Yama (The Pit) by Aleksandr Ivanovich Kuprin
PART ONE
CHAPTER XI
At this moment Simeon walked into the cabinet with a tray upon
which stood two goblets of a bubbling golden wine and lay a large
visiting card.
"May I ask which of you here might be Mister Gavrila Petrovich
Yarchenko?" he said, looking over all those sitting.
"I," responded Yarchenko.
"If youse please. The actor gent sent this."
Yarchenko took the visiting card and read aloud:
Eumenii Poluectovich
EGMONT—LAVRETZKI
Dramatic Artist of Metropolitan Theatres
"It's remarkable," said Volodya Pavlov, "that all the Russian
Garricks bear such queer names, on the style of Chrysantov,
Thetisov, Mamontov and Epimhakov."
"And besides that, the best known of them must needs either speak
thickly, or lisp, or stammer," added the reporter.
"Yes, but most remarkable of all is the fact that I do not at all
have the honour of knowing this artist of the metropolitan
theatres. However, there's something else written on the reverse
of this card. Judging by the handwriting, it was written by a man
greatly drunk and little lettered.
"'I dreenk'—not drink, but dreenk," explained Yarchenko. "'I
dreenk to the health of the luminary of Russian science, Gavrila
Petrovich Yarchenko, whom I saw by chance when I was passing by
through the collidor. Would like to clink glasses together
personally. If you do not remember, recollect the National
Theatre, Poverty Is No Disgrace, and the humble artist who played
African.' "Yes, that's right," said Yarchenko. "Once, somehow,
they saddled me with the arrangement of this benefit performance
in the National Theatre. Also, there dimly glimmers some clean-
shaven haughty visage, but ... What shall it be, gentlemen?"
Lichonin answered good-naturedly:
"Why, drag him here. Perhaps he's funny."
"And you?" the sub-professor turned to Platonov.
"It's all the same to me. I know him slightly. At first he'll
shout: 'KELLNER, champagne!' then burst into tears about his wife,
who is an angel, then deliver a patriotic speech and finally raise
a row over the bill, but none too loudly. All in all he's
entertaining."
"Let him come," said Volodya, from behind the shoulder of Katie,
who was sitting on his knees, swinging her legs.
"And you, Veltman?"
"What?" the student came to with a start. He was sitting on the
divan with his back to his companions, near the reclining Pasha,
bending over her, and already for a long time, with the
friendliest appearance of sympathy, had been stroking her, now on
the shoulder, now on the hair at the nape of the neck, while she
was smiling at him with her shyly shameless and senselessly
passionate smile through half-closed and trembling eyelashes.
"What? What's it all about? Oh yes,—is it all right to let the
actor in? I've nothing against it. Please do ..."
Yarchenko sent an invitation through Simeon, and the actor came
and immediately commenced the usual actor's play. In the door he
paused, in his long frock coat, shining with its silk lapels, with
a glistening opera hat, which he held with his arm in the middle
of his chest, like an actor portraying in the theatre an elderly
worldly lion or a bank director. And approximately these persons
he was inwardly picturing to himself.
"May I be permitted, gentlemen, to intrude into your intimate
company?" he asked in an unctuous, kindly voice, with a half-bow
done somewhat to one side.
They asked him in, and he began to introduce himself. Shaking
hands, he stuck out his elbow forward and raised it so high that
the hand proved to be far lower. Now it was no longer a bank
director, but such a clever, splendid fellow, a sportsman and a
rake of the golden youths. But his face—with rumpled, wild
eyebrows and with denuded lids without lashes—was the vulgar,
harsh and low face of a typical alcoholic, libertine, and pettily
cruel man. Together with him came two of his ladies: Henrietta
the eldest girl in years in the establishment of Anna Markovna,
experienced, who had seen everything and had grown accustomed to
everything, like an old horse on the tether of a threshing
machine, the possessor of a thick bass, but still a handsome
woman; and Big Manka, or Manka the Crocodile. Henrietta since
still the preceding night had not parted from the actor, who had
taken her from the house to a hotel.
Having seated himself alongside of Yarchenko, he straight off
began to play a new role—he became something on the order of an
old good soul of a landed proprietor, who had at one time been at
a university himself, and now can not look upon the students
without a quiet, fatherly emotion.
