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 pass 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 godlessness, 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 massacring the students, Simeon having scarce found it out had jumped into a fine carriage passing 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. “Hello, 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.”
Yarchenko always instilled confidence in servants and maitres d’hotel, with his dashing clothes and polite but seigniorial ways.
Emma Edwardovna started nodding her head willingly, just like an old, fat circus horse.
“It can be done … it can be done … Pass this way, gentlemen, into the parlor.
It can be done, it can be done … What liqueur?
We have only Benedictine … Benedictine, then?
It can be done, it can be done … And will you allow the young ladies to come in?”
“Well, if that is so indispensable?” Yarchenko spread out his hands with a sigh.
And at once the girls one after the other straggled into the parlor with its gray plush furniture and blue lantern.
They entered, extended to every one in turn their unbending palms, unused to hand-clasps, gave their names abruptly in a low voice— Manya, Katie, Liuba … They sat down on somebody’s knees, embraced him around the neck, and, as usual, began to importune:
“Little student, you’re such a little good-looker.
May I ask for oranzes?”
“Volodenka, buy me some candy!
All right?”
“And me chocolate!”
“Fatty,” Vera, dressed as a jockey, wheedled the sub-professor, clambering up on his knees, “I have a friend, only she’s sick and can’t come out into the drawing room.
I’ll carry her some apples and chocolate.
Will you let me?”
“Well, now, those are all just stories about a friend!
But above all, don’t be thrusting your tenderness at me.
Sit as smart children sit, right here alongside, on the arm chair, just so.
And fold your little hands.”
“Ah, but what if I can’t!” writhed Vera in coquetry, rolling her eyes up under her upper lids … “When you are so nice.”
But Lichonin, in answer to this professional beggary, only nodded his head gravely and good-naturedly, just like Emma Edwardovna, and repeated over and over again, mimicking her German accent:
“Itt can pe done, itt can pe done, itt can pe done… ”