The entire house is quiet, empty and drowsy.
The chopping of cutlets for dinner can be heard from the kitchen.
Liubka, one of the girls, barefooted, in her shift, with bare arms, not good-looking, freckled, but strong and fresh of body, has come out into the inner court.
Yesterday she had had but six guests on time, but no one had remained for the night with her, and because of that she had slept her fill— splendidly, delightfully, all alone, upon a wide bed.
She had risen early, at ten o’clock, and had with pleasure helped the cook scrub the floor and the tables in the kitchen.
Now she is feeding the chained dog Amour with the sinews and cuttings of the meat.
The big, rusty hound, with long glistening hair and black muzzle, jumps up on the girl— with his front paws, stretching the chain tightly and rattling in the throat from shortness of breath, then, with back and tail undulating all over, bends his head down to the ground, wrinkles his nose, smiles, whines and sneezes from the excitement.
But she, teasing him with the meat, shouts at him with pretended severity:
“There, you— stupid!
I’ll— I’ll give it to you!
How dare you?”
But she rejoices with all her soul over the tumult and caresses of Amour and her momentary power over the dog, and because she had slept her fill, and passed the night without a man, and because of the Trinity, according to dim recollections of her childhood, and because of the sparkling sunny day, which it so seldom befalls her to see.
All the night guests have already gone their ways.
The most business-like, quiet and workaday hour is coming on.
They are drinking coffee in the room of the proprietress.
The company consists of five people.
The proprietress herself, in whose name the house is registered, is Anna Markovna.
She is about sixty.
She is very small of stature, but dumpy: she may be visualized by imagining, from the bottom up, three soft, gelatinous globes— large, medium and small, pressed into each other without any interstices; this— her skirt, torso and head.
Strange, her eyes are a faded blue, girlish, even childish, but the mouth is that of an old person, with a moist lower lip of a raspberry colour, impotently hanging down.
Her husband— Isaiah Savvich— is also small, a grayish, quiet, silent little old man.
He is under his wife’s thumb; he was doorkeeper in this very house even at the time when Anna Markovna served here as housekeeper.
In order to be useful in some way, he has learned, through self-instruction, to play the fiddle, and now at night plays dance tunes, as well as a funeral march for shopmen far gone on a spree and craving some maudlin tears.
Then, there are the two housekeepers— senior and junior.
The senior is Emma Edwardovna.
She is a tall, full woman of forty-six, with chestnut hair, and a fat goitre of three chins.
Her eyes are encircled with black rings of hemorrhoidal origin.
The face broadens out like a pear from the forehead down to the cheeks, and is of an earthen colour; the eyes are small, black; the nose humped, the lips sternly pursed; the expression of the face calmly authoritative.
It is no mystery to anyone in the house that in a year or two Anna Markovna will go into retirement, and sell her the establishment with all its rights and furnishings, when she will receive part in cash, and part on terms— by promissory note.
Because of this the girls honour her equally with the proprietress and fear her somewhat.
Those who fall into error she beats with her own hands, beats cruelly, coolly, and calculatingly, without changing the calm expression of her face.
Among the girls there is always a favourite of hers, whom she tortures with her exacting love and fantastic jealousy.
And this is far harder than her beatings.
The other one is called Zociya.
She has just struggled out of the ranks of the common girls.
The girls, as yet, call her impersonally, flatteringly and familiarly, “little housekeeper.”
She is spare, spry, just a trifle squinting, with a rosy complexion, and hair dressed in a little curly pompadour; she adores actors— preferably stout comedians.
Toward Emma Edwardovna she is ingratiating.
The fifth person, finally, is the local district inspector, Kerbesh.
This is an athletic man; he is kind of bald, has a red beard like a fan, vividly blue slumbrous eyes, and a thin, slightly hoarse, pleasant voice.
Everybody knows that he formerly served in the secret service division and was the terror of crooks, thanks to his terrible physical strength and cruelty in interrogations.
He has several shady transactions on his conscience.
The whole town knows that two years back he married a rich old woman of seventy, and that last year he strangled her; however, he was somehow successful in hushing up this affair.
But for that matter, the remaining four have also seen a thing or two in their chequered life.
But, just as the bretteurs of old felt no twinges of conscience at the recollection of their victims, even so do these people regard the dark and bloody things in their past, as the unavoidable little unpleasantness of their professions.
They are drinking coffee with rich, boiled cream— the inspector with Benedictine.
But he, strictly speaking, is not drinking, but merely conveying the impression that he is doing it to oblige.
“Well, what is it to be, Phoma Phornich?” asks the proprietress searchingly. “This business isn’t worth an empty eggshell, now… Why, you have only to say a word… ”
Kerbesh slowly draws in half a wine-glass of liqueur, works the oily, strong, pungent liquid slightly with his tongue over the roof of his mouth, swallows it, chases it down, without hurrying, with coffee, and then passes the ring finger of his left hand over his moustaches, to the right and left.
“Think it over for yourself, Madam Shoibes,” he says, looking down at the table, spreading out his hands and screwing up his eyes. “Think of the risk to which I’m exposed!