Yama, Aleksandr Kuprin [grave mercy TXT] 📗

septum of its nose, shakes its handsome head, shifts its feet on the same spot, and pricks up its thin ears; the bearded, stout driver himself sits on the coach-box like a carven image, his arms stretched out straight along his knees.

“Oh, for a ride!” squeals Niura. “Oh, uncle! Oh you swell coachman!” she cries out, hanging over the window sill. “Give a poor little girlie a ride⁠ ⁠… Give us a ride for love.”

But the swell coachman laughs, makes a scarcely noticeable movement with his fingers, and immediately the white horse, as though it had been waiting just for that, starts from its place at a goodly trot, handsomely turns around and with measured speed floats away into the darkness together with the victoria and the broad back of the coachman.

“Pfui! What indecency!” the indignant voice of Emma Edwardovna sounds in the room. “Well, where did you see that respectable girls should allow themselves to climb out of the windows and holler all over the street. O, scandal! And it’s all Niura, and it’s always this horrible Niura!”

She is majestic in her black dress, with her yellow flabby face, with the dark pouches under her eyes, with the three pendulous, quivering chins. The girls, like boarding school misses, staidly seat themselves on the chairs along the walls, except Jennie, who continues to contemplate herself in all the mirrors. Two more cabbies drive up opposite, to the house of Sophia Vasilievna. Yama is beginning to liven up. At last one more victoria rattles along the paved road and its noise is cut short abruptly at the entrance to Anna Markovna’s.

The porter Simeon helps someone take off his things in the front hall. Jennie looks in there, holding on with both hands to the door jambs, but immediately turns back, and as she walks shrugs her shoulders and shakes her head negatively.

“Don’t know him, someone who’s an entire stranger,” she says in a low voice. “He has never been in our place. Some daddy or other, fat, in gold eyeglasses and a uniform.”

Emma Edwardovna commands in a voice which sounds like a summoning cavalry trumpet:

“Ladies, into the drawing room! Into the drawing room, ladies!”

One after the other, with haughty gaits, into the drawing room enter: Tamara, with bare white arms and bared neck, wound with a string of artificial pearls; fat Kitty with her fleshy, quadrangular face and low forehead⁠—she, too, is in décolleté, but her skin is red and in goose-pimples; Nina, the very newest one, pug-nosed and clumsy, in a dress the colour of a green parrot; another Manka⁠—Big Manka, or Manka the Crocodile, as they call her, and⁠—the last⁠—Sonka the Rudder, a Jewess, with an ugly dark face and an extraordinarily large nose, precisely for which she has received her nickname, but with such magnificent large eyes, at the same time meek and sad, burning and humid, as, among the women of all the terrestrial globe, are to be found only among the Jewesses.

VII

The elderly guest in the uniform of the Department of Charity walked in with slow, undecided steps, at each step bending his body a little forward and rubbing his palms with a circular motion, as though washing them. Since all the women were pompously silent, as though not noticing him, he traversed the drawing room and let himself down on a chair alongside of Liuba, who, in accordance with etiquette, only gathered up her skirt a little, preserving the abstracted and independent air of a girl from a respectable house.

“How do you do, miss?” he said.

“How do you do?” answered Liuba abruptly.

“How are you getting along?”

“Thanks⁠—thank you. Treat me to a smoke.”

“Pardon me⁠—I don’t smoke.”

“So that’s how. A man⁠—and he doesn’t smoke, just like that. Well, then, treat me to some Lafitte with lemonade. I am terribly fond of Lafitte with lemonade.”

He let that pass in silence.

“Ooh, what a stingy daddy! Where do you work, now? Are you one of the government clerks?”

“No, I’m a teacher. I teach the German language.”

“But I have seen you somewhere, daddy. Your physiognomy is familiar to me. Where have I met you before?”

“Well, now, I don’t know, really. Unless it was on the street.”

“It might have been on the street, likely as not⁠ ⁠… You ought to treat me to an orange, at least. May I ask for an orange?”

He again grew quiet, looking about him. His face began to glisten and the pimples on his forehead became red. He was mentally appraising all the women, choosing a likely one for himself, and was at the same time embarrassed by his silence. There was nothing at all to talk about; besides that the indifferent importunity of Liuba irritated him. Fat Katie pleased him with her large, bovine body, but she must be⁠—he decided in his mind⁠—very frigid in love, like all stout women, and in addition to that not handsome of face. Vera also excited him, with her appearance of a little boy, and her firm thighs, closely enveloped by the white tights; and Little White Manya, looking so like an innocent schoolgirl; and Jennie with her energetic, swarthy, handsome face. For one minute he was all ready to stop at Jennie, but only started in his chair and did not venture⁠—by her easy, inaccessible and negligent air, and because she in all sincerity did not pay him the least attention, he surmised that she was the most spoilt of all the girls in the establishment, accustomed to having the visitors spend more money on her than on the others. But the pedagogue was a calculating man, burdened with a large family and an exhausted wife, destroyed by his masculine demands and suffering from a multiplicity of female ills. Teaching in a female high school and in an institute, he lived constantly in a sort of secret sensual delirium, and only his German training, stinginess and cowardice helped him to hold his constantly aroused desires in check. But two or three times a year, with