My parents, who looked upon this incident with ordinary eyes, ascribed the stupid outcome of the hunt to the clumsiness of our Annushkas; but we, who knew the secret springs of the matter, also knew that it was impossible to do any better here, because it was not a simple rat, but the were-rat Selivan. However, we didn’t dare tell that to the adults. As simple-hearted folk, we feared criticism and the mockery of something we ourselves considered obvious and unquestionable.
Selivan didn’t dare to cross the front doorstep in any of his guises, as it seemed to me, because he knew something about my dagger.
And to me that was both flattering and annoying, because, as a matter of fact, I was tired of nothing but talk and rumors and was burning with a passionate desire to meet Selivan face-to-face.
That finally turned into a languishing in me, in which I spent the whole long winter with its interminable evenings, but when the first spring torrents came down the hills, an event took place that upset the whole order of our life and unleashed the dangerous impulses of unrestrained passions.
VIII
The event was unexpected and sad. At the height of the spring thaw, when, according to a popular expression, “a puddle can drown a bull,” a horseman came galloping from my aunt’s far-off estate with the fateful news of my grandfather’s dangerous illness.
A long journey over such bad spring roads presented a great danger; but that didn’t stop my mother and father, and they set out on their way at once. They had to go seventy miles, and in nothing but a simple cart, because it was impossible to make the trip in any other kind of carriage. The cart was accompanied by two horsemen carrying long poles. They went ahead and felt out the depth of the potholes. The house and I were left in the care of a special interim committee composed of various persons from various departments. Big Annushka was in charge of all persons of the female sex, down to Oska and Roska; but the high moral supervision was entrusted to Dementievna, the headman’s wife. Our intellectual guidance—in the sense of the observing of feasts and Sundays—was confided to Apollinary Ivanovich, the deacon’s son, who, having been expelled from the class of rhetoric in the seminary,4 had been attached to my person as a tutor. He taught me the Latin declensions and generally prepared me so that the next year I could enter the first class of the Orel school not as a complete savage likely to show surprise at the Latin grammar of Beliustin and the French grammar of Lhomond.
Apollinary was a young man of worldly tendency and planned to enter the “chancellery,” or, in modern parlance, to become a clerk in the Orel provincial office, where his uncle served in a most interesting post. If some police officer or other failed to observe some regulation or other, Apollinary’s uncle was sent as a one-horse “special envoy” at the expense of the culprits. He rode about without paying anything for his horse, and, besides that, received gifts and offerings from the culprits, and saw different towns and many different people of different ranks and customs. My Apollinary also set his sights on achieving such happiness in time, and could hope to do much more than his uncle, because he possessed two great talents that could be very pleasing in social intercourse: Apollinary could play two songs on the guitar, “A Girl Went to Cut Nettles,” and another, much more difficult one, “On a Rainy Autumn Evening,” and—what was still more rare in the provinces at that time—he could compose beautiful verses for the ladies, which, as a matter of fact, was what got him expelled from the seminary.
Despite our difference in age, Apollinary and I were on a friendly footing, and, as befits faithful friends, we kept each other’s secrets. In this case, his share came out a bit smaller than mine: all my secrets were limited to the dagger under my mattress, while I was obliged to keep deeply hidden two secrets entrusted to me: the first concerned the pipe hidden in his wardrobe, in which of an evening Apollinary smoked sour-sweet white Nezhin roots into the stove,5 and the second was still more important—here the matter had to do with verses composed by Apollinary in honor of some “light-footed Pulcheria.”
The verses seemed very bad, but Apollinary said that to judge them correctly, it was necessary to see the impression they produced when read nicely, with feeling, to a tender and sensitive woman.
That posed a great and, in our situation, even insurmountable difficulty, because there were no little ladies in our house, and when grown-up young ladies came to visit, Apollinary didn’t dare suggest that they be his listeners, because he was very shy, and among the young ladies of our acquaintance there were some great scoffers.
Necessity taught Apollinary to invent a compromise—namely, to declaim the ode to “Light-footed Pulcheria” before our maid Neonila, who had adopted various polished city manners in Madame Morozova’s fashion shop and, to Apollinary’s mind, ought to have the refined feelings necessary in order to feel the merits of poetry.
Being very young, I was afraid to give my teacher advice in his poetic experiments, but I considered his plan to declaim verses before the seamstress risky. I was judging by myself, naturally, and though I did take into account that young Neonila was familiar with some subjects of city circles, it could hardly be that she would understand the language of lofty poetry in which Apollinary sang of Pulcheria. Besides, in the ode to “Light-footed Pulcheria” there were such exclamations as “Oh, you cruel one!” or “Vanish from my sight!” and the like. By nature Neonila was of a timid and shy character, and I was afraid she would take it personally and most certainly burst into tears and run away.
