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Title: Yama (The Pit)

Author: Alexandra Kuprin

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YAMA [THE PIT]


Of this edition, intended for private circulation only, and
printed from type on Berkeley Antique laid paper, 950 copies have
been printed for America, and 550 for Great Britain. Also, 55
unnumbered copies, for the press.

This copy is Number 223





YAMA [THE PIT]

A NOVEL IN THREE PARTS

BY ALEXANDRA KUPRIN

TRANSLATED FROM THE RUSSIAN

BY BERNARD GUILBERT GUERNEY

"All the horror is in just this, that there is no horror ..."





AUTHOR'S DEDICATION


I know that many will find this novel immoral and indecent;
nevertheless, I dedicate it with all my heart to MOTHERS AND
YOUTHS--A. K.





TRANSLATOR'S DEDICATION


I dedicate the labour of translation, in all humility and
sincerity, to K. ANDRAE. B. G. G.





INTRODUCTION


"With us, you see," Kuprin makes the reporter Platonov, his
mouthpiece, say in Yama, "they write about detectives, about
lawyers, about inspectors of the revenue, about pedagogues, about
attorneys, about the police, about officers, about sensual ladies,
about engineers, about baritones--and really, by God, altogether
well--cleverly, with finesse and talent. But, after all, all these
people are rubbish, and their life is not life, but some sort of
conjured up, spectral, unnecessary delirium of world culture. But
there are two singular realities--ancient as humanity itself: the
prostitute and the moujik. And about them we know nothing, save
some tinsel, gingerbread, debauched depictions in literature..."

Tinsel, gingerbread, debauched depictions... Let us consider some
of the ways in which this monstrous reality has been approached by
various writers. There is, first, the purely sentimental:
Prevost's Manon Les caut. Then there is the slobberingly
sentimental: Dumas' Dame aux Camelias. A third is the
necrophilically romantic: Louys' Aphrodite. The fertile Balzac has
given us no less than two: the purely romantic, in his fascinating
portraits of the Fair Imperia; and the romantically realistic, in
his Splendeurs et Miseres des Courtisanes. Reade's Peg Woffington
may be called the literary parallel of the costume drama; Defoe's
Moll Flanders is honestly realistic; Zola's Nana is rabidly so.

There is one singular fact that must be noted in connection with
the vast majority of such depictions. Punk or bona roba, lorette
or drab--put her before an artist in letters, and, lo and behold
ye! such is the strange allure emanating from the hussy, that the
resultant portrait is either that of a martyred Magdalene, or, at
the very least, has all the enigmatic piquancy of a Monna Lisa...
Not a slut, but what is a hetaera; and not a hetaera, but what is
well-nigh Kypris herself! I know of but one depiction in all
literature that possesses the splendour of implacable veracity as
well as undiminished artistry; where the portrait is that of a
prostitute, despite all her tirings and trappings; a depiction
truly deserving to be designated a portrait: the portrait supreme
of the harlot eternal--Shakespeare's Cleopatra.

Furthermore, it will be observed that such depictions, for the
most part, are primarily portraits of prostitutes, and not
pictures of prostitution. It is also a singular fact that war,
another scourge has met with similar treatment. We have the
pretty, spotless grenadiers and cuirassiers of Meissonier in
plenty; Vereshchagin is still alone in the grim starkness of his
wind-swept, snow-covered battle-fields, with black crows wheeling
over the crumpled masses of gray...

And, curiously enough, it is another great Russian, Kuprin, who is
supreme--if not unique--as a painter of the universal scourge of
prostitution, per se; and not as an incidental background for
portraits. True, he may not have entirely escaped the strange
allure, aforementioned, of the femininity he paints; for
femininity--even though fallen, corrupt, abased, is still
femininity, one of the miracles of life, to Kuprin, the lover of
life. But, even if he may be said to have used too much of the oil
of sentimentality in mixing his colours for the portraits, his
portraits are subordinate to the background; and there his eye is
true and keen, his hand steady and unflinching, his colours and
brushwork unimpeachable. Whether, like his own Platonov--who may
be called to some extent an autobiographical figure, and many of
whose experiences are Kuprin's own--"came upon the brothel" and
gathered his material unconsciously, "without any ulterior
thoughts of writing, "we do not know, nor need we rummage in his
dirty linen, as he puts it. Suffice it to say here--to cite but
two instances--that almost anyone acquainted with Russia will tell
you the full name of the rich, gay, southern port city of K--;
that any Odessite will tell you that Treppel's is merely
transplanted, for fictional reasons, from his own city to K--...

Alexandre I. Kuprin was born in 1870; 1909 marked the twenty-fifth
anniversary of his literary activity. He attained his fame only
upon the publication of his amazing, epical novel, "The Duel"--
which, just like "YAMA," is an arraignment; an arraignment of
militaristic corruption. Russian criticism has styled him the poet
of life. If Chekhov was the Wunderkind of Russian letters, Kuprin
is its enfant terrible. His range of subjects is enormous; his
power of observation and his versatility extraordinary. Gambrinus
alone would justify his place among the literary giants of Europe.
Some of his picaresques, "THE INSULT," "HORSE-THIEVES," and "OFF
THE STREET"--the last in the form of a monologue--are sheer tours
de force. "Olessiya" is possessed of a weird, unearthly beauty;
"The Shulamite" is a prose-poem of antiquity. He deals with the
life of the moujik in "Back-woods" and "The Swamp"; of the Jews,
in "The Jewess" and "The Coward"; of the soldiers, in "The
Cadets," "The Interrogation," "The Night Watch," "Delirium"; of
the actors, in "How I Was an Actor" and "In Retirement." We have
circus life in "'Allez!'" "In The Circus," "Lolly," "The Clown"--
the last a one-act playlet; factory life, in "Moloch"; provincial
life, in "Small Fry"; bohemian life, in "Captain Ribnicov" and
"The River of Life"--which no one but Kuprin could have written.
There are animal stories and flower stories; stories for children
--and for neuropaths; one story is dedicated to a jockey; another
to a circus clown; a third, if I remember rightly, to a race-
horse... "Yama" created an enormous sensation upon the publication
of the first part in volume three of the "Sbornik Zemliya"--"The
Earth Anthology"--in 1909; the second part appeared in volume
fifteen, in 1914; the third, in volume sixteen, in 1915. Both the
original parts and the last revised edition have been followed in
this translation. The greater part of the stories listed above are
available in translations, under various titles; the list, of
course, is merely a handful from the vast bulk of the fecund
Kuprin's writings, nor is any group of titles exhaustive of its
kind. "The Star of Solomon," his latest collection of stories,
bears the imprint of Helsingfors, 1920.

It must not be thought, despite its locale, that Kuprin's "Yama"
is a picture of Russian prostitution solely; it is intrinsically
universal. All that is necessary is to change the kopecks into
cents, pennies, sous or pfennings; compute the versts into miles
or metres; Jennka may be Eugenie or Jeannette; and for Yama,
simply read Whitechapel, Montmartre, or the Barbary Coast. That is
why "Yama" is a "tremendous, staggering, and truthful book--a
terrific book." It has been called notorious, lurid--even
oleographic. So are, perhaps, the picaresques of Murillo, the
pictorial satires of Hogarth, the bizarreries of Goya...

The best introduction to "Yama," however, can be given in Kuprin's
own words, as uttered by the reporter Platonov. "They do write,"
he says, "... but it is all either a lie, or theatrical effects
for children of tender years, or else a cunning symbolism,
comprehensible only to the sages of the future. But the life
itself no one as yet has touched...

"But the material here is in reality tremendous, downright
crushing, terrible... And not at all terrible are the loud phrases
about the traffic in women's flesh, about the white slaves, about
prostitution being a corroding fester of large cities, and so on,
and so on... an old hurdy-gurdy of which all have tired! No,
horrible are the everyday, accustomed trifles; these business-
like, daily, commercial reckonings; this thousand-year-old science
of amatory practice; this prosaic usage, determined by the ages.
In these unnoticeable nothings are completely dissolved such
feelings as resentment, humiliation, shame. There remains a dry
profession, a contract, an agreement, a well-nigh honest petty
trade, no better, no worse than, say, the trade in groceries. Do
you understand, gentlemen, that all the horror is in just this--
that there is no horror! Bourgeois work days--and that is all...

"More awful than all awful words, a hundredfold more awful--is
some such little prosaic stroke or other as will suddenly knock
you all in a heap, like a blow on the forehead..."

It is in such little prosaic strokes; everyday, accustomed,
characteristic trifles; minute particles of life, that Kuprin
excels. The detailism which crowds his pages is like the stippling
of Whistler; or the enumerations of the Bible; or the chiselling
of Rodin, that endows the back of the Thinker with meaning.

"We all pass by these characteristic trifles indifferently, like
the blind, as though not seeing them scattered about under our
feet. But an artist will come, and he will look over them
carefully, and he will pick them up. And suddenly he will so
skillfully turn in the sun a minute particle of life, that we
shall all cry out: 'Oh, my God! But I myself--myself!--have seen
this with my own eyes. Only it simply did not enter my head to
turn my close attention upon it.' But our Russian artists of the
word--the most conscientious and sincere artists in the whole
world--for some reason have up to this time passed over
prostitution and the brothel. Why? Really, it is difficult for me
to answer that. Perhaps because of squeamishness, perhaps out of
pusillanimity, out of fear of being signalized as a pornographic
writer; finally from the apprehension that our gossiping criticism
will identify the artistic work of the writer with his personal
life and will start rummaging in his dirty linen. Or perhaps they
can find neither the time, nor the self-denial, nor the self-
possession to plunge in head first into this life and to watch it
right up close, without prejudice, without sonorous phrases,
without a sheepish pity, in all its monstrous simplicity and
everyday activity... That material... is truly unencompassable in
its significance and weightiness... The words of others do not
suffice--even though they be the most exact--even observations,
made with a little note-book and a bit of pencil, do not suffice.
One must grow accustomed to this life, without being cunningly
wise..."

"I believe, that not now, not soon--after fifty years or so--but
there will come a writer of genius, and precisely a Russian one,
who will absorb within himself all the burdens and all the
abominations of this life and will cast them forth to us in the
form of simple, fine, and deathlessly--caustic images. And we
shall all say: 'Why, now, we ourselves have seen and known all
this, but we could not even suppose that this is so horrible! In
this coming artist I believe with all my heart."

Kuprin is too sincere, too big, to have written this with himself
in mind; yet no reader of the scathing, searing arraignment called
"Yama," will question that the great, the gigantic Kuprin has
shown "the burdens and abominations" of prostitution, in "simple,
fine, and deathlessly-caustic images"; has shown that "all the
horror is in just this--that there is no horror..." For it is as a
pitiless reflection of a "singular," sinister reality that "Yama"
stands unsurpassed.

B. G. GUERNEY.

New York City, January, 1922.





TRANSLATOR'S NOTE.


A word must be said of Kuprin's style. He is by no means a purist;
his pages bristle with neologisms and foreign--or, rather,
outlandish--words; nor has he any hesitancy in adapting and
Russianizing such words. He coins words; he is, at times, actually
Borrowesque, and not only does he resort to colloquialisms and
slang, but to dialect, cant, and even actual argot. Therein is his
glory--and, perhaps, his weakness. Therefore, an attempt has been
made, wherever corruptions, slang, and so forth, appear in the
original, to render them through the nearest English equivalents.
While this has its obvious dubieties and disadvantages, any other
course would have smacked of prettification--a fate which such a
book as "Yama" surely does not deserve.





PART ONE





CHAPTER I.


A long, long time ago, long before the railroads, the stage-
drivers--both government and private--used to live, from
generation to generation, at the very farthest confine of a large
southern city. And that is why the entire region was called the
Yamskaya Sloboda--the Stage-drivers' Borough; or simply Yamskaya,
or Yamkas--Little Ditches, or, shorter still, Yama--The Pit. In
the course of time, when hauling by steam killed off
transportation by horses, the mettlesome tribe of the stage-
drivers little by little lost its boisterous ways and its brave
customs, went over into other occupations, fell apart and
scattered. But for many years--even up to this time--a shady
renown has remained to Yama, as of a place exceedingly gay, tipsy,
brawling, and in the night-time not without danger.

Somehow it came about of itself, that on the ruins of those
ancient, long-warmed nests, where of yore the rosy-cheeked,
sprightly wives of the soldiery and the plump widows of Yama, with
their black eyebrows, had secretly traded in vodka and free love,
there began to spring up wide-open brothels, permitted by the
authorities, regulated by official supervision and subject to
express, strict rules. Towards the end of the nineteenth century
both streets of Yama--Great Yamskaya and Little Yamskaya--proved
to be entirely occupied, on one side of the street as well as the
other, exclusively with houses of ill-fame. [Footnote: "Houses of
Suffrance"--i.e., Houses of the Necessary Evil.--Trans.] Of the
private houses no more than five or six were left, but even they
were taken up by public houses, beer halls, and general stores,
catering to the needs of Yama prostitution.

