Yama (The Pit) Part 9

"Gentlemen, I am ready to go with you, if you like ... Do not think, however, that the sophistries of the Egyptian Pharaoh Ramses have convinced me ... No, I simply would be sorry to break up the party ...

But I make one stipulation: we will drink a little there, gab a little, laugh a little, and so forth ... but let there be nothing more, no filth of any kind ... It is shameful and painful to think that we, the flower and glory--of the Russian intelligentzia, will go all to pieces and let our mouths water at the sight of the first skirt that comes our way."

"I swear it!" said Lichonin, putting up his hand.

"I can vouch for myself," said Ramses.

"And I! And I! By G.o.d, gentlemen, let's pledge our words ... Yarchenko is right," others took up.

They seated themselves in twos and threes in the cabs--the drivers of which had been long since following them in a file, grinning and cursing each other--and rode off. Lichonin, for the sake of a.s.surance, sat down beside the sub-professor, having embraced him around the waist and seated him on his knees and those of his neighbour, the little Tolpygin, a rosy, pleasant-faced boy on whose face, despite his twenty-three years, the childish white down--soft and light--still showed.

"The station is at Doroshenko's!" called out Lichonin after the cabbies driving off. "The stop is at Doroshenko's," he repeated, turning around.

They all stopped at Doroshenko's restaurant, entered the general room, and crowded about the bar. All were satiated and no one wanted either to drink or to have a bite. But in the soul of each one still remained a dark trace of the consciousness that right now they were getting ready to commit something needlessly shameful, getting ready to take part in some convulsive, artificial, and not at all a merry merriment.

And in each one was the yearning to bring himself through intoxication to that misty and rainbow condition when nothing makes any difference, and when the head does not know what the arms and legs are doing, and what the tongue is babbling. And, probably, not the students alone, but all the casual and constant visitors of Yama experienced in greater or lesser degree the friction of this inner psychic heart-sore, because Doroshenko did business only late in the evening and night, and no one lingered long in his place but only turned in in pa.s.sing, half-way on the journey.

While the students were drinking cognac, beer and vodka, Ramses was constantly and intently looking into the farthest corner of the restaurant hall, where two men were sitting--a tattered, gray, big old man, and, opposite him, his back to the bar, with his elbows spread out upon the table and his chin resting on the fists folded upon each other, some hunched up, stout, closely-propped gentleman in a gray suit. The old man was picking upon a dulcimer lying before him and quietly singing, in a hoa.r.s.e but pleasing voice:

"Oh my valley, my little valley, Bro-o-o-o-o-oad land of plenty."

"Excuse me, but that is a co-worker of ours," said Ramses, and went to greet the gentleman in the gray suit. After a minute he led him up to the bar and introduced him to his comrades.

"Gentlemen, allow me to introduce to you my companion in arms in the newspaper game, Sergei Ivanovich Platonov. The laziest and most talented of newspaper workers."

They all introduced themselves, indistinctly muttering out their names.

"And therefore, let's have a drink," said Uchonin, while Yarchenko asked with the refined amiability which never forsook him:

"Pardon me, pardon me, but I am acquainted with you a little, even though not personally. Weren't you in the university when Professor Priklonsky defended the doctor's dissertation?"

"It was I," answered the reporter.

"Ah, that's very nice," smiled Yarchenko charmingly, and for some reason once more pressed Platonov's hand vigorously. "I read your report afterwards: very exactly, circ.u.mstantially and skillfully put together ... Won't you favor me? ... To your health!"

"Then allow me, too," said Platonov. "Onuphriy Zakharich, pour out for us again ... one ... two, three, four ... nine gla.s.ses of cognac..."

"Oh no, you can't do that ... you are our guest, colleague,"

remonstrated Lichonin.

"Well, now, what sort of colleague am I to you?" good-naturedly laughed the reporter. "I was only in the first cla.s.s and then only for half a year--as an unmatriculated student. Here you are, Onuphriy Zakharich.

Gentlemen, I beg you..."

The upshot of it was that after half an hour Lichonin and Yarchenko did not under any consideration want to part with the reporter and dragged him with them to Yama. However, he did not resist.

"If I am not a burden to you, I would be very glad," he said simply.

"All the more since I have easy money to-day. THE DNIEPER WORD has paid me an honorarium, and this is just as much of a miracle as winning two hundred thousand on a check from a theatre coat room. Pardon me, I'll be right back..."

