible
Niura!”
She is majestic in her black dress, with her yellow flabby face, with
the dark pouches under her eyes, with the three pendulous, quivering
chins. The girls, like boarding school misses, staidly seat themselves
on the chairs along the walls, except Jennie, who continues to
contemplate herself in all the mirrors. Two more cabbies drive up
opposite, to the house of Sophia Vasilievna. Yama is beginning to liven
up. At last one more victoria rattles along the paved road and its
noise is cut short abruptly at the entrance to Anna Markovna’s.
The porter Simeon helps someone take off his things in the front hall.
Jennie looks in there, holding on with both hands to the door jambs,
but immediately turns back, and as she walks shrugs her shoulders and
shakes her head negatively.
“Don’t know him, someone who’s an entire stranger,” she says in a low
voice. “He has never been in our place. Some daddy or other, fat, in
gold eye-glasses and a uniform.”
Emma Edwardovna commands in a voice which sounds like a summoning
cavalry trumpet:
“Ladies, into the drawing room! Into the drawing room, ladies!”
One after the other, with haughty gaits, into the drawing room enter:
Tamara, with bare white arms and bared neck, wound with a string of
artificial pearls; fat Kitty with her fleshy, quadrangular face and low
forehead—she, too, is in decollete, but her skin is red and in
goose-pimples; Nina, the very newest one, pug-nosed and clumsy, in a
dress the colour of a green parrot; another Manka—Big Manka, or Manka
the Crocodile, as they call her, and—the last—Sonka the Rudder, a
Jewess, with an ugly dark face and an extraordinarily large nose,
precisely for which she has received her nickname, but with such
magnificent large eyes, at the same time meek and sad, burning and
humid, as, among the women of all the terrestrial globe, are to be
found only among the Jewesses.
CHAPTER VI.
The elderly guest in the uniform of the Department of Charity walked in
with slow, undecided steps, at each step bending his body a little
forward and rubbing his palms with a circular motion, as though washing
them. Since all the women were pompously silent, as though not noticing
him, he traversed the drawing room and let himself down on a chair
alongside of Liuba, who, in accordance with etiquette, only gathered up
her skirt a little, preserving the abstracted and independent air of a
girl from a respectable house.
“How do you do, miss?” he said.
“How do you do?” answered Liuba abruptly.
“How are you getting along?”
“Thanks—thank you. Treat me to a smoke.”
“Pardon me—I don’t smoke.”
“So that’s how. A man—and he doesn’t smoke, just like that. Well, then,
treat me to some Lafitte with lemonade. I am terribly fond of Lafitte
with lemonade.”
He let that pass in silence.
“Ooh, what a stingy daddy! Where do you work, now? Are you one of the
government clerks?”
“No, I’m a teacher. I teach the German language.”
“But I have seen you somewhere, daddy. Your physiognomy is familiar to
me. Where have I met you before?”
“Well, now, I don’t know, really. Unless it was on the street.”
“It might have been on the street, likely as not... You ought to treat
me to an orange, at least. May I ask for an orange?”
He again grew quiet, looking about him. His face began to glisten and
the pimples on his forehead became red. He was mentally appraising all
the women, choosing a likely one for himself, and was at the same time
embarrassed by his silence. There was nothing at all to talk about;
besides that the indifferent importunity of Liuba irritated him. Fat
Katie pleased him with her large, bovine body, but she must be—he
decided in his mind—very frigid in love, like all stout women, and in
addition to that not handsome of face. Vera also excited him, with her
appearance of a little boy, and her firm thighs, closely enveloped by
the white tights; and Little White Manya, looking so like an innocent
school-girl; and Jennie with her energetic, swarthy, handsome face. For
one minute he was all ready to stop at Jennie, but only started in his
chair and did not venture—by her easy, inaccessible and negligent air,
and because she in all sincerity did not pay him the least attention,
he surmised that she was the most spoilt of all the girls in the
establishment, accustomed to having the visitors spend more money on
her than on the others. But the pedagogue was a calculating man,
burthened with a large family and an exhausted wife, destroyed by his
masculine demands and suffering from a multiplicity of female ills.
Teaching in a female high school and in an institute, he lived
constantly in a sort of secret sensual delirium, and only his German
training, stinginess and cowardice helped him to hold his constantly
aroused desires in check. But two or three times a year, with
incredible privations, he would cut five or ten roubles out of his
beggarly budget, denying himself in his beloved evening mug of beer and
contriving to save on the street cars, which necessitated his making
enormous distances on foot through the town. This money he set aside
for women and spent it slowly, with gusto, trying to prolong and
cheapen down the enjoyment as much as possible. And for his money he
wanted a very great deal, almost the impossible; his German sentimental
soul dimly thirsted after innocence, timidity, poesy, in the flaxen
image of Gretchen; but as a man he dreamt, desired, and demanded that
his caresses should bring a woman into rapture and palpitation and into
a sweet exhaustion.
However, all the men strove for the very same thing—even the most
wretched, monstrous, misshapen and impotent of them—and ancient
experience had long ago taught the women to imitate with voice and
movements the most flaming passion, retaining in the most tempestuous
minutes the fullest sang froid.
“You might at least order the musicians to play a polka. Let the girls
dance a little,” asked Liuba grumblingly.
That suited him. Under cover of the music, amid the jostling of the
dances, it was far more convenient to get up courage, arise, and lead
one of the girls out of the drawing room, than to do it amid the
general silence and the finical immobility.
“And how much does that cost?” he asked cautiously.
“A quadrille is half a rouble; but ordinary dances are thirty kopecks.
Is it all right then?”
“Well, of course...if you please...I don’t begrudge it,” he agreed,
pretending to be generous...
“Whom do you speak to?”
“Why, over there—to the musicians.”
“Why not? ... I’ll do it with pleasure...Mister musician, something in
the light dances, if you please,” he said, laying down his silver on
the pianoforte.
“What will you order?” asked Isaiah Savvich, putting the money away in
his pocket. “Waltz, polka, polka-mazourka?”
“Well...Something sort of...”
“A waltz, a waltz!” Vera, a great lover of dancing, shouted from her
place.
“No, a polka! ... A waltz! ... A vengerka! ... A waltz!” demanded
others.
“Let them play a polka,” decided Liuba in a capricious tone. “Isaiah
Savvich, play a little polka, please. This is my husband, and he is
ordering fox me,” she added, embracing the pedagogue by the neck.
“Isn’t that true, daddy?”
But he freed himself from under her arm, drawing his head in like a
turtle, and she without the least offence went to dance with Niura.
Three other couples were also whirling about. In the dances all the
girls tried to hold the waist as straight as possible, and the head as
immobile as possible, with a complete unconcern in their faces, which
constituted one of the conditions of the good taste of the
establishment. Under cover of the slight noise the teacher walked up to
Little Manka.
“Let’s go?” he said, offering her his bent arm.
“Let’s go,” answered she, laughing.
She brought him into her room, gotten up with all the coquettishness of
a bedroom in a brothel of the medium sort, with a bureau, covered with
a knit scarf, and upon it a mirror, a bouquet of paper flowers, a few
empty bonbonierres, a powder box, a faded photograph of a young man
with white eyebrows and eyelashes and a haughtily astonished face, as
well as several visiting cards. Above the bed, which is covered with a
pink pique blanket, along the wall, is nailed up a rug with a
representation of a Turkish sultan luxuriating in his harem, a narghili
in his mouth; on the walls, several more photographs of dashing men of
the waiter and actor type; a pink lantern hangs down from the ceiling
by chains; there are also a round table under a carpet cover, three
vienna chairs, and an enameled bowl with a pitcher of the same sort in
the corner on a tabouret, behind the bed.
“Darling, treat me to Lafitte with lemonade,” in accordance with
established usage asked Little Manka, unbuttoning her corsage.
“Afterwards,” austerely answered the pedagogue. “It will all depend
upon yourself. And then—what sort of Lafitte can you have here? Some
muddy brew or other?”
“We have good Lafitte,” contradicted the girl touchily. “Two roubles a
bottle. But if you are so stingy, then buy me beer at least. All
right?”
“Well, beer is all right...”
“And for me lemonade and oranges. Yes?”
“A bottle of lemonade, yes; but oranges, no. Later, maybe, I will treat
you to champagne even. It will all depend on you. If you’ll exert
yourself.”
“Then, daddy, I’ll ask for four bottles of beer and two bottles of
lemonade? Yes? And for me just a little cake of chocolate. All right?
Yes?”
“Two bottles of beer, a bottle of lemonade, and nothing more. I don’t
like when I’m bargained with. If need be, I’ll order myself.”
“And may I invite a friend of mine?”
“No, let it be without any friends, if you please.”
Manka leaned out of the door into the corridor and called out
resoundingly:
“Housekeeper, dear! Two bottles of beer and a bottle of lemonade for
me.”
Simeon came with a tray and began with an accustomed rapidity to uncork
the bottles. Following him came Zociya, the housekeeper.
“There, now, how well you’ve made yourself at home here. Here’s to your
lawful marriage!” she congratulated them.
“Daddy, treat the little housekeeper with beer,” begged Manka. “Drink,
housekeeper dear.”
“Well, in that case here’s to your health, mister. Somehow, your face
seems kind of familiar to me?”
The German drank his beer, sucking and licking his moustache, and
impatiently waited for the housekeeper to go away. But she, having put
down her glass and thanked him, said:
“Let me get the money coming from you, mister. As much as is coming for
the beer and the time. That’s both better for you and more convenient
for us.”
The demand for the money went against the grain of the teacher, because
it completely destroyed the sentimental part of his intentions. He
became angry:
“What sort of boorishness is this, anyway! It doesn’t look as if I were
preparing to run away from here. And besides, can’t you discriminate
between people at all? You can see that a man of respectability, in a
uniform, has come to you, and not some tramp. What sort of importunity
is this!”
The housekeeper gave in a little.
“Now, don’t get offended, mister. Of course, you’ll pay the young lady
yourself for the visit. I don’t think you will do her any wrong, she’s
a fine girl among us. But I must trouble you to pay for the beer and
lemonade. I, too, have to give an account to the proprietress. Two
bottles at fifty is a rouble and the lemonade thirty—a rouble thirty.”
“Good Lord, a bottle of beer fifty kopecks!” the German waxed
indignant. “Why, I will get it in any beer-shop for twelve kopecks.”
“Well, then, go to a beer-shop if it’s cheaper there,” Zociya became
offended. “But if you’ve come to a respectable establishment, the
regular price is half a rouble. We don’t take anything extra. There,
that’s better. Twenty kopecks change coming to you?”
“Yes, change, without fail,” firmly emphasized the German teacher. “And
I would request of you that nobody else should enter.”
“No, no, no, what are you saying,” Zociya began to bustle near the
door. “Dispose yourself as you please, to your heart’s content. A
pleasant appetite to you.”
Manka locked the door on a hook after her and sat down on the German’s
knee, embracing him with her bare arm.
“Are you here long?” he asked, sipping his beer. He felt dimly that
that imitation of love which must immediately take place demanded some
sort of psychic propinquity, a more intimate acquaintance, and on that
account, despite his impatience, began the usual conversation, which is
carried on by almost all men—when alone with prostitutes, and which
compels the latter to lie almost mechanically, to lie without
mortification, enthusiasm or malice, according to a single, very
ancient stencil.
“Not long, only the third month.”
“And how old are you?”
“Sixteen,” fibbed Little Manka, taking five years off her age.
“O, such a young one!” the German wondered, and began, bending down and
grunting, to take off his boots. “Then how did you get here?”
“Well, a certain officer deprived me of my innocence there...near his
birthplace. And it’s terrible how strict my mamma is. If she was to
find out, she’d strangle me with her own hands. Well, so then I ran
away from home and got in here...”
“And did you love that same officer, the one who was the first one,
now?”
“If I hadn’t loved him, I wouldn’t have gone to him. He promised to
marry me, the scoundrel, but then managed to get what he was after, and
abandoned me.”
“Well, and were you ashamed the first time?”
“Of course, you’d be ashamed...How do you like it, daddy, with light or
without light? I’ll turn, down the lantern a little. All right?”
“Well, and aren’t you bored here? What do they call you?”
“Manya. To be sure I’m bored. What sort of a life is ours!”
The German kissed her hard on her lips and again asked:
“And do you love the men? Are there men who please you? Who afford you
pleasure?”
“How shouldn’t there be?” Manka started laughing. “I love the ones like
you especially, such nice little fatties.”
“You love them? Eh? Why do you love them?”
“Oh, I love them just so. You’re nice, too.”
The German meditated for a few seconds, pensively sipping away at his
beer. Then he said that which every man tells a prostitute in these
moments preceding the casual possession of her body:
“Do you know, Marichen, you also please me very much. I would willingly
take you and set you up.”
“You’re married,” the girl objected, touching his ring.
“Yes, but, you understand, I don’t live with my wife; she isn’t well,
she can’t fulfill her conjugal duties.”
“The poor thing! If she were to find out where you go, daddy, she would
cry for sure.”
“Let’s drop that. So, you know, Mary, I am always looking out for such
a girl as you for myself, so modest and pretty. I am a man of means, I
would find a flat with board for you, with fuel and light. And forty
roubles a month pin money. Would you go?”
“Why not go—I’d go.”
He kissed her violently, but a secret apprehension glided swiftly
through his cowardly heart.
“But are you healthy?” he asked in an inimical, quavering voice.
“Why, yes, I am healthy. There’s a doctor’s inspection every Saturday
in our place.”
After five minutes she went away from him, as she walked putting away
in her stocking the earned money, on which, as on the first handsel,
she had first spat, after a superstitious custom. There had been no
further speech either about maintenance or natural liking. The German
was left unsatisfied with the frigidity of Manka and ordered the
housekeeper to be summoned to him.
“Housekeeper dear, my husband demands your presence!” said Manya,
coming into the drawing room and fixing her hair before a mirror.
Zociya went away, then returned afterwards and called Pasha out into
the corridor. Later she came back into the drawing room, but alone.
“How is it, Manka, that you haven’t pleased your cavalier?” she asked
with laughter. “He complains about you: ‘This,’ he says, ‘is no woman,
but some log of wood, a piece of ice.’ I sent him Pashka.”
“Eh, what a disgusting man!” Manka puckered up her face and spat aside.
“Butts in with his conversations. Asks: ‘Do you feel when I kiss you?
Do you feel a pleasant excitement?’ An old hound. ‘I’ll take you,’ he
says, ‘and set you up!’”
“They all say that,” remarked Zoe indifferently.
But Jennie, who since morning has been in an evil mood, suddenly flared
up.
“Oh, the sneak, the big, miserable sneak that he is!” she exclaimed,
turning red and energetically putting her hands to her sides. “Why, I
would take him, the old, dirty little beast, by the ear, then lead him
up to the mirror and show him his disgusting snout. What? Good-looking,
aren’t you? And how much better you’ll be when the spit will be running
out of your mouth, and you’ll cross your eyes, and begin to choke and
rattle in the throat, and to snort right in the face of the woman. And
for your damned rouble you want me to go all to pieces before you like
a pancake, and that from your nasty love my eyes should pop out onto my
forehead? Why, hit him in the snout, the skunk, in the snout! Until
there’s blood!”
“O, Jennie! Stop it now! PFUI!” the susceptible Emma Edwardovna, made
indignant by her tone, stopped her.
“I won’t stop!” she cut her short abruptly. But she grew quiet by
herself and wrathfully walked away with distending nostrils and with
fire in the darkened, handsome eyes.
CHAPTER VII.
Little by little the drawing room was filling. There came Roly-Poly,
long known to all Yama—a tall, thin, red-nosed, gray old man, in the
uniform of a forest ranger, in high boots, with a wooden yard-stick
always sticking out of his side-pocket. He passed whole days and
evenings as a habitue of the billiard parlor in the tavern, always
half-tipsy, shedding his little jokes, jingles and little sayings,
acting familiarly with the porters, with the housekeepers and the
girls. In the houses everybody from the proprietress to the
chamber-maids—treated him with a bit of derision—careless, a trifle
contemptuous, but without malice. At times he was even not without use:
he could transmit notes from the girls to their lovers, and run over to
the market or to the drug-store. Not infrequently, thanks to his
loosely hung tongue and long extinguished self respect, he would worm
himself into a gathering of strangers and increase their expenditures,
nor did he carry elsewhere the money gotten as “loans” on such
occasions, but spent it right here for women—unless, indeed, he left
himself some change for cigarettes. And, out of habit, he was
good-naturedly tolerated.
“And here’s Roly-Poly arrived,” announced Niura, when he, having
already managed to shake hands amicably with Simeon the porter, stopped
in the doorway of the drawing room, lanky, in a uniform cap knocked at
a brave slant over one side of his head. “Well, now, Roly-Poly, fire
away!”
“I have the honour to present myself,” Roly-Poly immediately commenced
to grimace, putting his hand up to his brim in military fashion, “a
right honourable privy frequenter of the local agreeable
establishments, Prince Bottlekin, Count Liquorkin, Baron
Whoatinkevich-Giddapkovski—Mister Beethoven! Mister Chopin!” he greeted
the musicians. “Play me something from the opera The Brave and Charming
General Anisimov, or, A Hubbub in the Coolidor. My regards to the
little political economist Zociya.[5] A-ha! Then you kiss only at
Easter? We shall write that down. Ooh-you, my Tomalachka, my pitty-itty
tootsicums!”
[5] An untranslatable pun on Economochka, a diminutive for
“housekeeper.”—Trans.
And so with jests and with pinches he went the round of all the girls
and at last sat down alongside of the fat Katie, who put her fat leg
upon his, leant with her elbow upon her knee, while upon the palm she
laid her chin, and began to watch indifferently and closely the
surveyor rolling a cigarette for himself.
“And how is it that you don’t ever get tired of it, Roly-Poly? You’re
forever rolling a coffin nail.”
Roly-Poly at once commenced to move his eye-brows and the skin of his
scalp and began to speak in verse:
“Dear cigarette, my secret mate,
How can I help loving thee?