The course of life, the manners and customs, are almost identical
in all the thirty-odd establishments; the difference is only in
the charges exacted for the briefly-timed love, and consequently
in certain external minutiae as well: in the assortment of more or
less handsome women, in the comparative smartness of the costumes,
in the magnificence of the premises and the luxuriousness of the
furnishings.

The most chic establishment is that of Treppel, the first house to
the left upon entering Great Yamskaya. This is an old firm. Its
present owner bears an entirely different name, and fills the post
of an elector in the city council and is even a member of the city
board. The house is of two stories, green and white, built in the
debauched pseudo-Russian style a la Ropetovsky, with little
horses, carved facings, roosters, and wooden towels bordered with
lace-also of wood; a carpet with a white runner on the stairs; in
the front hall a stuffed bear, holding a wooden platter for
visiting cards in his out-stretched paws; a parquet floor in the
ballroom, heavy raspberry silk curtains and tulle on the windows,
along the walls white and gold chairs and mirrors with gilt
frames; there are two private cabinets with carpets, divans, and
soft satin puffs; in the bedrooms blue and rose lanterns, blankets
of raw silk stuff and clean pillows; the inmates are clad in low-
cut ball gowns, bordered with fur, or in expensive masquerade
costumes of hussars, pages, fisher lasses, school-girls; and the
majority of them are Germans from the Baltic provinces--large,
handsome women, white of body and with ample breasts. At Treppel's
three roubles are taken for a visit, and for the whole night, ten.

Three of the two-rouble establishments--Sophie Vassilievna's, The
Old Kiev, and Anna Markovna's--are somewhat worse, somewhat
poorer. The remaining houses on Great Yamskaya are rouble ones;
they are furnished still worse. While on Little Yamskaya, which is
frequented by soldiers, petty thieves, artisans, and drab folk In
general, and where fifty kopecks or less are taken for time,
things are altogether filthy and poor-the floor in the parlor is
crooked, warped, and full of splinters, the windows are hung with
pieces of red fustian; the bedrooms, just like stalls, are
separated by thin partitions, which do not reach to the ceiling,
and on the beds, on top of the shaken down hay-mattresses, are
scattered torn, spotted bed-sheets and flannel blankets, dark from
time, crumpled any old way, full of holes; the air is sour and
full of fumes, with a mixture of alcohol vapours and the smell of
human emanations; the women, dressed in rags of coloured printed
calico or in sailor costumes, are for the greater part hoarse or
snuffling, with noses half fallen through, with faces preserving
traces of yesterday's blows and scratches and naively bepainted
with the aid of a red cigarette box moistened with spit.

All the year round, every evening--with the exception of the last
three days of Holy Week and the night before Annunciation, when no
bird builds its nest and a shorn wench does not plait her braid--
when it barely grows dark out of doors, hanging red lanterns are
lit before every house, above the tented, carved street doors. It
is just like a holiday out on the street--like Easter. All the
windows are brightly lit up, the gay music of violins and pianos
floats out through the panes, cabmen drive up and drive off
without cease. In all the houses the entrance doors are opened
wide, and through them one may see from the street a steep
staircase with a narrow corridor on top, and the white flashing of
the many-facetted reflector of the lamp, and the green walls of
the front hall, painted over with Swiss landscapes. Till the very
morning hundreds and thousands of men ascend and descend these
staircases. Here everybody frequents: half-shattered, slavering
ancients, seeking artificial excitements, and boys-military cadets
and high-school lads--almost children; bearded paterfamiliases;
honourable pillars of society, in goldon spectacles; and newly-
weds, and enamoured bridegrooms, and honourable professors with
renowned names; and thieves, and murderers, and liberal lawyers;
and strict guardians of morals--pedagogues, and foremost writers--
the authors of fervent, impassioned articles on the equal rights
of women; and catchpoles, and spies, and escaped convicts, and
officers, and students, and Social Democrats, and hired patriots;
the timid and the brazen, the sick and the well, those knowing
woman for the first time, and old libertines frayed by all species
of vice; clear-eyed, handsome fellows and monsters maliciously
distorted by nature, deaf-mutes, blind men, men without noses,
with flabby, pendulous bodies, with malodorous breath, bald,
trembling, covered with parasites--pot-bellied, hemorrhoidal apes.
They come freely and simply, as to a restaurant or a depot; they
sit, smoke, drink, convulsively pretend to be merry; they dance,
executing abominable movements of the body imitative of the act of
sexual love. At times attentively and long, at times with gross
haste, they choose any woman they like and know beforehand that
they will never meet refusal. Impatiently they pay their money in
advance, and on the public bed, not yet grown cold after the body
of their predecessor, aimlessly commit the very greatest and most
beautiful of all universal mysteries--the mystery of the
conception of new life. And the women with indifferent readiness,
with uniform words, with practiced professional movements, satisfy
their desires, like machines--only to receive, right after them,
during the same night, with the very same words, smiles and
gestures, the third, the fourth, the tenth man, not infrequently
already biding his turn in the waiting room.

So passes the entire night. Towards daybreak Yama little by little
grows quiet, and the bright morning finds it depopulated,
spacious, plunged into sleep, with doors shut tightly, with
shutters fixed on the windows. But toward evening the women awaken
and get ready for the following night.

And so without end, day after day, for months and years, they live
a strange, incredible life in their public harems, outcast by
society, accursed by the family, victims of the social
temperament, cloacas for the excess of the city's sensuality, the
guardians of the honour of the family--four hundred foolish, lazy,
hysterical, barren women.





CHAPTER II.


Two in the afternoon. In the second-rate, two-rouble establishment
of Anna Markovna everything is plunged in sleep. The large square
parlor with mirrors in gilt frames, with a score of plush chairs
placed decorously along the walls, with oleograph pictures of
Makovsky's Feast of the Russian Noblemen, and Bathing, with a
crystal lustre in the middle, is also sleeping, and in the quiet
and semi-darkness it seems unwontedly pensive, austere, strangely
sad. Yesterday here, as on every evening, lights burned, the most
rollicking of music rang out, blue tobacco smoke swirled, men and
women careered in couples, shaking their hips and throwing their
legs on high. And the entire street shone on the outside with the
red lanterns over the street doors and with the light from the
windows, and it seethed with people and carriages until morning.

Now the street is empty. It is glowing triumphantly and joyously
in the glare of the summer sun. But in the parlor all the window
curtains are lowered, and for that reason it is dark within, cool,
and as peculiarly uninviting as the interiors of empty theatres,
riding academies and court buildings usually are in the middle of
the day.

The pianoforte glimmers dully with its black, bent, glossy side;
the yellow, old, time-eaten, broken, gap-toothed keys glisten
faintly. The stagnant, motionless air still retains yesterday's
odour; it smells of perfumes, tobacco, the sour dampness of a
large uninhabited room, the perspiration of unclean and unhealthy
feminine flesh, face-powder, boracic-thymol soap, and the dust of
the yellow mastic with which the parquet floor had been polished
yesterday. And with a strange charm the smell of withering swamp
grass is blended with these smells. To-day is Trinity. In
accordance with an olden custom, the chambermaids of the
establishment, while their ladies were still sleeping, had bought
a whole waggon of sedge on the market, and had strewn its long,
thick blades, that crunch underfoot, everywhere about--in the
corridors, in the private cabinets, in the drawing room. They,
also, had lit the lamps before all the images. The girls, by
tradition, dare not do this with their hands, which have been
denied during the night.

And the house-porter has adorned the house-entrance, which is
carved in the Russian style, with two little felled birch-trees.
And so with all the houses--the thin white trunks with their scant
dying verdure adorn the exterior near the stoops, bannisters and
doors.

The entire house is quiet, empty and drowsy. The chopping of
cutlets for dinner can be heard from the kitchen. Liubka, one of
the girls, barefooted, in her shift, with bare arms, not good-
looking, freckled, but strong and fresh of body, has come out into
the inner court. Yesterday she had had but six guests on time, but
no one had remained for the night with her, and because of that
she had slept her fill--splendidly, delightfully, all alone, upon
a wide bed. She had risen early, at ten o'clock, and had with
pleasure helped the cook scrub the floor and the tables in the
kitchen. Now she is feeding the chained dog Amour with the sinews
and cuttings of the meat. The big, rusty hound, with long
glistening hair and black muzzle, jumps up on the girl--with his
front paws, stretching the chain tightly and rattling in the
throat from shortness of breath, then, with back and tail
undulating all over, bends his head down to the ground, wrinkles
his nose, smiles, whines and sneezes from the excitement. But she,
teasing him with the meat, shouts at him with pretended severity:

"There, you--stupid! I'll--I'll give it to you! How dare you?"

But she rejoices with all her soul over the tumult and caresses of
Amour and her momentary power over the dog, and because she had
slept her fill, and passed the night without a man, and because of
the Trinity, according to dim recollections of her childhood, and
because of the sparkling sunny day, which it so seldom befalls her
to see.

All the night guests have already gone their ways. The most
business-like, quiet and workaday hour is coming on.

They are drinking coffee in the room of the proprietress. The
company consists of five people. The proprietress herself, in
whose name the house is registered, is Anna Markovna. She is about
sixty. She is very small of stature, but dumpy: she may be
visualized by imagining, from the bottom up, three soft,
gelatinous globes--large, medium and small, pressed into each
other without any interstices; this--her skirt, torso and head.
Strange, her eyes are a faded blue, girlish, even childish, but
the mouth is that of an old person, with a moist lower lip of a
raspberry colour, impotently hanging down. Her husband--Isaiah
Savvich--is also small, a grayish, quiet, silent little old man.
He is under his wife's thumb; he was doorkeeper in this very house
even at the time when Anna Markovna served here as housekeeper. In
order to be useful in some way, he has learned, through self-
instruction, to play the fiddle, and now at night plays dance
tunes, as well as a funeral march for shopmen far gone on a spree
and craving some maudlin tears.

Then, there are the two housekeepers--senior and junior. The
senior is Emma Edwardovna. She is a tall, full woman of forty-six,
with chestnut hair, and a fat goitre of three chins. Her eyes are
encircled with black rings of hemorrhoidal origin. The face
broadens out like a pear from the forehead down to the cheeks, and
is of an earthen colour; the eyes are small, black; the nose
humped, the lips sternly pursed; the expression of the face calmly
authoritative. It is no mystery to anyone in the house that in a
year or two Anna Markovna will go into retirement, and sell her
the establishment with all its rights and furnishings, when she
will receive part in cash, and part on terms--by promissory note.
Because of this the girls honour her equally with the proprietress
and fear her somewhat. Those who fall into error she beats with
her own hands, beats cruelly, coolly, and calculatingly, without
changing the calm expression of her face. Among the girls there is
always a favourite of hers, whom she tortures with her exacting
love and fantastic jealousy. And this is far harder than her
beatings.

The other one is called Zociya. She has just struggled out of the
ranks of the common girls. The girls, as yet, call her
impersonally, flatteringly and familiarly, "little housekeeper."
She is spare, spry, just a trifle squinting, with a rosy
complexion, and hair dressed in a little curly pompadour; she
adores actors--preferably stout comedians. Toward Emma Edwardovna
she is ingratiating.

The fifth person, finally, is the local district inspector,
Kerbesh. This is an athletic man; he is kind of bald, has a red
beard like a fan, vividly blue slumbrous eyes, and a thin,
slightly hoarse, pleasant voice. Everybody knows that he formerly
served in the secret service division and was the terror of
crooks, thanks to his terrible physical strength and cruelty in
interrogations.

He has several shady transactions on his conscience. The whole
town knows that two years back he married a rich old woman of
seventy, and that last year he strangled her; however, he was
somehow successful in hushing up this affair. But for that matter,
the remaining four have also seen a thing or two in their
chequered life. But, just as the bretteurs of old felt no twinges
of conscience at the recollection of their victims, even so do
these people regard the dark and bloody things in their past, as
the unavoidable little unpleasantness of their professions.

They are drinking coffee with rich, boiled cream--the inspector
with Benedictine. But he, strictly speaking, is not drinking, but
merely conveying the impression that he is doing it to oblige.

"Well, what is it to be, Phoma Phornich?" asks the proprietress
searchingly. "This business isn't worth an empty eggshell, now...
Why, you have only to say a word..."

Kerbesh slowly draws in half a wine-glass of liqueur, works the
oily, strong, pungent liquid slightly with his tongue over the
roof of his mouth, swallows it, chases it down, without hurrying,
with coffee, and then passes the ring finger of his left hand over
his moustaches, to the right and left.

"Think it over for yourself, Madam Shoibes," he says, looking down
at the table, spreading out his hands and screwing up his eyes.
"Think of the risk to which I'm exposed! The girl through means of
deception was enticed into this... what-you-may-call-it... well,
in a word, into a house of ill-fame, to express it in lofty style.
Now the parents are searching for her through the police. Ve-ery
well. She gets into one place after another, from the fifth into
the tenth... Finally the trail is picked up with you, and most
important of all--think of it!--in my district! What can I do?"

"Mr. Kerbesh, but she is of age," says the proprietress.

"They are of age," confirms Isaiah Savvich. "They gave an
acknowledgment, that it was of their own will..."

Emma Edwardovna pronounces in a bass, with cool accurance:

"Honest to God, she's the same here as an own daughter."

