Yama (The Pit) Part 14

Judging by the handwriting, it was written by a man greatly drunk and little lettered.

"'I dreenk'--not drink, but dreenk," explained Yarchenko. "'I dreenk to the health of the luminary of Russian science, Gavrila Petrovich Yarchenko, whom I saw by chance when I was pa.s.sing by through the collidor. Would like to clink gla.s.ses together personally. If you do not remember, recollect the National Theatre, Poverty Is No Disgrace, and the humble artist who played African.' Yes, that's right," said Yarchenko. "Once, somehow, they saddled me with the arrangement of this benefit performance in the National Theatre. Also, there dimly glimmers some clean-shaven haughty visage, but ... What shall it be, gentlemen?"

Lichonin answered good-naturedly:

"Why, drag him here. Perhaps he's funny."

"And you?" the sub-professor turned to Platonov.

"It's all the same to me. I know him slightly. At first he'll shout: 'KELLNER, champagne!' then burst into tears about his wife, who is an angel, then deliver a patriotic speech and finally raise a row over the bill, but none too loudly. All in all he's entertaining."

"Let him come," said Volodya, from behind the shoulder of Katie, who was sitting on his knees, swinging her legs.

"And you, Veltman?"

"What?" the student came to with a start. He was sitting on the divan with his back to his companions, near the reclining Pasha, bending over her, and already for a long time, with the friendliest appearance of sympathy, had been stroking her, now on the shoulder, now on the hair at the nape of the neck, while she was smiling at him with her shyly shameless and senselessly pa.s.sionate smile through half-closed and trembling eyelashes. "What? What's it all about? Oh yes,--is it all right to let the actor in? I've nothing against it. Please do ..."

Yarchenko sent an invitation through Simeon, and the actor came and immediately commenced the usual actor's play. In the door he paused, in his long frock coat, shining with its silk lapels, with a glistening opera hat, which he held with his arm in the middle of his chest, like an actor portraying in the theatre an elderly worldly lion or a bank director. And approximately these persons he was inwardly picturing to himself.

"May I be permitted, gentlemen, to intrude into your intimate company?"

he asked in an unctuous, kindly voice, with a half-bow done somewhat to one side.

They asked him in, and he began to introduce himself. Shaking hands, he stuck out his elbow forward and raised it so high that the hand proved to be far lower. Now it was no longer a bank director, but such a clever, splendid fellow, a sportsman and a rake of the golden youths.

But his face--with rumpled, wild eyebrows and with denuded lids without lashes--was the vulgar, harsh and low face of a typical alcoholic, libertine, and pettily cruel man. Together with him came two of his ladies: Henrietta the eldest girl in years in the establishment of Anna Markovna, experienced, who had seen everything and had grown accustomed to everything, like an old horse on the tether of a threshing machine, the possessor of a thick ba.s.s, but still a handsome woman; and Big Manka, or Manka the Crocodile. Henrietta since still the preceding night had not parted from the actor, who had taken her from the house to a hotel.

Having seated himself alongside of Yarchenko, he straight off began to play a new role--he became something on the order of an old good soul of a landed proprietor, who had at one time been at a university himself, and now can not look upon the students without a quiet, fatherly emotion.

"Believe me, gentlemen, that one's soul rests from all these worldly squabbles in the midst of youth," he was saying, imparting to his depraved and harsh face an actor-like, exaggerated and improbable expression of being moved. "This faith in a high ideal, these honest impulses! ... What can be loftier and purer than our Russian students as a body? ... KELLNER! Chompa-a-agne!" he yelled deafeningly all of a sudden, and dealt a heavy blow on the table with his fist.

Lichonin and Yarchenka did not wish to remain in debt to him. A spree began. G.o.d knows in what manner Mishka the Singer and Nicky the Book-keeper soon found themselves in the cabinet, and at once began singing in their galloping voices:

"They fe-e-e-el the tru-u-u-uth, Come thou daw-aw-aw-awning quicker ..."

