The Bet, and other stories
audible again from upstairs.
Something heavy and bulky tumbled down the staircase. It was the
painter coming head over heels. He had evidently been thrown out.
He lifted himself up from the ground, dusted his hat, and with an angry
indignant face, shook his fist at the upstairs.
“Scoundrels! Butchers! Bloodsuckers! I won’t have you hitting a weak,
drunken woman. Ah, you....”
“Yegor ... Yegor!” the medico began to implore, “I give my word I’ll
never go out with you again. Upon my honour, I won’t.”
The painter gradually calmed, and the friends went home.
“To these sad shores unknowing”--the medico began--“An unknown power
entices....”
“‘Behold the mill,’” the painter sang with him after a pause, “‘Now fallen
into ruin.’ How the snow is falling, most Holy Mother. Why did you go
away, Grisha? You’re a coward; you’re only an old woman.”
Vassiliev was walking behind his friends. He stared at their backs and
thought: “One of two things: either prostitution only seems to us an
evil and we exaggerate it, or if prostitution is really such an evil as
is commonly thought, these charming friends of mine are just as much
slavers, violators, and murderers as the inhabitants of Syria and Cairo
whose photographs appear in ‘The Field.’ They’re singing, laughing,
arguing soundly now, but haven’t they just been exploiting starvation,
ignorance, and stupidity? They have, I saw them at it. Where does their
humanity, their science, and their painting come in, then? The science,
art, and lofty sentiments of these murderers remind me of the lump of
fat in the story. Two robbers killed a beggar in a forest; they began
to divide his clothes between themselves and found in his bag a lump
of pork fat. ‘In the nick of time,’ said one of them. ‘Let’s have a
bite!’ ‘How can you?’ the other cried in terror. ‘Have you forgotten
to-day’s Friday?’ So they refrained from eating. After having cut the
man’s throat they walked out of the forest confident that they were
pious fellows. These two are just the same. When they’ve paid for women
they go and imagine they’re painters and scholars....
“Listen, you two,” he said angrily and sharply. “Why do you go to those
places? Can’t you understand how horrible they are? Your medicine
tells you every one of these women dies prematurely from consumption
or something else; your arts tell you that she died morally still
earlier. Each of them dies because during her lifetime she accepts on
an average, let us say, five hundred men. Each of them is killed by
five hundred men, and you’re amongst the five hundred. Now if each of
you comes here and to places like this two hundred and fifty times in
his lifetime, then it means that between you you have killed one woman.
Can’t you understand that? Isn’t it horrible?”
“Ah, isn’t this awful, my God?”
“There, I knew it would end like this,” said the painter frowning. “We
oughtn’t to have had anything to do with this fool of a blockhead. I
suppose you think your head’s full of great thoughts and great ideas
now. Devil knows what they are, but they’re not ideas. You’re staring
at me now with hatred and disgust; but if you want my opinion you’d
better build twenty more of the houses than look like that. There’s
more vice in your look than in the whole street. Let’s clear out,
Volodya, damn him! He’s a fool. He’s a blockhead, and that’s all he is.”
“Human beings are always killing each other,” said the medico. “That is
immoral, of course. But philosophy won’t help you. Good-bye!”
The friends parted at Trubnoi Square and went their way. Left alone,
Vassiliev began to stride along the boulevard. He was frightened of the
dark, frightened of the snow, which fell to the earth in little flakes,
but seemed to long to cover the whole world; he was frightened of the
street-lamps, which glimmered faintly through the clouds of snow. An
inexplicable faint-hearted fear possessed his soul. Now and then people
passed him; but he gave a start and stepped aside. It seemed to him
that from everywhere there came and stared at him women, only women....
“It’s coming on,” he thought, “I’m going to have a fit.”
VI
At home he lay on his bed and began to talk, shivering all over his
body.
“Live women, live.... My God, they’re alive.”
He sharpened the edge of his imagination in every possible way. Now he
was the brother of an unfortunate, now her father. Now he was himself a
fallen woman, with painted cheeks; and all this terrified him.
It seemed to him somehow that he must solve this question immediately,
at all costs, and that the problem was not strange to him, but was his
own. He made a great effort, conquered his despair, and, sitting on the
side of the bed, his head clutched in his hands, he began to think:
How could all the women he had seen that night be saved? The process
of solving a problem was familiar to him as to a learned person; and
notwithstanding all his excitement he kept strictly to this process.
He recalled to mind the history of the question, its literature, and
just after three o’clock he was pacing up and down, trying to remember
all the experiments which are practised nowadays for the salvation of
women. He had a great many good friends who lived in furnished rooms,
Falzfein, Galyashkin, Nechaiev, Yechkin ... not a few among them were
honest and self-sacrificing, and some of them had attempted to save
these women....
