‘Mind, if you are not telling us a lie, old chap, I must be off to my company to give some orders for to-morrow,’ said Lieutenant-Captain S.
‘No.… Why should?… Is it likely?… It is certain began the stranger, but stopped suddenly, having evidently determined to feel hurt, frowned unnaturally and, muttering something between his teeth, again began making cigarettes. But the dregs of tobacco-dust that he could extract from his pouch being insufficient, he asked S. to favour him with the loan of a cigarette. We long continued among ourselves that monotonous military chatter familiar to all who have been on campaign. We complained, ever in the same terms, of the tediousness and duration of the expedition; discussed our commanders in the same old way; and, just as often before, we praised one comrade, pitied another, were astonished that So-and-so won so much, and that So-and-so lost so much at cards, and so on and so on.
‘Our Adjutant has got himself into a mess, and no mistake,’ said Lieutenant-Captain S. ‘He always used to win when he was on the staff – whoever he sat down with he’d pluck clean – but now these last two months he does nothing but lose. He has not hit it off in this detachment! I should think he’s lost 1,000 rubles in money, and things for another 500: the carpet he won of Mukhin, Nikitin’s pistols, the gold watch from Sada’s that Vorontsov gave him – have all gone.’
‘Serves him right,’ said Lieutenant O.; ‘he gulled everybody, it was impossible to play with him.’
‘He gulled everybody, and now he himself is gravelled,’ and Lieutenant-Captain S. laughed good-naturedly. ‘Guskov, here, lives with him – the Adjutant nearly lost him one day at cards! Really! Am I not right, old chap?’ he said, turning to Guskov.
Guskov laughed. It was a pitifully sickly laugh which completely changed the expression of his face. This change suggested to me the idea that I had seen and known the man before, besides, Guskov, his real name, was familiar to me. But how and when I had seen him I was quite unable to remember.
‘Yes,’ said Guskov, who kept raising his hand to his moustaches and letting it sink again without touching them, ‘Paul Dmitrich has been very unlucky this campaign: such a veine de malheur,’2 he added, in carefully spoken but good French, and I again thought I had met, and even often met, him somewhere. ‘I know Paul Dmitrich well; he has great confidence in me,’ continued he; ‘we are old acquaintances – I mean he is fond of me,’ he added, evidently alarmed at his own too bold assertion of being an old acquaintance of the Adjutant. ‘Paul Dmitrich plays remarkably well, but now it is incomprehensible what has happened to him; he seems quite lost – la chance a tourné,’3 he said, addressing himself chiefly to me.
At first we had listened to Guskov with condescending attention, but as soon as he uttered this second French phrase we all involuntarily turned away from him.
‘I have played hundreds of times with him,’ said Lieutenant O., ‘and you won’t deny that it is strange’ (he put a special emphasis on the word ‘strange’), ‘remarkably strange, that I never once won even a twenty-kopek piece of him. How is it I win when playing with others?’
‘Paul Dmitrich plays admirably: I have long known him,’ said I. I had really known the Adjutant for some years; had more than once seen him playing for stakes high in proportion to the officers’ means; and had admired his handsome, rather stern, and always imperturbably calm face, his slow Ukrainian pronunciation, his beautiful things, his horses, his leisurely Ukrainian disposition, and especially his ability to play with self-control – systematically and pleasantly. I confess that more than once when looking at his plump white hands with a diamond ring on the first finger as he beat my cards one after the other, I was enraged with this ring, with the white hands, with the whole person of the Adjutant, and evil thoughts concerning him rose in my mind. But on thinking matters over in cool blood I became convinced that he was simply a more sagacious player than all those with whom he happened to play. I was confirmed in this by the fact that when listening to his general reflections on gaming – how, having been lucky starting with a small stake, one should follow up one’s luck; how in certain cases one ought to stop playing; that the first rule was to play for ready-money, &c., &c. – it was clear that he always won simply because he was cleverer and more self-possessed than the rest of us. And it now appeared that this self-possessed, strong player had, in the detachment, lost completely, not only money, but other belongings as well – which among officers indicates the lowest depth of loss.
‘He was always devilish lucky when playing against me,’ continued Lieutenant O.; ‘I have sworn never to play with him again.’
‘What a queer fellow you are, old man!’ said S., winking at me so that his whole head moved while he addressed O.; ‘you have lost some 300 rubles to him – lost it, haven’t you?’
‘More!’ said the Lieutenant crossly.
‘And now you’ve suddenly come to your senses; but it’s too late, old chap! Everyone else has long known him to be the sharper of our regiment,’ said S., hardly able to refrain from laughter and highly delighted at his invention.
‘Here’s Guskov himself— he prepares the cards for him. That is why they are friends, old chap!…’ And Lieutenant-Captain S. laughed good-humouredly so that he shook all over and spilt some of the mulled wine he held in his hand. A faint tinge of colour seemed to rise on Guskov’s thin, yellow face; he opened his mouth repeatedly, lifted his hands to his moustache and let them drop again to the places where his pockets should have been, several times began to rise but sat down again, and at last said in an unnatural voice, turning to S.:
‘This is not a joke, Nicholas Ivanich, you are saying such things! And in the presence of people who don’t know me and who see me in a common sheepskin coat … because …’ His voice failed him, and again the little red hands with their dirty nails moved from his coat to his face, now smoothing his moustaches or hair, now touching his nose, rubbing his eye, or unnecessarily scratching his cheek.
‘What’s the good of talking; everyone knows it, old chap!’ continued S., really enjoying his joke and not in the least noticing Guskov’s excitement. Guskov again muttered something, and leaning his right elbow on his left knee in a most unnatural position, looked at S. and tried to smile contemptuously.
‘Yes,’ thought I, watching that smile, ‘I have not only seen him before, but have spoken with him somewhere.’
‘We must have met somewhere before,’ I said to him when, under the influence of the general silence, S.’s laughter began to subside.
Guskov’s mobile face suddenly brightened, and his eyes, taking for the first time a sincerely pleased expression, turned to me.
‘Certainly; I knew you at once!’ he began in French. ‘In ’48 I had the pleasure of meeting you rather often in Moscow at my sister’s – the Ivashins.’
I apologized for not having recognized him in his present costume. He rose, approached me, and with his moist hand irresolutely and feebly pressed mine. Instead of looking at me, whom he professed to be so glad to see, he looked round in an unpleasantly boastful kind of way at the other officers. Either because he had been recognized by me who had seen him some years before in a drawing-room in a dress-coat, or because that recollection suddenly raised him in his own esteem, his face and even his movements, as it seemed to me, changed completely. They now expressed a lively intellect, childish self-satisfaction at the consciousness of that intellect, and a kind of contemptuous indifference. So that I admit, notwithstanding the pitiful position he was in, my old acquaintance no longer inspired me with sympathy, but with an almost inimical feeling.