Not through mere whim, prompted by fate,
All have started smoking thee.”
“Why, Roly-Poly, but you are going to croak soon,” said Kitty
indifferently.
“And a very simple matter, that.”
“Roly-Poly, say something still funnier, in verse,” begged Verka.
And at once, obediently, having placed himself in a funny pose, he
began to declaim:
“Many stars are in the bright sky,
But to count them there’s no way.
Yes, the wind whispers there can be,
But there really is no way.
Blossoming now are burdocks,
Now sing out the birds called cocks.”
Playing the tom-fool in this manner, Roly-Poly would sit whole evenings
and nights through in the drawing rooms of the establishments. And
through some strange psychic fellow feeling the girls counted him
almost as one of their own; occasionally rendered him little temporary
services and even bought him beer and vodka at their expense.
Some time after Roly-Poly a large company of hairdressers, who were
that day free from work, tumbled in. They were noisy, gay, but even
here, in a brothel, did not cease their petty reckonings and
conversations about closed and open theatrical benefits, about the
bosses, about the wives of the bosses. All these were people corrupt to
a sufficient degree, liars, with great hopes for the future—such as,
for example, entering the service of some countess as a kept lover.
They wanted to utilize to the widest possible extent their rather
hard-earned money, and on that account decided to make a review of
absolutely all the houses of Yama; only Treppel’s they could not
resolve to enter, as that was too swell for them. But at Anna
Markovna’s they at once ordered a quadrille and danced it, especially
the fifth figure, where the gents execute a solo, perfectly, like real
Parisians, even putting their thumbs in the arm holes of their vests.
But they did not want to remain with the girls; instead, they promised
to come later, when they had wound up the complete review of the
brothels.
And there also came and went government clerks of some sort; crisp
young people in patent leather boots; several students; several
officers, who were horribly afraid of losing their dignity in the eyes
of the proprietress and the guests of the brothel. Little by little in
the drawing room was created such a noisy, fumy setting that no one
there any longer felt ill at ease. There came a steady visitor, the
lover of Sonka the Rudder, who came almost every day and sat whole
hours through near his beloved, gazed upon her with languishing
oriental eyes, sighed, grew faint and created scenes for her because
she lives in a brothel, because she sins against the Sabbath, because
she eats meat not prepared in the orthodox Hebrew manner, and because
she has strayed from the family and the great Hebrew church.
As a usual thing—and this happened often—Zociya the housekeeper would
walk up to him under cover of the hubbub and would say, twisting her
lips:
“Well, what are you sitting there for mister? Warming your behind? You
might go and pass the time with the young lady.”
Both of them, the Jew and the Jewess, were by birth from Homel, and
must have been created by God himself for a tender, passionate, mutual
love; but many circumstances—as, for example, the pogrom which took
place in their town, impoverishment, a complete confusion, fright—had
for a time parted them. However, love was so great that the junior drug
clerk Neiman, with great difficulty, efforts, and humiliations,
contrived to find for himself the place of a junior in one of the local
pharmacies, and had searched out the girl he loved. He was a real,
orthodox Hebrew, almost fanatical. He knew that Sonka had been sold by
her very mother to one of the buyers-up of live merchandise, knew many
humiliating, hideous particulars of how she had been resold from hand
to hand, and his pious, fastidious, truly Hebraic soul writhed and
shuddered at these thoughts, but nevertheless love was above all. And
every evening he would appear in the drawing room of Anna Markovna. If
he was successful, at an enormous deprivation, in cutting out of his
beggarly income some chance rouble, he would take Sonka into her room,
but this was not at all a joy either for him or for her: after a
momentary happiness—the physical possession of each other—they cried,
reproached each other, quarreled with characteristic Hebraic,
theatrical gestures, and always after these visits Sonka the Rudder
would return into the drawing room with swollen, reddened eyelids.
But most frequently of all he had no money, and would sit whole
evenings through near his mistress, patiently and jealously awaiting
her when Sonka through chance was taken by some guest. And when she
would return and sit down beside him, he would, without being
perceived, overwhelm her with reproaches, trying not to turn the
general attention upon himself and without turning his head in her
direction. And in her splendid, humid, Hebraic eyes during these
conversations there was always a martyr-like but meek expression.
There arrived a large company of Germans, employed in an optical shop;
there also arrived a party of clerks from the fish and gastronomical
store of Kereshkovsky, and two young people very well known in the
Yamas—both bald, with sparse, soft, delicate hairs around the bald
spots: Nicky the Book-keeper and Mishka the Singer—so were they both
called in the houses. They also were met very cordially, just like Karl
Karlovich of the optical shop and Volodka of the fish store—with
raptures, cries and kisses, flattering to their self-esteem. The spry
Niurka would jump out into the foyer, and, having informed herself as
to who had come, would report excitedly, after her wont:
“Jennka, your husband has come!”
Or:
“Little Manka, your lover has come!”
And Mishka the Singer, who was no singer at all, but the owner of a
drug warehouse, at once, upon entering, sang out in a vibrating,
quavering, goatish voice:
“They fe-e-e-l the tru-u-u-u-uth!
Come thou daw-aw-aw-aw-ning...”
which he perpetrated at every visit of his to Anna Markovna.
Almost incessantly they played the quadrille, waltz, polka, and danced.
There also arrived Senka—the lover of Tamara—but, contrary to his wont,
he did not put on airs, did not go in for “ruination,” did not order a
funeral march from Isaiah Savvich, and did not treat the girls to
chocolate ... For some reason he was gloomy, limped on his right leg,
and sought to attract as little attention as possible—probably his
professional affairs were at this time in a bad way. With a single
motion of his head, while walking, he called Tamara out of the drawing
room and vanished with her into her room. And there also arrived
Egmont-Lavretzki the actor, clean-shaven, tall, resembling a court
flunky with his vulgar and insolently contemptuous face.
The clerks from the gastronomical store danced with all the ardour of
youth and with all the decorum recommended by Herman Hoppe, the
self-instructor of good manners. In this regard the girls also
responded to their intentions. Both with these and with the others it
was accounted especially decorous and well-bred to dance as rigidly as
possible, keeping the arms hanging down, while the heads were raised
high and inclined to one side with a certain proud, and, at the same
time, tired and enervated air. In the intermissions, between the
figures of the dance, it was necessary to fan one’s self with a
handkerchief, with a bored and negligent air ... In a word, they all
made believe that they belonged to the choicest society, and that if
they do dance, they only do it out of condescension, as a little
comradely turn. But still they danced so ardently that the perspiration
rolled down in streams from the clerks of Kereshkovsky.
Two or three rows had already happened in different houses. Some man,
all in blood, whose face in the pale light of the moon’s crescent
seemed black from the blood, was running around in the street, cursing,
and, without paying the least attention to his wounds, was searching
for his cap which had been lost in the brawl. On Little Yamskaya some
government scribes had had a fight with a ship’s company. The tired
pianists and musicians played as in a delirium, in a doze, through
mechanical habit. This was towards the waning of the night.
Altogether unexpectedly, seven students, a sub-professor, and a local
reporter walked into the establishment of Anna Markovna.
CHAPTER VIII.
They had all, except the reporter, passed the whole day together, from
the very morning, celebrating May Day with some young women of their
acquaintance. They had rowed in boats on the Dnieper, had cooked field
porridge on the other side of the river, in the thick, bitter-smelling
underbrush; had bathed—men and women by turns—in the rapid, warm water;
had drunk home-made spiced brandy, sung sonorous songs of Little
Russia, and had returned to town only late in the evening, when the
dark, broad, running river so eerily and merrily plashed against the
sides of their boats, playing with the reflections of the stars, the
silvery shimmering paths of the electric lamps, and the bowing lights
of the can-buoys. And when they had stepped out on the shore, the palms
of each burned from the oars, the muscles of the arms and legs ached
pleasantly, and suffusing the whole body was a blissful, healthy
fatigue.
Then they had escorted the young women to their homes and at the
garden-gates and entrances had taken leave of them long and cordially,
with laughter and with such swinging hand-shakes as if they were
working the lever of a pump.
The whole day had passed in gaiety and noise, even a trifle
clamorously, and just the least wee bit tiresomely, but with youth-like
continence; without intoxication, and, which happens especially rarely,
without the least shadow of mutual affronts, or jealousy, or unvoiced
mortifications. Of course, such a benign mood had been helped by the
sun, the fresh river breeze, the sweet exhalations of the grasses and
the water, the joyous sensation of the strength and alertness of one’s
body while bathing and rowing, and the restraining influence of the
clever, kind, pure and handsome girls from families they were
acquainted with. But, almost without the knowledge of their
consciousness, their sensuousness—not imagination, but the simple,
healthy, instinctive sensuousness of young playful males—kindled from
chance encounters of their hands with feminine hands and from comradely
obliging embraces, when the occasion arose to help the young ladies
enter a boat or jump out on shore; from the tender odour of maiden
apparel, warmed by the sun; from the feminine cries of coquettish
fright on the river; from the sight of feminine figures, negligently
half-reclining with a naive immodesty on the green grass around the
samovar—from all these innocent liberties, which are so usual and
unavoidable on picnics, country outings and river excursions, when
within man, in the infinite depth of his soul, secretly awakens from
the care-free contact with earth, grasses, water and sun, the
beast-ancient, splendid, free, but disfigured and intimidated of men.
And for that reason, at two o’clock in the night, when THE SPARROWS, a
cozy students’ restaurant, had barely closed, and all the eight,
excited by alcohol and the plentiful food, had come out of the smoky,
fumy underground place into the street, into the sweet, disquieting
darkness of the night, with its beckoning fires in the sky and on the
earth, with its warm, heady air, from which the nostrils dilate avidly,
with its aromas, gliding from unseen gardens and flower-beds,—the head
of each one of them was aflame and the heart quietly and languishingly
yearning from vague desires. It was joyous and arrogant to sense after
the rest the new, fresh strength in all the sinews, the deep breathing
of the lungs, the red, resilient blood in the veins, the supple
obedience of all the members. And—without words, without thoughts,
without consciousness—one was drawn on this night to be running without
raiment in the somnolent forest, to be sniffing hurriedly the tracks of
some one’s feet on the dewy grass, with a loud call to be summoning a
female unto one’s self.
But to separate was now very difficult. The whole day, passed together,
had shaken them into an accustomed, tenacious herd. It seemed that if
even one were to go away from the company, a certain attained
equilibrium would be disturbed and could not be restored afterwards.
And so they dallied and stamped upon the sidewalk, near the exit of the
tavern’s underground vault, interfering with the progress of the
infrequent passers-by. They discussed hypocritically where else they
might go to wind up the night. It proved to be too far to the Tivoli
Garden, and in addition to that one also had to pay for admission
tickets, and the prices in the buffet were outrageous, and the program
had ended long ago. Volodya Pavlov proposed going to him—he had a dozen
of beer and a little cognac home. But it seemed a bore to all of them
to go in the middle of the night to a family apartment, to enter on
tiptoes up the stairs and to talk in whispers all the time.
“Tell you what, brethren ... Let’s better ride to the girlies, that
will be nearer the mark,” said peremptorily Lichonin, an old student, a
tall, stooping, morose and bearded fellow. By convictions he was an
anarchist—theoretic, but by avocation a passionate gambler at
billiards, races and cards—a gambler with a very broad, fatalistic
sweep. Only the day before he had won a thousand roubles at macao in
the Merchants’ Club, and this money was still burning a hole in his
pockets.
“And why not? Right-o!” somebody sustained him. “Let’s go, comrades?”
“Is it worth while? Why, this is an all night affair ...” spoke another
with a false prudence and an insincere fatigue.
And a third said through a feigned yawn:
“Let’s better go home, gentlemen ... a-a-a ... go bye-bye ... That’s
enough for to-day.”
“You won’t work any wonders when you’re asleep,” Lichonin remarked
sneeringly. “Herr professor, are you coming?”
But the sub-professor Yarchenko was obstinate and seemed really
angered, although, perhaps, he himself did not know what was lurking
within him, in some dark cranny of his soul.
“Leave me in peace, Lichonin. As I see it, gentlemen, this is downright
and plain swinishness—that which you are about to do. We have passed
the time so wonderfully, amiably and simply, it seems,—but no, you
needs must, like drunken cattle, clamber into a cesspool. I won’t go.”
“Still, if my memory does not play me false,” said Lichonin, with calm
causticity, “I recollect that no further back than past autumn we with
a certain future Mommsen were pouring in some place or other a jug of
ice into a pianoforte, delineating a Bouratian god, dancing the
belly-dance, and all that sort of thing?”
Lichonin spoke the truth. In his student days, and later, being
retained at the university, Yarchenko had led the most wanton and
crack-brained life. In all the taverns, cabarets, and other places of
amusement his small, fat, roundish little figure, his rosy cheeks,
puffed out like those of a painted cupid, and the shining, humid kindly
eyes were well known, his hurried, spluttering speech and shrill
laughter remembered.
His comrades could never fathom where he found the time to employ in
study, but nevertheless he went through all examinations and prescribed
work with distinction and from the first course the professors had him
in view. Now Yarchenko was beginning little by little to quit his
former comrades and bottle companions. He had just established the
indispensable connections with the professorial circle; the reading of
lectures in Roman history for the coming year had been offered him, and
not infrequently in conversation he would use the expression current
among the sub-professors: “We, the learned ones!” The student
familiarity, the compulsory companionship, the obligatory participation
in all meetings, protests and demonstrations, were becoming
disadvantageous to him, embarrassing, and even simply tedious. But he
knew the value of popularity among the younger element, and for that
reason could not decide to sever relations abruptly with his former
circle. Lichonin’s words, however, provoked him.
“Oh, my God, what does it matter what we did when we were youngsters?
We stole sugar, soiled our panties, tore the wings off beetles,”
Yarchenko began to speak, growing heated, and spluttering. “But there
is a limit and a mean to all this. I, gentlemen, do not presume, of
course, to give you counsels and to teach you, but one must be
consistent. We are all agreed that prostitution is one of the greatest
calamities of humanity, and are also agreed, that in this evil not the
women are guilty, but we, men, because the demand gives birth to the
offer. And therefore if, having drunk a glass of wine too much, I
still, notwithstanding my convictions, go to the prostitutes, I am
committing a triple vileness: before the unfortunate, foolish woman,
whom I subject to the most degrading form of slavery for my filthy
rouble; before humanity, because, hiring a public woman for an hour or
two for my abominable lust, I through this justify and uphold
prostitution; and finally, this is a vileness before one’s own
conscience and mind. And before logic.”
“Phew-ew!” Lichonin let out a long-drawn whistle and chanted in a thin,
dismal voice, nodding in time with his head hanging down to one side:
“The philosopher is off on our usual stuff: ‘A rope—is a common cord.’”
“Of course, there’s nothing easier than to play the tom-fool,”
responded Yarchenko. “But in my opinion there is not in the sorrowful
life of Russia a more mournful phenomenon than this lackadaisicalness
and vitiation of thought. To-day we will say to ourselves: Eh! It’s all
the same, whether I go to a brothel or whether I do not go, from this
one time things will get neither worse nor better. And after five years
we will be saying: Undoubtedly a bribe is a horribly nasty bit of
business, but you know—children ... the family ... And just the same
way after ten years we, having remained fortuitous Russian liberals,
will be sighing about personal freedom and bowing low before worthless
scoundrels, whom we despise, and will be cooling our heels in their
ante-rooms. ‘Because, don’t you know,’ we will say, tittering, ‘when
you live with wolves, you must howl like a wolf.’ By God, it wasn’t in
vain that some minister called the Russian students future
head-clerks!”
“Or professors,” Lichonin put in.
“But most important of all,” continued Yarchenko, letting this pointed
remark pass by, “most important of all is this, that I have seen all of
you to-day on the river and afterwards there ... on the other shore ...
with these charming, fine girls. How attentive, well-bred, obliging you
all were—but scarcely have you taken leave of them, when you are drawn
to public women. Let each one of you imagine for a moment, that we all
had been visiting his sisters and straight from them had driven to Yama
... What? Is such a supposition pleasant?”
“Yes, but there must exist some valves for the passions of society,”
pompously remarked Boris Sobashnikov, a tall, somewhat supercilious and
affected young man, upon whom the short, white summer uniform jacket,
which scarcely covered his fat posteriors, the modish trousers, of a
military cut, the PINCE-NEZ on a broad, black ribbon, and a cap after a
Prussian model, all bestowed the air of a coxcomb. “Surely, it isn’t
more respectable to enjoy the caresses of your chambermaid, or to carry
on an intrigue on the side with another man’s wife? What am I to do if
woman is indispensable to me!”
“Eh, very indispensable indeed!” said Yarchenko with vexation and
feebly made a despondent gesture.
But here a student who was called Ramses in the friendly coterie
intervened. This was a yellowish-swarthy, hump-nosed man of small
stature; his clean-shaven face seemed triangular, thanks to a broad
forehead, beginning to get bald, with two wedge-like bald spots at the
temples, fallen-in cheeks and a sharp chin. He led a mode of life
sufficiently queer for a student. While his colleagues employed
themselves by turns with politics, love, the theatre, and a little in
study, Ramses had withdrawn entirely into the study of all conceivable
suits and claims, into the chicane subtleties of property, hereditary,
land and other business law-suits, into the memorizing and logical
analysis of quashed decisions. Perfectly of his own will, without in
the least needing the money, he served for a year as a clerk at a
notary’s for another as a secretary to a justice of the peace, while
all of the past year, being in the last term, he had conducted in a
local newspaper the reports of the city council and had borne the
modest duty of an assistant to a secretary in the management of a
syndicate of sugar manufacturers. And when this same syndicate
commenced the well-known suit against one of its members, Colonel
Baskakov, who had put up the surplus sugar for sale contrary to
agreement, Ramses from the very beginning guessed beforehand and very
subtly engineered, precisely that decision which the senate
subsequently handed down in this suit.
