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.

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."

"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.