Chapter summary
At the Variety Theater, the financial director Rimsky, already shaken by the scandal of the magic session, looks out of the office window and sees on the sidewalk women in nothing but their slips, surrounded by a laughing crowd: the dresses they won on stage have disappeared. When the scandal ends, he tries to phone and report what happened and blame Stepan, but he receives an anonymous call that threatens him: a feminine voice, insinuating and vulgar, says "Don't call anyone, Rimsky, it will be worse." Seized with fear, he decides to leave the empty theater.
Before he can, Varenukha, the administrator who had been sent to take Stepan Likhodeyev's telegrams to the authorities, enters the office and tells a story full of details: Stepan was supposedly drunk in a tavern in Pushkino called Yalta and had sent the telegrams from there. The more picturesque the details, the less Rimsky believes. He notices that Varenukha wears a scarf on a summer night, hides a purple bruise on his face and flees from the lamplight. Then he sees on the floor the shadow of the armchair's back, but no shadow of Varenukha's head, and understands that he is facing something that is no longer human. Varenukha locks the door, and at the window a young redhead, with visible marks of decomposition on her body, opens the latch with her greenish fingers (the same redhead who is named Hella in the following chapters). The two only retreat when a rooster crows in the neighboring garden, and they leave at the third crow, she through the window and he flying after her. Rimsky, who turns gray in a single night, flees the theater without his hat, bribes a taxi driver and boards the first train to Leningrad.
Analysis
Rimsky stays in the theater after the scandal because he needs to make a phone call, report what happened and extricate himself; twice he picks up the receiver and draws back. When Varenukha comes in, he feels relief; he immediately notices two odd things, his answer and the way he passed without the guards, but has no time to think about them. Then come the Pushkino lie, the purple bruise, the scarf and the flight from the light, and the certainty arrives only when he sees, on the floor, the shadow of the armchair's back and no shadow of Varenukha seated in it. The flight to Leningrad comes from what he now knows, not from what he did.
Don't call anyone, Rimsky, it will be worse...
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