“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 recollect.
“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 ,” 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 ,” 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-kopeck piece of him. How is it I win when playing with others?”