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

I was passing by through the collidor. Would like to clink glasses together personally. If you do not remember, recollect the National Theatre, Poverty Is No Disgrace, and the humble artist who played African.”

“Yes, that’s right,” said Yarchenko. “Once, somehow, they saddled me with the arrangement of this benefit performance in the National Theatre. Also, there dimly glimmers some clean-shaven haughty visage, but⁠ ⁠… What shall it be, gentlemen?”

Likhonin answered good-naturedly:

“Why, drag him here. Perhaps he’s funny.”

“And you?” the sub-professor turned to Platonov.

“It’s all the same to me. I know him slightly. At first he’ll shout: ‘Kellner, champagne!’ then burst into tears about his wife, who is an angel, then deliver a patriotic speech and finally raise a row over the bill, but none too loudly. All in all he’s entertaining.”

“Let him come,” said Volodya, from behind the shoulder of Katie, who was sitting on his knees, swinging her legs.

“And you, Veltman?”

“What?” the student came to with a start. He was sitting on the divan with his back to his companions, near the reclining Pasha, bending over her, and already for a long time, with the friendliest appearance of sympathy, had been stroking her, now on the shoulder, now on the hair at the nape of the neck, while she was smiling at him with her shyly shameless and senselessly passionate smile through half-closed and trembling eyelashes. “What? What’s it all about? Oh yes⁠—is it all right to let the actor in? I’ve nothing against it. Please do⁠ ⁠…”

Yarchenko sent an invitation through Simeon, and the actor came and immediately commenced the usual actor’s play. In the door he paused, in his long frock coat, shining with its silk lapels, with a glistening opera hat, which he held with his arm in the middle of his chest, like an actor portraying a theatrical elderly worldly lion or bank director. And it was approximately these characters that he was inwardly picturing to himself.

“May I be permitted, gentlemen, to intrude into your intimate company?” he asked in an unctuous, kindly voice, with a half-bow done somewhat to one side.

They asked him in, and he began to introduce himself. Shaking hands, he stuck out his elbow forward and raised it so high that the hand proved to be far lower. Now it was no longer a bank director, but such a clever, splendid fellow, a sportsman and a rake of the golden youths. But his face⁠—with rumpled, wild eyebrows and with denuded lids without lashes⁠—was the vulgar, harsh and low face of a typical alcoholic, libertine, and pettily cruel man. Together with him came two of his ladies: Henrietta⁠—the eldest girl in years in the establishment of Anna Markovna, experienced, who had seen everything and had grown accustomed to everything, like an old horse on the tether of a threshing machine, the possessor of a thick bass, but still a handsome woman; and Big Manka, or Manka the Crocodile. Henrietta, since the preceding night, had not parted from the actor, who had taken her from the house to a hotel.

Having seated himself alongside of Yarchenko, he straight off began to play a new role⁠—he became something on the order of an old good soul of a landed proprietor, who had at one time been at a university himself, and now can not look upon the students without a quiet, fatherly emotion.

“Believe me, gentlemen, that one’s soul rests from all these worldly squabbles in the midst of youth,” he was saying, imparting to his depraved and harsh face an actor-like, exaggerated and improbable expression of being moved. “This faith in a high ideal, these honest impulses!⁠ ⁠… What can be loftier and purer than our Russian students as a body?⁠ ⁠… Kellner! Chompa-a-agne!” he yelled deafeningly all of a sudden, and dealt a heavy blow on the table with his fist.

Likhonin and Yarchenka did not wish to remain in debt to him. A spree began. God knows in what manner Mishka the Singer and Nicky the Bookkeeper soon found themselves in the cabinet, and at once began singing in their galloping voices:

“They fe-e-e-el the tru-u-u-uth,
Come thou daw-aw-aw-awning quicker⁠ ⁠…”

There also appeared Roly-Poly, who had awakened. Letting his head drop touchingly to one side and having made little narrowed, lachrymose, sweet eyes in his wrinkled, lantern-jawed old face of a Don Quixote, he was speaking in a persuasively begging tone:

“Gentlemen students⁠ ⁠… you ought to treat a little old man. I love education, by God!⁠ ⁠… Allow me!”

Likhonin was glad to see everybody, but Yarchenko in the beginning⁠—until the champagne had mounted to his head⁠—only raised high his small, short eyebrows with a timorous, wondering and naive air. It suddenly became crowded, smoky, noisy and close in the cabinet. Simeon, with rattling, bolted the blinds on the outside. The women, just having gotten done with a visit or in the interim between dances, walked into the room, sat on somebody’s knees, smoked, sang disjointedly, drank wine, kissed and again went away, and again came. The clerks of Kereshkovsky, offended because the damsels bestowed more attention upon the cabinet than the drawing room, did start a row and tried to enter into a provoking explanation with the students, but Simeon in a moment quelled them with two or three authoritative words, thrown out as though in passing.

Niura came back from her room and a little later Petrovsky followed her. Petrovsky with an extremely serious air declared that he had been walking on the street all this time, thinking over the incident which had taken place and in the end had come to the conclusion that comrade Boris was in reality not in the right, but that there also was a circumstance in extenuation of his fault⁠—intoxication. Also, Jennie came later, but alone⁠—Sobashnikov had fallen asleep in her room.

The actor proved to have no end of talents. He very faithfully imitated the buzzing of a fly which an intoxicated man is catching on a windowpane, and the sounds of a saw; drolly performed, standing with his face in