“Well, sir, and how did you and the prince finish this business of the loosed swans?”
“I don’t know myself, somehow very simply: how I got myself home from those Gypsies I don’t remember, nor how I went to bed, only I hear the prince knocking and calling, and I want to get up from my cot, but I simply can’t find the edge and climb off. I crawl one way—no edge; I turn the other way—no edge there either … I’m lost on the cot, of all things! … The prince cries: ‘Ivan Severyanych!’ And I respond: ‘Just a minute!’—and I’m crawling in all directions and still don’t find the edge, and finally I think: ‘Well, if I can’t get off, I’ll jump,’ and I reared back and hurled myself as far as I could, and felt as if I’d been smashed in the mug, and around me something’s jingling and pouring down, and behind me it’s also jingling and pouring down, and the prince’s voice says to his orderly: ‘Quick, bring a light!’
“And I stand there, I don’t move, because I don’t know whether I’m seeing all this awake or in a dream; and I think I still haven’t reached the edge of the cot, but instead, when the orderly brings the light, I see that I’m standing on the floor and that I’ve rammed my mug into the master’s cabinet of crystal and broken it all …”
“How did you lose your bearings like that?”
“Very simply: I thought I was sleeping on my cot, as had always been my habit, but most likely, on coming back from the Gypsies, I lay down on the floor, and crawled all over searching for the edge, and then jumped … and jumped right into the cabinet. I lost my bearings because that … magnetizer, having rid me of the demon of drink, provided me with the demon of straying … I remembered at once the words he had spoken: ‘It may be worse if you stop drinking’—and I went looking for him—I wanted to ask him if he hadn’t better demagnetize me to the old way, but I didn’t find him. He, too, had taken a lot on himself and couldn’t bear it, and right there, in a pot-house across from the Gypsies, had drunk so much that he died.”
“And so you remained magnetized?”
“So I did, sir.”
“And did this magnetism work on you for long?”
“Why for long? Maybe it’s still working.”
“But all the same it would be interesting to learn how things went between you and the prince … Can it be that you never had it out over those swans?”
No, sir, we had it out, only it wasn’t much. The prince also came home having lost at cards and began asking me for money to win it back. I say:
“Forget about that: I have no money at all.”
He thinks I’m joking, but I say:
“No, it’s true, I had a big outing while you were gone.”
He asks:
“What could you have done with five thousand on one outing?”
I say:
“I threw it all to a Gypsy girl …”
He doesn’t believe me.
I say:
“Well, don’t believe me, then; but I’m telling you the truth.”
He got angry and said:
“Lock the door, I’m going to give it to you for throwing my money away”—and then he suddenly cancelled it and said: “No, never mind, I myself am as wayward as you are.”
And he went to his room to finish his night’s sleep, and I also went to sleep again in the hayloft. I came to my senses in a hospital and heard them saying that I had had delirium tremens and had wanted to hang myself, only, thank God, I’d been swaddled in a long shirt. Then I got better and went to the prince on his country estate, because in the meantime he had resigned his commission, and I said:
“Your Serenity, I have to earn the money back for you.”
He says:
“Go to the devil.”
I see he’s very offended at me, go up to him, and bend down:
“What does this mean?” he says.
“At least,” I beg, “give me a good, sound thrashing.”
And he replies:
“And why do you think I’m angry at you? Maybe I don’t consider you guilty at all.”
“For pity’s sake,” I say, “how am I not guilty, when I squandered a whole province of money? I myself know that hanging’s too good for such a scoundrel as me.”
And he replies:
“No help for it, brother, since you’re an artist.”
“How’s that?” I ask.
“It is,” he replies, “that you, dearest Ivan Severyanych, my half-esteemed fellow, are an artist.”
“That,” I say, “I can’t understand.”
“Don’t think anything bad,” he says, “because I’m also an artist myself.”
“Well, that’s clear enough,” I think. “Obviously, I’m not the only one who has made a pursuit of delirium tremens.”
