Page 730 - the-brothers-karamazov

drunk.’
She meant Kalganov. He was, in fact, drunk, and had
dropped asleep for a moment, sitting on the sofa. But he
was not merely drowsy from drink; he felt suddenly deject-
ed, or, as he said, ‘bored.’ He was intensely depressed by the
girls’ songs, which, as the drinking went on, gradually be-
came coarse and more reckless. And the dances were as bad.
Two girls dressed up as bears, and a lively girl, called Ste-
panida, with a stick in her hand, acted the part of keeper,
and began to ‘show them.’
‘Look alive, Marya, or you’ll get the stick!
The bears rolled on the ground at last in the most unseem-
ly fashion, amid roars of laughter from the closely-packed
crowd of men and women.
‘Well, let them! Let them!’ said Grushenka sententiously,
with an ecstatic expression on her face. ‘When they do get a
day to enjoy themselves; why shouldn’t folks be happy?’
Kalgonov looked as though he had been besmirched
with dirt.
‘It’s swinish, all this peasant foolery,’ he murmured, mov-
ing away; ‘it’s the game they play when it’s light all night in
summer.’
He particularly disliked one ‘new’ song to a jaunty dance-
tune. It described how a gentleman came and tried his luck
with the girls, to see whether they would love him:
The master came to try the girls:
Would they love him, would they not?
But the girls could not love the master:
He would beat me cruelly