There also appeared Roly-Poly, who had awakened. Letting his head drop touchingly to one side and having made little narrowed, lachrymose, sweet eyes in his wrinkled old face of a Don Quixote, he was speaking in a persuasively begging tone:

"Gentlemen students ... you ought to treat a little old man. I love education, by G.o.d! ... Allow me!"

Lichonin was glad to see everybody, but Yarchenko in the beginning--until the champagne had mounted to his head--only raised high his small, short eyebrows with a timorous, wondering and naive air. It suddenly became crowded, smoky, noisy and close in the cabinet.

Simeon, with rattling, closed the blinds with bolts on the outside. The women, just having gotten done with a visit or in the interim between dances, walked into the room, sat on somebody's knees, smoked, sang disjointedly, drank wine, kissed and again went away, and again came.

The clerks of Kereshkovsky, offended because the damsels bestowed more attention upon the cabinet than the drawing room, did start a row and tried to enter into a provoking explanation with the students, but Simeon in a moment quelled them with two or three authoritative words, thrown out as though in pa.s.sing.

Niura came back from her room and a little later Petrovsky followed her. Petrovsky with an extremely serious air declared that he had been walking on the street all this time, thinking over the incident which had taken place and in the end had come to the conclusion that comrade Boris was in reality not in the right, but that there also was a circ.u.mstance in extenuation of his fault--intoxication. Also, Jennie came later, but alone--Sobashnikov had fallen asleep in her room. The actor proved to have no end of talents. He very faithfully imitated the buzzing of a fly which an intoxicated man is catching on a window-pane, and the sounds of a saw; drolly performed, standing with his face in the corner, the conversation of a nervous lady over the telephone; imitated the singing of a phonograph record, and in the end, with exceeding likeness to life, showed a little Persian lad with a little trained monkey. Holding on with his hand to an imaginary small chain and at the same time baring his teeth, squatting like a monkey, winking his eyelids often, and scratching now his posteriors, now the hair on his head, he sang through his nose, in a monotonous and sad voice, distorting the words:

"The i-young cissack to the war has went, The i-young ladee underneath the fence lies spraw-aw-ling.

AINA, AINA, AI-NA-NA-NA, AI-NA NA-NA-NA."

In conclusion he took Little White Manka in his arms, wrapped her up in the skirts of his frock and, stretching out his hand and making a tearful face, began to nod his head, bent to one side, as is done by little swarthy, dirty, oriental lads who roam over all Russia in long, old, soldiers' overcoats, with bared chest of a bronze colour, holding a coughing, moth-eaten little monkey in their bosom.

"And who may you be?" severely asked fat Kate, who knew and loved this joke.

"Me Serbian, lady-y-y," piteously moaned the actor through his nose.

"Give me somethin', lady-y-y."

"And what do they call your little monkey?"

"Matreshka-a-a ... Him 'ungry-y-y, lady ... him want eat..."

"And have you got a pa.s.sport?"

"We Serbia-a-an. Gimme something lady-y-y..."

The actor proved not superfluous on the whole. He created at once a great deal of noise and raised the spirits of the company, which were beginning to be depressing. And every minute he cried out in a stentorian voice:

"KELLNER! Chompa-a-agne!"--although Simeon, who was accustomed to his manner paid very little attention to these cries.

There began a truly Russian hubbub, noisy and senseless. The rosy, flaxen-haired, pleasing Tolpygin was playing LA SEGUIDILLE from CARMEN on the piano, while Roly-Poly was dancing a Kamarinsky peasant dance to its tune. His narrow shoulders hunched up, twisted all to one side, the fingers of his hanging hands widely spread, he intricately hopped on one spot from one long, thin leg to the other, then suddenly letting out a piercing grunt, would throw himself upward and shout out in time to his wild dance:

"Ugh! Dance on, Matthew, Don't spare your boots, you! ..."

"Eh, for one stunt like that a quartern of brandy isn't enough!" he would add, shaking his long, graying hair.

