"That's better," said Lichonin, 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 Lichonin. "She won't be in the way," he turned to the student and slightly smiled. "For the conversation will be about prost.i.tution? 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."

Lichonin 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 to-day 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 open eyes... I ask you, what is prost.i.tution 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 Lichonin.

"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 Lichonin 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 p.r.o.nounce 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 prost.i.tution, 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 many-millioned human life: the power of effort is equal to the power of resistance. The worse, the better. Let evil and vindictiveness acc.u.mulate in mankind, let them grow and ripen like a monstrous abscess--an abscess the size of the whole terrestrial sphere.

For it will burst some time! And let there be terror and insufferable pain. Let the pus deluge all the universe. But mankind will either choke in it and perish, or, having gone through the illness, will be regenerated to a new, beautiful life."

Lichonin avidly drank off a cup of cold black coffee and continued vehemently:

"Yes. Just so do I and many others theorize, sitting in our rooms, over tea with white bread and cooked sausage, when the value of each separate human life is so-so, an infinitesimally small numeral in a mathematical formula. But let me see a child abused, and the red blood will rush to my head from rage. And when I look and look upon the labour of a moujik or a labourer, I am thrown into hysterics for shame at my algebraic calculations. There is--the devil take it!--there is something incongruous, altogether illogical, but which at this time is stronger than human reason. Take to-day, now ... Why do I feel at this minute as though I had robbed a sleeping man or deceived a three-year-old child, or hit a bound person? And why does it seem to me to-day that I myself am guilty of the evil of prost.i.tution--guilty in my silence, my indifference, my indirect permission? What am I to do, Platonov!" exclaimed the student with grief in his voice.

Platonov kept silent, squinting at him with his little narrow eyes. But Jennie unexpectedly said in a caustic tone:

"Well, you do as one Englishwoman did ... A certain red-haired clodhopper came to us here. She must have been important, because she came with a whole retinue ... all some sort of officials ... But before her had come the a.s.sistant of the commissioner, with the precinct inspector Kerbesh. And the a.s.sistant directly forewarned us, just like that: 'If you stiffs, and so on and so on, will let out even one little rude word, or something, then I won't leave one stone upon another of your establishment, while I'll flog all the wenches soundly in the station-house and make 'em rot in jail!' Well, at last this galoot came. She gibbered and she gibbered something in a foreign language, all the time pointed to heaven with her hand, and then distributed a five-kopeck Testament to every one of us and rode away. Now you ought to do the same, dearie."

Platonov burst into loud laughter. But seeing the naive and sad face of Lichonin, who did not seem to understand, nor even suspect mockery, he restrained his laughter and said seriously:

"You won't accomplish anything, Lichonin. While there will be property, there will also be poverty. While marriage exists, prost.i.tution also will not die. Do you know who will always sustain and nourish prost.i.tution? It is the so-called decent people, the n.o.ble paterfamiliases, the irreproachable husbands, the loving brothers. They will always find a seemly motive to legitimize, normalize and put a wrapper all around paid libertinage, because they know very well that otherwise it would rush in a torrent into their bedrooms and nurseries.

Prost.i.tution is for them a deflection of the sensuousness of others from their personal, lawful alcove. And even the respectable paterfamilias himself is not averse to indulge in a love debauch in secret. And really, it is palling to have always the one and the same thing the wife, the chambermaid, and the lady on the side. Man, as a matter of fact, is a poly--and exceedingly so--a polygamous animal. And to his rooster-like amatory instincts it will always be sweet to unfold in such a magnificent nursery garden, A LA Treppel's or Anna Markovna's. Oh, of course, a well-balanced spouse or the happy father of six grown-up daughters will always be clamouring about the horror of prost.i.tution. He will even arrange with the help of a lottery and an amateur entertainment a society for the saving of fallen women, or an asylum in the name of St. Magdalene. But the existence of prost.i.tution he will bless and sustain."

"Magdalene asylums!" with quiet laughter, full of an ancient hatred the ache of which had not yet healed, repeated Jennie.

