Short Fiction, Leo Tolstoy [general ebook reader .txt] 📗

give into the visitors’ hands but put down on the table near them, not having quite recovered from her excitement, and she listened eagerly to the Count’s remarks. His stories, which were not very deep, and the hesitation in his speech gradually calmed her. She did not hear from him the very clever things she had anticipated, nor did she see the elegance in everything she had vaguely expected to find in him. At the third glass of tea, after her bashful eyes had once met his, and he had not looked down but had continued to look at her too quietly and with a slight smile, she even felt rather inimically disposed towards him, and soon found that not only was there nothing particular about him, but that he was in no wise different from other people she had met; that there was no need to be afraid of him though his nails were long and clean, and that there was not even any special beauty in him. Lisa suddenly relinquished her dream, not without some inward pain, and grew calmer; and only the gaze of the silent Cornet, which she felt fixed upon her, disturbed her.

“Perhaps it’s not this one, but that one!” she thought.

XIII

After tea the old lady asked the visitors into the drawing-room, and again sat down in her old place.

“But would you not like to rest, Count?” she asked. “Then how could we entertain you, my dear guests?” she continued, after receiving an answer in the negative. “Do you play cards, Count? There now, brother, you should arrange something; make up a party⁠—”

“But you yourself play Préférence,”198 answered the cavalryman. “Why not all play? Will you play, Count? Will you, too?”

The officers expressed their readiness to do anything their kind hosts desired. Lisa brought her old pack of cards, which she used for divining when her mother’s swollen face would be well, whether her uncle would return the same day when he went to town, whether one of the neighbours would call today, and so on. These cards, though she had used them for a couple of months, were cleaner than those Anna Fyódorovna used.

“But perhaps you won’t play for small stakes?” asked the uncle. “Anna Fyódorovna and I play for half-kopecks.⁠ ⁠… And even so she wins all our money.”

“Oh, any stakes you like⁠—I shall be delighted,” replied the Count.

“Well then, one kopeck ‘assignations,’199 just for once, in honour of our dear visitors! Let them beat me, an old woman!” said Anna Fyódorovna, spreading herself in her armchair and arranging her mantilla. “And maybe I’ll win a rouble or so from them,” thought Anna Fyódorovna, who had developed a slight passion for cards in her old age.

“If you like, I’ll teach you to play with ‘tables’ and ‘misère,’ ” said the Count. “It is capital.”

Everyone liked the new Petersburg way. The uncle was even sure he knew it; it was just the same as “boston” used to be, only he had forgotten it a bit. But Anna Fyódorovna could not understand it at all, and so long failed to understand it that at last she felt herself obliged, with a smile and a nod of approval, to assert that now she understood it, and that all was quite clear to her. There was not a little laughter during the game when Anna Fyódorovna, holding ace and king blank, declared misère, and was left with six tricks. She even became confused, and began to smile shyly and to explain hurriedly that she had not got quite used to the new way. All the same they scored against her, especially as the Count, being used to play a careful game for high stakes, was cautious, skilfully played through his opponents’ hands, and would not at all understand the shoves the Cornet gave him under the table with his foot, nor the mistakes the latter made when they played as partners.

Lisa brought some more sweets, three kinds of jam, and some specially-prepared apples which had been kept since last season, and stood behind her mother’s back watching the game and occasionally looking at the officers, and especially at the Count’s white hands with their rosy, well-kept nails, which threw the cards and took up the tricks in so practised, assured, and elegant a manner.

Again Anna Fyódorovna, rather irritably outbidding the others, declared to make seven tricks, made only four and was fined accordingly; and having very clumsily noted down, on her brother’s demand, the points she had lost, became quite confused and fluttered.

“Never mind, mama, you will win it back!” smilingly remarked Lisa, wishful to help her mother out of the ridiculous situation. “Make uncle put on a remise of one trick, and then he will be caught.”

“If you would only help me, Lisa dear!” said Anna Fyódorovna, with a frightened glance at her daughter. “I don’t know how this is.⁠ ⁠…”

“But I don’t know this way either,” Lisa answered, mentally reckoning up her mother’s losses. “You will lose very much that way, mama! There will be nothing left for Pímotchka’s new dress,” she added in jest.

“Yes, this way one may easily lose ten roubles silver,” said the Cornet, looking at Lisa, and anxious to enter into conversation with her.

“Are we not playing for ‘assignations’?” said Anna Fyódorovna, looking round at all present.

“I don’t know how we are playing, only I can’t reckon in ‘assignations,’ ” said the Count. “What is it? I mean, what are ‘assignations’?”

“Why, nowadays no one counts by ‘assignations’ any longer,” remarked the uncle, who had played very cautiously, and had been winning.

The old lady ordered some sparkling homemade wine to be brought, drank two glasses, became very red, and seemed to resign herself to any fate. A lock of her grey hair escaped from under her cap, and she did not even put it right. No doubt it seemed to her as if she had lost millions and it was