"They fee-ee-eel! the tru-u-u-uth!" roared the two friends, raising with difficulty their underlids, grown heavy, beneath dull, bleary eyes.

The actor commenced to tell obscene anecdotes, pouring them out as from a bag, and the women squealed from delight, bent in two from laughter and threw themselves against the backs of their chairs. Veltman, who had long been whispering with Pasha, inconspicuously, in the hubbub, slipped out of the cabinet, while a few minutes after him Pasha also went away, smiling with her quiet, insane and bashful smile.

But all of the remaining students as well, save Lichonin, one after the other, some on the quiet, some under one pretext or another, vanished from the cabinet and did not return for long periods. Volodya Pavlov experienced a desire to look at the dancing; Tolpygin's head began to ache badly, and he asked Tamara to lead him somewhere where he might wash up; Petrovski, having "touched" Lichonin for three roubles on the quiet, went out into the corridor and only from there despatched the housekeeper Zociya for Little White Manka. Even the prudent and fastidious Ramses could not cope with that spicy feeling which to-day's strange, vivid and unwholesome beauty of Jennie excited in him. It proved that he had some important, undeferrable business this morning; it was necessary to go home and s.n.a.t.c.h a bit of sleep if only for a couple of hours. But, having told good-bye to his companions, he, before going out of the cabinet, rapidly and with deep significance pointed the door out to Jennie with his eyes. She understood, slowly, scarcely perceptibly, lowered her eyelashes as a sign of consent, and, when she again raised them, Platonov, who almost without looking had seen this silent dialogue, was struck by that expression of malice and menace in her eyes which she sped the back of the departing Ramses.

Having waited for five minutes she got up, said "Excuse me, I'll be right back," and went out, swinging her short orange skirt.

"Well, now? Is it your turn, Lichonin?" asked the reporter banteringly.

"No, brother, you're mistaken!" said Lichonin and clacked his tongue.

"And I'm not doing it out of conviction or on principle, either ... No!

I, as an anarchist, proclaim the gospel that the worse things are, the better ... But, fortunately, I am a gambler and spend all my temperament on gaming; on that account simple squeamishness speaks louder within me than this same unearthly feeling. But it's amazing our thoughts coincided. I just wanted to ask you about the same thing."

"I--no. Sometimes, if I become very much tired out, I sleep here over night. I take from Isaiah Savvich the key to his little room and sleep on the divan. But all the girls here are already used to the fact that I am a being of the third s.e.x."

"And really ... never? ..."

"Never."

"Well, what's right is right!" exclaimed Nhira. "Sergei Ivanich is like a holy hermit."

"Previously, some five years ago, I experienced this also," continued Platonov. "But, do you know, it's really too tedious and disgusting.

Something on the nature of these flies which the actor gentleman just represented. They're stuck together on the window sill, and then in some sort of fool wonder scratch their backs with their little hind legs and fly apart forever. And to play at love here? ... Well, for that I'm no hero out of their sort of novel. I'm not handsome, am shy with women, uneasy, and polite. While here they thirst for savage pa.s.sions, b.l.o.o.d.y jealousy, tears, poisonings, beatings, sacrifices,--in a word, hysterical romanticism. And it's easy to understand why. The heart of woman always wants love, while they are told of love every day with various sour, drooling words. Involuntarily one wants pepper in one's love. One no longer wants words of pa.s.sion, but tragically-pa.s.sionate deeds. And for that reason thieves, murderers, souteners and other riff-raff will always be their lovers."

"And most important of all," added Platonov, "that would at once spoil for me all the friendly relations which have been so well built up."

"Enough of joking!" incredulously retorted Lichonin. "Then what compels you to pa.s.s days and nights here? Were you a writer--it would be a different matter. It's easy to find an explanation; well, you're gathering types or something ... observing life ... After the manner of that German professor who lived for three years with monkeys, in order to study closely their language and manners. But you yourself said that you don't indulge in writing?"