“Jennechka, your lover has come!”
It was pleasant, in relating this to his comrades,
to be plucking at an imaginary moustache.
It was still early—about nine—of
a rainy August evening. The illuminated drawing
room in the house of Anna Markovna was almost empty.
Only near the very doors a young telegraph clerk was
sitting, his legs shyly and awkwardly squeezed under
his chair, and was trying to start with the thick-fleshed
Katie that worldly, unconstrained conversation which
is laid down as the proper thing in polite society
at quadrille, during the intermissions between the
figures of the dance. And, also, the long-legged,
aged Roly-Poly wandered over the room, sitting down
now next one girl, now another, and entertaining them
all with his fluent chatter.
When Kolya Gladishev walked into the front hall, the
first to recognize him was the round-eyed Verka, dressed
in her usual jockey costume. She began to twirl
round and round, to clap her palms, and called out:
“Jennka, Jennka, come quicker, your little lover
has come to you ... The little cadet ...
And what a handsome little fellow!”
But Jennka was not in the drawing room at this time;
a stout head-conductor had already managed to get
hold of her.
This elderly, sedate, and majestic man was a very
convenient guest, because he never lingered in the
house for more than twenty minutes, fearing to let
his train go by; and, even so, glanced at his watch
all the while. During this time he regularly drank
down four bottles of beer, and, going away, infallibly
gave the girl half a rouble for candy and Simeon twenty
kopecks for drink-money.
Kolya Gladishev was not alone, but with a comrade
of the same school, Petrov, who was stepping over
the threshold of a brothel for the first time, having
given in to the tempting persuasions of Gladishev.
Probably, during these minutes, he found himself in
the same wild, absurd, feverish state which Kolya
himself had gone through a year and a half ago, when
his legs had shook, his mouth had grown dry, and the
lights of the lamps had danced before him in revolving
wheels.
Simeon took their great-coats from them and hid them
separately, on the side, that the shoulder straps
and the buttons might not be seen.
It must be said, that this stern man, who did not
approve of students because of their free-and-easy
facetiousness and incomprehensible style in conversation,
also did not like when just such boys in uniform appeared
in the establishment.
“Well, what’s the good of it?” he
would at times say sombrely to his colleagues by profession.
“What if a whippersnapper like that comes, and
runs right up nose to nose against his superiors?
Smash, and they’ve closed up the establishment!
There, like Lupendikha’s three years back.
Of course, it’s nothing that they closed it
up—she transferred it in another name right