"Believe me, gentlemen, that one's soul rests from all these
worldly squabbles in the midst of youth," he was saying, imparting
to his depraved and harsh face an actor-like, exaggerated and
improbable expression of being moved. "This faith in a high ideal,
these honest impulses! ... What can be loftier and purer than our
Russian students as a body? ... KELLNER! Chompa-a-agne!" he yelled
deafeningly all of a sudden, and dealt a heavy blow on the table
with his fist.
Lichonin and Yarchenka did not wish to remain in debt to him. A
spree began. God knows in what manner Mishka the Singer and Nicky
the Book-keeper soon found themselves in the cabinet, and at once
began singing in their galloping voices:
"They fe-e-e-el the tru-u-u-uth,
Come thou daw-aw-aw-awning quicker ..."
There also appeared Roly-Poly, who had awakened. Letting his head
drop touchingly to one side and having made little narrowed,
lachrymose, sweet eyes in his wrinkled old face of a Don Quixote,
he was speaking in a persuasively begging tone:
"Gentlemen students ... you ought to treat a little old man. I
love education, by God! ... Allow me!"
Lichonin was glad to see everybody, but Yarchenko in the
beginning—until the champagne had mounted to his head—only
raised high his small, short eyebrows with a timorous, wondering
and naive air. It suddenly became crowded, smoky, noisy and close
in the cabinet. Simeon, with rattling, closed the blinds with
bolts on the outside. The women, just having gotten done with a
visit or in the interim between dances, walked into the room, sat
on somebody's knees, smoked, sang disjointedly, drank wine, kissed
and again went away, and again came. The clerks of Kereshkovsky,
offended because the damsels bestowed more attention upon the
cabinet than the drawing room, did start a row and tried to enter
into a provoking explanation with the students, but Simeon in a
moment quelled them with two or three authoritative words, thrown
out as though in passing.
Niura came back from her room and a little later Petrovsky
followed her. Petrovsky with an extremely serious air declared
that he had been walking on the street all this time, thinking
over the incident which had taken place and in the end had come to
the conclusion that comrade Boris was in reality not in the right,
but that there also was a circumstance in extenuation of his
fault—intoxication. Also, Jennie came later, but alone—
Sobashnikov had fallen asleep in her room. The actor proved to
have no end of talents. He very faithfully imitated the buzzing of
a fly which an intoxicated man is catching on a window-pane, and
the sounds of a saw; drolly performed, standing with his face in
the corner, the conversation of a nervous lady over the telephone;
imitated the singing of a phonograph record, and in the end, with
exceeding likeness to life, showed a little Persian lad with a
little trained monkey. Holding on with his hand to an imaginary
small chain and at the same time baring his teeth, squatting like
a monkey, winking his eyelids often, and scratching now his
posteriors, now the hair on his head, he sang through his nose, in
a monotonous and sad voice, distorting the words:
"The i-young cissack to the war has went,
The i-young ladee underneath the fence lies
spraw-aw-ling.
AINA, AINA, AI-NA-NA-NA, AI-NA NA-NA-NA."
In conclusion he took Little White Manka in his arms, wrapped her
up in the skirts of his frock and, stretching out his hand and
making a tearful face, began to nod his head, bent to one side, as
is done by little swarthy, dirty, oriental lads who roam over all
Russia in long, old, soldiers' overcoats, with bared chest of a
bronze colour, holding a coughing, moth-eaten little monkey in
their bosom.
"And who may you be?" severely asked fat Kate, who knew and loved
this joke.
"Me Serbian, lady-y-y," piteously moaned the actor through his
nose. "Give me somethin', lady-y-y."
"And what do they call your little monkey?"
"Matreshka-a-a ... Him 'ungry-y-y, lady ... him want eat..."
"And have you got a passport?"
"We Serbia-a-an. Gimme something lady-y-y..."
The actor proved not superfluous on the whole. He created at once
a great deal of noise and raised the spirits of the company, which
were beginning to be depressing. And every minute he cried out in
a stentorian voice:
"KELLNER! Chompa-a-agne!"—although Simeon, who was accustomed to
his manner paid very little attention to these cries.