"Yes, I know that all these false measures undertaken are stuff and a total mockery," cut in Lichonin. "But let me be ridiculous and stupid, yet I do not wish to remain a commiserating spectator, who sits on a warm ledge, gazes upon a conflagration, and is saying all the time: 'Oh, my, but it's burning ... by G.o.d, it is burning! Perhaps there are even people burning!'--but for his part merely laments and slaps his thighs."

"Well, now," said Platonov harshly, "would you take a child's syringe and go to put out the fire with it?"

"No!" heatedly exclaimed Lichonin ... "Perhaps--who knows?--perhaps I'll succeed in saving at least one living soul? It was just this that I wanted to ask you about, Platonov, and you must help me ... Only, I implore you, without jeers, without cooling off ..."

"You want to take a girl out of here? To save her?" asked Platonov, looking at him attentively. He now understood the drift of this entire conversation.

"Yes ... I don't know ... I'll try ..." answered Lichonin uncertainly.

"She'll come back," said Platonov.

"She will," Jennie repeated with conviction.

Lichonin walked up to her, took her by the hands and began to speak in a trembling whisper:

"Jennechka ... Perhaps you ... eh? For I don't call you as a mistress ... but a friend ... It's all a trifle, half a year of rest ... and then we'll master some trade or other ... we'll read..."

Jennie s.n.a.t.c.hed her hands out of his with vexation.

"Oh, into a bog with you!" she almost shouted. "I know you! Want me to darn socks for you? Cook on a kerosene stove? Pa.s.s nights without sleeping on account of you when you'll be chitter-chattering with your short-haired friends? But when you get to be a doctor or a lawyer, or a government clerk, then it's me will get a knee in the back: 'Out on the street with you, now, you public hide, you've ruined my young life. I want to marry a decent girl, pure, and innocent! ..."

"I meant it as a brother ... I meant it without that ..." mumbled Lichonin in confusion.

"I know that kind of brothers. Until the first night ... Leave off and don't talk nonsense to me! It makes me tired to listen to it!"

"Wait, Lichonin!" began the reporter seriously. "Why, you will pile a load beyond your strength upon yourself as well. I've known idealists, among the populists, who married peasant girls out of principle. This is just the way they thought--nature, black-loam, untapped forces. ...

But this black-loam after a year turned into the fattest of women, who lies the whole day in bed and chews cookies, or studs her fingers with penny rings, spreads them out and admires them. Or else sits in the kitchen, drinks sweet liquor with the coachman and carries on a natural romance with him. Look out, here it will be worse!"

All three became silent. Lichonin was pale and was wiping his moist forehead with a handkerchief.

"No, the devil take it!" he cried out suddenly with obstinacy. "I don't believe you! I don't want to believe! Liuba" he called loudly the girl who had fallen asleep. "Liubochka!"

The girl awoke, pa.s.sed her palm over her lips, first to one side, then the other, yawned, and smiled, in a funny, child-like manner.

"I wasn't sleeping, I heard everything," she said. "I only dozed off for a teeny-weeny bit."

"Liuba, do you want to go away from here with me?" asked Lichonin and took her by the hand. "But entirely, forever, to go away so's never to return either to a brothel or the street?"

Liuba questioningly, with perplexity, looked at Jennie, as though seeking from her an explanation of this jest.

"That's enough for you," she said slyly. "You're still studying yourself. Where do you come in, then, to take a girl and set her up?"

"Not to set you up, Liuba ... I simply want to help you ... For it isn't very sweet for you in a brothel, is it now!"

"Naturally, it isn't all sugar! If I was as proud as Jennechka, or so enticing like Pasha ... but I won't get used to things here for anything ..."

"Well, then, let's go, let's go! ..." entreated Lichonin. "Surely, you know some manual work--well, now, sewing something, embroidering, cutting?"

"I don't know anything!" answered Liuba bashfully and started laughing and turned red, covering her mouth with the elbow of her free arm.

"What's asked of us in the village, that I know, but anything more I don't know. I can cook a little ... I lived at the priest's--cooked for him."

"That's splendid! That's excellent!" Lichonin grew joyous. "I will a.s.sist you, you'll open a dining room ... A cheap dining room, you understand ... I'll advertise it for you ... The students will come!

That's magnificent! ..."

"That's enough of making fun of me!" retorted Liuba, a bit offended, and again looked askance and questioningly at Jennie.