Yama: the pit eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 474 pages of information about Yama.

Yama: the pit eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 474 pages of information about Yama.
its wondrous muddle and farrago, makes one stand aghast.  You can utter a thousand sonorous words against souteneurs, but just such a Simeon you will never think up.  So diverse and motley is life!  Or else take Anna Markovna, the proprietress of this place.  This blood-sucker, hyena, vixen and so on ... is the tenderest mother imaginable.  She has one daughter—­Bertha, she is now in the fifth grade of high school.  If you could only see how much careful attention, how much tender care Anna Markovna expends that her daughter may not somehow, accidentally, find out about her profession.  And everything is for Birdie, everything is for the sake of Birdie.  And she herself dare not even converse before her, is afraid of her lexicon of a bawd and an erstwhile prostitute, looks into her eyes, holds herself servilely, like an old servant, like a foolish, doting nurse, like an old, faithful, mange-eaten poodle.  It is long since time for her to retire to rest, because she has money, and because her occupation is both arduous and troublesome, and because her years are already venerable.  But no and no; one more extra thousand is needed, and then more and more—­everything for Birdie.  And so Birdie has horses, Birdie has an English governess, Birdie is every year taken abroad, Birdie has diamonds worth forty thousand—­the devil knows whose they are, these diamonds?  And it isn’t that I am merely convinced, but I know well, that for the happiness of this same Birdie, nay, not even for her happiness, but, let us suppose that Birdie gets a hangnail on her little finger—­well then, in order that this hangnail might pass away—­imagine for a second the possibility of such a state of things!—­Anna Markovna, without the quiver of an eyelash, will sell into corruption our sisters and daughters, will infect all of us and our sons with syphilis.  What?  A monster, you will say?  But I will say that she is moved by the same grand, unreasoning, blind, egoistical love for which we call our mothers sainted women.”

“Go easy around the curves!” remarked Boris Sobashnikov through his teeth.

“Pardon me:  I was not comparing people, but merely generalizing on the first source of emotion.  I might have brought out as an example the self-denying love of animal-mothers as well.  But I see that I have started on a tedious matter.  Better let’s drop it.”

“No, you finish,” protested Lichonin.  “I feel that you have a massive thought.”

“And a very simple one.  The other day a professor asked me if I am not observing the life here with some literary aims.  And all I wanted to say was, that I can see, but precisely can not observe.  Here I have given you Simeon and the bawd for example.  I do not know myself why, but I feel that in them lurks some terrible, insuperable actuality of life, but either to tell it, or to show it, I can not.  Here is necessary the great ability to take some picayune trifle, an insignificant, paltry little stroke, and

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Yama: the pit from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.