Page:Dead Souls - A Poem by Nikolay Gogol - vol1.djvu/132

120 'Because I simply don't want them, and that's all about it.'

'Well, you are a fellow! I see there is no doing business with you as between good friends and comrades. … You really are … one can see at once that you are a double-faced man!'

'Why, do you take me for a fool or what? Judge for yourself: why should I take a thing absolutely of no use to me?'

'Oh, it is no use your talking. I understand you very well now. You are really such a cad. But I tell you what. If you like we'll have out the cards. I'll stake all my dead souls on a card, the barrel-organ too.'

'Well, staking it on a card means leaving it in uncertainty,' said Tchitchikov, while he glanced askance at the cards that were in Nozdryov's hands. Both the packs looked to him as though they had been tampered with and the very spots on the back looked suspicious.

'Why uncertainty?' said Nozdryov. 'There is no uncertainty. If only the luck's on your side, you'll win a devilish lot. There it is! What luck!' he said, beginning to lay out the cards to tempt him to play. 'What luck, what luck; take everything.'

'There's that damned nine that I lost everything on! I felt that it would sell me and, half shutting my eyes, I thought to myself: damnation take you, you may sell me, you brute!'

While Nozdryov was saying this, Porfiry brought in a bottle. But Tchitchikov absolutely refused either to drink or to play.