Vasilisa was asleep beside his wife in their damp bedroom that smelled of mice, mildew and a peevish sleeping couple.
In his dream Lebid-Yurchik came riding up on a horse and a gang of thieves with skeleton keys discovered his secret hiding-place.
The jack of hearts climbed up on a chair, spat at Vasilisa's moustache and fired at him point-blank.
In a cold sweat Vasilisa leaped up with a shriek and the first thing that he heard was the mouse family hard at work in the dining-room on a packet of rusks; then laughter and the gentle sound of a guitar came through the ceiling and the carpets . . .
Suddenly from the floor above a voice of unusual strength and passion struck up, and the guitar swung into a march.
'There's only one thing to be done - turn them out of the apartment', said Vasilisa as he muffled himself up in the sheets. 'This is outrageous.
There's no peace day or night.'
'The guards' cadets Are marching along -Swinging along, Singing a song.'
'Still, in case anything happened . . .
Times are bad enough.
If you kick them out you never know who you'll get instead - they are at least officers and if anything happened, they would defend us . . .
Shoo!' Vasilisa shouted at the furiously active mouse.
The sound of a guitar . . .
Four lights burning in the dining-room chandelier.
Pennants of blue smoke.
The french windows on to the verandah completely shut out by cream-colored blinds.
Fresh bunches of hot-house flowers against the whiteness of the tablecloth, three bottles of vodka and several narrow bottles of German white wine.
Long-stemmed glasses, apples in glittering cut-crystal vases, slices of lemon, crumbs everywhere, tea ...
On the armchair a crumpled sheet of the humorous magazine Peep-show.
Heads muzzy, the mood swinging at one moment towards the heights of unreasoning joy, at the next towards the trough of despondency.
Singing, pointless jokes which seemed irresistibly funny, guitar chords, Myshlaevsky laughing drunkenly.
Elena had not had time to collect herself since Talberg's departure . . . white wine does not remove the pain altogether, only blunts it. Elena sat in an armchair at the head of the table.
Opposite her at the other end was Myshlaevsky, shaggy and pale in a bathrobe, his face blotchy with vodka and insane fatigue.
His eyes were red-ringed from cold, the horror he had been through, vodka and fury.
Down one of the long sides of the table sat Alexei and Nikolka, on the other Leonid Shervinsky, one-time First Lieutenant in His Majesty's Own Regiment of Lancers and now an aide on the staff of Prince Belorukov, and alongside him Second Lieutenant Fyodor Stepanov, an artilleryman, still known by his high school nickname of 'Karas'-the carp.
Short, stocky and really looking very like a carp, Karas had bumped into Shervinsky at the Turbins' front door about twenty minutes after Talberg had left.
Both had brought some bottles with them.
In Shervinsky's package were four bottles of white wine, while Karas had two bottles of vodka.
Beside that Shervinsky was loaded with an enormous bouquet, swathed in three layers of paper - roses for Elena, of course.
Karas gave him his news on the doorstep: he was back in artillery uniform. He had lost patience with studying at the university, which was pointless now anyway; everybody had to go and fight, and if Petlyura ever got into the City time spent at the university would be worse than useless.
It was everyone's duty to volunteer and the mortar regiment needed trained gunnery officers.
The commanding officer was Colonel Malyshev, the regiment was a fine one - all his friends from the university were in it.
Karas was in despair because Myshlaevsky had gone off to join that crazy infantry detachment.
All that death-or-glory stuff was idiotic, and now where the hell was he?
Maybe even killed at his post somewhere outside the City . . .
But Myshlaevsky was here - upstairs!
At her mirror, with its frame of silver foliage, in the half-light of the bedroom the lovely Elena hastily powdered her face and emerged to accept her roses.
Hurrah!
They were all here.
Karas' golden crossed cannon on his crumpled shoulder-straps and carefully pressed blue breeches.
A shameless spark of joy flashed in Shervinsky's little eyes at the news of Talberg's departure.
The little hussar immediately felt himself in excellent voice and the pink-lit sitting-room was filled with a positive hurricane of gorgeous sound as Shervinsky sang an epithalamion to the god Hymen - how he sang!
Shervinsky's voice was surely unique.
Of course he was still an officer at present, there was this stupid war, the Bolsheviks, and Petlyura, and one had one's duty to do, but afterwards when everything was back to normal he would leave the army, in spite of all his influential connections in Petersburg -and they all knew what sort of connections those were (knowing laughter) - and ... he would go on the stage.
He would sing at La Scala and at the Bolshoi in Moscow - as soon as they started hanging Bolsheviks from the lamp-posts in the square outside the theatre.
Once at Zhmerinka, Countess Lendrikov had fallen in love with him because when he had sung the Epithalamion, instead of C he had hit E and held it for five bars.
As he said 'five', Shervinsky lowered his head slightly and looked around in an embarrassed way, as though someone else had told the story instead of him.
'Mm'yes. Five bars.
Well, let's have supper.'
And now the room was hung with wispy pennants of smoke . . .