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