As a usual thing— and this happened often— Zociya the housekeeper would walk up to him under cover of the hubbub and would say, twisting her lips:
“Well, what are you sitting there for mister?
Warming your behind?
You might go and pass the time with the young lady.”
Both of them, the Jew and the Jewess, were by birth from Homel, and must have been created by God himself for a tender, passionate, mutual love; but many circumstances— as, for example, the pogrom which took place in their town, impoverishment, a complete confusion, fright— had for a time parted them.
However, love was so great that the junior drug clerk Neiman, with great difficulty, efforts, and humiliations, contrived to find for himself the place of a junior in one of the local pharmacies, and had searched out the girl he loved.
He was a real, orthodox Hebrew, almost fanatical.
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.
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.
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.
And when she would return and sit down beside him, he would, without being perceived, overwhelm her with reproaches, trying not to turn the general attention upon himself and without turning his head in her direction.
And in her splendid, humid, Hebraic eyes during these conversations there was always a martyr-like but meek expression.
There arrived a large company of Germans, employed in an optical shop; there also arrived a party of clerks from the fish and gastronomical store of Kereshkovsky, and two young people very well known in the Yamas— both bald, with sparse, soft, delicate hairs around the bald spots: Nicky the Book-keeper and Mishka the Singer— so were they both called in the houses.
They also were met very cordially, just like Karl Karlovich of the optical shop and Volodka of the fish store— with raptures, cries and kisses, flattering to their self-esteem.
The spry Niurka would jump out into the foyer, and, having informed herself as to who had come, would report excitedly, after her wont:
“Jennka, your husband has come!”
Or:
“Little Manka, your lover has come!”
And Mishka the Singer, who was no singer at all, but the owner of a drug warehouse, at once, upon entering, sang out in a vibrating, quavering, goatish voice:
“They fe-e-e-l the tru-u-u-u-uth!
Come thou daw-aw-aw-aw-ning… ”
which he perpetrated at every visit of his to Anna Markovna.
Almost incessantly they played the quadrille, waltz, polka, and danced.
There also arrived Senka— the lover of Tamara— but, contrary to his wont, he did not put on airs, did not go in for “ruination,” did not order a funeral march from Isaiah Savvich, and did not treat the girls to chocolate … For some reason he was gloomy, limped on his right leg, and sought to attract as little attention as possible— probably his professional affairs were at this time in a bad way.
With a single motion of his head, while walking, he called Tamara out of the drawing room and vanished with her into her room.
And there also arrived Egmont-Lavretzki the actor, clean-shaven, tall, resembling a court flunky with his vulgar and insolently contemptuous face.
The clerks from the gastronomical store danced with all the ardour of youth and with all the decorum recommended by Herman Hoppe, the self-instructor of good manners.
In this regard the girls also responded to their intentions.
Both with these and with the others it was accounted especially decorous and well-bred to dance as rigidly as possible, keeping the arms hanging down, while the heads were raised high and inclined to one side with a certain proud, and, at the same time, tired and enervated air.
In the intermissions, between the figures of the dance, it was necessary to fan one’s self with a handkerchief, with a bored and negligent air … In a word, they all made believe that they belonged to the choicest society, and that if they do dance, they only do it out of condescension, as a little comradely turn.
But still they danced so ardently that the perspiration rolled down in streams from the clerks of Kereshkovsky.
Two or three rows had already happened in different houses.
Some man, all in blood, whose face in the pale light of the moon’s crescent seemed black from the blood, was running around in the street, cursing, and, without paying the least attention to his wounds, was searching for his cap which had been lost in the brawl.
On Little Yamskaya some government scribes had had a fight with a ship’s company.
The tired pianists and musicians played as in a delirium, in a doze, through mechanical habit.
This was towards the waning of the night.
Altogether unexpectedly, seven students, a sub-professor, and a local reporter walked into the establishment of Anna Markovna.
Chapter 8
They had all, except the reporter, passed the whole day together, from the very morning, celebrating May Day with some young women of their acquaintance.
They had rowed in boats on the Dnieper, had cooked field porridge on the other side of the river, in the thick, bitter-smelling underbrush; had bathed— men and women by turns— in the rapid, warm water; had drunk home-made spiced brandy, sung sonorous songs of Little Russia, and had returned to town only late in the evening, when the dark, broad, running river so eerily and merrily plashed against the sides of their boats, playing with the reflections of the stars, the silvery shimmering paths of the electric lamps, and the bowing lights of the can-buoys.
And when they had stepped out on the shore, the palms of each burned from the oars, the muscles of the arms and legs ached pleasantly, and suffusing the whole body was a blissful, healthy fatigue.
Then they had escorted the young women to their homes and at the garden-gates and entrances had taken leave of them long and cordially, with laughter and with such swinging hand-shakes as if they were working the lever of a pump.
The whole day had passed in gaiety and noise, even a trifle clamorously, and just the least wee bit tiresomely, but with youth-like continence; without intoxication, and, which happens especially rarely, without the least shadow of mutual affronts, or jealousy, or unvoiced mortifications.
Of course, such a benign mood had been helped by the sun, the fresh river breeze, the sweet exhalations of the grasses and the water, the joyous sensation of the strength and alertness of one’s body while bathing and rowing, and the restraining influence of the clever, kind, pure and handsome girls from families they were acquainted with.
But, almost without the knowledge of their consciousness, their sensuousness— not imagination, but the simple, healthy, instinctive sensuousness of young playful males— kindled from chance encounters of their hands with feminine hands and from comradely obliging embraces, when the occasion arose to help the young ladies enter a boat or jump out on shore; from the tender odour of maiden apparel, warmed by the sun; from the feminine cries of coquettish fright on the river; from the sight of feminine figures, negligently half-reclining with a naive immodesty on the green grass around the samovar— from all these innocent liberties, which are so usual and unavoidable on picnics, country outings and river excursions, when within man, in the infinite depth of his soul, secretly awakens from the care-free contact with earth, grasses, water and sun, the beast-ancient, splendid, free, but disfigured and intimidated of men.
And for that reason, at two o’clock in the night, when the sparrows, a cozy students’ restaurant, had barely closed, and all the eight, excited by alcohol and the plentiful food, had come out of the smoky, fumy underground place into the street, into the sweet, disquieting darkness of the night, with its beckoning fires in the sky and on the earth, with its warm, heady air, from which the nostrils dilate avidly, with its aromas, gliding from unseen gardens and flower-beds,— the head of each one of them was aflame and the heart quietly and languishingly yearning from vague desires.
It was joyous and arrogant to sense after the rest the new, fresh strength in all the sinews, the deep breathing of the lungs, the red, resilient blood in the veins, the supple obedience of all the members.
And— without words, without thoughts, without consciousness— one was drawn on this night to be running without raiment in the somnolent forest, to be sniffing hurriedly the tracks of some one’s feet on the dewy grass, with a loud call to be summoning a female unto one’s self.
But to separate was now very difficult.