The Bet, and other stories
“Eighty,” joked the girl, looking and laughing at the tricks the
painter was doing with his hands and feet.
She suddenly giggled and uttered a long filthy expression aloud so that
every one could hear.
Vassiliev, terrified, not knowing how to look, began to laugh uneasily.
He alone smiled: all the others, his friends, the musicians and the
women--paid no attention to his neighbour. They might never have heard.
“Stand me a Lafitte,” said the girl again.
Vassiliev was suddenly repelled by her white trimming and her voice
and left her. It seemed to him close and hot. His heart began to beat
slowly and violently, like a hammer, one, two, three.
“Let’s get out of here,” he said, pulling the painter’s sleeve.
“Wait. Let’s finish it.”
While the medico and the painter were finishing their quadrille,
Vassiliev, in order to avoid the women, eyed the musicians. The
pianist was a nice old man with spectacles, with a face like Marshal
Basin; the fiddler a young man with a short, fair beard dressed in
the latest fashion. The young man was not stupid or starved, on the
contrary he looked clever, young and fresh. He was dressed with a touch
of originality, and played with emotion. Problem: how did he and the
decent old man get here? Why aren’t they ashamed to sit here? What do
they think about when they look at the women?
If the piano and the fiddle were played by ragged, hungry, gloomy,
drunken creatures, with thin stupid faces, then their presence would
perhaps be intelligible. As it was, Vassiliev could understand.
nothing. Into his memory came the story that he had read about the
unfortunate woman, and now he found that the human figure with the
guilty smile had nothing to do with this. It seemed to him that they
were not unfortunate women that he saw, but they belonged to another,
utterly different world, foreign and inconceivable to him; if he had
seen this world on the stage or read about it in a book he would never
have believed it.... The girl with the white trimming giggled again and
said something disgusting aloud. He felt sick, blushed, and went out:
“Wait. We’re coming too,” cried the painter.
IV
“I had a talk with my _mam’selle_ while we were dancing,” said the
medico when all three came into the street. “The subject was her first
love. _He_ was a bookkeeper in Smolensk with a wife and five children.
She was seventeen and lived with her pa and ma who kept a soap and
candle shop.”
“How did he conquer her heart?” asked Vassiliev.
“He bought her fifty roubles’-worth of underclothes--Lord knows what!”
“However could he get her love-story out of his girl?” thought
Vassiliev. “I can’t. My dear chaps, I’m off home,” he said.
“Why?”
“Because I don’t know how to get on here. I’m bored and disgusted. What
is there amusing about it? If they were only human beings; but they’re
savages and beasts. I’m going, please.”
“Grisha darling, please,” the painter said with a sob in his voice,
pressing close to Vassiliev, “let’s go to one more--then to Hell with
them. Do come, Grigor.”
They prevailed on Vassiliev and led him up a staircase. The carpet and
the gilded balustrade, the porter who opened the door, the panels which
decorated the hall, were still in the same S----v Street style, but
here it was perfected and imposing.
“Really I’m going home,” said Vassiliev, taking off his overcoat.
“Darling, please, please,” said the painter and kissed him on the neck.
“Don’t be so faddy, Grigri--be a pal. Together we came, together we go.
What a beast you are though!”
“I can wait for you in the street. My God, it’s disgusting here.”
“Please, please.... You just look on, see, just look on.”
“One should look at things objectively,” said the medico seriously.
Vassiliev entered the salon and sat down. There were many more guests
besides him and his friends: two infantry officers, a grey, bald-headed
gentleman with gold spectacles, two young clean-shaven men from the
Surveyors’ Institute, and a very drunk man with an actor’s face.
All the girls were looking after these guests and took no notice of
Vassiliev. Only one of them dressed like Aïda glanced at him sideways,
smiled at something and said with a yawn:
“So the dark one’s come.”
Vassiliev’s heart was beating and his face was burning. He felt
ashamed for being there, disgusted and tormented. He was tortured by
the thought that he, a decent and affectionate man (so he considered
himself up till now), despised these women and felt nothing towards
them but repulsion. He could not feel pity for them or for the
musicians or the lackeys.
“It’s because I don’t try to understand them,” he thought. “They’re all
more like beasts than human beings; but all the same they are human
beings. They’ve got souls. One should understand them first, then judge
them.”
“Grisha, don’t go away. Wait for us,” called the painter; and he
disappeared somewhere.
Soon the medico disappeared also.
“Yes, one should try to understand. It’s no good, otherwise,” thought
Vassiliev, and he began to examine intently the face of each girl,
looking for the guilty smile. But whether he could not read faces or
because none of these women felt guilty he saw in each face only a dull
look of common, vulgar boredom and satiety. Stupid eyes, stupid smiles,
harsh, stupid voices, impudent gestures--and nothing else. Evidently
every woman had in her past a love romance with a bookkeeper and fifty
roubles’-worth of underclothes. And in the present the only good things
in life were coffee, a three-course dinner, wine, quadrilles, and
sleeping till two in the afternoon....
Finding not one guilty smile, Vassiliev began to examine them to see
if even one looked clever and his attention was arrested by one pale,
rather tired face. It was that of a dark woman no longer young, wearing
a dress scattered with spangles. She sat in a chair staring at the
floor and thinking of something. Vassiliev paced up and down and then
sat down beside her as if by accident.
