“Look here, old fellow, if you are not telling us false, I shall have to go to my company and give some orders for to-morrow,” said Captain S.
“No . . . why . . . it may be, I am sure,” . . . stammered the stranger, but suddenly stopped, and, apparently feeling himself affronted, contracted his brows, and, muttering something between his teeth, again began to roll a cigarette. But the fine-cut tobacco in his chintz pouch began to show signs of giving out, and he asked S. to lend him a little cigarette.
We kept on for a considerable time with that monotonous military chatter which every one who has ever been on an expedition will appreciate; all of us, with one and the same expression, complaining of the dullness and length of the expedition, in one and the same fashion sitting in judgment on our superiors, and all of us likewise, as we had done many times before, praising one comrade, pitying another, wondering how much this one had gained, how much that one had lost, and so on, and so on.
“Here, fellows, this adjutant of ours is completely broken up,” said Captain S. “At headquarters he was everlastingly on the winning side; no matter whom he sat down with, he’d rake in everything: but now for two months past he has been losing all the time. The present expedition hasn’t been lucky for him. I think he has got away with two thousand silver rubles and five hundred rubles’ worth of articles, — the carpet that he won at Mukhin’s, Nikitin’s pistols, Sada’s gold watch which Vorontsof gave him. He has lost it all.”
“The truth of the matter in his case,” said Lieutenant O., “was that he used to cheat everybody; it was impossible to play with him.”
“He cheated every one, but now it’s all gone up in his pipe;” and here Captain S. laughed good-naturedly. “Our friend Guskof here lives with him. He hasn’t quite lost HIM yet: that’s so, isn’t it, old fellow?” he asked, addressing Guskof.
Guskof tried to laugh. It was a melancholy, sickly laugh, which completely changed the expression of his countenance. Till this moment it had seemed to me that I had seen and known this man before; and, besides the name Guskof, by which Captain S. called him, was familiar to me; but how and when I had seen and known him, I actually could not remember.
“Yes,” said Guskof, incessantly putting his hand to his moustaches, but instantly dropping it again without touching them. “Pavel Dmitrievitch’s luck has been against him in this expedition, such a veine de malheur” he added in a careful but pure French pronunciation, again giving me to think that I had seen him, and seen him often, somewhere. “I know Pavel Dmitrievitch very well.
He has great confidence in me,” he proceeded to say; “he and I are old friends; that is, he is fond of me,” he explained, evidently fearing that it might be taken as presumption for him to claim old friendship with the adjutant. “Pavel Dmitrievitch plays admirably; but now, strange as it may seem, it’s all up with him, he is just about perfectly ruined; la chance a tourne,” he added, addressing himself Particularly to me.
At first we had listened to Guskof with condescending attention; but as soon as he made use of that second French phrase, we all involuntarily turned from him.
“I have played with him a thousand times, and we agreed then that it was strange,” said Lieutenant O., with peculiar emphasis on the word STRANGE . “I never once won a ruble from him. Why was it, when I used to win of others?”
“Pavel Dmitrievitch plays admirably: I have known him for a long time,” said I. In fact, I had known the adjutant for several years; more than once I had seen him in the full swing of a game, surrounded by officers, and I had remarked his handsome, rather gloomy and always passionless calm face, his deliberate Malo-Russian pronunciation, his handsome belongings and horses, his bold, manly figure, and above all his skill and self-restraint in carrying on the game accurately and agreeably.
More than once, I am sorry to say, as I looked at his plump white hands with a diamond ring on the index-finger, passing out one card after another, I grew angry with that ring, with his white hands, with the whole of the adjutant’s person, and evil thoughts on his account arose in my mind.
But as I afterwards reconsidered the matter coolly, I persuaded myself that he played more skilfully than all with whom he happened to play: the more so, because as I heard his general observations concerning the game, — how one ought not to back out when one had laid the smallest stake, how one ought not to leave off in certain cases as the first rule for honest men, and so forth, and so forth, — it was evident that he was always on the winning side merely from the fact that he played more sagaciously and coolly than the rest of us. And now it seemed that this self-reliant, careful player had been stripped not only of his money but of his effects, which marks the lowest depths of loss for an officer.
“He always had devilish good luck with me,” said Lieutenant O. “I made a vow never to play with him again.”
“What a marvel you are, old fellow!” said S., nodding at me, and addressing O. “You lost three hundred silver rubles, that’s what you lost to him.”
“More than that,” said the lieutenant savagely.
“And now you have come to your senses; it is rather late in the day, old man, for the rest of us have known for a long time that he was the cheat of the regiment,” said S., with difficulty restraining his laughter, and feeling very well satisfied with his fabrication. “Here is Guskof right here, — he FIXES his cards for him. That’s the reason of the friendship between them, old man” . . . and Captain S., shaking all over, burst out into such a hearty “ha, ha, ha!” that he spilt the glass of mulled wine which he was holding in his hand.
On Guskof’s pale emaciated face there showed something like a color; he opened his mouth several times, raised his hands to his moustaches, and once more dropped them to his side where the pockets should have been, stood up, and then sat down again, and finally in an unnatural voice said to S.:
“It’s no joke, Nikolai Ivanovitch, for you to say such things before people who don’t know me and who see me in this unlined jacket . . . because— “ His voice failed him, and again his small red hands with their dirty nails went from his jacket to his face, touching his moustache, his hair, his nose, rubbing his eyes, or needlessly scratching his cheek.
“As to saying that, everybody knows it, old fellow,” continued S., thoroughly satisfied with his jest, and not heeding Guskof’s complaint. Guskof was still trying to say something; and placing the palm of his right hand on his left knee in a most unnatural position, and gazing at S., he had an appearance of smiling contemptuously.
“No,” said I to myself, as I noticed that smile of his, “I have not only seen him, but have spoken with him somewhere.”
“You and I have met somewhere,” said I to him when, under the influence of the common silence, S.’s laughter began to calm down. Guskof’s mobile face suddenly lighted up, and his eyes, for the first time with a truly joyous expression, rested upon me.
“Why, I recognized you immediately,” he replied in French. “In ‘48 I had the pleasure of meeting you quite frequently in Moscow at my sister’s.”
I had to apologize for not recognizing him at first in that costume and in that new garb. He arose, came to me, and with his moist hand irresolutely and weakly seized my hand, and sat down by me. Instead of looking at me, though he apparently seemed so glad to see me, he gazed with an expression of unfriendly bravado at the officers.
Either because I recognized in him a man whom I had met a few years before in a dresscoat in a parlor, or because he was suddenly raised in his own opinion by the fact of being recognized, — at all events it seemed to me that his face and even his motions completely changed: they now expressed lively intelligence, a childish self-satisfaction in the consciousness of such intelligence, and a certain contemptuous indifference; so that I confess, notwithstanding the pitiable position in which he found himself, my old acquaintance did not so much excite sympathy in me as it did a sort of unfavorable sentiment.
I now vividly remembered our first meeting. In 1848, while I was staying at Moscow, I frequently went to the house of Ivashin, who from childhood had been an old friend of mine. His wife was an agreeable hostess, a charming woman, as everybody said; but she never pleased me. . . . The winter that I knew her, she often spoke with hardly concealed pride of her brother, who had shortly before completed his course, and promised to be one of the most fashionable and popular young men in
