d ludicrous, motley events arose. The police would appear
suddenly together with disguised detectives and arrest some seemingly
respectable, irreproachable gentlemen and lead them off, pushing them
along with blows in the neck. At times brawls would spring up between
the drunken, trouble-making company and the porters of all the
establishments, who had gathered on the run for the relief of a fellow
porter--a brawl, during which the window-panes and the decks of
grand-pianos were broken, when the legs of the plush chairs were
wrenched out for weapons, blood ran over the parquet floor of the
drawing room and the steps of the stairs, and people with pierced sides
and broken heads fell down into the dirt near the street entrance, to
the feral, avid delight of Jennka, who, with burning eyes, with happy
laughter, went into the thickest of the melee, slapped herself on the
hips, swore and sicked them on, while her mates were squealing from
fear and hiding under the beds.

There were occurrences when there would arrive, with a pack of
parasites, some member of a workingmen's association or a cashier, long
since far gone in an embezzlement of many thousands through gambling at
cards and hideous orgies, and now, in a drunken, senseless delirium,
tossing the last money after the other, before suicide or the
prisoner's box. Then the doors and windows of the house would be
tightly closed, and for two days and nights at a stretch a Russian orgy
would go on--nightmarish, tedious, savage, with screams and tears, with
revilement over the body of woman; paradisaical nights were gotten up,
during which naked, drunken, bow-legged, hairy, pot-bellied men, and
women with flabby, yellow, pendulous thin bodies hideously grimaced to
the music; they drank and guzzled like swine, on the beds and on the
floor, amidst the stifling atmosphere, permeated with spirits, befouled
with human respiration and the exhalations of unclean skins.

Occasionally, there would appear a circus athlete, creating in the
low-ceiled quarters a strangely cumbersome impression, somewhat like
that of a horse led into a room; a Chinaman in a blue blouse, white
stockings, and with a queue; a negro from a cabaret, in a tuxedo coat
and checked pantaloons, with a flower in his button-hole, and with
starched linen, which, to the amazement of the girls, not only did not
soil from the black skin, but appeared still more dazzlingly white.

These rare people fomented the satiated