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"To turn over virgin soil it is necessary to use a deep plough going well into the earth, not a surface plough gliding lightly over the top." AT one o'clock in the afternoon of a spring day in the year 1868, a young man of twenty-seven, carelessly and shabbily dressed, was toiling up the back staircase of a five-storied house on Officers Street in St. Petersburg.
The stationer's and the tobacconist's were still there. In the rear, over some low buildings, you could see the leprous facades of several five-storied houses rearing their tumble-down outlines against the sky. The "Grand Balcony" dancing hall no longer existed; some sugar-cutting works, which hissed continually, had been installed in the hall with the ten flaming windows.
Christophe thought: "How lonely they all are!" In that sense nothing could have been more characteristic than the house in which Christophe and Olivier lodged. It was a world in miniature, a little France, honest and industrious, without any bond which could unite its divers elements. A five-storied house, a shaky house, leaning over to one side, with creaking floors and crumbling ceilings.
The hot, garbage-strewn pavements and sunbaked gutters swarmed with the sons and daughters of the Tenement. Directly opposite its five-storied front was the rear entrance to the Fourth Regiment Armory. And there, at that moment, a sad-eyed, swarthy Italian, swinging his hand-organ down on the asphalt pavement in front of the Armory's open doors, was beginning to grind out his melodies.
The dark rooms of the five-storied boarding-house had seemed gloomy enough to her, and she had found it much more difficult to adjust herself to her surroundings than she could have been induced to admit to her father.
The two girls strolled along the ridge of the hill as far as the five-storied pagoda. They passed the tea-house, so famous for its plum-blossoms in early March. It was brightly lighted. The paper rectangles of the shoji were aglow like an illuminated honeycomb. The wooden walls resounded with the jangle of the samisen, the high screaming geisha voices, and the rough laughter of the guests.
On an exceptionally hot evening early in July a young man came out of the garret in which he lodged in S. Place and walked slowly, as though in hesitation, towards K. bridge. He had successfully avoided meeting his landlady on the staircase. His garret was under the roof of a high, five-storied house and was more like a cupboard than a room.
He first made her acquaintance in 1831, and would often go puffing up the stairs of the five-storied house on the Quai Saint-Michel, at the top of which she lived. His ostensible object was to give advice about her writing, but in reality he would leave this comparatively uninteresting subject very quickly, and pour out floods of talk about his own novels. "Ah, I have found something else!
'Will you fight with the sword? 'No, sir. 'The pistol? 'No, sir. 'The sabre, the knife? 'No, sir. 'Ah, then, I see what you want. You are not fastidious. What you want is a duel in the prairie. I agree. We will replace the prairie by a five-storied house. You are permitted to conceal yourself in the vegetation. Chevalier used to recite The Duel in the Prairie in a very humorous manner.
She read no more than the opening words, but she had read enough to realize that it was, indeed, her father's will. One sultry evening early in July a young man emerged from the small furnished lodging he occupied in a large five-storied house in the Pereoulok S , and turned slowly, with an air of indecision, toward the K bridge. He was fortunate enough not to meet his landlady on the stairs.
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