He’s not much of a match! When he gets up from a chair he takes all he’s got with him. He lost all his money gambling at Easter. Fedka said so.”
“Yes; the lad’s not one to spend, but he gets through cash no end.”
“Ah, brother, I was married too. It’s no use for a man to be married: when you are married the night’s too short,” remarked Skuratov, putting his word in.
“Oh, indeed! It was you we were talking about, of course,” observed the free-and-easy youth who had been a clerk. “But you are a silly fool, Kvasov, let me tell you. Do you suppose the major could bribe a general like that, and that such a general would come all the way from Petersburg to inspect the major? You are a fool, my lad, let me tell you.”
“Why, because he’s a general won’t he take it?” some one in the crowd observed sceptically.
“Of course he won’t, if he does, he’ll take a jolly big one.”
“To be sure, he will; to match his rank.”
“A general will always take bribes,” Kvasov observed with decision.
“You’ve tried it on, I suppose?” said Baklushin suddenly coming in and speaking contemptuously. “I don’t believe you’ve ever seen a general.”
“I have, though!”
“You are lying!”
“Lie yourself!”
“Lads, if he has seen one, let him tell us all directly what general he knows. Come, speak away—for I know all the generals.”
“I’ve seen General Ziebert,” Kvasov answered with strange hesitation.
“Ziebert? There isn’t such a general. He looked at your back, I suppose, your Ziebert, when he was a lieutenant-colonel maybe, and you fancied in your fright he was a general!”
“No, listen to me!” cried Skuratov, “for I am a married man. There really was such a general at Moscow, Ziebert, of German family, though he was a Russian. He used to confess to a Russian priest every year, at the fast of the Assumption, and he was always drinking water, lads, like a duck. Every day he’d drink forty glasses of Moscow river water. They said that he took it for some disease, his valet told me so himself.”
“He bred carp in his belly, I bet, with all that water,” observed the convict with the balalaika.