All these few attempts, thought Vassiliev, rare attempts, may be
divided into three groups. Some having rescued a woman from a brothel
hired a room for her, bought her a sewing-machine and she became a
dressmaker, and the man who saved her kept her for his mistress,
openly or otherwise, but later when he had finished his studies and was
going away, he would hand her over to another decent fellow. So the
fallen woman remained fallen. Others after having bought her out also
hired a room for her, bought the inevitable sewing-machine and started
her off reading and writing and preached at her. The woman sits and
sews as long as it is novel and amusing, but later, when she is bored,
she begins to receive men secretly, or runs back to where she can sleep
till three in the afternoon, drink coffee, and eat till she is full.
Finally, the most ardent and self-sacrificing take a bold, determined
step. They marry, and when the impudent, self-indulgent, stupefied
creature becomes a wife, a lady of the house, and then a mother, her
life and outlook are utterly changed, and in the wife and mother it is
hard to recognise the unfortunate woman. Yes, marriage is the best, it
may be the only, resource.
“But it’s impossible,” Vassiliev said aloud and threw himself down on
his bed. “First of all, I could not marry one. One would have to be a
saint to be able to do it, unable to hate, not knowing disgust. But
let us suppose that the painter, the medico, and I got the better of
our feelings and married, that all these women got married, what is
the result? What kind of effect follows? The result is that while the
women get married here in Moscow, the Smolensk bookkeeper seduces a
fresh lot, and these will pour into the empty places, together with
women from Saratov, Nijni-Novgorod, Warsaw.... And what happens to the
hundred thousand in London? What can be done with those in Hamburg?”
The oil in the lamp was used up and the lamp began to smell. Vassiliev
did not notice it. Again he began to pace up and down, thinking. Now he
put the question differently. What can be done to remove the demand for
fallen women? For this it is necessary that the men who buy and kill
them should at once begin to feel all the immorality of their _rôle_ of
slave-owners, and this should terrify them. It is necessary to save the
men.
Science and art apparently won’t do, thought Vassiliev. There is only
one way out--to be an apostle.
And he began to dream how he would stand to-morrow evening at the
corner of the street and say to each passer-by: “Where are you going
and what for? Fear God!”
He would turn to the indifferent cabmen and say to them:
“Why are you standing here? Why don’t you revolt? You do believe in
God, don’t you? And you do know that this is a crime, and that people
will go to Hell for this? Why do you keep quiet, then? True, the women
are strangers to you, but they have fathers and brothers exactly the
same as you....”
Some friend of Vassiliev’s once said of him that he was a man of
talent. There is a talent for writing, for the theatre, for painting;
but Vassiliev’s was peculiar, a talent for humanity. He had a fine and
noble _flair_ for every kind of suffering. As a good actor reflects in
himself the movement and voice of another, so Vassiliev could reflect
in himself another’s pain. Seeing tears, he wept. With a sick person,
he himself became sick and moaned. If he saw violence done, it seemed
to him that he was the victim. He was frightened like a child, and,
frightened, ran for help. Another’s pain roused him, excited him, threw
him into a state of ecstasy....
Whether the friend was right I do not know, but what happened to
Vassiliev when it seemed to him that the question was solved was very
much like an ecstasy. He sobbed, laughed, said aloud the things he
would say to-morrow, felt a burning love for the men who would listen
to him and stand by his side at the corner of the street, preaching. He
sat down to write to them; he made vows.
All this was the more like an ecstasy in that it did not last.
Vassiliev was soon tired. The London women, the Hamburg women, those
from Warsaw, crushed him with their mass, as the mountains crush the
earth. He quailed before this mass; he lost himself; he remembered he
had no gift for speaking, that he was timid and faint-hearted, that
strange people would hardly want to listen to and understand him, a
law-student in his third year, a frightened and insignificant figure.
The true apostleship consisted, not only in preaching, but also in
deeds....
When daylight came and the carts rattled on the streets, Vassiliev lay
motionless on the sofa, staring at one point. He did not think any
more of women, or men, or apostles. All his attention was fixed on the
pain of his soul which tormented him. It was a dull pain, indefinite,
vague; it was like anguish and the most acute fear and despair. He
could say where the pain was. It was in his breast, under the heart.
It could not be compared to anything. Once on a time he used to have
violent toothache. Once, he had pleurisy and neuralgia. But all these
pains were as nothing beside the pain of his soul. Beneath this pain
life seemed repulsive. The thesis, his brilliant work already written,
the people he loved, the salvation of fallen women, all that which only
yesterday he loved or was indifferent to, remembered now, irritated
him in the same way as the noise of the carts, the running about of
the porters and the daylight.... If someone now were to perform before
his eyes a deed of mercy or an act of revolting violence, both would
produce upon him an equally repulsive impression. Of all the thoughts
which roved lazily in his head, two only did not irritate him: one--at
any moment he had the power to kill himself, the other--that the pain
would not last more than three days. The second he knew from experience.
After having lain down for a while he got up and walked wringing his
hands, not from corner to corner as usually, but in a square along
the walls. He caught a glimpse of himself in the glass. His face
was pale and haggard, his temples hollow, his eyes bigger, darker,
more immobile, as if they were not his own, and they expressed the
intolerable suffering of his soul.
In the afternoon the painter knocked at the door.
“Gregory, are you at home?” he asked.