CHAPTER I.

All this Liubka told at length and disjointedly, sobbing on Jennka's shoulder. Of course, in her personal elucidation this tragi-comical history proved altogether unlike what it had been in reality.

Lichonin, according to her words, had taken her to him only to entice, to tempt her; to have as much use as possible out of her foolishness, and then to abandon her. But she, the fool, had in truth fallen in love—with him, and since she was very jealous about him and all these tousled girls in leather belts, he had done a low-down thing: had sent up his comrade on purpose, had framed it up with him, and the other had begun to hug Liubka, and Vasska came in, saw it, and kicked up a great row, and chased Liubka out into the street.

Of course, in her version there were two almost equal parts of truth and untruth; but so, at least, all this had appeared to her.

She also told with great details how, having found herself without masculine support or without anybody's powerful extraneous influence, she had hired a room In a rather bad little hotel, on a retired street; how even from the first day the boots, a tough bird, a hard-boiled egg, had attempted to trade in her, without even having and Vasska came in, saw it, and kicked up a great row, the hotel to a private room, but even there had been overtaken by an experienced old woman go-between, with whose like the houses inhabited by poverty swarm.

Therefore, even with quiet living, there was in the face, in the conversation, and in the entire manner of Liubka something peculiar, specific to the casual eye; perhaps even entirely imperceptible, but for the business scent as plain and as irrefutable as the day.

But the chance, brief, sincere love had given her the strength to oppose the inevitability of a second fall. In her heroic courage she even went so far as putting in a few notices in the newspapers, that she was seeking a place with "all found." However, she had no recommendation of any sort. In addition, she had to do exclusively with women when it came to the hiring; and they also, with some sort of an inner, infallible instinct, surmised in her their ancient foe—the seductress of their husbands, brothers, fathers, and sons.

There was neither sense nor use in going home. Her native Vassilkovsky district is distant only fifteen versts from the state capital; and the rumour that she had entered that sort of an establishment had long since penetrated, by means of her fellow-villagers, into the village. This was written of in letters, and transmitted verbally, by those village neighbours who had seen her both on the street and at Anna Markovna's place itself—porters and bell-hops of hotels, waiters at small restaurants, cabbies, small contractors. She knew what odour this fame would give off if she were to return to her native haunts. It were better to hang one's self than to endure this.

She was as uneconomical and impractical in money matters as a five-year-old child, and in a short while was left without a kopeck; while to go back to the brothel was fearful and shameful. But the temptations of street prostitution turned up of themselves, and at every step begged to be seized. In the evenings, on the main street, old hardened street prostitutes at once unerringly guessed her former profession. Ever and anon one of them, having come alongside of her, would begin in a sweet, ingratiating voice:

"How is it, young lady, that you're walking alone? Let's be mates. Let's walk together. That's always more convenient. Whenever men want to pass the time pleasantly with girls, they always love to start a party of four."

And right here the experienced, tried recruiting agent, at first casually, but after that warmly, with all her heart, would begin to praise up all the conveniences of living at your own landlady's—the tasty food, full freedom of going out, the possibility of always concealing from the landlady of your rooms the surplus over the agreed pay. Here also much of the malicious and the offensive was said, by the way, against the women of the private houses, who were called "government hides," "government stuff," "genteel maidens" and "institutes." Liubka knew the value of these sneers, because the dwellers in brothels also bear themselves with the greatest contempt toward street prostitutes, calling them "bimmies" and "venereals."

To be sure, in the very end that happened which had to happen. Seeing in perspective a whole series of hungry days, and in the very depth of them the dark horror of an unknown future, Liubka consented to a very civil invitation of some respectable little old man; important, grayish, well-dressed and correct. For this ignominy Liubka received a rouble, but did not dare to protest: the previous life in the house had entirely eaten away her personal initiative, mobility and energy. Later, several times running, he even did not pay her anything at all.

One young man, easy of manner and handsome, in a cap with a flattened brim, put on at a brave slant over one ear, in a silk blouse, girdled by a cord with tassels, also led her with him into a hotel, asked for wine and a snack; for a long time lied to Liubka about his being an earl's son on the wrong side of the blanket, and that he was the first billiardist in the whole city; that all the wenches like him and that he would make a swell Jane out of Liubka as well. Then he went out of the room for just one minute, as though on business of his own, and vanished forever. The stern, cross-eyed porter beat her with contentment, long, in silence, with a business-like air; breathing hard and covering up Liubka's mouth with his hand. But in the end, having become convinced, probably, that the fault was not hers, but the guest's, he took her purse, in which was a rouble with some small change, away from her; and took as security her rather cheap little hat and small outer jacket.

Another man of forty-five years, not at all badly dressed, having tortured the girl for some two hours, paid for the room and gave her 80 kopecks; but when she started to complain, he with a ferocious face put an enormous red-haired fist up to her very nose, the first thing, and said decisively:

"You just snivel a bit more to me... I'll snivel you... I'll yell for the police, now, and say that you robbed me when I was sleeping. Want me to? Is it long since you've been in a station house?"

And went away.

And of such cases there were many.

On that day, when her landlords—a boatman and his wife—had refused to let her have a room and just simply threw her things out into the yard; and when she had wandered the night through on the streets, without sleep, under the rain, hiding from the policemen—only then, with aversion and shame, did she resolve to turn to Lichonin's aid. But Lichonin was no longer in town pusillanimously, he had gone away the very same day when the unjustly wronged and disgraced Liubka had run away from the flat. And it was in the morning that there came into her head the desperate thought of returning into the brothel and begging forgiveness there.

"Jennechka, you're so clever, so brave, so kind; beg Emma Edwardovna for me—the little housekeeper will listen to you," she implored Jennka and kissed her bare shoulders and wetted them with tears.

"She won't listen to anybody," gloomily answered Jennka. "And you did have to tie up with a fool and a low-down fellow like that."

"Jennechka, but you yourself advised me to," timidly retorted Liubka.

"I advised you? ... I didn't advise you anything. What are you lying on me for, just as though I was dead... Well, all right then—let's go."

Emma Edwardovna had already known for a long while about the return of Liubka; and had even seen her at that moment when she had passed through the yard of the house, looking all around her. At soul she was not at all against taking Liubka back. It must be said, that she had even let her go only because she had been tempted by the money, one-half of which she had appropriated for herself. And in addition to that, she had reckoned that with the present seasonal influx of new prostitutes she would have a large choice; in which, however, she had made a mistake, because the season had terminated abruptly. But in any case, she had firmly resolved to take Liubka. Only it was necessary, for the preservation and rounding out of prestige, to give her a scare befittingly.

"Wha-at?" she began to yell at Liubka, scarcely having heard her out, babbling in confusion. "You want to be taken on again? ... You wallowed the devil knows with whom in the streets, under the fences; and now, you scum, you're again shoving your way into a respectable, decent establishment! ... Pfui, you Russian swine! Out! ..."

Liubka was catching her hands, aiming to kiss them, but the housekeeper roughly snatched them away. Then, suddenly paling, with a distorted face, biting her trembling, twisted lower lip, Emma calculatingly and with good aim struck Liubka on her cheek, with all her might; from which the other went down on her knees, but got up right away, gasping for breath and stammering from the sobs.

"Darlingest, don't beat me... Oh my dear, don't beat me..."

And again fell down, this time flat upon the floor.

And this systematic, malignant slaughter, in cold blood, continued for some two minutes. Jennka, who had at first been looking on with her customary malicious, disdainful air, suddenly could not stand it; she began to squeal savagely, threw herself upon the housekeeper, clutched her by the hair, tore off her chignon and began to vociferate in a real hysterical fit:

"Fool! ... Murderer! ... Low-down go-between! ... Thief! ..."

All the three women vociferated together, and at once enraged wails resounded through all the corridors and rooms of the establishment. This was that general fit of grand hysterics, which takes possession of those confined in prisons, or that elemental insanity (raptus), which envelops unexpectedly and epidemically an entire lunatic asylum, from which even experienced psychiatrists grow pale.

Only after the lapse of an hour was order restored by Simeon and two comrades by profession who had come to his aid. All the thirteen girls got it hot; but Jennka, who had gone into a real frenzy, more than the others. The beaten-up Liubka kept on crawling before the housekeeper until she was taken back. She knew that Jennka's outbreak would sooner or later be reflected upon her in a cruel repayment. Jennka sat on her bed until the very night, her legs crossed Turkish fashion; refused dinner, and chased out all her mates who went in to her. Her eye was bruised, and she assiduously applied a five-kopeck copper to it. From underneath the torn shirt a long, transversal scratch reddened on the neck, just like a mark from a rope. That was where Simeon had torn off her skin in the struggle. She sat thus, alone, with eyes that glowed in the dark like a wild beast's, with distended nostrils, with spasmodically moving cheek-bones, and whispered wrathfully:

"Just you wait... Watch out, you damned things—I'll show you... You'll see yet... Ooh-ooh, you man-eaters..."

But when the lights had been lit, and the junior housekeeper, Zociya, knocked on her door with the words: "Miss, get dressed! ... Into the drawing room!" she rapidly washed herself, dressed, put some powder on the bruise, smeared the scratch over with CREME DE SIMON and pink powder, and went out into the drawing room, pitiful but proud; beaten-up, but her eyes flaming with an unbearable wrathfulness and a beauty not human.

Many people, who have happened to see suicides a few hours before their horrible death, say that in their visages in those fateful hours before death they have noticed some enigmatic, mysterious, incomprehensible allurement. And all who saw Jennka on this night, and on the next day for a few hours, for long, intently and in wonder, kept their gaze upon her.

And strangest of all (this was one of the sombre wiles of fate) was the fact that the indirect culprit of her death, the last grain of sand which draws down the pan of the scales, appeared none other than the dear, most kind, military cadet Kolya Gladishev.

CHAPTER II.

Kolya Gladishev was a fine, merry, bashful young lad, with a large head; pink-cheeked, with a funny little white, bent line, as though from milk, upon his upper lip, under the light down of the moustache, sprouting through for the first time; with gray, naive eyes, placed far apart; and so closely cropped, that from underneath his flaxen little bristles the skin glistened through, just as with a thoroughbred Yorkshire suckling pig. It was precisely he with whom Jennka during the past winter had played either at maternal relations, or at dolls; and thrust upon him a little apple or a couple of bon-bons on his way, when he would be going away from the house of ill repute, squirming from shame.

This time, when he came, there could at once be felt in him, after long living in camps, that rapid change in age, which so often imperceptibly and rapidly transforms a boy into a youth. He had already finished the cadet academy and with pride counted himself a junker; although he still walked around in a cadet's uniform, with aversion. He had grown taller, had become better formed and more adroit; the camp life had done him good. He spoke in a bass, and during these months to his most great pride the nipples of his breast had hardened; the most important—he already knew about this—and undeniable sign of virile maturity. Now, in the meanwhile, until the eyes-front severities of a military school, he had a period of alluring freedom. Already he was permitted to smoke at home, in the presence of grown-ups; and even his father had himself presented him with a leather cigar case with his monogram, and also, in the elevation of family joy, had assigned him fifteen roubles monthly salary.

And it was just here—at Anna Markovna's—that he had come to know woman for the first time—the very same Jennka.

The fall of innocent souls in houses of ill-fame, or with street solitaries, is fulfilled far more frequently than it is usually thought. When not green youths only, but even honourable men of fifty, almost grandfathers, are interrogated about this ticklish matter, they will tell you, sure enough, the ancient stencilled lie of how they had been seduced by a chambermaid or a governess. But this is one of those lingering, queer lies, going back into the depth of past decades, which are almost never noticed by a single one of the professional observers, and in any case are not described by any one.

If each one of us will try, to put it pompously, to put his hand on his heart, then every one will catch himself in the fact, that having once in childhood said some sort of boastful or touching fiction, which had success, and having repeated it for that reason two and five and ten times more—he afterwards cannot get rid of it all his life, and repeats with entire firmness by now a history which had never been; a firmness such that in the very end he believes the story. With time Kolya also narrated to his comrades how his aunt once removed, a young woman of the world had seduced him. It must be said, however, that the intimate proximity to this lady—a large, dark-eyed, white faced, sweetly fragrant southern woman—did really exist; but existed only in Kolya's imagination, in those sad, tragic and timid minutes of solitary sexual enjoyments, through which pass if not a hundred percent of all men, then ninety-nine, in any case.

Having experienced mechanical sexual excitements very early, approximately since nine or nine years and a half, Kolya did not at all have the least understanding of the significance of that end of being in love or of courtship, which is so horrible on the face of it, if it be looked at impartially, or if it be explained scientifically. Unfortunately, there was at that time near him not a one of the present progressive and learned ladies who, having turned away the neck of the classic stork, and torn up by the roots the cabbage underneath which children are found, recommend that the great mystery of love and generation be explained to children in lectures, through comparisons and assimilations, mercilessly and in a well-nigh graphic manner.

It must be said, that at that remote time of which we are speaking, the private institutions—male PENSIONS and institutes, as well as academies for cadets—represented some sort of hot-house nurseries. The care of the mind and morality they tried to entrust as much as possible to educators who were bureaucrats-formalists; and in addition impatient, captious, capricious in their sympathies and hysterical, just like old maid lady teachers. Now it is otherwise. But at that time the boys were left to themselves. Barely snatched away, speaking figuratively, from the maternal breast; from the care of devoted nurses; from morning and evening caresses, quiet and sweet; even though they were ashamed of every manifestation of tenderness as "womanishness," they were still irresistibly and sweetly drawn to kisses, contacts, conversations whispered in the ear.

Of course, attentive, solicitous treatment, bathing, exercises in the open air—precisely not gymnastics, but voluntary exercises, each to his own taste—could have always put off the coming of this climacteric period or soften and make it understandable.

I repeat—then there was nothing of this.

The longing for family endearment, the endearment of mother, sister, nurse, so roughly and unexpectedly cut short, turned into deformed forms of courting (every whit like the "crushes" in a female institute) of good-looking boys, of "fairies"; they loved to whisper in corners and, walking arm in arm, or embracing in dark corridors, to tell in each other's ears improbable histories of adventures with women. This was partly both childhood's need of the fairy-tale element and partly awakening sensuality as well. Not infrequently some fifteen-year-old chubby, for whom it was just the proper time to be playing at popular tennis or to be greedily putting away buckwheat porridge with milk, would be telling, having read up, of course, on certain cheap novels, of how every Saturday, now, when it is leave, he goes to a certain, handsome widow millionairess; and of how she is passionately enamored of him; and how near their couch always stand fruits and precious wine; and how furiously and passionately she makes love to him.

Here, by the bye, came along the inevitable run of prolonged reading, like hard drinking, which, of course, every boy and girl has undergone. No matter how strict in this respect the class surveillance may be, the striplings did read, are reading, and will read just that which is not permitted them. Here is a special passion, CHIC, the allurement of the forbidden. Already in the third class went from hand to hand the manuscript transcripts of Barkov; of a spurious Pushkin; the youthful sins of Lermontov and others: "THE FIRST NIGHT," "THE CHERRY," "LUCAS," "THE FESTIVAL AT PETERHOF," "THE SHE UHLAN, GRIEF THROUGH WISDOM," "THE PRIEST," &c.

But no matter how strange, fictitious or paradoxical this may seem, still, even these compositions, and drawings, and obscene photographic cards, did not arouse a delightful curiosity. They were looked upon as a prank, a lark, and the allurement of contraband risk. In the cadets' library were chaste excerpts from Pushkin and Lermontov; all of Ostrovsky, who only made you laugh; and almost all of Turgenev, who was the very one that played a chief and cruel role in Kolya's life. As it is known, love with the late great Turgenev is always surrounded with a tantalizing veil; some sort of crepe, unseizable, forbidden, but tempting: his maidens have forebodings of love and are agitated at its approach, and are ashamed beyond all measure, and tremble, and turn red. Married women or widows travel this tortuous path somewhat differently: they struggle for a long time with their duty, or with respectability, or with the opinion of the world; and, in the end—oh!—fall with tears; or—oh!—begin to brave it; or, which is still more frequent, the implacable fate cuts short her or his life at the most—oh!—necessary moment, when it only lacks a light puff of wind for the ripened fruit to fall. And yet all of his personages still thirst after this shameful love; weep radiantly and laugh joyously from it; and it shuts out all the world for them. But since boys think entirely differently than we grown-ups, and since everything that is forbidden, everything not said fully, or said in secret, has in their eyes an enormous, not only twofold but threefold interest—it is therefore natural that out of reading they drew the hazy thought that the grown-ups were concealing something from them.

And it must be mentioned—had not Kolya (like the majority of those of his age) seen the chambermaid Phrociya—so rosy-cheeked, always merry, with legs of the hardness of steel (at times he, in the heat of playing, had slapped her on the back), had he not seen her once, when Kolya had by accident walked quickly into papa's cabinet, scurry out of there with all her might, covering her face with her apron; and had he not seen that during this time papa's face was red, with a dark blue, seemingly lengthened nose? And Kolya had reflected: "Papa looks like a turkey." Had not Kolya—partly through the fondness for pranks and the mischievousness natural to all boys, partly through tedium—accidentally discovered in an unlocked drawer of papa's writing table an enormous collection of cards, whereon was represented just that which shop clerks call the crowning of love, and worldly nincompoops—the unearthly passion?

And had he not seen, that every time before the visit of the sweet-scented and bestarched Paul Edwardovich, some ninny with some embassy, with whom mamma, in imitation of the fashionable St. Petersburg promenades to the Strelka, used to ride to the Dnieper to contemplate the sun setting on the other side of the river, in the Chernigovskaya district—had he not seen how mamma's bosom went, and how her cheeks glowed under the powder; had he not detected at these moments many new and strange things; had he not heard her voice, an altogether unknown voice, like an actor's; nervously breaking off, mercilessly malicious to those of the family and the servants, and suddenly soft, like velvet, like a green meadow under the sun, when Paul Edwardovich would arrive? Ah, if we people who have been made wise by experience would know how much, and even too much, the urchins and little girls surrounding us know, of whom we usually say:

"Well, why mind Volodya (or Petie, or Katie)? ... Why, they are little. They don't understand anything! ..."

So also not in vain passed for Gladishev the history of his elder brother, who had just come out of a military school into one of the conspicuous grenadier regiments; and, being on leave until such time when it would be possible for him to spread his wings, lived in two separate rooms with his family. At that time Niusha, a chambermaid, was in their service; at times they jestingly called her signorita Anita—a seductive black-haired girl, who, if she were to change costumes, could in appearance be taken for a dramatic actress, or a princess of the royal blood, or a political worker. Kolya's mother manifestly countenanced the fact that Kolya's brother, half in jest, half in earnest, was allured by this girl. Of course, she had only the sole, holy, maternal calculation: If it were destined, after all, for her Borenka to fall, then let him give his purity, his innocence, his first physical inclination, not to a prostitute, not to a street-walker, not to a seeker of adventures, but to a pure girl. Of course, only a disinterested, unreasoning, truly-maternal feeling guided her. Kolya at that time was living through the epoch of llanos, pampases, Apaches, track-finders, and a chief by the name of "Black Panther"; and, of course, attentively kept track of the romance of his brother, and made his own syllogisms; at times only too correct, at times fantastic. After six months, from behind a door, he was the witness—or more correctly the auditor—of an outrageous scene. The wife of the general, always so respectable and restrained, was yelling in her boudoir at signorita Anita, and cursing in the words of a cab-driver: the signorita was in the fifth month of pregnancy. If she had not cried, then, probably, they would simply have given her smart-money, and she would have gone away in peace; but she was in love with the young master, did not demand anything, and for that reason they drove her away with the aid of the police.

In the fifth or sixth class many of Kolya's comrades had already tasted of the tree of knowledge of evil. At that time it was considered in their corpus an especial, boastful masculine chic to call all secret things by their own names. Arkasha Shkar contracted a disease, not dangerous, but still venereal; and he became for three whole months the object of worship of all the seniors—at that time there were no squads yet. And many of them visited brothels; and, really, about their sprees they spoke far more handsomely and broadly than the hussars of the time of Denis Davidov.[23] These debauches were esteemed by them the last word in valour and maturity.

[23] A Russian ban vivant, wit and poet (1781-1839), the overwhelming majority of whose lyrics deals with military exploits and debauches.—Trans.