Despite his comparative youth, rather well-known jurists gave heed to
his opinions—true, a little loftily. None of those who knew Ramses
closely doubted that he would make a brilliant career, and even Ramses
himself did not conceal his confidence in that toward thirty-five he
would knock together a million, exclusively through his practice as a
civil lawyer. His comrades not infrequently elected him chairman of
meetings and head of the class, but this honour Ramses invariably
declined, excusing himself with lack of time. But still he did not
avoid participation in his comrades’ trials by arbitration, and his
arguments—always incontrovertibly logical—were possessed of an amazing
virtue in ending the trials with peace, to the mutual satisfaction of
the litigating parties. He, as well as Yarchenko, knew well the value
of popularity among the studying youths, and even if he did look upon
people with a certain contempt, from above, still he never, by as much
as a single movement of his thin, clever, energetical lips, showed
this.
“Well, Gavrila Petrovich, no one is necessarily dragging you into
committing a fall from grace,” said Ramses in a conciliatory manner,
“What is all this pathos and melancholy for, when the matter as it
stands is altogether simple? A company of young Russian gentlemen
wishes to pass the remnant of the night modestly and amicably, to make
merry, to sing a little, and to take internally several gallons of wine
and beer. But everything is closed now, except these very same houses.
ERGO! ...”
“Consequently, we will go merry-making to women who are for sale? To
prostitutes? Into a brothel?” Yarchenko interrupted him, mockingly and
inimically.
“And even so? A certain philosopher, whom it was desired to humiliate,
was given a seat at dinner near the musicians. But he, sitting down,
said: ‘Here is a sure means of making the last place the first.’ And
finally I repeat: If your conscience does not allow you, as you express
yourself, to buy a woman, then you can go there and come away,
preserving your innocence in all its blossoming inviolability.”
“You overdo it, Ramses,” objected Yarchenko with displeasure. “You
remind me of those bourgeois, who, while it is still dark, have
gathered to gape at an execution and who say: we have nothing to do
with this, we are against capital punishment, this is all the
prosecuting attorney’s and the executioner’s doing.”
“Superbly said and partly true, Gavrila Petrovich. But to us,
precisely, this comparison may not even apply. One cannot, you see,
treat some malignant disease while absent, without seeing the sufferer
in person. And yet all of us, who are now standing here in the street
and interfering with the passers-by, will be obliged at some time in
our work to run up against the terrible problem of prostitution, and
what a prostitution at that—the Russian! Lichonin, I, Borya Sobashnikov
and Pavlov as jurists, Petrovsky and Tolpygin as medicos. True, Veltman
has a distinct specialty—mathematics. But then, he will be a pedagogue,
a guide of youth, and, deuce take it, even a father! And if you are
going to scare with a bugaboo, it is best to look upon it one’s self
first. And finally, you yourself, Gavrila Petrovich—expert of dead
languages and future luminary of grave digging—is the comparison, then,
of the contemporary brothels, say, with some Pompeian lupanaria, or the
institution of sacred prostitution in Thebes and Nineveh, not important
and instructive to you? ...”
“Bravo, Ramses, magnificent!” roared Lichonin. “And what’s there to
talk so much about, fellows? Take the professor under the gills and put
him in a cab!”
The students, laughing and jostling, surrounded Yarchenko, seized him
under the arms, caught him around the waist. All of them were equally
drawn to the women, but none, save Lichonin, had enough courage to take
the initiative upon himself. But now all this complicated, unpleasant
and hypocritical business was happily resolved into a simple, easy joke
upon the older comrade. Yarchenko resisted, and was angry, and
laughing, trying to break away. But at this moment a tall,
black-moustached policeman, who had long been eyeing them keenly and
inimically, walked up to the uproarious students.
“I’d ask you stewdent gents not to congregate. It’s not allowed! Keep
on going!”
They moved on in a throng. Yarchenka was beginning to soften little by
little.
“Gentlemen, I am ready to go with you, if you like ... Do not think,
however, that the sophistries of the Egyptian Pharaoh Ramses have
convinced me ... No, I simply would be sorry to break up the party ...
But I make one stipulation: we will drink a little there, gab a little,
laugh a little, and so forth ... but let there be nothing more, no
filth of any kind ... It is shameful and painful to think that we, the
flower and glory—of the Russian intelligentzia, will go all to pieces
and let our mouths water at the sight of the first skirt that comes our
way.”
“I swear it!” said Lichonin, putting up his hand.
“I can vouch for myself,” said Ramses.
“And I! And I! By God, gentlemen, let’s pledge our words ... Yarchenko
is right,” others took up.
They seated themselves in twos and threes in the cabs—the drivers of
which had been long since following them in a file, grinning and
cursing each other—and rode off. Lichonin, for the sake of assurance,
sat down beside the sub-professor, having embraced him around the waist
and seated him on his knees and those of his neighbour, the little
Tolpygin, a rosy, pleasant-faced boy on whose face, despite his
twenty-three years, the childish white down—soft and light—still
showed.
“The station is at Doroshenko’s!” called out Lichonin after the cabbies
driving off. “The stop is at Doroshenko’s,” he repeated, turning
around.
They all stopped at Doroshenko’s restaurant, entered the general room,
and crowded about the bar. All were satiated and no one wanted either
to drink or to have a bite. But in the soul of each one still remained
a dark trace of the consciousness that right now they were getting
ready to commit something needlessly shameful, getting ready to take
part in some convulsive, artificial, and not at all a merry merriment.
And in each one was the yearning to bring himself through intoxication
to that misty and rainbow condition when nothing makes any difference,
and when the head does not know what the arms and legs are doing, and
what the tongue is babbling. And, probably, not the students alone, but
all the casual and constant visitors of Yama experienced in greater or
lesser degree the friction of this inner psychic heart-sore, because
Doroshenko did business only late in the evening and night, and no one
lingered long in his place but only turned in in passing, half-way on
the journey.
While the students were drinking cognac, beer and vodka, Ramses was
constantly and intently looking into the farthest corner of the
restaurant hall, where two men were sitting—a tattered, gray, big old
man, and, opposite him, his back to the bar, with his elbows spread out
upon the table and his chin resting on the fists folded upon each
other, some hunched up, stout, closely-propped gentleman in a gray
suit. The old man was picking upon a dulcimer lying before him and
quietly singing, in a hoarse but pleasing voice:
“Oh my valley, my little valley,
Bro-o-o-o-o-oad land of plenty.”
“Excuse me, but that is a co-worker of ours,” said Ramses, and went to
greet the gentleman in the gray suit. After a minute he led him up to
the bar and introduced him to his comrades.
“Gentlemen, allow me to introduce to you my companion in arms in the
newspaper game, Sergei Ivanovich Platonov. The laziest and most
talented of newspaper workers.”
They all introduced themselves, indistinctly muttering out their names.
“And therefore, let’s have a drink,” said Uchonin, while Yarchenko
asked with the refined amiability which never forsook him:
“Pardon me, pardon me, but I am acquainted with you a little, even
though not personally. Weren’t you in the university when Professor
Priklonsky defended the doctor’s dissertation?”
“It was I,” answered the reporter.
“Ah, that’s very nice,” smiled Yarchenko charmingly, and for some
reason once more pressed Platonov’s hand vigorously. “I read your
report afterwards: very exactly, circumstantially and skillfully put
together ... Won’t you favor me? ... To your health!”
“Then allow me, too,” said Platonov. “Onuphriy Zakharich, pour out for
us again ... one ... two, three, four ... nine glasses of cognac...”
“Oh no, you can’t do that ... you are our guest, colleague,”
remonstrated Lichonin.
“Well, now, what sort of colleague am I to you?” good-naturedly laughed
the reporter. “I was only in the first class and then only for half a
year—as an unmatriculated student. Here you are, Onuphriy Zakharich.
Gentlemen, I beg you...”
The upshot of it was that after half an hour Lichonin and Yarchenko did
not under any consideration want to part with the reporter and dragged
him with them to Yama. However, he did not resist.
“If I am not a burden to you, I would be very glad,” he said simply.
“All the more since I have easy money to-day. THE DNIEPER WORD has paid
me an honorarium, and this is just as much of a miracle as winning two
hundred thousand on a check from a theatre coat room. Pardon me, I’ll
be right back...”
He walked up to the old man with whom he had been sitting before,
shoved some money into his hand, and gently took leave of him.
“Where I’m going, grandpa, there you mustn’t go—to-morrow we will meet
in the same place as to-day. Good-bye!”
They all walked out of the restaurant. At the door Borya Sobashnikov,
always a little finical and unnecessarily supercilious, stopped
Lichonin and called him to one side.
“I’m surprised at you, Lichonin,” he said squeamishly. “We have
gathered together in our own close company, yet you must needs drag in
some vagabond. The devil knows who he is!”
“Quit that, Borya,” answered Lichonin amicably. “He’s a warm-hearted
fellow.”
CHAPTER IX.
“Well now, gentlemen, this isn’t fit for pigs,” Yarchenko was saying,
grumblingly, at the entrance of Anna Markovna’s establishment. “If we
finally have gone, we might at least have chosen a decent place, and
not some wretched hole. Really, gentlemen, let’s better go to Treppel’s
alongside; there it’s clean and light, at any rate.”
“If you please, if you please, signior,” insisted Lichonin, opening the
door before the sub-professor with courtly urbanity, bowing and
spreading his arms before him. “If you please.”
“But this is an abomination ... At Treppel’s the women are
better-looking, at least.”
Ramses, walking behind, burst into dry laughter.
“So, so, Gavrila Petrovich. Let us continue in the same spirit. Let us
condemn the hungry, petty thief who has stolen a five-kopeck loaf out
of a tray, but if the director of a bank has squandered somebody else’s
million on race horses and cigars, let us mitigate his lot.”
“Pardon me, but I do not understand this comparison,” answered
Yarchenko with restraint. “However, it’s all the same to me; let’s go.”
“And all the more so,” said Lichonin, letting the subprofessor pass
ahead; “all the more so, since this house guards within it so many
historical traditions. Comrades! Decades of student generations gaze
upon us from the heights of the coat-hooks, and, besides that, through
the power of the usual right, children and students pay half here, as
in a panopticon. Isn’t that so, citizen Simeon?”
Simeon did not like to have people come in large parties—this always
smacked of scandal in the not distant future; moreover, he despised
students in general for their speech, but little comprehensible to him,
for their propensity towards frivolous jokes, for their godlessness,
and chiefly because they were in constant revolt against officialdom
and order. It was not in vain that on the day when on the Bessarabian
Square the cossacks, meat-sellers, flour dealers and fish mongers were
massacring the students, Simeon having scarce found it out had jumped
into a fine carriage passing by, and, standing just like a chief of
police in the victoria, tore off to the scene of the fray in order to
take part in it. He esteemed people who were sedate, stout and elderly,
who came singly, in secret, peeped in cautiously from the ante-room
into the drawing room, fearing to meet with acquaintances, and very
soon and with great haste went away, tipping him generously. Such he
always styled “Your Excellency.”
And so, while taking the light grey overcoat off Yarchenko, he sombrely
and with much significance snarled back in answer to Lichonin’s banter:
“I am no citizen here, but the bouncer.”
“Upon which I have the honour to congratulate you,” answered Lichonin
with a polite bow.
There were many people in the drawing room. The clerks, having danced
their fill, were sitting, red and wet, near their ladies, rapidly
fanning themselves with their handkerchiefs; they smelt strongly of old
goats’ wool. Mishka the Singer and his friend the Book-keeper, both
bald, with soft, downy hairs around the denuded skulls, both with
turbid, nacreous, intoxicated eyes, were sitting opposite each other,
leaning with their elbows on a little marble table, and were constantly
trying to start singing in unison with such quavering and galloping
voices as though some one was very, very often striking them in the
cervical vertebrae:
“They fe-e-e-l the tru-u-u-u-uth!”
while Emma Edwardovna and Zociya with all their might were exhorting
them not to behave indecently. Roly-Poly was peacefully slumbering on a
chair, his head hanging down, having laid one long leg over the other
and grasped the sharp knee with his clasped hands.
The girls at once recognized some of the students and ran to meet them.
“Tamarochka, your husband has come—Volodenka. And my husband
too!—Mishka!” cried Niura piercingly, hanging herself on the neck of
the lanky, big-nosed, solemn Petrovsky. “Hello, Mishenka. Why haven’t
you come for so long? I grew weary of waiting for you.”
Yarchenko with a feeling of awkwardness was looking about him on all
sides.
“We’d like to have in some way ... don’t you know ... a little private
room,” he said with delicacy to Emma Edwardovna who had approached.
“And give us some sort of red wine, please ... And then, some coffee as
well ... You know yourself.”
Yarchenko always instilled confidence in servants and MAITRES D’HOTEL,
with his dashing clothes and polite but seigniorial ways. Emma
Edwardovna started nodding her head willingly, just like an old, fat
circus horse.
“It can be done ... it can be done ... Pass this way, gentlemen, into
the parlor. It can be done, it can be done ... What liqueur? We have
only Benedictine ... Benedictine, then? It can be done, it can be done
... And will you allow the young ladies to come in?”
“Well, if that is so indispensable?” Yarchenko spread out his hands
with a sigh.
And at once the girls one after the other straggled into the parlor
with its gray plush furniture and blue lantern. They entered, extended
to every one in turn their unbending palms, unused to hand-clasps, gave
their names abruptly in a low voice—Manya, Katie, Liuba ... They sat
down on somebody’s knees, embraced him around the neck, and, as usual,
began to importune:
“Little student, you’re such a little good-looker. May I ask for
oranzes?”
“Volodenka, buy me some candy! All right?”
“And me chocolate!”
“Fatty,” Vera, dressed as a jockey, wheedled the sub-professor,
clambering up on his knees, “I have a friend, only she’s sick and can’t
come out into the drawing room. I’ll carry her some apples and
chocolate. Will you let me?”
“Well, now, those are all just stories about a friend! But above all,
don’t be thrusting your tenderness at me. Sit as smart children sit,
right here alongside, on the arm chair, just so. And fold your little
hands.”
“Ah, but what if I can’t!” writhed Vera in coquetry, rolling her eyes
up under her upper lids ... “When you are so nice.”
But Lichonin, in answer to this professional beggary, only nodded his
head gravely and good-naturedly, just like Emma Edwardovna, and
repeated over and over again, mimicking her German accent:
“Itt can pe done, itt can pe done, itt can pe done...”
“Then I will tell the waiter, honey, to carry my friend some sweets and
apples?” pestered Vera.
Such importunity entered the round of their tacit duties. There even
existed among the girls some captious, childish, strange rivalry as to
the ability to “ease a guest of his money”—strange enough because they
did not derive any profit out of this, unless, indeed, a certain
affection from the housekeeper or a word of approbation from the
proprietress. But in their petty, monotonous, habitually frivolous life
there was, in general, a great deal of semi-puerile, semi-hysterical
play.
Simeon brought a coffee pot, cups, a squatty bottle of Benedictine,
fruits and bon-bons in glass vases, and gaily and easily began making
the corks of the beer and wine pop.
“But why don’t you drink?” Yarchenko turned to the reporter Platonov.
“Allow me ... I do not mistake? Sergei Ivanovich, I believe?”
“Right.”
“Allow me to offer you a cup of coffee, Sergei Ivanovich. It’s
refreshing. Or perhaps, let’s drink this same dubious Lafitte?”
“No, you really must allow me to refuse. I have a drink of my own ...
Simeon, give me...”
“Cognac!” cried out Niura hurriedly.
“And with a pear!” Little White Manka caught up just as fast.
“I heard you, Sergei Ivanich—right away,” unhurriedly but respectfully
responded Simeon, and, bending down and letting out a grunt,
resoundingly drew the cork out of the neck of the bottle.
“It’s the first time I hear of cognac being served in Yama,” uttered
Lichonin with amazement. “No matter how much I asked, they always
refused me.”
“Perhaps Sergei Ivanich knows some sort of magic word,” jested Ramses.
“Or is held here in an especially honoured state?” Boris Sobashnikov
put in pointedly, with emphasis.
The reporter listlessly, without turning his head, looked askance at
Sobashnikov, at the lower row of buttons on his short, foppish, white
summer uniform jacket, and answered with a drawl:
“There is nothing honourable in that I can drink like a horse and never
get drunk; but then, I also do not quarrel with anyone or pick upon
anybody. Evidently, these good sides of my character are sufficiently
known here, and because of that confidence is shown me.”
“Good for you, old fellow!” joyously exclaimed Lichonin, who was
delighted by a certain peculiar, indolent negligence—of few words, yet
at the same time self-confident—in the reporter. “Will you share the
cognac with me also?”
“Very, very gladly,” affably answered Platonov and suddenly looked at
Lichonin with a radiant, almost child-like smile, which beautified his
plain face with the prominent cheek-bones. “You, too, appealed to me
from the first. And even when I saw you there, at Doroshenko’s, I at
once thought that you are not at all as rough as you seem.”
“Well, now, we have exchanged pleasantries,” laughed Lichonin. “But
it’s amazing that we haven’t met once just here. Evidently, you come to
Anna Markovna’s quite frequently?”
“Even too much so.”
“Sergei Ivanich is our most important guest!” naively shrieked Niura.
“Sergei Ivanich is a sort of brother among us!”
“Fool!” Tamara stopped her.
“That seems strange to me,” continued Lichonin. “I, too, am a habitue.
In any case, one can only envy everybody’s cordiality toward you.”
“The local chieftain!” said Boris Sobashnikov, curling his lips
downward, but said it so low that Platanov, if he chose to, could
pretend that he had not heard anything distinctly. This reporter had
for long aroused in Boris some blind and prickling irritation. That he
was not one of his own herd really meant nothing. But Boris, like many
students (and also officers, junkers, and high-school boys) had grown
accustomed to the fact that the outside “civilian” people, who
accidentally fell into a company of students on a spree, should hold
themselves somewhat subordinately and with servility in it, flatter the
studying youths, be struck with its daring, laugh at its jokes, admire
its self-admiration, recall their own student years with a sigh of
suppressed envy. But in Platonov there not only was none of this
customary wagging of the tail before youth, but, on the contrary, there
was to be felt a certain abstracted, calm and polite indifference.
