Yama (The Pit) | Page 6

smells of perfumes, tobacco, the sour dampness of a large
uninhabited room, the perspiration of unclean and unhealthy feminine flesh, face-powder,
boracic-thymol soap, and the dust of the yellow mastic with which the parquet floor had
been polished yesterday. And with a strange charm the smell of withering swamp grass is
blended with these smells. To-day is Trinity. In accordance with an olden custom, the
chambermaids of the establishment, while their ladies were still sleeping, had bought a
whole waggon of sedge on the market, and had strewn its long, thick blades, that crunch
underfoot, everywhere about--in the corridors, in the private cabinets, in the drawing
room. They, also, had lit the lamps before all the images. The girls, by tradition, dare not
do this with their hands, which have been denied during the night.
And the house-porter has adorned the house-entrance, which is carved in the Russian
style, with two little felled birch-trees. And so with all the houses--the thin white trunks
with their scant dying verdure adorn the exterior near the stoops, bannisters and doors.
The entire house is quiet, empty and drowsy. The chopping of cutlets for dinner can be
heard from the kitchen. Liubka, one of the girls, barefooted, in her shift, with bare arms,
not good- looking, freckled, but strong and fresh of body, has come out into the inner
court. Yesterday she had had but six guests on time, but no one had remained for the
night with her, and because of that she had slept her fill--splendidly, delightfully, all
alone, upon a wide bed. She had risen early, at ten o'clock, and had with pleasure helped
the cook scrub the floor and the tables in the kitchen. Now she is feeding the chained dog
Amour with the sinews and cuttings of the meat. The big, rusty hound, with long
glistening hair and black muzzle, jumps up on the girl--with his front paws, stretching the
chain tightly and rattling in the throat from shortness of breath, then, with back and tail

undulating all over, bends his head down to the ground, wrinkles his nose, smiles, whines
and sneezes from the excitement. But she, teasing him with the meat, shouts at him with
pretended severity:
"There, you--stupid! I'll--I'll give it to you! How dare you?"
But she rejoices with all her soul over the tumult and caresses of Amour and her
momentary power over the dog, and because she had slept her fill, and passed the night
without a man, and because of the Trinity, according to dim recollections of her
childhood, and because of the sparkling sunny day, which it so seldom befalls her to see.
All the night guests have already gone their ways. The most business-like, quiet and
workaday hour is coming on.
They are drinking coffee in the room of the proprietress. The company consists of five
people. The proprietress herself, in whose name the house is registered, is Anna
Markovna. She is about sixty. She is very small of stature, but dumpy: she may be
visualized by imagining, from the bottom up, three soft, gelatinous globes--large,
medium and small, pressed into each other without any interstices; this--her skirt, torso
and head. Strange, her eyes are a faded blue, girlish, even childish, but the mouth is that
of an old person, with a moist lower lip of a raspberry colour, impotently hanging down.
Her husband--Isaiah Savvich--is also small, a grayish, quiet, silent little old man. He is
under his wife's thumb; he was doorkeeper in this very house even at the time when Anna
Markovna served here as housekeeper. In order to be useful in some way, he has learned,
through self- instruction, to play the fiddle, and now at night plays dance tunes, as well as
a funeral march for shopmen far gone on a spree and craving some maudlin tears.
Then, there are the two housekeepers--senior and junior. The senior is Emma
Edwardovna. She is a tall, full woman of forty-six, with chestnut hair, and a fat goitre of
three chins. Her eyes are encircled with black rings of hemorrhoidal origin. The face
broadens out like a pear from the forehead down to the cheeks, and is of an earthen
colour; the eyes are small, black; the nose humped, the lips sternly pursed; the expression
of the face calmly authoritative. It is no mystery to anyone in the house that in a year or
two Anna Markovna will go into retirement, and sell her the establishment with all its
rights and furnishings, when she will receive part in cash, and part on terms--by
promissory note. Because of this the girls honour her equally with the proprietress and
fear her somewhat. Those who fall into error she beats with her own hands, beats cruelly,
coolly, and calculatingly, without changing the calm