"But that's not what I am talking about," the inspector frowns in
vexation. "Just consider my position... Why, this is duty. Lord,
there's no end of unpleasantnesses without that!"

The proprietress suddenly arises, shuffles in her slippers to the
door, and says, winking to the inspector with a sleepy,
expressionless eye of faded blue:

"Mr. Kerbesh, I would ask you to have a look at our alterations.
We want to enlarge the place a bit."

"A-ah! With pleasure..."

After ten minutes both return, without looking at each other.
Kerbesh's hand is crunching a brand-new hundred rouble note in his
pocket. The conversation about the seduced girl is not renewed.
The inspector, hastily finishing his Benedictine, complains of the
present decline in manners.

"I have a son, now, a schoolboy--Paul. He comes to me, the
scoundrel, and declares: 'Papa, the pupils swear at me, because
you are a policeman, and because you serve on Yamskaya, and
because you take bribes from brothels.' Well, tell me, for God's
sake, Madam Shoibes, if that isn't effrontery?"

"Ai, ai, ai! ... And what bribes can there be? Now with me..."

"I say to him: 'Go, you good-for-nothing, and let the principal
know, that there should be no more of this, otherwise papa will
inform on all of you to the governor.' And what do you think? He
comes to me and says: 'I am no longer a son to you--seek another
son for yourself.' What an argument! Well, I gave him enough to
last till the first of the month! Oho-ho! Now he doesn't want to
speak with me. Well, I'll show him yet!"

"Ah, you don't have to tell us," sighs Anna Markovna, letting her
lower, raspberry-coloured lip hang down and with a mist coming
over her faded eyes. "We keep our Birdie--she is in Fleisher's
high school--we purposely keep her in town, in a respectable
family. You. understand, it is awkward, after all. And all of a
sudden she brings such words and expressions from the high school
that I just simply turned all red."

"Honest to God, Annochka turned all red," confirms Isaiah Savvich.

"You'll turn red, all right!" warmly agrees the inspector. "Yes,
yes, yes, I understand you fully. But, my God, where are we going!
Where are we only going? I ask you, what are these revolutionaries
and all these various students, or... what-you-may-call-'ems? ...
trying to attain? And let them put the blame on none but
themselves. Corruption is everywhere, morality is falling, there
is no respect for parents. They ought to be shot."

"Well, now, the day before yesterday we had a case," Zociya mixes
in bustlingly. "A certain guest came, a stout man..."

"Drop it!" Emma Edwardovna, who was listening to the inspector,
piously nodding with her head bowed to one side, cuts her short in
the jargon of the brothels. "You'd better go and see about
breakfast for the young ladies."

"And not a single person can be relied upon," continues the
proprietress grumblingly. "Not a servant but what she's a stiff, a
faker. And all the girls ever think about is their lovers. Just
so's they may have their own pleasure. But about their duties they
don't even think."

There is an awkward silence. Some one knocks on the door. A thin,
feminine voice speaks on the other side of the door:

"Housekeeper, dear, take the money and be kind enough to give me
the stamps. Pete's gone."

The inspector gets up and adjusts his sabre.

"Well, it's time I was going to work. Best regards, Anna Markovna.
Best wishes, Isaiah Savvich."

"Perhaps you'll have one more little glass for a stirrup cup?" the
nearly blind Isaiah Savvich thrusts himself over the table.

"Tha-ank you. I can't. Full to the gills. Honoured, I'm sure! ..."

"Thanks for your company. Drop in some time."

"Always glad to be your guest, sir. Au revoir!"

But in the doorway he stops for a minute and says significantly:

"But still, my advice to you is--you'd better pass this girl on to
some place or other in good time. Of course, it's your affair, but
as a good friend of yours I give you warning."

He goes away. When his steps are abating on the stairs and the
front door bangs to behind him, Emma Edwardovna snorts through her
nose and says contemptuously:

"Stool-pigeon! He wants to take money both here and there..."

Little by little they all crawl apart out of the room. It is dark
in the house. It smells sweetly of the half-withered sedge. Quiet
reigns.





CHAPTER III.


Until dinner, which is served at six in the evening, the time
drags endlessly long and with intolerable monotony. And, in
general, this daily interval is the heaviest and emptiest in the
life of the house. It remotely resembles in its moods those
slothful, empty hours which are lived through during the great
holidays in scholastic institutes and other private institutions
for females, when all the friends have dispersed, when there is
much leisure and much indolence, and a radiant, agreeable tedium
reigns the whole day. In only their petticoats and white shifts,
with bare arms, sometimes barefooted, the women aimlessly ramble
from room to room, all of them unwashed, uncombed; lazily strike
the keys of the old pianoforte with the index finger, lazily lay
out cards to tell their fortune, lazily exchange curses, and with
a languishing irritation await the evening.

Liubka, after breakfast, had carried out the leavings of bread and
the cuttings of ham to Amour, but the dog had soon palled upon
her. Together with Niura she had bought some barberry bon-bons and
sunflower seeds, and now both are standing behind the fence
separating the house from the street, gnawing the seeds, the
shells of which remain on their chins and bosoms, and speculate
indifferently about those who pass on the street: about the lamp-
lighter, pouring kerosene into the street lamps, about the
policeman with the daily registry book under his arm, about the
housekeeper from somebody else's establishment, running across the
road to the general store.

Niura is a small girl, with goggle-eyes of blue; she has white,
flaxen hair and little blue veins on her temples. In her face
there is something stolid and innocent, reminiscent of a white
sugar lamb on a Paschal cake. She is lively, bustling, curious,
puts her nose into everything, agrees with everybody, is the first
to know the news, and, when she speaks, she speaks so much and so
rapidly that spray flies out of her mouth and bubbles
effervescence on the red lips, as in children.

Opposite, out of the dram-shop, a servant pops out for a minute--a
curly, besotted young fellow with a cast in his eye--and runs into
the neighbouring public house.

"Prokhor Ivanovich, oh Prokhor Ivanovich," shouts Niura, "don't
you want some?--I'll treat you to some sunflower seeds!"

"Come on in and pay us a visit," Liubka chimes in.

Niura snorts and adds through the laughter which suffocates her:

"Warm your feet for a while!"

But the front door opens; in it appears the formidable and stern
figure of the senior housekeeper.

"Pfui! [Footnote: A German exclamation of disgust or contempt,
corresponding to the English fie.--Trans.] What sort of indecency
is this!" she cries commandingly. "How many times must it be
repeated to you, that you must not jump out on the street during
the day, and also--pfui!--only in your underwear. I can't
understand how you have no conscience yourselves. Decent girls,
who respect themselves, must not demean themselves that way in
public. It seems, thank God, that you are not in an establishment
catering to soldiers, but in a respectable house. Not in Little
Yamskaya."

The girls return into the house, get into the kitchen, and for a
long time sit there on tabourets, contemplating the angry cook
Prascoviya, swinging their legs and silently gnawing the sunflower
seeds.

In the room of Little Manka, who is also called Manka the
Scandaliste and Little White Manka, a whole party has gathered.
Sitting on the edge of the bed, she and another girl--Zoe, a tall
handsome girl, with arched eyebrows, with grey, somewhat bulging
eyes, with the most typical, white, kind face of the Russian
prostitute--are playing at cards, playing at "sixty-six." Little
Manka's closest friend, Jennie, is lying behind their backs on the
bed, prone on her back, reading a tattered book, The Queen's
Necklace, the work of Monsieur Dumas, and smoking. In the entire
establishment she is the only lover of reading and reads
intoxicatingly and without discrimination. But, contrary to
expectation, the forced reading of novels of adventure has not at
all made her sentimental and has not vitiated her imagination.
Above all, she likes in novels a long intrigue, cunningly thought
out and deftly disentangled; magnificent duels, before which the
viscount unties the laces of his shoes to signify that he does not
intend to retreat even a step from his position,[Footnote:
Probably a sly dig at Gautier's Captain Fracasse.-Trans.] and
after which the marquis, having spitted the count through,
apologizes for having made an opening in his splendid new
waistcoat; purses, filled to the full with gold, carelessly strewn
to the left and right by the chief heroes; the love adventures and
witticisms of Henry IV--in a word, all this spiced heroism, in
gold and lace, of the past centuries of French history. In
everyday life, on the contrary, she is sober of mind, jeering,
practical and cynically malicious. In her relation to the other
girls of the establishment she occupies the same place that in
private educational institutions is accorded to the first strong
man, the man spending a second year in the same grade, the first
beauty in the class--tyrannizing and adored. She is a tall, thin
brunette, with beautiful hazel eyes, a small proud mouth, a little
moustache on the upper lip and with a swarthy, unhealthy pink on
her cheeks.

Without letting the cigarette out of her mouth and screwing up her
eyes from the smoke, all she does is to turn the pages constantly
with a moistened finger. Her legs are bare to the knees; the
enormous balls of the feet are of the most vulgar form; below the
big toes stand out pointed, ugly, irregular tumours.

Here also, with her legs crossed, slightly bent, with some sewing,
sits Tamara--a quiet, easy-going, pretty girl, slightly reddish,
with that dark and shining tint of hair which is to be found on
the back of a fox in winter. Her real name is Glycera, or Lukeria,
as the common folk say it. But it is already an ancient usage of
the houses of ill-fame to replace the uncouth names of the
Matrenas, Agathas, Cyclitinias with sonorous, preferably exotic
names. Tamara had at one time been a nun, or, perhaps, merely a
novice in a convent, and to this day there have been preserved on
her face timidity and a pale puffiness--a modest and sly
expression, which is peculiar to young nuns. She holds herself
aloof in the house, does not chum with any one, does not initiate
any one into her past life. But in her case there must have been
many more adventures besides having been a nun: there is something
mysterious, taciturn and criminal in her unhurried speech, in the
evasive glance of her deep and dark-gold eyes from under the long,
lowered eyelashes, in her manners, her sly smiles and intonations
of a modest but wanton would-be saint. There was one occurrence
when the girls, with well-nigh reverent awe, heard that Tamara
could talk fluently in French and German. She has within her some
sort of an inner, restrained power. Notwithstanding her outward
meekness and complaisance, all in the establishment treat her with
respect and circumspection--the proprietress, and her mates, and
both housekeepers, and even the doorkeeper, that veritable sultan
of the house of ill-fame, that general terror and hero.

"I've covered it," says Zoe and turns over the trump which had
been lying under the pack, wrong side up. "I'm going with forty,
going with an ace of spades--a ten-spot, Mannechka, if you please.
I'm through. Fifty-seven, eleven, sixty-eight. How much have you?"

"Thirty," says Manka in an offended tone, pouting her lips; "oh,
it's all very well for you--you remember all the plays. Deal ...
Well, what's after that, Tamarochka?" she turns to her friend.
"You talk on--I'm listening."

Zoe shuffles the old, black, greasy cards, allows Manya to cut,
then deals, having first spat upon her fingers.

Tamara in the meanwhile is narrating to Manya in a quiet voice,
without dropping her sewing.

"We embroidered with gold, in flat embroidery--altar covers,
palls, bishops' vestments... With little grasses, with flowers,
little crosses. In winter, you'd be sitting near a casement; the
panes are small, with gratings, there isn't much light, it smells
of lamp oil, incense, cypress; you mustn't talk--the mother
superior was strict. Some one from weariness would begin droning a
pre-Lenten first verse of a hymn ... 'When I consider thy heavens
...' We sang fine, beautifully, and it was such a quiet life, and
the smell was so fine; you could see the flaky snow out the
windows--well, now, just like in a dream..."

Jennie puts the tattered novel down on her stomach, throws the
cigarette over Zoe's head, and says mockingly:

"We know all about your quiet life. You chucked the infants into
toilets. The Evil One is always snooping around your holy places."

"I call forty. I had forty-six. Finished!" Little Manka exclaims
excitedly and claps her palms. "I open with three."

Tamara, smiling at Jennie's words, answers with a scarcely
perceptible smile, which barely distends her lips, but makes
little, sly, ambiguous depressions at their corners, altogether as
with Monna Lisa in the portrait by Leonardo da Vinci.

"Lay folk say a lot of things about nuns ... Well, even if there
had been sin once in a while ..."

"If you don't sin--you don't repent," Zoe puts in seriously, and
wets her finger in her mouth.

"You sit and sew, the gold eddies before your eyes, while from
standing in the morning at prayer your back just aches, and your
legs ache. And at evening there is service again. You knock at the
door of the mother superior's cell: 'Through prayers of Thy
saints, oh Lord, our Father, have mercy upon us.' And the mother
superior would answer from the cell, in a little bass-like 'A-men.'"

Jennie looks at her intently for some time, shakes her head and
says with great significance:

"You're a queer girl, Tamara. Here I'm looking at you and
wondering. Well, now, I can understand how these fools, on the
manner of Sonka, play at love. That's what they're fools for. But
you, it seems, have been roasted on all sorts of embers, have been
washed in all sorts of lye, and yet you allow yourself foolishness
of that sort. What are you embroidering that shirt for?"