There began a truly Russian hubbub, noisy and senseless. The rosy,
flaxen-haired, pleasing Tolpygin was playing LA SEGUIDILLE from
CARMEN on the piano, while Roly-Poly was dancing a Kamarinsky
peasant dance to its tune. His narrow shoulders hunched up,
twisted all to one side, the fingers of his hanging hands widely
spread, he intricately hopped on one spot from one long, thin leg
to the other, then suddenly letting out a piercing grunt, would
throw himself upward and shout out in time to his wild dance:
"Ugh! Dance on, Matthew,
Don't spare your boots, you! ..."
"Eh, for one stunt like that a quartern of brandy isn't enough!"
he would add, shaking his long, graying hair.
"They fee-ee-eel! the tru-u-u-uth!" roared the two friends,
raising with difficulty their underlids, grown heavy, beneath
dull, bleary eyes.
The actor commenced to tell obscene anecdotes, pouring them out as
from a bag, and the women squealed from delight, bent in two from
laughter and threw themselves against the backs of their chairs.
Veltman, who had long been whispering with Pasha, inconspicuously,
in the hubbub, slipped out of the cabinet, while a few minutes
after him Pasha also went away, smiling with her quiet, insane and
bashful smile.
But all of the remaining students as well, save Lichonin, one
after the other, some on the quiet, some under one pretext or
another, vanished from the cabinet and did not return for long
periods. Volodya Pavlov experienced a desire to look at the
dancing; Tolpygin's head began to ache badly, and he asked Tamara
to lead him somewhere where he might wash up; Petrovski, having
"touched" Lichonin for three roubles on the quiet, went out into
the corridor and only from there despatched the housekeeper Zociya
for Little White Manka. Even the prudent and fastidious Ramses
could not cope with that spicy feeling which to-day's strange,
vivid and unwholesome beauty of Jennie excited in him. It proved
that he had some important, undeferrable business this morning; it
was necessary to go home and snatch a bit of sleep if only for a
couple of hours. But, having told good-bye to his companions, he,
before going out of the cabinet, rapidly and with deep
significance pointed the door out to Jennie with his eyes. She
understood, slowly, scarcely perceptibly, lowered her eyelashes as
a sign of consent, and, when she again raised them, Platonov, who
almost without looking had seen this silent dialogue, was struck
by that expression of malice and menace in her eyes which she sped
the back of the departing Ramses. Having waited for five minutes
she got up, said "Excuse me, I'll be right back," and went out,
swinging her short orange skirt.
"Well, now? Is it your turn, Lichonin?" asked the reporter
banteringly.
"No, brother, you're mistaken!" said Lichonin and clacked his
tongue. "And I'm not doing it out of conviction or on principle,
either ... No! I, as an anarchist, proclaim the gospel that the
worse things are, the better ... But, fortunately, I am a gambler
and spend all my temperament on gaming; on that account simple
squeamishness speaks louder within me than this same unearthly
feeling. But it's amazing our thoughts coincided. I just wanted to
ask you about the same thing."
"I—no. Sometimes, if I become very much tired out, I sleep here
over night. I take from Isaiah Savvich the key to his little room
and sleep on the divan. But all the girls here are already used to
the fact that I am a being of the third sex."
"And really ... never? ..."
"Never."
"Well, what's right is right!" exclaimed Nhira. "Sergei Ivanich is
like a holy hermit."
"Previously, some five years ago, I experienced this also,"
continued Platonov. "But, do you know, it's really too tedious and
disgusting. Something on the nature of these flies which the actor
gentleman just represented. They're stuck together on the window
sill, and then in some sort of fool wonder scratch their backs
with their little hind legs and fly apart forever. And to play at
love here? ... Well, for that I'm no hero out of their sort of
novel. I'm not handsome, am shy with women, uneasy, and polite.
While here they thirst for savage passions, bloody jealousy,
tears, poisonings, beatings, sacrifices,—in a word, hysterical
romanticism. And it's easy to understand why. The heart of woman
always wants love, while they are told of love every day with
various sour, drooling words. Involuntarily one wants pepper in
one's love. One no longer wants words of passion, but tragically-
passionate deeds. And for that reason thieves, murderers,
souteners and other riff-raff will always be their lovers."
