He would carefully question each of them,
"Your name?
Who; arrested you?
Lor how long?
What for?"
Sometimes he would quite unexpectedly commend an officer for a courageous if unlawful act, or take him to task so loudly that he could be heard outside.
But when he had finished shouting he would inquire almost in the same breath! where the officer got his meals and how much they cost him.
It sometimes happened that a lieutenant, who had erred and been sent for a prolonged detention from an out-of-the-way corner that had no guard -room of its own,, would confess that, being short of funds, he had to eat with the privates.
Anosov then would immediately order meals to be supplied to the poor devil from his own home, which was no more than a hundred yards from the guardhouse.
It was in K. that he had grown intimate with the Tuganovsky family and established a close friendship with the children, so that with him it had become a virtual necessity to see them every evening.
If it so happened that the young ladies went away somewhere or he himself was kept away by his official duties, he would feel terribly lonely and melancholy in the large rooms of the governor's mansion.
Every summer he would take his leave and spend a whole month at the Tuganovsky estate, Yegorovskoye, some forty miles from K.
All his repressed tenderness and his longing for love had gone out to the children, especially the girls.
Once he had been married, but that had been so long ago that he hardly remembered it.
It was before the war that his wife had eloped with a strolling actor, who had fascinated her with his velvet jacket and lace cuffs.
Anosov paid her an allowance as long as she lived, but did not permit her to come back to him despite all the scenes of repentance and tearful letters.
They had had no children.
V
Unexpectedly, the evening was calm and warm, and the candles on the terrace and in the dining-room burned with a steady flame.
At dinner Prince Vasily Lvovich amused the company.
He had an extraordinary and very peculiar gift for telling stories.
He would take some incident that had happened to one of the company or a common acquaintance, but would embellish it so, and use so matter- of-fact a tone, that his listeners would split their sides with laughter.
That night he was telling the story of Nikolai Nikolayevich's unhappy wooing of a wealthy and beautiful lady.
The only authentic detail was the husband's refusal to give her a divorce.
But the prince skilfully combined fact and fancy.
He made the grave, rather priggish Nikolai run down the street in his stocking-feet at the dead of night, his boots under his arm At a comer the young man was stopped by the policeman, and it was only after a long and stormy explanation that Nikolai managed to convince him that he was an assistant public prosecutor and not a burglar.
The wedding all hut came off, or so the narrator said, except that at the crucial moment a band of false witnesses, who had a hand in the affair, suddenly went on strike, demanding a rise.
Being a stingy man — which he actually was, to some extent — and also being opposed on principle to all forms of strike, Nikolai flatly refused to pay more, referring to a certain clause in the law, which was confirmed by a ruling of the court of appeal.
Then, in reply to the customary question,
"Does anyone here present know of any impediment to the lawful joining together of these two in matrimony?" the enraged perjurers said as one man,
"Yes, we do.
All that we have testified under oath in court is a falsehood to which the prosecutor here forced us by intimidation and coercion.
As for this lady's husband, we can only say from personal knowledge that he is the most respectable man in the world, chaste as Joseph and kind as an angel."
Having begun to tell wedding stories, Prince Vasily did not spare even Gustav Ivanovich Friesse, Anna's husband, who, he said, had on the day following his wedding called the police to evict the young bride from her parents' house because she had no passport of her own and to install her in her lawful husband's home.
The only part of the tale which was true was the fact that, in the very first days of her married life, Anna had had to be continually with her sick mother because Vera had gone off south, and poor Gustav Ivanovich was plunged in despair.
Everybody laughed.
Anna smiled with her narrowed eyes.
Gustav Ivanovich guffawed in delight, and his gaunt face with the tight, shining skin, the thin, light hair sleeked carefully down and the deep-set eyes, was like a skull mirthfully baring a set of very bad teeth.
He still adored Anna as on the first day of their married life; he was always trying to sit beside her, and touch her surreptitiously, and he danced attendance on her with such smug infatuation that you often pitied him and felt embarrassed for him.
Before rising from the table Vera Nikolayevna mechanically counted the guests.
There were thirteen of them.
She was superstitious and she said to herself,
"What a nuisance!
Why didn't I think of counting them before?
And Vasya's to blame too — he told me nothing on the telephone."
When friends gathered at Sheyin's or Friesse's they usually played poker after dinner, because both sisters were ridiculously fond of games of chance.
In fact, certain rules had been established in both houses: all the players would be given an equal number of ivory tokens of a specific value, and the game would go on until all the tokens passed to one of the players; then it would be stopped for the evening, no matter how earnestly the others insisted on continuing it.
It was strictly forbidden to take fresh tokens from the cash-box.
Experience had shown that these rigid rules were indispensable to check Vera and Anna, who would grow so excited in the course of the game that there was no stopping them.
The total loss seldom exceeded two hundred rubles.