“That’s right,” confirmed Lichonin, while the reporter continued, gazing pensively into his glass: 

“We read in the papers, in leading articles, various wailings of anxious souls.  And the women-physicians are also endeavouring in this matter, and endeavouring disgustingly enough.  ’Oh, dear, regulation!  Oh, dear, abolition!  Oh, dear, live merchandise!  A condition of slavery!  The mesdames, these greedy haeterae!  These heinous degenerates of humanity, sucking the blood of prostitutes!’ ...  But with clamour you will scare no one and will affect no one.  You know, there’s a little saying:  much cry, little wool.  More awful than all awful words—­a hundredfold more awful—­ is some such little prosaic stroke or other as will suddenly knock you all in a heap, like a blow on the forehead.  Take even Simeon, the porter here.  It would seem, according to you, there is no sinking lower—­a bouncer in a brothel, a brute, almost certainly a murderer, he plucks the prostitutes, gives them “black eyes,” to use a local expression—­that is, just simply beats them.  But, do you know on what grounds he and I came together and became friendly?  On the magnificent details of the divine service of the prelate, on the canon of the honest Andrew, pastor of Crete, on the works of the most beatific father, John the Damascene.  He is religious—­unusually so!  I used to lead him on, and he would sing to me with tears in his eyes:  ’Come ye brethren, and we will give the last kiss to him who has gone to his rest...’  From the ritual of the burial of laymen.  No, just think:  it is only in the Russian soul alone that such contradictions may dwell together!”

“Yes.  A fellow like that will pray, and pray, then cut a throat, and then wash his hands and put a candle before an image,” said Ramses.

“Just so.  I know of nothing more uncanny than this fusion of fully sincere devoutness with an innate leaning toward crime.  Shall I confess to you?  I, when I talk all alone to Simeon—­and we talk with each other long and leisurely, for hours—­I experience at moments a genuine terror.  A superstitious terror!  Just as though, for instance, I am standing in the dusk upon a shaking little board, bending over some dark, malodorous well, and just barely distinguish how there, at the bottom, reptiles are stirring.  And yet, he is devout in a real way, and I am sure will some time join the monks and will be a great faster and sayer of prayers, and the devil knows how, in what monstrous fashion, a real religious ecstasy will entwine in his soul with blasphemy, with scoffing at sacred things, with some repulsive passion or other, with sadism or something else of that nature!”

“However, you do not spare the object of your observations,” said Yarchenko, and carefully indicated the girls with his eyes.

“Eh, it’s all the same.  Our relations are cool now.”

“How so?” asked Volodya Pavlov, who had caught the end of the conversation.