Seeing what the matter was, he did not become amazed or excited; during his practice as an official city doctor, he had had his fill of seeing such things, so that he had already grown benumbed and hardened to human sufferings, wounds and death.
He ordered Simeon to lift the corpse of Jennka a bit upward, and himself getting up on the seat, cut through the tape.
Proforma, he ordered Jennka’s body to be borne away into the room that had been hers, and tried with the help of the same Simeon to produce artificial respiration; but after five minutes gave it up as a bad job, fixed the pince-nez, which had become crooked, on his nose, and said:
“Call the police in to make a protocol.”
Again Kerbesh came, again whispered for a long time with the proprietress in her little bit of a cabinet, and again crunched in his pocket a new hundred-rouble bill.
The protocol was made in five minutes; and Jennka, just as half-naked as she had hung herself, was carted away in a hired wagon into an anatomical theatre, wrapped up in and covered with two straw mats.
Emma Edwardovna was the first to find the note that Jennka had left on her night table.
On a sheet, torn out of the income-expense book, compulsory for every prostitute, in pencil, in a naive, rounded, childish handwriting— by which, however, it could be judged that the hands of the suicide had not trembled during the last minutes— was written:
“I beg that no one be blamed for my death.
I am dying because I have become infected, and also because all people are scoundrels and it is very disgusting to live.
How to divide my things— Tamara knows about that.
I told her in detail.”
Emma Edwardovna turned around upon Tamara, who was right on the spot among a number of other girls, and with eyes filled with a cold, green hatred, hissed out:
“Then you knew, you low-down thing, what she was preparing to do? … You knew, you vermin? … You knew and didn’t tell? … ”
She already had swung back, in order, as was her wont, to hit Tamara cruelly and calculatingly; but suddenly stopped just as she was, with gaping mouth and with eyes wide open.
It was just as though she was seeing, for the first time, Tamara, who was looking at her with a firm, wrathful, unbearable gaze, and slowly, slowly was raising from below, and at last brought up to the level of the housekeeper’s face, a small object, glistening with white metal.
Chapter 6
That very same day, at evening, a very important event took place in the house of Anna Markovna: the whole institution— with land and house, with live and inanimate stock— passed into the hands of Emma Edwardovna.
They had been speaking of this, on and off, for a long time in the establishment; but when the rumours so unexpectedly, immediately right after the death of Jennka, turned into realities, the misses could not for a long time come to themselves for amazement and fear.
They knew well, having experienced the sway of the German upon themselves, her cruel, implacable pedantism; her greed, arrogance, and, finally, her perverted, exacting, repulsive love, now for one, now for another favorite.
Besides that, it was no mystery to any one, that out of the fifteen thousand which Emma Edwardovna had to pay the former proprietress for the firm and for the property, one third belonged to Kerbesh, who had, for a long time already, been carrying on half-friendy, half-business relations with the fat housekeeper.
From the union of two such people, shameless, pitiless, and covetous, the girls could expect all sorts of disasters for themselves.
Anna Markovna had to let the house go so cheaply not simply because Kerbesh, even if he had not known about certain shady little transactions to her credit, could still at any time he liked trip her up and eat her up without leaving anything.
Of pretexts and cavils for this even a hundred could be found every day; and certain ones of them not merely threatened the shutting down of the house alone, but, if you like, even with the court.
But, dissembling, oh-ing and sighing, bewailing her poverty, her maladies and orphanhood, Anna Markovna at soul was glad of even such a settlement.
And then it must be said: she was already for a long time feeling the approach of senile infirmity, together with all sorts of ailments and the thirst for complete, benevolent rest, undisturbed by anything.
All, of which she had not even dared dream in her early youth, when she herself had yet been a prostitute of the rank and file— all had now come to her of itself, one in addition to the other: peaceful old age, a house— a brimming cup on one of the quiet, cozy streets, almost in the centre of the city,— the adored daughter Birdie, who— if not to-day then tomorrow— must marry a respected man, an engineer, a house-owner, and member of the city-council; provided for as she was with a respectable dowry and magnificent valuables … Now it was possible peacefully, without hurrying, with gusto, to dine and sup on sweet things, for which Anna Markovna had always nourished a great weakness; to drink after dinner good, home-made, strong cherry-brandy; and of evenings to play a bit at “preference,” for kopeck stakes, with esteemed elderly ladies of her acquaintance, who, even although they never as much as let it appear that they knew the real trade of the little old woman, did in reality know it very well; and not only did not condemn her business but even bore themselves with respect toward those enormous percentages which she earned upon her capital.
