Fifty-Two Stories

“Treat me to some porter,” she said and yawned again.

“Porter…,” thought Vassilyev. “And what if your brother or your mother came in here now? What would you say? And what would they say? There’d be porter then, I can just picture it…”

Suddenly he heard weeping. A fair-haired gentleman with a red face and angry eyes quickly came out of the room where the lackey had carried the seltzer water. He was followed by the tall, plump madam, who was shouting in a shrill voice:

“No one has allowed you to slap girls in the face! We have better visitors than you, and they don’t go hitting people! Charlatan!”

A row ensued. Vassilyev became frightened and turned pale. In the next room someone was sobbing, genuinely, as an insulted person does. And he realized that in fact people lived here, real people, who, as everywhere, get insulted, suffer, weep, ask for help…The intense hatred and feeling of disgust gave way to a sharp feeling of pity and anger at the offender. He rushed to the room where the weeping came from; behind the row of bottles that stood on the marble tabletop, he made out a suffering, tear-drenched face, reached his arms out to it, took a step towards the table, but recoiled at once in horror. The weeping girl was drunk.

Making his way through the noisy crowd that surrounded the fair-haired man, he lost heart, turned chicken like a little boy, and it seemed to him that in this alien, incomprehensible world he would be hunted down, beaten, showered with dirty words…He tore his coat from the rack and rushed headlong down the stairs.

V

Pressing against the fence, he stood by the house waiting for his comrades to come out. The sounds of pianos and fiddles, merry, rollicking, impudent, and sad, mingled in the air into a sort of chaos, and this mingling as before resembled an invisible orchestra tuning up in the darkness above the roofs. If you looked up into this darkness, the whole black background was speckled with white, moving dots: it was snowing. Snowflakes, falling into the light, circled lazily in the air like down, and still more lazily fell to the ground. Snow whirled densely around Vassilyev and clung to his beard, eyelashes, eyebrows…The cabbies, the horses, the passersby were white.

“How can it snow in this lane?” Vassilyev thought. “Curse these houses!”

His legs, weary from having run down the stairs, were giving way under him; he was breathless, as if he had been climbing a mountain; his heart was pounding so hard he could hear it. He was tormented by the desire to get out of the lane quickly and go home, but he wanted still more to wait for his comrades and vent his painful feeling on them.

There was much in those houses he did not understand, the souls of the perishing women still remained a mystery to him, but it was clear to him that things were much worse than one might have thought. If that guilty woman who had poisoned herself was called fallen, then it was hard to find a suitable name for all the ones who were now dancing to that muddle of sounds and uttering long, repulsive phrases. They were not perishing, they had already perished.

“There is vice,” he thought, “but there is no consciousness of guilt or hope for salvation. They are bought and sold, drowned in wine and vileness, but, like sheep, they are dumb, indifferent, and without understanding. My God, my God!”

It was also clear to him that here everything that is called human dignity, personhood, the image and likeness of God, is defiled to its very foundation, “totaled,” as drunkards say, and that the fault for it was not only with the lane and the stupid women.

A crowd of students, white with snow, went past him, laughing and talking merrily. One of them, tall and thin, stopped, looked into Vassilyev’s face, and said in a drunken voice:

“One of ours! Smashed, brother? A-ha-ha, brother! Never mind, live it up! Go on! Keep at it, old boy!”

He took Vassilyev by the shoulders and pressed his wet, cold moustache to his cheeks, then slipped, staggered, and, waving both arms, cried:

“Hold on! Don’t fall!”

And, laughing, he ran to catch up with his comrades.

Through the noise the artist’s voice was heard:

“Don’t you dare beat women! I won’t allow it, devil take you! What scoundrels!”

The medic appeared in the doorway of the house. He looked around and, seeing Vassilyev, said in alarm:

“You’re here? Listen, by God, it’s decidedly impossible to go anywhere with Egor! I don’t understand what got into him! He started a scandal! Do you hear? Egor!” he shouted into the doorway. “Egor!”

“I won’t allow you to beat women!” the artist’s piercing voice came from above.

Something heavy and bulky rolled down the stairs. It was the artist flying down headlong. He had obviously been thrown out.

He got up from the ground, dusted off his hat, and with an angry, indignant face shook his fist up the stairs and shouted:

“Scoundrels! Butchers! Bloodsuckers! I won’t allow it! To beat a weak, drunken woman! Ahh, you…”