And so it happened once, that they did not exactly persuade Gladishev to go to Anna Markovna, but rather he himself had begged to go, so weakly had he resisted temptation. This evening he always recalled with horror, with aversion; and dimly, just like some heavy dream. With difficulty he recalled, how in the cab, to get up courage, he had drunk rum, revoltingly smelling of real bedbugs; how qualmish this beastly drink made him feel; how he had walked into the big hall, where the lights of the lustres and the candelabra on the walls were turning round in fiery wheels; where the women moved as fantastic pink, blue, violet splotches, and the whiteness of their necks, bosoms and arms flashed with a blinding, spicy, victorious splendour. Some one of the comrades whispered something in the ear of one of these fantastic figures. She ran up to Kolya and said:

"Listen, you good-looking little cadet, your comrades are saying, now, that you're still innocent ... Let's go ... I'll teach you everything."

The phrase was said in a kindly manner; but this phrase the walls of Anna Markovna's establishment had already heard several thousand times. Further, that took place which it was so difficult and painful to recall, that in the middle of his recollections Kolya grew tired, and with an effort of the will turned back the imagination to something else. He only remembered dimly the revolving and spreading circles from the light of the lamp; persistent kisses; disconcerting contacts—then a sudden sharp pain, from which one wanted both to die in enjoyment and to cry out in terror; and then with wonder he saw his pale shaking hands, which could not, somehow, button his clothes.

Of course, all men have experienced this primordial tristia post coitus; but this great moral pain, very serious in its significance and depth, passes very rapidly, remaining, however, with the majority for a long time—sometimes for all life—in the form of wearisomeness and awkwardness after certain moments. In a short while Kolya became accustomed to it; grew bolder, became familiarized with woman, and rejoiced very much over the fact that when he came into the establishment, all the girls, and Verka before all, would call out:

"Jennechka, your lover has come!"

It was pleasant, in relating this to his comrades, to be plucking at an imaginary moustache.

CHAPTER III.

It was still early—about nine—of a rainy August evening. The illuminated drawing room in the house of Anna Markovna was almost empty. Only near the very doors a young telegraph clerk was sitting, his legs shyly and awkwardly squeezed under his chair, and was trying to start with the thick-fleshed Katie that worldly, unconstrained conversation which is laid down as the proper thing in polite society at quadrille, during the intermissions between the figures of the dance. And, also, the long-legged, aged Roly-Poly wandered over the room, sitting down now next one girl, now another, and entertaining them all with his fluent chatter.

When Kolya Gladishev walked into the front hall, the first to recognize him was the round-eyed Verka, dressed in her usual jockey costume. She began to twirl round and round, to clap her palms, and called out:

"Jennka, Jennka, come quicker, your little lover has come to you ... The little cadet ... And what a handsome little fellow!"

But Jennka was not in the drawing room at this time; a stout head-conductor had already managed to get hold of her.

This elderly, sedate, and majestic man was a very convenient guest, because he never lingered in the house for more than twenty minutes, fearing to let his train go by; and, even so, glanced at his watch all the while. During this time he regularly drank down four bottles of beer, and, going away, infallibly gave the girl half a rouble for candy and Simeon twenty kopecks for drink-money.

Kolya Gladishev was not alone, but with a comrade of the same school, Petrov, who was stepping over the threshold of a brothel for the first time, having given in to the tempting persuasions of Gladishev. Probably, during these minutes, he found himself in the same wild, absurd, feverish state which Kolya himself had gone through a year and a half ago, when his legs had shook, his mouth had grown dry, and the lights of the lamps had danced before him in revolving wheels.

Simeon took their great-coats from them and hid them separately, on the side, that the shoulder straps and the buttons might not be seen.

It must be said, that this stern man, who did not approve of students because of their free-and-easy facetiousness and incomprehensible style in conversation, also did not like when just such boys in uniform appeared in the establishment.

"Well, what's the good of it?" he would at times say sombrely to his colleagues by profession. "What if a whippersnapper like that comes, and runs right up nose to nose against his superiors? Smash, and they've closed up the establishment! There, like Lupendikha's three years back. Of course, it's nothing that they closed it up—she transferred it in another name right off; and when they sentenced her to sit in jail for a year and a half, why, it came to a pre-etty penny for her. She had to shell out four hundred for Kerbesh alone ... And then it also happens: a little pig of that kind will cook up some sort of disease for himself and start in whining: 'Oh, papa! Oh, mamma! I am dying!' 'Tell me, you skunk, where you got it?' 'There and there ...' Well, and so they haul you over the coals again; judge me, thou unrighteous judge!"

"Pass on, pass on," said he to the cadets sternly.

The cadets entered, blinking from the bright light. Petrov, who had been drinking to get up courage, swayed and was pale. They sat down beneath the picture of the Feast of the Russian Noblemen, and immediately two of the young ladies—Verka and Tamara—joined them on both sides.

"Treat me to a smoke, you beautiful little brunet!" Verka turned to Petrov; and as though by accident put against his leg her strong, warm thigh, closely drawn over with white tights. "What an agreeable little fellow you are!"

"But where's Jennie?" Gladishev asked of Tamara. "Is she busy with anybody?"

Tamara looked him in the eyes intently—looked so fixedly, that the boy even began to feel uncomfortable, and turned away.

"No. Why should she be busy? Only the whole day to-day her head ached; she was walking through the corridor, and at that time the housekeeper opened the door quickly and accidentally struck her in the forehead—and so her head started in to ache. The poor thing, she's lying the whole day with a cold pack. But why? Or can't you hold out? Wait a while, she'll come out in five minutes. You'll remain very much satisfied with her."

Verka pestered Petrov:

"Sweetie, dearie, what a tootsie-wootsicums you are! I adore such pale brunets; they are jealous and very fiery in love."

And suddenly she started singing in a low voice:

"He's kind of brown,
My light, my own,
Won't sell me out, and won't deceive.
He suffers madly,
Pants and coat gladly
All for a woman he will give."

"How do they call you, ducky dear?"

"George," answered Petrov in a hoarse, cadet's bass.

"Jorjik Jorochka! Ah, how very nice!"

She suddenly drew near to his ear and whispered with a cunning face:

"Jorochka, come to me."

Petrov was abashed and forlornly let out in a bass:

"I don't know ... It all depends on what the comrade says, now..."

Verka burst into loud laughter:

"There's a case for you! Say, what an infant it is! Such as you, Jorochka, in a little village would long since have been married; but he says: 'It all depends on the comrade!' You ought to ask a nurse or a wet nurse yet! Tamara, my angel, just imagine: I'm calling him to go sleeping, but he says: 'It all depends on the comrade.' What about you, mister friend, are you his bringer up?"

"Don't be pestering, you devil!" clumsily, altogether like a cadet before a quarrel, grumbled out Petrov in a bass.

The lanky, ricketty Roly-Poly, grown still grayer, walked up to the cadets, and, inclining his long, narrow head to one side, and having made a touching grimace, began to patter:

"Messieurs cadets, highly educated young people; the flower, so to speak, of the intelligentzia; future masters of ordnance, will you not lend to a little old man, an aborigine of these herbiferous regions, one good old cigarette? I be poor. Omnia mea mecum porto. But I do adore the weed."

And, having received a cigarette, suddenly, without delay, he got into a free-and-easy, unconstrained pose; put forward the bent right leg, put his hand to his side, and began to sing in a wizened falsetto:

"It used to be that I gave dinners,
In rivers flowed the champagne wine;
But now I have not even bread crusts,
Nor for a split, oh brother mine.

It used to be—in the Saratov
The doorman rushed, and was so fine;
But now all drive me in the neck,
Give for a split, oh brother mine."

"Gentlemen!" suddenly exclaimed Roly-Poly with pathos, cutting short his singing and smiting himself on the chest. "Here I behold you, and know that you are the future generals Skobelev and Gurko; but I, too, in a certain respect, am a military hound. In my time, when I was studying for a forest ranger, all our department of woods and forests was military; and for that reason, knocking at the diamond-studded, golden doors of your hearts, I beg of you—donate toward the raising for an ensign of taxation of a wee measure of spiritus vini, which same is taken of the monks also."

"Roly!" cried the stout Kitty from the other end, "show the young officers the lightning; or else, look you, you're taking the money only for nothing, you good-for-nothing camel."

"Right away!" merrily responded Roly-Poly. "Most illustrious benefactors, turn your attention this way. Living Pictures. Thunder Storm on a Summer Day in June. The work of the unrecognized dramaturgist who concealed himself under the pseudonym of Roly-Poly. The first picture.

"'It was a splendid day in June. The scorching rays of the sun illumined the blossoming meadows and environs ...'"

Roly-Poly's Don Quixotic phiz spread into a wrinkled, sweetish smile; and the eyes narrowed into half-circles.

"'... But now in the distance the first clouds have appeared upon the horizon. They grew, piled upon each other like crags, covering little by little the blue vault of the sky."

By degrees the smile was coming off Roly-Poly's face, and it grew more and more serious and austere.

"'At last the clouds have overcast the sun ... An ominous darkness has fallen ...'"

Roly-Poly made his physiognomy altogether ferocious.

"'The first drops of the rain fell ...'"

Roly-Poly began to drum his fingers on the back of a chair.

"'... In the distance flashed the first lightning ... '"

Roly-Poly's eye winked quickly, and the left corner of his mouth gave a twitch.

"'... Whereupon the rain began to pour down in torrents, and there came a sudden, blinding flash of lightning...'"

And with unusual artistry and rapidity Roly-Poly, with a successive movement of his eyebrows, eyes, nose, the upper and the lower lip, portrayed a lightning zig-zag.

"'... A jarring thunder clap burst out—trrroo-oo. An oak that had stood through the ages fell down to earth, as though it were a frail reed ...'"

And Roly-Poly with an ease and daring not to be expected from one of his years, bending neither the knees nor the back, only drawing down his head, instantaneously fell down; straight, like a statue, with his back to the floor, but at once deftly sprang up on his feet.

"'But now the thunder storm is gradually abating. The lightning flashes less and less often. The thunder sounds duller, just like a satiated beast—oooooo-oooooo ... The clouds scurry away. The first rays of the blessed sun have peeped out ...'"

Roly-Poly made a wry smile.

"'... And now, the luminary of day has at last begun to shine anew over the bathed earth ...'"

And the silliest of beatific smiles spread anew over the senile face of Roly-Poly.

The cadets gave him a twenty-kopeck piece each. He laid them on his palm, made a pass in the air with the other hand, said: ein, zwei, drei, snapped two of his fingers, and the coins vanished.

"Tamarochka, this isn't honest," he said reproachfully. "Aren't you ashamed to take the last money from a poor retired almost-head-officer? Why have you hidden them here?"

And, having snapped his fingers again, he drew the coins out of Tamara's ear.

"I shall return at once, don't be bored without me," he reassured the young people; "but if you can't wait for me, then I won't have any special pretensions about it. I have the honour! ..."

"Roly-Poly!" Little White Manka cried after him, "Won't you buy me candy for fifteen kopecks... Turkish Delight, fifteen kopecks' worth. There, grab!"

Roly-Poly neatly caught in its flight the thrown fifteen-kopeck piece; made a comical curtsey and, pulling down the uniform cap with the green edging at a slant over his eyes, vanished.

The tall, old Henrietta walked up to the cadets, also asked for a smoke and, having yawned, said:

"If only you young people would dance a bit—for as it is the young ladies sit and sit, just croaking from weariness."

"If you please, if you please!" agreed Kolya. "Play a waltz and something else of the sort."

The musicians began to play. The girls started to whirl around with one another, ceremoniously as usual, with stiffened backs and with eyes modestly cast down.

Kolya Gladishev, who was very fond of dancing, could not hold out and invited Tamara; he knew even from the previous winter that she danced more lightly and skillfully than the rest. While he was twirling in the waltz, the stout head-conductor, skillfully making his way between the couples, slipped away unperceived through the drawing room. Kolya did not have a chance to notice him.

No matter how Verka pressed Petrov, she could not, in any way, drag him off his place. The recent light intoxication had by now gone entirely out of his head; and more and more horrible, and unrealizable, and monstrous did that for which he had come here seem to him. He might have gone away, saying that not a one here pleased him; have put the blame on a headache, or something; but he knew that Gladishev would not let him go; and mainly—it seemed unbearably hard to get up from his place and to walk a few steps by himself. And, besides that, he felt that he had not the strength to start talking of this with Kolya.

They finished dancing. Tamara and Gladishev again sat down side by side.

"Well, really, how is it that Jennechka isn't coming by now?" asked Kolya impatiently.

Tamara quickly gave Verka a look with a question, incomprehensible to the uninitiated, in her eyes. Verka quickly lowered her eyelashes. This signified: yes, he is gone.

"I'll go right away and call her," said Tamara.

"But what are you so stuck on your Jennka for," said Henrietta. "You might take me."

"All right, another time," answered Kolya and nervously began to smoke.

Jennka was not even beginning to dress yet. She was sitting before the mirror and powdering her face.

"What is it, Tamarochka?" she asked.

"Your little cadet has come to you. He's waiting."

"Ah, that's the little baby of last year... Well, the devil with him!"

"And that's right, too. But how healthy and handsome the lad has grown, and how tall... It's a delight, that's all! So if you don't want to, I'll go myself."

Tamara saw in the mirror how Jennka contracted her eyebrows.

"No, you wait a while, Tamara, don't. I'll see. Send him here to me. Say that I'm not well, that my head aches."

"I have already told him, anyway, that Zociya had opened the door unsuccessfully and hit you on the head; and that you're lying down with a cold pack. But the only thing is, is it worth while, Jennechka?"

"Whether it's worth while or not, that's not your business, Tamara," answered Jennka rudely.

Tamara asked cautiously:

"Is it possible, then, that you aren't at all, at all sorry?"

"But for me you aren't sorry?" and she passed her hand over the red stripe that slashed her throat. "And for yourself you aren't sorry? And not sorry for this Liubka, miserable as she is? And not sorry for Pashka? You're huckleberry jelly, and not a human being!"

Tamara smiled craftily and haughtily:

"No, when it comes to a real matter, I'm not jelly. Perhaps you'll see this soon, Jennechka. Only let's better not quarrel—as it is it isn't any too sweet to live. All right, I'll go at once and send him to you."

When she had gone away, Jennka lowered the light in the little hanging blue lantern, put on her night blouse, and lay down. A minute later Gladishev walked in; and after him Tamara, dragging Petrov by the hand, who resisted and kept his head down. And in the rear was thrust in the pink, sharp, foxy little phiz of the cross-eyed housekeeper Zociya.

"And that's fine, now," the housekeeper commenced to bustle. "It's just sweet to look at; two handsome gents and two swell dames. A regular bouquet. What shall I treat you with, young people? Will you order beer or wine?"

Gladishev had a great deal of money in his pocket, as much as he never had before during all his brief life—all of twenty-five roubles; and he wanted to go on a splurge. Beer he drank only out of bravado, but could not bear its bitter taste, and wondered himself how others could ever drink it. And for that reason, squeamishly, like an old rake, sticking out his lower lip, he said mistrustfully:

"But then, you surely must have some awful stuff?"

"What do you mean, what do you mean, good-looking! The very best gentlemen approve of it. Of the sweet, there are Cagore, church wine, Teneriffe; while of the French there's Lafitte. You can get port wine also. The girls just simply adore Lafitte with lemonade."

"And what are the prices?"

"No dearer than money. As is the rule in all good establishments—a bottle of Lafitte five roubles, four bottles of lemonade at a half each, that's two roubles, and only seven in all..."

"That'll do you, Zociya," Jennka stopped her indifferently, "it's a shame to take advantage of boys. Even five is enough. You can see these are decent people, and not just anybody..."

But Gladishev turned red, and with a negligent air threw a ten rouble note on the table.

"Oh, what's the use of talking about it. All right, bring it."

"Whilst I'm at it, I'll take the money for the visit as well. What about you, young people—are you on time or for the night? You know the rates yourself: on time, at two roubles; for the night, at five."

"All right, all right. On time," interrupted Jennka, flaring up. "Trust us in that, at least."

The wine was brought. Tamara through importunity got pastry, besides. Jennka asked for permission to call in Little White Manka. Jennka herself did not drink, did not get up from the bed, and all the time muffled herself up in a gray shawl of Orenburg[24] manufacture, although it was hot in the room. She looked fixedly, without tearing her eyes away, at the handsome, sunburned face of Gladishev, which had become so manly.

[24] Orenburg has as high a reputation for woolens as Sheffield has for steel.—Trans.

"What's the matter with you, dearie?" asked Gladishev, sitting down on her bed and stroking her hand.

"Nothing special... Head aches a little... I hit myself."

"Well, don't you pay any attention."

"Well, here I've seen you, and already I feel better. How is it you haven't been here for so long?"

"I couldn't snatch away the time, nohow-camping. You know yourself... We had to put away twenty-five versts a day. The whole day drilling and drilling: field, formation, garrison. With a full pack. Used to get so fagged out from morning to night that towards evening you couldn't feel your legs under you... We were at the manoeuvres also... It isn't sweet..."

"Oh, you poor little things!" Little White Manka suddenly clasped her hands. "And what do they torture you for, angels that you are? If I was to have a brother like you, or a son—my heart would just simply bleed. Here's to your health, little cadet!"

They clinked glasses. Jennka was just as attentively scrutinizing Gladishev.

"And you, Jennechka?" he asked, extending a glass.

"I don't want to," she answered listlessly, "but, however, ladies, you've drunk some wine, chatted a bit—don't wear the welcome off the mat."

"Perhaps you'll stay with me the whole night?" she asked Gladishev, when the others had gone away. "Don't you be afraid, dearie; if you won't have enough money, I'll pay the difference for you. You see, how good-looking you are, that a wench does not grudge even money for you?" she began laughing.

Gladishev turned around to her; even his unobserving ear was struck by Jennka's strange tone—neither sad, nor kindly, nor yet mocking.

"No, sweetie, I'd be very glad to; I'd like to remain myself, but I can't possibly; I promised to be home toward ten o'clock."

"That's nothing, dear, they'll wait; you're altogether a grown-up man now. Is it possible that you have to listen to anybody? ... But, however, as you wish. Shall I put out the light entirely, perhaps; or is it all right the way it is? Which do you want—the outside or near the wall?"

"It's immaterial to me," he answered in a quavering voice; and, having embraced with his arm the hot, dry body of Jennka, he stretched with his lips toward her face. She slightly repulsed him.

"Wait, bear a while, sweetheart—we have time enough to kiss our fill yet. Just lie still for one little minute... So, now... quiet, peaceful... don't stir..."

These words, passionate and imperious, acted like hypnosis upon Gladishev. He submitted to her and lay down on his back, putting his hands underneath his head. She raised herself a little, leant upon her elbow, and placing her head upon the bent hand, silently, in the faint half-light, was looking his body over—so white, strong, muscular; with a high and broad pectoral cavity; with well-made ribs; with a narrow pelvis; and with mighty, bulging thighs. The dark tan of the face and the upper half of the neck was divided by a sharp line from the whiteness of the shoulders and breast.

Gladishev blinked for a second. It seemed to him that he was feeling upon himself, upon his face, upon his entire body, this intensely fixed gaze, which seemed to touch his face and tickle it, like the cobwebby contact of a comb, which you first rub against a cloth—the sensation of a thin, imponderous, living matter.

He opened his eyes and saw altogether near him the large, dark, uncanny eyes of the woman, who seemed to him now an entire stranger.

"What are you looking at, Jennie?" he asked quietly. "What are you thinking of?"

"My dear little boy! ...They call you Kolya: isn't that so?"

"Yes."

"Don't be angry at me, carry out a certain caprice of mine, please: shut your eyes again... no, even tighter, tighter... I want to turn up the light and have a good look at you. There now, so... If you only knew how beautiful you are now... right now... this second. Later you will become coarse, and you will begin giving off a goatish smell; but now you give off an odour of fur and milk... and a little of some wild flower. But shut them—shut your eyes!"

She added light, returned to her place, and sat down in her favourite pose—Turkish fashion. Both kept silent. In the distance, several rooms away, a broken-down grand piano was tinkling; somebody's vibrating laughter floated in; while from the other side—a little song, and rapid, merry talking. The words could not be heard. A cabby was rumbling by somewhere through the distant street...

