So I walked about, watching these workmen making turmoil in the streets till about eleven o’clock. Then their movement began to quiet down. Only a few drunken ones remained, and here and there men and women who were being taken to the police station. And now from all sides carriages began to appear all driving in one direction.
On the boxes were coachmen and footmen well-dressed and wearing cockades. The well-fed caparisoned trotters flew over the snow at fourteen miles an hour, and in the carriages were ladies wrapped in warm cloaks and careful of their flowers and coiffures. Everything-from the horses’ harness, the carriages, the rubber tyres, and the cloth of the coachmen’s warm coats, to the stockings, shoes, flowers, velvet, gloves, and perfumes-was made by those people some of whom are sprawling drunk in their bunks in the dormitories, some are with prostitutes in the dosshouses, or distributed in the lock-ups. Past them on what was all theirs and in what was all theirs drive those going to the ball; and it never enters their heads that there is any connexion between the ball to which they are going and those drunkards at whom their coachmen shout so sternly.
These people with quiet consciences-in full confidence that they are doing nothing bad but something very good-amuse themselves at the ball.
Amuse themselves! Amuse themselves from eleven till six in the morning, through the very middle of the night, while others are tossing with empty stomachs in doss-houses, and some are dying like the washerwoman.
1 These could often be hired for short distances for two or three pence a ride.-A. M.
The amusement consists in married women and girls baring their breasts, padding themselves out behind, and showing themselves in this unseemly condition in which an unperverted girl or woman would not for the world wish to exhibit herself to a man; and in that semi-nude condition, with bare breasts protruding and arms uncovered to the shoulder, with bustles behind and dresses drawn tight to their hips, in the strongest illumination, women and girls, whose chief virtue has always been modesty, appear among strange men similarly clad in improperly close-fitting garments, whom to the sound of intoxicating music they embrace, and with whom they whirl around. The old women, often exposing their persons as much as the young ones, sit, look on, and eat and drink things that taste nice; the old men doing the same. No wonder this is done at night when the common people, being all asleep, do not see it. But that is not done to hide it; it seems to the doers that there is nothing it is necessary to hide, that it is very good, and that by this amusement in which they consume the painful labour of thousands, they not only injure no one, but actually feed the poor.
It may be very merry at balls. But how does this happen? When among ourselves we see that some one has not eaten or is cold, we are ashamed to be merry, and cannot be merry till he has been fed and warmed; and we do not understand people making merry with sports that cause others to suffer. We dislike and do not understand the mirth of cruel boys who squeeze a dog’s tail in a cleft stick and make merry over it.
Then how is it that here in these amusements of ours blindness has befallen us, and we do not see the cleft stick in which we squeeze the tails of those who suffer for our amusement?
Not one of the women who drove to this ball in a one hundred and fifty ruble dress was born at the ball, or at Madame Minanquoit’s,1 and each of them has lived in the country and seen peasants, and knows her own nurse and lady’s-maid who have poor fathers or brothers for whom to save a hundred and fifty rubles to build a hut is the aim of a long and laborious life. She knows this-how then can she be merry, knowing that at this ball she wears on her half-naked body the hut that is the dream of her good maid’s brother? But granting that this may not have struck her the fact that velvet, silk, sweets, flowers, laces, and dresses do not grow of themselves but are made by people, is one that it would seem she cannot but know-or what kind of people make these things, and under what conditions they make them, and why.
She must know that the seamstress she scolded did not make that dress for her at all out of love of her, and so she cannot help knowing that it was all made for her under compulsion, and that, like her dress, the lace and flowers and velvet were made for the same reason. Perhaps, however, they are so befogged that they do not see even that. But the fact that five or six people, old, decent, often infirm, footmen and maids have missed their sleep and been put to trouble on her account she cannot help knowing. She has seen their weary, gloomy faces. She cannot but know also that the frost that night reached thirty-one degrees below zero Fahrenheit? and that in that frost the old coachman sat on his box all night. But I know that they really do not see this. And if the young married women and girls from the hypnotism produced on them by the ball, do not see it, they must not be condemned. They, poor things, are doing what their elders consider right; but can one explain the cruelty shown by those elders?
1 A fashionable Moscow dressmaker.
The elders always give one and the same explanation: I do not force anyone; I buy the things and hire people-the maids and the coachmen. There is nothing wrong in buying and hiring. I do not force anyone, I hire them; what is wrong in that?’
The other day I called on an acquaintance of mine. Passing through the first room, I was surprised to see two women there at the table for I knew my acquaintance was a bachelor. A lean, sallow, old-looking woman of about thirty, wearing a kerchief, was doing something very rapidly with her hands and fingers under the table and was twitching nervously as if in a fit. Sideways to her sat a little girl who was doing something and twitching in just the same way. Both women seemed as if subject to St. Vitus’s dance. I went to them and looked at what they were doing. They glanced up at me and continued their work with the same concentration.
Before them lay some loose tobacco and paper cartridges. They were making Cigarettes. The woman rubbed the tobacco between her hands, placed it in a machine, drew on the cartridge, pressed it home, and threw It to !he girl. The girl rolled up a piece of paper, pushing a wad into the Cigarette, threw it aside, and started on another. This all was done with such rapidity and with such tension that it is impossible to describe it to a man who has not seen it. I expressed surprise at their rapidity.
‘Have been doing nothing else for fourteen years,’ said the woman. ‘Is it hard?’
‘Yes one’s chest hurts and it is hard to breathe.’ Indeed she need not have said so. One had only to look at her and at the little girl. The girl has been working for over two years, and anyone seeing her at it would say that she had a strong constitution but was already beginning to break up. My acquaintance, a kindly and. liberal minded man, had hired them to fill cigarettes at two rubles fifty kopeks1 a thousand. He has money and gives it them for their work-what harm is there in that? He gets up about noon; spends his evenings from six till two in the morning at cards or at the piano, and eats tasty and sweet food; other people do all his work for him. He devised a new pleasure-smoking. I remember when he began it.
Here are a woman and a girl who by making machines of themselves can barely manage to support themselves, and who spend their whole lives inhaling tobacco, and so ruin their health. He has money which he did not earn, and he prefers to play bridge2 to making cigarettes for himself. He gives money to these women only on condition that they continue to live as wretchedly as before, that is, that they make cigarettes for him.
I like cleanliness, and give my money only on condition that a laundress washes the shirt I change twice a day, and this work has drained her last strength and she has died.
‘What is there bad in it? People buy and hire whether I do or not, and will go on compelling others to make velvet and sweets and will buy them, and will go on hiring people to make cigarettes and to wash shirts, even if I don’t. So why should I deprive myself of velvet and sweets and cigarettes and clean shirts, if things are so arranged?’ I often, almost always, hear this argument. It is the same that is used by a maddened crowd that is destroying something. It is the same that dogs are guided by when one of them flies at
1 About 5s. . . .
2 The game actually mentioned in the Russian is vint, which much resembles bridge.
another and overthrows it, and the rest rush at it
