Yama, Aleksandr Kuprin [grave mercy TXT] 📗

to Kislovodsk,10 a rich, fashionable health resort. It was a warm, fragrant, summer evening. The Ingush heard music, set out in the direction of its sounds, and found himself near a lattice surrounding a dancing space. They were playing a waltz. One of the ladies was in such décolleté, that, to all intents and purposes, she was simply naked.

“She, out of some caprice, found it pleasing, as she whirled in the waltz, to career by so close to the lattice beyond which stood the young, handsome horseman that every time she almost touched him with her bellying skirt.

“And suddenly a cry of horror rang out. At a single bound the mountaineer leapt over the lattice, and thrust away the lady’s puny partner. In an instant he had torn to pieces all the gauzy shreds the lady had on, and threw her to the ground. In vain did they beat him with canes and umbrellas. Someone shot off a revolver. Someone of the military⁠—an infantry man⁠—slashed him with a sabre. It mattered not a jot: before the eyes of the entire, most respected public, he raped the unhappy woman. But afterward, when the police fell upon him, he calmly said:

“ ‘Lead me off to prison now⁠—chop off my head. That’s as it should be. But why did she walk about naked?’

“And that’s all. I would have vindicated this young blockhead. Wherein is any elemental force to blame? But you speak of your needs. Heh! All of us cerebral chaps love with the imagination. We are onanists, rather than males.”

“Parlez pour vous,” said Sobashnikov. “Your soul, professor, is that of a Roman who has carried off a Sabine woman, but your psychology is that of a repenting country squire.”

But here a student, who was called Ramses in the friendly coterie, intervened. This was a yellowish-swarthy, hump-nosed man of small stature; his clean-shaven face seemed triangular, thanks to a broad forehead, beginning to get bald, with two wedge-like bald spots at the temples, fallen-in cheeks and a sharp chin. He led a mode of life sufficiently queer for a student. While his colleagues employed themselves by turns with politics, love, the theatre, and a little in study, Ramses had withdrawn entirely into the study of all conceivable suits and claims, into the chicane subtleties of property, hereditary, land and other business lawsuits, into the memorizing and logical analysis of quashed decisions. Perfectly of his own will, without in the least needing the money, he served for a year as a clerk at a notary’s for another as a secretary to a justice of the peace, while all of the past year, being in the last term, he had conducted in a local newspaper the reports of the city council and had borne the modest duty of an assistant to a secretary in the management of a syndicate of sugar manufacturers. And when this same syndicate commenced the well-known suit against one of its members, Colonel Baskakov, who had put up the surplus sugar for sale contrary to agreement, Ramses from the very beginning guessed beforehand and very subtly engineered, precisely that decision which the senate subsequently handed down in this suit.

Despite his comparative youth, rather well-known jurists gave heed to his opinions⁠—true, a little loftily. None of those who knew Ramses closely doubted that he would make a brilliant career, and even Ramses himself did not conceal his confidence in that toward thirty-five he would knock together a million, exclusively through his practice as a civil lawyer. His comrades not infrequently elected him chairman of meetings and head of the class, but this honour Ramses invariably declined, excusing himself with lack of time. But still he did not avoid participation in his comrades’ trials by arbitration, and his arguments⁠—always incontrovertibly logical⁠—were possessed of an amazing virtue in ending the trials with peace, to the mutual satisfaction of the litigating parties. He, as well as Yarchenko, knew well the value of popularity among the studying youths, and even if he did look upon people with a certain contempt, from above, still he never, by as much as a single movement of his thin, clever, energetical lips, showed this.

“Well, Gavrila Petrovich, no one is necessarily dragging you into committing a fall from grace,” said Ramses in a conciliatory manner, “What is all this pathos and melancholy for, when the matter as it stands is altogether simple? A company of young Russian gentlemen wishes to pass the remnant of the night modestly and amicably, to make merry, to sing a little, and to take internally several gallons of wine and beer. But everything is closed now, except these very same houses. Ergo!⁠ ⁠…”

“Consequently, we will go merrymaking to women who are for sale? To prostitutes? Into a brothel?” Yarchenko interrupted him, mockingly and inimically.

“And even so? A certain philosopher, whom it was desired to humiliate, was given a seat at dinner near the musicians. But he, sitting down, said: ‘Here is a sure means of making the last place the first.’ And finally I repeat: If your conscience does not allow you, as you express yourself, to buy a woman, then you can go there and come away, preserving your innocence in all its blossoming inviolability.”

“You overdo it, Ramses,” objected Yarchenko with displeasure. “You remind me of those bourgeois, who, while it is still dark, have gathered to gape at an execution and who say: we have nothing to do with this, we are against capital punishment, this is all the prosecuting attorney’s and the executioner’s doing.”

“Superbly said and partly true, Gavrila Petrovich. But to us, precisely, this comparison may not even apply. One cannot, you see, treat some malignant disease while absent, without seeing the sufferer in person. And yet all of us, who are now standing here in the street and interfering with the passersby, will be obliged at some time in our work to run up against the terrible problem of prostitution, and what a prostitution at that⁠—the Russian! Likhonin,