"And now I will infect him right away, just like all the others," pondered Jennka, gliding with a deep gaze over his well-made legs, his handsome torso of a future athlete, and over his arms, thrown back, upon which, above the bend of the elbow, the muscles tautened—bulging, firm. "Why, then, am I so sorry for him? Or is it because he is such a good-looking little fellow? No. I am long since a stranger to such feelings. Or is it because he is a boy? Why, only a little over a year ago I shoved apples in his pocket, when he was going away from me at night. Why have I not told him then that which, I can, and dare, tell him now? Or would he not have believed me, anyway? Would have grown angry? Would have gone to another? For sooner or later this turn awaits every man... And that he bought me for money—can that be forgiven? Or did he act just as all of them do—blindly? ..."

"Kolya!" she said quietly, "Open your eyes."

He obeyed, opened his eyes, turned to her; entwined her neck with his arm, drew her a little to him, and wanted to kiss her in the opening of her chemise—on the breast. She again tenderly but commandingly repulsed him.

"No, wait a while, wait a while—hear me out... one little minute more. Tell me, boy, why do you come here to us—to the women?"

Kolya quietly and hoarsely began laughing.

"How silly you are! Well, what do they all come for? Am I not also a man? For, it seems, I'm at that age when in every man ripens... well, a certain need... for woman. For I'm not going to occupy myself with all sorts of nastiness!"

"Need? Only need? That means, just as for that chamber which stands under my bed?"

"No, why so?" retorted Kolya, with a kindly laugh. "I liked you very much... From the very first time... If you will, I'm even... a little in love with you... at least, I never stayed with any of the others."

"Well, all right! But then, the first time, could it possibly have been need?"

"No, perhaps, it wasn't need even; but somehow, vaguely, I wanted woman... My friends talked me into it... Many had already gone here before me... So then, I too..."

"But, now, weren't you ashamed the first time?"

Kolya became confused; all this interrogation was to him unpleasant, oppressive. He felt, that this was not the empty, idle bed talk, so well known to him, out of his small experience; but something else, of more import.

"Let's say... not that I was ashamed... well, but still I felt kind of awkward. I drank that time to get up courage."

Jennie again lay down on her side; leaned upon her elbow, and again looked at him from time to time, near at hand and intently.

"But tell me, sweetie," she asked, in a barely audible voice, so that the cadet with difficulty made out her words, "tell me one thing more; but the fact of your paying money, these filthy two roubles—do you understand?—paying them for love, so that I might caress, kiss you, give all my body to you—didn't you feel ashamed to pay for that? Never?"

"Oh, my God! What strange questions you put to me to-day! But then they all pay money! Not I, then some one else would have paid—isn't it all the same to you?"

"And have you been in love with any one, Kolya? Confess! Well, now, if not in real earnest, then just so... at soul... Have you done any courting? Brought little flowers of some sort... Strolled arm-in-arm with her under the moon? Wasn't that so?"

"Well, yes," said Koiya in a sedate bass. "What follies don't happen in one's youth! It's a matter anyone can understand..."

"Some sort of a little first cousin? An educated young lady? A boarding school miss? A high school girl? ... There has been, hasn't there?"

"Well, yes, of course—everybody has them."

"Why, you wouldn't have touched her, would you? ... You'd have spared her? Well, if she had only said to you: take me, but only give me two roubles—what would you have said to her?"

"I don't understand you, Jennka!" Gladishev suddenly grew angry. "What are you putting on airs for! What sort of comedy are you trying to put over! Honest to God, I'll dress myself at once and go away."

"Wait a while, wait a while, Kolya! One more, one more, the last, the very, very last question."

"Oh, you!" growled Kolya displeased.

"And could you never imagine... well, imagine it right now, even for a second... that your family has suddenly grown poor, become ruined. You'd have to earn your bread by copying papers; or, now, let's say, through carpenter or blacksmith work; and your sister was to go wrong, like all of us... yes, yes, yours, your own sister... if some blockhead seduced her and she was to go travelling... from hand to hand... what would you say then?"

"Bosh! ... That can't be..." Kolya cut her short curtly. "But, however, that's enough—I'm going away!"

"Go away, do me that favour! I've ten roubles lying there, near the mirror, in a little box from chocolates—take them for yourself. I don't need them, anyway. Buy with them a tortoise powder box with a gold setting for your mamma; and if you have a little sister, buy her a good doll. Say: in memory from a certain wench that died. Go on, little boy!"

Kolya, with a frown, angry, with one shove of a well-knit body jumped off the bed, almost without touching it. Now he was standing on the little mat near the bed, naked, well-formed, splendid in all the magnificence of his blooming, youthful body.

"Kolya!" Jennka called him quietly, insistently and caressingly. "Kolechka!"

He turned around to her call, and drew in the air in a short, jerky gust, as though he had gasped: he had never yet in his life met anywhere, even in pictures, such a beautiful expression of tenderness, sorrow, and womanly silent reproach, as the one he was just now beholding in the eyes of Jennka, filled with tears. He sat down on the edge of the bed, and impulsively embraced her around the bared, swarthy arms.

"Let's not quarrel, then, Jennechka," he said tenderly.

And she twined herself around him, placed her arms on his neck, while her head she pressed against his breast. They kept silent so for several seconds.

"Kolya," Jennie suddenly asked dully, "but were you never afraid of becoming infected?"

Kolya shivered. Some chill, loathsome horror stirred and glided through within his soul. He did not answer at once.

"Of course, that would be horrible... horrible... God save me! But then I go only to you alone, only to you! You'd surely have told me? ..."

"Yes, I'd have told you," she uttered meditatively. And at once rapidly, consciously, as though having weighed the significance of her words: "Yes, of course, of course, I would have told you! But haven't you ever heard what sort of a thing is that disease called syphilis?"

"Of course, I've heard... The nose falls through..."

"No, Kolya, not only the nose! The person becomes all diseased: his bones, sinews, brains grow diseased... Some doctors say such nonsense as that it's possible to be cured of this disease. Bosh! You'll never cure yourself! A person rots ten, twenty, thirty years. Every second paralysis can strike him down, so that the right side of the face, the right arm, the right leg die—it isn't a human being that's living, but some sort of a little half. Half-man-half-corpse. The majority of them go out of their minds. And each understands... every person... each one so infected understands, that if he eats, drinks, kisses, simply even breathes—he can't be sure that he won't immediately infect some one of those around him, the very nearest—sister, wife, son... To all syphilitics the children are born monsters, abortions, goitrous, consumptives, idiots. There, Kolya, is what this disease means. And now," Jennka suddenly straightened up quickly, seized Kolya fast by his bare shoulders, turned his face to her, so that he was almost blinded by the flashing of her sorrowful, sombre, extraordinary eyes, "and now, Kolya, I will tell you that for more than a month I am sick with this filth. And that's just why I haven't allowed you to kiss me..."

"You're joking! ... You're teasing me on purpose, Jennie!" muttered Gladishev, wrathful, frightened, and out of his wits.

"Joking? ...Come here!"

She abruptly compelled him to get up on his feet, lit a match and said:

"Now look closely at what I'm going to show you..."

She opened her mouth wide and placed the light so that it would illumine her larynx. Kolya looked and staggered back.

"Do you see these white spots? This is syphilis, Kolya! Do you understand?—syphilis in the most fearful, the most serious stage. Now dress yourself and thank God."

He, silently and without looking around at Jennka, began to dress hurriedly, missing his clothes when he tried to put his legs through. His hands were shaking, and his under jaw jumped so that the lower teeth knocked against the upper; while Jennka was speaking with bowed head:

"Listen, Kolya, it's your good fortune that you've run across an honest woman; another wouldn't have spared you. Do you hear that? We, whom you deprive of innocence and then drive out of your home, while later you pay us two roubles a visit, we always—do you understand?"—she suddenly raised her head—"we always hate you and never have any pity for you!"

The half-clad Kolya suddenly dropped his dressing, sat down on the bed near Jennka and, covering his face with his palms, burst into tears; sincerely, altogether like a child...

"Lord, Lord," he whispered, "why this is the truth! ... What a vile thing this really is! ... We, also, we had this happen: we had a chambermaid, Niusha...a chambermaid... they also called her signorita Anita...a pretty little girl...and my brother lived with her...my elder brother...an officer...and when he went away, she proved pregnant and mother drove her out...well, yes—drove her out...threw her out of the house, like a floor mop...Where is she now? And father...father...he also with a cham...chambermaid."

And the half-naked Jennka, this Jennka, the atheist, swearer, and brawler, suddenly got up from the bed, stood before the cadet, and slowly, almost solemnly, made the sign of the cross over him.

"And may God preserve you my boy!" she said with an expression of deep tenderness and gratitude.

And at once she ran to the door, opened it and called out: "Housekeeper!"

"Tell you what, housekeeper dear," Jennka directed, "go and find out, please, which one of them is free—Tamara or Little White Manka. And the one that's free send here."

Kolya growled out something in the back, but Jennka purposely did not listen to him.

"And please make it as quick as possible, housekeeper dear, won't you be so kind?"

"Right away, right away, miss."

"Why, why do you do this, Jennie?" asked Gladishev with anguish. "Well, what's that for? ...Is it possible that you want to tell about it? ..."

"Wait awhile, that's not your business...Wait a while, I won't do anything unpleasant for you."

After a minute Little White Manka came in her brown, smooth, deliberately modest dress of a high school girl.

"What did you call me for, Jennie? Or have you quarreled?"

"No, we haven't quarreled, Mannechka, but my head aches very much," answered Jennka calmly, "and for that reason my little friend finds me very cold. Be a friend, Mannechka, stay with him, take my place!"

"That's enough, Jennie, stop it, darling!" in a tone of sincere suffering retorted Kolya. "I understand everything, everything, it's not necessary now ... Don't be finishing me off, then! ..."

"I don't understand anything of what's happened," the frivolous Manka spread out her hands. "Maybe you'll treat a poor little girl to something?"

"Well, go on, go on!" Jennka sent her away gently. "I'll come right away. We just played a joke."

Already dressed, they stood for long in the open door between the bedroom and the corridor; and without words sadly looked at each other. And Kolya did not understand, but sensed, that at this moment in his soul was taking place one of those tremendous crises which tell imperiously upon the entire life.

Then he pressed Jennie's hand hard and said:

"Forgive! ... Will you forgive me, Jennie? Will you forgive? ..."

"Yes, my boy! ... Yes, my fine one! ... Yes...yes..."

She tenderly, softly, like a mother, stroked his closely cropped harsh head and gave him, a slight shove into the corridor.

"Where are you bound now?" she sent after him, half opening her door.

"I'll take my comrade right away, and then home."

"As you know best! ... God bless you, dearie!"

"Forgive me! ... Forgive me! ..." once more repeated Kolya, stretching out his hands to her.

"I've already told you, my splendid boy...And you forgive me too...For we won't see each other anymore!"

And she, having closed the door, was left alone.

In the corridor Gladishev hesitated, because he did not know how to find the room to which Petrov had retired with Tamara. But the housekeeper Zociya helped him, running past him very quickly, and with a very anxious, alarmed air.

"Oh, I haven't time to bother with you now!" she snarled back at Gladishev's question. "Third door to the left."

Kolya walked up to the door indicated and knocked. Some sort of bustle and whispering sounded in the room. He knocked once more.

"Kerkovius, open! This is me—Soliterov."

Among the cadets, setting out on expeditions of this sort, it was always agreed upon to call each other by fictitious names. It was not so much a conspiracy or a shift against the vigilance of those in authority, or fear of compromising one's self before a chance acquaintance of the family, but rather a play, of its own kind, at mysteriousness and disguise—a play tracing its beginning from those times when the young people were borne away by Gustave Aimard, Mayne Reid, and the detective Lecocq.

"You can't come in!" the voice of Tamara came from behind the door. "You can't come in. We are busy."

But the bass voice of Petrov immediately cut her short:

"Nonsense! She's lying. Come in. It's all right."

Kolya opened the door.

Petrov was sitting on a chair dressed, but all red, morose, with lips pouting like a child's, with downcast eyes.

"Well, what a friend you've brought—I must say!" Tamara began speaking sneeringly and wrathfully. "I thought he was a man in earnest, but this is only some sort of a little girl! He's sorry to lose his innocence, if you please. What a treasure you've found, to be sure! But take back, take back your two roubles!" she suddenly began yelling at Petrov and tossed two coins on the table. "You'll give them away to some poor chambermaid or other! Or else save them for gloves for yourself, you marmot!"

"But what are you cursing for?" grumbled Petrov, without raising his eyes. "I'm not cursing you, am I? Then why do you curse first? I have a full right to act as I want to. But I have passed some time with you, and so take them. But to be forced, I don't want to. And on your part, Gladishev—that is, Soliterov—this isn't at all nice. I thought she was a nice girl, but she's trying to kiss all the time, and does God knows what..."

Tamara, despite her wrath, burst into laughter.

"Oh, you little stupid, little stupid! Well, don't be angry—I'll take your money. Only watch: this very evening you'll be sorry, you'll be crying. Well, don't be angry, don't be angry, angel, let's make up. Put your hand out to me, as I'm doing to you."

"Let's go, Kerkovius," said Gladishev. "Au revoir, Tamara!"

Tamara let the money down into her stocking, through the habit of all prostitutes, and went to show the boys the way.

Even at the time that they were passing through the corridor Gladishev was struck by the strange, silent, tense bustle in the drawing room; the trampling of feet and some muffled, low-voiced, rapid conversations.

Near that place where they had just been sitting below the picture, all the inmates of Anna Markovna's house and several outsiders had gathered. They were standing in a close knot, bending down. Kolya walked up with curiosity, and, wedging his way through a little, looked in between the heads: on the floor, sideways, somehow unnaturally drawn up, was lying Roly-Poly. His face was blue, almost black. He did not move, and was lying strangely small, shrunken, with legs bent. One arm was squeezed in under his breast, while the other was flung back.

"What's the matter with him?" asked Gladishev in a fright.

Niurka answered him, starting to speak in a rapid, jerky whisper:

"Roly-Poly just came here...Gave Manka the candy, and then started in to put Armenian riddles to us...'Of a blue colour, hangs in the parlor and whistles'...We couldn't guess nohow, but he says: 'A herring'...Suddenly he started laughing, had a coughing spell, and began falling sideways; and then—bang on the ground and don't move...They sent for the police...Lord, there's doings for you! ... I'm horribly afraid of corpseses!"

"Wait!" Gladishev stopped her. "It's necessary to feel his forehead; he may be alive yet..."

He did try to thrust himself forward, but Simeon's fingers, just like iron pincers, seized him above the elbows and dragged him back.

"There's nothing, there's nothing to be inspecting," sternly ordered Simeon, "go on, now, young gents, out of here! This is no place for you: the police will come, will summon you as witnesses—then it's scat! to the devil's dam! for you out of the military high school! Better go while you're good and healthy!"

He escorted them to the entrance hall, shoved the great-coats into their hands and added still more sternly:

"Well, now—go at a run...Lively! So's there won't be even a whiff of you left. And if you come another time, then I won't let youse in at all. You are wise guys, you are! You gave the old hound money for whiskey—so now he's gone and croaked."

"Well, don't you get too smart, now!" Gladishev flew at him, all ruffled up.

"What d'you mean, don't get smart? ..." Simeon suddenly began to yell infuriatedly, and his black eyes without lashes and brows became so terrible that the cadets shrank back. "I'll soak you one on the snout so hard you'll forget how to say papa and mamma! Git, this second! Or else I'll bust you in the neck!"

The boys went down the steps.

At this time two men were going up, in cloth caps on the sides of their heads; one in a blue, the other in a red blouse, with the skirts outside, under the unbuttoned, wide open jackets—evidently, Simeon's comrades in the profession.

"What?" one of them called out gaily from below, addressing Simeon, "Is it bye-bye for Roly-Poly?"

"Yes, it must be the finish," answered Simeon. "We've got to throw him out into the street in the meantime, fellows, or else the spirits will start haunting. The devil with him, let 'em think that he drank himself full and croaked on the road."

"But you didn't ... well, now? ... You didn't do for him?"

"Well, now, there's foolish talk! If there'd only been some reason. He was a harmless fellow. Altogether like a little lamb. It must be just that his turn came."

"And didn't he find a place where to die! Couldn't he have thought up something worse?" said the one who was in the red shirt.

"Right you are, there!" seconded the other. "Lived to grin and died in sin. Well, let's go, mate, what?"

The cadets ran with all their might. Now, in the darkness, the figure of Roly-Poly drawn up on the floor, with his blue face, appeared before them in all the horror that the dead possess for early youth; and especially if recalled at night, in the dark.

CHAPTER IV.

A fine rain, like dust, obstinate and tedious, had been drizzling since morning. Platonov was working in the port at the unloading of watermelons. At the mill, where he had since the very summer proposed to establish himself, luck had turned against him; after a week he had already quarreled, and almost had a fight, with the foreman, who was extremely brutal with the workers. About a month Sergei Ivanovich had struggled along somehow from hand to mouth, somewheres in the back-yards of Temnikovskaya Street, dragging into the editorial rooms of The Echoes, from time to time, notes of street accidents or little humorous scenes from the court rooms of the justices of the peace. But the hard newspaper game had long ago grown distasteful to him. He was always drawn to adventures, to physical labour in the fresh air, to life completely devoid of even the least hint at comfort; to care-free vagabondage, in which a man, having cast from him all possible external conditions, does not know himself what is going to be with him on the morrow. And for that reason, when from the lower stretches of the Dnieper the first barges with watermelons started coming in, he willingly entered a gang of labourers, in which he was known even from last year, and loved for his merry nature, for his comradely spirit, and for his masterly ability of keeping count.

This labour was carried on with good team work and with skill. Four parties, each of five men, worked on each barge. Number one would reach for a watermelon and pass it on to the second, who was standing on the side of the barge. The second cast it to the third, standing already on the wharf; the third threw it over to the fourth; while the fourth handed it up to the fifth, who stood on a horse cart and laid the watermelons away—now dark-green, now white, now striped—into even glistening rows. This work is clean, lively, and progresses rapidly. When a good party is gotten up, it is a pleasure to see how the watermelons fly from hand to hand, are caught with a circus-like quickness and success, and anew, and anew, without a break, fly, in order to fill up the dray. It is only difficult for the novices, that have not as yet gained the skill, have not caught on to that especial sense of the tempo. And it is not as difficult to catch a watermelon as to be able to throw it.

Platonov remembered well his first experiences of last year. What swearing—virulent, mocking, coarse—poured down upon him when for the third or fourth time he had been gaping and had slowed up the passing: two watermelons, not thrown in time, had smashed against the pavement with a succulent crunch, while the completely lost Platonov dropped the one which he was holding in his hands as well. The first time they treated him gently; on the second day, however, for every mistake they began to deduct from him five kopecks per watermelon out of the common share. The following time when this happened, they threatened to throw him out of the party at once, without any reckoning. Platonov even now still remembered how a sudden fury seized him: "Ah, so? The devil take you!" he had thought. "And yet you want me to be chary of your watermelons? So then, here you are, here you are! ..." This flare-up helped him as though instantaneously. He carelessly caught the watermelons, just as carelessly threw them over, and to his amazement suddenly felt that precisely just now he had gotten into the real swing of the work with all his muscles, sight, and breathing; and understood, that the most important thing was not to think at all of the watermelons representing some value, and that then everything went well. When he, finally, had fully mastered this art, it served him for a long time as a pleasant and entertaining athletic game of its own kind. But that, too, passed away. He reached, in, the end, the stage where he felt himself a will-less, mechanical wheel in a general machine consisting of five men and an endless chain of flying watermelons.

Now he was number two. Bending downward rhythmically, he, without looking, received with both hands the cold, springy, heavy watermelon; swung it to the right; and, also almost without looking, or looking only out of the corner of his eye, tossed it downward, and immediately once again bent down for the next watermelon. And his ear seized at this time how smack-smack ...smack-smack...the caught watermelons slapped in the hands; and immediately bent downwards and again threw, letting the air out of himself noisily—ghe...ghe...

The present work was very profitable; their gang, consisting of forty men, had taken on the work, thanks to the great rush, not by the day but by the amount of work done, by the waggon load. Zavorotny, the head—an enormous, mighty Poltavian—had succeeded with extreme deftness in getting around the owner; a young man, and, to boot, in all probability not very experienced as yet. The owner, it is true, came to his senses later and wanted to change the stipulations; but experienced melon growers dissuaded him from it in time: "Drop it. They'll kill you," they told him simply and firmly. And so, through this very stroke of good luck every member of the gang was now earning up to four roubles a day. They all worked with unusual ardour, even with some sort of vehemence; and if it had been possible to measure with some apparatus the labour of each one of them, then, in all probability, the number of units of energy created would have equalled the work of a large Voronezhian train horse.