And these charming friends, the joy and consolation of an untroubled old age, were: one— the keeper of a loan office; another— the proprietress of a lively hotel near the railroad; the third— the owner of a jewelry shop, not large, but all the go and well known among the big thieves, &c.
And about them, in her turn, Anna Markovna knew and could tell several shady and not especially flattering anecdotes; but in their society it was not customary to talk of the sources of the family well-being— only cleverness, daring, success, and decent manners were esteemed.
But, even besides that, Anna Markovna, sufficiently limited in mind and not especially developed, had some sort of an amazing inner intuition, which during all her life permitted her instinctively but irreproachably to avoid unpleasantnesses, and to find prudent paths in time.
And so now, after the sudden death of Roly-Poly, and the suicide of Jennka which followed the next day, she, with her unconsciously— penetrating soul foreguessed that fate— which had been favouring her house of ill-fame, sending her good fortunes, turning away all under-water shoals— was now getting ready to turn its back upon her.
And she was the first to retreat.
They say, that not long before a fire in a house, or before the wreck of a ship, the wise, nervous rats in droves make their way into another place.
And Anna Markovna was directed by the same rat-like, animal, prophetic intuition.
And she was right: immediately right after the death of Jennka some fearful curse seemed to hang over the house, formerly Anna Markovna Shaibes’, but now Emma Edwardovna Titzner’s: deaths, misfortunes, scandals just simply descended upon it ceaselessly, becoming constantly more frequent, on the manner of bloody events in Shakespeare’s tragedies; as, however, was the case at all the remaining houses of the Yamas as well.
And one of the first to die, a week after the liquidation of the business, was Anna Markovna herself.
However, this frequently happens with people put out of their accustomed rut of thirty years: so die war heroes, who have gone into retirement— people of insuperable health and iron will; so quickly go off the stage former stock brokers, who have happily gone away to rest, but have been deprived of the burning allurement of risk and hazard; so, too, age rapidly, droop, and grow decrepit, the great artists who leave the stage … Her death was the death of the just.
Once at a game of cards she felt herself unwell; begged them to wait a while for her; said that she would lie down for just a minute; lay down in the bedroom on a bed; sighed deeply, and passed on into another world— with a calm face, with a peaceful, senile smile upon her lips.
Isaiah Savvich— her faithful comrade on the path of life, a trifle downtrodden, who had always played a secondary, subordinate role— survived her only a month.
Birdie was left sole heiress.
She very successfully turned the cozy house into money, as well as the land somewheres at the edge of the town; married, as it had been presupposed, very happily; and up to this time is convinced that her father carried on a great commercial business in the export of wheat through Odessa and Novorossiysk into Asia Minor.
On the evening of the day when Jennie’s corpse had been carried away to an anatomical theatre; at an hour when not even a chance guest appears on Yamskaya Street, all the girls, at the insistence of Emma Edwardovna, assembled in the drawing room.
Not one of them dared murmur against the fact that on this distressing day, when they had not yet recovered from the impression of Jennka’s horrible death, they would be compelled to dress up, as usual, in wildly festive finery, and to go into the brightly illuminated drawing room, in order to dance, sing, and to entice lecherous men with their denuded bodies.
And at last into the drawing room walked Emma Edwardovna herself.
She was more majestic than she had ever been— clad in a black silk gown, from which, just like battlements, her enormous breasts jutted out, upon which descended two fat chins; in black silk mittens; with an enormous gold chain wound thrice around her neck, and terminating in a ponderous medallion hanging upon the very abdomen.
“Ladies! … ” she began impressively, “I must … Stand up!” she suddenly called out commandingly. “When I speak, you must hear me out standing.”
They all exchanged glances with perplexity: such an order was a novelty in the establishment.
However, the girls got up one after another, irresolutely, with eyes and mouths gasping.
“Sie sollen … you must from this day show me that respect which you are bound to show to your mistress,” importantly and weightily began Emma Edwardovna. “Beginning from to-day, the establishment in a legal manner has passed from our good and respected Anna Markovna to me, Emma Edwardovna Titzner.
I hope that we will not quarrel, and that you will behave yourselves like sensible, obedient, and well-brought-up girls.