Besides that, Sobashnikov was angered—and angered with a petty, jealous
vexation—by that simple and yet anticipatory attention which was shown
to the reporter by everybody in the establishment, beginning with the
porter and ending with the fleshy, taciturn Katie. This attention was
shown in the way he was listened to, in that triumphal carefulness with
which Tamara filled his glass, and in the way Little White Manka pared
a pear for him solicitously, and in the delight of Zoe, who had caught
the case skillfully thrown to her across the table by the reporter,
when she had vainly asked for a cigarette from her two neighbors, who
were lost in conversation; and in the way none of the girls begged
either chocolate or fruits from him, in the lively gratitude for his
little services and his treating. “Pimp!” Sobashkinov had almost
decided mentally with malice, but did not believe it even himself—the
reporter was altogether too homely and too carelessly dressed, and
moreover he bore himself with great dignity.
Platonov again made believe that he had not heard the insolent remark
made by the student. He only nervously crumpled a napkin in his fingers
and lightly threw it aside from him. And again his eyelids quivered in
the direction of Boris Sobashnikov.
“Yes, true, I am one of the family here,” he continued calmly, moving
his glass in slow circles on the table. “Just think, I dined in this
very house, day after day, for exactly four months.”
“No? Seriously?” Yarchenko wondered and laughed.
“In all seriousness. The table here isn’t at all bad, by the way. The
food is filling and savory, although exceedingly greasy.”
“But how did you ever...”
“Why, just because I was tutoring for high school a daughter of Anna
Markovna, the lady of this hospitable house. Well, I stipulated that
part of my monthly pay should be deducted for my dinners.”
“What a strange fancy!” said Yarchenko. “And did you do this of your
own will? Or ... Pardon me, I am afraid of seeming indiscreet to you
... Perhaps at that time ... extreme necessity? ...”
“Not at all. Anna Markovna soaked me three times as much as it would
have cost in a student’s dining room. I simply wanted to live here a
while on a somewhat nearer, closer footing, to enter intimately into
this little world, so to speak.”
“A-ah! It seems I am beginning to understand!” beamed Yarchenko. “Our
new friend—pardon me for the little familiarity—is, apparently,
gathering material from life? And, perhaps, in a few years we will have
the pleasure of reading ...”
“A t-r-ragedy out of a brothel!” Boris Sobashnikov put in loudly, like
an actor.
While the reporter had been answering Yarchenko, Tamara quietly got up
from her place, walked around the table, and, bending down over
Sobashnikov, spoke in a whisper in his ear:
“Dearie, sweetie, you’d better not touch this gentleman. Honest to God,
it will be better for you, even.”
“Wass that?” the student looked at her superciliously, fixing his
PINCE-NEZ with two spread fingers. “Is he your lover? Your pimp?”
“I swear by anything you want that not once in his life has he stayed
with any one of us. But, I repeat, don’t pick on him.”
“Why, yes! Why, of course!” retorted Sobashnikov, grimacing scornfully.
“He has such a splendid defense as the entire brothel. And it’s a sure
thing that all the bouncers on Yamskaya are his near friends and
cronies.”
“No, not that,” retorted Tamara in a kind whisper. “Only he’ll take you
by the collar and throw you out of the window, like a puppy. I’ve
already seen such an aerial flight. God forbid its happening to anyone.
It’s disgraceful, and bad for the health.”
“Get out of here, you filth!” yelled Sobashnikov, swinging his elbow at
her.
“I’m going, dearie,” meekly answered Tamara, and walked away from him
with her light step.
Everybody for an instant turned toward the student.
“Behave yourself, barberry!” Lichonin threatened him with his finger.
“Well, well, go on,” he begged the reporter; “all that you’re saying is
so interesting.”
“No, I’m not gathering anything,” continued the reporter calmly and
seriously. “But the material here is in reality tremendous, downright
crushing, terrible ... And not at all terrible are the loud phrases
about the traffic in women’s flesh, about the white slaves, about
prostitution being a corroding fester of large cities, and so on, and
so on ... an old hurdy-gurdy of which all have tired! No, horrible are
the everyday, accustomed trifles, these business-like, daily,
commercial reckonings, this thousand year old science of amatory
practice, this prosaic usage, determined by the ages. In these
unnoticeable nothings are completely dissolved such feelings as
resentment, humiliation, shame. There remains a dry profession, a
contract, an agreement, a well-nigh honest petty trade, no better, no
worse than, say, the trade in groceries. Do you understand, gentlemen,
that all the horror is in just this, that there is no horror! Bourgeois
work days—and that is all. And also an after taste of an exclusive
educational institution, with its NAIVETE, harshness, sentimentality
and imitativeness.”
“That’s right,” confirmed Lichonin, while the reporter continued,
gazing pensively into his glass:
“We read in the papers, in leading articles, various wailings of
anxious souls. And the women-physicians are also endeavouring in this
matter, and endeavouring disgustingly enough. ‘Oh, dear, regulation!
Oh, dear, abolition! Oh, dear, live merchandise! A condition of
slavery! The mesdames, these greedy haeterae! These heinous degenerates
of humanity, sucking the blood of prostitutes!’ ... But with clamour
you will scare no one and will affect no one. You know, there’s a
little saying: much cry, little wool. More awful than all awful words—a
hundredfold more awful—is some such little prosaic stroke or other as
will suddenly knock you all in a heap, like a blow on the forehead.
Take even Simeon, the porter here. It would seem, according to you,
there is no sinking lower—a bouncer in a brothel, a brute, almost
certainly a murderer, he plucks the prostitutes, gives them “black
eyes,” to use a local expression—that is, just simply beats them. But,
do you know on what grounds he and I came together and became friendly?
On the magnificent details of the divine service of the prelate, on the
canon of the honest Andrew, pastor of Crete, on the works of the most
beatific father, John the Damascene. He is religious—unusually so! I
used to lead him on, and he would sing to me with tears in his eyes:
‘Come ye brethren, and we will give the last kiss to him who has gone
to his rest...’ From the ritual of the burial of laymen. No, just
think: it is only in the Russian soul alone that such contradictions
may dwell together!”
“Yes. A fellow like that will pray, and pray, then cut a throat, and
then wash his hands and put a candle before an image,” said Ramses.
“Just so. I know of nothing more uncanny than this fusion of fully
sincere devoutness with an innate leaning toward crime. Shall I confess
to you? I, when I talk all alone to Simeon—and we talk with each other
long and leisurely, for hours—I experience at moments a genuine terror.
A superstitious terror! Just as though, for instance, I am standing in
the dusk upon a shaking little board, bending over some dark,
malodorous well, and just barely distinguish how there, at the bottom,
reptiles are stirring. And yet, he is devout in a real way, and I am
sure will some time join the monks and will be a great faster and sayer
of prayers, and the devil knows how, in what monstrous fashion, a real
religious ecstasy will entwine in his soul with blasphemy, with
scoffing at sacred things, with some repulsive passion or other, with
sadism or something else of that nature!”
“However, you do not spare the object of your observations,” said
Yarchenko, and carefully indicated the girls with his eyes.
“Eh, it’s all the same. Our relations are cool now.”
“How so?” asked Volodya Pavlov, who had caught the end of the
conversation.
“Just so ... It isn’t even worth the telling...” smiled the reporter
evasively. “A trifle ... Let’s have your glass here, Mr. Yarchenko.”
But the precipitate Niura, who could never keep her tongue behind her
teeth, suddenly shot oat in rapid patter:
“It’s because Sergei Ivanich gave him one in the snout ... On account
of Ninka. A certain old man came to Ninka ... And stayed for the night
... And Ninka had the flowers ... And the old man was torturing her all
the time ... So Ninka started crying and ran away.”[6]
[6] The Russian expression is “the red flag.”—TRANS.
“Drop it, Niura; it’s boring,” said Platonov with a wry face.
“Can it!” (leave off) ordered Tamara severely, in the jargon of houses
of prostitution.
But it was impossible to stop Niura, who had gotten a running start.
“But Ninka says: ‘I,’ she says, ‘won’t stay with him for anything,
though you cut me all to pieces ... He,’ she says, ‘has made me all wet
with his spit.’ Well, the old man complained to the porter, to be sure,
and the porter starts in to beat up Ninka, to be sure. And Sergei
Ivanich at this time was writing for me a letter home, to the province,
and when he heard that Ninka was hollering...”
“Zoe, shut her mouth!” said Platonov.
“He just jumped up at once and ... app! ...” and Niura’s torrent
instantly broke off, stopped up by Zoe’s palm.
Everybody burst out laughing, only Boris Sobashnikov muttered under
cover of the noise with a contemptuous look:
“OH, CHEVALIER SANS PEUR ET SANS REPROCHE!”
He was already pretty far gone in drink, stood leaning against the
wall, in a provoking pose, and was nervously chewing a cigarette.
“Which Ninka is this?” asked Yarchenko with curiosity. “Is she here?”
“No, she isn’t here. Such a small, pug-nosed little girl. Naive and
very angry.” The reporter suddenly and sincerely burst into laughter.
“Excuse me ... It’s just so ... over my thoughts,” explained he through
laughter. “I recalled this old man very vividly just now, as he was
running along the corridor in fright, having grabbed his outer clothing
and shoes ... Such a respectable ancient, with the appearance of an
apostle, I even know where he serves. Why, all of you know him. But the
funniest of all was when he, at last, felt himself out of danger in the
drawing room. You understand—he is sitting on a chair, putting on his
pantaloons, can’t put his foot where it ought to go, by any means, and
bawls all over the house: ‘It’s an outrage! This is an abominable dive!
I’ll show you up! ... To-morrow I’ll give you twenty-four hours to
clear out! ... Do you know, this combination of pitiful helplessness
with the threatening cries was so killing that even the gloomy Simeon
started laughing ... Well, now, apropos of Simeon ... I say, that life
dumfounds, with its wondrous muddle and farrago, makes one stand
aghast. You can utter a thousand sonorous words against souteneurs, but
just such a Simeon you will never think up. So diverse and motley is
life! Or else take Anna Markovna, the proprietress of this place. This
blood-sucker, hyena, vixen and so on ... is the tenderest mother
imaginable. She has one daughter—Bertha, she is now in the fifth grade
of high school. If you could only see how much careful attention, how
much tender care Anna Markovna expends that her daughter may not
somehow, accidentally, find out about her profession. And everything is
for Birdie, everything is for the sake of Birdie. And she herself dare
not even converse before her, is afraid of her lexicon of a bawd and an
erstwhile prostitute, looks into her eyes, holds herself servilely,
like an old servant, like a foolish, doting nurse, like an old,
faithful, mange-eaten poodle. It is long since time for her to retire
to rest, because she has money, and because her occupation is both
arduous and troublesome, and because her years are already venerable.
But no and no; one more extra thousand is needed, and then more and
more—everything for Birdie. And so Birdie has horses, Birdie has an
English governess, Birdie is every year taken abroad, Birdie has
diamonds worth forty thousand—the devil knows whose they are, these
diamonds? And it isn’t that I am merely convinced, but I know well,
that for the happiness of this same Birdie, nay, not even for her
happiness, but, let us suppose that Birdie gets a hangnail on her
little finger—well then, in order that this hangnail might pass
away—imagine for a second the possibility of such a state of
things!—Anna Markovna, without the quiver of an eyelash, will sell into
corruption our sisters and daughters, will infect all of us and our
sons with syphilis. What? A monster, you will say? But I will say that
she is moved by the same grand, unreasoning, blind, egoistical love for
which we call our mothers sainted women.”
“Go easy around the curves!” remarked Boris Sobashnikov through his
teeth.
“Pardon me: I was not comparing people, but merely generalizing on the
first source of emotion. I might have brought out as an example the
self-denying love of animal-mothers as well. But I see that I have
started on a tedious matter. Better let’s drop it.”
“No, you finish,” protested Lichonin. “I feel that you have a massive
thought.”
“And a very simple one. The other day a professor asked me if I am not
observing the life here with some literary aims. And all I wanted to
say was, that I can see, but precisely can not observe. Here I have
given you Simeon and the bawd for example. I do not know myself why,
but I feel that in them lurks some terrible, insuperable actuality of
life, but either to tell it, or to show it, I can not. Here is
necessary the great ability to take some picayune trifle, an
insignificant, paltry little stroke, and then will result a dreadful
truth, from which the reader, aghast, will forget that his mouth is
agape. People seek the terrible in words, in cries, in gestures. Well,
now, for example, I am reading a description of some pogrom or of a
slaughter in jail, or of a riot being put down. Of course, the
policemen are described, these servants of arbitrariness, these
lifeguards of contemporaneousness, striding up to their knees in blood,
or how else do they write in such cases? Of course, it is revolting and
it hurts, and is disgusting, but all this is felt by the mind, and not
the heart. But here I am walking along Lebyazhia Street, and see that a
crowd has collected, a girl of five years in the centre—she has lagged
behind the mother and has strayed, or it may be that the mother had
abandoned her. And before the girl, squatting down on his heels, is a
roundsman. He is interrogating her, how she is called, and where is she
from, and how do they call papa, and how do they call mamma. He has
broken out into sweat, the poor fellow, from the effort, the cap is at
the back of his neck, the whiskered face is such a kindly and woeful
and helpless one, while the voice is gentle, so gentle. At last, what
do you think? As the girl has become all excited, and has already grown
hoarse from tears, and is shy of everybody—he, this same ‘roundsman on
the beat,’ stretches out two of his black, calloused fingers, the index
and the little, and begins to imitate a nanny goat for the girl and
reciting an appropriate nursery rhyme! ... And so, when I looked upon
this charming scene and thought that half an hour later at the station
house this same patrolman will be beating with his feet the face and
chest of a man whom he had not till that time seen once, and whose
crime he is entirely ignorant of—then—you understand!—I began to feel
inexpressibly eerie and sad. Not with the mind, but the heart. Such a
devilish muddle is this life. Shall we drink some cognac, Lichonin?”
“What do you say to calling each other thou?” suddenly proposed
Lichonin.
“All right. Only, really, without any of this business of kissing, now.
Here’s to your health, old man ... Or here is another instance ... I
read a certain French classic, describing the thoughts and sensations
of a man condemned to capital punishment. He describes it all
sonorously, powerfully, brilliantly, but I read and ... well, there is
no impression of any sort; neither emotion nor indignation—just ENNUI.
But then, within the last few days I come across a brief newspaper
notice of a murderer’s execution somewhere in France. The Procureur,
who was present at the last toilet of the criminal, sees that he is
putting on his shoes on his bare feet, and—the blockhead!—reminds him:
‘What about the socks?’ But the other gives him a look and says, sort
of thoughtfully: ‘Is it worth while?’ Do you understand, these two
remarks, so very short, struck me like a blow on the skull! At once all
the horror and all the stupidity of unnatural death were revealed to me
... Or here is something else about death ... A certain friend of mine
died, a captain in the infantry—a drunkard, a vagabond, and the finest
soul in the world. For some reason we called him the Electrical
Captain. I was in the vicinity, and it fell to me to dress him for the
last parade. I took his uniform and began to attach the epaulettes to
it. There’s a cord, you know, that’s drawn through the shank of the
epaulette buttons, and after that the two ends of this cord are shoved
through two little holes under the collar, and on the inside—the
lining—are tied together. Well, I go through all this business, and tie
the cord with a slipknot, and, you know, the loop won’t come out,
nohow—either it’s too loosely tied, or else one end’s too short. I am
fussing over this nonsense, and suddenly into my head comes the most
astonishingly simple thought, that it’s far simpler and quicker to tie
it in a knot—for after all, it’s all the same, NO ONE IS GOING TO UNTIE
IT. And immediately I felt death with all my being. Until that time I
had seen the captain’s eyes, grown glassy, had felt his cold forehead,
and still somehow had not sensed death to the full, but I thought of
the knot—and I was all transpierced, and the simple and sad realization
of the irrevocable, inevitable perishing of all our words, deeds, and
sensations, of the perishing of all the apparent world, seemed to bow
me down to the earth ... And I could bring forward a hundred such small
but staggering trifles ... Even, say, about what people experienced in
the war ... But I want to lead my thought up to one thing. We all pass
by these characteristic trifles indifferently, like the blind, as
though not seeing them scattered about under our feet. But an artist
will come, and he will look over them carefully, and he will pick them
up. And suddenly he will so skillfully turn in the sun a minute bit of
life that we shall all cry out: ‘Oh, my God! But I myself—myself—have
seen this with my own eyes. Only it simply did not enter my head to
turn my close attention upon it.’ But our Russian artists of the
word—the most conscientious and sincere artists in the whole world—for
some reason have up to this time passed over prostitution and the
brothel. Why? Really, it is difficult for me to answer that. Perhaps
because of squeamishness, perhaps because of pusillanimity, out of fear
of being signalized as a pornographic writer; finally, from the
apprehension that our gossiping criticism will identify the artistic
work of the writer with his personal life and will start rummaging in
his dirty linen. Or perhaps they can find neither the time, nor the
self-denial, nor the self-possession to plunge in head first into this
life and to watch it right up close, without prejudice, without
sonorous phrases, without a sheepish pity, in all its monstrous
simplicity and every-day activity. Oh, what a tremendous, staggering
and truthful book would result!”
“But they do write!” unwillingly remarked Ramses.