However, Zavorotny was not satisfied even with this—he hurried and hurried his lads on all the time. Professional ambition was speaking within him; he wanted to bring the daily earnings of every member of the gang up to five roubles per snout. And gaily, with unusual ease, twinkled from the harbour to the waggon, twirling and flashing, the wet green and white watermelons; and their succulent plashing resounded against accustomed palms.

But now a long blast sounded on the dredging machine in the port. A second, a third, responded to it on the river; a few more on shore; and for a long time they roared together in a mighty chorus of different voices.

"Ba-a-a-st-a-a!" hoarsely and thickly, exactly like a locomotive blast, Zavorotny started roaring.

And now the last smack-smack—and the work stopped instantaneously.

Platonov with enjoyment straightened out his back and bent it backward, and spread out his swollen arms. With pleasure he thought of having already gotten over that first pain in all the muscles, which tells so during the first days, when one is just getting back into the work after disuse. While up to this day, awaking in the mornings in his lair on Temnikovskaya—also to the sound of a factory blast agreed upon—he would during the first minutes experience such fearful pains in his neck, back, in his arms and legs, that it seemed to him as if only a miracle would be able to compel him to get up and make a few steps.

"Go-o-o and e-at," Zavorotny began to clamour again.

The stevedores went down to the water; got down on their knees or laid down flat on the gangplank or on the rafts; and, scooping up the water in handfuls, washed their wet, heated faces and arms. Right here, too, on the shore, to one side, where a little grass had been left yet, they disposed themselves for dinner: placed in a circle ten of the most ripe watermelons, black bread, and twenty dried porgies. Gavriushka the Bullet was already running with a half-gallon bottle to the pot-house and was singing as he went the soldiers' signal for dinner:

"Drag spoon and mess-kit out,
If there's no bread, eat without."

A bare-footed urchin, dirty and so ragged that there was more of his bare body than clothes upon him, ran up to the gang.

"Which one of you here is Platonov?" he asked, quickly running over them with his thievish eyes.

"I'm Platonov, and by what name do they tease you?"

"Around the corner here, behind the church, some sort of a young lady is waiting for you...Here's a note for you."

The whole gang neighed deeply.

"What d'you open up your mouths for, you pack of fools!" said Platonov calmly. "Give me the note here."

This was a letter from Jennka, written in a round, naive, rolling, childish handwriting, and not very well spelt.

"Sergei Ivanich. Forgive me that I disturbe you. I must talk over a very, very important matter with you. I would not be troubling you if it was Trifles. For only 10 minutes in all. Jennka, whom you know, from Anna Markovna's."

Platonov got up.

"I'm going away for a little while," he said to Zavorotny. "When you begin, I'll be in my place."

"Now you've found somethin' to do," lazily and contemptuously said the head of the gang. "There's the night for that business...Go ahead, go ahead, who's holding you. But only if you won't be here when we begin work, then this day don't count. I'll take any tramp. And as many watermelons as he busts—that's out of your share, too...I didn't think it of you, Platonov—that you're such a he-dog..."

Jennka was waiting for him in the tiny little square, sheltered between a church and the wharf, and consisting of ten sorry poplars. She had on a gray, one-piece street dress; a simple, round, straw hat with a small black ribbon. "And yet, even though she has dressed herself simply," reflected Platonov, looking at her from a distance with his habitually puckered eyes, "and yet, every man will walk past, give a look, and inevitably look back three or four times; he'll feel the especial tone at once."

"Howdy do, Jennka! Very glad to see you," he said cordially, squeezing the girl's hand. "There, now, I didn't expect it!"

Jennka was reserved, sad, and apparently troubled over something. Platonov at once understood and sensed this.

"You excuse me, Jennechka, I must have dinner right away," said he, "so, perhaps, you'll go together with me and tell me what's the matter, while I'll manage to eat at the same time. There's a modest little inn not far from here. At this time there are no people there at all, and there's even a tiny little stall, a sort of a private room; that will be just the thing for you and me. Let's go! Perhaps you'll also have a bite of something."

"No. I won't eat," answered Jennka hoarsely, "and I won't detain you for long...a few minutes. I have to talk things over, have some advice—but I haven't anybody."

"Very well...Let's go then! In whatever way I can, I'm always at your service, in everything. I love you very much, Jennka!"

She looked at him sadly and gratefully.

"I know this, Serge Ivanovich; that's why I've come."

"You need money, perhaps? Just say so. I haven't got much with me, myself; but the gang will trust me with an advance."

"No, thanks...it isn't that at all. I'll tell everything at once, there, where we're going now."

In the dim, low-ceiled little inn, the customary haunt of petty thieves, where business was carried on only in the evening, until very far into the night, Platonov took the little half-dark cubby hole.

"Give me boiled meat, cucumbers, a large glass of vodka, and bread," he ordered the waiter.

The waiter—a young fellow with a dirty face; pugnosed; as dirty and greasy in all his person as though he had just been pulled out of a cesspool, wiped his lips and asked hoarsely:

"How many kopecks' bread?" "As much as it comes to." Then he started laughing:

"Bring as much as possible—we'll reckon it up later... and some bread cider!"

"Well, Jennie, say what your trouble is...I can already see by your face that there's trouble, or something distasteful in general...Go ahead and tell it!"

Jennka for a long time plucked her handkerchief and looked at the tips of her slippers, as though, gathering her strength. Timorousness had taken possession of her—the necessary and important words would not come into her mind, for anything. Platonov came to her aid: "Don't be embarrassed, my dear Jennie, tell all there is! For you know that I'm like one of the family, and will never give you away. And perhaps I may really give you some worth-while advice. Well, dive off with a splash into the water—begin!"

"That's just it, I don't know how to begin," said Jennka irresolutely. "Here's what, Sergei Ivanovich, I'm a sick woman...Understand?—sick in a bad way...With the most nasty disease...Do you know which?"

"Go on!" said Platonov, nodding his head.

"And I've been that way for a long time...more than a month...a month and a half, maybe...Yes, more than a month, because I found out about this on the Trinity..."

Platonov quickly rubbed his forehead with his hand. "Wait a while, I've recalled it...This was that day I was there together with the students...isn't that so?"

"That's right, Sergei Ivanovich, that's so..."

"Ah, Jennka," said Platonov reproachfully and with regret. "For do you know, that after this two of the students got sick...Wasn't it from you?"

Jennka wrathfully and disdainfully flashed her eyes.

"Perhaps even from me...How should I know? There were a lot of them...I remember there was this one, now, who was even trying to pick a fight with you all the time ...A tall sort of fellow, fair-haired, in pince-nez..."

"Yes, yes...That's Sobashnikov. They passed the news to me...That's he...that one was nothing—a little coxcomb! But then the other—him I'm sorry for. Although I've known him long, somehow I never made the right inquiries about his name...I only remember that he comes from some city or other—Poliyansk...Zvenigorodsk... His comrades called him Ramses...When the physicians—he turned to several physicians—when they told him irrevocably that he had the lues, he went home and shot himself...And in the note that he wrote there were amazing things, something like this: I supposed all the meaning of life to be in the triumph of mind, beauty and good; with this disease I am not a man, but junk, rottenness, carrion; a candidate for a progressive paralytic. My human dignity cannot reconcile itself to this. But guilty in all that has happened, and therefore in my death as well, am I alone; for that I, obeying a momentary bestial inclination, took a woman without love, for money. For that reason have I earned the punishment which I myself lay upon me..."

"I am sorry for him..." added Platonov quietly.

Jennka dilated her nostrils.

"But I, now, not the very least bit."

"That's wrong...You go away now, young fellow. When I'll need you I'll call out," said Platonov to the serving-man "Absolutely wrong, Jennechka! This was an unusually big and forceful man. Such come only one to the hundreds of thousands. I don't respect suicides. Most frequent of all, these are little boys, who shoot and hang themselves over trifles, like a child that has not been given a piece of candy, and hits itself against the wall to spite those around it. But before his death I reverently and with sorrow bow my head. He was a wise, generous, kindly man, attentive to all; and, as you see, too strict to himself."

"But to me this is absolutely all one," obstinately contradicted Jennka, "wise or foolish, honest or dishonest, old or young—I have come to hate them all. Because—look upon me—what am I? Some sort of universal spittoon, cesspool, privy. Think of it, Platonov; why, thousands, thousands of people have taken me, clutched me; grunted, snorted over me; and all those who were, and all those who might yet have been on my bed—oh, how I hate them all! If I only could, I would sentence them to torture by fire and iron! ... I would order..."

"You are malicious and proud, Jennie," said Platonov quietly.

"I was neither malicious nor proud...It's only now. I wasn't ten yet when my own mother sold me; and since that time I've been travelling from hand to hand... If only some one had seen a human being in me! No! ... I am vermin, refuse, worse than a beggar, worse than a thief, worse than a murderer! ... Even a hangman...we have even such coming to the establishment—and even he would have treated me loftily, with loathing: I am nothing; I am a public wench! Do you understand, Sergei Ivanovich, what a horrible word this is? Pub-lic! ... This means nobody's: not papa's, not mamma's, not Russian, not Riyazan, but simply—public! And not once did it enter anybody's head to walk up to me and think: why, now, this is a human being too; she has a heart and a brain; she thinks of something, feels something; for she's not made out of wood, and isn't stuffed with straw, small hay, or excelsior! And yet, only I feel this. I, perhaps, am the only one out of all of them who feels the horror of her position; this black, stinking, filthy pit. But then, all the girls with whom I have met, and with whom I am living right now—understand, Platonov, understand me!—why, they don't realize anything... Talking, walking pieces of meat! And this is even worse than my malice! ..."

"You are right!" said Platonov quietly. "And this is one of those questions where you'll always run up against a wall. No one will help you..."

"No one, no one! ..." passionately exclaimed Jennka. "Do you remember—this was while you were there: a student carried away our Liubka..."

"Why, certainly, I remember well! ... Well, and what then?"

"And this is what, that yesterday she came back tattered, wet...Crying...Left her, the skunk! ... Played a while at kindliness, and then away with her! 'You,' he says, 'are a sister.' 'I,' he says, 'will save you, make a human being of you...'"

"Is that possible?"

"Just so! ... One man I did see, kindly, indulgent, without the designs of a he-dog—that's you. But then, you're altogether different. You're somehow queer. You're always wandering somewhere, seeking something...You forgive me, Sergei Ivanovich, you're some sort of a little innocent! ... And that's just why I've come to you, to you alone! ..."

"Speak on, Jennechka..."

"And so, when I found out that I was sick, I almost went out of my mind from wrath; I choked from wrath ...I thought: and here's the end; therefore, there's no more use in pitying, there's nothing to grieve about, nothing to expect...The lid! ... But for all that I have borne—can it be that there's no paying back for it? Can it be that there's no justice in the world? Can it be that I can't even feast myself with revenge?—for that I have never known love; that of family life I know only by hearsay; that, like a disgustin', nasty little dog, they call me near, pat me and then with a boot over the head—get out!—that they made me over, from a human being, equal to all of them, no more foolish than all those I've met; made me over into a floor mop, some sort of a sewer pipe for their filthy pleasures? ...Ugh! ... Is it possible that for all of this I must take even such a disease with gratitude as well? ... Or am I a slave? ... A dumb object? ... A pack horse? ... And so, Platonov, it was just then that I resolved to infect them all: young, old, poor, rich, handsome, hideous—all, all, all! ..."

Platonov, who had already long since put his plate away from him, was looking at her with astonishment, and even more—almost with horror. He, who had seen in life much of the painful, the filthy, at times even of the bloody—he grew frightened with an animal fright before this intensity of enormous, unvented hatred. Coming to himself, he said:

"One great writer tells of such a case. The Prussians conquered the French and lorded it over them in every possible way: shot the men, violated the women, pillaged the houses, burned down the fields...And so one handsome woman—a Frenchwoman, very handsome,—having become infected, began out of spite to infect all the Germans who happened to fall into her embraces. She made ill whole hundreds, perhaps even thousands...And when she was dying in a hospital, she recalled this with joy and with pride...[25] But then, those were enemies, trampling upon her fatherland and slaughtering her brothers...But you, you, Jennechka! ..."

[25] This story is Lit. No. 29, by Guy de Maupassant.—Trans.

"But I—all, just all! Tell me, Sergei Ivanovich, only tell me on your conscience: if you were to find in the street a child, whom some one had dishonoured, had abused...well, let's say, had stuck its eyes out, cut its ears off—and then you were to find out that this man is at this minute walking past you, and that only God alone, if only He exists, is looking at you this minute from heaven—what would you do?"

"Don't know," answered Platonov, dully and downcast; but he paled, and his fingers underneath the table convulsively clenched into fists, "Perhaps I would kill him..."

"Not 'perhaps,' but certainly! I know you, I sense you. Well, and now think: every one of us has been abused so, when we were children! ... Children! ..." passionately moaned out Jennka and covered her eyes for a moment with her palm. "Why, it comes to me, you also spoke of this at one time, in our place—wasn't it on that same evening before the Trinity? ... Yes, children—foolish, trusting, blind, greedy, frivolous...And we cannot tear ourselves out of our harness...where are we to go? what are we to do? ... And please, don't you think it, Sergei Ivanovich—that the spite within me is strong only against those who wronged just me, me personally...No, against all our guests in general; all these cavaliers, from little to big...Well, and so I have resolved to avenge myself and my sisters. Is that good or no? ..."

"Jehnechka, really I don't know...I can't...I dare not say anything...I don't understand."

"But even that's not the main thing...For the main thing is this: I infected them, and did not feel anything—no pity, no remorse, no guilt before God or my fatherland. Within me was only joy, as in a hungry wolf that has managed to get at blood...But yesterday something happened which even I can't understand. A cadet came to me, altogether a little bit of a lad, silly, with yellow around his mouth...He used to come to me from still last winter...And then suddenly I had pity on him... Not because he was very handsome and very young; and not because he had always been very polite—even tender, if you will...No, both the one and the other had come to me, but I did not spare them: with enjoyment I marked them off, just like cattle, with a red-hot brand ...But this one I suddenly pitied...I myself don't understand—why? I can't make it out. It seemed to me, that it would be all the same as stealing money from a little simpleton, a little idiot; or hitting a blind man, or cutting a sleeper's throat...if he only were some dried-up marasmus or a nasty little brute, or a lecherous old fellow, I would not have stopped. But he was healthy, robust, with chest and arms like a statue's...and I could not... I gave him his money back, showed him my disease; in a word, I acted like a fool among fools. He went away from me...burst into tears...And now since last evening I haven't slept. I walk around as in a fog...Therefore—I'm thinking right now—therefore, that which, I meditated; my dream to infect them all; to infect their fathers, mothers, sisters, brides—even all the world—therefore, all this was folly, an empty fantasy, since I have stopped? ... Once again, I don't understand anything ...Sergei Ivanovich, you are so wise, you have seen so much of life—help me, then, to find myself now!..."

"I don't know, Jennechka!" quietly pronounced Platonov. "Not that I fear telling you, or advising you, but I know absolutely nothing. This is above my reason... above conscience..."

Jennie crossed her fingers and nervously cracked them.

"And I, too, don't know...Therefore, that which I thought—is not the truth. Therefore, there is but one thing left me...This thought came into my head this morning..."

"Don't, don't do it, Jennechka! ... Jennie! ..." Platonov quickly interrupted her.

"There's one thing: to hang myself..."

"No, no, Jennie, only not that! ... If there were other circumstances, unsurmountable, I would, believe me, tell you boldly: well, it's no use, Jennie; it's time to close up shop... But what you need isn't that at all... If you wish, I can suggest one way out to you, no less malicious and merciless; but which, perhaps, will satiate your wrath a hundredfold..."

"What's that?" asked Jennie, wearily, as though suddenly wilted after her flare-up.

"Well, this is it ... You're still young, and I'll tell you the truth, you are very handsome; that is, you can be, if you only want to, unusually stunning ... That's even more than beauty. But you've never yet known the bounds and the power of your appearance; and, mainly, you don't know to what a degree such natures as yours are bewitching, and how mightily they enchain men to them, and make out of them more than slaves and brutes ... You are proud, you are brave, you are independent, you are a clever woman. I know—you have read a great deal, let's presuppose even trashy books, but still you have read, you have an entirely different speech from the others. With a successful turn of life, you can cure yourself, you can get out of these 'Yamkas,' these 'Little Ditches,' into freedom. You have only to stir a finger, in order to see at your feet hundreds of men; submissive, ready for your sake for vileness, for theft, for embezzlement ... Lord it over them with tight reins, with a cruel whip in your hands! ... Ruin them, make them go out of their minds, as long as your desire and energy hold out! ... Look, my dear Jennie, who manages life now if not women! Yesterday's chambermaid, laundress, chorus girl goes through estates worth millions, the way a country-woman of Tver cracks sunflower seeds. A woman scarcely able to sign her name, at times affects the destiny of an entire kingdom through a man. Hereditary princes marry the street-walkers, the kept mistresses of yesterday... Jennechka, there is the scope for your unbridled vengeance; while I will admire you from a distance... For you—you are made of this stuff—you are a bird of prey, a spoliator... Perhaps not with such a broad sweep—but you will cast them down under your feet."

"No," faintly smiled Jennka. "I thought of this before ... But something of the utmost importance has burned out within me. There are no forces within me, there is no will within me, no desires ... I am somehow all empty inside, rotted ... Well, now, you know, there's a mushroom like that—white, round,—you squeeze it, and snuff pours out of it. And the same way with me. This life has eaten out everything within me save malice. And I am flabby, and my malice is flabby ... I'll see some little boy again, will have pity on him, will be punishing myself again ... No, it's better ... better so! ..."

She became silent. And Platonov did not know what to say. It became oppressive and awkward for both. Finally, Jennka got up, and, without looking at Platonov, extended her cold, feeble hand to him.

"Good-bye, Sergei Ivanovich! Excuse me, that I took up your time ... Oh, well, I can see myself that you'd help me, if you only could ... But, evidently, there's nothing to be done here ... Good-bye!"

"Only don't do anything foolish, Jennechka! I implore you! ..."

"Oh, that's all right!" said she and made a tired gesture with her hand.

Having come out of the square, they parted; but, having gone a few steps, Jennka suddenly called after him:

"Sergei Ivanovich, oh Sergei Ivanovich! ..."

He stopped, turned around, walked back to her.

"Roly-Poly croaked last evening in our drawing room. He jumped and he jumped, and then suddenly plumped down ... Oh, well, it's an easy death at least! And also I forgot to ask you, Sergei Ivanovich ... This is the last, now ... Is there a God or no?"

Platonov knit his eyebrows.

"What answer can I make? I don't know. I think that there is, but not such as we imagine Him. He is more wise, more just..."

"And future life? There, after death? Is there, now, as they tell us, a paradise or hell? Is that the truth? Or is there just nothing at all? A barren void? A sleep without a dream? A dark basement?"

Platonov kept silent, trying not to look at Jennka. He felt oppressed and frightened.

"I don't know," said he, finally, with an effort. "I don't want to lie to you."

Jennka sighed, and smiled with a pitiful, twisted smile.

"Well, thanks, my dear. And thanks for even that much ... I wish you happiness. With all my soul. Well, good-bye..."

She turned away from him and began slowly, with a wavering walk, to climb up the hill.

Platonov returned to work just in the nick of time. The gathering of tramps, scratching, yawning, working out their accustomed dislocations, were getting into their places. Zavorotny, at a distance, with his keen eyes caught sight of Platonov and began to yell over the whole port:

"You did manage to get here in time, you round-shouldered devil ... But I was already wanting to take you by the tail and chase you out of the gang ... Well, get in your place! ..."

"Well, but I did get a he-dog in you, Serejka! ..." he added, in a kindly manner. "If only it was night; but no,—look you, he starts in playing ring-around-a-rosie in broad daylight..."

CHAPTER V.

Saturday was the customary day of the doctor's inspection, for which they prepared very carefully and with quaking in all the houses; as, however, even society ladies prepare themselves, when getting ready for a visit to a physician-specialist; they diligently made their intimate toilet and inevitably put on clean underthings, even as dressy as possible. The windows toward the street were closed with shutters, while at one of those windows, which gave out upon the yard, was put a table with a hard bolster to put under the back.

All the girls were agitated ... "And what if there's a disease, which I haven't noticed myself? ... And then the despatch to a hospital; disgrace; the tedium of hospital life; bad food; the hard course of treatment..."

