Yama by Aleksandr Kuprin (best ereader for pdf TXT) 📕

“If I am not a burden to you, I would be very glad,” he said simply. “All the more since I have easy money today. The Dnieper Word has paid me an honorarium, and this is just as much of a miracle as winning two hundred thousand on a check from a theatre coatroom. Pardon me, I’ll be right back⁠ ⁠…”

He walked up to the old man with whom he had been sitting before, shoved some money into his hand, and gently took leave of him.

“Where I’m going, grandpa, there you mustn’t go⁠—tomorrow we will meet in the same place as today. Goodbye!”

They all walked out of the restaurant. At the door Borya Sobashnikov, always a little finical and unnecessarily supercilious, stopped Likhonin and called him to one side.

“I’m surprised at you, Likhonin,” he said squeamishly. “We have gathered together in our own close company, yet you must needs drag in some vagabond. The devil knows who he is!”

“Quit that, Borya,” answered Likhonin amicably. “He’s a warmhearted fellow.”

“Well now, gentlemen, this isn’t fit for pigs,” Yarchenko was saying, grumblingly, at the entrance of Anna Markovna’s establishment. “If we finally have gone, we might at least have chosen a decent place, and not some wretched hole. Really, gentlemen, let’s better go to Treppel’s alongside; there it’s clean and light, at any rate.”

“If you please, if you please, signor,” insisted Likhonin, opening the door before the sub-professor with courtly urbanity, bowing and spreading his arms before him. “If you please.”

“But this is an abomination⁠ ⁠… At Treppel’s the women are better-looking, at least.”

Ramses, walking behind, burst into dry laughter.

“So, so, Gavrila Petrovich. Let us continue in the same spirit. Let us condemn the hungry, petty thief who has stolen a five-kopeck loaf out of a tray, but if the director of a bank has squandered somebody else’s million on race horses and cigars, let us mitigate his lot.”

“Pardon me, but I do not understand this comparison,” answered Yarchenko with restraint. “However, it’s all the same to me; let’s go.”

“And all the more so,” said Likhonin, letting the subprofessor pass ahead; “all the more so, since this house guards within it so many historical traditions. Comrades! Decades of student generations gaze upon us from the heights of the coat-hooks, and, besides that, through the power of the usual right, children and students pay half here, as in a panopticon. Isn’t that so, citizen Simeon?”

Simeon did not like to have people come in large parties⁠—this always smacked of scandal in the not distant future; moreover, he despised students in general for their speech, but little comprehensible to him, for their propensity towards frivolous jokes, for their godlessness, and chiefly because they were in constant revolt against officialdom and order. It was not in vain that on the day when on the Bessarabian Square the cossacks, meat sellers, flour dealers and fish mongers were massacring the students, Simeon having scarce found it out had jumped into a fine carriage passing by, and, standing just like a chief of police in the victoria, tore off to the scene of the fray in order to take part in it. He esteemed people who were sedate, stout and elderly, who came singly, in secret, peeped in cautiously from the anteroom into the drawing room, fearing to meet with acquaintances, and very soon and with great haste went away, tipping him generously. Such he always styled “Your Excellency.”

And so, while taking the light grey overcoat off Yarchenko, he sombrely and with much significance snarled back in answer to Likhonin’s banter:

“I am no citizen here, but the bouncer.”

“Upon which I have the honour to congratulate you,” answered Likhonin with a polite bow.

There were many people in the drawing room. The clerks, having danced their fill, were sitting, red and wet, near their ladies, rapidly fanning themselves with their handkerchiefs; they smelt strongly of old goats’ wool. Mishka the Singer and his friend the Bookkeeper, both bald, with soft, downy hairs around the denuded skulls, both with turbid, nacreous, intoxicated eyes, were sitting opposite each other, leaning with their elbows on a little marble table, and were constantly trying to start singing in unison with such quavering and galloping voices as though someone was very, very often striking them in the cervical vertebrae:

“They fe-e-e-e-l the tru-u-u-u-uth!”

while Emma Edwardovna and Zociya with all their might were exhorting them not to behave indecently. Roly-Poly was peacefully slumbering on a chair, his head hanging down, having laid one long leg over the other and grasped the sharp knee with his clasped hands.

The girls at once recognized some of the students and ran to meet them.

“Tamarochka, your husband has come⁠—Volodenka. And my husband too!⁠—Mishka!” cried Niura piercingly, hanging herself on the neck of the lanky, big-nosed, solemn Petrovsky. “Hello, Mishenka. Why haven’t you come for so long? I grew weary of waiting for you.”

Yarchenko with a feeling of awkwardness was looking about him on all sides.

“We’d like to have in some way⁠ ⁠… don’t you know⁠ ⁠… a little private room,” he said with delicacy to Emma Edwardovna who had approached. “And give us some sort of red wine, please⁠ ⁠… And then, some coffee as well⁠ ⁠… You know yourself.”

Yarchenko always instilled confidence in servants and maîtres d’hôtel, with his dashing clothes and polite but seigniorial ways. Emma Edwardovna started nodding her head willingly, just like an old, fat circus horse.

“It can be done⁠ ⁠… it can be done⁠ ⁠… Pass this way, gentlemen, into the parlor. It can be done, it can be done⁠ ⁠… What liqueur? We have only Benedictine⁠ ⁠… Benedictine, then? It can be done, it can be done⁠ ⁠… And will you allow the young ladies to come in?”

“Well, if that is so indispensable?” Yarchenko spread out his hands with a sigh.

And at once the girls one after the other straggled into the parlor with its gray furniture and blue lantern. They entered, extended to everyone in turn their unbending palms, unused