“They do write,” wearily repeated Platonov in the same tone as he. “But
it is all either a lie, or theatrical effects for children of tender
years, or else a cunning symbolism, comprehensible only to the sages of
the future. But the life itself no one as yet has touched. One big
writer—a man with a crystal-pure soul and a remarkable talent for
delineation—once approached this theme,[7] and then all that could
catch the eye of an outsider was reflected in his soul, as in a
wondrous mirror. But he could not decide to lie to and to frighten
people. He only looked upon the coarse hair of the porter, like that of
a dog, and reflected: ‘But, surely, even he had a mother.’ He passed
with his wise, exact gaze over the faces of the prostitutes and
impressed them on his mind. But that which he did not know he did not
dare to write. It is remarkable, that this same writer, enchanting with
his honesty and truthfulness, has looked at the moujik as well, more
than once. But he sensed that both the tongue and the turn of mind, as
well as the soul of the people, were for him dark and incomprehensible
... And he, with an amazing tact, modestly went around the soul of the
people, but refracted all his fund of splendid observation through the
eyes of townsfolk. I have brought this up purposely. With us, you see,
they write about detectives, about lawyers, about inspectors of the
revenue, about pedagogues, about attorneys, about the police, about
officers, about sensual ladies, about engineers, about baritones—and
really, by God, altogether well—cleverly, with finesse and talent. But,
after all, all these people, are rubbish, and their life is not life
but some sort of conjured up, spectral, unnecessary delirium of world
culture. But there are two singular realities—ancient as humanity
itself: the prostitute and the moujik. And about them we know nothing
save some tinsel, gingerbread, debauched depictions in literature. I
ask you: what has Russian literature extracted out of all the nightmare
of prostitution? Sonechka Marmeladova alone.[8]
What has it given us about the moujik save odious, false, nationalistic
pastorals? One, altogether but one, but then, in truth, the greatest
work in all the world—a staggering tragedy, the truthfulness of which
takes the breath away and makes the hair stand on end. You know what I
am speaking of ...”
[7] The reference here is most probably to Chekhov.—TRANS.
[8] The heroine of Dostoievsky’s “Crime and Punishment.”—Trans.
“‘The little claw is sunk in...’”[9] quietly prompted Lichonin.
[9] “The little claw is sunk in, the whole bird is bound to perish”—a
folk proverb used by Tolstoi as a sub-title to his “The Power of
Darkness.”—Trans.
“Yes,” answered the reporter, and looked kindly at the student with
gratefulness.
“But as regards Sonechka—why, this is an abstract type,” remarked
Yarchenko with assurance. “A psychological scheme, so to speak...”
Platonov, who up to now had been speaking as though unwillingly, at a
slow rate, suddenly grew heated:
“A hundred times have I heard this opinion, a hundred times! And it is
entirely an untruth. Underneath the coarse and obscene profession,
underneath the foulest oaths—about one’s mother—underneath the drunken,
hideous exterior—Sonechka Marmeladova still lives! The fate of the
Russian prostitute—oh, what a tragic, piteous, bloody, ludicrous and
stupid path it is! Here everything has been juxtaposed: the Russian
God, Russian breadth and unconcern, Russian despair in a fall, Russian
lack of culture, Russian naivete, Russian patience, Russian
shamelessness. Why, all of them, whom you take into bedrooms,—look upon
them, look upon them well,—why, they are all children; why, each of
them is but eleven years old. Fate has thrust them upon prostitution
and since then they live in some sort of a strange, fairy-like, toy
existence, without developing, without being enriched by experience,
naive, trusting, capricious, not knowing what they will say and do half
an hour later—altogether like children. This radiant and ludicrous
childishness I have seen in the very oldest wenches, fallen as low as
low can be, broken-winded and crippled like a cabby’s nags. And never
does this impotent pity, this useless commiseration toward human
suffering die within them ... For example...”
Platonov looked over all the persons sitting with a slow gaze, and
suddenly, waving his hand despondently, said in a tired voice:
“However ... The devil take it all! To-day I have spoken enough for ten
years ... And all of it to no purpose.”
“But really, Sergei Ivanich, why shouldn’t you try to describe all this
yourself?” asked Yarchenko. “Your attention is so vitally concentrated
on this question.”
“I did try!” answered Platonov with a cheerless smile. “But nothing
came of it. I started writing and at once became entangled in various
‘whats,’ ‘which’s,’ ‘was’s.’ The epithets prove flat. The words grow
cold on the page. It’s all a cud of some sort. Do you know, Terekhov
was here once, while passing through ... You know ... The well-known
one ... I came to him and started in telling him lots and lots about
the life here, which I do not tell you for fear of boring you. I begged
him to utilize my material. He heard me out with great attention, and
this is what he said, literally: ‘Don’t get offended, Platonov, if I
tell you that there’s almost not a single person of those I have met
during my life, who wouldn’t thrust themes for novels and stories upon
me, or teach me as to what ought to be written up. That material which
you have just communicated to me is truly unencompassable in its
significance and weightiness. But what shall I do with it? In order to
write a colossal book such as the one you have in mind, the words of
others do not suffice—even though they be the most exact—even
observations, made with a little note-book and a bit of pencil, do not
suffice. One must grow accustomed to this life, without being cunningly
wise, without any ulterior thoughts of writing. Then a terrific book
will result.’
“His words discouraged me and at the same time gave me wings. Since
that time I believe, that now, not soon—after fifty years or so—but
there will come a writer of genius, and precisely a Russian one, who
will absorb within himself all the burdens and all the abominations of
this life and will cast them forth to us in the form of simple, fine,
and deathlessly-caustic images. And we shall all say: ‘Why, now, we,
ourselves, have seen and known all this, but we could not even suppose
that this is so horrible!’ In this coming artist I believe with all my
heart.”
“Amen!” said Lichonin seriously. “Let us drink to him.”
“But, honest to God,” suddenly declared Little Manka, “If some one
would only write the truth about the way we live here, miserable w—that
we are...”
There was a knock at the door, and at once Jennie entered in her
resplendent orange dress.
CHAPTER X.
She greeted all the men without embarrassment, with the independent
bearing of the first personage in the house, and sat down near Sergei
Ivanich, behind his chair. She had just gotten free from that same
German in the uniform of the benevolent organization, who early in the
evening had made Little White Manka his choice, but had afterwards
changed her, at the recommendation of the housekeeper, for Pasha. But
the provoking and self-assured beauty of Jennie must have smitten
deeply his lecherous heart, for, having prowled some three hours
through certain beer emporiums and restaurants, and having there
gathered courage, he had again returned into the house of Anna
Markovna, had waited until her time-guest—Karl Karlovich, from the
optical store—had gone away from Jennie, and had taken her into a room.
To the silent question in Tamara’s eyes Jennie made a wry face of
disgust, shivered with her back and nodded her head affirmatively.
“He’s gone... Brrr! ...”
Platonov was looking at Jennie with extraordinary attentiveness. He
distinguished her from the rest of the girls and almost respected her
for her abrupt, refractory, and impudently mocking character. And now,
turning around occasionally, by her flaming, splendid eyes, by the
vividly and unevenly glowing unhealthy red of her cheeks, by the much
bitten parched lips, he felt that her great, long ripening rancour was
heavily surging within the girl and suffocating her. And it was then
that he thought (and subsequently often recalled this) that he had
never yet seen Jennie so radiantly beautiful as on this night. He also
noticed, that all the men present in the private cabinet, with the
exception of Lichonin, were looking at her—some frankly, others by
stealth and as though in passing—with curiosity and furtive desire. The
beauty of this woman, together with the thought of her altogether easy
accessibility, at any minute, agitated their imagination.
“There’s something working upon you, Jennie,” said Platonov quietly.
Caressingly, she just barely drew her fingers over his arm.
“Don’t pay any attention. Just so ... our womanish affairs ... It won’t
be interesting to you.”
But immediately, turning to Tamara, she passionately and rapidly began
saying something in an agreed jargon, which presented a wild mixture
out of the Hebrew, Tzigani and Roumanian tongues and the cant words of
thieves and horse-thieves.
“Don’t try to put anything over on the fly guy, the fly guy is next,”
Tamara cut her short and with a smile indicated the reporter with her
eyes.
Platonov had, in fact, understood. Jennie was telling with indignation
that during this day and night, thanks to the influx of a cheap public,
the unhappy Pashka had been taken into a room more than ten times—and
all by different men. Only just now she had had a hysterical fit,
ending in a faint. And now, scarcely having brought Pashka back to
consciousness and braced her up on valerian drops in a glass of
spirits, Emma Edwardovna had again sent her into the drawing room.
Jennie had attempted to take the part of her comrade, but the
house-keeper had cursed the intercessor out and had threatened her with
punishment.
“What is it all about?” asked Yarchenko in perplexity, raising high his
eyebrows.
“Don’t trouble yourself ... nothing out of the way...” answered Jennie
in a still agitated voice. “Just so ... our little family trifles ...
Sergei Ivanich, may I have some of your wine?”
She poured out half a glass for herself and drank the cognac off at a
draught, distending her thin nostrils wide.
Platonov got up in silence and went toward the door.
“It’s not worth while, Sergei Ivanich. Drop it...” Jennie stopped him.
“Oh no, why not?” objected the reporter. “I shall do a very simple and
innocent thing, take Pasha here, and if need be—pay for her, even. Let
her lie down here for a while on the divan and rest, even though a
little ... Niura, run for a pillow quick!”
Scarcely had the door shut behind his broad, ungainly figure in its
gray clothes, when Boris Sobashnikov at once commenced speaking with a
contemptuous bitterness:
“Gentlemen, what the devil for have we dragged into our company this
peach off the street? We must needs tie up with all sorts of riff-raff?
The devil knows what he is—perhaps he’s even a dinny? Who can vouch for
him? And you’re always like that, Lichonin.”
“It isn’t Lichonin but I who introduced him to everybody,” said Ramses.
“I know him for a fully respectable person and a good companion.”
“Eh! Nonsense! A good companion to drink at some one else’s expense.
Why, don’t you see for yourselves that this is the most ordinary type
of habitue attached to a brothel, and, most probably, he is simply the
pimp here, to whom a percentage is paid for the entertainment into
which he entices the visitors.”
“Leave off, Borya. It’s foolish,” remarked Yarchenko reproachfully.
But Borya could not leave off. He had an unfortunate
peculiarity—intoxication acted neither upon his legs nor his tongue,
but put him in a morose, touchy frame of mind and egged him on into
quarrels. And Platonov had already for a long time irritated him with
his negligently sincere, assured and serious bearing, so little
suitable to the private cabinet of a brothel. But the seeming
indifference with which the reporter let pass the malicious remarks
which he interposed into the conversation angered Sobashnikov still
more.
“And then, the tone in which he permits himself to speak in our
company!” Sobashnikov continued to seethe. “A certain aplomb,
condescension, a professorial tone ... The scurvy penny-a-liner! The
free-lunch grafter!”
Jennie, who had all the time been looking intently at the student,
gaily and maliciously flashing with her sparkling dark eyes, suddenly
began to clap her hands.
“That’s the way! Bravo, little student! Bravo, bravo, bravo! ... That’s
the way, give it to him good! ... Really, what sort of a disgrace is
this! When he’ll come, now, I’ll repeat everything to him.”
“I—if you please! A—as much as you like!” Sobashnikov drawled out like
an actor, making superciliously squeamish creases about his mouth. “I
shall repeat the very same things myself.”
“There’s a fine fellow, now,—I love you for that!” exclaimed Jennie
joyously and maliciously, striking her fist on the table. “You can tell
an owl at once by its flight, a good man by his snot!”
Little White Manya and Tamara looked at Jennie with wonder, but, noting
the evil little lights leaping in her eyes and her nervously quivering
nostrils, they both understood and smiled.
Little White Manya, laughing, shook her head reproachfully. Jennie
always had such a face when her turbulent soul sensed that a scandal
was nearing which she herself had brought on.
“Don’t get your back up, Borinka,” said Lichonin. “Here all are equal.”
Niura came with a pillow and laid it down on the divan.
“And what’s that for?” Sobashnikov yelled at her. “Git! take it away at
once. This isn’t a lodging house.”
“Now, leave her be, honey. What’s that to you?” retorted Jennie in a
sweet voice and hid the pillow behind Tamara’s back. “Wait, sweetie,
I’d better sit with you for a while.”
She walked around the table, forced Boris to sit on a chair, and
herself got up on his knees. Twining his neck with her arm, she pressed
her lips to his mouth, so long and so vigorously that the student
caught his breath. Right up close to his eyes he saw the eyes of the
woman—strangely large, dark, luminous, indistinct and unmoving. For a
quarter of a second or so, for an instant, it seemed to him that in
these unliving eyes was impressed an expression of keen, mad hate; and
the chill of terror, some vague premonition of an ominous, inevitable
calamity flashed through the student’s brain. With difficulty tearing
the supple arms of Jennie away from him, and pushing her away, he said,
laughing, having turned red and breathing hard:
“There’s a temperament for you! Oh, you Messalina Paphnutievna! ...
They call you Jennka, I think? You’re a good-looking little rascal.”
Platonov returned with Pasha. Pasha was pitiful and revolting to look
at. Her face was pale, with, a bluish cast as though the blood had run
off; the glazed, half-closed eyes were smiling with a faint, idiotic
smile; the parted lips seemed to resemble two frayed, red, wet rags,
and she walked with a sort of timid, uncertain step, just as though
with one foot she were making a large step, and with the other a small
one. She walked with docility up to the divan and with docility laid
her head down on the pillow, without ceasing to smile faintly and
insanely. Even at a distance it was apparent that she was cold.
“Pardon me, gentlemen, I am going to undress,” said Lichonin, and
taking his coat off he threw it over the shoulders of the prostitute.
“Tamara, give her chocolate and wine.”
Boris Sobashnikov again stood up picturesquely in the corner, in a
leaning position, one leg in front of the other and his head held high.
Suddenly he spoke amid the general silence, addressing Platonov
directly, in a most foppish tone:
“Eh ... Listen ... what’s your name? ... This, then, must be your
mistress? Eh?” And with the tip of his boot he pointed in the direction
of the recumbent Pasha.
“Wha-at?” asked Platonov in a drawl, knitting his eyebrows.
“Or else you are her lover—it’s all one ... What do they call this duty
here? Well, now, these same people for whom the women embroider shirts
and with whom they divide their honest earnings? ... Eh? ...”
Platonov looked at him with a heavy, intent gaze through his narrowed
lids.
“Listen,” he said quietly, in a hoarse voice, slowly and ponderously
separating his words. “This isn’t the first time that you’re trying to
pick a quarrel with me. But, in the first place, I see that despite
your sober appearance you are exceedingly and badly drunk; and, in the
second place, I spare you for the sake of your comrades. However, I
warn you, that if you think of talking that way to me again, take your
eyeglasses off.”
“What’s this stuff?” exclaimed Boris, raising his shoulders high and
snorting through his nose. “What eyeglasses? Why eyeglasses?” But
mechanically, with two extended fingers, he fixed the bow of the
PINCE-NEZ on the bridge of his nose.
“Because I’m going to hit you, and the pieces may get in your eye,”
said the reporter unconcernedly.
Despite the unexpectedness of such a turn of the quarrel, nobody
started laughing. Only Little White Manka oh’d in astonishment and
clapped her hands. Jennie, with avid impatience, shifted her eyes from
one to the other.
“Well, now! I’ll give you change back myself so’s you won’t like it!”
roughly, altogether boyishly, cried out Sobashnikov. “Only it’s not
worth while mussing one’s hands with every ...” he wanted to add a new
invective, but decided not to, “with every ... And besides, comrades, I
do not intend to stay here any longer. I am too well brought up to be
hail-fellow-well-met with such persons.”
He rapidly and haughtily walked to the door.
It was necessary for him to pass almost right up against Platonov, who,
out of the corner of his eye, animal-like, was watching his every
movement. For a moment in the mind of the student flashed a desire to
strike Platonov unexpectedly, from the side, and jump away—the comrades
would surely part them and not allow a fight. But immediately, almost
without looking at the reporter, with some sort of deep, unconscious
instinct, he saw and sensed those broad hands, lying quietly on the
table, that obdurately bowed head with its broad forehead, and all the
ungainly, alert, powerful body of his foe, so neligently hunched up and
spread out on the chair, but ready at any second for a quick and
terrific blow. And Sobashnikov walked out into the corridor, loudly
banging the door after him.
“Good riddance to bad rubbish,” said Jennie after him in a mocking
patter. “Tamarochka, pour me out some more cognac.”
But the lanky student Petrovsky got up from his place and considered it
necessary to defend Sobashnikov.
“Just as you wish, gentlemen; this is a matter of your personal view,
but out of principle I go together with Boris. Let him be not right and
so on, we can express censure to him in our own intimate company, but
when an insult has been rendered our comrade—I can’t remain here. I am
going away.”
“Oh, my God!” And Lichonin nervously and vexedly scratched his temple.
“Boris behaved himself all the time in the highest degree vulgarly,
rudely and foolishly. What sort of corporate honour do you think this
is? A collective walk-out from editorial offices, from political
meetings, from brothels. We aren’t officers to screen the foolishness
of each comrade.”
“All the same, just as you wish, but I am going away out of a sense of
solidarity!” said Petrovsky importantly and walked out.
“May the earth be as down upon you!” Jennie sent after him.
But how tortuous and dark the ways of the human soul! Both of
them—Sobashnikov as well as Petrovsky—acted in their indignation rather
sincerely, but the first only half so, while the second only a quarter
in all. Sobashnikov, despite his intoxication and wrath, still had
knocking at the door of his mind the alluring thought that now it would
be more convenient and easier before his comrades to call out Jennka on
the quiet and to be alone with her. While Petrovsky, with exactly the
same aim, went after Sobashnikov in order to make a loan of three
roubles from him. In the general drawing room they made things up
between them, and after ten minutes Zociya, the housekeeper, shoved in
her little, squinting, pink, cunning face through the half-open door of
the private room.
“Jennechka,” she called, “go, they have brought your linen, go count
it. And you, Niura, the actor begs to come for just a minute, to drink
some champagne. He’s with Henrietta and Big Manya.”
The precipitate and incongruous quarrel of Platonov and Sobashnikov
long served as a subject of conversation. The reporter, in cases like
this, always felt shame, uneasiness, regret and the torments of
conscience. And despite the fact that all those who remained were on
his side, he was speaking with weariness in his voice:
“By God, gentlemen! I’ll go away, best of all. Why should I disrupt
your circle? We were both at fault. I’ll go away. Don’t bother about
the bill. I’ve already paid Simeon, when I was going after Pasha.”