He stood up, flung his pipe on the floor, and said:
“No wonder you threw all you had before her: I, brother, gave for her what I don’t have and never did have.”
I stared at him goggle-eyed.
“Merciful heavens,” I say, “Your Serenity, my dear man, what are you saying? It’s even dreadful for me to hear it.”
“Well,” he replies, “don’t be very frightened: God is merciful, and perhaps I’ll get out of it somehow, only I gave the Gypsy camp fifty thousand for this Grusha.”
I gasped.
“What?” I say. “Fifty thousand? For a Gypsy girl? Can the snake be worth it?”
“Well, there,” he replies, “my half-esteemed fellow, you are talking most stupidly and inartistically … Is she worth it? A woman is worth everything in the world, because she can inflict such a wound that you won’t be cured of it for a whole kingdom, but she alone can cure you of it in a single moment.”
I keep thinking it’s all true, and keep shaking my head and saying:
“Such a sum! A whole fifty thousand!”
“Yes, yes,” he says, “and don’t go on repeating it, because thankfully they took it, otherwise I’d have given more … as much as you like.”
“You should have spat on it,” I say, “and left it at that.”
“I couldn’t, brother,” he says, “I couldn’t spit on it.”
“Why not?”
“She stung me with her beauty and talent, and I need to be cured, otherwise I’ll go out of my mind. But tell me: she is beautiful, isn’t she? Eh? Isn’t she? Enough to drive you out of your mind? …”
I bit my lips and only nodded silently:
“Right, right.”
“You know,” says the prince, “I could even die for a woman, it would be nothing to me. Can you understand that I think nothing of dying?”
“What’s there not to understand?” I say. “It’s beauty, nature’s perfection.”
“How do you understand that?”
“Like this,” I reply, “that beauty is nature’s perfection, and from that ravishment a man can perish—even joyfully!”
“Good for you,” my prince replies, “good for you, my almost half-esteemed and most greatly insignificant Ivan Severyanych! Precisely, sir, precisely, it is joyful to perish, and it now feels sweet to me that I overturned my whole life for her: resigned my commission, mortgaged my estate, and from now on I’ll live here, seeing nobody, but only looking in her face.”
I lowered my voice still more and whispered:
“How are you going to look in her face?” I say. “You mean she’s here?”
And he answers:
“What else? Of course she’s here.”
“Can it be?” I ask.
“Wait here,” he says, “I’ll bring her right now. You’re an artist—I’m not going to hide her from you.”
And with that he left me and went out the door. I stood there, waiting and thinking:
“Eh, it’s not good your insisting that you only want to look at her face! You’ll get bored!” But I didn’t reason about it in detail, because when I remembered that she was there, I immediately felt that my sides were even getting hot, and my mind became addled, and I thought: “Can it be that I’m going
to see her now?” And suddenly they came in: the prince came first, carrying a guitar on a broad red ribbon in one hand, and with the other dragging Grusha by both hands, and she walked downcast, reluctantly, without looking, and only those huge eyelashes of hers fluttered against her cheeks like a bird’s wings.
The prince led her in, picked her up in his arms, and seated her like a child, with her legs tucked under, in the corner of a wide, soft sofa; he put one velvet pillow behind her back, another under her right elbow, threw the ribbon of the guitar over her shoulder, and placed her fingers on the strings. Then he himself sat on the floor by the sofa, leaned his head against her red morocco bootie, and nodded for me to sit down, too.
I quietly lowered myself to the floor by the doorway, also tucked my legs under, and sat looking at her. It became as quiet as if the room were empty. I sat and sat, my knees even began to ache, and I glanced at her, she was still in the same position, and I looked at the prince: I see he’s gnawing his mustache from languor, but he doesn’t say a word to her.
I nod to him, as if to say: tell her to sing! And in response he does me a pamtomine, meaning: she won’t listen to me.
