The young gamblers redoubled their attention. Tomsky lit his pipe, puffed on it, and went on.
“That same evening grandmother appeared at Versailles,
“Pure chance!” said one of the guests.
“A fairy tale!” observed Hermann.
“Marked cards, maybe?” chimed in a third.
“I don’t think so,” Tomsky replied imposingly.
“What!” said Narumov. “You have a grandmother who can guess three cards in a row, and you still haven’t taken over her cabbalistics from her?”
“The devil she’d tell me!” Tomsky replied. “She had four sons, including my father, all four of them desperate gamblers, and she didn’t reveal her secret to a one of them; though it wouldn’t have been a bad thing for them, or for me either. But here is what my uncle, Count Ivan Ilyich, told me, and he assured me of it on his honor. The late Chaplitsky, the one who died a pauper after squandering millions, in his youth once lost—to Zorich, as I recall—around three hundred thousand. He was in despair. Grandmother, who was always severe towards young people’s follies, somehow took pity on Chaplitsky. She gave him three cards, which he was to play one after the other, and made him swear on his honor that he would never gamble afterwards. Chaplitsky appeared before his vanquisher: they sat down to play. Chaplitsky staked fifty thousand on the first card and won straight off; bent down a
“But it’s time for bed; it’s a quarter to six.”
Indeed, dawn was breaking. The young men finished their glasses and went their ways.
II
SOCIETY CONVERSATION5
The old countess * * * was sitting in her dressing room before the mirror. Three maids surrounded her. One held a jar of rouge, another a box of hairpins, the third a tall bonnet with flame-colored ribbons. The countess had not the slightest pretension to a beauty faded long ago, but she preserved all the habits of her youth, held strictly to the fashion of the seventies, and dressed just as slowly and just as painstakingly as sixty years ago. By the window a young lady, her ward, sat over her embroidery.
“Greetings,
“What is it, Paul?”
“Allow me to introduce one of my friends to you and to bring him to your ball on Friday.”
“Bring him straight to the ball and introduce him to me there. Were you at * * *’s last night?”
“What else! It was very merry. We danced till five in the morning. How pretty Eletskaya was!”
“Come, my dear! What’s so pretty about her? Is she anything like her grandmother, Princess Darya Petrovna?…By the way, I fancy she’s aged a lot, Princess Darya Petrovna?”
“Aged, you say?” Tomsky replied distractedly. “She died seven years ago.”
The young lady raised her head and made a sign to the young man. He remembered that they were to conceal from the old countess the deaths of women her age, and he bit his tongue. But the countess heard the news, which was new to her, with great indifference.
“Died!” she said. “And I didn’t know! We were made ladies-in-waiting together, and when we were presented, the empress…”
And for the hundredth time the countess told her grandson the story.
“Well, Paul,” she said afterwards, “now help me up. Lizanka, where’s my snuffbox?”
And the countess went behind the screen with her maids to finish her toilette. Tomsky remained with the young lady.
“Who is it you want to introduce?” Lizaveta Ivanovna asked softly.
“Narumov. Do you know him?”
“No! Is he military or civilian?”
“Military.”
“An engineer?”
“No, a cavalryman. What made you think he was an engineer?”
The young lady laughed and made no reply.
“Paul!” the countess called out from behind the screen. “Send me some new novel, only, please, not like they write nowadays.”
“How do you mean,
“I mean the kind of novel where the hero doesn’t strangle his father or mother, and where there are no drowned bodies. I’m terribly afraid of drowned bodies!”
“There are no such novels nowadays. Or maybe you’d like a Russian one?”
“You mean there are Russian novels?…Send me one, old boy, please do send me one!”
“Excuse me,
And Tomsky left the dressing room.