"And most important of all," added Platonov, "that would at once
spoil for me all the friendly relations which have been so well
built up."
"Enough of joking!" incredulously retorted Lichonin. "Then what
compels you to pass days and nights here? Were you a writer—it
would be a different matter. It's easy to find an explanation;
well, you're gathering types or something ... observing life ...
After the manner of that German professor who lived for three
years with monkeys, in order to study closely their language and
manners. But you yourself said that you don't indulge in writing?"
"It isn't that I don't indulge, but I simply don't know how—I
can't."
"We'll write that down. Now let's suppose another thing—that you
come here as an apostle of a better, honest life, in the nature of
a, now, saviour of perishing souls. You know, as in the dawn of
Christianity certain holy fathers instead of standing on a column
for thirty years or living in a cave in the woods, went to the
market places, into houses of mirth, to the harlots and
scaramuchios. But you aren't inclined that way."
"I'm not."
"Then why, the devil take it, do you hang around here? I can see
very well that a great deal here is revolting and oppressive and
painful to your own self. For example, this fool quarrel with
Boris or this flunky who beats a woman, and—, in general, the
constant contemplation of every kind of filth, lust, bestiality,
vulgarity, drunkenness. Well, now, since you say so—I believe
that you don't give yourself up to lechery. But then, still more
incomprehensible to me is your MODUS VIVENDI, to express myself in
the style of leading articles."
The reporter did not answer at once:
"You see," he began speaking slowly, with pauses, as though for
the first time lending ear to his thoughts and weighing them. "You
see, I'm attracted and interested in this life by its ... how
shall I express it? ... its fearful, stark truth. Do you
understand, it's as though all the conventional coverings were
ripped off it. There is no falsehood, no hypocrisy, no
sanctimoniousness, there are no compromises of any sort, neither
with public opinion, nor with the importunate authority of our
forefathers, nor with one's own conscience. No illusions of any
kind, nor any kind of embellishments! Here she is—'I! A public
woman, a common vessel, a cloaca for the drainage of the city's
surplus lust. Come to me any one who wills—thou shalt meet no
denial, therein is my service. But for a second of this sensuality
in haste—thou shalt pay in money, revulsion, disease and
ignominy.' And that is all. There is not a single phase of human
life where the basic main truth should shine with such a
monstrous, hideous, stark clearness, without any shade of human
prevarication or self-whitewashing."
"Oh, I don't know! These women lie like the very devil. You just
go and talk with her a bit about her first fall. She'll spin you
such a yarn!"
"Well, don't you ask then. What business is that of yours? But
even if they do lie, they lie altogether like children. But then,
you know yourself that children are the foremost, the most
charming fibsters, and at the same time the sincerest people on
earth. And it's remarkable, that both they and the others—that
is, both prostitutes and children—lie only to us—men—and grown-
ups. Among themselves they don't lie—they only inspiredly
improvise. But they lie to us because we ourselves demand this of
them, because we clamber into their souls, altogether foreign to
us, with our stupid tactics and questionings, because they regard
us in secret as great fools and senseless dissemblers. But if you
like, I shall right now count off on my fingers all the occasions
when a prostitute is sure to lie, and you yourself will be
convinced that man incites her to lying."
"Well, well, we shall see." "First: she paints herself
mercilessly, at times even in detriment to herself. Why? Because
every pimply military cadet, who is so distressed by his sexual
maturity that he grows stupid in the spring, like a wood-cock on a
drumming-log; or some sorry petty government clerk or other from
the department of the parish, the husband of a pregnant woman and
the father of nine infants—why, they both come here not at all
with the prudent and simple purpose of leaving here the surplus of
their passion. He, the good for nothing, has come to enjoy
himself; he needs beauty, d'you see—aesthete that he is! But all
these girls, these daughters of the simple, unpretentious, great
Russian people—how do they regard aesthetics? 'What's sweet,
that's tasty; what's red, that's handsome.' And so, there you are,
receive, if you please, a beauty of antimony, white lead and
rouge.
"That's one. Secondly, his desire for beauty isn't enough for this
resplendent cavalier—no, he must in addition be served with a
similitude of love, so that from his caresses there should kindle
in the woman this same 'fa-hire of in-sane pahass-ssion!' which is
sung about In idiotical ballads. Ah! Then THAT is what you want?
