The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories

“You’ll get used to it here,” they say. “Change your religion, and we’ll get you married.”

“That,” said Lefty, “can never be.”

“Why so?”

“Because,” he says, “our Russian faith is the most correct one, and as our anceptors believed, so the descenders should believe.”

“You don’t know our faith,” say the Englishmen. “We’re of the same Christian religion and adhere to the same Gospel.”

“The Gospel,” says Lefty, “is indeed the same for all, only our books are thicker next to yours, and our faith has more in it.”

“What makes you think so?”

“About that,” he says, “we have all the obvious proofs.”

“Such as?”

“Such as,” he says, “that we have God-working icons and tomb-exuding heads and relics, and you have nothing, and, except for Sunday, you don’t even have any extraneous feast days, and for another reason—though we might be married legally, it would be embarrassing for me to live with an Englishwoman.”

“How come?” they ask. “Don’t scorn them: our women also dress neatly and make good housewives.”

And Lefty says:

“I don’t know them.”

The Englishmen reply:

“That doesn’t matter. You can get to know them: we’ll arrange a grandezvous for you.”

Lefty became abashed.

“Why addle girls’ heads for nothing?” he says. And he declined. “A grandezvous is for gentlefolk, it’s not fitting for us, and if they find out back home in Tula, they’ll make a great laughingstock of me.”

The Englishmen became curious:

“And if it’s without a grandezvous,” they said, “what do you do in such cases, so as to make an agreeable choice?”

Lefty explained our situation to them.

“With us,” he says, “when a man wants to display thorough-going intentions regarding a girl, he sends a talker woman, and once she makes a preposition, they politely go to the house together and look the girl over, not in secret, but with all the familiality.”

They understood, but replied that with them there were no talker women and no such custom, and Lefty said:

“That’s even better, because if you take up such business, it must be with thorough-going intentions, and since I feel none at all towards a foreign nation, why addle girls’ heads?”

He pleased the Englishmen with these reasonings of his, and they again set about patting him pleasantly on the shoulders and knees, and then asked:

“We’d like to know just one thing out of curiosity: what reproach-able qualities have you noticed in our girls and why are you devoiding them?”

Here Lefty replied quite openly:

“I don’t reproach them, and the only thing I don’t like is that the clothes on them somehow flutter, and you can’t figure out what it is they’re wearing and out of what necessity; first there’s some one thing, then something else pinned on below, and some sort of socks on their arms. Just like a sapajou ape in a velveteen cape.”

The Englishmen laughed and said:

“What obstacle is that to you?”

“Obstacle,” replied Lefty, “it’s not. Only I’m afraid I’d be ashamed to watch and wait for her to get herself out of it all.”

“Can it be,” they said, “that your fashion is better?”

“Our fashion in Tula,” he replies, “is simple: each girl wears her own lace, and even grand ladies wear our lace.”¹²

They also showed him to their ladies, and there they served him tea and asked:

“Why do you wince?”

He replied that we are not used to it so sweet.

Then they gave him a lump of sugar to suck Russian-style.

It seemed to them that it would be worse that way, but he said:

“To our taste it’s tastier.”

There was nothing the Englishmen could do to throw him off, so as to tempt him by their life, and they only persuaded him to stay for a short time, during which they would take him to various factories and show him all their art.

“And then,” they say, “we’ll put you on our ship and deliver you alive to Petersburg.”

To that he agreed.

XVI

The Englishmen took charge of Lefty and sent the Russian courier back to Russia. Though the courier was a man of rank and knew various languages, they were not interested in him, but in Lefty they were interested—and they started taking him around and showing him everything. He looked at all their industries—metalworking shops and soap-rope factories—and liked all their arrangements very much, especially with regard to the workers’ keeping. Each of their workers ate his fill, was dressed not in rags, but in his own good jacket, and was shod in thick boots with iron hobnails, so that his feet would never run up against anything; he worked, not under the lash, but with training and with his own understanding. In plain view before each of them hung the multipeclation table, and under his hand was a rub-out board: whatever a master does, he looks at the multipeclation table and checks it with his understanding, and then writes one thing on the board, rubs out another, and brings it to precision: whatever’s written in the numbers is what turns out in reality. And when a holiday comes, they get together in pairs, take their sticks, and go promenading nobly and decorously, as is proper.