Yama, Aleksandr Kuprin [grave mercy TXT] 📗

to handclasps, gave their names abruptly in a low voice⁠—Manya, Katie, Liuba⁠ ⁠… They sat down on the first lap they came to, embraced its owner around the neck, and, as usual, began to importune:

“Little student, you’re such a little good-looker. May I ask for oranzes?”

“Volodenka, buy me some candy! All right?”

“And me chocolate!”

“Fatty,” Vera, dressed as a jockey, wheedled the sub-professor, clambering up on his knees, “I have a friend, only she’s sick and can’t come out into the drawing room. I’ll carry her some apples and chocolate. Will you let me?”

“Well, now, those are all just stories about a friend! But above all, don’t be thrusting your tenderness at me. Sit as smart children sit, right here alongside, on the arm chair, just so. And fold your little hands.”

“Ah, but what if I can’t!” writhed Vera in coquetry, rolling her eyes up under her upper lids⁠ ⁠… “When you are so nice.”

But Likhonin, in answer to this professional beggary, only nodded his head gravely and good-naturedly, just like Emma Edwardovna, and repeated over and over again, mimicking her German accent:

“Itt can pe done, itt can pe done, itt can pe done⁠ ⁠…”

“Then I will tell the waiter, honey, to carry my friend some sweets and apples?” pestered Vera.

Such importunity entered the round of their tacit duties. There even existed among the girls some captious, childish, strange rivalry as to the ability to “ease a guest of his money”⁠—strange enough because they did not derive any profit out of this, unless, indeed, a certain affection from the housekeeper or a word of approbation from the proprietress. But in their petty, monotonous, habitually frivolous life there was, in general, a great deal of semi-puerile, semi-hysterical play.

Simeon brought a coffee pot, cups, a squatty bottle of Benedictine, fruits and bonbons in glass vases, and gaily and easily began making the corks of the beer and wine pop.

“But why don’t you drink?” Yarchenko turned to the reporter Platonov. “Allow me⁠ ⁠… I do not mistake? Sergei Ivanovich, I believe?”

“Right.”

“Allow me to offer you a cup of coffee, Sergei Ivanovich. It’s refreshing. Or, perhaps, let’s drink this same dubious Lafitte?”

“No, you really must allow me to refuse. I have a drink of my own⁠ ⁠… Simeon, give me⁠ ⁠…”

“Cognac!” cried out Niura hurriedly.

“And with a pear!” Little White Manka caught up just as fast.

“I heard you, Sergei Ivanich⁠—right away,” unhurriedly but respectfully responded Simeon, and, bending down and letting out a grunt, resoundingly drew the cork out of the neck of the bottle.

“It’s the first time I hear of cognac being served in Yama,” uttered Likhonin with amazement. “No matter how much I asked, they always refused me.”

“Perhaps Sergei Ivanich knows some sort of magic word,” jested Ramses.

“Or is held here in an especially honoured state?” Boris Sobashnikov put in pointedly, with emphasis.

The reporter listlessly, without turning his head, looked askance at Sobashnikov, at the lower row of buttons on his short, foppish, white summer uniform jacket, and answered with a drawl:

“There is nothing honourable in that I can drink like a horse and never get drunk; but then, I also do not quarrel with anyone or pick upon anybody. Evidently, these good sides of my character are sufficiently known here, and because of that confidence is shown me.”

“Good for you, old fellow!” joyously exclaimed Likhonin, who was delighted by a certain peculiar, indolent negligence⁠—of few words, yet at the same time self-confident⁠—in the reporter. “Will you share the cognac with me also?”

“Very, very gladly,” affably answered Platonov and suddenly looked at Likhonin with a radiant, almost childlike smile, which beautified his plain face with the prominent cheekbones. “You, too, appealed to me from the first. And even when I saw you there, at Doroshenko’s, I at once thought that you are not at all as rough as you seem.”

“Well, now, we have exchanged pleasantries,” laughed Likhonin. “But it’s amazing that we haven’t met once just here. Evidently, you come to Anna Markovna’s quite frequently?”

“Even too much so.”

“Sergei Ivanich is our most important guest!” naively shrieked Niura. “Sergei Ivanich is a sort of brother among us!”

“Fool!” Tamara stopped her.

“That seems strange to me,” continued Likhonin. “I, too, am a habitué. In any case, one can only envy everybody’s cordiality toward you.”

“The local chieftain!” said Boris Sobashnikov, curling his lips downward, but said it so low that Platanov, if he chose to, could pretend that he had not heard anything distinctly. This reporter had for long aroused in Boris some blind and prickling irritation. That he was not one of his own herd really meant nothing. But Boris, like many students, military officers, junkers, and high-school boys had grown accustomed to having outside “civilian” people who accidentally fell into their company when on a spree hold themselves somewhat subordinately and with servility in it, flattering the youths, expressing amazement at their daring, laughing at their jokes, admiring their self-admiration, recalling the years of their own youth with a sigh of suppressed envy. But in Platonov there not only was none of this customary wagging of the tail before youth, but, on the contrary, there was to be felt a certain abstracted, calm and polite indifference.

Besides that, Sobashnikov was angered⁠—and angered with a petty, jealous vexation⁠—by that simple and yet anticipatory attention which was shown to the reporter by everybody in the establishment, beginning with the porter and ending with the fleshy, taciturn Katie. This attention was shown in the way he was listened to, in that triumphal carefulness with which Tamara filled his glass, and in the way Little White Manka pared a pear for him solicitously, and in the delight of Zoe, who had caught the case skillfully thrown to her across the table by the reporter, when she had vainly asked for a cigarette from her two neighbors, who were lost in conversation; and in the way none of the girls begged either chocolate or fruits from him, in the lively gratitude for his little services and his treating. “Pimp!” Sobashkinov had almost decided mentally with malice, but