“Please, sir,” a girl with a sharp chin and rabbit eyes whines, “buy me dinner!”

The man resists.

“I’m hungry. Just a little portion of something.”

“What a nag you are! Waiter!”

The waiter brings a piece of meat. The girl eats. And how she eats! With her mouth, her eyes, her nose.

In a shooting booth bullets are whizzing. Two Tyrolean ladies are loading one rifle after another, and they are not at all bad-looking, either. An artist is standing next to them, drawing one of them on the cuff of his shirt.

“Thank you! Goodbye! Good luck to you!” the Tyrolean women shout as they leave.

As they leave the clock strikes two. The women onstage are still dancing. Noise, uproar, shouts, shrieks, whistling, a cancan. Oppressive heat and stuffiness. At the bar the drunks are getting drunker, and by three o’clock there is total mayhem.

In the meantime, in the private rooms . . .

Anyway, time to go! How wonderful it is to leave this place. If I were the owner of the Salon des Variétés, I would not charge customers at the entrance—but at the exit.

AN IDYLL—BUT ALAS!

“My uncle is such a wonderful man,” Grisha, Captain Nasechkin’s hard-up nephew and sole heir, would say to me. “I love him with all my heart! Why don’t you come meet him? It would make him so happy!”

Whenever Grisha spoke of his uncle his eyes filled with tears. And I will say to his credit that he was not ashamed of these tears and was quite prepared to cry in public. I accepted his invitation, and a week ago dropped by to see the old captain. When I entered the hall and peered into the drawing room, I witnessed a most touching scene. The wizened captain was sitting in a large armchair holding a cup of tea, and Grisha was kneeling next to him, tenderly stirring it. The pretty hand of Grisha’s fiancée was caressing the old man’s leathery neck, while she and Grisha squabbled as to who would be the first to shower the dear uncle with kisses.

“And now, sweet children of my heart, my sole heirs, you must kiss each other!” Captain Nasechkin spluttered with joy.

An enviable bond united the three. Even though I am a hard man, I must admit that my heart was gripped by joy as I gazed at them.

“Yes indeed!” Captain Nasechkin was saying to them. “I think I can say I’ve had a good life! And may God grant a good life to everyone! How many fine fillets of sturgeon I have enjoyed, like the one I ate back in Skopin! Even today it makes my mouth water!”

“Oh, tell us all about it!” I heard Grisha’s fiancée plead.

“So there I was in the town of Skopin with all my thousands of rubles, and . . . er . . . I went straight to . . . er . . . Rikov . . . Yes, to Mr. Rikov. What a man! Good as gold! A gentleman! He received me like I was family . . . you’d have thought he wanted something from me . . . but no, like I was family! He served me coffee, and after the coffee, a little snack . . .