“One must begin with something trivial,” he thought, “and gradually
pass on to serious conversation....”
“What a beautiful little dress you have on,” he said, and touched the
gold fringe of her scarf with his finger.
“It’s all right,” said the dark woman.
“Where do you come from?”
“I? A long way. From Tchernigov.”
“It’s a nice part.”
“It always is, where you don’t happen to be.”
“What a pity I can’t describe nature,” thought Vassiliev. “I’d move her
by descriptions of Tchernigov. She must love it if she was born there.”
“Do you feel lonely here?” he asked.
“Of course I’m lonely.”
“Why don’t you go away from here, if you’re lonely?”
“Where shall I go to? Start begging, eh?”
“It’s easier to beg than to live here.”
“Where did you get that idea? Have you been a beggar?”
“I begged, when I hadn’t enough to pay my university fees; and even if
I hadn’t begged it’s easy enough to understand. A beggar is a free man,
at any rate, and you’re a slave.”
The dark woman stretched herself, and followed with sleepy eyes the
lackey who carried a tray of glasses and soda-water.
“Stand us a champagne,” she said, and yawned again.
“Champagne,” said Vassiliev. “What would happen if your mother or your
brother suddenly came in? What would you say? And what would they say?
You would say ‘champagne’ then.”
Suddenly the noise of crying was heard. From the next room where the
lackey had carried the soda-water, a fair man rushed out with a red
face and angry eyes. He was followed by the tall, stout madame, who
screamed in a squeaky voice:
“No one gave you permission to slap the girls in the face. Better class
than you come here, and never slap a girl. You bounder!”
Followed an uproar. Vassiliev was scared and went white. In the next
room some one wept, sobbing, sincerely, as only the insulted weep.
And he understood that indeed human beings lived here, actually
human beings, who get offended, suffer, weep, and ask for help. The
smouldering hatred, the feeling of repulsion, gave way to an acute
sense of pity and anger against the wrong-doer. He rushed into the
room from which the weeping came. Through the rows of bottles which
stood on the marble table-top he saw a suffering tear-stained face,
stretched out his hands towards this face, stepped to the table and
instantly gave a leap back in terror. The sobbing woman was dead-drunk.
As he made his way through the noisy crowd, gathered round the fair
man, his heart failed him, he lost his courage like a boy, and it
seemed to him that in this foreign, inconceivable world, they wanted to
run after him, to beat him, to abuse him with foul words. He tore down
his coat from the peg and rushed headlong down the stairs.
V
Pressing close to the fence, he stood near to the house and waited
for his friends to come out. The sounds of the pianos and fiddles,
gay, bold, impudent and sad, mingled into chaos in the air, and this
confusion was, as before, as if an unseen orchestra were tuning in the
dark over the roof-tops. If he looked up towards the darkness, then
all the background was scattered with white, moving points: it was
snowing. The flakes, coming into the light, spun lazily in the air like
feathers, and still more lazily fell. Flakes of snow crowded whirling
about Vassiliev, and hung on his beard, his eyelashes, his eyebrows.
The cabmen, the horses, and the passers-by, all were white.
“How dare the snow fall in this street?” thought Vassiliev. “A curse on
these houses.”
Because of his headlong rush down the staircase his feet failed him
from weariness; he was out of breath as if he had climbed a mountain.
His heart beat so loud that he could hear it. A longing came over him
to get out of this street as soon as possible and go home; but still
stronger was his desire to wait for his friends and to vent upon them
his feeling of heaviness.
He had not understood many things in the houses. The souls of the
perishing women were to him a mystery as before; but it was dear to
him that the business was much worse than one would have thought. If
the guilty woman who poisoned herself was called a prostitute, then it
was hard to find a suitable name for all these creatures, who danced
to the muddling music and said long, disgusting phrases. They were not
perishing; they were already done for.
“Vice is here,” he thought; “but there is neither confession of sin
nor hope of salvation. They are bought and sold, drowned in wine
and torpor, and they are dull and indifferent as sheep and do not
understand. My God, my God!”
It was so clear to him that all that which is called human dignity,
individuality, the image and likeness of God, was here dragged down to
the gutter, as they say of drunkards, and that not only the street and
the stupid women were to blame for it.
A crowd of students white with snow, talking and laughing gaily,
passed by. One of them, a tall, thin man, peered into Vassiliev’s face
and said drunkenly, “He’s one of ours. Logged, old man? Aha! my lad.
Never mind. Walk up, never say die, uncle.”
He took Vassiliev by the shoulders and pressed his cold wet moustaches
to his cheek, then slipped, staggered, brandished his arms, and cried
out:
“Steady there--don’t fall.”
Laughing, he ran to join his comrades.
Through the noise the painter’s voice became audible.
“You dare beat women! I won’t have it. Go to Hell. You’re regular
swine.”
The medico appeared at the door of the house. He glanced round and on
seeing Vassiliev, said in alarm:
“Is that you? My God, it’s simply impossible to go anywhere with Yegor.
I can’t understand a chap like that. He kicked up a row--can’t you
hear? Yegor,” he called from the door. “Yegor!”
“I won’t have you hitting women.” The painter’s shrill voice was