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English Audio Request

serhio7
383 Words / 1 Recordings / 0 Comments
Note to recorder:

slowly, please

Meanwhile, tea was ready. I took two travelling-tumblers out of my portmanteau, and, filling one of them, set it before the staff-captain. He sipped his tea and said, as if speaking to himself, "Yes, many a one!" This exclamation gave me great hopes. Your old Caucasian officer loves, I know, to talk and yarn a bit; he so rarely succeeds in getting a chance to do so. It may be his fate to be quartered five years or so with his company in some out-of-the-way place, and during the whole of that time he will not hear "good morning" from a soul (because the sergeant says "good health"). And, indeed, he would have good cause to wax loquacious—with a wild and interesting people all around him, danger to be faced every day, and many a marvellous incident happening. It is in circumstances like this that we involuntarily complain that so few of our countrymen take notes.
"Would you care to put some rum in your tea?" I said to my companion. "I have some white rum with me—from Tiflis; and the weather is cold now."
"No, thank you, sir; I don't drink."
"Really?"
"Just so. I have sworn off drinking. Once, you know, when I was a sub-lieutenant, some of us had a drop too much. That very night there was an alarm, and out we went to the front, half seas over! We did catch it, I can tell you, when Aleksei Petrovich came to hear about us! Heaven save us, what a rage he was in! He was within an ace of having us court-martialled. That's just how things happen! You might easily spend a whole year without seeing a soul, but just go and have a drop and you're a lost man!"
On hearing this I almost lost hope.
"Take the Circassians, now," he continued; "once let them drink their fill of buza[6] at a wedding or a funeral, and out will come their knives. On one occasion I had some difficulty in getting away with a whole skin, and yet it was at the house of a 'friendly'[7] prince, where I was a guest, that the affair happened."
"How was that?" I asked.
"Here, I'll tell you."...
He filled his pipe, drew in the smoke, and began his story.

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