Demons

II

According to the program, the festive day was divided into two parts: the literary matinée, from noon till four, and then the ball, from nine o'clock on through the night. But this arrangement itself concealed germs of disorder. First, from the very begi

Thus matters stood, while in town people still went on believing in a Belshazzar's feast—that is, in the committee buffet; they believed in it to the last hour. Even the young ladies dreamed of quantities of candies and preserves and other unheard-of things. Everyone knew that the collection realized was abundant, that the whole town would be storming the doors, that people were coming in from the country, and there were not enough tickets. It was also known that beyond the fixed price there had also been considerable donations: Varvara Petrovna, for example, had paid three hundred roubles for her ticket and provided all the flowers from her greenhouse to decorate the hall. The marshal's wife (a committee member) provided her house and the lighting; the club provided the music and servants, and released Prokhorych for the whole day. There were other donations, though not such big ones, so that there was even a thought of lowering the original ticket price from three roubles to two. The committee indeed feared at first that the young ladies would not come for three roubles, and suggested arranging family tickets somehow—namely, by asking each family to pay for just one young lady, while all other young ladies of the same name, even an edition of ten, would come free. But all fears proved groundless: on the contrary, it was precisely the young ladies who did come. Even the poorest officials brought their girls, and it was only too clear that if they had not had girls, it would never have occurred to them to subscribe. One most insignificant secretary brought all seven of his daughters, not to mention his wife, of course, and also his niece, and each of these persons held a three-rouble entrance ticket in her hand. One can imagine, however, what a revolution went on in town! Take merely the fact that the fête was divided into two parts, and thus for each lady two costumes were necessary—a morning gown for the reading, and a ball gown for the dancing. Many of the middle class, it turned out later, pawned everything for that day, even the family linen, even their sheets and almost their mattresses, to the local Jews, who, over the past two years, as if on purpose, had been settling in terrible quantities in our town, and keep coming more and more. Almost all the officials took an advance on their salaries, and some landowners sold much-needed cattle, and all this just so as to bring their young ladies looking like real marquises, and to be no worse than others. The magnificence of the costumes this time was, considering the place, unheard-of. Two weeks beforehand the town was already stuffed with family anecdotes, all of which were immediately carried to Yulia Mikhailovna's court by our witlings. Family caricatures were passed around. I myself saw several drawings of this sort in Yulia Mikhailovna's album. All this became only too well known there where the anecdotes originated; that, it seems to me, is why such hatred for Yulia Mikhailovna had built up lately in these families. Now they all curse and gnash their teeth when they recall it. But it was clear beforehand that if the committee should fail to please in some way, were the ball to go amiss somehow, there would be an unheard-of outburst of indignation. That is why everyone was secretly expecting a scandal; and if it was so expected, how then could it not take place? At noon precisely the orchestra struck up. Being one of the ushers, that is, one of the twelve "young men with a bow," I saw with my own eyes how this day of infamous memory began. It began with a boundless crush at the entrance. How did it happen that everything went amiss from the very first, begi