Only Big Manka—or otherwise Manka the Crocodile—Zoe, and Henrietta—all thirty years old, and, therefore, in the reckoning of Yama, already old prostitutes, who had seen everything, had grown inured to everything, grown indifferent to their trade, like white, fat circus horses—remained imperturbably calm. Manka the Crocodile even often said of herself:

"I have gone through fire and water and pipes of brass ... Nothing will stick to me any more."

Jennka, since morning, was meek and pensive. She presented to Little White Manka a golden bracelet; a medallion upon a thin little chain with her photograph; and a silver neck crucifix. Tamara she moved through entreaty into taking two rings for remembrance: one of silver, in three hoops, that could be moved apart, with a heart in the middle, and under it two hands that clasped one another when all the three parts of the ring were joined; while the other was of thin gold wire with an almandine.

"As for my underwear, Tamarochka—you give it to Annushka, the chambermaid. Let her wash it out well and wear it in good health, in memory of me."

The two of them were sitting in Tamara's room. Jennka had in the very morning sent after cognac; and now slowly, as though lazily, was imbibing wine-glass after wine-glass, eating lemon and a piece of sugar after drinking. Tamara was observing this for the first time and wondered, because Jennka had always disliked wine, and drank very rarely; and then only at the constraint of guests.

"What are you giving stuff away so to-day?" asked Tamara. "Just as though you'd gotten ready to die, or to go into a convent?"

"Yes, and I will go away," answered Jennka listlessly. "I am weary, Tamarochka! ..."

"Well, which one of us has a good time?"

"Well, no! ... It isn't so much that I'm weary; but somehow everything—everything is all the same ... I look at you, at the table, at the bottle; at my hands and feet; and I'm thinking, that all this is alike and everything is to no purpose ... There's no sense in anything ... Just like on some old, old picture. Look there—there's a soldier walking on the street, but it's all one to me, as though they had wound up a doll, and it's moving ... And that he's wet under the ram, is also all one to me ... And that he'll die, and I'll die, and you, Tamara, will die—in this also I see nothing frightful, nothing amazing... So simple and wearisome is everything to me..."

Jennka was silent for a while; drank one more wine-glass; sucked the sugar, and, still looking out at the street, suddenly asked:

"Tell me, please, Tamara, I've never asked you about it—from where did you get in here, into the house? You don't at all resemble all of us; you know everything; for everything that turns up you have a good, clever remark ... Even French, now—how well you spoke it that time! But none of us knows anything at all about you ... Who are you?"

"Darling Jennechka, really, it's not worth while ... A life like any life ... I went to boarding school; was a governess; sang in a choir; then kept a shooting gallery in a summer garden; and then got mixed up with a certain charlatan and taught myself to shoot with a Winchester ... I traveled with circuses—I represented an American Amazon. I used to shoot splendidly ... Then I found myself in a monastery. There I passed two years ... I've been through a lot ... Can't recall everything ... I used to steal..."

"You've lived through a great deal ... Checkered-like."

"But then, my years are not a few. Well, what do you think—how many?"

"Twenty-two, twenty-four? ..."

"No, my angel! It just struck thirty-two a week ago. I, if you like, am older than all of you here in Anna Markovna's. Only I didn't wonder at anything, didn't take anything near to heart. As you see, I never drink ... I occupy myself very carefully with the care of my body; and the main thing, the very main thing—I don't allow myself ever to be carried away with men..."

"Well, but what about your Senka? ..."

"Senka—that's a horse of another colour; the heart of woman is foolish, inconsistent ... Can it possibly live without love? And even so, I don't love him, but just so ... a self-deception ... But, however, I shall be in very great need of Senka soon."

Jennka suddenly grew animated and looked at her friend with curiosity.

"But how did you come to get stuck right here, in this hole? So clever, handsome, sociable..."

"I'd have to take a long time in telling it ... And then I'm too lazy ... I got in here out of love; I got mixed up with a certain young man and went into a revolution with him. For we always act so, we women: where the dearie is looking, there we also look; what the dearie sees, that we also see ... I didn't believe at soul in his work, but I went. A flattering man he was; smart, a good talker, a good looker ... Only he proved to be a skunk and a traitor afterwards. He played at revolution; while he himself gave his comrades away to the gendarmes. A stool-pigeon, he was. When they had killed and shown him up, then all the foolishness left me. However, it was necessary to conceal myself ... I changed my passport. Then they advised me, that the easiest thing of all was to screen myself with a yellow ticket ... And then the fun began! ... And even here I'm on a sort of pasture ground; when the time comes, the successful moment arrives—I'll go away!"

"Where?" asked Jennie with impatience.

"The world is large ... And I love life! ... There, now, I was the same way in the convent: I lived on and I lived on; sang antiphonies and dulias, until I had rested up, and had finally grown weary of it; and then all at once—hop! and into a cabaret ... Wasn't that some jump? The same way out of here ... I'll get into a theatre, into a circus, into a corps de ballet ... but do you know, Jennechka, I'm drawn to the thieving trade the most, after all ... Daring, dangerous, hard, and somehow intoxicating ... It's drawing me! ... Don't you mind that I'm so respectable and modest, and can appear an educated young lady. I'm entirely, entirely different."

Her eyes suddenly blazed up, vividly and gaily.

"There's a devil dwells in me!"

"It's all very well for you," pensively and with weariness pronounced Jennie. "You at least desire something, but my soul is some sort of carrion ... I'm twenty-five years old, now; but my soul is like that of an old woman, shrivelled up, smelling of the earth ... And if I had only lived sensibly! ... Ugh! ... There was only some sort of slush."

"Drop it, Jennka; you're talking foolishly. You're smart, you're original; you have that special power before which men crawl and creep so willingly. You go away from here, too. Not with me, of course—I'm always single—but go away all by your own self."

Jennka shook her head and quietly, without tears, hid her face in her palms.

"No," she responded dully, after a long silence, "no, this won't work out with me: fate has chewed me all up! ... I'm not a human being any more, but some sort of dirty cud ... Eh!" she suddenly made a gesture of despair. 'Let's better drink some cognac, Jennechka,'" she addressed herself, "'and let's suck the lemon a little! ...' Brr ... what nasty stuff! ... And where does Annushka always get such abominable stuff? If you smear a dog's wool with it, it will fall off ... And always, the low-down thing, she'll take an extra half. Once I somehow ask her—'What are you hoarding money for?' 'Well, I,' she says, 'am saving it up for a wedding. What sort,' she says, 'of joy will it be for my husband, that I'll offer him up my innocence alone! I must earn a few hundreds in addition.' She's happy! ... I have here, Tamara, a little money in the little box under the mirror; you pass it on to her, please..."

"And what are you about, you fool; do you want to die, or what?" sharply, with reproach, said Tamara.

"No, I'm saying it just so, if anything happens ... Take it, now, take the money! Maybe they'll take me off to the hospital ... And how do you know what's going to take place there? I left myself some small change, if anything happens ... And supposing that I wanted to do something to myself in downright earnest, Tamarochka—is it possible that you'd interfere with me?"

Tamara looked at her fixedly, deeply, and calmly. Jennie's eyes were sad, and as though vacant. The living fire had become extinguished in them, and they seemed turbid, just as though faded, with whites like moonstone.

"No," Tamara said at last, quietly but firmly. "If it was on account of love, I'd interfere; if it was on account of money, I'd talk you out of it: but there are cases where one must not interfere. I wouldn't help, of course; but I also wouldn't seize you and interfere with you."

At this moment the quick-limbed housekeeper Zociya whirled through the corridor with an outcry:

"Ladies, get dressed! The doctor has arrived ... Ladies, get dressed! ... Lively, ladies! ..."

"Well, go on, Tamara, go on," said Jennka tenderly, getting up. "I'll run into my room for just a minute—I haven't changed my dress yet, although, to tell the truth, this also is all one. When they'll be calling out for me, and I don't come in time, call out, run in after me."

And, going out of Tamara's room, she embraced her by the shoulder, as though by chance, and stroked it tenderly.

Doctor Klimenko—the official city doctor—was preparing in the parlor everything indispensable for an inspection—vaseline, a solution of sublimate, and other things—and was placing them on a separate little table. Here also were arranged for him the white blanks of the girls, replacing their passports, as well as a general alphabetical list. The girls, dressed only in their chemises, stockings, and slippers, were standing and sitting at a distance. Nearer the table was standing the proprietress herself—Anna Markovna—while a little behind her were Emma Edwardovna and Zociya.

The doctor—aged, disheartened, slovenly; a man indifferent to everything—put the pince-nez crookedly upon his nose, looked at the list, and called out:

"Alexandra Budzinskaya! ..."

The frowning, little, pug-nosed Nina stepped out. Preserving on her face an angry expression, and breathing heavily from shame, from the consciousness of her own awkwardness, and from the exertions, she clumsily climbed up on the table. The doctor, squinting through his pince-nez and dropping it every minute, carried out the inspection.

"Go ahead! ... You're sound."

And on the reverse side of the blank he marked off: "Twenty-eighth of August. Sound" and put down a curly-cue. And when he had not even finished writing called out:

"Voshchenkova, Irene! ..."

Now it was the turn of Liubka. She, during the past month and a half of comparative freedom, had had time to grow unaccustomed to the inspections of every week; and when the doctor turned up the chemise over her breast, she suddenly turned as red as only very bashful women can—even with her back and breast.

After her was the turn of Zoe; then of Little White Manka; after that of Tamara and Niurka—the last, the doctor found, had gonorrhoea, and ordered her to be sent off to a hospital.

The doctor carried out the inspection with amazing rapidity. It was now nearly twenty years that every week, on Saturdays, he had to inspect in such a manner several hundred girls; and he had worked out that habitual technical dexterity and rapidity, a calm carelessness of movements, which is; frequently to be found in circus artists, in card sharpers, in furniture movers and packers, and in other professionals. And he carried out his manipulations with the same calmness with which a drover or a veterinary inspects several hundred head of cattle in a day.

Did he ever think that before him were living people; or that he appeared as the last and most important link of that fearful chain which is called legalized prostitution?

No! And even if he did experience this, then it must have been in the very beginning of his career. Now before him were only naked abdomens, naked backs, and opened mouths. Not one exemplar of all this faceless herd of every Saturday would he have recognized subsequently on the street. The main thing was the necessity of finishing as soon as possible the inspection in one establishment, in order to pass on to another, to a third, a ninth, a twentieth...

"Susannah Raitzina!" the doctor finally called out.

No one walked up to the table.

All the inmates of the house began to exchange glances and to whisper.

"Jennka ... Where's Jennka? ..."

But she was not among the girls.

Then Tamara, just released by the doctor, moved a little forward and said:

"She isn't here. She hasn't had a chance to get herself ready yet. Excuse me, Mr. Doctor, I'll go right away and call her."

She ran into the corridor and did not return for a long time. After her went, at first Emma Edwardovna, then Zociya, several girls, and even Anna Markovna herself.

"PFUI! What indecency is this! ..." the majestic Emma Edwardovna was saying in the corridor, making an indignant face. "And eternally this Jennka! ... Always this Jennka! ... It seems my patience has already burst ..."

But Jennka was nowhere—neither in her room, nor in Tamara's. They looked into other chambers, in all the out-of-the-way corners ... But she did not prove to be even there.

"We must look in the water-closet ... Perhaps she's there?" surmised Zoe.

But this institution was locked from the inside with a bolt. Emma Edwardovna knocked on the door with her fist.

"Jennie, do come out at last! What foolishness is this?"

And, raising her voice, she cried out impatiently and threateningly:

"Do you hear, you swine? ... Come out this minute—the doctor's waiting!"

But there was no answer of any sort.

All exchanged glances with fear in their eyes, with one and the same thought in mind.

Emma Edwardovna shook the door by the brass knob, but the door did not yield.

"Go after Simeon!" Anna Markovna directed.

Simeon was called ... He came, sleepy and morose, as was his wont. By the distracted faces of the girls and the housekeepers, he already saw that some misunderstanding or other had occurred, in which his professional cruelty and strength were required. When they explained to him what the matter was, he silently took the door-knob with both hands, braced himself against the wall, and gave a yank.

The knob remained in his hands; and he himself, staggering backward, almost fell to the floor on his back.

"A-a, hell!" he began to growl in a stifled voice. "Give me a table knife."

Through the crack of the door he felt the inner bolt with the table knife; whittled away with the blade the edges of the crack, and widened it so that he could at last push the end of the knife through it, and began gradually to scrape back the bolt. Only the grating of metal against metal could be heard.

Finally Simeon threw the door wide open.

Jennka was hanging in the middle of the water-closet on a tape from her corset, fastened to the lamphook. Her body, already motionless after an unprolonged agony, was slowly swinging in the air, and describing scarcely perceptible turns to the right and left around its vertical axis. Her face was bluishly-purple, and the tip of the tongue was thrust out between clenched and bared teeth. The lamp which had been taken off was also here, sprawling on the floor.

Some one began to squeal hysterically, and all the girls, like a stampeded herd, crowding and jostling each other in the narrow corridor, vociferating and choking with hysterical sobbings, started in to run.

The doctor came upon hearing the outcries... Came, precisely, and not ran. Seeing what the matter was, he did not become amazed or excited; during his practice as an official city doctor, he had had his fill of seeing such things, so that he had already grown benumbed and hardened to human sufferings, wounds and death. He ordered Simeon to lift the corpse of Jennka a bit upward, and himself getting up on the seat, cut through the tape. Proforma, he ordered Jennka's body to be borne away into the room that had been hers, and tried with the help of the same Simeon to produce artificial respiration; but after five minutes gave it up as a bad job, fixed the pince-nez, which had become crooked, on his nose, and said:

"Call the police in to make a protocol."

Again Kerbesh came, again whispered for a long time with the proprietress in her little bit of a cabinet, and again crunched in his pocket a new hundred-rouble bill.

The protocol was made in five minutes; and Jennka, just as half-naked as she had hung herself, was carted away in a hired wagon into an anatomical theatre, wrapped up in and covered with two straw mats.

Emma Edwardovna was the first to find the note that Jennka had left on her night table. On a sheet, torn out of the income-expense book, compulsory for every prostitute, in pencil, in a naive, rounded, childish handwriting—by which, however, it could be judged that the hands of the suicide had not trembled during the last minutes—was written:

"I beg that no one be blamed for my death. I am dying because I have become infected, and also because all people are scoundrels and it is very disgusting to live. How to divide my things—Tamara knows about that. I told her in detail."

Emma Edwardovna turned around upon Tamara, who was right on the spot among a number of other girls, and with eyes filled with a cold, green hatred, hissed out:

"Then you knew, you low-down thing, what she was preparing to do? ... You knew, you vermin? ... You knew and didn't tell? ..."

She already had swung back, in order, as was her wont, to hit Tamara cruelly and calculatingly; but suddenly stopped just as she was, with gaping mouth and with eyes wide open. It was just as though she was seeing, for the first time, Tamara, who was looking at her with a firm, wrathful, unbearable gaze, and slowly, slowly was raising from below, and at last brought up to the level of the housekeeper's face, a small object, glistening with white metal.

CHAPTER VI.

That very same day, at evening, a very important event took place in the house of Anna Markovna: the whole institution—with land and house, with live and inanimate stock—passed into the hands of Emma Edwardovna.

They had been speaking of this, on and off, for a long time in the establishment; but when the rumours so unexpectedly, immediately right after the death of Jennka, turned into realities, the misses could not for a long time come to themselves for amazement and fear. They knew well, having experienced the sway of the German upon themselves, her cruel, implacable pedantism; her greed, arrogance, and, finally, her perverted, exacting, repulsive love, now for one, now for another favorite. Besides that, it was no mystery to any one, that out of the fifteen thousand which Emma Edwardovna had to pay the former proprietress for the firm and for the property, one third belonged to Kerbesh, who had, for a long time already, been carrying on half-friendly, half-business relations with the fat housekeeper. From the union of two such people, shameless, pitiless, and covetous, the girls could expect all sorts of disasters for themselves.

Anna Markovna had to let the house go so cheaply not simply because Kerbesh, even if he had not known about certain shady little transactions to her credit, could still at any time he liked trip her up and eat her up without leaving anything. Of pretexts and cavils for this even a hundred could be found every day; and certain ones of them not merely threatened the shutting down of the house alone, but, if you like, even with the court.

But, dissembling, oh-ing and sighing, bewailing her poverty, her maladies and orphanhood, Anna Markovna at soul was glad of even such a settlement. And then it must be said: she was already for a long time feeling the approach of senile infirmity, together with all sorts of ailments and the thirst for complete, benevolent rest, undisturbed by anything. All, of which she had not even dared dream in her early youth, when she herself had yet been a prostitute of the rank and file—all had now come to her of itself, one in addition to the other: peaceful old age, a house—a brimming cup on one of the quiet, cozy streets, almost in the centre of the city,—the adored daughter Birdie, who—if not to-day then tomorrow—must marry a respected man, an engineer, a house-owner, and member of the city-council; provided for as she was with a respectable dowry and magnificent valuables ... Now it was possible peacefully, without hurrying, with gusto, to dine and sup on sweet things, for which Anna Markovna had always nourished a great weakness; to drink after dinner good, home-made, strong cherry-brandy; and of evenings to play a bit at "preference," for kopeck stakes, with esteemed elderly ladies of her acquaintance, who, even although they never as much as let it appear that they knew the real trade of the little old woman, did in reality know it very well; and not only did not condemn her business but even bore themselves with respect toward those enormous percentages which she earned upon her capital. And these charming friends, the joy and consolation of an untroubled old age, were: one—the keeper of a loan office; another—the proprietress of a lively hotel near the railroad; the third—the owner of a jewelry shop, not large, but all the go and well known among the big thieves, &c. And about them, in her turn, Anna Markovna knew and could tell several shady and not especially flattering anecdotes; but in their society it was not customary to talk of the sources of the family well-being—only cleverness, daring, success, and decent manners were esteemed.

But, even besides that, Anna Markovna, sufficiently limited in mind and not especially developed, had some sort of an amazing inner intuition, which during all her life permitted her instinctively but irreproachably to avoid unpleasantnesses, and to find prudent paths in time. And so now, after the sudden death of Roly-Poly, and the suicide of Jennka which followed the next day, she, with her unconsciously—penetrating soul foreguessed that fate—which had been favouring her house of ill-fame, sending her good fortunes, turning away all under-water shoals—was now getting ready to turn its back upon her. And she was the first to retreat.

They say, that not long before a fire in a house, or before the wreck of a ship, the wise, nervous rats in droves make their way into another place. And Anna Markovna was directed by the same rat-like, animal, prophetic intuition. And she was right: immediately right after the death of Jennka some fearful curse seemed to hang over the house, formerly Anna Markovna Shaibes', but now Emma Edwardovna Titzner's: deaths, misfortunes, scandals just simply descended upon it ceaselessly, becoming constantly more frequent, on the manner of bloody events in Shakespeare's tragedies; as, however, was the case at all the remaining houses of the Yamas as well.

And one of the first to die, a week after the liquidation of the business, was Anna Markovna herself. However, this frequently happens with people put out of their accustomed rut of thirty years: so die war heroes, who have gone into retirement—people of insuperable health and iron will; so quickly go off the stage former stock brokers, who have happily gone away to rest, but have been deprived of the burning allurement of risk and hazard; so, too, age rapidly, droop, and grow decrepit, the great artists who leave the stage ... Her death was the death of the just. Once at a game of cards she felt herself unwell; begged them to wait a while for her; said that she would lie down for just a minute; lay down in the bedroom on a bed; sighed deeply, and passed on into another world—with a calm face, with a peaceful, senile smile upon her lips. Isaiah Savvich—her faithful comrade on the path of life, a trifle downtrodden, who had always played a secondary, subordinate role—survived her only a month.

Birdie was left sole heiress. She very successfully turned the cozy house into money, as well as the land somewheres at the edge of the town; married, as it had been presupposed, very happily; and up to this time is convinced that her father carried on a great commercial business in the export of wheat through Odessa and Novorossiysk into Asia Minor.

On the evening of the day when Jennie's corpse had been carried away to an anatomical theatre; at an hour when not even a chance guest appears on Yamskaya Street, all the girls, at the insistence of Emma Edwardovna, assembled in the drawing room. Not one of them dared murmur against the fact that on this distressing day, when they had not yet recovered from the impression of Jennka's horrible death, they would be compelled to dress up, as usual, in wildly festive finery, and to go into the brightly illuminated drawing room, in order to dance, sing, and to entice lecherous men with their denuded bodies.

