selling bread-cider, old wenches trafficked in themselves by
twos and threes, right alongside behind a partition of deal, and to
many mothers and fathers is this summer painful and memorable through
the degrading diseases of their sons--schoolboys and military cadets.
For the casual arrivals servants were demanded, and thousands of
peasant girls started out from the surrounding villages toward the
city. It was inevitable that the demand on prostitution should become
unusually high. And so, from Warsaw, from Lodz, from Odessa, from
Moscow, and even from St. Petersburg, even from abroad, flocked
together an innumerable multitude of foreign women; cocottes of Russian
fabrication, the most ordinary prostitutes of the rank and file, and
chic Frenchwomen and Viennese. Imperiously told the corrupting
influence of the hundreds of millions of easy money. It was as though
this cascade of gold had lashed down upon, had set to whirling and
deluged within it, the whole city. The number of thefts and murders
increased with astounding rapidity. The police, collected in augmented
proportions, lost its head and was swept off its feet. But it must also
be said that, having gorged itself with plentiful bribes, it resembled
a sated python, willy-nilly drowsy and listless. People were killed for
anything and nothing, just so. It happened that men would walk up to a
person in broad daylight somewhere on an unfrequented street and ask:
"What's your name?" "Fedorov." "Aha, Federov? Then take this!" and they
would slit his belly with a knife. They nicknamed these blades just
that in the city--"rippers"; and there were among them names of which
the city news seemed actually proud: the two brothers Polishchuk (Mitka
and Dundas), Volodka the Greek, Fedor Miller, Captain Dmitriev,
Sivocho, Dobrovolski, Shpachek, and many others.

Both day and night on the main streets of the frenzied city stood,
moved, and yelled the mob, as though at a fire. It would be almost
impossible to describe what went on in the Yamkas then. Despite the
fact that the madams had increased the staff of their patients to more
than double and increased their prices trebly, their poor demented
girls could not catch up in satisfying the demands of the drunken,
crazed public, which threw money around like chips. It happened that in
the drawing room, filled to overflowing with people, each girl would be
awaited for by some seven, eight, at times even ten, men. It was,
truly, some k