“Certainly.”
“That, let us say, is 50 rubles for two years; therefore 25 rubles a year for clothes. Then for food, 40 kopecks a day—is that right?”
“Oh yes, that is even too much.”
“Well, never mind, I’ll leave it so. Then for a horse and repair of harness and saddle—30 rubles. And that is all. So it’s 25, and 120, and 30—that’s 175 rubles. So you have for luxuries—tea, sugar, tobacco—a matter of 20 rubles left. So you see … Isn’t it so, Nicholas Fedorovich?”
“No, but excuse me, Abram Ilyich,” said the Adjutant timidly, “nothing remains for tea and sugar. You allow one suit in two years; but it’s hardly possible to keep oneself in trousers with all this marching. And boots? I wear out a pair almost every month. Then underclothing—shirts, towels, leg-bands, —it all has to be bought. When one comes to reckon it all up nothing remains over. That’s really so, Abram Ilyich.”
“Ah, it’s splendid to wear leg-bands,” Kraft suddenly remarked after a moment’s silence, uttering the word “leg-bands” in specially tender tones. “It’s so simple, you know; quite Russian!”
“I’ll tell you something,” Trosenko remarked. “Reckon what way you like and you’ll find we might as well put our teeth away on a shelf, and yet here we are all alive, drinking tea, smoking tobacco, and drinking vodka. When you’ve served as long as I have,” he went on, turning to the ensign, “you’ll have also learned how to live. Why, gentlemen, do you know how he treats the orderlies?”
And Trosenko, dying with laughter, told us the whole story about the ensign and his orderly, though we had all heard it hundreds of times.
“Why do you look so like a rose, old chap?” continued he, addressing the ensign, who blushed, perspired, and smiled, so that it was pitiful to see