And again we both sit on the floor and wait, but suddenly it’s as if she starts raving, sighing, and sobbing, and a little tear flows from her lashes, and her fingers crawl and murmur over the strings like wasps … And suddenly she begins to sing very, very softly, as if she’s weeping: “Good people, listen to my heartfelt grief.”
The prince whispers: “What?”
And I whisper back in French:
“P’tit-comme-peu”—and have nothing more to say, but at that same moment she suddenly cries out: “And for my beauty they’ll sell me, they’ll sell me,” and she flings the guitar far from her knees, and tears the kerchief from her head, and falls facedown on the sofa, covers her face with her hands, and weeps, and I weep, looking at her, and the prince … he, too, begins to weep, and he takes up the guitar, and, not really singing but more like intoning in church, moans: “If you but knew all the fire of love, all the anguish in my ardent soul”—and he bursts into sobs. He sings and sobs: “Comfort me, the comfortless one, make me happy, the unhappy one.” As he becomes so cruelly shaken, I see that she begins to heed his tears and singing and grows quieter, calmer, and she suddenly takes her hand quietly from under her face and, like a mother, tenderly embraces his head …
Well, here it became clear to me that she had pitied him this time and would now comfort him and heal all the anguish of his ardent soul, and I got up quietly, inconspicuously, and left.
“And it was probably then that you entered the monastery?” someone asked the storyteller.
“No, sir, not then, but later,” replied Ivan Severyanych and added that he was still to see much from that woman in this world, before all that was destined for her was fulfilled and crossed him out.
His listeners naturally fell upon him with requests that he tell them Grusha’s story, if only briefly, and Ivan Severyanych did so.
XV
You see (Ivan Severyanych began), my prince had a good heart, but a changeable one. Whatever he wanted, he had to get at all costs on the spot—otherwise he’d go out of his mind; and in that state, he wouldn’t spare anything in the world to attain it, but then, once he got it, he wouldn’t appreciate his good luck. That’s how it was with this Gypsy girl, and Grusha’s father and all the Gypsies of the camp right away understood that very well about him and asked him God knows what price for her, more than all his domestic property allowed, because though he did have a nice country estate, it was ruined. The prince did not have on hand then the kind of money the camp was asking for Grusha, and he went into debt for it and could no longer serve in the army.
Knowing all his habits, I didn’t expect much good from him for Grusha, and it came out as I thought. He kept clinging to her, endlessly gazed at her and sighed, and suddenly he started yawning and kept inviting me to keep them company.
“Sit down,” he’d say, “and listen.”
I’d take a chair, sit somewhere near the door, and listen. This happened often: he’d ask her to sing, and she’d say:
“Who am I going to sing for! You’ve turned cold, and I want my song to make someone’s soul burn and suffer.”
The prince would at once send for me again, and the two of us would listen to her; later Grusha herself started reminding him to invite me, and began to treat me very amiably, and more than once after her singing I had tea in her rooms together with the prince, though, naturally, either at a separate table or somewhere by the window, but when she was alone, she always simply sat me down beside her. Some time passed this way, and the prince was becoming more and more troubled, and once he said to me:
“You know, Ivan Severyanych, thus and so, things are very bad with me.”
I say:
“What’s so bad about them? Thank God, you live as one ought to, and you’ve got everything.”
He suddenly became offended.
“How stupid you are, my half-esteemed fellow,” he says. “I’ve ‘got everything’? And what is it I’ve got?”
“Why,” I say, “everything a man needs.”
“Not so,” he says. “I’ve become poor, I now have to calculate whether I can have a bottle of wine with dinner. Is that a life? Is that a life?”
“So,” I think, “that’s what you’re upset about,” and I say:
“Well, if there’s not wine enough, that’s still no great trouble, it can be endured, since there’s something sweeter than wine and honey.”
He understood I was hinting at Grusha and seemed to be ashamed, and he paced about, waved his arm, and said:
“Of course … of course … naturally … only … I’ve been living here for half a year now and haven’t set eyes on another human being …”
“And what do you need another human being for,” I say, “when you’ve got your heart’s desire?”
The prince flared up.
