The day I wrote this down, there was a great ball given in Moscow.
That evening I left home after eight o’clock. I live in a place surrounded by factories, and I left the house after the factory whistles had sounded, which after a week’s incessant work let the men out for a holiday.
I passed, and was passed by, workmen making for the dram-shops and taverns. Many were already drunk and many had women with them.
I live amid factories. Every morning at five a whistle is heard, then a second, a third, a tenth, and others farther and farther away. This means that work has begun for women, children, and old men. At eight o’clock the whistle sounds again for half an hour’s interval. At noon there is a third: this is an hour for dinner; and at eight a fourth sounds, for closing.
1 For medical examination, as prostitutes.-A. M.
Curiously enough all the three factories around me produce exclusively articles needed for balls.
In the nearest one stockings are made; at another, silk stuffs; in the third, perfumery and pomades.
It is possible to hear those whistles and to attach to them no idea but that of time. ‘Ah, there’s the whistle already, so it is time for my walk’; but it is also possible to realize what really is the case: that the first whistle at five in the morning means that people-sleeping in a damp basement, often men and women side by side-get up in the dark and are hurrying to the buildings where the machines drone and taking their places at work to which they foresee no end and for themselves no use; and so they work, often in hot, stuffy, dirty rooms, with very short intervals, for one, two, three… twelve and more hours a day. They sleep and again get up, and again and again continue the same work-which has no meaning for them and to which they are driven by sheer necessity.
And so week passes after week, with the intervention of holidays, and here I saw these workers let out for one of these holidays. They come out into the street: everywhere taverns, Imperial dram-shops, and wenches. And tipsily they drag one another along by the arm, and drag with them girls such as the one that was taken to the police station, and hire sledges,1 and drive or walk from tavern to tavern, swearing and staggering and saying they know not what. Formerly I had seen such staggering factory-hands and fastidiously avoided them and almost blamed them; but since I have heard those whistles every day and know their meaning, I am only surprised that all these men do not become roughs such as those of whom Moscow is full, and not all the women come to be like the girl I saw near my house.
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