There y'are! And the woman lies to him with countenance, voice,
sighs, moans, movements of the body. And even he himself in the
depths of his soul knows about this professional deception, but—
go along with you!—still deceives himself: 'Ah, what a handsome
man I am! Ah, how the women love me! Ah, into what an ecstasy I
bring them ...' You know, there are cases when a man with the most
desperate brazenness, in the most unlikely manner, is flattered to
his face, and he himself sees and knows it very plainly, but—the
devil take it!—despite everything a delightful feeling of some
sort lubricates his soul. And so here. Query: whose is the
initiative in the lie?
"And here's a third point for you, Lichonin. You prompted it
yourself. They lie most of all when they are asked: 'How did you
come to such a life?' But what right have you to ask her about
that, may the devil take you! For she does not push her way into
your intimate life? She doesn't interest herself with your first,
'holy' love or the virtue of your sisters and your bride. Aha! You
pay money? Splendid! The bawd and the bouncer, and the police, and
medicine, and the city government, watch over your interests.
Polite and seemly conduct on the part of the prostitute hired by
you for love is guaranteed you, and your personality is immune ...
even though in the most direct sense, in the sense of a slap in
the face, which you, of course, deserve through your aimless, and
perhaps tormenting interrogations. But you desire truth as well
for your money? Well, that you are never to discount and to
control. They will tell you just such a conventionalized history
as you—yourself a man of conventionality and a vulgarian—will
digest easiest of all. Because by itself life is either
exceedingly humdrum and tedious to you, or else as exceedingly
improbable as only life can be improbable. And so you have the
eternal mediocre history about an officer, about a shop clerk,
about a baby and a superannuated father, who there, in the
provinces, bewails his strayed daughter and implores her to return
home. But mark you, Lichonin, all that I'm saying doesn't apply to
you; in you, upon my word of honour, I sense a sincere and great
soul ... Let's drink to your health?"
They drank.
"Shall I speak on?" continued Platonov undecidedly.
"Are you bored?"
"No, no, I beg of you, speak on."
"They also lie, and lie especially innocently, to those who preen
themselves before them on political hobby horses. Here they agree
with anything you want. I shall tell her to-day: Away with the
modern bourgeois order! Let us destroy with bombs and daggers the
capitalists, landed proprietors, and the bureaucracy! She'll
warmly agree with me. But to-morrow the hanger-on Nozdrunov will
yell that it's necessary to string up all the socialists, to beat
up all the students and massacre all the sheenies, who partake of
communion in Christian blood. And she'll gleefully agree with him
as well. But if in addition to that you'll also inflame her
imagination, make her fall in love with yourself, then she'll go
with you everywhere you may wish—on a pogrom, on a barricade, on
a theft, on a murder. But then, children also are yielding. And
they, by God, are children, my dear Lichonin...
"At fourteen years she was seduced, and at sixteen she became a
patent prostitute, with a yellow ticket and a venereal disease.
And here is all her life, surrounded and fenced off from the
universe with a sort of a bizarre, impenetrable and dead wall.