But worst of all was that, with the usual strict order of our domestic life, this poetic rehearsal thought up by the rhetorician was absolutely impossible. Neither the time, nor the place, nor even all the other conditions favored Neonila’s listening to Apollinary’s verses and being their first appreciator. However, the anarchy that installed itself with my parents’ departure changed all that, and the student decided to take advantage of it. Now, forgetting all difference in our positions, we played cards every evening, and Apollinary even smoked his Nezhin roots around the house and sat in my father’s chair in the dining room, which offended me a little. Besides that, at his insistence, we played blind man’s buff several times, from which my brother and I wound up with bruises. We also played hide-and-seek, and once even organized a formal fête with lots of food. It seems all this was done “on the house,” as many thoughtless carousers reveled in those days, down whose ruinous path we were drawn by the rhetorician. To this day I don’t know who then made the suggestion that we gather a whole sack of the ripest hazelnuts, extracted from the mouse holes (where one usually finds only nuts of the highest quality). Besides the nuts, we had three gray paper bags of yellow sugar lollipops, sunflower seeds, and candied pears. These last really stuck to your hands and were hard to wash off.
Since this last fruit enjoyed special attention, pears were given only as prizes in the game of forfeits. Moska, Oska, and Roska, being essentially insignificant, got no candied fruit at all. The game of forfeits included Annushka, and me, and my tutor Apollinary, who proved to be very clever and inventive. All this took place in the drawing room, where only very honored guests used to sit. And there, in the daze of passionate merriment, some desperate spirit got into Apollinary, and he conceived a still bolder undertaking. He decided to declaim his ode in a grandiose and even terrifying setting, where the strongest nerves would be subjected to the highest tension. He began inciting us all to go together the next Sunday to pick lily of the valley in Selivan’s forest. And in the evening, when he and I were going to bed, he revealed to me that the lily of the valley was only a pretext, while the main goal was to read the verses in that terrible setting.
On one side would be the effect of the fear of Selivan, on the other the fear of the terrible verses … How would it turn out, and could anyone bear it?
And, imagine, we did venture to do it.
In the animation that gripped us all on that memorable spring evening, it seemed to us that we were all brave and could pull off the desperate stunt safely. In fact, the
re would be a lot of us, and besides I would, naturally, bring along my huge Caucasian dagger.
I admit, I wanted very much for all the others to be armed according to their strength and possibilities, but I didn’t meet with any due attention or readiness for that. Apollinary took only his pipe and guitar, and the girls went with trivets, skillets, a kettle of eggs, and a cast-iron pot. In the pot they intended to boil wheat porridge with lard, and in the skillets to fry eggs, and in that sense they were excellent; but in the sense of defending ourselves in case of possible mischief on Selivan’s part, they meant decidedly nothing.
To tell the truth, however, I was displeased with my companions for something else as well—namely, that I didn’t feel on their part the same consideration for Selivan that I myself was imbued with. They did fear him, but somehow light-mindedly, and even risked some critical bantering about him. One Annushka said she would take a rolling pin and kill him with it, and Snappy laughingly said she could bite him, and with that she bared her extremely white teeth and bit off a piece of wire. All this was somehow unserious; but the rhetorician surpassed them all. He denied the existence of Selivan altogether—said that there had never even been such a person, and that he was simply a figment of the imagination, like the Python, Cerberus, and their ilk.6
I saw then for the first time how far a man was capable of being carried away by negation! What was the use, then, of any rhetoric, if it allowed one to put on the same level of probability the mythological Python and Selivan, the reality of whose existence was confirmed by a multitude of manifest events?
I did not yield to that temptation and preserved my belief in Selivan. More than that, I believed that the rhetorician was certain to be punished for his unbelief.
However, if one did not take this philosophizing seriously, then the projected outing in the forest promised much merriment, and no one either wished or was able to make himself prepare for occurrences of another sort. And yet good sense should have made us highly cautious in that cursed forest, where we would be, so to speak, in the very jaws of the beast.
They all thought only of what fun it would be to wander about in the forest, where everybody was afraid to go, but they were not. They reflected on how we would go through the whole dangerous forest, hallooing and calling to each other, and leaping over holes and gullies where the last snow was crumbling away, and never thought whether all this would be approved of when our higher authorities returned. On the other hand, however, we did have in mind making two big bouquets of the best lily of the valley for mama’s dressing table, and using the rest to make a fragrant extract, which would serve for the whole coming summer as an excellent lotion against sunburn.
IX
The impatiently awaited Sunday came, we left Dementievna, the headman’s wife, to look after the house, and set out for Selivan’s forest. The whole public went on foot, keeping to the raised shoulders, which were already dry and where the first emerald-green grass was sprouting, while the train, which consisted of a cart hitched to an old dun horse, followed on the road. In the cart lay Apollinary’s guitar and the girls’ jackets, taken along in case of bad weather. I was the driver, and behind me, in the quality of passengers, sat Roska and the other little girls, one of whom carefully cradled a bag of eggs on her knees, while the other had general charge of various objects, but mainly supported with her hand my huge dagger, which I had slung over my shoulder on an old hussar cord from my uncle’s saber, and which dangled from side to side, interfering considerably with my movements and distracting my attention from guiding the horse.
