“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.
“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.