Tamara, without haste, with a pin refastens the fabric more
conveniently on her knee, smooths the seam down with the thimble,
and speaks, without raising the narrowed eyes, her head bent just
a trifle to one side:

"One's got to be doing something. It's wearisome just so. I don't
play at cards, and I don't like them."

Jennie continues to shake her head.

"No, you're a queer girl, really you are. You always have more
from the guests than all of us get. You fool, instead of saving
money, what do you spend it on? You buy perfumes at seven roubles
the bottle. Who needs it? And now you have bought fifteen roubles'
worth of silk. Isn't this for your Senka, now?"

"Of course, for Sennechka."

"What a treasure you've found, to be sure! A miserable thief. He
rides up to this establishment like some general. How is it he
doesn't beat you yet? The thieves--they like that. And he plucks
you, have no fear?"

"More than I want to, I won't give," meekly answers Tamara and
bites the thread in two.

"Now that is just what I wonder at. With your mind, your beauty, I
would put such rings-around-a-rosie about a guest like that, that
he'd take me and set me up. I'd have horses of my own, and
diamonds."

"Everyone to his tastes, Jennechka. You too, now, are a very
pretty and darling girl, and your character is so independent and
brave, and yet you and I have gotten stuck in Anna Markovna's."

Jennie flares up and answers with unsimulated bitterness:

"Yes! Why not! All things come your way! ...You have all the very
best guests. You do what you want with them, but with me it's
always either old men or suckling babies. I have no luck. The ones
are snotty, the others have yellow around the mouth. More than
anything else, now, I dislike the little boys. He comes, the
little varmint; he's cowardly, he hurries, he trembles, but having
done the business, he doesn't know what to do with his eyes for
shame. He's all squirming from disgust. I just feel like giving
him one in the snout. Before giving you the rouble, he holds it in
his pocket in his fist, and that rouble's all hot, even sweaty.
The milksop! His mother gives him a ten kopeck piece for a French
roll with sausage, but he's economized out of that for a wench. I
had one little cadet in the last few days. So just on purpose, to
spite him, I say: 'Here, my dearie, here's a little caramel for
you on your way; when you're going back to your corps, you'll suck
on it.' So at first he got offended, but afterwards took it. Later
I looked from the stoop, on purpose; just as soon as he walked
out, he looked around, and right away into his mouth with the
caramel. The little swine!"

"But with old men it's still worse," says Little Manka in a tender
voice, and slyly looks at Zoe. "What do you think, Zoinka?"

Zoe, who had already finished playing, and was just about to yawn,
now cannot in any way give rein to her yawns. She does not know
whether she wants to be angry or to laugh. She has a steady
visitor, some little old man in a high station, with perverted
erotic habits. The entire establishment makes fun of his visits to
her.

Zoe at last succeeds in yawning.

"To the devil's dam with all of you," she says, with her voice
hoarse after the yawn; "may he be damned, the old anathema!"

"But still, the worst of all," Jennie continues to discourse,
"worse than your director, Zoinka, worse than my cadet, the worst
of all--are your lovers. What can there be joyous in this: he
comes drunk, poses, makes sport of you, wants to pretend there's
something in him--only nothing comes of it all. Wha-at a lad-die,
to be sure! The scummiest of the scum, dirty, beaten-up, stinking,
his whole body in scars, there's only one glory about him: the
silk shirt which Tamarka will embroider for him. He curses one's
mother, the son of a bitch, always aching for a fight. Ugh! No!"
she suddenly exclaimed in a merry provoking voice, "The one I love
truly and surely, for ever and ever, is my Mannechka, Manka the

white, little Manka, my Manka-Scandalistochka."

And unexpectedly, having embraced Manya by the shoulders and
bosom, she drew her toward herself, threw her down on the bed, and
began to kiss deeply and vigorously her hair, eyes, lips. Manka
with difficulty tore herself away from her, with dishevelled,
bright, fine, downy hair, all rosy from the resistance, and with
eyes downcast and moist from shame and laughter.

"Leave off, Jennechka, leave off. Well, now, what are you doing?
Let me go!"

Little Manya is the meekest and quietest girl in the entire
establishment. She is kind, yielding, can never refuse anybody's
request, and involuntarily everybody treats her with great
gentleness. She blushes over every trifle, and at such time
becomes especially attractive, as only very tender blondes with a
sensitive skin can be attractive. But it is sufficient for her to
drink three or four glasses of Liqueur Benedictine, of which she
is very fond, for her to become unrecognizable and to create
brawls, such, that there is always required the intervention of
the housekeepers, the porter, at times even the police. It is
nothing for her to hit a guest in the face or to throw in his face
a glass filled with wine, to overturn the lamp, to curse out the
proprietress, Jennie treats her with some strange, tender
patronage and rough adoration.

"Ladies, to dinner! To dinner, ladies!" calls Zociya the
housekeeper, running along the corridor. On the run she opens the
door into Manya's room and drops hurriedly:

"To dinner, to dinner, ladies!"

They go again to the kitchen, all still in their underwear, all
unwashed, in slippers and barefoot. A tasty vegetable soup of pork
rinds and tomatoes, cutlets, and pastry-cream rolls are served.
But no one has any appetite, thanks to the sedentary life and
irregular sleep, and also because the majority of the girls, just
like school-girls on a holiday, had already managed during the day
to send to the store for halvah, nuts, rakkat loukoum (Turkish
Delight), dill-pickles and molasses candy, and had through this
spoiled their appetites. Only Nina alone--a small, pug-nosed,
snuffling country girl, seduced only two months ago by a
travelling salesman, and (also by him) sold into a brothel--eats
for four. The inordinate, provident appetite of a woman of the
common people has not yet disappeared in her.

Jennie, who has only picked fastidiously at her cutlet and eaten
half her cream roll, speaks to her in a tone of hypocritical
solicitude:

"Really, Pheclusha, you might just as well eat my cutlet, too.
Eat, my dear, eat; don't be bashful--you ought to be gaining in
health. But do you know what I'll tell you, ladies?" she turns to
her mates, "Why, our Pheclusha has a tape-worm, and when a person
has a tape-worm, he always eats for two: half for himself, half
for the worm."

Nina sniffs angrily and answers in a bass which comes as a
surprise from one of her stature, and through her nose:

"There are no tape-worms in me. It's you that has the tape-worms,
that's why you are so skinny."

And she imperturbably continues to eat, and after dinner feels
herself sleepy, like a boa constrictor, eructs loudly, drinks
water, hiccups, and, by stealth, if no one sees her, makes the
sign of the cross over her mouth, through an old habit.

But already the ringing voice of Zociya can. be heard through the
corridors and rooms:

"Get dressed, ladies, get dressed. There's no use in sitting
around...To work..."

After a few minutes in all the rooms of the establishment there
are smells of singed hair, boric-thymol soap, cheap eau-de-
cologne. The girls are dressing for the evening.





CHAPTER IV.


The late twilight came on, and after it the warm, dark night, but
for long, until very midnight, did the deep crimson glow of the
sky still smoulder. Simeon, the porter of the establishment, has
lit all the lamps along the walls of the drawing room, and the
lustre, as well as the red lantern over the stoop. Simeon was a
spare, stocky, taciturn and harsh man, with straight, broad
shoulders, dark-haired, pock-marked, with little bald spots on his
eye-brows and moustaches from small-pox, and with black, dull,
insolent eyes. By day he was free and slept, while at night he sat
without absenting himself in the front hall under the reflector,
in order to help the guests with their coats and to be ready in
case of any disorder.

The pianist came--a tall, elegant young man, with white eyebrows
and eyelashes, and a cataract in his right eye. The while there
were no guests, he and Isaiah Savvich quietly rehearsed Pas
d'Espagne, at that time coming into fashion. For every dance
ordered by the guests, they received thirty kopecks for an easy
dance, and a half rouble for a quadrille. But one-half of this
price was taken out by the proprietress, Anna Markovna; the other,
however, the musicians divided evenly. In this manner the pianist
received only a quarter of the general earnings, which, of course,
was unjust, since Isaiah Savvich played as one self-taught and was
distinguished for having no more ear for music than a piece of
wood. The pianist was constantly compelled to drag him on to new
tunes, to correct and cover his mistakes with loud chords. The
girls said of their pianist to the guests, with a certain pride,
that he had been in the conservatory and always ranked as the
first pupil, but since he is a Jew, and in addition to that his
eyes had begun to trouble him, he had not succeeded in completing
the course. They all treated him carefully and considerately, with
some sort of solicitous, somewhat mawkish, commiseration, which
chimes so well with the inner, backstage customs of houses of ill-
fame, where underneath the outer coarseness and the flaunting of
obscene words dwells the same sweetish, hysterical sentimentality
as in female boarding schools, and, so they say, in penal
institutions.

In the house of Anna Markovna everybody was already dressed and
ready for the reception of the guests, and languishing from
inaction and expectation. Despite the fact that the majority of
the women experienced toward men--with the exception of their
lovers--a complete, even somewhat squeamish, indifference, before
every evening dim hopes came to life and stirred within their
souls; it was unknown who would choose them, whether something
unusual, funny and alluring might not happen, whether a guest
would not astonish with his generosity, whether there would not be
some miracle which would overturn the whole life...In these
presentiments and hopes was something akin to those emotions which
the accustomed gamester experiences when counting his ready money
before starting out for his club. Besides that, despite their
asexuality, they still had not lost the chiefest instinctive
aspiration of women--to please.

And, in truth, altogether curious personages came into the house
at times and ludicrous, motley events arose. The police would
appear suddenly together with disguised detectives and arrest some
seemingly respectable, irreproachable gentlemen and lead them off,
pushing them along with blows in the neck. At times brawls would
spring up between the drunken, trouble-making company and the
porters of all the establishments, who had gathered on the run for
the relief of a fellow porter--a brawl, during which the window-
panes and the decks of grand-pianos were broken, when the legs of
the plush chairs were wrenched out for weapons, blood ran over the
parquet floor of the drawing room and the steps of the stairs, and
people with pierced sides and broken heads fell down into the dirt
near the street entrance, to the feral, avid delight of Jennka,
who, with burning eyes, with happy laughter, went into the
thickest of the melee, slapped herself on the hips, swore and
sicked them on, while her mates were squealing from fear and
hiding under the beds.

There were occurrences when there would arrive, with a pack of
parasites, some member of a workingmen's association or a cashier,
long since far gone in an embezzlement of many thousands through
gambling at cards and hideous orgies, and now, in a drunken,
senseless delirium, tossing the last money after the other, before
suicide or the prisoner's box. Then the doors and windows of the
house would be tightly closed, and for two days and nights at a
stretch a Russian orgy would go on--nightmarish, tedious, savage,
with screams and tears, with revilement over the body of woman;
paradisaical nights were gotten up, during which naked, drunken,
bow-legged, hairy, pot-bellied men, and women with flabby, yellow,
pendulous thin bodies hideously grimaced to the music; they drank
and guzzled like swine, on the beds and on the floor, amidst the
stifling atmosphere, permeated with spirits, befouled with human
respiration and the exhalations of unclean skins.

Occasionally, there would appear a circus athlete, creating in the
low-ceiled quarters a strangely cumbersome impression, somewhat
like that of a horse led into a room; a Chinaman in a blue blouse,
white stockings, and with a queue; a negro from a cabaret, in a
tuxedo coat and checked pantaloons, with a flower in his button-
hole, and with starched linen, which, to the amazement of the
girls, not only did not soil from the black skin, but appeared
still more dazzlingly white.

These rare people fomented the satiated imagination of the
prostitutes, excited their exhausted sensuality and professional
curiosity, and all of them, almost enamoured, would walk in their
steps, jealous and bickering with one another.

There was one incident when Simeon had let into the room an
elderly man, dressed like a bourgeois. There was nothing
exceptional about him; he had a stern, thin face, with bony, evil-
looking cheek-bones, protruding like tumours, a low forehead, a
beard like a wedge, bushy eyebrows, one eye perceptibly higher
than the other. Having entered, he raised his fingers, folded for
the sign of the cross, to his forehead, but having searched the
corners with his eyes and finding no image, he did not in the
least grow confused, put down his hand, and at once with a
business-like air walked up to the fattest girl in the
establishment--Kitty.

"Let's go!" he commanded curtly, and with determination nodded his
head in the direction of the door.

During the entire period of her absence the omniscious Simeon,
with a mysterious, and even somewhat proud air, managed to inform
Niura, at that time his mistress, while she, in a whisper, with
horror in her rounded eyes, told her mates, in secret, that the
name of the bourgeois was Dyadchenko, and that last fall he had
volunteered, owing to the absence of the hangman, to carry out the
execution of eleven rioters, and with his own hands had hung them
in two mornings. And--monstrous as it may be--at that hour there
was not in the establishment a single girl who did not feel envy
toward the fat Kitty, and did not experience a painful, keen,
vertiginous curiosity. When Dyadchenko was going away half an hour
later--with his sedate and stern air, all the women speechlessly,
with their mouths gaping, escorted him. to the street door and
afterwards watched him from the windows as he walked along the
street. Then they rushed into the room of the dressing Kitty and
overwhelmed her with interrogations. They looked with a new
feeling, almost with astonishment, at her bare, red, thick arms,
at the bed, still crumpled, at the old, greasy, paper rouble,
which Kitty showed them, having taken it out of her stocking.
Kitty could tell them nothing. "A man like any man, like all men,"
she said with a calm incomprehension; but when she found out who
her visitor had been, she suddenly burst into tears, without
herself knowing why.