And at last into the drawing room walked Emma Edwardovna herself. She was more majestic than she had ever been—clad in a black silk gown, from which, just like battlements, her enormous breasts jutted out, upon which descended two fat chins; in black silk mittens; with an enormous gold chain wound thrice around her neck, and terminating in a ponderous medallion hanging upon the very abdomen.

"Ladies! ..." she began impressively, "I must ... Stand up!" she suddenly called out commandingly. "When I speak, you must hear me out standing."

They all exchanged glances with perplexity: such an order was a novelty in the establishment. However, the girls got up one after another, irresolutely, with eyes and mouths gasping.

"Sie sollen ... you must from this day show me that respect which you are bound to show to your mistress," importantly and weightily began Emma Edwardovna. "Beginning from to-day, the establishment in a legal manner has passed from our good and respected Anna Markovna to me, Emma Edwardovna Titzner. I hope that we will not quarrel, and that you will behave yourselves like sensible, obedient, and well-brought-up girls. I will be to you like in place of your own mother, but only remember, that I will not stand for laziness, or drunkenness, or notions of any sort; or any kind of disorder. The kind Madam Shaibes, it must be said, held you in too loose reins. O—o, I will be far more strict. Discipline uber alles ... before everything. It's a great pity, that the Russian people are lazy, dirty and stoopid, do not understand this rule; but don't you trouble yourself, I will teach you this for your own good. I say 'for your own good,' because my main thought is to kill the competition of Treppel. I want that my client should be a man of substance, and not some charlatan and ragamuffin, some kind of student, now, or ham actor. I want that my ladies should be the most beautiful, best brought-up, the healthiest and gayest in the whole city. I won't spare any money in order to set up swell furnishings; and you will have rooms with silk furniture and with genuine, beautiful rugs. Your guests will no longer be demanding beer, but only genteel Bordeaux and Burgundy wines and champagne. Remember, that a rich, substantial, elderly man never likes your common, ordinary, coarse love. He requires Cayenne pepper; he requires not a trade, but an art, and you will soon acquire this. At Treppel's they take three roubles for a visit and ten roubles for a night ... I will establish it so, that you will receive five roubles for a visit and twenty-five for a night. They will present you with gold and diamonds. I will contrive it so, that you won't have to pass on into establishments of a lower sort, und so weiter ... right down to the soldiers' filthy den. No! Deposits will be put away and saved with me for each one of you every month; and will be put away in your name in a banker's office, where there will increase interest upon them, and interest upon interest. And then, if a girl feels herself tired, or wants to marry a respectable man, there will always be at her disposal not a large, but a sure capital. So is it done in the best establishments in Riga, and everywhere abroad. Let no one say about me, that Emma Edwardovna is a spider, a vixen, a cupping glass. But for disobedience, for laziness, for notions, for lovers on the side, I will punish cruelly and, like nasty weeds, will throw out—on the street, or still worse. Now I have said all that I had to. Nina, come near me. And all the rest of you come up in turn."

Ninka irresolutely walked right up to Emma Edwardovna—and even staggered back in amazement: Emma Edwardovna was extending her right hand to her, with the fingers lowered downward, and slowly nearing it to Ninka's lips.

"Kiss it! ..." impressively and firmly pronounced Emma Edwardovna, narrowing her eyes and with head thrown back, in the magnificent pose of a princess ascending her throne.

Ninka was so bewildered that her right arm gave a jerk in order to make the sign of the cross; but she corrected herself, loudly smacked the extended hand, and stepped aside. Following her Zoe, Henrietta, Vanda and others stepped up also. Tamara alone continued to stand near the wall with her back to the mirror; that mirror into which Jennka so loved to gaze, in gone-by times, admiring herself as she walked back and forth through the drawing room.

Emma Edwardovna let the imperious, obstinate gaze of a boa-constrictor rest upon her; but the hypnosis did not work. Tamara bore this gaze without turning away, without flinching; but without any expression on her face. Then the new proprietress put down her hand, produced on her face something resembling a smile, and said hoarsely:

"And with you, Tamara, I must have a little talk separately, eye to eye. Let's go!"

"I hear you, Emma Edwardovna!" calmly answered Tamara.

Emma Edwardovna came to the little bit of a cabinet, where formerly Anna Markovna loved to drink coffee with clotted cream; sat down on the divan and pointed out a place opposite her to Tamara. For some time the women kept silent; searchingly, mistrustfully eyeing each other.

"You acted rightly, Tamara," said Emma Edwardovna finally. "You did wisely in not stepping up, on the manner of those sheep, to kiss my hand. But just the same, I would not have let you come to that. I wanted right there, in the presence of all, when you walked up to me, to press your hand and to offer you the place of first housekeeper—you understand?—my chief assistant—and on terms very advantageous to you..."

"I thank you ..."

"No, wait a while, don't interrupt me. I will have my say to the end, and then you will express your pros and cons. But will you explain to me, please, when yesterday you were aiming at me out of a revolver, what did you want? Can it possibly be, to kill me?"

"On the contrary, Emma Edwardovna," retorted Tamara respectfully, "on the contrary; it seemed to me that you wanted to strike me."

"PJUI! What do you mean, Tamarochka! ... Have you paid no attention to the fact that during all the time of our acquaintance I never permitted myself, not only to hit you, but even to address you with a rude word? ... What do you mean, what do you mean? ... I don't confuse you with this poor Russian trash ... Glory be to God, I am an experienced person and one who knows people well. I can very well see that you are a genuinely cultured young lady; far more educated, for example, than I myself. You are refined, elegant, smart. I am convinced of the fact that you even know music not at all badly. Finally, if I were to confess, I was a little ... how shall I put it to you? ... I always was a little in love with you. And now you wanted to shoot me! Me, a person who could be a very good friend to you! Well, what will you say to that?"

"Well ... nothing at all, Emma Edwardovna," retorted Tamara in the meekest and most plausible tone. "Everything was very simple. Even before that I found the revolver under Jennka's pillow and brought it, in order to give it over to you. I did not want to interfere, when you were reading the letter; but then you turned around to me—I stretched the revolver out to you and wanted to say: 'See, Emma Edwardovna, what I found'—for, don't you see, it surprised me awfully how the late Jennie, having a revolver at her disposal, preferred such a horrible death as hanging? And that's all."

The bushy, frightful eyebrows of Emma Edwardovna rose upward; the eyes widened joyously; and a real, uncounterfeited smile spread over her cheeks of a behemoth. She quickly extended both hands to Tamara.

"And is this all? O, MEIN KIND? And I thought ... God knows what I imagined! Give me your hands, Tamara, your little charming white hands, and allow me to press them auf mein Herz, upon my heart, and to kiss you."

The kiss was so long, that Tamara with great difficulty and with aversion barely freed herself from the embraces of Emma Edwardovna.

"Well, and now to business. And so, here are my terms: you will be housekeeper, I give you fifteen percent, out of the clear gain. Mind you, Tamara, fifteen percent. And, besides that, a small salary—thirty, forty, well, if you like, fifty roubles a month. Splendid terms—isn't that the truth? I am deeply convinced, that none other than just you will help me to raise the house to a real height, and make it the swellest not only in our city, but in all the south of Russia as well. You have taste, and an understanding of things! ... Besides that, you will always be able to entertain, and to stir up the most exacting, the most unyielding guests. In rare instances, when a very rich and distinguished gentleman—in Russian they call it one "sun-fish," while with us, ein Freier,[26]—when he becomes infatuated with you—for you are so handsome, Tamarochka," (the proprietress looked at her with misty, humid eyes), "then I do not at all forbid you to pass the time with him gaily; only to bear down always upon the fact that you have no right, owing to your duty, your position, Und so weiter, und so weiter ... aber sagen sie bitte, do you easily make yourself understood in German?"

[26] In English, a "toff"; in American, a "swell."—trans.

"Die Deutsche Sprache beherrsche ich in geringerem Grade als die franzosische; indes kann ich stets in einer Salon-Plauderei mitmachen."[27]

[27] "My mastery of the German language is a trifle worse than that of the French, but I can always keep up my end in parlor small talk."

"O, wunderbar! sie haben eine entzuckende Rigaer Aussprache, die beste alter deutschen Aussprachen. Und also—fahren wir in unserer Sprache fort. Sie klingt viel susser meinem Ohr, die Muttersprache. Schon?"[28]

[28] O, splendid! ... You have a bewitching Riga enunciation, the most correct of all the German ones. And so, let us continue in my tongue. That is far sweeter to my ear—my mother tongue. All right?"

"SCHON."[29]

[29] "All right."

"Zuletzt werden Sie nachgeben, dem Anschein nach ungern, unwillkurlich, van der Laune des Augenblicks hingerissen—und, was die Hauptsache ist, lautlos, heimlich vor mir. Sie verstehen? Dafur zahlen Narren ein schweres Geld. Ubrigens brauche ich Sie wohl nicht zu lernen."[30]

[30] "In the very end you will give in, as though unwillingly, as though against your will, as though from infatuation, a momentary caprice, and—which is the main thing—as though on the sly from me. You understand? For this the fools pay enormous money. However, it seems I will not have to teach you."

"Ja, gnadige Frau. Sie sprechen gar kluge Dinge. Doch das ist schon keine Plauderei mehr, sondern eine ernste unterhaltung. Yes, my dear madam. You say very wise things. But this is no longer small talk; it is, rather, serious conversation ... And for that reason it is more convenient for me, if you will revert to the Russian language ... I am ready to obey you."

"Furthermore! ... I was just now talking about a lover. I dare not forbid you this pleasure, but let us be prudent: let him not appear here, or appear as rarely as possible. I will give you days for going out, when you will be perfectly free. But it's best if you would get along without him entirely. It will serve your benefit too. This is only a drag and a yoke. I am telling you this from my own personal experience. Wait a while; after three or four years we will expand this business so, that you will have substantial money already, and then I vill take you into the business as a partner with full rights. After ten years you will still be young and handsome, and then take and buy men as much as you want to. By that time romantic follies will go out of your head entirely, and it will not be you who will be chosen already, but you who will be choosing with sense and with feeling, as a connoisseur picks out precious stones. Do you agree with me?"

Tamara cast down her eyes, and smiled just the least trifle.

"You speak golden truths, Emma Edwardovna. I will drop mine, but not at once. For that I will need some two weeks. I will try not to have him appear here. I accept your proposition."

"And that's splendid!" said Emma Edwardovna, get ting up. "Now let us conclude our agreement with one good, sweet kiss."

And she again embraced and took to kissing Tamara hard; who, with her downcast eyes and naive, tender face, seemed now altogether a little girl. But, having freed herself, finally, from the proprietress, she asked in Russian:

"You see, Emma Edwardovna, that I agree in everything with you, but for that I beg you to fulfill one request of mine. It will not cost you anything. Namely, I hope that you will allow me and the other girls to escort the late Jennie to the cemetery."

Emma Edwardovna made a wry face.

"Oh, if you want to, my darling Tamara, I have nothing against your whim. Only what for? This will not help the dead person and will not make her alive. Only sentimentalism alone will come out of it ... But very well! Only, however, you know yourself that in accordance with your law suicides are not buried, or—I don't know with certainty—it seems they throw them into some dirty hole beyond the cemetery."

"No, do allow me to do as I want to myself. Let it be my whim, but concede it to me, my darling, dear, bewitching Emma Edwardovna! But then, I promise you that this will be my last whim. After this I will be like a wise and obedient soldier at the disposal of a talented general."

"IS' GUT!" Emma Edwardovna gave in with a sigh. "I can not deny you in anything, my child. Let me press your hand. Let us toil and labour together for the common good."

And, having opened the door, she called out across the drawing room into the entrance-hall: "Simeon!" And when Simeon appeared in the room, she ordered him weightily and triumphantly:

"Bring us a bottle of champagne here, but the real thing—Rederer demi sec, and as cool as possible. Step lively!" she ordered the porter, who was gaping at her with popping eyes. "We will drink with you, Tamara, to the new business, to our brilliant and beautiful future."

They say that dead people bring luck. If there is any foundation at all in this superstition, then on this Saturday it could not have told plainer: the influx of visitors was out of the ordinary, even for a Saturday night. True, the girls, passing through the corridor or past the room that had been Jennka's increased their steps; timorously glanced at it sidelong, out of the corner of the eye; while others even crossed themselves. But late in the night the fear of death somehow subsided, grew bearable. All the rooms were occupied, while in the drawing room a new violinist was trilling without cease—a free-and-easy, clean-shaven young man, whom the pianist with the cataract had searched out somewhere and brought with him.

The appointment of Tamara as housekeeper was received with cold perplexity, with taciturn dryness. But, having bided her time, Tamara managed to whisper to Little White Manka:

"Listen, Manya! You tell them all that they shouldn't pay any attention to the fact that I've been chosen housekeeper. It's got to be so. But let them do as they wish, only don't let them trip me up. I am as before—their friend and intercessor ... And further on we'll see."

CHAPTER VII.

On the next day, on Sunday, Tamara had a multitude of cares. She had become possessed by a firm and undeviating thought to bury her friend despite all circumstances, in the way that nearest friends are buried—in a Christian manner, with all the sad solemnity of the burial of secular persons.

She belonged to the number of those strange persons who underneath an external indolent calmness, careless taciturnity, egotistical withdrawal into one's self, conceal within them unusual energy; always as though slumbering with half an eye, guarding itself from unnecessary expenditure; but ready in one moment to become animated and to rush forward without reckoning the obstacles.

At twelve o'clock she descended in a cab into the old town; rode through it into a little narrow street giving out upon a square where fairs were held; and stopped near a rather dirty tea-room, having ordered the cabby to wait. In the room she made inquiries of a boy, red-haired, with a badger hair-cut and the parting slicked down with butter, if Senka the Depot had not come here? The serving lad, who, judging by his refined and gallant readiness, had already known Tamara for a long time, answered that "Nohow, ma'am; they—Semen Ignatich—had not been in yet, and probably would not be here soon seein' as how yesterday they had the pleasure of going on a spree at the Transvaal, and had played at billiards until six in the morning; and that now they, in all probabilities, are at home, in the Half Way House rooms, and if the young lady will give the word, then it's possible to hop over to them this here minute."

Tamara asked for paper and pencil, and wrote a few words right on the spot. Then she gave the note to the waiter, together with a half-rouble piece for a tip, and rode away.

The following visit was to the artiste Rovinskaya, living, as Tamara had known even before, in the city's most aristocratic hotel—Europe—where she occupied several rooms in a consecutive suite. To obtain an interview with the singer was not very easy: the doorman below said that it looked as if Ellena Victorovna was not at home; while her own personal maid, who came out in answer to Tamara's knocking, declared that madam had a headache, and that she was not receiving any one. Again Tamara was compelled to write on a piece of paper:

"I come to you from her who once, in a house which is not spoken of loudly, cried, standing before you on her knees, after you had sung the ballad of Dargomyzhsky. Your kind treatment of her was so splendid. Do you remember? Do not fear—she has no need of any one's help now: yesterday she died. But you can do one very important deed in her memory, which will be almost no trouble to you at all. While I—am that very person who permitted herself to say a few bitter truths to the baroness T—, who was then with you; for which truths I am remorseful and apologize even now."

"Hand this over!" she ordered the chambermaid.

She returned after two minutes.

"The madam requests you. They apologize very much that they will receive you not fully dressed."

She escorted Tamara, opened a door before her and quietly shut it.

The great artiste was lying upon an enormous ottoman, covered with a beautiful Tekin rug and a multitude of little silk pillows, and soft cylindrical bolsters of tapestry. Her feet were wrapped up in silvery, soft fur. Her fingers, as usual, were adorned by a multiplicity of rings with emeralds, attracting the eyes by their deep and tender green.

The artiste was having one of her evil, black days to-day. Yesterday morning some misunderstandings with the management had arisen; while in the evening the public had received her not as triumphantly as she would have desired, or, perhaps, this had simply appeared so to her; while to-day in the newspaper the fool of a reviewer, who understood just as much of art as a cow does of astronomy, had praised up her rival, Titanova, in a big article. And so Ellena Victorovna had persuaded herself that her head was aching; that there was a nervous tic in her temples; and that her heart, time and again, seemed suddenly to fall through somewheres.

"How do you do, my dear!" she said, a trifle nasally, in a weak, wan voice, with pauses, as heroines on the stage speak when dying from love and from consumption. "Sit down here ... I am glad to see you ... Only don't be angry—I am almost dying from migraine, and from my miserable heart. Pardon my speaking with difficulty. I think I sang too much and tired my voice ..."

Rovinskaya, of course, had recalled both the mad escapade of that evening; and the striking, unforgettable face of Tamara; but now, in a bad mood, in the wearisome, prosaic light of an autumn day, this adventure appeared to her as unnecessary bravado; something artificial, imagined, and poignantly shameful. But she was equally sincere on that strange, night-marish evening when she, through the might of talent, had prostrated the proud Jennka at her feet, as well as now, when she recalled it with fatigue, indolence, and artistic disdain. She, as well as many distinguished artists, was always playing a role; was always not her own self, and always regarded her words, movements, actions, as though looking at herself from a distance with the eyes and feelings of the spectators.

She languidly raised from the pillow her narrow, slender, beautiful hand, and applied it to her forehead; and the mysterious, deep emeralds stirred as though alive and began to flash with a warm, deep sparkle.

"I just read in your note that this poor ... pardon me, her name has vanished out of my head..."

"Jennie."

"Yes, yes, thank you! I recall it now. She died? But from what?"

"She hanged herself ... yesterday morning, during the doctor's inspection..."

The eyes of the artiste, so listless, seemingly faded, suddenly opened, and, as through a miracle, grew animated and became shining and green, just like her emeralds; and in them were reflected curiosity, fear and aversion.

"Oh, my God! Such a dear, so original, handsome, so fiery ... Oh, the poor, poor soul! ... And the reason for this was? ..."

"You know ... the disease. She told you."

"Yes, yes ... I remember, I remember ... But to hang one's self! ... What horror! ... Why, I advised her to treat herself then. Medicine works miracles now. I myself know several people who absolutely ... well, absolutely cured themselves. Everybody in society knows this and receives them ... Ah, the poor little thing, the poor little thing! ..."

"And so I've come to you, Ellena Victorovna. I wouldn't have dared to disturb you, but I seem to be in a forest, and have no one to turn to. You were so kind then, so touchingly attentive, so tender to us ... I need only your advice and, perhaps, a little of your influence, your protection..."

"Oh, please, my dear! ... All I can do, I will ... Oh, my poor head! And then this horrible news. Tell me, in what way can I be of assistance to you?"

"To confess, I don't know even myself yet," answered Tamara. "You see, they carried her away to an anatomical theatre ... But until they had made the protocol, until they made the journey—then the time for receiving had gone by also—in general I think that they have not had a chance to dissect her yet ... I'd like, if it's only possible, that she should not be touched. To-day is Sunday; perhaps they'll postpone it until to-morrow, and in the meanwhile something may be done for her..."

"I can't tell you, dear ... Wait! ... Haven't I some friend among the professors, in the medical world? ... I will look later in my memo-books. Perhaps we will succeed in doing something."

"Besides that," continued Tamara, "I want to bury her ... At my expense ... I was attached to her with all my heart during her life."

"I will help you with pleasure in this, materially..."

"No, no! ... A thousand thanks! ... I'll do everything myself. I would not hesitate to have recourse to your kind heart, but this ... —you will understand me— ... this is something in the nature of a vow, that a person gives to one's self and to the memory of a friend. The main difficulty is in how we may manage to bury her with Christian rites. She was, it seems, an unbeliever, or believed altogether poorly. And it's only by chance that I, also, will cross my forehead. But I don't want them to bury her just like a dog, somewhere beyond the enclosure of the cemetery; in silence, without words, without singing ... I don't know, will they permit burying her properly—with choristers, with priests? For that reason I'm asking you to assist me with your advice. Or, perhaps, you will direct me somewhere? ..."

Now the artiste had little by little become interested and was already beginning to forget about her fatigue, and migraine, and the consumptive heroine dying in the fourth act. She was already picturing the role of an intercessor, the beautiful figure of genius merciful to a fallen woman. This was original, extravagant, and at the same time so theatrically touching! Rovinskaya, like many of her confreres, did not let one day pass by—and, if it were possible, she would not have let pass even one hour—without standing out from the crowd, without compelling people to talk about her: to-day she would participate in a pseudo-patriotic manifestation, while to-morrow she would read from a platform, for the benefit of revolutionaries exiled to Siberia, inciting verses, full of fire and vengeance. She loved to sell flowers at carnivals, in riding academies; and to sell champagne at large balls. She would think up her little bon mots beforehand, which on the morrow would be caught up by the whole town. She desired that everywhere and always the crowd should look only at her, repeat her name, love her Egyptian, green eyes, her rapacious and sensuous mouth; her emeralds on the slender and nervous hands.