Turn your attention to her everyday vocabulary—thirty or forty
words, no more—altogether as with a baby or a savage: to eat, to
drink, to sleep, man, bed, the madam, rouble, lover, doctor,
hospital, linen, policeman—and that's all. And so her mental
development, her experience, her interests, remain on an infantile
plane until her very death, exactly as in the case of a gray and
naive lady teacher who has not crossed over the threshold of a
female institute since she was ten, as in the case of a nun given
as a child into a convent. In a word, picture to yourself a tree
of a genuinely great species, but raised in a glass bell, in a jar
from jam. And precisely to this childish phase of their existence
do I attribute their compulsory lying—so innocent, purposeless
and habitual ... But then, how fearful, stark, unadorned with
anything the frank truth in this business-like dickering about the
price of a night; in these ten men in an evening; in these printed
rules, issued by the city fathers, about the use of a solution of
boric acid and about maintaining one's self in cleanliness; in the
weekly doctors' inspections; in the nasty diseases, which are
looked upon as lightly and facetiously, just as simply and without
suffering, as a cold would be; in the deep revulsion of these
women to men—so deep, that they all, without conception,
compensate for it in the Lesbian manner and do not even in the
least conceal it. All their incongruous life is here, on the palm
of my hand, with all its cynicism, monstrous and coarse injustice;
but there is in it none of that falsehood and that hypocrisy
before people and before one's self, which enmesh all humanity
from top to bottom. Consider, my dear Lichonin, how much nagging,
drawn out, disgusting deception, how much hate, there is in any
marital cohabitation in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred. How
much blind, merciless cruelty—precisely not animal, but human,
reasoned, far-sighted, calculated cruelty—there is in the sacred
maternal instinct—and behold, with what tender colours this
instinct is adorned! Then what about all these unnecessary, tom-
fool professions, invented by cultured man for the safeguarding of
my nest, my bit of meat, my woman, my child, these different
overseers, controllers, inspectors, judges, attorneys, jailers,
advocates, chiefs, bureaucrats, generals, soldiers, and hundreds
of thousands of titles more. They all subserve human greed,
cowardice, viciousness, servility, legitimised sensuality,
laziness-beggarliness!—yes, that is the real word!—human
beggarliness. But what magnificent words we have! The altar of the
fatherland, Christian compassion for our neighbor, progress,
sacred duty, sacred property, holy love. Ugh! I do not believe in
a single fine word now, and I am nauseated to infinity with these
petty liars, these cowards and gluttons! Beggar women! ... Man is
born for great joy, for ceaseless creation, in which he is God;
for a broad, free love, unhindered by anything,—love for
everything: for a tree, for the sky, for man, for a dog, for the
dear, benign, beautiful earth,—oh, especially for the earth with
its beatific motherhood, with its mornings and nights, with its
magnificent everyday miracles. But man has lied himself out so,
has become such an importunate beggar, and has sunk so low! ...
Ah, Lichonin, but I am weary!"
"I, as an anarchist, partly understand you," said Lichonin
thoughtfully. It was as though he heard and yet did not hear the
reporter. Some thought was with difficulty, for the first time,
being born in his mind. "But one thing I can not comprehend. If
humanity has become so malodorous to you, then how do you stand—
and for so long, too,—all this,—" Lichonin took in the whole
table with a circular motion of his hand,—"the basest thing that
mankind could invent?"
"Well, I don't even know myself," said Platonov with artlessness.
"You see, I am a vagabond, and am passionately in love with life.
I have been a turner, a compositor; I have sown and sold tobacco—
the cheap Silver Makhorka kind—have sailed as a stoker on the
Azov Sea, have been a fisherman on the Black—on the Dubinin
fisheries; I have loaded watermelons and bricks on the Dnieper,
have ridden with a circus, have been an actor—I can't even recall
everything. And never did need drive me. No, only an immeasurable
thirst for life and an insupportable curiosity. By God, I would
like for a few days to become a horse, a plant, or a fish, or to
be a woman and experience childbirth; I would like to live with
the inner life, and to look upon the universe with the eyes of
every human being I meet. And so I wander care-free over towns and
hamlets, bound by nothing; know and love tens of trades and
joyously float wherever it suits fate to set my sail... And so it
was that I came upon the brothel, and the more I look at it, the
more there grows within me alarm, incomprehension, and very great
anger. But even this will soon be at an end. When things get well
into autumn—away again! I'll get into a rail-rolling mill. I've a
certain friend, he'll manage it ... Wait, wait, Lichonin ...
Listen to the actor ... That's the third act."
Egmont-Lavretzki, who until this had been very successfully
imitating now a shoat which is being put into a bag, now the
altercation of a cat with a dog, was beginning little by little to
wilt and droop. Upon him was already advancing the stage of self-
revelation, next in order, in the paroxysm of which he several
times attempted to kiss Yarchenko's hand. His lids had become red;
around the shaven, prickly lips had deepened the tearful wrinkles
that gave him an appearance of weeping; and it could be heard by
his voice that his nose and throat were already overflowing with
tears.