Lichonin suddenly rumpled up his hair and stood up
“Oh, no, the devil take it! I’ll go and drag him here. Upon my word of
honour, they’re both fine fellows—Boris as well as Vaska. But they’re
young yet, and bark at their own tails. I’m going after them, and I
warrant that Boris will apologize.”
He went away, but came back after five minutes.
“They repose,” said he, sombrely, and made a hopeless gesture with his
hand. “Both of them.”
CHAPTER XI.
At this moment Simeon walked into the cabinet with a tray upon which
stood two goblets of a bubbling golden wine and lay a large visiting
card.
“May I ask which of you here might be Mister Gavrila Petrovich
Yarchenko?” he said, looking over all those sitting.
“I,” responded Yarchenko.
“If youse please. The actor gent sent this.”
Yarchenko took the visiting card and read aloud:
Eumenii Poluectovich
EGMONT—LAVRETZKI
Dramatic Artist of Metropolitan Theatres
“It’s remarkable,” said Volodya Pavlov, “that all the Russian Garricks
bear such queer names, on the style of Chrysantov, Thetisov, Mamontov
and Epimhakov.”
“And besides that, the best known of them must needs either speak
thickly, or lisp, or stammer,” added the reporter.
“Yes, but most remarkable of all is the fact that I do not at all have
the honour of knowing this artist of the metropolitan theatres.
However, there’s something else written on the reverse of this card.
Judging by the handwriting, it was written by a man greatly drunk and
little lettered.
“‘I dreenk’—not drink, but dreenk,” explained Yarchenko. “‘I dreenk to
the health of the luminary of Russian science, Gavrila Petrovich
Yarchenko, whom I saw by chance when I was passing by through the
collidor. Would like to clink glasses together personally. If you do
not remember, recollect the National Theatre, Poverty Is No Disgrace,
and the humble artist who played African.’ Yes, that’s right,” said
Yarchenko. “Once, somehow, they saddled me with the arrangement of this
benefit performance in the National Theatre. Also, there dimly glimmers
some clean-shaven haughty visage, but ... What shall it be, gentlemen?”
Lichonin answered good-naturedly:
“Why, drag him here. Perhaps he’s funny.”
“And you?” the sub-professor turned to Platonov.
“It’s all the same to me. I know him slightly. At first he’ll shout:
‘KELLNER, champagne!’ then burst into tears about his wife, who is an
angel, then deliver a patriotic speech and finally raise a row over the
bill, but none too loudly. All in all he’s entertaining.”
“Let him come,” said Volodya, from behind the shoulder of Katie, who
was sitting on his knees, swinging her legs.
“And you, Veltman?”
“What?” the student came to with a start. He was sitting on the divan
with his back to his companions, near the reclining Pasha, bending over
her, and already for a long time, with the friendliest appearance of
sympathy, had been stroking her, now on the shoulder, now on the hair
at the nape of the neck, while she was smiling at him with her shyly
shameless and senselessly passionate smile through half-closed and
trembling eyelashes. “What? What’s it all about? Oh yes,—is it all
right to let the actor in? I’ve nothing against it. Please do ...”
Yarchenko sent an invitation through Simeon, and the actor came and
immediately commenced the usual actor’s play. In the door he paused, in
his long frock coat, shining with its silk lapels, with a glistening
opera hat, which he held with his arm in the middle of his chest, like
an actor portraying in the theatre an elderly worldly lion or a bank
director. And approximately these persons he was inwardly picturing to
himself.
“May I be permitted, gentlemen, to intrude into your intimate company?”
he asked in an unctuous, kindly voice, with a half-bow done somewhat to
one side.
They asked him in, and he began to introduce himself. Shaking hands, he
stuck out his elbow forward and raised it so high that the hand proved
to be far lower. Now it was no longer a bank director, but such a
clever, splendid fellow, a sportsman and a rake of the golden youths.
But his face—with rumpled, wild eyebrows and with denuded lids without
lashes—was the vulgar, harsh and low face of a typical alcoholic,
libertine, and pettily cruel man. Together with him came two of his
ladies: Henrietta the eldest girl in years in the establishment of Anna
Markovna, experienced, who had seen everything and had grown accustomed
to everything, like an old horse on the tether of a threshing machine,
the possessor of a thick bass, but still a handsome woman; and Big
Manka, or Manka the Crocodile. Henrietta since still the preceding
night had not parted from the actor, who had taken her from the house
to a hotel.
Having seated himself alongside of Yarchenko, he straight off began to
play a new role—he became something on the order of an old good soul of
a landed proprietor, who had at one time been at a university himself,
and now can not look upon the students without a quiet, fatherly
emotion.
“Believe me, gentlemen, that one’s soul rests from all these worldly
squabbles in the midst of youth,” he was saying, imparting to his
depraved and harsh face an actor-like, exaggerated and improbable
expression of being moved. “This faith in a high ideal, these honest
impulses! ... What can be loftier and purer than our Russian students
as a body? ... KELLNER! Chompa-a-agne!” he yelled deafeningly all of a
sudden, and dealt a heavy blow on the table with his fist.
Lichonin and Yarchenka did not wish to remain in debt to him. A spree
began. God knows in what manner Mishka the Singer and Nicky the
Book-keeper soon found themselves in the cabinet, and at once began
singing in their galloping voices:
“They fe-e-e-el the tru-u-u-uth,
Come thou daw-aw-aw-awning quicker ...”
There also appeared Roly-Poly, who had awakened. Letting his head drop
touchingly to one side and having made little narrowed, lachrymose,
sweet eyes in his wrinkled old face of a Don Quixote, he was speaking
in a persuasively begging tone:
“Gentlemen students ... you ought to treat a little old man. I love
education, by God! ... Allow me!”
Lichonin was glad to see everybody, but Yarchenko in the
beginning—until the champagne had mounted to his head—only raised high
his small, short eyebrows with a timorous, wondering and naive air. It
suddenly became crowded, smoky, noisy and close in the cabinet. Simeon,
with rattling, closed the blinds with bolts on the outside. The women,
just having gotten done with a visit or in the interim between dances,
walked into the room, sat on somebody’s knees, smoked, sang
disjointedly, drank wine, kissed and again went away, and again came.
The clerks of Kereshkovsky, offended because the damsels bestowed more
attention upon the cabinet than the drawing room, did start a row and
tried to enter into a provoking explanation with the students, but
Simeon in a moment quelled them with two or three authoritative words,
thrown out as though in passing.
Niura came back from her room and a little later Petrovsky followed
her. Petrovsky with an extremely serious air declared that he had been
walking on the street all this time, thinking over the incident which
had taken place and in the end had come to the conclusion that comrade
Boris was in reality not in the right, but that there also was a
circumstance in extenuation of his fault—intoxication. Also, Jennie
came later, but alone—Sobashnikov had fallen asleep in her room. The
actor proved to have no end of talents. He very faithfully imitated the
buzzing of a fly which an intoxicated man is catching on a window-pane,
and the sounds of a saw; drolly performed, standing with his face in
the corner, the conversation of a nervous lady over the telephone;
imitated the singing of a phonograph record, and in the end, with
exceeding likeness to life, showed a little Persian lad with a little
trained monkey. Holding on with his hand to an imaginary small chain
and at the same time baring his teeth, squatting like a monkey, winking
his eyelids often, and scratching now his posteriors, now the hair on
his head, he sang through his nose, in a monotonous and sad voice,
distorting the words:
“The i-young cissack to the war has went,
The i-young ladee underneath the fence lies spraw-aw-ling.
AINA, AINA, AI-NA-NA-NA, AI-NA NA-NA-NA.”
In conclusion he took Little White Manka in his arms, wrapped her up in
the skirts of his frock and, stretching out his hand and making a
tearful face, began to nod his head, bent to one side, as is done by
little swarthy, dirty, oriental lads who roam over all Russia in long,
old, soldiers’ overcoats, with bared chest of a bronze colour, holding
a coughing, moth-eaten little monkey in their bosom.
“And who may you be?” severely asked fat Kate, who knew and loved this
joke.
“Me Serbian, lady-y-y,” piteously moaned the actor through his nose.
“Give me somethin’, lady-y-y.”
“And what do they call your little monkey?”
“Matreshka-a-a ... Him ’ungry-y-y, lady ... him want eat...”
“And have you got a passport?”
“We Serbia-a-an. Gimme something lady-y-y...”
The actor proved not superfluous on the whole. He created at once a
great deal of noise and raised the spirits of the company, which were
beginning to be depressing. And every minute he cried out in a
stentorian voice:
“KELLNER! Chompa-a-agne!”—although Simeon, who was accustomed to his
manner paid very little attention to these cries.
There began a truly Russian hubbub, noisy and senseless. The rosy,
flaxen-haired, pleasing Tolpygin was playing LA SEGUIDILLE from CARMEN
on the piano, while Roly-Poly was dancing a Kamarinsky peasant dance to
its tune. His narrow shoulders hunched up, twisted all to one side, the
fingers of his hanging hands widely spread, he intricately hopped on
one spot from one long, thin leg to the other, then suddenly letting
out a piercing grunt, would throw himself upward and shout out in time
to his wild dance:
“Ugh! Dance on, Matthew,
Don’t spare your boots, you! ...”
“Eh, for one stunt like that a quartern of brandy isn’t enough!” he
would add, shaking his long, graying hair.
“They fee-ee-eel! the tru-u-u-uth!” roared the two friends, raising
with difficulty their underlids, grown heavy, beneath dull, bleary
eyes.
The actor commenced to tell obscene anecdotes, pouring them out as from
a bag, and the women squealed from delight, bent in two from laughter
and threw themselves against the backs of their chairs. Veltman, who
had long been whispering with Pasha, inconspicuously, in the hubbub,
slipped out of the cabinet, while a few minutes after him Pasha also
went away, smiling with her quiet, insane and bashful smile.
But all of the remaining students as well, save Lichonin, one after the
other, some on the quiet, some under one pretext or another, vanished
from the cabinet and did not return for long periods. Volodya Pavlov
experienced a desire to look at the dancing; Tolpygin’s head began to
ache badly, and he asked Tamara to lead him somewhere where he might
wash up; Petrovski, having “touched” Lichonin for three roubles on the
quiet, went out into the corridor and only from there despatched the
housekeeper Zociya for Little White Manka. Even the prudent and
fastidious Ramses could not cope with that spicy feeling which to-day’s
strange, vivid and unwholesome beauty of Jennie excited in him. It
proved that he had some important, undeferrable business this morning;
it was necessary to go home and snatch a bit of sleep if only for a
couple of hours. But, having told good-bye to his companions, he,
before going out of the cabinet, rapidly and with deep significance
pointed the door out to Jennie with his eyes. She understood, slowly,
scarcely perceptibly, lowered her eyelashes as a sign of consent, and,
when she again raised them, Platonov, who almost without looking had
seen this silent dialogue, was struck by that expression of malice and
menace in her eyes which she sped the back of the departing Ramses.
Having waited for five minutes she got up, said “Excuse me, I’ll be
right back,” and went out, swinging her short orange skirt.
“Well, now? Is it your turn, Lichonin?” asked the reporter banteringly.
“No, brother, you’re mistaken!” said Lichonin and clacked his tongue.
“And I’m not doing it out of conviction or on principle, either ... No!
I, as an anarchist, proclaim the gospel that the worse things are, the
better ... But, fortunately, I am a gambler and spend all my
temperament on gaming; on that account simple squeamishness speaks
louder within me than this same unearthly feeling. But it’s amazing our
thoughts coincided. I just wanted to ask you about the same thing.”
“I—no. Sometimes, if I become very much tired out, I sleep here over
night. I take from Isaiah Savvich the key to his little room and sleep
on the divan. But all the girls here are already used to the fact that
I am a being of the third sex.”
“And really ... never? ...”
“Never.”
“Well, what’s right is right!” exclaimed Nhira. “Sergei Ivanich is like
a holy hermit.”
“Previously, some five years ago, I experienced this also,” continued
Platonov. “But, do you know, it’s really too tedious and disgusting.
Something on the nature of these flies which the actor gentleman just
represented. They’re stuck together on the window sill, and then in
some sort of fool wonder scratch their backs with their little hind
legs and fly apart forever. And to play at love here? ... Well, for
that I’m no hero out of their sort of novel. I’m not handsome, am shy
with women, uneasy, and polite. While here they thirst for savage
passions, bloody jealousy, tears, poisonings, beatings, sacrifices,—in
a word, hysterical romanticism. And it’s easy to understand why. The
heart of woman always wants love, while they are told of love every day
with various sour, drooling words. Involuntarily one wants pepper in
one’s love. One no longer wants words of passion, but
tragically-passionate deeds. And for that reason thieves, murderers,
souteners and other riff-raff will always be their lovers.”
“And most important of all,” added Platonov, “that would at once spoil
for me all the friendly relations which have been so well built up.”
“Enough of joking!” incredulously retorted Lichonin. “Then what compels
you to pass days and nights here? Were you a writer—it would be a
different matter. It’s easy to find an explanation; well, you’re
gathering types or something ... observing life ... After the manner of
that German professor who lived for three years with monkeys, in order
to study closely their language and manners. But you yourself said that
you don’t indulge in writing?”
“It isn’t that I don’t indulge, but I simply don’t know how—I can’t.”
“We’ll write that down. Now let’s suppose another thing—that you come
here as an apostle of a better, honest life, in the nature of a, now,
saviour of perishing souls. You know, as in the dawn of Christianity
certain holy fathers instead of standing on a column for thirty years
or living in a cave in the woods, went to the market places, into
houses of mirth, to the harlots and scaramuchios. But you aren’t
inclined that way.”
“I’m not.”
“Then why, the devil take it, do you hang around here? I can see very
well that a great deal here is revolting and oppressive and painful to
your own self. For example, this fool quarrel with Boris or this flunky
who beats a woman, and—, in general, the constant contemplation of
every kind of filth, lust, bestiality, vulgarity, drunkenness. Well,
now, since you say so—I believe that you don’t give yourself up to
lechery. But then, still more incomprehensible to me is your MODUS
VIVENDI, to express myself in the style of leading articles.”
The reporter did not answer at once:
“You see,” he began speaking slowly, with pauses, as though for the
first time lending ear to his thoughts and weighing them. “You see, I’m
attracted and interested in this life by its ... how shall I express
it? ... its fearful, stark truth. Do you understand, it’s as though all
the conventional coverings were ripped off it. There is no falsehood,
no hypocrisy, no sanctimoniousness, there are no compromises of any
sort, neither with public opinion, nor with the importunate authority
of our forefathers, nor with one’s own conscience. No illusions of any
kind, nor any kind of embellishments! Here she is—‘I! A public woman, a
common vessel, a cloaca for the drainage of the city’s surplus lust.
Come to me any one who wills—thou shalt meet no denial, therein is my
service. But for a second of this sensuality in haste—thou shalt pay in
money, revulsion, disease and ignominy.’ And that is all. There is not
a single phase of human life where the basic main truth should shine
with such a monstrous, hideous, stark clearness, without any shade of
human prevarication or self-whitewashing.”
“Oh, I don’t know! These women lie like the very devil. You just go and
talk with her a bit about her first fall. She’ll spin you such a yarn!”
“Well, don’t you ask then. What business is that of yours? But even if
they do lie, they lie altogether like children. But then, you know
yourself that children are the foremost, the most charming fibsters,
and at the same time the sincerest people on earth. And it’s
remarkable, that both they and the others—that is, both prostitutes and
children—lie only to us—men—and grown-ups. Among themselves they don’t
lie—they only inspiredly improvise. But they lie to us because we
ourselves demand this of them, because we clamber into their souls,
altogether foreign to us, with our stupid tactics and questionings,
because they regard us in secret as great fools and senseless
dissemblers. But if you like, I shall right now count off on my fingers
all the occasions when a prostitute is sure to lie, and you yourself
will be convinced that man incites her to lying.”
“Well, well, we shall see.” “First: she paints herself mercilessly, at
times even in detriment to herself. Why? Because every pimply military
cadet, who is so distressed by his sexual maturity that he grows stupid
in the spring, like a wood-cock on a drumming-log; or some sorry petty
government clerk or other from the department of the parish, the
husband of a pregnant woman and the father of nine infants—why, they
both come here not at all with the prudent and simple purpose of
leaving here the surplus of their passion. He, the good for nothing,
has come to enjoy himself; he needs beauty, d’you see—aesthete that he
is! But all these girls, these daughters of the simple, unpretentious,
great Russian people—how do they regard aesthetics? ‘What’s sweet,
that’s tasty; what’s red, that’s handsome.’ And so, there you are,
receive, if you please, a beauty of antimony, white lead and rouge.
“That’s one. Secondly, his desire for beauty isn’t enough for this
resplendent cavalier—no, he must in addition be served with a
similitude of love, so that from his caresses there should kindle in
the woman this same ‘fa-hire of in-sane pahass-ssion!’ which is sung
about In idiotical ballads. Ah! Then THAT is what you want? There
y’are! And the woman lies to him with countenance, voice, sighs, moans,
movements of the body. And even he himself in the depths of his soul
knows about this professional deception, but—go along with you!—still
deceives himself: ‘Ah, what a handsome man I am! Ah, how the women love
me! Ah, into what an ecstasy I bring them ...’ You know, there are
cases when a man with the most desperate brazenness, in the most
unlikely manner, is flattered to his face, and he himself sees and
knows it very plainly, but—the devil take it!—despite everything a
delightful feeling of some sort lubricates his soul. And so here.
Query: whose is the initiative in the lie?
“And here’s a third point for you, Lichonin. You prompted it yourself.
