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Updated: May 28, 2025
Seeing two rows of houses with brightly lighted windows and wide-open doors, and hearing gay strains of pianos and violins, sounds which floated out from every door and mingled in a strange chaos, as though an unseen orchestra were tuning up in the darkness above the roofs, Vassilyev was surprised and said: "What a lot of houses!" "That's nothing," said the medical student.
"Nothing laughable? You say nothing laughable?" Vassilyev sat up, and tears glistened in his eyes. An expression of bitter distress came into his pale face. His chin quivered. "You laugh at the deceit of cheating clerks and faithless wives," he said, "but no clerk, no faithless wife has cheated as my fate has cheated me!
The pain of others worked on his nerves, excited him, roused him to a state of frenzy, and so on. Whether this friend were right I don't know, but what Vassilyev experienced when he thought this question was settled was something like inspiration.
"Take off your coats and come into the drawing-room." The medical student and the artist, still talking Italian, went into the drawing-room. Vassilyev followed them irresolutely. "Gentlemen, take off your coats!" the flunkey said sternly; "you can't go in like that." In the drawing-room there was, besides the girl, another woman, very stout and tall, with a foreign face and bare arms.
To distract his spiritual anguish by some new sensation or some other pain, Vassilyev, not knowing what to do, crying and shuddering, undid his greatcoat and jacket and exposed his bare chest to the wet snow and the wind. But that did not lessen his suffering either.
The lamp in which the oil had burnt down began to smoke. Vassilyev did not notice it. He began pacing to and fro again, still thinking. Now he put the question differently: what must be done that fallen women should not be needed? For that, it was essential that the men who buy them and do them to death should feel all the immorality of their share in enslaving them and should be horrified.
He was the only one who smiled; all the others, his friends, the musicians, the women, did not even glance towards his neighbor, but seemed not to have heard her. "Stand me some Lafitte," his neighbor said again. Vassilyev felt a repulsion for her white fur and for her voice, and walked away from her.
Vassilyev, whistling and straightening his tie, walks off into the drawing-room, and I look after him, and feel vexed. For some reason I regret his past sufferings, I regret all that I felt myself on that man's account on that terrible night. It is as though I had lost something. . . . IT was a free night.
Half the questions usually asked by doctors of their patients can be left unanswered without the slightest ill effect on the health, but Mihail Sergeyitch, the medical student, and the artist all looked as though if Vassilyev failed to answer one question all would be lost. As he received answers, the doctor for some reason noted them down on a slip of paper.
Vassilyev thought it would be nice to touch this man's hair, to see whether it was soft or coarse. It must be coarse like a dog's. Having drunk two glasses of porter, the artist became suddenly tipsy and grew unnaturally lively. "Let's go to another!" he said peremptorily, waving his hands. "I will take you to the best one."
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