The girls return into the house, get into the kitchen, and for a long time sit there on tabourets, contemplating the angry cook Prascoviya, swinging their legs and silently gnawing the sunflower seeds.
In the room of Little Manka, who is also called Manka the Scandaliste and Little White Manka, a whole party has gathered.
Sitting on the edge of the bed, she and another girl— Zoe, a tall handsome girl, with arched eyebrows, with grey, somewhat bulging eyes, with the most typical, white, kind face of the Russian prostitute—are playing at cards, playing at “sixty-six.”
Little Manka’s closest friend, Jennie, is lying behind their backs on the bed, prone on her back, reading a tattered book, The Queen’s Necklace, the work of Monsieur Dumas, and smoking.
In the entire establishment she is the only lover of reading and reads intoxicatingly and without discrimination.
But, contrary to expectation, the forced reading of novels of adventure has not at all made her sentimental and has not vitiated her imagination.
Above all, she likes in novels a long intrigue, cunningly thought out and deftly disentangled; magnificent duels, before which the viscount unties the laces of his shoes to signify that he does not intend to retreat even a step from his position,[3] and after which the marquis, having spitted the count through, apologizes for having made an opening in his splendid new waistcoat; purses, filled to the full with gold, carelessly strewn to the left and right by the chief heroes; the love adventures and witticisms of Henry IV— in a word, all this spiced heroism, in gold and lace, of the past centuries of French history.
In everyday life, on the contrary, she is sober of mind, jeering, practical and cynically malicious.
In her relation to the other girls of the establishment she occupies the same place that in private educational institutions is accorded to the first strong man, the man spending a second year in the same grade, the first beauty in the class— tyrannizing and adored.
She is a tall, thin brunette, with beautiful hazel eyes, a small proud mouth, a little moustache on the upper lip and with a swarthy, unhealthy pink on her cheeks.
Without letting the cigarette out of her mouth and screwing up her eyes from the smoke, all she does is to turn the pages constantly with a moistened finger.
Her legs are bare to the knees; the enormous balls of the feet are of the most vulgar form; below the big toes stand out pointed, ugly, irregular tumours.
Here also, with her legs crossed, slightly bent, with some sewing, sits Tamara— a quiet, easy-going, pretty girl, slightly reddish, with that dark and shining tint of hair which is to be found on the back of a fox in winter.
Her real name is Glycera, or Lukeria, as the common folk say it.
But it is already an ancient usage of the houses of ill-fame to replace the uncouth names of the Matrenas, Agathas, Cyclitinias with sonorous, preferably exotic names.
Tamara had at one time been a nun, or, perhaps, merely a novice in a convent, and to this day there have been preserved on her face timidity and a pale puffiness— a modest and sly expression, which is peculiar to young nuns.
She holds herself aloof in the house, does not chum with any one, does not initiate any one into her past life.
But in her case there must have been many more adventures besides having been a nun: there is something mysterious, taciturn and criminal in her unhurried speech, in the evasive glance of her deep and dark-gold eyes from under the long, lowered eyelashes, in her manners, her sly smiles and intonations of a modest but wanton would-be saint.
There was one occurrence when the girls, with well-nigh reverent awe, heard that Tamara could talk fluently in French and German.
She has within her some sort of an inner, restrained power.
Notwithstanding her outward meekness and complaisance, all in the establishment treat her with respect and circumspection— the proprietress, and her mates, and both housekeepers, and even the doorkeeper, that veritable sultan of the house of ill-fame, that general terror and hero.
“I’ve covered it,” says Zoe and turns over the trump which had been lying under the pack, wrong side up. “I’m going with forty, going with an ace of spades— a ten-spot, Mannechka, if you please.
I’m through.
Fifty-seven, eleven, sixty-eight.
How much have you?”
“Thirty,” says Manka in an offended tone, pouting her lips; “oh, it’s all very well for you— you remember all the plays.
Deal … Well, what’s after that, Tamarochka?” she turns to her friend. “You talk on— I’m listening.”
Zoe shuffles the old, black, greasy cards, allows Manya to cut, then deals, having first spat upon her fingers.
Tamara in the meanwhile is narrating to Manya in a quiet voice, without dropping her sewing.
“We embroidered with gold, in flat embroidery— altar covers, palls, bishops’ vestments… With little grasses, with flowers, little crosses.
In winter, you’d be sitting near a casement; the panes are small, with gratings, there isn’t much light, it smells of lamp oil, incense, cypress; you mustn’t talk— the mother superior was strict.
Some one from weariness would begin droning a pre-Lenten first verse of a hymn … ’When I consider thy heavens … ’ We sang fine, beautifully, and it was such a quiet life, and the smell was so fine; you could see the flaky snow out the windows— well, now, just like in a dream… ”
Jennie puts the tattered novel down on her stomach, throws the cigarette over Zoe’s head, and says mockingly:
“We know all about your quiet life.
You chucked the infants into toilets.
The Evil One is always snooping around your holy places.”
“I call forty.
I had forty-six.
Finished!” Little Manka exclaims excitedly and claps her palms. “I open with three.”
Tamara, smiling at Jennie’s words, answers with a scarcely perceptible smile, which barely distends her lips, but makes little, sly, ambiguous depressions at their corners, altogether as with Monna Lisa in the portrait by Leonardo da Vinci.
“Lay folk say a lot of things about nuns … Well, even if there had been sin once in a while … ”
“If you don’t sin— you don’t repent,” Zoe puts in seriously, and wets her finger in her mouth.
“You sit and sew, the gold eddies before your eyes, while from standing in the morning at prayer your back just aches, and your legs ache.
And at evening there is service again.
You knock at the door of the mother superior’s cell: ’Through prayers of Thy saints, oh Lord, our Father, have mercy upon us.’
And the mother superior would answer from the cell, in a little bass-like
‘A-men.’”
Jennie looks at her intently for some time, shakes her head and says with great significance:
“You’re a queer girl, Tamara.
Here I’m looking at you and wondering.