They lie most of all when they are asked: ‘How did you come to such a
life?’ But what right have you to ask her about that, may the devil
take you! For she does not push her way into your intimate life? She
doesn’t interest herself with your first, ‘holy’ love or the virtue of
your sisters and your bride. Aha! You pay money? Splendid! The bawd and
the bouncer, and the police, and medicine, and the city government,
watch over your interests. Polite and seemly conduct on the part of the
prostitute hired by you for love is guaranteed you, and your
personality is immune ... even though in the most direct sense, in the
sense of a slap in the face, which you, of course, deserve through your
aimless, and perhaps tormenting interrogations. But you desire truth as
well for your money? Well, that you are never to discount and to
control. They will tell you just such a conventionalized history as
you—yourself a man of conventionality and a vulgarian—will digest
easiest of all. Because by itself life is either exceedingly humdrum
and tedious to you, or else as exceedingly improbable as only life can
be improbable. And so you have the eternal mediocre history about an
officer, about a shop clerk, about a baby and a superannuated father,
who there, in the provinces, bewails his strayed daughter and implores
her to return home. But mark you, Lichonin, all that I’m saying doesn’t
apply to you; in you, upon my word of honour, I sense a sincere and
great soul ... Let’s drink to your health?”
They drank.
“Shall I speak on?” continued Platonov undecidedly.
“Are you bored?”
“No, no, I beg of you, speak on.”
“They also lie, and lie especially innocently, to those who preen
themselves before them on political hobby horses. Here they agree with
anything you want. I shall tell her to-day: Away with the modern
bourgeois order! Let us destroy with bombs and daggers the capitalists,
landed proprietors, and the bureaucracy! She’ll warmly agree with me.
But to-morrow the hanger-on Nozdrunov will yell that it’s necessary to
string up all the socialists, to beat up all the students and massacre
all the sheenies, who partake of communion in Christian blood. And
she’ll gleefully agree with him as well. But if in addition to that
you’ll also inflame her imagination, make her fall in love with
yourself, then she’ll go with you everywhere you may wish—on a pogrom,
on a barricade, on a theft, on a murder. But then, children also are
yielding. And they, by God, are children, my dear Lichonin...
“At fourteen years she was seduced, and at sixteen she became a patent
prostitute, with a yellow ticket and a venereal disease. And here is
all her life, surrounded and fenced off from the universe with a sort
of a bizarre, impenetrable and dead wall. Turn your attention to her
everyday vocabulary—thirty or forty words, no more—altogether as with a
baby or a savage: to eat, to drink, to sleep, man, bed, the madam,
rouble, lover, doctor, hospital, linen, policeman—and that’s all. And
so her mental development, her experience, her interests, remain on an
infantile plane until her very death, exactly as in the case of a gray
and naive lady teacher who has not crossed over the threshold of a
female institute since she was ten, as in the case of a nun given as a
child into a convent. In a word, picture to yourself a tree of a
genuinely great species, but raised in a glass bell, in a jar from jam.
And precisely to this childish phase of their existence do I attribute
their compulsory lying—so innocent, purposeless and habitual ... But
then, how fearful, stark, unadorned with anything the frank truth in
this business-like dickering about the price of a night; in these ten
men in an evening; in these printed rules, issued by the city fathers,
about the use of a solution of boric acid and about maintaining one’s
self in cleanliness; in the weekly doctors’ inspections; in the nasty
diseases, which are looked upon as lightly and facetiously, just as
simply and without suffering, as a cold would be; in the deep revulsion
of these women to men—so deep, that they all, without conception,
compensate for it in the Lesbian manner and do not even in the least
conceal it. All their incongruous life is here, on the palm of my hand,
with all its cynicism, monstrous and coarse injustice; but there is in
it none of that falsehood and that hypocrisy before people and before
one’s self, which enmesh all humanity from top to bottom. Consider, my
dear Lichonin, how much nagging, drawn out, disgusting deception, how
much hate, there is in any marital cohabitation in ninety-nine cases
out of a hundred. How much blind, merciless cruelty—precisely not
animal, but human, reasoned, far-sighted, calculated cruelty—there is
in the sacred maternal instinct—and behold, with what tender colours
this instinct is adorned! Then what about all these unnecessary,
tom-fool professions, invented by cultured man for the safeguarding of
my nest, my bit of meat, my woman, my child, these different overseers,
controllers, inspectors, judges, attorneys, jailers, advocates, chiefs,
bureaucrats, generals, soldiers, and hundreds of thousands of titles
more. They all subserve human greed, cowardice, viciousness, servility,
legitimised sensuality, laziness-beggarliness!—yes, that is the real
word!—human beggarliness. But what magnificent words we have! The altar
of the fatherland, Christian compassion for our neighbor, progress,
sacred duty, sacred property, holy love. Ugh! I do not believe in a
single fine word now, and I am nauseated to infinity with these petty
liars, these cowards and gluttons! Beggar women! ... Man is born for
great joy, for ceaseless creation, in which he is God; for a broad,
free love, unhindered by anything,—love for everything: for a tree, for
the sky, for man, for a dog, for the dear, benign, beautiful earth,—oh,
especially for the earth with its beatific motherhood, with its
mornings and nights, with its magnificent everyday miracles. But man
has lied himself out so, has become such an importunate beggar, and has
sunk so low! ... Ah, Lichonin, but I am weary!”
“I, as an anarchist, partly understand you,” said Lichonin
thoughtfully. It was as though he heard and yet did not hear the
reporter. Some thought was with difficulty, for the first time, being
born in his mind. “But one thing I can not comprehend. If humanity has
become so malodorous to you, then how do you stand—and for so long,
too,—all this,—” Lichonin took in the whole table with a circular
motion of his hand,—“the basest thing that mankind could invent?”
“Well, I don’t even know myself,” said Platonov with artlessness. “You
see, I am a vagabond, and am passionately in love with life. I have
been a turner, a compositor; I have sown and sold tobacco—the cheap
Silver Makhorka kind—have sailed as a stoker on the Azov Sea, have been
a fisherman on the Black—on the Dubinin fisheries; I have loaded
watermelons and bricks on the Dnieper, have ridden with a circus, have
been an actor—I can’t even recall everything. And never did need drive
me. No, only an immeasurable thirst for life and an insupportable
curiosity. By God, I would like for a few days to become a horse, a
plant, or a fish, or to be a woman and experience childbirth; I would
like to live with the inner life, and to look upon the universe with
the eyes of every human being I meet. And so I wander care-free over
towns and hamlets, bound by nothing; know and love tens of trades and
joyously float wherever it suits fate to set my sail... And so it was
that I came upon the brothel, and the more I look at it, the more there
grows within me alarm, incomprehension, and very great anger. But even
this will soon be at an end. When things get well into autumn—away
again! I’ll get into a rail-rolling mill. I’ve a certain friend, he’ll
manage it ... Wait, wait, Lichonin ... Listen to the actor ... That’s
the third act.”
Egmont-Lavretzki, who until this had been very successfully imitating
now a shoat which is being put into a bag, now the altercation of a cat
with a dog, was beginning little by little to wilt and droop. Upon him
was already advancing the stage of self-revelation, next in order, in
the paroxysm of which he several times attempted to kiss Yarchenko’s
hand. His lids had become red; around the shaven, prickly lips had
deepened the tearful wrinkles that gave him an appearance of weeping;
and it could be heard by his voice that his nose and throat were
already overflowing with tears.
“I serve in a farce!” he was saying, smiting himself on the breast with
his fist. “I disport myself in striped trunks for the sport of the
sated mob! I have put out my torch, have hid my talent in the earth,
like the slothful servant! But fo-ormerly!” he began to bray
tragically, “Fo-ormerly-y-y! Ask in Novocherkassk, ask in Tvier, in
Ustejne, in Zvenigorodok, in Krijopole.[10] What a Zhadov and Belugin I
was! How I played Max! What a figure I created of Veltishchev—that was
my crowning ro-ole ... Nadin-Perekopski was beginning with me at
Sumbekov’s! With Nikiphorov-Pavlenko did I serve. Who made the name for
Legunov-Pochainin? I! But no-ow ...”
[10] All provincial towns.—Trans.
He sniveled, and sought to kiss the sub-professor.
“Yes! Despise me, brand me, ye honest folk. I play the tom-fool. I
drink ... I have sold and spilt the sacred ointment! I sit in a dive
with vendable merchandise. While my wife ... she is a saint, and pure,
my little dove! ... Oh, if she knew, if she only knew! she works hard,
she runs a modiste’s shop; her fingers—the fingers of an angel—are
pricked with the needle, but I! Oh, sainted woman! And I—the
scoundrel!—whom do I exchange thee for! Oh, horror!” The actor seized
his hair. “Professor, let me, I’ll kiss your scholarly hand. You alone
understand me. Let us go, I’ll introduce you, you’ll see what an angel
this is! ... She awaits me, she does not sleep nights, she folds the
tiny hands of my little ones and together with them whispers: ‘Lord,
save and preserve papa.’”
“You’re lying about it all, you ham!” said the drunken Little White
Manka suddenly, looking with hatred upon Egmont-Lavretzki. “She isn’t
whispering anything, but most peacefully sleeping with a man in your
bed.”
“Be still, you w—!” vociferated the actor beside himself; and seizing a
bottle by the neck raised it high over his head. “Hold me, or else I’ll
brain this carrion. Don’t you dare besmirch with your foul tongue...”
“My tongue isn’t foul—I take communion,” impudently replied the woman.
“But you, you fool, wear horns. You go traipsing around with
prostitutes yourself, and yet want your wife not to play you false. And
look where the dummy’s found a place to slaver, till he looks like he
had reins in his mouth. And what did you mix the children in for, you
miserable papa you! Don’t you roll your eyes and gnash your teeth at
me. You won’t frighten me! W—yourself!”
It required many efforts and much eloquence on the part of Yarchenko in
order to quiet the actor and Little White Manka, who always after
Benedictine ached for a row. The actor in the end burst into copious
and unbecoming tears and blew his nose, like an old man; he grew weak,
and Henrietta led him away to her room.
Fatigue had already overcome everybody. The students, one after
another, returned from the bedrooms; and separately from them, with an
indifferent air, came their chance mistresses. And truly, both these
and the others resembled flies, males and females, just flown apart on
the window pane. They yawned, stretched, and for a long time an
involuntary expression of wearisomeness and aversion did not leave
their faces, pale from sleeplessness, unwholesomely glossy. And when
they, before going their ways, said good-bye to each other, in their
eyes twinkled some kind of an inimical feeling, just as with the
participants of one and the same filthy and unnecessary crime.
“Where are you going right now?” Lichonin asked the reporter in a low
voice.
“Well, really, I don’t know myself. I did want to spend the night in
the cabinet of Isaiah Savvich, but it’s a pity to lose such a splendid
morning. I’m thinking of taking a bath, and then I’ll get on a steamer
and ride to the Lipsky monastery to a certain tippling black friar I
know. But why?”
“I would ask you to remain a little while and sit the others out. I
must have a very important word or two with you.”
“It’s a go.”
Yarchenko was the last to go. He averred a headache and fatigue. But
scarcely had he gone out of the house when the reporter seized Lichonin
by the hand and quickly dragged him into the glass vestibule of the
entrance.
“Look!” he said, pointing to the street.
And through the orange glass of the little coloured window Lichonin saw
the sub-professor, who was ringing at Treppel’s. After a minute the
door opened and Yarchenko disappeared through it.
“How did you find out?” asked Lichonin with astonishment.
“A mere trifle! I saw his face, and saw his hands smoothing Verka’s
tights. The others were less restrained. But this fellow is bashful.”
“Well, now, let’s go,” said Lichonin. “I won’t detain you long.”
CHAPTER XII.
Of the girls only two remained in the cabinet-Jennie, who had come in
her night blouse, and Liuba, who had long been sleeping under cover of
the conversation, curled up into a ball in the large plush armchair.
The fresh, freckled face of Liuba had taken on a meek, almost
childlike, expression, while the lips, just as they had smiled in
sleep, had preserved the light imprint of a radiant, peaceful and
tender smile. It was blue and biting in the cabinet from the dense
tobacco smoke; guttered, warty little streams had congealed on the
candles in the candelabras; the table, flooded with coffee and wine,
scattered all over with orange peels, seemed hideous.
Jennie was sitting on the divan, her knees clasped around with her
arms. And again was Platonov struck by the sombre fire in her deep
eyes, that seemed fallen in underneath the dark eyebrows, formidably
contracted downward, toward the bridge of the nose.
“I’ll put out the candles,” said Lichonin.
The morning half-light, watery and drowsy, filled the room through the
slits of the blinds. The extinguished wicks of the candles smoked with
faint streams. The tobacco smoke swirled in blue, layered shrouds, but
a ray of sunlight that had cut its way through the heart-shaped hollow
in a window shutter, transpierced the cabinet obliquely with a joyous,
golden sword of dust, and in liquid, hot gold splashed upon the paper
on the wall.
“That’s better,” said Lichonin, sitting down. “The conversation will be
short, but ... the devil knows ... how to approach it.”
He looked at Jennie in abstraction.
“Shall I go away, then?” said she indifferently.
“No, you sit a while,” the reporter answered for Lichonin. “She won’t
be in the way,” he turned to the student and slightly smiled. “For the
conversation will be about prostitution? Isn’t that so?”
“Well, yes... sort of...”
“Very well, then. You listen to her carefully. Her opinions happen to
be of an unusually cynical nature, but at times of exceeding weight.”
Lichonin vigorously rubbed and kneaded his face with his palms, then
intertwined his fingers and nervously cracked them twice. It was
apparent that he was agitated and was himself constrained about that
which he was getting ready to say.
“Oh, but isn’t it all the same!” he suddenly exclaimed angrily. “You
were to-day speaking about these women ... I listened... True, you
haven’t told me anything new. But-strangely-I, for some reason, as
though for the first time in my loose life, have looked upon this
question with open eyes... I ask you, what is prostitution in the end?
What is it? The extravagant delirium of large cities, or an eternal
historical phenomenon? Will it cease some time? Or will it die only
with the death of all mankind? Who will answer me that?”
Platonov was looking at him intently, narrowing his eyes slightly,
through habit. He wanted to know what main thought was inflicting such
sincere torture on Lichonin.
“When it will cease, none will tell you. Perhaps when the magnificent
Utopias of the socialists and anarchists will materialize, when the
world will become everyone’s and no one’s, when love will be absolutely
free and subject only to its own unlimited desires, while mankind will
fuse into one happy family, wherein will perish the distinction between
mine and thine, and there will come a paradise upon earth, and man will
again become naked, glorified and without sin. Perhaps it may be
then...”
“But now? Now?” asks Lichonin with growing agitation. “Shall I look on,
with my little hands folded? ‘It’s none of my affair?’ Tolerate it as
an unavoidable evil? Put up with it, and wash my hands of it? Shall I
pronounce a benediction upon it?”
“This evil is not unavoidable, but insuperable. But isn’t it all the
same to you?” asked Platonov with cold wonder. “For you’re an
anarchist, aren’t you?”
“What the devil kind of an anarchist am I! Well, yes, I am an
anarchist, because my reason, when I think of life, always leads me
logically to the anarchistic beginning. And I myself think in theory:
let men beat, deceive, and fleece men, like flocks of sheep—let
them!—violence will breed rancour sooner or later. Let them violate the
child, let them trample creative thought under foot, let there be
slavery, let there be prostitution, let them thieve, mock, spill
blood...Let them! The worse, the better, the nearer the end. There is a
great law, I think, the same for inanimate objects as well as for all
the tremendous and many-millioned human life: the power of effort is
equal to the power of resistance. The worse, the better. Let evil and
vindictiveness accumulate in mankind, let them grow and ripen like a
monstrous abscess—an abscess the size of the whole terrestrial sphere.
For it will burst some time! And let there be terror and insufferable
pain. Let the pus deluge all the universe. But mankind will either
choke in it and perish, or, having gone through the illness, will be
regenerated to a new, beautiful life.”
Lichonin avidly drank off a cup of cold black coffee and continued
vehemently:
“Yes. Just so do I and many others theorize, sitting in our rooms, over
tea with white bread and cooked sausage, when the value of each
separate human life is so-so, an infinitesimally small numeral in a
mathematical formula. But let me see a child abused, and the red blood
will rush to my head from rage. And when I look and look upon the
labour of a moujik or a labourer, I am thrown into hysterics for shame
at my algebraic calculations. There is—the devil take it!—there is
something incongruous, altogether illogical, but which at this time is
stronger than human reason. Take to-day, now ... Why do I feel at this
minute as though I had robbed a sleeping man or deceived a
three-year-old child, or hit a bound person? And why does it seem to me
to-day that I myself am guilty of the evil of prostitution—guilty in my
silence, my indifference, my indirect permission? What am I to do,
Platonov!” exclaimed the student with grief in his voice.
Platonov kept silent, squinting at him with his little narrow eyes. But
Jennie unexpectedly said in a caustic tone:
“Well, you do as one Englishwoman did ... A certain red-haired
clodhopper came to us here. She must have been important, because she
came with a whole retinue ... all some sort of officials ... But before
her had come the assistant of the commissioner, with the precinct
inspector Kerbesh. And the assistant directly forewarned us, just like
that: ‘If you stiffs, and so on and so on, will let out even one little
rude word, or something, then I won’t leave one stone upon another of
your establishment, while I’ll flog all the wenches soundly in the
station-house and make ’em rot in jail!’ Well, at last this galoot
came. She gibbered and she gibbered something in a foreign language,
all the time pointed to heaven with her hand, and then distributed a
five-kopeck Testament to every one of us and rode away. Now you ought
to do the same, dearie.”
Platonov burst into loud laughter. But seeing the naive and sad face of
Lichonin, who did not seem to understand, nor even suspect mockery, he
restrained his laughter and said seriously:
“You won’t accomplish anything, Lichonin. While there will be property,
there will also be poverty. While marriage exists, prostitution also
will not die. Do you know who will always sustain and nourish
prostitution? It is the so-called decent people, the noble
paterfamiliases, the irreproachable husbands, the loving brothers. They
will always find a seemly motive to legitimize, normalize and put a
wrapper all around paid libertinage, because they know very well that
otherwise it would rush in a torrent into their bedrooms and nurseries.