The girls, walking along the shoulder, sang: “I plough the field, I sow the hemp,” and the rhetorician doubled them in the bass. Some muzhiks we met on the way bowed and asked:
“What’s up?”
The Annushkas replied:
“We’re going to take Selivan prisoner.”
The muzhiks wagged their heads and said:
“Besotted fools!”
We were indeed in some sort of daze, overcome by an irrepressible, half-childish need to run, sing, laugh, and do everything recklessly.
But meanwhile an hour’s driving on a bad road began to have an adverse effect on me—I was sick of the old horse, and the eagerness to hold the rope reins in my hands had gone cold in me; but nearby, on the horizon, Selivan’s forest showed blue, and everything livened up again. My heart pounded and ached as Varus’s had when he entered the forest of Teutoburg.7 And just then a hare leaped out from under the melting snow on the shoulder and, crossing the road, took off over the field.
“Phooey on you!” the Annushkas shouted after him.
They all knew that meeting a hare never portends anything good. I also turned coward and seized my dagger, but, in the effort of drawing it from the rusty scabbard, I didn’t notice that I had let go of the reins, and I quite unexpectedly found myself under the overturned cart, which the horse, who pulled towards the shoulder to get some grass, turned over in the most proper fashion, so that all four wheels were up, and Roska and I and all our provisions were underneath.
This misfortune befell us in a moment, but its consequences were countless: Apollinary’s guitar was smashed to bits, and the broken eggs ran down and plastered our eyes with their sticky content. What’s more, Roska was howling.
I was utterly overwhelmed and abashed, and so much at a loss that I even wished they would rather not free us at all, but I already heard the voices of all the Annushkas, who, while working to free us, explained the reason for our fall very much to my advantage. Neither I nor the horse was the reason: it was all Selivan’s doing.
This was his first ruse to keep us from coming to his forest, but it didn’t frighten anyone very much; on the contrary, it filled us all with great indignation and increased our resolve to carry out at all costs the whole program we had conceived.
It was only necessary to lift the cart and turn it right side up, wash off the unpleasant egg slime in some brook, and see what remained after the catastrophe of the things we had brought as the day’s provisions for our numerous group.
All this got done somehow. Roska and I were washed in a brook that ran just at the edge of Selivan’s forest, and when my eyes opened, the world seemed very unsightly to me. The girls’ pink dresses and my new blue cashmere jacket were good for nothing: the dirt and egg that covered them ruined them completely and couldn’t be washed off without soap, which we had not brought with us. The pot and the skillet were cracked, the trivet’s legs were broken off and lay about, and all that was left of Apollinary’s guitar was the neck with strings twined around it. The bread and other dry goods were covered with mud. At the very least, we were threatened with a whole day of hunger, to say nothing of the other horrors that could be felt in everything around us. The wind whistled over the stream in the valley, and the black forest, not yet covered with green, rustled and ominously waved its branches at us.
Our spirits sank considerably—especially in Roska, who was cold and wept. But still we decided to enter Selivan’s kingdom, and let come what might.
In any case, the same adventure could not repeat itself without some sort of change.
X
We all crossed ourselves and began to enter the forest. We entered timidly and hesitantly, but each of us concealed his timidity from the others. We all simply agreed to call out to each other as often as we could. However, there was no great need for that, because nobody went very far in, and, as if by chance, we all kept crowding towards the edge and strung ourselves out along it. Only Apollinary proved braver than the rest and went a little further into the depths; he was concerned with finding the most remote and frightening spot, where his declaiming could produce the most terrible impression on the listening girls. But Apollinary had no sooner disappeared from sight than the forest resounded with his piercing, frenzied cry. No one could imagine what danger Apollinary had met with, but everybody abandoned him and ran headlong out of the forest to the clearing, and then, without looking back, ran fur
ther down the road home. All the Annushkas fled, and all the Moskas, and after them, still crying out from fear, sped our pedagogue himself; and my little brother and I were left alone.
There was no one left of all our company: not only the people, but even the horse, following the inhuman example of the people, abandoned us. Frightened by their cries, it tossed its head and, turning away from the forest, raced home, scattering over the potholes and bumps whatever was still left in the cart.
This was not a retreat, it was a full and most shameful rout, because it was accompanied by the loss not only of the train, but of all good sense, and we children were thrown on the mercy of fate.
God knows what we would have to endure in our helplessly orphaned condition, which was the more dangerous because we couldn’t find the way home by ourselves, and our footgear consisted of soft goatskin boots with thin soles, not at all convenient for walking three miles over sodden paths, on which there were still cold puddles in many places. To complete the disaster, before my brother and I had time to fully realize all the horror of our situation, something rumbled through the forest and then a breath of cold dampness blew from the direction of the stream.
We looked across the hollow and saw, racing through the sky from the direction where our road lay and where our retinue had shamefully fled, a huge cloud laden with spring rain and the first spring thunder, when young girls wash themselves from silver spoons, so as to become whiter than silver themselves.
The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories Page 58