This man, the outcast of outcasts, fallen as low as the fancy of
man can picture, this voluntary headsman, had treated her without
rudeness, but with such absence of even a hint at endearment, with
such disdain and wooden indifference, as no human being is
treated; not even a dog or a horse, and not even an umbrella,
overcoat or hat, but like some dirty, unclean object, for which a
momentary, unavoidable need arises, but which, at the passing of
its needfulness, becomes foreign, useless, and disgusting. The
entire horror of this thought the fat Kate could not embrace with
her brain of a fattened turkey hen, and because of that cried--as
it seemed even to her--without cause and reason.

There were also other happenings, which stirred up the turbid,
foul life of these poor, sick, silly, unfortunate women. There
were cases of savage, unbridled jealousy with pistol shots and
poisoning; occasionally, very rarely, a tender, flaming and pure
love would blossom out upon this dung; occasionally the women even
abandoned an establishment with the help of the loved man, but
almost always came back. Two or three times it happened that a
woman from a brothel would suddenly prove pregnant--and this
always seemed, on the face of it, laughable and disgraceful, but
touching in the profundity of the event.

And no matter what may have happened, every evening brought with
it such an irritating, strained, spicy expectation of adventures
that every other life, after that in a house of ill-fame, would
have seemed flat and humdrum to these lazy women of no will power.





CHAPTER V.


The windows are opened wide to the fragrant darkness of the
evening, and the tulle curtains stir faintly back and forth from
the imperceptible movement of the air. It smells of dewy grass
from the consumptive little garden in front of the house, and just
the least wee bit of lilac and the withering birch leaves of the
little trees placed near the entrance because of the Trinity.
Liuba, in a blue velvet blouse with low cut bosom, and Niura,
dressed as a "baby," in a pink, wide sacque to the knees, with her
bright hair loose and with little curls on her forehead, are lying
embraced on the window-sill, and are singing in a low voice a song
about the hospital, which song is the rage of the day and
exceedingly well known among prostitutes. Niura, through her nose,
leads in a high voice.

Liuba seconds her with a stifled alto:

    "Monday now is come again,
    They're supposed to get me out;
    Doctor Krasov won't let me out ..."

In all the houses the windows are brightly lit, while hanging
lanterns are burning before the entrances. To both girls the
interior in the establishment of Sophia Vasilievna, which is
directly opposite, is distinctly visible--the shining yellow
parquet, draperies of a dark cherry colour on the doors, caught up
with cords, the end of a black grand-piano, a pier glass in a gilt
frame, and the figures of women in gorgeous dresses, now flashing
at the windows, now disappearing, and their reflections in the
mirrors. The carved stoop of Treppel, to the right, is brightly
illuminated by a bluish electric light in a big frosted globe.

The evening is calm and warm. Somewhere far, far away, beyond the
line of the railroads, beyond some black roofs and the thin black
trunks of trees, down low over the dark earth in which the eye
does not see but rather senses the mighty green tone of spring,
reddens with a scarlet gold the narrow, long streak of the sunset
glow, which has pierced the dove-coloured mist. And in this
indistinct, distant light, in the caressing air, in the scents of
the oncoming night, was some secret, sweet, conscious
mournfulness, which usually is so gentle in the evenings between
spring and summer. The indistinct noise of the city floated in,
the dolorous, snuffling air of an accordeon, the mooing of cows
could be heard; somebody's soles were scraping dryly and a
ferruled cane rapped resoundingly on the flags of the pavement;
lazily and irregularly the wheels of a cabman's victoria, rolling
at a pace through Yama, would rumble by, and all these sounds
mingled with a beauty and softness in the pensive drowsiness of
the evening. And the whistles of the locomotives on the line of
the railroad, which was marked out in the darkness with green and
red lights, sounded with a quiet, singing caution.

    "Now the nurse is co-oming in,
    Bringing sugar and a roll,
    Bringing sugar and a roll,
    Deals them equally to all."

"Prokhor Ivanich!" Niura suddenly calls after the curly waiter
from the dram-shop, who, a light black silhouette, is running
across the road. "Oh, Prokhor Ivanich!"

"Oh, bother you!" the other snarls hoarsely. "What now?"

"A friend of yours sent you his regards. I saw him today."

"What sort of friend?"

"Such a little good-looker! An attractive little brunet ...No, but
you'd better ask--where did I see him?"

"Well, where?" Prokhor Ivanovich comes to a stop for a minute.

"And here's where: nailed over there, on the fifth shelf with old
hats, where we keep all dead cats."

"Scat! You darn fool!"

Niura laughs shrilly over all Yama, and throws herself down on the
sill, kicking her legs in high black stockings. Afterward, having
ceased laughing, she all of a sudden makes round astonished eyes
and says in a whisper:

"But do you know, girlie--why, he cut a woman's throat the year
before last--that same Prokhor. Honest to God!"

"Is that so? Did she die?"

"No, she didn't. She got by," says Niura, as though with regret.
"But just the same she lay for two months in the Alexandrovskaya
Hospital. The doctors said, that if it were only this teen-weeny
bit higher--then it would have been all over. Bye-bye!"

"Well, what did he do that to her for?"

"How should I know? Maybe she hid money from him or wasn't true to
him. He was her lover--her pimp."

"Well, and what did he get for it?"

"Why, nothing. There was no evidence of any kind. There had been a
free-for-all mix-up. About a hundred people were fighting. She
also told the police that she had no suspicions of any sort. But
Prokhor himself boasted afterwards: 'I,' says he, 'didn't do for
Dunka that time, but I'll finish her off another time. She,' says
he, 'won't get by my hands. I'm going to give her the works.'"

A shiver runs all the way down Liuba's back.

"They're desperate fellows, these pimps!" she pronounces quietly,
with horror in her voice.

"Something terrible! I, you know, played at love with our Simeon
for a whole year. Such a Herod, the skunk! I didn't have a whole
spot on me. I always went about in black and blue marks. And it
wasn't for any reason at all, but just simply so--he'd go in the
morning into a room with me, lock himself in, and start in to
torture me. He'd wrench my arms, pinch my breasts, grab my throat
and begin to strangle me. Or else he'd be kissing, kissing, and
then he'd bite the lips so that the blood would just spurt out ...
I'd start crying--but that's all he was looking for. Then he'd
just pounce an me like a beast--simply shivering all over. And
he'd take all my money away--well, now, to the very last little
copper. There wasn't anything to buy ten cigarettes with. He's
stingy, this here Simeon, that's what, always into the bank-book
with it, always putting it away into the bank-book... Says when he
gets a thousand roubles together--he'll go into a monastery."

"Go on!"

"Honest to God. You look into his little room: the twenty-four
hours round, day and night, the little holy lamp burns before the
images. He's very strong for God ... Only I think that he's that
way because there's heavy sins upon him. He's a murderer."

"What are you saying?"

"Oh, let's drop talking about him, Liubochka. Well, let's go on
further:

"I'll go to the drug store, buy me some poison, And I will poison
then meself,"

Niura starts off in a very high, thin voice.

Jennie walks back and forth in the room, with arms akimbo, swaying
as she walks, and looking at herself in all the mirrors. She has
on a short orange satin dress, with straight deep pleats in the
skirt, which vacillates evenly to the left and right from the
movement of her hips. Little Manka, a passionate lover of card
games, ready to play from morning to morning, without stopping, is
playing away at "sixty-six" with Pasha, during which both women,
for convenience in dealing, have left an empty chair between them,
while they gather their tricks into their skirts, spread out
between their knees. Manka has on a brown, very modest dress, with
black apron and pleated black bib; this dress is very becoming to
her dainty, fair little head and small stature; it makes her
younger and gives her the appearance of a high-school
undergraduate.

Her partner Pasha is a very queer and unhappy girl. She should
have been, long ago, not in a house of ill-fame, but in a
psychiatric ward, because of an excruciating nervous malady, which
compels her to give herself up, frenziedly, with an unwholesome
avidity, to any man whatsoever who may choose her, even the most
repulsive. Her mates make sport of her and despise her somewhat
for this vice, just as though for some treason to their corporate
enmity toward men. Niura, with very great versimilitude, mimics
her sighs, groans, outcries and passionate words, from which she
can never refrain in the moments of ecstasy and which are to be
heard in the neighbouring rooms through two or three partitions.
There is a rumour afloat about Pasha, that she got into a brothel
not at all through necessity or temptation or deception, but had
gone into it her own self, voluntarily, following her horrible,
insatiable instinct. But the proprietress of the house and both
the housekeepers indulge Pasha in every way and encourage her
insane weakness, because, thanks to it, Pasha is in constant
demand and earns four, five times as much as any one of the
remaining girls--earns so much, that on busy gala days she is not
brought out to the more drab guests at all, or else refused them
under the pretext of Pasha's illness, because the steady, paying
guests are offended if they are told that the girl they know is
busy with another. And of such steady guests Pasha has a
multitude; many are with perfect sincerity, even though bestially,
in love with her, and even not so long ago two, almost at the same
time, offered to set her up: a Georgian--a clerk in a store of
Cakhetine wines, and some railroad agent, a very proud and very
poor nobleman, with shirt cuffs the colour of a cabbage rose, and
with an eye which had been replaced by a black circle on an
elastic. Pasha, passive in everything save her impersonal
sensuality, would go with anybody who might call her, but the
administration of the house vigilantly guards its interests in
her. A near insanity already flits over her lovely face, in her
half-closed eyes, always smiling with some heady, blissful, meek,
bashful and unseemly smile, in her languorous, softened, moist
lips, which she is constantly licking; in her short, quiet laugh--
the laugh of an idiot. Yet at the same time she--this veritable
victim of the social temperament--in everyday life is very good-
natured, yielding, entirely uncovetous and is very much ashamed of
her inordinate passion. Toward her mates she is tender, likes very
much to kiss and embrace them and sleep in the same bed with them,
but still everybody has a little aversion for her, it would seem.

"Mannechka, sweetie, dearie," says Pasha lightly touching Manya's
hand with emotion, "tell my fortune, my precious little child."

"We-ell," Manya pouts her lips just like a child, "let's play a
little more."

"Mannechka, my little beauty, you little good-looker, my precious,
my own, my dear..."

Manya gives in and lays out the pack on her knees. A suit of
hearts comes out, a small monetary interest and a meeting in the
suit of spades with a large company in the king of clubs.

Pasha claps her hands joyously:

"Ah, it's my Levanchik! Well, yes, he promised to come to-day. Of
course, it's Levanchik."

"That's your Georgian!"

"Yes, yes, my little Georgian. Oh, how nice he is. I'd just love
never to let him go away from me. Do you know what he told me the
last time? 'If you'll go on living in a sporting house, then I'll
make both you dead, and make me dead.' And he flashed his eyes at
me so!"

Jennie, who had stopped near, listens to her words and asks
haughtily:

"Who was it said that?"

"Why, my little Georgian, Levan. 'Both for you death and for me
death.'"

"Fool! He isn't any little Georgian at all, but simply a common
Armenian. You're a crazy fool."

"Oh no, he isn't--he's a Georgian. And it is quite strange on your
part..."

"I'm telling you--a common Armenian. I can tell better. Fool!"

"What are you cursing for, Jennie? I didn't start cursing you
first off, did I?"

"You just try and be the first to start cursing! Fool! Isn't it
all the same to you what he is? Are you in love with him, or
what?"

"Well, I am in love with him!"

"Well, and you're a fool. And the one with the badge in his cap,
the lame one--are you in love with him too?"

"Well, what of it? I respect him very much. He is very
respectable."

"And with Nicky the Book-keeper? And with the contractor? And with
Antoshka-Kartoshka? [Footnote: Tony the Potato.-Trans.] And with
the fat actor? Oo-ooh, you shameless creature!" Jennie suddenly
cries out. "I can't look at you without disgust. You're a bitch!
In your place, if I was such a miserable thing, I'd rather lay
hands on myself, strangle myself with a cord from my corset. You
vermin!"

Pasha silently lowers her eyelashes over her tear-filled eyes.
Manya tries to defend her.

"Really, what are you carrying on like that for, Jennechka? What
are you down on her like that for..."

"Eh, all of you are fine!" Jennie sharply cuts her short. "No
self-respect of any sort! Some scum comes along, buys you like a
piece of meat, hires you like a cabby, at a fixed rate, for love
for an hour, but you go all to pieces: 'Ah, my little lover! Ah,
what unearthly passion!' Ugh!" she spat in disgust.

She wrathfully turns her back upon them and continues to promenade
on a diagonal through the room, swinging her hips and blinking at
herself in every mirror.

During this time Isaac Davidovich, the piano player, is still
struggling with the refractory violinist.

"Not that way, not that way, Isaiah Savvich. You throw the fiddle
away for one little minute. Listen a little to me. Here is the
tune."

