“Where are you going right now?” Likhonin asked the reporter in a low voice.
“Well, really, I don’t know myself. I did want to spend the night in the cabinet of Isaiah Savvich, but it’s a pity to lose such a splendid morning. I’m thinking of taking a bath, and then I’ll get on a steamer and ride to the Lipsky monastery to a certain tippling black friar I know, and chat with him a bit about Tertullian. But why?”
“I would ask you to remain a little while and sit the others out. I must have a very important word or two with you.”
“It’s a go.”
Yarchenko was the last to go. He averred a headache and fatigue. But scarcely had he gone out of the house when the reporter seized Likhonin by the hand and quickly dragged him into the glass vestibule of the entrance.
“Look!” he said, pointing to the street.
And through an orange pane of the little stained-glass window Likhonin saw the sub-professor, who was ringing at Treppel’s. After a minute the door opened and Yarchenko disappeared through it.
“How did you find out?” asked Likhonin with astonishment.
“A mere trifle! I saw his face, and saw his hands smoothing Verka’s tights. The others were less restrained. But this fellow is bashful.”
“Well, now, let’s go,” said Likhonin. “I won’t detain you long.”
XIII
Of the girls only two remained in the cabinet—Jennie, who had come in her night blouse, and Liuba, who had long been sleeping under cover of the conversation, curled up into a ball in the large plush armchair. The fresh, freckled face of Liuba had taken on a meek, almost childlike, expression, while the lips, just as they had smiled in sleep, had preserved the light imprint of a radiant, peaceful and tender smile. It was blue and biting in the cabinet from the dense tobacco smoke; guttered, warty little streams had congealed on the candles in the candelabras; the table, flooded with coffee and wine, scattered all over with orange peels, seemed hideous.
Jennie was sitting on the divan, her knees clasped around with her arms. And again was Platonov struck by the sombre fire in her deep eyes, that seemed fallen in underneath the dark eyebrows, formidably contracted downward, toward the bridge of the nose.
“I’ll put out the candles,” said Likhonin.
The morning half-light, watery and drowsy, filled the room through the slits of the blinds. The extinguished wicks of the candles smoked with faint streams. The tobacco smoke swirled in blue, layered shrouds, but a ray of sunlight that had cut its way through the heart-shaped hollow in a window shutter, transpierced the cabinet obliquely with a joyous, golden sword of dust, and in liquid, hot gold splashed upon the paper on the wall.
“That’s better,” said Likhonin, sitting down. “The conversation will be short, but … the devil knows … how to approach it.”
He looked at Jennie in abstraction.
“Shall I go away, then?” said she indifferently.
“No, you sit a while,” the reporter answered for Likhonin. “She won’t be in the way,” he turned to the student and slightly smiled. “For the conversation will be about prostitution? Isn’t that so?”
“Well, yes … sort of …”
“Very well, then. You listen to her carefully. Her opinions happen to be of an unusually cynical nature, but at times of exceeding weight.”
Likhonin vigorously rubbed and kneaded his face with his palms, then intertwined his fingers and nervously cracked them twice. It was apparent that he was agitated and was himself constrained about that which he was getting ready to say.
“Oh, but isn’t it all the same!” he suddenly exclaimed angrily. “You were today speaking about these women … I listened … True, you haven’t told me anything new. But—strangely—I, for some reason, as though for the first time in my loose life, have looked upon this question with opened eyes … I ask you, what is prostitution in the end? What is it? The extravagant delirium of large cities, or an eternal historical phenomenon? Will it cease some time? Or will it die only with the death of all mankind? Who will answer me that?”
Platonov was looking at him intently, narrowing his eyes slightly, through habit. He wanted to know what main thought was inflicting such sincere torture on Likhonin.
“When it will cease, none will tell you. Perhaps when the magnificent utopias of the socialists and anarchists will materialize, when the world will become everyone’s and no one’s, when love will be absolutely free and subject only to its own unlimited desires, while mankind will fuse into one happy family, wherein will perish the distinction between mine and thine, and there will come a paradise upon earth, and man will again become naked, glorified and without sin. Perhaps it may be then …”
“But now? Now?” asks Likhonin with growing agitation. “Shall I look on, with my little hands folded? ‘It’s none of my affair?’ Tolerate it as an unavoidable evil? Put up with it, and wash my hands of it? Shall I pronounce a benediction upon it?”
“This evil is not unavoidable, but insuperable. But isn’t it all the same to you?” asked Platonov with cold wonder. “For you’re an anarchist, aren’t you?”
“What the devil kind of an anarchist am I! Well, yes, I am an anarchist, because my reason, when I think of life, always leads me logically to the anarchistic beginning. And I myself think in theory: let men beat, deceive, and fleece men, like flocks of sheep—let them!—violence will breed rancour sooner or later. Let them violate the child, let them trample creative thought under foot, let there be slavery, let there be prostitution, let them thieve, mock, spill blood … Let them! The worse, the better, the nearer the end. There is a great law, I think, the same for inanimate objects as well as for all the tremendous and
