Yama: the pit eBook

Only after the lapse of an hour was order restored by Simeon and two comrades by profession who had come to his aid.  All the thirteen girls got it hot; but Jennka, who had gone into a real frenzy, more than the others.  The beaten-up Liubka kept on crawling before the housekeeper until she was taken back.  She knew that Jennka’s outbreak would sooner or later be reflected upon her in a cruel repayment.  Jennka sat on her bed until the very night, her legs crossed Turkish fashion; refused dinner, and chased out all her mates who went in to her.  Her eye was bruised, and she assiduously applied a five-kopeck copper to it.  From underneath the torn shirt a long, transversal scratch reddened on the neck, just like a mark from a rope.  That was where Simeon had torn off her skin in the struggle.  She sat thus, alone, with eyes that glowed in the dark like a wild beast’s, with distended nostrils, with spasmodically moving cheek-bones, and whispered wrathfully: 

“Just you wait...  Watch out, you damned things—­I’ll show you...  You’ll see yet...  Ooh-ooh, you man-eaters...”

But when the lights had been lit, and the junior housekeeper, Zociya, knocked on her door with the words:  “Miss, get dressed! ...  Into the drawing room!” she rapidly washed herself, dressed, put some powder on the bruise, smeared the scratch over with CREME de Simon and pink powder, and went out into the drawing room, pitiful but proud; beaten-up, but her eyes flaming with an unbearable wrathfulness and a beauty not human.

Many people, who have happened to see suicides a few hours before their horrible death, say that in their visages in those fateful hours before death they have noticed some enigmatic, mysterious, incomprehensible allurement.  And all who saw Jennka on this night, and on the next day for a few hours, for long, intently and in wonder, kept their gaze upon her.

And strangest of all (this was one of the sombre wiles of fate) was the fact that the indirect culprit of her death, the last grain of sand which draws down the pan of the scales, appeared none other than the dear, most kind, military cadet Kolya Gladishev.

CHAPTER II.

Kolya Gladishev was a fine, merry, bashful young lad, with a large head; pink-cheeked, with a funny little white, bent line, as though from milk, upon his upper lip, under the light down of the moustache, sprouting through for the first time; with gray, naive eyes, placed far apart; and so closely cropped, that from underneath his flaxen little bristles the skin glistened through, just as with a thoroughbred Yorkshire suckling pig.  It was precisely he with whom Jennka during the past winter had played either at maternal relations, or at dolls; and thrust upon him a little apple or a couple of bon-bons on his way, when he would be going away from the house of ill repute, squirming from shame.