"I can't grasp it all properly at once," said she after a silence. "But if a person wants anything hard, he will attain it, and I want to fulfill your wish with all my soul. Stay, stay! ... I think a glorious thought is coming into my head ... For then, on that evening, if I mistake not, there was with us, beside the baroness and me..."

"I don't know them ... One of them walked out of the cabinet later than all of you. He kissed Jennie's hand and said, that if she should ever need him, he was always at her service; and gave her his card, but asked her not to show it to any strangers. But later all this passed off somehow and was forgotten. In some way I never found the time to ask Jennie who this man was; while yesterday I searched for the card but couldn't find it..."

"Allow me, allow me! ... I have recalled it!" the artiste suddenly became animated. "Aha!" exclaimed she, rapidly getting off the ottoman. "It was Ryazanov... Yes, yes, yes... The advocate Ernst Andreievich Ryazanov. We will arrange everything right away. That's a splendid thought!"

She turned to the little table upon which the telephone apparatus was standing, and rang:

"Central—18-35 please ... Thank you ... Hello! ... Ask Ernst Andreievich to the telephone ... The artiste Rovinskaya ... Thank you ... Hello! ... Is this you, Ernst Andreievich? Very well, very well, but now it isn't a matter of little hands. Are you free? ... Drop the nonsense! ... The matter is serious. Couldn't you come up to me for a quarter of an hour? ...No, no ... Yes ... Only as a kind and a clever man. You slander yourself ... Well, that's splendid, really ... Well, I am not especially well-dressed, but I have a justification—a fearful headache. No, a lady, a girl ... You will see for yourself, come as soon as possible ... Thanks! Au revior! ..."

"He will come right away," said Rovinskaya, hanging up the receiver. "He is a charming and awfully clever man. Everything is possible to him, even the almost impossible to man ... But in the meantime ... pardon me—your name?"

Tamara was abashed, but then smiled at herself:

"Oh, it isn't worth your disturbing yourself, Ellena Victorovna! Mon nomme de guerre is Tamara but just so—Anastasia Nikolaevna. It's all the same—call me even Tamara ... I am more used to it..."

"Tamara! ... That is so beautiful! ... So now, Mile. Tamara, perhaps you will not refuse to breakfast with me? Perhaps Ryazanov will also do so with us..."

"I have no time, forgive me."

"That's a great pity! ... I hope, some other time ... But, perhaps you smoke," and she moved toward her a gold case, adorned with an enormous letter E out of the same emeralds she adored.

Ryazanov came very soon.

Tamara, who had not examined him properly on that evening, was struck by his appearance. Tall of stature, almost of an athletic build, with a broad brow, like Beethoven's, tangled with artistically negligent black, grizzled hair; with the large fleshy mouth of the passionate orator; with clear, expressive, clever, mocking eyes—he had such an appearance as catches one's eyes among thousands—the appearance of a vanquisher of souls and a conqueror of hearts; deeply ambitious, not yet oversated with life; still fiery in love and never retreating before a beautiful indiscretion ... "If fate had not broken me up so," reflected Tamara, watching his movements with enjoyment, "then here's a man to whom I'd throw my life; jestingly, with delight, with a smile, as a plucked rose is thrown to the beloved..."

Ryazanov kissed Rovinskaya's hand, then with unconstrained simplicity exchanged greetings with Tamara and said:

"We are acquainted even from that mad evening, when you dumbfounded all of us with your knowledge of the French language, and when you spoke. That which you said was, between us, paradoxical; but then, how it was said! ... To this day I remember the tone of your voice, so warm, expressive ... And so, Ellena Victorovna," he turned to Rovinskaya again, sitting down on a small, low chair without a back, "in what can I be of use to you? I am at your disposal."

Rovinskaya, with a languid air, again applied the tips of her fingers to her temples.

"Ah, really, I am so upset, my dear Ryazanov," said she, intentionally extinguishing the sparkle of her magnificent eyes, "and then, my miserable head ... May I trouble you to pass me the pyramidon what-not from that table ... Let Mile. Tamara tell you everything ... I can not, I am not able to ... This is so horrible! ..."

Tamara briefly, lucidly, narrated to Ryazanov all the sad history of Jennka's death; recalled also about the card left with Jennie; and also how the deceased had reverently preserved this card; and—in passing—about his promise to help in case of need.

"Of course, of course!" exclaimed Ryanzanov, when she had finished; and at once began pacing the room back and forth with big steps, ruffling and tossing back his picturesque hair through habit. "You are performing a magnificent, sincere, comradely action! That is good! ... That is very good! ... I am yours ... You say—a permit for the funeral ... Hm ... God grant me memory!..."

He rubbed his forehead with his palm.

"Hm ... hm ... If I'm not mistaken—Monocanon, rule one hundred seventy ... one hundred seventy ... eight ... Pardon me, I think I remember it by heart ... Pardon me! ... Yes, so! 'If a man slayeth himself, he shall not be chanted over, nor shall a mass be said for him, unless he were greatly astonied, that is, to wit, out of his mind'... Hm ... See St. Timothy Alexandrine ... And so, my dear miss, the first thing ... You say, that she was taken down from the noose by your doctor—i.e., the official city doctor ... His name? ..."

"Klimenko."

"It seems I've met him somewheres ... All right ... Who is the district inspector in your precinct station?"

"Kerbesh."

"Aha, I know ... Such a strong, virile fellow, with a red beard in a fan ... Yes?"

"Yes, that is he."

"I know him very well! There, now, is somebody that a sentence to hard labour is hankering after ... Some ten times he fell into my hands; and always, the skunk, gave me the slip somehow. Slippery, just like an eel-pout ... We will have to slip him a little present. Well, now! And then the anatomical theatre ... When do you want to bury her?"

"Really, I don't know ... I would like to do it as soon as possible ... if possible, to-day."

"Hm ... To-day ... I don't vouch for it—we will hardly manage it ... But here is my memorandum book. Well, take even this page, where are my friends under the letter T—just write the very same way: Tamara, and your address. In two hours I will give you an answer. Does that suit you? But I repeat again, that probably you will have to postpone the burial till to-morrow ... Then—pardon my unceremoniousness—is money needed, perhaps?"

"No, thank you!" refused Tamara. "I have money. Thanks for your interest! ... It's time for me to be going. I thank you with all my heart, Ellen Victorovna! ..."

"Then expect it in two hours," repeated Ryazanov, escorting her to the door.

Tamara did not at once ride away to the house. She turned into a little coffee-house on Catholicheskaya Street on the way. There Senka the Depot was waiting for her—a gay fellow with the appearance of a handsome Tzigan; not black—but blue-haired; black-eyed, with yellow whites; resolute and daring in his work; the pride of local thieves—a great celebrity in their world, the first leader of experience, and a constant, all-night gamester.

He stretched out his hand to her, without getting up. But in the way in which he so carefully, with a certain force, seated her in her place could be seen a broad, good-natured endearment.

"How do you do, Tamarochka! Haven't seen you in a long time—I grew weary ... Do you want coffee?"

"No! Business first ... To-morrow we bury Jennka ... She hanged herself..." "Yes, I read it in a newspaper," carelessly drawled out Senka through his teeth. "What's the odds? ..."

"Get fifty roubles for me at once."

"Tamarochka, my sweetheart—I haven't a kopeck! ..."

"I'm telling you—get them!" ordered Tamara, imperiously, but without getting angry.

"Oh, my Lord! ... Yours, now, I didn't touch, like I promised; but then, it's Sunday ... The savings banks are closed..."

"Let them! ... Hock the savings book! In general, it's up to you!"

"Why do you need this, my dearie?"

"Isn't it all the same to you, you fool? ... For the funeral."

"Oh! Well, all right then!" sighed Senka. "Then I'd best bring it to you myself in the evening ... Right, Tamarochka? ... It's so very hard for me to stand it without you! Oh, my dearie, how I'd kiss and kiss you; I wouldn't let you close your eyes! ... Shan't I come? ..."

"No, no! ... You do as I ask you, Senechka ... Give in to me. But you mustn't come—I'm housekeeper now."

"Well, what d'you know about that! ..." drawled out the astonished Senka and even whistled.

"Yes. And don't you come to me in the meantime. But afterwards, afterwards, sweetheart, whatever you desire ... There will be an end to everything soon!"

"Oh, if you wouldn't make me suffer so! Wind things up as soon as you can!"

"And I will wind 'em up! Wait one little week more, dearie! Did you get the powders?"

"The powders are a trifle!" discontentedly answered Senka. "And it isn't powders at all, but pills."

"And you're sure when you say that they'll dissolve at once in water?"

"Sure, I saw it myself."

"But he won't die? Listen, Senya: he won't die? Is that right?..."

"Nothing will happen to him ... He'll only snooze for a while ... Oh, Tamara!" exclaimed he in a passionate whisper; and even suddenly stretched himself hard from an unbearable emotion, so that his joints cracked. "Finish it, for God's sake, as soon as possible! ... Let's do the trick and—bye-bye! Wherever you want to go to, sweet-heart! I am all at your will: if you want to, we start off for Odessa; if you want to—abroad. Finish it up as soon as possible! ..."

"Soon, soon..."

"You just wink at me, and I'm all ready ... with powders, with instruments, with passports ... And then—choo-choo! The machine is off! Tamarochka! My angel! ... My precious, my sparkler! ..."

And he, always restrained, having forgotten that he could be seen by strangers, already wanted to embrace and hug Tamara to himself.

"Now, now!" ... rapidly and deftly, like a cat, Tamara jumped off the chair. "Afterwards ... afterwards, Senechka, afterwards, little dearie! ... I'll be all yours—there won't be any denial, nor forbiddance. I'll myself make you weary of me ... Good-bye, my little silly!"

And with a quick movement of her hand having rumpled up his black curls, she hastily went out of the coffee-house.

CHAPTER VIII.

On the next day, on Monday, toward ten o'clock in the morning, almost all the inmates of the house—formerly Madam Shaibes', but now Emma Edwardovna Titzner's—rode off in cabs to the centre of the city, to the anatomical theatre—all, except the far-sighted, much-experienced Henrietta; the cowardly and insensible Ninka; and the feeble-minded Pashka, who for two days now had not gotten up from her bed, kept silent, and to questions directed at her answered by a beatific, idiotical smile and with some sort of inarticulate animal lowing. If she were not given to eat, she would not even ask; but if food were brought, she would eat with greediness, right with her hands. She became so slovenly and forgetful, that it was necessary to remind her of certain necessary functions in order to avoid unpleasantness. Emma Edwardovna did not send out Pashka to her steady guests, who asked for Pashka every day. Even before, she had had such periods of a detriment of consciousness; however, they had not lasted long, and Emma Edwardovna in any case determined to tide it over: Pashka was a veritable treasure for the establishment, and its truly horrible victim.

The anatomical theatre represented a long, one-storied, dark-gray building, with white frames around the windows and doors. There was in its very exterior something low, pressed down, receding into the ground, almost weird. The girls one after the other stopped near the gates and timidly passed through the yard into the chapel; nestled down at the other end of the yard, in a corner, painted over in the same dark gray colour, with white frame-work.

The door was locked. It was necessary to go after the watchman. Tamara with difficulty sought out a bald, ancient old man, grown over as though with bog moss by entangled gray bristles; with little rheumy eyes and an enormous, reddish, dark-blue granulous nose, on the manner of a cookie.

He unlocked the enormous hanging lock, pushed away the bolt and opened the rusty, singing door. The cold, damp air together with the mixed smell of the dampness of stones, frankincense, and dead flesh breathed upon the girls. They fell back, huddling closely into a timorous flock. Tamara alone went after the watchman without wavering.

It was almost dark in the chapel. The autumn light penetrated scantily through the little, narrow prison-like window, barred with an iron grating. Two or three images without chasubles, dark and without visages, hung upon the walls. Several common board coffins were standing right on the floor, upon wooden carrying shafts. One in the middle was empty, and the taken-off lid was lying alongside.

"What sort is yours, now?" asked the watchman hoarsely and took some snuff. "Do you know her face or not?"

"I know her."

"Well, then, look! I'll show them all to you. Maybe this one? ..."

And he took the lid off one of the coffins, not yet fastened down with nails. A wrinkled old woman, dressed any old way in her tatters, with a swollen blue face, was lying there. Her left eye was closed; while the right was staring and gazing immovably and frightfully, having already lost its sparkle and resembling mica that had lain for a long time.

"Not this one, you say? Well, look ... Here's more for you!" said the watchman; and one after the other, opening the lids, exhibited the decedents—all, probably, the poorest of the poor: picked up on the streets, intoxicated, crushed, maimed and mutilated, beginning to decompose. Certain ones had already begun to show on their hands and faces bluish-green spots, resembling mould—signs of putrefaction. One man, without a nose, with an upper hare-lip cloven in two, had worms, like little white dots, swarming upon his sore-eaten face. A woman who had died from hydropsy, reared like a whole mountain from her board couch, bulging out the lid.

All of them had been hastily sewn up after autopsy, repaired, and washed by the moss-covered watchman and his mates. What affair was it of theirs if, at times, the brain got into the stomach; while the skull was stuffed with the liver and rudely joined with the help of sticking plaster to the head? The watchmen had grown used to everything during their night-marish, unlikely, drunken life; and, by the bye, almost never did their voiceless clients prove to have either relatives or acquaintances...

A heavy odour of carrion—thick, cloying, and so viscid that to Tamara it seemed as though it was covering all the living pores of her body just like glue—stood in the chapel.

"Listen, watchman," asked Tamara, "what's this crackling under my feet all the time?"

"Crack-ling?" the watchman questioned her over again, and scratched himself, "why, lice, it must be," he said indifferently. "It's fierce how these beasties do multiply on the corpseses! ... But who you lookin' for—man or woman?"

"A woman," answered Tamara.

"And that means that all these ain't yours?"

"No, they're all strangers."

"There, now! ... That means I have to go to the morgue. When did they bring her, now?"

"On Saturday, grandpa," and Tamara at this got out her purse. "Saturday, in the daytime. There's something for tobacco for you, my dear sir!"

"That's the way! Saturday, you say in the daytime? And what did she have on?"

"Well, almost nothing; a little night blouse, an underskirt ... both the one and the other white."

"So-o! That must be number two hundred and seventeen ... How is she called, now? ..."

"Susannah Raitzina."

"I'll go and see—maybe she's there. Well, now, mam'selles," he turned to the young ladies, who were dully huddling in the doorway, obstructing the light. "Which of you are the braver? If your friend came the day before yesterday, then that means that she's now lying in the manner that the Lord God has created all mankind—that is, without anything ... Well, who of you will be the bolder? Which two of you will come? She's got to be dressed..."

"Well, now, you go, Manka," Tamara ordered her mate, who, grown chill and pale from horror and aversion, was staring at the dead with widely open, limpid eyes. "Don't be afraid, you fool—I'll go with you! Who's to go, if not you?

"Well, am I ... well, am I? ..." babbled Little White Manka with barely moving lips. "Let's go. It's all the same to me..."

The morgue was right here, behind the chapel—a low, already entirely dark basement, into which one had to descend by six steps.

The watchman ran off somewhere, and returned with a candle-end and a tattered book. When he had lit the candle, the girls saw a score of corpses that were lying directly on the stone floor in regular rows—extended, yellow, with faces distorted by pre-mortal convulsions, with skulls split open, with clots of blood on their faces, with grinning teeth.

"Right away ... right away..." the watchman was saying, guiding his finger over the headings. "The day before yesterday ... that means, on Saturday ... on Saturday ... What did you say her name was, now?"

"Raitzina, Susannah," answered Tamara.

"Rai-tzina Susannah ..." said the watchman, just as though he were singing, "Raitzina, Susannah. Just as I said. Two hundred seventeen." Bending over the dead and illuminating them with the guttered and dripping candle-end, he passed from one to another. Finally he stopped before a corpse, upon whose foot was written in ink, in large black figures: 217.

"Here's the very same one! Let me, I'll carry her out into the little corridor and run after her stuff ... Wait a while! ..."

Grunting, but still with an ease amazing in one of his age, he lifted up the corpse of Jennka by the feet, and threw it upon his back with the head down, as though it were a carcass of meat, or a bag of potatoes.

It was a trifle lighter in the corridor; and, when the watchman had lowered his horrible burden to the floor, Tamara for a moment covered her face with her hands, while Manka turned away and began to cry.

"If you need anything, say so," the watchman was instructing them. "If you want to dress the deceased as is fitting, then we can get everything that's required—cloth of gold, a little wreath, a little image, a shroud, gauze—we keep everything ... You can buy a thing or two in, clothing ... Slippers, too, now..."

Tamara gave him money and went out into the air, letting Manka go in front of her.

After some time two wreaths were brought; one from Tamara, of asters and georginas with an inscription in black letters upon a white ribbon: "To Jennie from a friend;" the other was from Ryazanov, all of red flowers; upon its red ribbon stood in gold characters: "Through suffering shall we be purified." He also sent a short little note, expressing commiseration and apologizing for not being able to come, as he was occupied with an undeferrable business meeting.

Then came the singers who had been invited by Tamara—fifteen men from the very best choir in the city.

The precentor, in a gray overcoat and a gray hat, all gray, somehow, as though covered with dust, but with long, straight moustaches, like a military person's, recognized Verka; opened his eyes wide in astonishment, smiled slightly and winked at her. Two or three times a month, and sometimes even oftener, he visited Yamskaya Street with ecclesiastical academicians of his acquaintance, just the same precentors as he, and some psalmists; and having usually made a full review of all the establishments, always wound up with the house of Anna Markovna, where he invariably chose Verka.

He was a merry and sprightly man; danced in a lively manner, in a frenzy; and executed such figures during the dances that all those present just melted from laughter.

Following the singers came the two-horsed catafalque, that Tamara had hired; black, with white plumes, and seven torch-bearers along with it. They also brought a white, glazed brocade coffin; and a pedestal for it, stretched over with black calico. Without hurrying, with habitually deft movements, they put away the deceased into the coffin; covered her face with gauze; curtained off the corpse with cloth of gold, and lit the candles—one at the head and two at the feet.

Now, in the yellow, trembling light of the candles, the face of Jennka became more clearly visible. The lividness had almost gone off it, remaining only here and there on the temples, on the nose, and between the eyes, in party-coloured, uneven, serpentine spots. Between the parted dark lips slightly glimmered the whiteness of the teeth, and the tip of the bitten tongue was still visible. Out of the open collar of the neck, which had taken on the colour of old parchment, showed two stripes: one dark—the mark of the rope; another red—the sign of the scratch, inflicted by Simeon during the encounter—just like two fearful necklaces. Tamara approached and with a safety pin pinned together the lace on the collar, at the very chin.

The clergy came: a little gray priest in gold spectacles, in a skull-cap; a lanky, tall, thin-haired deacon with a sickly, strangely dark and yellow face, as though of terra-cotta; and a sprightly, long-skirted psalmist, animatedly exchanging on his way some gay, mysterious signs with his friends among the singers.

Tamara walked up to the priest:

"Father," she asked, "how will you perform the funeral service; all together or each one separate?"

"We perform the funeral service for all of them conjointly," answered the priest, kissing the stole, and extricating his beard and hair out of its slits. "Usually, that is. But by special request, and by special agreement, it's also possible to do it separately. What death did the deceased undergo?"

"She's a suicide, father."

"Hm ... a suicide? ... But do you know, young person, that by the canons of the church there isn't supposed to be any funeral service ... there ought not to be any? Of course, there are exceptions—by special intercession..."

"Right here, father, I have certificates from the police and from the doctor ... She wasn't in her right mind ... in a fit of insanity..."

Tamara extended to the priest two papers, sent her the evening before by Ryazanov, and on top of them three bank-notes of ten roubles each. "I would beg of you, father, to do everything fitting—Christian like. She was a splendid being, and suffered a very great deal. And won't you be so kind—go along with her to the cemetery, and there hold one more little mass..."

"It's all right for me to go along with her to the cemetery, but in the cemetery itself I have no right to hold service—there is a clergy of their own ... And also here's how, young person; in view of the fact that I'll have to return once more after the rest, won't you, now ... add another little ten-spot."