He plays with one finger and hums in that horrible goatish voice
that all musical directors--for which calling he had been at one
time preparing--possess.

"Ess-tam, ess-tam, ess-tiam-tiam. Well, now, repeat after me the
first part, first time off..... Well..... ein, zwei..."

Their rehearsal is being attentively watched by the grey-eyed,
round-faced, arch-browed Zoe, mercilessly bedaubed with cheap
rouges and whiteners, leaning with her elbows on the pianoforte,
and the slight Vera, with drink-ravaged face, in the costume of a
jockey--in a round little cap with straight brim, in a little silk
jacket, striped blue and white, in tightly stretched trunks and in
little patent leather boots with yellow facings. And really, Vera
does resemble a jockey, with her narrow face, in which the
exceedingly sparkling blue eyes, under a smart bob coming down on
the forehead, are set too near the humped, nervous, very handsome
nose. When, at last, after long efforts the musicians agree, the
somewhat small Verka walks up to the large Zoe, in that mincing,
tethered walk, the hind part sticking out, and elbows spread as
though for flight, with which only women in male costume can walk,
and makes a comical masculine bow to her, spreading her arms wide
and lowering them. And, with great enjoyment, they begin careering
over the room.

The nimble Niura, always the first to announce all the news,
suddenly jumps down from the window sill, and calls out,
spluttering from the excitement and hurry:

"A swell carriage...has driven up...to Treppel ...with
electricity... Oi, goils...may I die on the spot...there's
electricity on the shafts."

All the girls, save the proud Jennie, thrust themselves out of the
windows. A driver with a fine carriage is indeed standing near the
Treppel entrance. His brand-new, dashing victoria glistens with
new lacquer; at the ends of the shafts two tiny electric lights
burn with a yellow light; the tall white horse, with a bare pink
spot on the septum of its nose, shakes its handsome head, shifts
its feet on the same spot, and pricks up its thin ears; the
bearded, stout driver himself sits on the coach-box like a carven
image, his arms stretched out straight along his knees.

"Oh, for a ride!" squeals Niura. "Oh, uncle! Oh you swell
coachman!" she cries out, hanging over the window sill. "Give a
poor little girlie a ride... Give us a ride for love."

But the swell coachman laughs, makes a scarcely noticeable
movement with his fingers, and immediately the white horse, as
though it had been waiting just for that, starts from its place at
a goodly trot, handsomely turns around and with measured speed
floats away into the darkness together with the victoria and the
broad back of the coachman.

"Pfui! What indecency!" the indignant voice of Emma Edwardovna
sounds in the room. "Well, where did you see that respectable
girls should allow themselves to climb out of the windows and
holler all over the street. O, scandal! And it's all Niura, and
it's always this horrible Niura!"

She is majestic in her black dress, with her yellow flabby face,
with the dark pouches under her eyes, with the three pendulous,
quivering chins. The girls, like boarding school misses, staidly
seat themselves on the chairs along the walls, except Jennie, who
continues to contemplate herself in all the mirrors. Two more
cabbies drive up opposite, to the house of Sophia Vasilievna. Yama
is beginning to liven up. At last one more victoria rattles along
the paved road and its noise is cut short abruptly at the entrance
to Anna Markovna's.

The porter Simeon helps someone take off his things in the front
hall. Jennie looks in there, holding on with both hands to the
door jambs, but immediately turns back, and as she walks shrugs
her shoulders and shakes her head negatively.

"Don't know him, someone who's an entire stranger," she says in a
low voice. "He has never been in our place. Some daddy or other,
fat, in gold eye-glasses and a uniform."

Emma Edwardovna commands in a voice which sounds like a summoning
cavalry trumpet:

"Ladies, into the drawing room! Into the drawing room, ladies!"

One after the other, with haughty gaits, into the drawing room
enter: Tamara, with bare white arms and bared neck, wound with a
string of artificial pearls; fat Kitty with her fleshy,
quadrangular face and low forehead--she, too, is in decollete, but
her skin is red and in goose-pimples; Nina, the very newest one,
pug-nosed and clumsy, in a dress the colour of a green parrot;
another Manka--Big Manka, or Manka the Crocodile, as they call
her, and--the last--Sonka the Rudder, a Jewess, with an ugly dark
face and an extraordinarily large nose, precisely for which she
has received her nickname, but with such magnificent large eyes,
at the same time meek and sad, burning and humid, as, among the
women of all the terrestrial globe, are to be found only among the
Jewesses.





CHAPTER VI.


The elderly guest in the uniform of the Department of Charity
walked in with slow, undecided steps, at each step bending his
body a little forward and rubbing his palms with a circular
motion, as though washing them. Since all the women were pompously
silent, as though not noticing him, he traversed the drawing room
and let himself down on a chair alongside of Liuba, who, in
accordance with etiquette, only gathered up her skirt a little,
preserving the abstracted and independent air of a girl from a
respectable house.

"How do you do, miss?" he said.

"How do you do?" answered Liuba abruptly.

"How are you getting along?"

"Thanks--thank you. Treat me to a smoke."

"Pardon me--I don't smoke."

"So that's how. A man--and he doesn't smoke, just like that. Well,
then, treat me to some Lafitte with lemonade. I am terribly fond
of Lafitte with lemonade."

He let that pass in silence.

"Ooh, what a stingy daddy! Where do you work, now? Are you one of
the government clerks?"

"No, I'm a teacher. I teach the German language."

"But I have seen you somewhere, daddy. Your physiognomy is
familiar to me. Where have I met you before?"

"Well, now, I don't know, really. Unless it was on the street."

"It might have been on the street, likely as not... You ought to
treat me to an orange, at least. May I ask for an orange?"

He again grew quiet, looking about him. His face began to glisten
and the pimples on his forehead became red. He was mentally
appraising all the women, choosing a likely one for himself, and
was at the same time embarrassed by his silence. There was nothing
at all to talk about; besides that the indifferent importunity of
Liuba irritated him. Fat Katie pleased him with her large, bovine
body, but she must be--he decided in his mind--very frigid in
love, like all stout women, and in addition to that not handsome
of face. Vera also excited him, with her appearance of a little
boy, and her firm thighs, closely enveloped by the white tights;
and Little White Manya, looking so like an innocent school-girl;
and Jennie with her energetic, swarthy, handsome face. For one
minute he was all ready to stop at Jennie, but only started in his
chair and did not venture--by her easy, inaccessible and negligent
air, and because she in all sincerity did not pay him the least
attention, he surmised that she was the most spoilt of all the
girls in the establishment, accustomed to having the visitors
spend more money on her than on the others. But the pedagogue was
a calculating man, burthened with a large family and an exhausted
wife, destroyed by his masculine demands and suffering from a
multiplicity of female ills. Teaching in a female high school and
in an institute, he lived constantly in a sort of secret sensual
delirium, and only his German training, stinginess and cowardice
helped him to hold his constantly aroused desires in check. But
two or three times a year, with incredible privations, he would
cut five or ten roubles out of his beggarly budget, denying
himself in his beloved evening mug of beer and contriving to save
on the street cars, which necessitated his making enormous
distances on foot through the town. This money he set aside for
women and spent it slowly, with gusto, trying to prolong and
cheapen down the enjoyment as much as possible. And for his money
he wanted a very great deal, almost the impossible; his German
sentimental soul dimly thirsted after innocence, timidity, poesy,
in the flaxen image of Gretchen; but as a man he dreamt, desired,
and demanded that his caresses should bring a woman into rapture
and palpitation and into a sweet exhaustion.

However, all the men strove for the very same thing--even the most
wretched, monstrous, misshapen and impotent of them--and ancient
experience had long ago taught the women to imitate with voice and
movements the most flaming passion, retaining in the most
tempestuous minutes the fullest sang froid.

"You might at least order the musicians to play a polka. Let the
girls dance a little," asked Liuba grumblingly.

That suited him. Under cover of the music, amid the jostling of
the dances, it was far more convenient to get up courage, arise,
and lead one of the girls out of the drawing room, than to do it
amid the general silence and the finical immobility.

"And how much does that cost?" he asked cautiously.

"A quadrille is half a rouble; but ordinary dances are thirty
kopecks. Is it all right then?"

"Well, of course...if you please...I don't begrudge it," he
agreed, pretending to be generous...

"Whom do you speak to?"

"Why, over there--to the musicians."

"Why not? ... I'll do it with pleasure...Mister musician,
something in the light dances, if you please," he said, laying
down his silver on the pianoforte.

"What will you order?" asked Isaiah Savvich, putting the money
away in his pocket. "Waltz, polka, polka-mazourka?"

"Well...Something sort of..."

"A waltz, a waltz!" Vera, a great lover of dancing, shouted from
her place.

"No, a polka! ... A waltz! ... A vengerka! ... A waltz!" demanded
others.

"Let them play a polka," decided Liuba in a capricious tone.
"Isaiah Savvich, play a little polka, please. This is my husband,
and he is ordering fox me," she added, embracing the pedagogue by
the neck. "Isn't that true, daddy?"

But he freed himself from under her arm, drawing his head in like
a turtle, and she without the least offence went to dance with
Niura. Three other couples were also whirling about. In the dances
all the girls tried to hold the waist as straight as possible, and
the head as immobile as possible, with a complete unconcern in
their faces, which constituted one of the conditions of the good
taste of the establishment. Under cover of the slight noise the
teacher walked up to Little Manka.

"Let's go?" he said, offering her his bent arm.

"Let's go," answered she, laughing.

She brought him into her room, gotten up with all the
coquettishness of a bedroom in a brothel of the medium sort, with
a bureau, covered with a knit scarf, and upon it a mirror, a
bouquet of paper flowers, a few empty bonbonierres, a powder box,
a faded photograph of a young man with white eyebrows and
eyelashes and a haughtily astonished face, as well as several
visiting cards. Above the bed, which is covered with a pink pique
blanket, along the wall, is nailed up a rug with a representation
of a Turkish sultan luxuriating in his harem, a narghili in his
mouth; on the walls, several more photographs of dashing men of
the waiter and actor type; a pink lantern hangs down from the
ceiling by chains; there are also a round table under a carpet
cover, three vienna chairs, and an enameled bowl with a pitcher of
the same sort in the corner on a tabouret, behind the bed.

"Darling, treat me to Lafitte with lemonade," in accordance with
established usage asked Little Manka, unbuttoning her corsage.

"Afterwards," austerely answered the pedagogue. "It will all
depend upon yourself. And then--what sort of Lafitte can you have
here? Some muddy brew or other?"

"We have good Lafitte," contradicted the girl touchily. "Two
roubles a bottle. But if you are so stingy, then buy me beer at
least. All right?"

"Well, beer is all right..."

"And for me lemonade and oranges. Yes?"

"A bottle of lemonade, yes; but oranges, no. Later, maybe, I will
treat you to champagne even. It will all depend on you. If you'll
exert yourself."

"Then, daddy, I'll ask for four bottles of beer and two bottles of
lemonade? Yes? And for me just a little cake of chocolate. All
right? Yes?"

"Two bottles of beer, a bottle of lemonade, and nothing more. I
don't like when I'm bargained with. If need be, I'll order
myself."

"And may I invite a friend of mine?"

"No, let it be without any friends, if you please."

Manka leaned out of the door into the corridor and called out
resoundingly:

"Housekeeper, dear! Two bottles of beer and a bottle of lemonade
for me."

Simeon came with a tray and began with an accustomed rapidity to
uncork the bottles. Following him came Zociya, the housekeeper.

"There, now, how well you've made yourself at home here. Here's to
your lawful marriage!" she congratulated them.

"Daddy, treat the little housekeeper with beer," begged Manka.
"Drink, housekeeper dear."

"Well, in that case here's to your health, mister. Somehow, your
face seems kind of familiar to me?"

The German drank his beer, sucking and licking his moustache, and
impatiently waited for the housekeeper to go away. But she, having
put down her glass and thanked him, said:

"Let me get the money coming from you, mister. As much as is
coming for the beer and the time. That's both better for you and
more convenient for us."

The demand for the money went against the grain of the teacher,
because it completely destroyed the sentimental part of his
intentions. He became angry:

"What sort of boorishness is this, anyway! It doesn't look as if I
were preparing to run away from here. And besides, can't you
discriminate between people at all? You can see that a man of
respectability, in a uniform, has come to you, and not some tramp.
What sort of importunity is this!"

The housekeeper gave in a little.

"Now, don't get offended, mister. Of course, you'll pay the young
lady yourself for the visit. I don't think you will do her any
wrong, she's a fine girl among us. But I must trouble you to pay
for the beer and lemonade. I, too, have to give an account to the
proprietress. Two bottles at fifty is a rouble and the lemonade
thirty--a rouble thirty."

"Good Lord, a bottle of beer fifty kopecks!" the German waxed
indignant. "Why, I will get it in any beer-shop for twelve
kopecks."

"Well, then, go to a beer-shop if it's cheaper there," Zociya
became offended. "But if you've come to a respectable
establishment, the regular price is half a rouble. We don't take
anything extra. There, that's better. Twenty kopecks change coming
to you?"

