The riffraff do indeed play very filthily. I’m even not averse to the thought that a lot of the most common thievery goes on here at the table. The croupiers who sit at the ends of the table, look after the stakes, and make the payments, have a terrible amount of work. There’s more riffraff for you! For the most part they’re Frenchmen. However, I’m observing and making remarks here not at all in order to describe roulette; I’m attuning myself, in order to know how to behave in the future. I noticed, for instance, that there was nothing more ordinary than for someone’s hand suddenly to reach out from behind the table and take what you’ve won. An argument begins, there’s often shouting, and—I humbly ask you to prove, to find witnesses, that the stake is yours!
At first this was all Chinese to me; I only guessed and figured out somehow that one can stake on numbers, odds and evens, and colors. That evening I decided to try a hundred guldens of Polina Alexandrovna’s money. The thought that I was setting out to play for someone else somehow threw me off. The sensation was extremely unpleasant, and I wanted to be done with it quickly. I kept fancying that by starting out for Polina I was undermining my own luck. Is it really impossible to touch a gaming table without being infected at once with superstition? I began by taking out five friedrichs d’or, that is, fifty guldens, and staking them on evens. The wheel spun and it came up thirteen—I lost. With some morbid feeling, solely to be done with it somehow and leave, I staked another five friedrichs d’or on red. It came up red. I staked all ten friedrichs d’or—again it came up red. I again staked it all at once, and again it came up red. I took the forty friedrichs d’or and staked twenty on the twelve middle numbers, not knowing what would come of it. I was paid triple. Thus, from ten friedrichs d’or, I had suddenly acquired eighty. Some extraordinary and strange sensation made it so unbearable for me that I decided to leave. It seemed to me that I would play quite differently if I were playing for myself. Nevertheless, I staked all eighty friedrichs d’or once more on evens. This time it came up four; they poured out another eighty friedrichs d’or for me, and, taking the whole heap of a hundred and sixty friedrichs d’or, I went to look for Polina Alexandrovna.
They had all gone for a stroll somewhere in the park, and I managed to see her only at supper. This time the Frenchman wasn’t there, and the general made a display of himself; among other things, he found it necessary to observe to me again that he did not wish to see me at the gaming table. In his opinion, it would be very compromising for him if I somehow lost too much; “but even if you were to win a lot, then, too, I would be compromised,” he added significantly. “Of course, I have no right to control your actions, but you must agree…” Here, as usual, he didn’t finish. I answered dryly that I had very little money and that, consequently, I could not lose too conspicuously, even if I should gamble. On the way to my room upstairs, I managed to hand Polina her winnings and declared to her that I would not play for her another time.
“Why not?” she asked anxiously.
“Because I want to play for myself,” I replied, studying her with astonishment, “and this hampers me.”
“So you resolutely go on being convinced that roulette is your salvation and your only way out?” she asked mockingly. I answered again very seriously that, yes; that as for my absolute assurance of winning, let it be ridiculous, I agree, “so long as I’m left alone.”
Polina Alexandrovna insisted that I absolutely must share today’s winnings half and half with her, and wanted to give me eighty friedrichs d’or, suggesting that we go on playing in the future on that condition. I refused the half resolutely and definitively, and declared that I could not play for others, not because I didn’t want to, but because I was sure to lose.
“However, I myself, stupid as it may be, also hope almost only in roulette,” she said pensively. “And therefore you absolutely must go on playing half and half with me, and—of course—you will.” Here she left me, not listening to my further objections.
CHAPTER III
HOWEVER, FOR THE whole day yesterday she didn’t say a word to me about gambling. And she generally avoided talking with me yesterday. Her earlier manner with me did not change. The same complete carelessness of attitude when we met, and even something scornful and hateful. Generally she doesn’t wish to conceal her loathing for me; I can see that. In spite of that, she also doesn’t conceal from me that she needs me for something and is saving me for something. Some sort of strange relations have been established between us, in many ways incomprehensible to me—considering her pride and arrogance with everyone. She knows, for instance, that I love her madly, she even allows me to speak of my passion—and, of course, she could in no way express her scorn of me more fully than by this permission to speak to her of my love unhindered and uncensored. “Meaning,” so to say, “I hold your feelings of so little account that it is decidedly all the same to me what you speak to me about and what you feel for me.” Of her own affairs she talked a lot with me before as well, but she was never fully candid. What’s more, there were the following subtleties in her disregard for me: she knows, let’s say, that I’m aware of some circumstance of her life or of something that troubles her greatly; she will even tell me something of her circumstances herself, if she needs to use me somehow for her own purposes, like a slave, or for running errands; but she will always tell me exactly as much as someone needs to know who is used for running errands, and—if the whole sequence of events is still unknown to me, if she sees herself how I suffer and worry over her sufferings and worries, she will never deign to set me fully at ease by friendly candor, though, as she often employed me on not only troublesome but even dangerous errands, she was obliged, in my opinion, to be candid with me. And was it worth caring about my feelings, about the fact that I also worried, and maybe cared and suffered three times more over her cares and misfortunes than she did herself?