'It wasn't gentlemanly of me to do it,' he thought, as he rang at the door of his apartment.
'How can I look into his stupid, kind eyes?'
'My dear Svejk,' he said, when he was home. 'Today something unusual happened.
I had awfully bad luck in cards.
I went " banco "1 and had the ace in my hand, and then a ten came.
But the banker had the knave in his hand and made twenty-one too.
I drew an ace or a ten several times but the banker always had the same.
I went through all my money.'
He paused:
'And finally I gambled you away.
I borrowed a hundred crowns on you and if I don't return it by the day after tomorrow you won't belong to me any longer but to Lieutenant Lukas.
I'm really very sorry ... '
'If it's only a hundred crowns,' said Svejk,
'I can lend it to you.'
'Give it to me,' said the chaplain, brightening up.
'I'll take it at once to Lukas.
I should really hate to have to part with you.'
Lukas was very surprised when he saw the chaplain again.
'I'm coming to repay my debt,' said the chaplain, looking around triumphantly.
'Let me join the game.'
'Banco,' shouted the chaplain when it was his turn.
'I'm only one pip over,' he announced.
'All right, then. Banco again,' he said, when the second round came.
'And blind.'
'Paying twenty,' announced the banker.
'I've got nineteen altogether,' said the chaplain quietly and paid the bank the last forty crowns of the hundred which Svejk had lent him to ransom himself from his new serfdom.
On his way home the chaplain came to the conclusion that it was all finished, that nothing could save Svejk, and that it was predestined that he should be Lieutenant Lukas's batman.
And when Svejk opened the door he told him:
'It's all up, Svejk.
No one can escape his fate.
I have lost you and your hundred crowns too.
I did my utmost, but fate was stronger than me.
I've thrown you into the clutches of Lieutenant Lukas and the time is coming when we must part.'
'And was there a lot in the bank?' asked Svejk calmly. 'Didn't you get a chance of being Forehand very often?
If the right card doesn't come it's very bad, but sometimes it's awful when the cards are too good. At Zderaz there was once a tinsmith called Vejvoda and he always used to play marias in a pub behind the Century Cafe.
Once the devil whispered into his ear:
"How about a game of vingt-et-un at tenheller stakes?"
And so they played vingt-et-un at ten hellers and he held the bank.
They all joined the game and then the bank grew to ten crowns.
Old Vejvoda wanted to help the others and so he kept on saying:
"Low and bad is safe."
But you can't imagine what bad luck he had. However low his card was it was never worse than what the others had.
The bank grew and grew and there was already a hundred crowns in it.
None of the players had enough to go "banco" and Vejvoda sat there sweating.
You couldn't hear anything except his
"Low and bad is safe."
One after another people joined in with tencrown stakes and all of them burst.
A master chimney-sweep got furious and went home for more money. He went "banco" when there was already more than a hundred and fifty in the bank.
Vejvoda wanted to get himself out of the game and, as he confessed afterwards, he tried to push the bidding up to as much as thirty just so as not to win. But instead he got two aces.
He pretended he had nothing and said on purpose: