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Well, now, I can understand how these fools, on the manner of Sonka, play at love. That's what they're fools for. But you, it seems, have been roasted on all sorts of embers, have been washed in all sorts of lye, and yet you allow yourself foolishness of that sort. What are you embroidering that shirt for?"
The thing is clear: girls are cream; women are milk; women are near, girls are far. Consequently, go to Sonka, if you cannot do without it, and tell her plainly. That's how the matter stands. Fool! If she is a sinner, you can get her more easily. Why are you so angry, then? Why so bristled up?" "You don't understand," said Foma, in a low voice. "What is it I do not understand?
But most frequently of all he had no money, and would sit whole evenings through near his mistress, patiently and jealously awaiting her when Sonka through chance was taken by some guest.
One after the other, with haughty gaits, into the drawing room enter: Tamara, with bare white arms and bared neck, wound with a string of artificial pearls; fat Kitty with her fleshy, quadrangular face and low forehead she, too, is in decollete, but her skin is red and in goose-pimples; Nina, the very newest one, pug-nosed and clumsy, in a dress the colour of a green parrot; another Manka Big Manka, or Manka the Crocodile, as they call her, and the last Sonka the Rudder, a Jewess, with an ugly dark face and an extraordinarily large nose, precisely for which she has received her nickname, but with such magnificent large eyes, at the same time meek and sad, burning and humid, as, among the women of all the terrestrial globe, are to be found only among the Jewesses.
Sonka once began shivering from terror, in the night, when Thekla, a mountain of a woman of some two hundred pounds, jumped out into the yard to fulfill a need of nature, and cried out to the housekeeper who was passing by her: "Housekeeper, dear! Listen the thirty-sixth man! ... Don't forget!" Fortunately, Sonka was not disturbed much; even in this establishment she was too homely.
If he was successful, at an enormous deprivation, in cutting out of his beggarly income some chance rouble, he would take Sonka into her room, but this was not at all a joy either for him or for her: after a momentary happiness the physical possession of each other they cried, reproached each other, quarreled with characteristic Hebraic, theatrical gestures, and always after these visits Sonka the Rudder would return into the drawing room with swollen, reddened eyelids.
He knew that Sonka had been sold by her very mother to one of the buyers-up of live merchandise, knew many humiliating, hideous particulars of how she had been resold from hand to hand, and his pious, fastidious, truly Hebraic soul writhed and shuddered at these thoughts, but nevertheless love was above all. And every evening he would appear in the drawing room of Anna Markovna.
And, glory be to God, we have done with her! At least, she won't be compromising our establishment." In such a way Sonka the Rudder, avoiding a rouble establishment, was transferred into a half-rouble one, where all kinds of riff-raff made sport of the girls at their own sweet will, whole nights through. There tremendous health and great nervous force were requisite.
You had better feel your head more often so that you may not lose it by accident." "What do you mean?" asked Foma. "I speak of Sonka. You are going to see her too often." "What has that to do with you?" said Foma, rather rudely. "And why do you call her Sonka?" "It's nothing to me. I would lose nothing if you should be fleeced. And as to calling her Sonka everybody knows that is her name.
Sitting in the daytime at Anna Markovna's, he was saying, squinting from the smoke of the cigarette, and swinging one leg crossed over the other: "The question is ... What do you need this same Sonka for? It's no place for her in a decent establishment. If we'll float her down the stream, then you'll make a hundred roubles for yourself, I twenty-five for myself.
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