He walked up to the old man with whom he had been sitting before, shoved some money into his hand, and gently took leave of him.

"Where I'm going, grandpa, there you mustn't go--to-morrow we will meet in the same place as to-day. Good-bye!"

They all walked out of the restaurant. At the door Borya Sobashnikov, always a little finical and unnecessarily supercilious, stopped Lichonin and called him to one side.

"I'm surprised at you, Lichonin," he said squeamishly. "We have gathered together in our own close company, yet you must needs drag in some vagabond. The devil knows who he is!"

"Quit that, Borya," answered Lichonin amicably. "He's a warm-hearted fellow."

CHAPTER IX.

"Well now, gentlemen, this isn't fit for pigs," Yarchenko was saying, grumblingly, at the entrance of Anna Markovna's establishment. "If we finally have gone, we might at least have chosen a decent place, and not some wretched hole. Really, gentlemen, let's better go to Treppel's alongside; there it's clean and light, at any rate."

"If you please, if you please, signior," insisted Lichonin, opening the door before the sub-professor with courtly urbanity, bowing and spreading his arms before him. "If you please."

"But this is an abomination ... At Treppel's the women are better-looking, at least."

Ramses, walking behind, burst into dry laughter.

"So, so, Gavrila Petrovich. Let us continue in the same spirit. Let us condemn the hungry, petty thief who has stolen a five-kopeck loaf out of a tray, but if the director of a bank has squandered somebody else's million on race horses and cigars, let us mitigate his lot."

"Pardon me, but I do not understand this comparison," answered Yarchenko with restraint. "However, it's all the same to me; let's go."

"And all the more so," said Lichonin, letting the subprofessor pa.s.s ahead; "all the more so, since this house guards within it so many historical traditions. Comrades! Decades of student generations gaze upon us from the heights of the coat-hooks, and, besides that, through the power of the usual right, children and students pay half here, as in a panopticon. Isn't that so, citizen Simeon?"

Simeon did not like to have people come in large parties--this always smacked of scandal in the not distant future; moreover, he despised students in general for their speech, but little comprehensible to him, for their propensity towards frivolous jokes, for their G.o.dlessness, and chiefly because they were in constant revolt against officialdom and order. It was not in vain that on the day when on the Bessarabian Square the cossacks, meat-sellers, flour dealers and fish mongers were ma.s.sacring the students, Simeon having scarce found it out had jumped into a fine carriage pa.s.sing by, and, standing just like a chief of police in the victoria, tore off to the scene of the fray in order to take part in it. He esteemed people who were sedate, stout and elderly, who came singly, in secret, peeped in cautiously from the ante-room into the drawing room, fearing to meet with acquaintances, and very soon and with great haste went away, tipping him generously. Such he always styled "Your Excellency."

And so, while taking the light grey overcoat off Yarchenko, he sombrely and with much significance snarled back in answer to Lichonin's banter:

"I am no citizen here, but the bouncer."

"Upon which I have the honour to congratulate you," answered Lichonin with a polite bow.

There were many people in the drawing room. The clerks, having danced their fill, were sitting, red and wet, near their ladies, rapidly fanning themselves with their handkerchiefs; they smelt strongly of old goats' wool. Mishka the Singer and his friend the Book-keeper, both bald, with soft, downy hairs around the denuded skulls, both with turbid, nacreous, intoxicated eyes, were sitting opposite each other, leaning with their elbows on a little marble table, and were constantly trying to start singing in unison with such quavering and galloping voices as though some one was very, very often striking them in the cervical vertebrae:

"They fe-e-e-l the tru-u-u-u-uth!"

while Emma Edwardovna and Zociya with all their might were exhorting them not to behave indecently. Roly-Poly was peacefully slumbering on a chair, his head hanging down, having laid one long leg over the other and grasped the sharp knee with his clasped hands.

The girls at once recognized some of the students and ran to meet them.

"Tamarochka, your husband has come--Volodenka. And my husband too!--Mishka!" cried Niura piercingly, hanging herself on the neck of the lanky, big-nosed, solemn Petrovsky. "h.e.l.lo, Mishenka. Why haven't you come for so long? I grew weary of waiting for you."

Yarchenko with a feeling of awkwardness was looking about him on all sides.

"We'd like to have in some way ... don't you know ... a little private room," he said with delicacy to Emma Edwardovna who had approached.

"And give us some sort of red wine, please ... And then, some coffee as well ... You know yourself."