"Yes, change, without fail," firmly emphasized the German teacher.
"And I would request of you that nobody else should enter."

"No, no, no, what are you saying," Zociya began to bustle near the
door. "Dispose yourself as you please, to your heart's content. A
pleasant appetite to you."

Manka locked the door on a hook after her and sat down on the
German's knee, embracing him with her bare arm.

"Are you here long?" he asked, sipping his beer. He felt dimly
that that imitation of love which must immediately take place
demanded some sort of psychic propinquity, a more intimate
acquaintance, and on that account, despite his impatience, began
the usual conversation, which is carried on by almost all men--
when alone with prostitutes, and which compels the latter to lie
almost mechanically, to lie without mortification, enthusiasm or
malice, according to a single, very ancient stencil.

"Not long, only the third month."

"And how old are you?"

"Sixteen," fibbed Little Manka, taking five years off her age.

"O, such a young one!" the German wondered, and began, bending
down and grunting, to take off his boots. "Then how did you get
here?"

"Well, a certain officer deprived me of my innocence there...near
his birthplace. And it's terrible how strict my mamma is. If she
was to find out, she'd strangle me with her own hands. Well, so
then I ran away from home and got in here..."

"And did you love that same officer, the one who was the first
one, now?"

"If I hadn't loved him, I wouldn't have gone to him. He promised
to marry me, the scoundrel, but then managed to get what he was
after, and abandoned me."

"Well, and were you ashamed the first time?"

"Of course, you'd be ashamed...How do you like it, daddy, with
light or without light? I'll turn, down the lantern a little. All
right?"

"Well, and aren't you bored here? What do they call you?"

"Manya. To be sure I'm bored. What sort of a life is ours!"

The German kissed her hard on her lips and again asked:

"And do you love the men? Are there men who please you? Who afford
you pleasure?"


"How shouldn't there be?" Manka started laughing. "I love the ones
like you especially, such nice little fatties."

"You love them? Eh? Why do you love them?"

"Oh, I love them just so. You're nice, too."

The German meditated for a few seconds, pensively sipping away at
his beer. Then he said that which every man tells a prostitute in
these moments preceding the casual possession of her body:

"Do you know, Marichen, you also please me very much. I would
willingly take you and set you up."

"You're married," the girl objected, touching his ring.

"Yes, but, you understand, I don't live with my wife; she isn't
well, she can't fulfill her conjugal duties."

"The poor thing! If she were to find out where you go, daddy, she
would cry for sure."

"Let's drop that. So, you know, Mary, I am always looking out for
such a girl as you for myself, so modest and pretty. I am a man of
means, I would find a flat with board for you, with fuel and
light. And forty roubles a month pin money. Would you go?"

"Why not go--I'd go."

He kissed her violently, but a secret apprehension glided swiftly
through his cowardly heart.

"But are you healthy?" he asked in an inimical, quavering voice.

"Why, yes, I am healthy. There's a doctor's inspection every
Saturday in our place."

After five minutes she went away from him, as she walked putting
away in her stocking the earned money, on which, as on the first
handsel, she had first spat, after a superstitious custom. There
had been no further speech either about maintenance or natural
liking. The German was left unsatisfied with the frigidity of
Manka and ordered the housekeeper to be summoned to him.

"Housekeeper dear, my husband demands your presence!" said Manya,
coming into the drawing room and fixing her hair before a mirror.

Zociya went away, then returned afterwards and called Pasha out
into the corridor. Later she came back into the drawing room, but
alone.

"How is it, Manka, that you haven't pleased your cavalier?" she
asked with laughter. "He complains about you: 'This,' he says, 'is
no woman, but some log of wood, a piece of ice.' I sent him
Pashka."

"Eh, what a disgusting man!" Manka puckered up her face and spat
aside. "Butts in with his conversations. Asks: 'Do you feel when I
kiss you? Do you feel a pleasant excitement?' An old hound. 'I'll
take you,' he says, 'and set you up!'"

"They all say that," remarked Zoe indifferently.

But Jennie, who since morning has been in an evil mood, suddenly
flared up.

"Oh, the sneak, the big, miserable sneak that he is!" she
exclaimed, turning red and energetically putting her hands to her
sides. "Why, I would take him, the old, dirty little beast, by the
ear, then lead him up to the mirror and show him his disgusting
snout. What? Good-looking, aren't you? And how much better you'll
be when the spit will be running out of your mouth, and you'll
cross your eyes, and begin to choke and rattle in the throat, and
to snort right in the face of the woman. And for your damned
rouble you want me to go all to pieces before you like a pancake,
and that from your nasty love my eyes should pop out onto my
forehead? Why, hit him in the snout, the skunk, in the snout!
Until there's blood!"

"O, Jennie! Stop it now! PFUI!" the susceptible Emma Edwardovna,
made indignant by her tone, stopped her.

"I won't stop!" she cut her short abruptly. But she grew quiet by
herself and wrathfully walked away with distending nostrils and
with fire in the darkened, handsome eyes.





CHAPTER VII.


Little by little the drawing room was filling. There came Roly-
Poly, long known to all Yama--a tall, thin, red-nosed, gray old
man, in the uniform of a forest ranger, in high boots, with a
wooden yard-stick always sticking out of his side-pocket. He
passed whole days and evenings as a habitue of the billiard parlor
in the tavern, always half-tipsy, shedding his little jokes,
jingles and little sayings, acting familiarly with the porters,
with the housekeepers and the girls. In the houses everybody
from the proprietress to the chamber-maids--treated him with a bit
of derision--careless, a trifle contemptuous, but without malice.
At times he was even not without use: he could transmit notes from
the girls to their lovers, and run over to the market or to the
drug-store. Not infrequently, thanks to his loosely hung tongue
and long extinguished self respect, he would worm himself into a
gathering of strangers and increase their expenditures, nor did he
carry elsewhere the money gotten as "loans" on such occasions, but
spent it right here for women--unless, indeed, he left himself
some change for cigarettes. And, out of habit, he was good-
naturedly tolerated.

"And here's Roly-Poly arrived," announced Niura, when he, having
already managed to shake hands amicably with Simeon the porter,
stopped in the doorway of the drawing room, lanky, in a uniform
cap knocked at a brave slant over one side of his head. "Well,
now, Roly-Poly, fire away!"

"I have the honour to present myself," Roly-Poly immediately
commenced to grimace, putting his hand up to his brim in military
fashion, "a right honourable privy frequenter of the local
agreeable establishments, Prince Bottlekin, Count Liquorkin, Baron
Whoatinkevich-Giddapkovski--Mister Beethoven! Mister Chopin!" he
greeted the musicians. "Play me something from the opera The Brave
and Charming General Anisimov, or, A Hubbub in the Coolidor. My
regards to the little political economist Zociya. [Footnote: An
untranslatable pun on Economochka, a diminutive for
"housekeeper."--Trans.] A-ha! Then you kiss only at Easter? We
shall write that down. Ooh-you, my Tomalachka, my pitty-itty
tootsicums!"

And so with jests and with pinches he went the round of all the
girls and at last sat down alongside of the fat Katie, who put her
fat leg upon his, leant with her elbow upon her knee, while upon
the palm she laid her chin, and began to watch indifferently and
closely the surveyor rolling a cigarette for himself.

"And how is it that you don't ever get tired of it, Roly-Poly?
You're forever rolling a coffin nail."

Roly-Poly at once commenced to move his eye-brows and the skin of
his scalp and began to speak in verse:

    "Dear cigarette, my secret mate,
    How can I help loving thee?
    Not through mere whim, prompted by fate,
    All have started smoking thee."

"Why, Roly-Poly, but you are going to croak soon," said Kitty
indifferently.

"And a very simple matter, that."

"Roly-Poly, say something still funnier, in verse," begged Verka.

And at once, obediently, having placed himself in a funny pose, he
began to declaim:

    "Many stars are in the bright sky,
    But to count them there's no way.
    Yes, the wind whispers there can be,
    But there really is no way.
    Blossoming now are burdocks,
    Now sing out the birds called cocks."

Playing the tom-fool in this manner, Roly-Poly would sit whole
evenings and nights through in the drawing rooms of the
establishments. And through some strange psychic fellow feeling
the girls counted him almost as one of their own; occasionally
rendered him little temporary services and even bought him beer
and vodka at their expense.

Some time after Roly-Poly a large company of hairdressers, who
were that day free from work, tumbled in. They were noisy, gay,
but even here, in a brothel, did not cease their petty reckonings
and conversations about closed and open theatrical benefits, about
the bosses, about the wives of the bosses. All these were people
corrupt to a sufficient degree, liars, with great hopes for the
future--such as, for example, entering the service of some
countess as a kept lover. They wanted to utilize to the widest
possible extent their rather hard-earned money, and on that
account decided to make a review of absolutely all the houses of
Yama; only Treppel's they could not resolve to enter, as that was
too swell for them. But at Anna Markovna's they at once ordered a
quadrille and danced it, especially the fifth figure, where the
gents execute a solo, perfectly, like real Parisians, even putting
their thumbs in the arm holes of their vests. But they did not
want to remain with the girls; instead, they promised to come
later, when they had wound up the complete review of the brothels.

And there also came and went government clerks of some sort; crisp
young people in patent leather boots; several students; several
officers, who were horribly afraid of losing their dignity in the
eyes of the proprietress and the guests of the brothel. Little by
little in the drawing room was created such a noisy, fumy setting
that no one there any longer felt ill at ease. There came a steady
visitor, the lover of Sonka the Rudder, who came almost every day
and sat whole hours through near his beloved, gazed upon her with
languishing oriental eyes, sighed, grew faint and created scenes
for her because she lives in a brothel, because she sins against
the Sabbath, because she eats meat not prepared in the orthodox
Hebrew manner, and because she has strayed from the family and the
great Hebrew church.

As a usual thing--and this happened often--Zociya the housekeeper
would walk up to him under cover of the hubbub and would say,
twisting her lips:

"Well, what are you sitting there for mister? Warming your behind?
You might go and pass the time with the young lady."

Both of them, the Jew and the Jewess, were by birth from Homel,
and must have been created by God himself for a tender,
passionate, mutual love; but many circumstances--as, for example,
the pogrom which took place in their town, impoverishment, a
complete confusion, fright--had for a time parted them. However,
love was so great that the junior drug clerk Neiman, with great
difficulty, efforts, and humiliations, contrived to find for
himself the place of a junior in one of the local pharmacies, and
had searched out the girl he loved. He was a real, orthodox
Hebrew, almost fanatical. He knew that Sonka had been sold by her
very mother to one of the buyers-up of live merchandise, knew many
humiliating, hideous particulars of how she had been resold from
hand to hand, and his pious, fastidious, truly Hebraic soul
writhed and shuddered at these thoughts, but nevertheless love was
above all. And every evening he would appear in the drawing room
of Anna Markovna. If he was successful, at an enormous
deprivation, in cutting out of his beggarly income some chance
rouble, he would take Sonka into her room, but this was not at all
a joy either for him or for her: after a momentary happiness--the
physical possession of each other--they cried, reproached each
other, quarreled with characteristic Hebraic, theatrical gestures,
and always after these visits Sonka the Rudder would return into
the drawing room with swollen, reddened eyelids.

But most frequently of all he had no money, and would sit whole
evenings through near his mistress, patiently and jealously
awaiting her when Sonka through chance was taken by some guest.
And when she would return and sit down beside him, he would,
without being perceived, overwhelm her with reproaches, trying not
to turn the general attention upon himself and without turning his
head in her direction. And in her splendid, humid, Hebraic eyes
during these conversations there was always a martyr-like but meek
expression.

There arrived a large company of Germans, employed in an optical
shop; there also arrived a party of clerks from the fish and
gastronomical store of Kereshkovsky, and two young people very
well known in the Yamas--both bald, with sparse, soft, delicate
hairs around the bald spots: Nicky the Book-keeper and Mishka the
Singer--so were they both called in the houses. They also were met
very cordially, just like Karl Karlovich of the optical shop and
Volodka of the fish store--with raptures, cries and kisses,
flattering to their self-esteem. The spry Niurka would jump out
into the foyer, and, having informed herself as to who had come,
would report excitedly, after her wont:

    "Jennka, your husband has come!"

Or:

    "Little Manka, your lover has come!"

And Mishka the Singer, who was no singer at all, but the owner of
a drug warehouse, at once, upon entering, sang out in a vibrating,
quavering, goatish voice:

    "They fe-e-e-l the tru-u-u-u-uth!
    Come thou daw-aw-aw-aw-ning..."

which he perpetrated at every visit of his to Anna Markovna.

Almost incessantly they played the quadrille, waltz, polka, and
danced. There also arrived Senka--the lover of Tamara--but,
contrary to his wont, he did not put on airs, did not go in for
"ruination," did not order a funeral march from Isaiah Savvich,
and did not treat the girls to chocolate ... For some reason he
was gloomy, limped on his right leg, and sought to attract as
little attention as possible--probably his professional affairs
were at this time in a bad way. With a single motion of his head,
while walking, he called Tamara out of the drawing room and
vanished with her into her room. And there also arrived Egmont-
Lavretzki the actor, clean-shaven, tall, resembling a court flunky
with his vulgar and insolently contemptuous face.