And having taken the money from Tamara's hand, the priest blessed the thurible, which had been brought up by the psalmist, and began to walk around the body of the deceased with thurification. Then, having stopped at her head, he in a meek, wontedly sad voice, uttered:

"Blessed is our God. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end!"

The psalmist began pattering: Holy God, Most Holy Trinity and Our Father poured out like peas.

Quietly, as though confiding some deep, sad, occult mystery, the singers began in a rapid, sweet recitative: "With Thy blessed saints in glory everlasting, the soul of this Thy servant save, set at rest; preserving her in the blessed life, as Thou hast loving kindness for man."

The psalmist distributed the candles; and they with warm, soft, living little flames, one after the other, were lit in the heavy, murky air, tenderly and transparently illuminating the faces of the women.

Harmoniously the mournful melody flowed forth, and like the sighs of aggrieved angels sounded the great words:

"Rest, oh God, this Thy servant and establish her in Heaven, wherein the faces of the just and the saints of the Lord shine like unto lights; set at rest this Thy servant who hath fallen asleep, contemning all her trespasses."

Tamara was listening intently to the long familiar, but now long unheard words, and was smiling bitterly. The passionate, mad words of Jennka came back to her, full of such inescapable despair and unbelief ... Would the all-merciful, all-gracious Lord forgive or would He not forgive her foul, fumy, embittered, unclean life? All-Knowing—can it be that Thou wouldst repulse her—the pitiful rebel, the involuntary libertine; a child that had uttered blasphemies against Thy radiant, holy name? Thou—Benevolence, Thou—our Consolation!

A dull, restrained wailing, suddenly passing into a scream, resounded in the chapel. "Oh, Jennechka!" This was Little White Manka, standing on her knees and stuffing her mouth with her handkerchief, beating about in tears. And the remaining mates, following her, also got down upon their knees; and the chapel was filled with sighs, stifled lamentations and sobbings ...

"Thou alone art deathless, Who hast created and made man; out of the dust of the earth were we made, and unto the same dust shall we return; as Thou hast ordained me, creating me and saying unto me, dust thou art and unto dust shalt thou return."

Tamara was standing motionless and with an austere face that seemed turned to stone. The light of the candle in thin gold spirals shone in her bronze-chestnut hair; while she could not tear her eyes away from the lines of Jennka's moist, yellow forehead and the tip of her nose, which were visible to Tamara from her place.

"Dust thou art and unto dust shalt thou return ..." she was mentally repeating the words of the canticles. "Could it be that that would be all; only earth alone and nothing more? And which is better: nothing, or even anything at all—even the most execrable—but merely to be existing?"

And the choir, as though affirming her thoughts, as though taking away from her the last consolation, was uttering forlornly:

"And all mankind may go..."

They sang Eternal Memory through, blew out the candles, and the little blue streams spread in the air, blue from frankincense. The priest read through the farewell prayer; and afterwards, in the general silence, scooped up some sand with the little shovel handed to him by the psalmist, and cast it cross-wise upon the corpse, on top of the gauze. And at this he was uttering great words, filled with the austere, sad inevitability of a mysterious universal law: "The world is the Lord's, and its fulfillment the universe, and all that dwelleth therein."

The girls escorted their dead mate to the very cemetery. The road thither intersected the very entrance to Yamskaya Street. It would have been possible to turn to the left through it, and that would have been almost half as short; but dead people were not usually carried through Yamskaya.

Nevertheless, out of almost all the doors their inmates poured out towards the cross roads, in whatever they had on: in slippers upon bare feet, in night gowns, with kerchiefs upon their heads; they crossed themselves, sighed, wiped their eyes with their handkerchiefs and the edges of their jackets.

The weather cleared up ... The cold sun shone brightly from a cold sky of radiant blue enamel; the last grass showed its green, the withered leaves on the trees glowed, showing their pink and gold ... And in the crystal clear, cold air solemnly, and mournfully reverberated the sonorous sounds: "Holy God, Holy Almighty, Holy Everliving, have mercy upon us!" And with what flaming thirst for life, not to be satiated by aught; with what longing for the momentary—transient like unto a dream—joy and beauty of being; with what horror before the eternal silence of death, sounded the ancient refrain of John Damascene!

Then a brief requiem at the grave, the dull thud of the earth against the lid of the coffin ... a small fresh hillock ...

"And here's the end!" said Tamara to her comrades, when they were left alone. "Oh, well, girls—an hour earlier, an hour later! ... I'm sorry for Jennka! ... Horribly sorry! ... We won't ever find such another. And yet, my children, it's far better for her in her pit than for us in ours ... Well, let's cross ourselves for the last time—and home! ..."

And when they all were already nearing their house, Tamara suddenly uttered pensively the strange, ominous words:

"And we won't be long together without her: soon we will be scattered, by the wind far and wide. Life is good! ... Look: there's the sun, the blue sky ... How pure the air is ... Cobwebs are floating—it's Indian summer ... How good it is in this world! ... Only we alone—we wenches—are wayside rubbish."

The girls started off on their journey. But suddenly from somewhere on the side, from behind a monument, a tall sturdy student detached himself. He caught up with Liubka and softly touched her sleeve. She turned around and beheld Soloviev. Her face instantaneously turned pale, her eyes opened wide and her lips began to tremble.

"Go away!" she said quietly, with infinite hatred.

"Liuba ... Liubochka ..." Soloviev began to mumble. "I searched ... searched for you ... I ... Honest to God, I'm not like that one ... like Lichonin ... I'm in earnest ... even right now, even to-day.

"Go away!" still more quietly pronounced Liubka.

"I'm serious ... I'm serious ... I'm not trifling, I want to marry..."

"Oh, you creature!" suddenly squealed out Liubka, and quickly, hard, peasant-like, hit Soloviev on the cheek with her palm.

Soloviev stood a little while, slightly swaying. His eyes were like those of a martyr ... The mouth half-open, with mournful creases at the sides.

"Go away! Go away! I can't bear to look at all of you!" Liubka was screaming with rage. "Hangmen, swine!"

Soloviev unexpectedly covered his face with his palms and went back, without knowing his way, with uncertain steps, like one drunk.

CHAPTER IX.

And in reality, the words of Tamara proved to be prophetic: since the funeral of Jennie not more than two weeks had passed, but during this brief space of time so many events burst over the house of Emma Edwardovna as do not befall sometimes even in half a decade.

On the very next day they had to send off to a charitable institution—into a lunatic asylum—the unfortunate Pashka, who had fallen completely into feeble-mindedness. The doctors said that there was no hope of her ever improving. And in reality, as they had placed her in the hospital on the floor, upon a straw mattress, so did she remain upon it without getting up from it to her very death; submerging more and more into the black, bottomless abyss of quiet feeble-mindedness; but she died only half a year later, from bed-sores and infection of the blood.

The next turn was Tamara's.

For about half a month she fulfilled the duties of a housekeeper, was all the time unusually active, energetic; and somehow unwontedly wound up with that inner something of her own, which was so strongly fomenting within her. On a certain evening she vanished, and did not return at all to the establishment...

The matter of fact was, that in the city she had carried on a protracted romance with a certain notary—an elderly man, sufficiently rich, but exceedingly niggardly. Their acquaintance had been scraped up yet a year back, when they had been by chance travelling together on the same steamer to a suburban monastery, and had begun a conversation. The clever, handsome Tamara; her enigmatic, depraved smile; her entertaining conversation; her modest manner of deporting herself, had captivated the notary. She had even then marked down for herself this elderly man with picturesque gray hair, with seigniorial manners; an erstwhile jurisconsult and a man of good family. She did not tell him about her profession—it pleased her rather to mystify him. She only hazily, in a few words, hinted at the fact that she was a married lady of the middle class; that she was unfortunate in domestic life, since her husband was a gambler and a despot; and that even by fate she was denied such a consolation as children. At parting she refused to pass an evening with the notary, and did not want to meet him; but then she allowed him to write to her—general delivery, under a fictitious name. A correspondence commenced between them, in which the notary flaunted his style and the ardency of his feelings, worthy of the heroes of Paul Bourget. She maintained the same withdrawn, mysterious tone.

Then, being touched by the entreaties of the notary for a meeting, she made an appointment in Prince Park; was charming, witty, and languishing; but refused to go with him anywhere.

So she tortured her adorer and skillfully inflamed within him the last passion, which at times is stronger and more dangerous than first love. Finally, this summer, when the family of the notary had gone abroad, she decided to visit his rooms; and here for the first time gave herself up to him with tears, with twinges of her conscience, and at the same time with such ardour and tenderness, that the poor secretary lost his head completely—was plunged entirely into that senile love, which no longer knows either reason or retrospect; which compels a man to lose the last thing—the fear of appearing ridiculous.

Tamara was very sparing of her meetings. This inflamed her impatient friend still more. She consented to receiving from him bouquets of flowers, a modest breakfast in a suburban restaurant; but indignantly refused all expensive presents, and bore herself so skillfully and subtly, that the notary never got up the courage to offer her money. When he once stammered out something about a separate apartment and other conveniences, she looked him in the eyes so intently, haughtily, and sternly, that he, like a boy, turned red in his picturesque gray hairs, and kissed her hands, babbling incoherent apologies.

So did Tamara play with him, and feel the ground more and more under her. She already knew now on what days the notary kept in his fireproof iron safe especially large sums. However, she did not hurry, fearing to spoil the business through clumsiness or prematurity.

And so right now this long expected day arrived; a great contractors' fair had just ended, and all the notaries' offices were transacting deals for enormous suras every day. Tamara knew that the notary usually carried off the money to the bank on Saturdays, in order to be perfectly free on Sunday. And for that reason on Friday the notary received the following letter:

"My dear, my adored King Solomon! Thy Shoilamite, thy girl of the vineyard, greets thee with burning kisses ... Dear, to-day is a holiday for me, and I am infinitely happy. To-day I am free, as well as you. HE has gone away to Homel for twenty-four hours on business matters, and I want to pass all the evening and ALL the night in your place. Ah, my beloved! All my life I am ready to pass on my knees before thee. I do not want to go anywhere. The suburban road-houses and cabarets have bored me long ago. I want you, only you ... you ... you alone. Await me, then, in the evening, my joy, about ten-eleven-o'clock! Prepare a great quantity of cold white wine, a canteloupe, and sugared chestnuts. I am burning, I am dying from desire! It seems to me, I will tire you out! I can not wait! My head is spinning around, my face burning, and my hands as cold as ice. I embrace you. Thy Valentina."

That very same evening, about eleven o'clock, she artfully, through conversation, led the notary into showing her his fireproof safe; playing upon his odd, pecuniary vanity. Rapidly gliding with her glance over the shelves and the movable boxes, Tamara turned away with a skillfully executed yawn and said:

"Fie, what a bore!"

And, having embraced the notary's neck, she whispered with her lips at his very ears, burning him with her hot breath:

"Lock up this nastiness, my treasure! Let's go! .... Let's go! ..."

And she was the first to go out into the dining room.

"Come here, now, Volodya!" she cried out from there. "Come quicker! I want wine and after that love, love, love without end! ... No! Drink it all, to the very bottom! Just as we will drain our love to the very bottom today!"

The notary clinked glasses with her and at one gulp drank off his glass. Then he drew in his lips and remarked:

"Strange ... The wine seems to be sort of bitter to-day."

"Yes!" agreed Tamara and looked attentively at her lover. "This wine is always the least bit bitter. For such is the nature of Rhine wines..."

"But to-day it's especially strong," said the notary. "No, thanks, my dear—I don't want any more!"

After five minutes he fell asleep, sitting in his chair; his head thrown back against its back, and his lower jaw hanging down. Tamara waited for some time and started to awaken him. He was without motion. Then she took the lit candle, and, having placed it on the window sill giving out upon the street, went out into the entrance hall and began to listen, until she heard light steps on the stairs. Almost without a sound she opened the door and let in Senka, dressed like a real gentleman, with a brand new leather hand-bag in his hands.

"Ready?" asked the thief in a whisper.

"He's sleeping," answered Tamara, just as quietly. "Look and here are the keys."

They passed together into the study with the fireproof safe. Having looked over the lock with the aid of a flashlight, Senka swore in a low voice:

"The devil take him, the old animal! ... I just knew that it would be a lock with a combination. Here you've got to know the letters ... It's got to be melted with electricity, and the devil knows how much time it'll take."

"It's not necessary," retorted Tamara hurriedly. "I know the word ... Pick it out: m-o-r-t-g-a-g-. Without the e."

After ten minutes they descended the steps together; went in purposely broken lines through several streets, hiring a cab to the depot only in the old city; and rode out of the city with irreproachable passports of citizens and landed proprietors—the Stavnitzkys, man and wife. For a long time nothing was heard of them until, a year later, Senka was caught in Moscow in a large theft, and gave Tamara away during the interrogation. They were both tried and sentenced to imprisonment.

Following Tamara came the turn of the naive, trusting, and amorous Verka. For a long time already she had been in love with a semi-military man, who called himself a civic clerk in the military department. His name was Dilectorsky. In their relations Verka was the adoring party; while he, like an important idol, condescendingly received the worship and the proffered gifts. Even from the end of summer Verka noticed that her beloved was becoming more and more cold and negligent; and, talking with her, was dwelling in thought somewhere far, far away. She tortured herself, was jealous, questioned him, but always received in answer some indeterminate phrases, some ominous hints at a near misfortune, at a premature grave ...

In the beginning of September he finally confessed to her, that he had embezzled official money, big money, something around three thousand; and that after five days he would be checked up, and that he, Dilectorsky, was threatened with disgrace, the court, and finally, hard labour ... Here the civic clerk of the military department burst into sobs, clasping his head, and exclaimed:

"My poor mother! ... What will become of her? She will not be able to sustain this degradation ... No! Death is a thousand times better than these hellish tortures of a being guilty of naught."

Although he was expressing himself, as always, in the style of the dime novels (in which way he had mainly enticed the trusting Verka), still, the theatrical thought of suicide, once arisen, no longer forsook him.

Somehow one day he was promenading for a long time with Verka in Prince Park. Already greatly devastated by autumn, this wonderful ancient park glistened and played with the magnificent tones of the foliage, blossoming out into colours: crimson, purple, lemon, orange and the deep cherry colour of old, settled wine; and it seemed that the cold air was diffusing sweet odours, like precious wine. And yet, a fine impress, a tender aroma of death, was wafted from the bushes, from the grass, from the trees.

Dilectorsky waxed tender; gave his feelings a free rein, was moved over himself, and began to weep. Verka wept a bit with him, too.

"To-day I will kill myself!" said Dilectorsky finally. "All is over! ..."

"My own, don't! ... My precious, don't! ..."

"It's impossible," answered Dilectorsky sombrely. "The cursed money! ... Which is dearer—honour or life?!"

"My dear..."

"Don't speak, don't speak, Annetta!" (He, for some reason, preferred to the common name of Verka the aristocratic Annetta, thought up by himself.) "Don't speak. This is decided!"

"Oh, if only I could help you!" exclaimed Verka woefully. "Why, I'd give my life away ... Every drop of blood! ..."

"What is life?" Dilectorsky shook his head with an actor's despondence. "Farewell, Annetta! ... Farewell! ..."

The girl desperately began to shake her head:

"I don't want it! ... I don't want it! ... I don't want it! ... Take me! ... I'll go with you too! ..."

Late in the evening Dilectorsky took a room in an expensive hotel. He knew, that within a few hours, perhaps minutes, he and Verka would be corpses; and for that reason, although he had in his pocket only eleven kopecks, all in all, he gave orders sweepingly, like a habitual, downright prodigal; he ordered sturgeon stew, double snipes, and fruits; and, in addition to all this, coffee, liqueurs and two bottles of frosted champagne. And he was in reality convinced that he would shoot himself; but thought of it somehow affectedly, as though admiring, a trifle from the side, his tragic role; and enjoying beforehand the despair of his relatives and the amazement of his fellow clerks. While Verka, when she had suddenly said that she would commit suicide with her beloved, had been immediately strengthened in this thought. And there was nothing fearful to Verka in this impending death. "Well, now, is it better to croak just so, under a fence? But here it's together with your dearie! At least a sweet death! ..." And she frantically kissed her clerk, laughed, and with dishevelled, curly hair, with sparkling eyes, was prettier than she had ever been.

The final triumphal moment arrived at last.

"You and I have both enjoyed ourselves, Annetta ... We have drained the cup to the bottom and now, to use an expression of Pushkin's, must shatter the goblet!" said Dilectorsky. "You do not repent, oh, my dear? ..."

"No, no! ..."

"Are you ready?"

"Yes!" whispered she and smiled.

"Then turn away to the wall and shut your eyes!"

"No, no, my dearest, I don't want it so! ... I don't want it! Come to me! There, so! Nearer, nearer.. Give me your eyes, I will be gazing into them. Give me your lips—I will be kissing you, while you... I am not afraid! ... Be braver! ... Kiss me harder! ..."

He killed her; and when he looked upon the horrible deed of his hands, he then suddenly felt a loathsome, abominable, abject fear. The half-naked body of Verka was still quivering on the bed. The legs of Dilectorsky gave in from horror; but the reason of a hypocrite, coward and blackguard kept vigil: he did still have spirit sufficient to stretch away at his side the skin over his ribs, and to shoot through it. And when he was falling, frantically crying out from pain, from fright, and from the thunder of the shot, the last convulsion was running through the body of Verka.

While two weeks after the death of Verka, the naive, sportful, meek, brawling Little White Manka perished as well. During one of the general, clamourous brawls, usual in the Yamkas, in an enormous affray, some one killed her, hitting her with a heavy empty bottle over the head. And the murderer remained undiscovered to the last.

So rapidly did events take place in the Yamkas, in the house of Emma Edwardovna; and well nigh not a one of its inmates escaped a bloody, foul or disgraceful doom.

The final, most grandiose, and at the same time most bloody calamity was the devastation committed on the Yamkas by soldiers.

Two dragoons had been short-changed in a rouble establishment, beaten up, and thrown out at night into the street. Tom to pieces, in blood, they returned to the barracks, where their comrades, having begun in the morning, were still finishing up their regimental holiday. And so, not half an hour passed, when a hundred soldiers burst into the Yamkas and began to wreck house after house. They were joined by an innumerable mob that gathered on the run—men of the golden squad[31], ragamuffins, tramps, crooks, souteneurs. The panes were broken in all the houses, and the grand pianos smashed to smithereens. The feather beds were ripped open and the down thrown out into the street; and yet for a long while after—for some two days—the countless bits of down flew and whirled over the Yamkas, like flakes of snow. The wenches, bare-headed, perfectly naked, were driven out into the street. Three porters were beaten to death. The rabble shattered, befouled, and rent into pieces all the silk and plush furniture of Treppel. They also smashed up all the neighbouring taverns and drink-shops, while they were at it.

[31] Zolotorotzi—a subtle euphemism for cleaners of cesspools and carters of the wealth contained therein.—trans.

The drunken, bloody, hideous slaughter continued for some three hours; until the arrayed military authorities, together with the fire company, finally succeeded in repulsing and scattering the infuriated mob. Two half-rouble establishments were set on fire, but the fire was soon put out. However, on the next day the tumult again flared up; this time already over the whole city and its environs. Altogether unexpectedly it took on the character of a Jewish pogrom, which lasted for three days, with all its horrors and miseries.

And a week after followed the order of the governor-general about the immediate shutting down of houses of prostitution, on the Yamkas as well as other streets of the city. The proprietresses were given only a week's time for the settlement of matters in connection with their property.

Annihilated, crushed, plundered; having lost all the glamour of their former grandeur; ludicrous and pitiful, the aged, faded proprietresses and fat-faced, hoarse housekeepers were hastily packing up their things. And a month after only the name reminded one of merry Yamskaya Street; of the riotous, scandalous, horrible Yamkas.

However, even the name of the street was soon replaced by another, more respectable one, in order to efface even the memory of the former unpardonable times.

And all these Henriettas-Horses, Fat Kitties, Lelkas-Polecats and other women—always naive and foolish, often touching and amusing, in the majority of cases deceived and perverted children,—spread through the big city, were dissolved within it. Out of them was born a new stratum of society—a stratum of the strolling, street prostitutes—solitaries. And about their life, just as pitiful and incongruous, but tinged by other interests and customs, the author of this novel—which he still dedicates to youths and mothers—will some time tell.

THE END