"I serve in a farce!" he was saying, smiting himself on the breast
with his fist. "I disport myself in striped trunks for the sport
of the sated mob! I have put out my torch, have hid my talent in
the earth, like the slothful servant! But fo-ormerly!" he began to
bray tragically, "Fo-ormerly-y-y! Ask in Novocherkassk, ask in
Tvier, in Ustejne, in Zvenigorodok, in Krijopole. [Footnote: All
provincial towns.—Trans.] What a Zhadov and Belugin I was! How I
played Max! What a figure I created of Veltishchev—that was my
crowning ro-ole ... Nadin-Perekopski was beginning with me at
Sumbekov's! With Nikiphorov-Pavlenko did I serve. Who made the
name for Legunov-Pochainin? I! But no-ow ..."
He sniveled, and sought to kiss the sub-professor.
"Yes! Despise me, brand me, ye honest folk. I play the tom-fool.
I drink ... I have sold and spilt the sacred ointment! I sit in a
dive with vendable merchandise. While my wife ... she is a saint,
and pure, my little dove! ... Oh, if she knew, if she only knew!
she works hard, she runs a modiste's shop; her fingers—the
fingers of an angel—are pricked with the needle, but I! Oh,
sainted woman! And I—the scoundrel!—whom do I exchange thee for!
Oh, horror!" The actor seized his hair. "Professor, let me, I'll
kiss your scholarly hand. You alone understand me. Let us go, I'll
introduce you, you'll see what an angel this is! ... She awaits
me, she does not sleep nights, she folds the tiny hands of my
little ones and together with them whispers: 'Lord, save and
preserve papa.'"
"You're lying about it all, you ham!" said the drunken Little
White Manka suddenly, looking with hatred upon Egmont-Lavretzki.
"She isn't whispering anything, but most peacefully sleeping with
a man in your bed."
"Be still, you w—!" vociferated the actor beside himself; and
seizing a bottle by the neck raised it high over his head. "Hold
me, or else I'll brain this carrion. Don't you dare besmirch with
your foul tongue..."
"My tongue isn't foul—I take communion," impudently replied the
woman. "But you, you fool, wear horns. You go traipsing around
with prostitutes yourself, and yet want your wife not to play you
false. And look where the dummy's found a place to slaver, till he
looks like he had reins in his mouth. And what did you mix the
children in for, you miserable papa you! Don't you roll your eyes
and gnash your teeth at me. You won't frighten me! W—yourself!"
It required many efforts and much eloquence on the part of
Yarchenko in order to quiet the actor and Little White Manka, who
always after Benedictine ached for a row. The actor in the end
burst into copious and unbecoming tears and blew his nose, like an
old man; he grew weak, and Henrietta led him away to her room.
Fatigue had already overcome everybody. The students, one after
another, returned from the bedrooms; and separately from them,
with an indifferent air, came their chance mistresses. And truly,
both these and the others resembled flies, males and females, just
flown apart on the window pane. They yawned, stretched, and for a
long time an involuntary expression of wearisomeness and aversion
did not leave their faces, pale from sleeplessness, unwholesomely
glossy. And when they, before going their ways, said good-bye to
each other, in their eyes twinkled some kind of an inimical
feeling, just as with the participants of one and the same filthy
and unnecessary crime.
"Where are you going right now?" Lichonin asked the reporter in a
low voice.
"Well, really, I don't know myself. I did want to spend the night
in the cabinet of Isaiah Savvich, but it's a pity to lose such a
splendid morning. I'm thinking of taking a bath, and then I'll get
on a steamer and ride to the Lipsky monastery to a certain
tippling black friar I know. But why?"
"I would ask you to remain a little while and sit the others out.
I must have a very important word or two with you."
"It's a go."
Yarchenko was the last to go. He averred a headache and fatigue.
But scarcely had he gone out of the house when the reporter seized
Lichonin by the hand and quickly dragged him into the glass
vestibule of the entrance.
"Look!" he said, pointing to the street.
And through the orange glass of the little coloured window
Lichonin saw the sub-professor, who was ringing at Treppel's.
After a minute the door opened and Yarchenko disappeared through
it.
"How did you find out?" asked Lichonin with astonishment.
"A mere trifle! I saw his face, and saw his hands smoothing
Verka's tights. The others were less restrained. But this fellow
is bashful."
"Well, now, let's go," said Lichonin. "I won't detain you long."