The clerks from the gastronomical store danced with all the ardour
of youth and with all the decorum recommended by Herman Hoppe, the
self-instructor of good manners. In this regard the girls also
responded to their intentions. Both with these and with the others
it was accounted especially decorous and well-bred to dance as
rigidly as possible, keeping the arms hanging down, while the
heads were raised high and inclined to one side with a certain
proud, and, at the same time, tired and enervated air. In the
intermissions, between the figures of the dance, it was necessary
to fan one's self with a handkerchief, with a bored and negligent
air ... In a word, they all made believe that they belonged to the
choicest society, and that if they do dance, they only do it out
of condescension, as a little comradely turn. But still they
danced so ardently that the perspiration rolled down in streams
from the clerks of Kereshkovsky.

Two or three rows had already happened in different houses. Some
man, all in blood, whose face in the pale light of the moon's
crescent seemed black from the blood, was running around in the
street, cursing, and, without paying the least attention to his
wounds, was searching for his cap which had been lost in the
brawl. On Little Yamskaya some government scribes had had a fight
with a ship's company. The tired pianists and musicians played as
in a delirium, in a doze, through mechanical habit. This was
towards the waning of the night.

Altogether unexpectedly, seven students, a sub-professor, and a
local reporter walked into the establishment of Anna Markovna.





CHAPTER VIII.


They had all, except the reporter, passed the whole day together,
from the very morning, celebrating May Day with some young women
of their acquaintance. They had rowed in boats on the Dnieper, had
cooked field porridge on the other side of the river, in the
thick, bitter-smelling underbrush; had bathed--men and women by
turns--in the rapid, warm water; had drunk home-made spiced
brandy, sung sonorous songs of Little Russia, and had returned to
town only late in the evening, when the dark, broad, running river
so eerily and merrily plashed against the sides of their boats,
playing with the reflections of the stars, the silvery shimmering
paths of the electric lamps, and the bowing lights of the can-
buoys. And when they had stepped out on the shore, the palms of
each burned from the oars, the muscles of the arms and legs ached
pleasantly, and suffusing the whole body was a blissful, healthy
fatigue.

Then they had escorted the young women to their homes and at the
garden-gates and entrances had taken leave of them long and
cordially, with laughter and with such swinging hand-shakes as if
they were working the lever of a pump.

The whole day had passed in gaiety and noise, even a trifle
clamorously, and just the least wee bit tiresomely, but with
youth-like continence; without intoxication, and, which happens
especially rarely, without the least shadow of mutual affronts, or
jealousy, or unvoiced mortifications. Of course, such a benign
mood had been helped by the sun, the fresh river breeze, the sweet
exhalations of the grasses and the water, the joyous sensation of
the strength and alertness of one's body while bathing and rowing,
and the restraining influence of the clever, kind, pure and
handsome girls from families they were acquainted with. But,
almost without the knowledge of their consciousness, their
sensuousness--not imagination, but the simple, healthy,
instinctive sensuousness of young playful males--kindled from
chance encounters of their hands with feminine hands and from
comradely obliging embraces, when the occasion arose to help the
young ladies enter a boat or jump out on shore; from the tender
odour of maiden apparel, warmed by the sun; from the feminine
cries of coquettish fright on the river; from the sight of
feminine figures, negligently half-reclining with a naive
immodesty on the green grass around the samovar--from all these
innocent liberties, which are so usual and unavoidable on picnics,
country outings and river excursions, when within man, in the
infinite depth of his soul, secretly awakens from the care-free
contact with earth, grasses, water and sun, the beast-ancient,
splendid, free, but disfigured and intimidated of men.

And for that reason, at two o'clock in the night, when THE
SPARROWS, a cozy students' restaurant, had barely closed, and all
the eight, excited by alcohol and the plentiful food, had come out
of the smoky, fumy underground place into the street, into the
sweet, disquieting darkness of the night, with its beckoning fires
in the sky and on the earth, with its warm, heady air, from which
the nostrils dilate avidly, with its aromas, gliding from unseen
gardens and flower-beds,--the head of each one of them was aflame
and the heart quietly and languishingly yearning from vague
desires. It was joyous and arrogant to sense after the rest the
new, fresh strength in all the sinews, the deep breathing of the
lungs, the red, resilient blood in the veins, the supple obedience
of all the members. And--without words, without thoughts, without
consciousness--one was drawn on this night to be running without
raiment in the somnolent forest, to be sniffing hurriedly the
tracks of some one's feet on the dewy grass, with a loud call to
be summoning a female unto one's self.

But to separate was now very difficult. The whole day, passed
together, had shaken them into an accustomed, tenacious herd. It
seemed that if even one were to go away from the company, a
certain attained equilibrium would be disturbed and could not be
restored afterwards. And so they dallied and stamped upon the
sidewalk, near the exit of the tavern's underground vault,
interfering with the progress of the infrequent passers-by. They
discussed hypocritically where else they might go to wind up the
night. It proved to be too far to the Tivoli Garden, and in
addition to that one also had to pay for admission tickets, and
the prices in the buffet were outrageous, and the program had
ended long ago. Volodya Pavlov proposed going to him--he had a
dozen of beer and a little cognac home. But it seemed a bore to
all of them to go in the middle of the night to a family
apartment, to enter on tiptoes up the stairs and to talk in
whispers all the time.

"Tell you what, brethren ... Let's better ride to the girlies,
that will be nearer the mark," said peremptorily Lichonin, an old
student, a tall, stooping, morose and bearded fellow. By
convictions he was an anarchist--theoretic, but by avocation a
passionate gambler at billiards, races and cards--a gambler with a
very broad, fatalistic sweep. Only the day before he had won a
thousand roubles at macao in the Merchants' Club, and this money
was still burning a hole in his pockets.

"And why not? Right-o!" somebody sustained him. "Let's go,
comrades?"

"Is it worth while? Why, this is an all night affair ..." spoke
another with a false prudence and an insincere fatigue.

And a third said through a feigned yawn:

"Let's better go home, gentlemen ... a-a-a ... go bye-bye ...
That's enough for to-day."

"You won't work any wonders when you're asleep," Lichonin remarked
sneeringly. "Herr professor, are you coming?"

But the sub-professor Yarchenko was obstinate and seemed really
angered, although, perhaps, he himself did not know what was
lurking within him, in some dark cranny of his soul.

"Leave me in peace, Lichonin. As I see it, gentlemen, this is
downright and plain swinishness--that which you are about to do.
We have passed the time so wonderfully, amiably and simply, it
seems,--but no, you needs must, like drunken cattle, clamber into
a cesspool. I won't go."

"Still, if my memory does not play me false," said Lichonin, with
calm causticity, "I recollect that no further back than past
autumn we with a certain future Mommsen were pouring in some place
or other a jug of ice into a pianoforte, delineating a Bouratian
god, dancing the belly-dance, and all that sort of thing?"

Lichonin spoke the truth. In his student days, and later, being
retained at the university, Yarchenko had led the most wanton and
crack-brained life. In all the taverns, cabarets, and other places
of amusement his small, fat, roundish little figure, his rosy
cheeks, puffed out like those of a painted cupid, and the shining,
humid kindly eyes were well known, his hurried, spluttering speech
and shrill laughter remembered.

His comrades could never fathom where he found the time to employ
in study, but nevertheless he went through all examinations and
prescribed work with distinction and from the first course the
professors had him in view. Now Yarchenko was beginning little by
little to quit his former comrades and bottle companions. He had
just established the indispensable connections with the
professorial circle; the reading of lectures in Roman history for
the coming year had been offered him, and not infrequently in
conversation he would use the expression current among the sub-
professors: "We, the learned ones!" The student familiarity, the
compulsory companionship, the obligatory participation in all
meetings, protests and demonstrations, were becoming
disadvantageous to him, embarrassing, and even simply tedious. But
he knew the value of popularity among the younger element, and for
that reason could not decide to sever relations abruptly with his
former circle. Lichonin's words, however, provoked him.

"Oh, my God, what does it matter what we did when we were
youngsters? We stole sugar, soiled our panties, tore the wings off
beetles," Yarchenko began to speak, growing heated, and
spluttering. "But there is a limit and a mean to all this. I,
gentlemen, do not presume, of course, to give you counsels and to
teach you, but one must be consistent. We are all agreed that
prostitution is one of the greatest calamities of humanity, and
are also agreed, that in this evil not the women are guilty, but
we, men, because the demand gives birth to the offer. And
therefore if, having drunk a glass of wine too much, I still,
notwithstanding my convictions, go to the prostitutes, I am
committing a triple vileness: before the unfortunate, foolish
woman, whom I subject to the most degrading form of slavery for my
filthy rouble; before humanity, because, hiring a public woman for
an hour or two for my abominable lust, I through this justify and
uphold prostitution; and finally, this is a vileness before one's
own conscience and mind. And before logic."

"Phew-ew!" Lichonin let out a long-drawn whistle and chanted in a
thin, dismal voice, nodding in time with his head hanging down to
one side: "The philosopher is off on our usual stuff: 'A rope--is
a common cord.'"

"Of course, there's nothing easier than to play the tom-fool,"
responded Yarchenko. "But in my opinion there is not in the
sorrowful life of Russia a more mournful phenomenon than this
lackadaisicalness and vitiation of thought. To-day we will say to
ourselves: Eh! It's all the same, whether I go to a brothel or
whether I do not go, from this one time things will get neither
worse nor better. And after five years we will be saying:
Undoubtedly a bribe is a horribly nasty bit of business, but you
know--children ... the family ... And just the same way after ten
years we, having remained fortuitous Russian liberals, will be
sighing about personal freedom and bowing low before worthless
scoundrels, whom we despise, and will be cooling our heels in
their ante-rooms. 'Because, don't you know,' we will say,
tittering, 'when you live with wolves, you must howl like a wolf.'
By God, it wasn't in vain that some minister called the Russian
students future head-clerks!"

"Or professors," Lichonin put in.

"But most important of all," continued Yarchenko, letting this
pointed remark pass by, "most important of all is this, that I
have seen all of you to-day on the river and afterwards there ...
on the other shore ... with these charming, fine girls. How
attentive, well-bred, obliging you all were--but scarcely have you
taken leave of them, when you are drawn to public women. Let each
one of you imagine for a moment, that we all had been visiting his
sisters and straight from them had driven to Yama ... What? Is
such a supposition pleasant?"

"Yes, but there must exist some valves for the passions of
society," pompously remarked Boris Sobashnikov, a tall, somewhat
supercilious and affected young man, upon whom the short, white
summer uniform jacket, which scarcely covered his fat posteriors,
the modish trousers, of a military cut, the PINCE-NEZ on a broad,
black ribbon, and a cap after a Prussian model, all bestowed the
air of a coxcomb. "Surely, it isn't more respectable to enjoy the
caresses of your chambermaid, or to carry on an intrigue on the
side with another man's wife? What am I to do if woman is
indispensable to me!"

"Eh, very indispensable indeed!" said Yarchenko with vexation and
feebly made a despondent gesture.

But here a student who was called Ramses in the friendly coterie
intervened. This was a yellowish-swarthy, hump-nosed man of small
stature; his clean-shaven face seemed triangular, thanks to a
broad forehead, beginning to get bald, with two wedge-like bald
spots at the temples, fallen-in cheeks and a sharp chin. He led a
mode of life sufficiently queer for a student. While his
colleagues employed themselves by turns with politics, love, the
theatre, and a little in study, Ramses had withdrawn entirely into
the study of all conceivable suits and claims, into the chicane
subtleties of property, hereditary, land and other business law-
suits, into the memorizing and logical analysis of quashed
decisions. Perfectly of his own will, without in the least needing
the money, he served for a year as a clerk at a notary's for
another as a secretary to a justice of the peace, while all of the
past year, being in the last term, he had conducted in a local
newspaper the reports of the city council and had borne the modest
duty of an assistant to a secretary in the management of a
syndicate of sugar manufacturers. And when this same syndicate
commenced the well-known suit against one of its members, Colonel
Baskakov, who had put up the surplus sugar for sale contrary to
agreement, Ramses from the very beginning guessed beforehand and
very subtly engineered, precisely that decision which the senate
subsequently handed down in this suit.

Despite his comparative youth, rather well-known jurists gave heed
to his opinions--true, a little loftily. None of those who knew
Ramses closely doubted that he would make a brilliant career, and
even Ramses himself did not conceal his confidence in that toward
thirty-five he would knock together a million, exclusively through
his practice as a civil lawyer. His comrades not infrequently
elected him chairman of meetings and head of the class, but this
honour Ramses invariably declined, excusing himself with lack of
time. But still he did not avoid participation in his comrades'
trials by arbitration, and his arguments--always incontrovertibly
logical--were possessed of an amazing virtue in ending the trials
with peace, to the mutual satisfaction of the litigating parties.
He, as well as Yarchenko, knew well the value of popularity among
the studying youths, and even if he did look upon people with a
certain contempt, from above, still he never, by as much as a
single movement of his thin, clever, energetical lips, showed
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