Prostitution is for them a deflection of the sensuousness of others
from their personal, lawful alcove. And even the respectable
paterfamilias himself is not averse to indulge in a love debauch in
secret. And really, it is palling to have always the one and the same
thing the wife, the chambermaid, and the lady on the side. Man, as a
matter of fact, is a poly—and exceedingly so—a polygamous animal. And
to his rooster-like amatory instincts it will always be sweet to unfold
in such a magnificent nursery garden, A LA Treppel’s or Anna
Markovna’s. Oh, of course, a well-balanced spouse or the happy father
of six grown-up daughters will always be clamouring about the horror of
prostitution. He will even arrange with the help of a lottery and an
amateur entertainment a society for the saving of fallen women, or an
asylum in the name of St. Magdalene. But the existence of prostitution
he will bless and sustain.”
“Magdalene asylums!” with quiet laughter, full of an ancient hatred the
ache of which had not yet healed, repeated Jennie.
“Yes, I know that all these false measures undertaken are stuff and a
total mockery,” cut in Lichonin. “But let me be ridiculous and stupid,
yet I do not wish to remain a commiserating spectator, who sits on a
warm ledge, gazes upon a conflagration, and is saying all the time:
‘Oh, my, but it’s burning ... by God, it is burning! Perhaps there are
even people burning!’—but for his part merely laments and slaps his
thighs.”
“Well, now,” said Platonov harshly, “would you take a child’s syringe
and go to put out the fire with it?”
“No!” heatedly exclaimed Lichonin ... “Perhaps—who knows?—perhaps I’ll
succeed in saving at least one living soul? It was just this that I
wanted to ask you about, Platonov, and you must help me ... Only, I
implore you, without jeers, without cooling off ...”
“You want to take a girl out of here? To save her?” asked Platonov,
looking at him attentively. He now understood the drift of this entire
conversation.
“Yes ... I don’t know ... I’ll try ...” answered Lichonin uncertainly.
“She’ll come back,” said Platonov.
“She will,” Jennie repeated with conviction.
Lichonin walked up to her, took her by the hands and began to speak in
a trembling whisper:
“Jennechka ... Perhaps you ... eh? For I don’t call you as a mistress
... but a friend ... It’s all a trifle, half a year of rest ... and
then we’ll master some trade or other ... we’ll read...”
Jennie snatched her hands out of his with vexation.
“Oh, into a bog with you!” she almost shouted. “I know you! Want me to
darn socks for you? Cook on a kerosene stove? Pass nights without
sleeping on account of you when you’ll be chitter-chattering with your
short-haired friends? But when you get to be a doctor or a lawyer, or a
government clerk, then it’s me will get a knee in the back: ‘Out on the
street with you, now, you public hide, you’ve ruined my young life. I
want to marry a decent girl, pure, and innocent! ...”
“I meant it as a brother ... I meant it without that ...” mumbled
Lichonin in confusion.
“I know that kind of brothers. Until the first night ... Leave off and
don’t talk nonsense to me! It makes me tired to listen to it!”
“Wait, Lichonin!” began the reporter seriously. “Why, you will pile a
load beyond your strength upon yourself as well. I’ve known idealists,
among the populists, who married peasant girls out of principle. This
is just the way they thought—nature, black-loam, untapped forces. ...
But this black-loam after a year turned into the fattest of women, who
lies the whole day in bed and chews cookies, or studs her fingers with
penny rings, spreads them out and admires them. Or else sits in the
kitchen, drinks sweet liquor with the coachman and carries on a natural
romance with him. Look out, here it will be worse!”
All three became silent. Lichonin was pale and was wiping his moist
forehead with a handkerchief.
“No, the devil take it!” he cried out suddenly with obstinacy. “I don’t
believe you! I don’t want to believe! Liuba” he called loudly the girl
who had fallen asleep. “Liubochka!”
The girl awoke, passed her palm over her lips, first to one side, then
the other, yawned, and smiled, in a funny, child-like manner.
“I wasn’t sleeping, I heard everything,” she said. “I only dozed off
for a teeny-weeny bit.”
“Liuba, do you want to go away from here with me?” asked Lichonin and
took her by the hand. “But entirely, forever, to go away so’s never to
return either to a brothel or the street?”
Liuba questioningly, with perplexity, looked at Jennie, as though
seeking from her an explanation of this jest.
“That’s enough for you,” she said slyly. “You’re still studying
yourself. Where do you come in, then, to take a girl and set her up?”
“Not to set you up, Liuba ... I simply want to help you ... For it
isn’t very sweet for you in a brothel, is it now!”
“Naturally, it isn’t all sugar! If I was as proud as Jennechka, or so
enticing like Pasha ... but I won’t get used to things here for
anything ...”
“Well, then, let’s go, let’s go! ...” entreated Lichonin. “Surely, you
know some manual work—well, now, sewing something, embroidering,
cutting?”
“I don’t know anything!” answered Liuba bashfully and started laughing
and turned red, covering her mouth with the elbow of her free arm.
“What’s asked of us in the village, that I know, but anything more I
don’t know. I can cook a little ... I lived at the priest’s—cooked for
him.”
“That’s splendid! That’s excellent!” Lichonin grew joyous. “I will
assist you, you’ll open a dining room ... A cheap dining room, you
understand ... I’ll advertise it for you ... The students will come!
That’s magnificent! ...”
“That’s enough of making fun of me!” retorted Liuba, a bit offended,
and again looked askance and questioningly at Jennie.
“He’s not joking,” answered Jennie with a voice which quavered
strangely. “He’s in earnest, seriously.”
“Here’s my word of honour that I’m serious! Honest to God, now!” the
student caught her up with warmth and for some reason even made the
sign of the cross in the direction of the empty corner.
“And really,” said Jennie, “take Liubka. That’s not the same thing as
taking me. I’m like an old dragoon’s nag, and used to it. You can’t
make me over, neither with hay nor a stick. But Liubka is a simple girl
and a kind one. And she hasn’t grown used to our life yet. What are you
popping your eyes out at me for, you ninny? Answer when you’re asked.
Well? Do you want to or don’t you want to?”
“And why not? If they ain’t laughing, but for real ... And you,
Jennechka, what would you advise me ...”
“Oh, you’re such wood!” Jennie grew angry. “What’s better according to
you—to rot on straw with a nose fallen through? To croak under the
fence like a dog? Or to turn honest? Fool! You ought to kiss his hands;
but no, you’re getting particular.”
The naive Liuba did, in fact, extend her lips toward Lichonin’s hand,
and this movement made everybody laugh, and touched them just the least
trifle.
“And that’s very good! It’s like magic!” bustled the overjoyed
Lichonin. “Go and notify the proprietress at once that you’re going
away from here forever. And take the most necessary things; it isn’t as
it used to be; now a girl can go away from a brothel whenever she wants
to.”
“No, it can’t be done that way,” Jennie stopped him; “she can go away,
that’s so, but you’ll have no end of unpleasantness and hullabaloo.
Here’s what you do, student. You won’t regret ten roubles?”
“Of course, of course ... if you please.”
“Let Liuba tell the housekeeper that you’re taking her to your rooms
for to-day. That’s the fixed rate—ten roubles. And afterwards, well,
even to-morrow—come after the ticket and things. That’s nothing; we’ll
work this thing roundly. And after that you must go to the police with
her ticket and declare, that Liubka So-and-so has hired herself to you
as chambermaid, and that you desire to exchange her blank for a real
passport. Well, Liubka, lively! Take the money and march. And, look
out, be as quick as possible with the housekeeper, or else she, the
bitch, will read it in your eyes. And also don’t forget,” she cried,
now after Liuba, “wipe the rouge off your puss, now. Or else the
drivers will be pointing their fingers at you.”
After half an hour Liuba and Lichonin were getting on a cab at the
entrance. Jennie and the reporter were standing on the sidewalk.
“You’re committing a great folly, Lichonin,” Platonov was saying
listlessly, “but I honour and respect the fine impulse within you.
Here’s the thought—and here’s the deed. You’re a brave and a splendid
fellow.”
“Here’s to your commencement!” laughed Jennie. “Look out, don’t forget
to send for me to the christening.”
“You won’t see it, no matter how long you wait for it!” laughed
Lichonin, waving his cap about.
They rode off. The reporter looked at Jennie, and with astonishment saw
tears in her softened eyes.
“God grant it, God grant it,” she was whispering.
“What has been the matter with you to-day, Jennie?” he asked kindly.
“What? Are you oppressed? Can’t I do anything?”
She turned her back to him and leaned over the bent balustrade of the
stoop.
“How shall I write to you, if need be?” she asked in a stifled voice.
“Why, it’s simple. Editorial rooms of Echoes. So-and-so. They’ll pass
it on to me pretty fast.”
“I ... I ... I ...” Jennie just began, but suddenly burst into loud,
passionate sobs and covered her face with her hands, “I’ll write you
...”
And without taking her hands away from her face, her shoulders
quivering, she ran up the stoop and disappeared in the house, loudly
banging the door after her.
PART TWO
CHAPTER I.
Even to this day, after a lapse of ten years, the erstwhile inhabitants
of the Yamkas recall that year, abounding in unhappy, foul, bloody
events, which began with a series of trifling, small affrays, but
terminated in the administration’s, one fine day, taking and destroying
completely the ancient, long-warmed nest of legalized prostitution,
which nest it had itself created—scattering its remains over the
hospitals, jails and streets of the big city. Even to this day a few of
the former proprietresses who have remained alive and have reached the
limit of decrepitude, and quondam housekeepers, fat and hoarse, like
pug-dogs grown old, recall this common destruction with sorrow, horror,
and stolid perplexity.
Just like potatoes out of a sack, brawls, robberies, diseases, murders
and suicides began to pour down, and, it seemed, no one was to blame
for this. All these misfortunes just simply began to be more frequent
of their own accord, to pile one upon the other, to expand and grow;
just as a small lump of snow, pushed by the feet of urchins, becomes
constantly bigger and bigger by itself from the thawing snow sticking
to it, grows bigger than the stature of a man, and, finally, with one
last, small effort is precipitated into a ravine and rolls down as an
enormous avalanche. The old proprietresses and housekeepers, of course,
had never heard of fatality; but inwardly, with the soul, they sensed
its mysterious presence in the inevitable calamities of that terrible
year.
And, truly, everywhere in life where people are bound by common
interests, blood relationship, or the benefits of a profession into
close, individualized groups—there inevitably can be observed this
mysterious law of sudden accumulation, of a piling up, of events; their
epidemicity, their strange succession and connectedness, their
incomprehensible lingering. This occurs, as popular wisdom has long ago
noted, in isolated families, where disease or death suddenly falls upon
the near ones in an inevitable, enigmatic order. “Misfortune does not
come alone.” “Misfortune without waits—open wide the gates.” This is to
be noticed also in monasteries, banks, governmental departments,
regiments, places of learning and other public institutions, where for
a long time, almost for decades, life flows evenly, like a marshy
river; and, suddenly, and after some altogether insignificant incident
or other, there begin transfers, changes in positions, expulsions from
service, losses, sicknesses. The members of society, just as though
they had conspired, die, go insane, are caught thieving, shoot or hang
themselves; vacancy after vacancy is freed; promotions follow
promotions, new elements flow in, and, behold, after two years there is
not a one of the previous people on the spot; everything is new, if
only the institution has not fallen into pieces completely, has not
crept apart. And is it not the same astounding destiny which overtakes
enormous social, universal organizations—cities, empires, nations,
countries, and, who knows, perhaps whole planetary worlds?
Something resembling this incomprehensible fatality swept over the
Yamaskya Borough as well, bringing it to a rapid and scandalous
destruction. Now in place of the boisterous Yamkas is left a peaceful,
humdrum outskirt, in which live truck-farmers, cat’s-meat men, Tartars,
swineherds and butchers from the near-by slaughterhouses. At the
petition of these worthy people even the designation of Yamaskya
Borough itself, as disgracing the inhabitants with its past, has been
named over into Golubovka, in honour of the merchant Golubov, owner of
a shop dealing in groceries and delicacies, and warden of the local
church.
The first subterranean shocks of this catastrophe began in the heat of
summer, at the time of the annual summer fair, which this year was
unbelievably brilliant. Many circumstances contributed to its
extraordinary success, multitudes, and the stupendousness of the deals
concluded during it: the building in the vicinity of three new sugar
refineries, and the unusually abundant crop of wheat, and, in
particular, of sugar beets; the commencement of work in the laying of
an electric trolley and of canalization; the building of a new road to
the distance of 750 versts; but mainly, the fever of building which
seized the whole town, all the banks and financial institutions, and
all the houseowners. Factories for making brick sprang up on the
outskirts of the town like mushrooms. A grandiose agricultural
exposition opened. Two new steamer lines came into being, and they,
together with the previously established ones, frenziedly competed with
each other, transporting freight and pilgrims. In competition they
reached such a state, that they lowered their passenger rates for the
third class from seventy-five kopecks to five, three, two, and even one
kopeck. In the end, ready to fall from exhaustion in the unequal
struggle, one of the steamship companies offered a free passage to all
the third-class passengers. Then its competitor at once added to the
free passage half a loaf of white bread as well. But the biggest and
most significant enterprise of this city was the engineering of the
extensive river port, which had attracted to it hundreds of thousands
of labourers and which cost God knows what money.
It must also be added, that the city was at this time celebrating the
millennial anniversary of its famous abbey, the most honoured and the
richest among all the monasteries of Russia. From all the ends of
Russia, out of Siberia, from the shores of the Frozen Ocean, from the
extreme south—the Black and Caspian Seas—countless pilgrims had
gathered for the worship of the local sanctities: the abbey’s saints,
reposing deep underground in calcareous caverns. Suffice it to say,
that the monastery gave shelter, and food of a sort, to forty thousand
people daily; while those for whom there was not enough room lay, at
night, side by side, like logs, in the extensive yards and lanes of the
abbey.
This was a summer out of some fairy-tale. The population of the city
increased well-nigh fourfold through every sort of newly-come people.
Stone-masons, carpenters, painters, engineers, technicians, foreigners,
agriculturists, brokers, shady business men, river navigators,
unoccupied knaves, tourists, thieves, card sharpers—they all overflowed
the city, and not in a single hotel, the most dirty and dubious one,
was there a vacant room. Insane prices were paid for quarters. The
stock exchange gambled on a grand scale, as never before or since that
summer. Money in millions simply flowed from hands to hands, and thence
to a third pair. In one hour colossal riches were created, but then
many former firms burst, and yesterday’s men of wealth turned into
beggars. The commonest of labourers bathed and warmed themselves in
this golden flood. Stevedores, draymen, street porters, roustabouts,
hod carriers and ditch diggers still remember to this day what money
they earned by the day during this mad summer. Any tramp received no
less than four of five roubles a day at the unloading of barges laden
with watermelons. And all this noisy, foreign band, locoed by the easy
money, intoxicated with the sensual beauty of the ancient, seductive
city, enchanted by the delightful warmth of the southern nights, made
drunk by the insidious fragrance of the white acacias—these hundreds of
thousands of insatiable, dissolute beasts in the image of men, with all
their massed will clamoured: “Give us woman!”
In a single month new amusement enterprises—chic Tivolis, CHATEAUX DES
FLEURES, Olympias, Alcazars, etc., with a chorus and an operetta; many
restaurants and beerhouses, with little summer gardens, and common
little taverns—sprang up by the score in the city, in the vicinity of
the building port. On every crossing new “violet-wine” houses were
opened every day—little booths of boards, in each of which, under the
pretext of selling bread-cider, old wenches trafficked in themselves by
twos and threes, right alongside behind a partition of deal, and to
many mothers and fathers is this summer painful and memorable through
the degrading diseases of their sons—schoolboys and military cadets.
For the casual arrivals servants were demanded, and thousands of
peasant girls started out from the surrounding villages toward the
city. It was inevitable that the demand on prostitution should become
unusually high. And so, from Warsaw, from Lodz, from Odessa, from
Moscow, and even from St. Petersburg, even from abroad, flocked
together an innumerable multitude of foreign women; cocottes of Russian
fabrication, the most ordinary prostitutes of the rank and file, and
chic Frenchwomen and Viennese. Imperiously told the corrupting
influence of the hundreds of millions of easy money. It was as though
this cascade of gold had lashed down upon, had set to whirling and
deluged within it, the whole city. The number of thefts and murders
increased with astounding rapidity. The police, collected in augmented
proportions, lost its head and was swept off its feet. But it must also
be said that, having gorged itself with plentiful bribes, it resembled
a sated python, willy-nilly drowsy and listless. People were killed for
anything and nothing, just so. It happened that men would walk up to a
person in broad daylight somewhere on an unfrequented street and ask:
“What’s your name?” “Fedorov.” “Aha, Federov? Then take this!” and they
would slit his belly with a knife. They nicknamed these blades just
that in the city—“rippers”; and there were among them names of which
the city news seemed actually proud: the two brothers Polishchuk (Mitka
and Dundas), Volodka the Greek, Fedor Miller, Captain Dmitriev,
Sivocho, Dobrovolski, Shpachek, and many others.
Both day and night on the main streets of the frenzied city stood,
moved, and yelled the mob, as though at a fire. It would be almost
impossible to describe what went on in the Yamkas then. Despite the
fact that the madams had increased the staff of their patients to more
than double and increased their prices trebly, their poor demented
girls could not catch up in satisfying the demands of the drunken,
crazed public, which threw money around like chips. It happened that in
the drawing room, filled to overflowing with people, each girl would be
awaited for by some seven, eight, at times even ten, men. It was,
truly, some kind of a mad, intoxicated, convulsive time!
And from that very time began all the misfortunes of the Yamkas, which
brought them to ruin. And together with the Yamkas perished also the
house, familiar to us, of the stout, old, pale-eyed Anna Markovna.