He, contrary to his usual brazenness, always bore himself with a shade of respect toward Jennka.
Simeon said:
“Well, now, Jennechka, their Excellency has come to Vanda.
Allow her to go away for ten minutes.”
Vanda, a blue-eyed, light blonde, with a large red mouth, with the typical face of a Lithuanian, looked imploringly at Jennka.
If Jennka had said
“No” she would have remained in the room, but Jennka did not say anything and even shut her eyes deliberately.
Vanda obediently went out of the room.
This general came accurately twice a month, every two weeks (just as to Zoe, another girl, came daily another honoured guest, nicknamed the Director in the house).
Jennka suddenly threw the old, tattered book behind her.
Her brown eyes flared up with a real golden fire.
“You’re wrong in despising this general,” said she. “I’ve known worse Ethiopians.
I had a certain guest once— a real blockhead.
He couldn’t make love to me otherwise than … otherwise than … well, let’s say it plainly: he pricked me with pins in the breast … While in Vilno a Polish Catholic priest used to come to me.
He would dress me all in white, compel me to powder myself, lay me down on the bed.
He’d light three candles near me.
And then, when I seemed to him altogether like a dead woman, he’d throw himself upon me.”
Little White Manka suddenly exclaimed:
“It’s the truth you’re telling, Jennka!
I had a certain old bugger, too.
He made me pretend all the time that I was an innocent girl, so’s I’d cry and scream.
But, Jennechka, though you’re the smartest one of us, yet I’ll bet you won’t guess who he was … ”
“The warden of a prison?”
“A fire chief.”
Suddenly Katie burst into laughter in her bass:
“Well, now, I had a certain teacher.
He taught some kind of arithmetic, I disremember which.
He always made me believe, that I was the man, and he the woman, and that I should do it to him … by force … And what a fool!
Just imagine, girls, he’d yell all the time:
‘I’m your woman!
I’m all yours!
Take me!
Take me!’”
“Loony!” said the blue-eyed, spry Verka in a positive and unexpectedly contralto voice: “Loony.”
“No, why?” suddenly retorted the kindly and modest Tamara. “Not crazy at all, but simply, like all men, a libertine.
At home it’s tiresome for him, while here for his money he can receive whatever pleasure he desires.
That’s plain, it seems?”
Jennka, who had been silent up to now, suddenly, with one quick movement sat up in bed.
“You’re all fools!” she cried. “Why do you forgive them all this?
Before I used to be foolish myself, too, but now I compel them to walk before me on all fours, compel them to kiss my soles, and they do this with delight … You all know, girlies, that I don’t love money, but I pluck the men in whatever way I can.
They, the nasty beasts, present me with the portraits of their wives, brides, mothers, daughters … However, you’ve seen, I think, the photographs in our water-closet?
But now, just think of it, my children … A woman loves only once, but for always, while a man loves like a he-greyhound… That he’s unfaithful is nothing; but he never has even the commonest feeling of gratitude left either for the old, or the new, mistress.
I’ve heard it said, that now there are many clean boys among the young people.
I believe this, though I haven’t seen, haven’t met them, myself.
But all those I have seen are all vagabonds, nasty brutes and skunks.
Not so long ago I read some novel of our miserable life.
It’s almost the same thing as I’m telling you now.”
Vanda came back.
She slowly, carefully, sat down on the edge of Jennka’s bed; there, where the shadow of the lamp fell.
Out of that deep, though deformed psychical delicacy, which is peculiar to people sentenced to death, prisoners at hard labour, and prostitutes, none had the courage to ask her how she had passed this hour and a half.