“You understand nothing, brother,” he says. “All’s well when you’ve got the one and the other.”
“Aha!” I think, “so that’s your tune, brother?”—and I say:
“What do we do now?”
“Let’s take up horse trading,” he says. “I want to have remount officers and horse breeders come to me again.”
Horse trading is a futile and ungentlemanly business, but, I think, “So long as baby’s amused and doesn’t cry,” and I say: “If you like.”
And we began to set up a corral. But we had barely started work, when the prince got carried away by this passion: whenever a little money came in, he at once bought horses, and he took them, he snatched them up senselessly; he wouldn’t listen to me … We bought a slew of them, but there were no sales … He couldn’t stand it, dropped the horses, and gave himself to whatever happened along: first he threw himself into building an extraordinary mill, then he started a saddler’s shop, and all of it brought losses and debts, and worst of all it deranged his character … He was never at home, but flew now here, now there, looking for something, and Grusha was alone and in a certain condition … expecting. She was bored. “I see little of him,” she said—but she forced herself to be tactful. The moment she noticed that he was bored at home for a day or two, she would say at once:
“My ruby-jewel, why don’t you go out and have some fun? What should you sit with me for? I’m simple and uneducated.”
At these words he would at once feel ashamed, and kiss her hands, and hold himself back for two or three days, but then he would just go off in a whirl and leave me in charge of her.
“Take care of her, my half-esteemed Ivan Severyanych,” he’d say. “You’re an artist, you’re not a whippersnapper like me, but a real high-class artist, and therefore you’re somehow able to talk to her so that you both have a nice time, while those ‘ruby-jewels’ just put me to sleep.”
I say:
“Why so? They’re loving words.”
“Loving,” he says, “bu
t stupid and tiresome.”
I made no reply, but from then on started visiting her without ceremony: when the prince wasn’t there, I’d go to her wing twice a day to have tea and amuse her the best I could.
And I had to amuse her because, if she happened to start talking, she always complained:
“My dear Ivan Severyanych, friend of my heart,” she’d say, “jealousy, my darling one, torments me bitterly.”
Well, naturally, I reassured her:
“Why be so tormented?” I’d say. “Wherever he goes, he always comes back to you.”
She would burst into tears, beat her breast, and say:
“No, tell me … don’t conceal it from me, friend of my heart: where does he go?”
“To gentlefolk,” I say, “in the neighborhood or in town.”
“But isn’t there some woman,” she says, “who has come between us? Tell me: maybe he loved someone before me and has now gone back to her—or might my wicked one be thinking of marrying?” And her eyes blaze so as she says it that it’s even terrible to see.
I comfort her, but I think to myself:
“Who knows what he’s up to?”—because we saw little of him at that time.
Once it occurred to her that he wanted to marry, she got to begging me:
“Go to town, Ivan Severyanych, my darling, my this-and-that; go, find out the whole truth about him, and tell me everything without any secrets.”
She badgered me about it more and more and made me feel so sorry for her that I thought:
“Well, come what may, I’ll go. Though if I find out anything bad about betrayal, I won’t tell her everything, but I’ll see and clear things up for myself.”
I chose as a pretext that I supposedly had to go to buy medicine for the horses from the herbalists, and so I went, but I went not simply, but with a cunning design.
Grusha didn’t know, and the servants were under the strictest orders to conceal from her, that the prince, before this occasion with Grusha, had had another love in town: Evgenia Semyonovna, a gentlewoman, an official’s daughter. She was known to the whole town as a great piano player and a very kindly lady, and was also very good-looking, and she had a daughter by my prince, but she gained weight, and people said that was why he left her. However, as he still had considerable capital at that time, he bought a house for this lady and her daughter, and they lived on the income from this house. After bestowing it upon Evgenia Semyonovna, the prince never visited her, but our people, remembering old times, recalled her kindliness, and on each trip to town they would all drop in on her, because they loved her and she was terribly affectionate towards them all and was interested in the prince.
The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories Page 27
