Fifty-Two Stories

“Just now, while we were dancing, I had a conversation with my partner,” the medic said, when all three of them came outside. “It was about her first romance. He, her hero, was some kind of bookkeeper in Smolensk, who had a wife and five children. She was seventeen and lived with her father and mother, who traded in soap and candles.”

“How did he win over her heart?” asked Vassilyev.

“He bought her fifty roubles’ worth of underwear. What the hell!”

“Anyhow he managed to worm her romance out of his partner,” Vassilyev thought about the medic. “And I don’t know how…”

“Gentlemen, I’m going home!” he said.

“Why?”

“Because I don’t know how to behave here. Besides, I’m bored and disgusted. Where’s the fun of it? If only they were human beings, but they’re savages and animals. I’m leaving, do as you like.”

“Now, Grisha, Grigory, dear heart…,” said the artist in a tearful voice, snuggling up to Vassilyev. “Come on! We’ll go to one more, and curse them all…Please! Grigoriants!”

They talked Vassilyev into it and led him up the stairs. In the carpeting, in the gilt banisters, in the porter who opened the door, and in the panels that decorated the front hall, the same S——v Lane style could be felt, but improved, more impressive.

“Really, I’m going home!” Vassilyev said, taking off his coat.

“Now, now, dear heart…,” said the artist, kissing him on the neck. “Don’t throw a tantrum…Be a good friend, Gri-Gri! We’ve come together, and we’ll leave together. What a brute you are, really.”

“I can wait for you outside. By God, it disgusts me here.”

“Now, now, Grisha…It disgusts you, but just observe it! Understand? Observe!”

“One must look at things objectively,” the medic said seriously.

Vassilyev went into the reception room and sat down. Besides him and his two friends, there were many visitors in the room: two infantry officers, a gray-haired and balding gentleman in gold-rimmed spectacles, two moustacheless students from the land-surveying institute, and a very drunk man with an actor’s face. The girls were all occupied with these visitors and paid no attention to Vassilyev. Only one of them, dressed like Aïda,⁶ glanced sideways at him, smiled at something, and said, yawning:

“Here’s a dark-haired boy…”

Vassilyev’s heart was pounding and his face was burning. He felt ashamed before the visitors for his presence there, and also disgusted and tormented. He was tormented by the thought that he, a decent and affectionate man (as he had considered himself until then), hated these women and felt nothing but loathing for them. He was not sorry for these women, or for the musicians, or for the lackeys.

“It’s because I’m not trying to understand them,” he thought. “They all resemble animals more than people, but still they are people, they have souls. I must understand them and only then judge them…”

“Grisha, don’t go, wait for us!” the artist shouted and disappeared.

Soon the medic also disappeared.

“Yes, I must try to understand, not do like this…,” Vassilyev went on thinking.

And he started peering intently into each woman’s face and searching for a guilty smile. But either he did not know how to read faces, or none of these women felt any guilt: on each face he read only a dull expression of humdrum, banal boredom and contentment. Stupid eyes, stupid smiles, sharp, stupid voices, insolent gestures—and nothing else. Apparently each of them in the past had a romance with a bookkeeper and fifty roubles of underwear, and in the present no delight in life except coffee, a three-course dinner, wine, the quadrille, and sleeping until two in the afternoon…

Not finding a single guilty smile, Vassilyev began to search for an intelligent face. And his attention fixed on a pale, slightly sleepy, tired face…It was a brunette, no longer young, dressed in an outfit covered with sequins; she was sitting in an armchair, looking down and thinking about something. Vassilyev walked back and forth and, as if accidentally, sat down beside her.

“I should begin with something banal,” he thought, “and then gradually go on to the serious…”

“What a pretty little outfit you have,” he said and touched the golden fringe of her shawl with his finger.

“I wear what I’ve got…,” the brunette said listlessly.

“What province are you from?”

“Me? From far away…Chernigov.”

“That’s a good province. Life’s good there.”

“It’s always good where we’re not.”

“A pity I’m not able to describe nature,” Vassilyev thought. “I could move her by descriptions of nature in Chernigov. She must love it, since she was born there.”

“Are you bored here?” he asked.

“Of course I’m bored.”

“Why don’t you leave this place, if you’re bored?”

“Where should I go? Begging, or something?”

“Begging is better than living here.”

“How do you know? Do you beg?”

“I did, when I couldn’t pay for my schooling. But even if I didn’t beg, it’s clear anyway. A beggar, whatever else, is a free man, and you’re a slave.”

The brunette stretched and followed with her sleepy eyes a waiter who was carrying glasses and seltzer water on a tray.