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Updated: May 28, 2025
He took Vassilyev by the shoulder and pressed his cold wet mustache against his cheek, then he slipped, staggered, and, waving both hands, cried: "Hold on! Don't upset!" 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 the women! I won't let you, damnation take you! You scoundrels!"
"If she wants it, why not let her have the pleasure?" said Vassilyev, justifying himself. "You did not give pleasure to her, but to the 'Madam. They are told to ask the visitors to stand them treat because it is a profit to the keeper." "Behold the mill..." hummed the artist, "in ruins now...." Going into the next house, the friends stopped in the hall and did not go into the drawing-room.
If they don't understand it of themselves, their visitors might surely have taught them...." A young lady in a Polish dress edged with white fur came up to him and sat down beside him. "You nice dark man, why aren't you dancing?" she asked. "Why are you so dull?" "Because it is dull." "Treat me to some Lafitte. Then it won't be dull." Vassilyev made no answer.
Vassilyev walked behind his companions, looked at their backs, and thought: "One of two things: either we only fancy prostitution is an evil, and we exaggerate it; or, if prostitution really is as great an evil as is generally assumed, these dear friends of mine are as much slaveowners, violators, and murderers, as the inhabitants of Syria and Cairo, that are described in the 'Neva. Now they are singing, laughing, talking sense, but haven't they just been exploiting hunger, ignorance, and stupidity?
Here, as in the first house, a figure in a black coat, with a sleepy face like a flunkey's, got up from a sofa in the hall. Looking at this flunkey, at his face and his shabby black coat, Vassilyev thought: "What must an ordinary simple Russian have gone through before fate flung him down as a flunkey here? Where had he been before and what had he done? What was awaiting him? Was he married?
She was seventeen, and she lived with her papa and mamma, who sold soap and candles." "How did he win her heart?" asked Vassilyev. "By spending fifty roubles on underclothes for her. What next!" "So he knew how to get his partner's story out of her," thought Vassilyev about the medical student. "But I don't know how to." "I say, I am going home!" he said. "What for?"
He made Vassilyev sit down in a big armchair near the table, and moved a box of cigarettes towards him. "Now then!" he began, stroking his knees. "Let us get to work.... How old are you?" He asked questions and the medical student answered them.
These last words Vassilyev pronounced in a faint, failing voice. He was exhausted, and sank into silence. A pause followed. I began scrutinising his face. It was as pale as a dead man's. It seemed as though life were almost extinct in him, and only the signs of the suffering that the "vain and fatuous" man was feeling betrayed that it was still alive.
They sing, and have a passion for the theatre, and draw, and talk a great deal, and drink, and they don't have headaches the day after; they are both poetical and debauched, both soft and hard; they can work, too, and be indignant, and laugh without reason, and talk nonsense; they are warm, honest, self-sacrificing, and as men are in no way inferior to himself, Vassilyev, who watched over every step he took and every word he uttered, who was fastidious and cautious, and ready to raise every trifle to the level of a problem.
Come along, Volodya, let him go to the devil! He's a fool and an ass, and that's all...." "We human beings do murder each other," said the medical student. "It's immoral, of course, but philosophizing doesn't help it. Good-by!" At Trubnoy Square the friends said good-by and parted. When he was left alone, Vassilyev strode rapidly along the boulevard.
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