“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…”
“Egor…Come on, Egor…” the medic started pleading. “I give you my word of honor, I’ll never go with you again. Word of honor!”
The artist gradually calmed down, and the friends went home.
“ ‘Without my will to these sad shores,’ ” the medic began to sing, “ ‘a mysterious force doth draw me…’ ”
“ ‘Behold the mill…’ ” the artist joined in a little later. “ ‘Already ’tis in ruin…’ Holy Mother, the snow’s really pouring down! Grishka, why did you leave? You’re a coward, an old woman, and nothing more.”
Vassilyev walked behind his friends, looked at their backs, and thought:
“One of two things: either it only seems to us that prostitution is evil, and we exaggerate, or, if prostitution is in fact as evil as we commonly think, then these dear friends of mine are as much slave-owners, rapists, and murderers as those residents of Syria and Cairo portrayed in Niva.7 Now they sing, laugh, reason sensibly, but didn’t they just exploit hunger, ignorance, and stupidity? They did—I witnessed it. What has their humaneness, medicine, art got to do with it? The learning, art, and lofty feelings of these murderers remind me of a joke about lard. Two robbers killed a beggar in the forest. They started dividing up his clothes and found a piece of pork lard in his bag. ‘What luck,’ says the one, ‘let’s have a bite.’ ‘No, how can we?’ the other says in horror. ‘Have you forgotten it’s Wednesday?’8 And they didn’t eat it. Having killed a man, they left the forest convinced that they were good observers of the fast. The same with these two: they buy women, and go off thinking they’re artists and scholars…”
“Listen, you two!” he said angrily and sharply. “Why do you come here? Don’t you understand how terrible it is? Your medicine says that each of these women dies prematurely of consumption or something else; art tells us that morally she dies even before that. Each of them dies, because in the course of her life she receives an average of, let’s say, five hundred men. Each woman is killed by five hundred men. And you are among those five hundred! Now, if you both go to this and other similar places two hundred and fifty times in your life, the two of you will have killed one woman! Isn’t that clear? Isn’t that terrible? The two of you, or three, or five, kill one stupid, hungry woman! Ah, my God, isn’t that terrible?”
“I just knew it would end like this,” the artist said, wincing. “We should have nothing to do with this fool and blockhead! So you think you’ve got great thoughts and ideas in your head now? No, devil knows what, only not ideas! You’re looking at me now with hatred and disgust, but in my opinion you’d do better to build twenty more of these houses than look like that. There’s more vice in this look of yours than in this whole lane! Let’s go, Volodya, to hell with him! A fool, a blockhead, and nothing more…”
“We human beings do kill each other,” the medic said. “It’s immoral, of course, but philosophy won’t help here. Goodbye!”
At Trubnaya Square the friends said goodbye and parted. Left alone, Vassilyev walked quickly down the boulevard. He was afraid of the darkness, afraid of the snow that poured down in big flakes and seemed intent on covering the whole world; he was afraid of the streetlamps, palely glimmering through the billows of snow. His soul was seized by an unaccountable, fainthearted fear. There were some rare passersby, but he timorously avoided them. It seemed to him that women, only women, were coming from everywhere and looking at him from everywhere…
“It’s beginning,” he thought. “The breakdown is beginning…”
VI
At home he lay on the bed and said, shuddering all over:
“Alive! Alive! My God, they’re alive!”
He fantasized, trying very hard to imagine to himself now the brother of the fallen woman, now her father, now the fallen woman herself, with her painted cheeks, and it all horrified him.
It seemed to him for some reason that he had to resolve this question immediately, at all costs, and that it was not someone else’s question, but his own. With great effort, he overcame his despair and, sitting on his bed, holding his head in his hands, began to think: how to save all the women he had seen that day? As an educated man, he knew the method for resolving various questions very well. And, agitated as he was, he held strictly to this method. He recalled the history of the question, the literature about it, and by three o’clock he was already pacing up and down trying to remember all the attempts put into practice at the present time for saving women. He had a great many good friends and acquaintances who lived in the furnished rooms of Falzfein, Galyashkin, Nechaev, Echkin. Among them were not a few honest and self-sacrificing men. Some of them had attempted to save women…
“All of these not very numerous attempts,” thought Vassilyev, “can be divided into three groups. Some, having bought a woman out of the brothel, would rent her a room, buy her a sewing machine, and she would become a seamstress. And having bought her out, willy-nilly, he made her his kept woman; then, on finishing his studies, he would leave and hand her over to some other decent man, like some sort of object. And the fallen woman remained fallen. Others, having bought her out, also rented her a furnished room, bought the inevitable sewing machine, and set about on literacy, sermonizing, reading books. The woman lived and sewed as long as it was interesting and new, but then, getting bored, she would start receiving men in secret from the preacher, or would run away and go back to where she could sleep until three o’clock, drink coffee, and have good dinners. The third group, the most ardent and self-sacrificing, took a bold, resolute step. They married. And when the insolent, spoiled, or stupid downtrodden animal became a wife, a homemaker, and then a mother, it turned her life and worldview upside down, so that in the wife and mother it was hard to recognize the former fallen woman. Yes, marriage is the best and perhaps the only way.”