Page:The Dial (Volume 73).djvu/77

Rh "I did not catch the name and thought you meant 'Prague, he muttered, turning his horse slowly; he seemed displeased, although the Prague was further away.

"I remember the Prague too, old fellow," answered Kasimir Stanislavovitch. "You must have been driving for a long time in Moscow."

"Driving?" the old man said. "I have been driving now for fifty-one years."

"That means that you may have driven me before," said Kasimir Stanislavovitch.

"Perhaps I did," answered the old man dryly. "There are lots of people in the world; one can't remember all of you."

Of the old restaurant, once known to Kasimir Stanislavovitch, there remained only the name. Now it was a large, first-class, though vulgar, restaurant. Over the entrance burnt an electric globe which with its unpleasant, heliotrope light, illuminated the smart, second-rate cabmen, impudent, and cruel to their lean, short-winded animals. In the damp hall stood pots of laurel and tropical plants of the kind which one sees carried on to the platforms from funerals to weddings and vice versa. From the porters' lodge several men rushed out together to Kasimir Stanislavovitch, and all of them had just the same thick curl of hair as the porter at the Versailles. In the large greenish room, decorated in rococo style, were a multitude of broad mirrors, and in the corner burnt a crimson ikon-lamp. The room was still empty and only a few of the electric lights were on. Kasimir Stanislavovitch sat for a long time alone, doing nothing. One felt that behind the windows with their white blinds the long, spring evening had not yet grown dark; one heard from the street the thudding of hoofs; in the middle of the room there was the monotonous splash-splash of the little fountain in an aquarium round which gold-fish, with their scales peeling off, lighted somehow from below, swam through the water. A waiter in white brought the dinner things, bread, and a decanter of cold vodka. Kasimir Stanislavovitch began drinking the vodka, held it in his mouth before swallowing it, and, having swallowed it, smelt the black bread as though with loathing. With a suddenness which gave even him a start a gramophone began to roar out through the room a mixture of Russian songs, now exaggeratedly boisterous and turbulent, now too tender, drawling, sentimental And Kas-