The big guest was playing with the prince. I just go round the table with the rest in my hand, counting ‘ten and forty-eight, twelve and forty-eight’. Everybody knows what it is to be a billiard-marker. You haven’t had a bite all day, nor slept for two nights, but you must keep calling the score and taking the balls out. I go on counting and look round – there’s a new gentleman coming in at the door. He looks and looks and then sits down on the sofa. All right.
‘Who may that be? – Of what class, I mean?’ think I to myself. He was well dressed – oh, very smartly – all his clothes looked as if they had just come out of a bandbox: fine cloth checked trousers, short fashionable coat, a plush waistcoat, and a gold chain with all sorts of little things hanging from it.
Handsomely dressed, but still handsomer himself: slim, tall, hair brushed to the front, latest fashion, and with a red and white complexion – in a word, a fine fellow.
Of course, in our business we see all sorts of people: the grandest that ever were and much trash also, so that though you are a marker you fit in with people, if you are artful enough I mean.
I looked at the gentleman and noticed that he was sitting quietly and did not know anybody, and his clothes were as new as could be. So I think to myself: ‘He is either a foreigner – an Englishman – or some count who has turned up. He bears himself well although he is young.’ Oliver was sitting beside him and even moved to make room for him.
The game was finished – the big guest had lost and shouted at me:
‘You always blunder! You keep looking at something else instead of counting properly.’
He swore, threw down the cue, and went out. What can you make of it? He’ll play a fifty-ruble game with the prince of an evening, but now when he loses a bottle of Burgundy he’s quite beside himself. He’s that kind of character! Sometimes he plays with the prince till two in the morning. They don’t put their stakes in the pockets,2 and I know they haven’t either of them got any money, but they just swagger.
‘Shall we play double or quits for twenty-five?’
‘All right.’
But if you just dare to yawn or don’t put a ball right – after all, one is not made of stone – then they just jump down your throat:
‘We are not playing for chips, but for money!’
That one plagues me more than all the rest …
Well – so the prince says to the new gentleman, when the big one has gone:
‘Would you care to have a game with me?’
‘With pleasure!’ he says.
As long as he was sitting down he looked quite a sport, and seemed to have plenty of confidence, but when he got up and came to the table he was – not exactly timid – no, he was not timid, but one could see he was upset. Whether he was uncomfortable in his new clothes, or frightened because everybody was looking at him, anyhow his confidence was gone. He walked somehow sideways, his pocket catching the table pockets. When chalking the cue he dropped the chalk, and when he did get a ball into a pocket he kept looking round and blushing. Not like the prince – he was used to it – he would chalk the cue and his hand, turn up his sleeve, and just smash the balls into the pockets, small as he was.
They played two or three games – I don’t quite remember – and the prince put down the cue and said:
‘Allow me to ask your name …’
‘Nekhlyúdov,’ he says.
‘Didn’t your father command a corps?’
‘Yes,’ he says.
Then they began talking quickly in French, and I didn’t understand. Probably talking about their relations.
‘Au revoir,’ says the prince, ‘I’m very glad to have made your acquaintance.’
He washed his hands and went out to get something to eat, but the other remained beside the table with his cue, shoving the balls about.
Of course everyone knows in our business that the ruder one is with a newcomer the better, so I began collecting the balls. He blushed and said:
‘Can I go on playing?’
‘Of course,’ I says, ‘that’s what the billiard-table is for – to be played on.’
But I didn’t look at him and put away the cues.
‘Will you play with me?’
‘Of course, sir,’ say I.
I placed the balls.
‘Is it to be a crawl?’
‘What do you mean by a crawl?’
So I say: ‘You pay half a ruble, and I crawl under the table if I lose.’
Of course never having seen such a thing it seemed funny to him and he laughed.
‘Let’s!’ he says.
‘All right. How much will you allow me?’ I ask.
‘Why, do you play worse than I?’
‘Of course,’ I say. ‘I can see there are few players to match you.’
We began to play. He really thought himself a master at it. He banged the balls about dreadfully, and the pan sat there and kept saying:
‘What a ball! What a stroke!’
What indeed! He could make strokes, but there was no calculation about it. Well, I lost the first game as is the usual thing, and began crawling under the table and groaning. Here Oliver and the pan jumped up and knocked with their cues.
‘Splendid! Go on!’ they said. ‘Go on!’
Go on indeed! The pan especially … for half a ruble he would himself have been glad not only to crawl under the table but under the Blue Bridge. And then he shouted:
‘Splendid!’ he says. ‘But you haven’t swept up all the dust yet.’
I am Petrúshka the marker. Everybody knows me. It used to be Tyúrik the marker, but now it is Petrúshka.
But of course I did not show my game. I lost another one.
‘I can’t play level with you, sir,’ I says.
He laughed. Then after I had won three games – and when he had a score of forty-nine and I nothing, I put my cue on the table and said: ‘Will you make it double or quits, sir?’
‘Quits, what do you mean?’ he says.
‘Either you’ll owe me three rubles, or nothing,’ I say.
‘What?’ he says. ‘Am I playing you for money? You fool!’
He even blushed.
Very well. He lost the game.
‘Enough!’ he says.
He got out his pocket-book, quite a new one bought at the Magasin Anglais, and opened it. I see that he wants to show off. It was chock full of notes, all hundred-ruble ones.
‘No,’ he says, ‘there’s no change there,’ and he took three rubles out of his purse.
‘There you are,’ he says, ‘two for the games, and the rest for you to have a drink.’
‘Thank you very much,’ I say. I saw he was a nice gentleman. One can do a little crawling for such as him. The pity was that he didn’t want to play for money – ‘or else,’ think I, ‘I’d manage to get maybe twenty or even forty rubles off him.’
When the pan saw the young gentleman’s money he says: ‘Would you care to play a game with me? You play so splendidly!’ he says, fawning on him like a fox.
‘No,’ he says, ‘excuse me, please, I haven’t time,’ and he went away.
I don’t know who that pan was. Someone nicknamed him ‘the pan’ and the name stuck to him. He’d sit all day long in the billiard-room looking on. He had been beaten and sworn at, and no one would play with him. He would bring his pipe and sit by himself and smoke. But he could play a careful game … the beast!
Well, Nekhlyúdov came a second and a third time and began coming often. He’d come in the morning and in the evening. Billiards, pool, snooker, he learnt them all. He grew bolder, got to know everybody, and began to play a decent game. Naturally, being a young man of good family and with money, everybody respected him. Only once he had a row with the big guest.