"One must take an objective view of things," said the medical student gravely.
Vasilyev went into the drawing-ro^ and sat do^. There were a number of visitors in the room besides him and his friends: two infantry officers, a bald, gray- haired gentleman in spectacles, two beardless youths from the Institute of Surveying, and a very tipsy man who looked like an actor. All the young ladies were taken up with these visitors and paid no attention to Vasilyev.
Only one of them, dressed a la Aida, glanced side- ways at him, smiled, and said, yawning: "A dark one has come. . . ."
Vasilyev's heart was pounding and his face burned. He felt ashamed before these visitors of his presence here, and he felt disgusted and miserable. He was tor- mented by the thought that he, a decent and affection- ate person (such as he had hitherto considered him- self), hated these women and felt only repelled by them. He felt pity neither for the women nor the musi- cians nor the flunkeys.
"It is because I am not trying to understand them," he thought. "They are all more like animals than human beings, but of course they are human beings all the same, they have souls. One must understand them and then judge. . . ."
"Grisha, don't go, wait for us," the artist shouted to him and disappeared.
The medical student disappeared soon after.
"Yes, one must make an effort to understand, one mustn't be like this . . ." Vasilyev went on thinking.
And he began gazing at each of the women with strained attention, looking for a guilty smile. But either he did not know how to read their faces, or not one of these women felt guilty; he read on every face nothing but a blank expression of everyday vulgar boredom and complacency. Stupid faces, stupid smiles, harsh, stupid voices, insolent movements, and nothing else. Appar- ently each of them had in the past a romance with an accountant based on fifty rubles' worth of underwear, and looked for no other delights in the present but coffee, a dinner of three courses, wines, quadrilles, sleep- ing till two in the afternoon. . . .
Finding no guilty smile, Vasilyev began to look round to see if there were one intelligent face. And his atten- tion was caught by one pale, rather sleepy, tired-looking face. . . . It was a brunette, not very young, wearing a dress covered with spangles; she sat in an easy-chair, looking at the floor and lost in thought. Vasilyev walked from one corner of the room to the other, and, as though casually, sat down beside her.
"I must begin with something trivial," he thought, "and pass to what is serious. . . ."
"What a pretty dress you have," and with his finger he touched the gold fringe of her fichu.
"Oh, is it? . . ." said the dark woman listlessly.
''What province do you come from?"
"I? From a distance. . . . From Chernigov."
"A fine province. It's nice there."
"Any place seems nice when one is not in it."
"It's a pity I cannot describe nature," thought Vasil- yev. "I might touch her by a description of nature in Chernigov. No doubt she loves the place if she was born there."
"Are you dull here?'' he asked.
"Of course I am dull."
'Why don't you go away from here if you are dull?"
'Where should I go to? Go begging or what?"
"Begging would be easier than living here."
"How do you know that? Have you begged?"
"Yes, when I hadn't the money to study. Even if I hadn't, anyone could understand that. A beggar is any- way a free man, and you are a slave."
The brunette stretched, and with sleepy eyes watched the footman who was carrying a trayful of glasses and soda water.
"Stand me a glass of porter," she said, and yawned again.
"Porter," thought Vasilyev. "And what if your brother or mother walked in at this moment? What would you say? And what would they say? There would be porter then, I imagine. • . ."
All at once there was the sound of weeping. From the adjoining room, to which the footman had taken the soda water, a fair-haired man with a red face and angry eyes ran rapidly. He was followed by the tall, stout madam, who was shouting in a shrill voice:
"Nobody has given you leave to slap girls on the cheeks! We have visitors better than you, and they don't fight! You fourflusherl"
A hubb-ib arose. Vasilyev was frightened and turned pale. In the next room there was the sound of bitter, genuine weeping, as though of someone insulted. And he realized that there were real people living here who, like people everywhere else, felt insulted, suffered, wept, and cried for help. The feeling of choking hate and disgust gave way to an acute feeling of pity and anger against the aggressor. He rushed into the room where there was weeping. Across rows of bottles on a marble-top table he distinguished a suffering face, wet with tears, stretched out his hands towards that face, took a step towards the table, but at once drew back in horror. The weeping woman was drunk.
As he made his way through the noisy crowd gathered about the fair-haired man, his heart sank and he felt frightened like a child; and it seemed to him that in this alien, incomprehensible world people wanted to pursue him, to beat him, to pelt him with filthy words. . . . He tore down his coat from the hanger and ran headlong downstairs.
v
Pressed against the fence, he stood near the house waiting for his friends to come out. The sounds of the pianos and violins, gay, reckless, insolent, and mourn- ful, mingled in the air in a sort of chaos, and this tangle of sounds seemed again like an unseen orchestra tuning up on the roofs. If one looked upwards into the darkness, the black background was all spangled with white, moving specks: it was snow falling. As the snow- flakes came into the light they floated round lazily in the air like down, and still more lazily fell to the ground. The snowflakes whirled thickly round Vasilyev and hung upon his beard, his eyelashes, his eyebrows. . . . The cabmen, the horses, and the passers-by were white.
"And how can the snow fall in this street!" thought Vasilyev. "Damnation take these houses!"
His legs seemed to be giving way from fatigue, simply from having run down the stairs; he gasped for breath as though he had been climbing uphill, his heart beat so loudly that he could hear it. He was consumed by a desire to get out of the street as quickly as possible and to go home, but even stronger was his desire to wait for his companions and vent upon them his op- pressive feeling.
There was much he did not understand about these houses, the souls of ruined women were a mystery to him as before; but it was clear to him that the situation was far worse than could have been believed. If that sinful woman who had poisoned herself was called fallen, it was difficult to find a fitting name for all these who were dancing now to this tangle of sound and uttering long, loathsome sentences. They were not on the road to ruin, but ruined.
"There is vice," he thought, "but neither conscious- ness of sin nor hope of salvation. People sell and buy them, drown them in wine and steep them in abomina- tions, while, like sheep, they are stupid, indifferent, and don't understand. My God!My God!"
It was clear to him, too, that everything that is called human dignity, personality, the divine image and like- ness, was defiled to the uttermost and that not only the street and the stupid women were responsible for it.
A group of students, white with snow, passed him, laughing and talking gaily; one, a tall thin fellow, stopped, glanced at Vasilyev's face, and said in a drunken voice:
"One of us! A bit high, old man? Aha-ha! Never mind, have a good time! Don't be downhearted, old chap!"
He took Vasilyev by the shoulders and pressed his cold wet mustaches against his cheek, then he slipped, staggered, and, waving both hands, cried:
"Hold on! Don't tumble!"
And laughing, he ran to overtake his companions.
Through the noise came the sound of the artist's voice:
"Don't you dare to hit womenl I won't let you, dam- nation take you! You scoundrels!"