The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories

“Terrible, nanny.”

“Well, and what I’ll tell you now is still more terrible.”

Here is one of her stories about the toupee master Arkady, a sensitive and brave young man, who was very close to her heart.

IV

Arkady “did the hair and makeup” only for actresses. For men there was another hairdresser, and Arkady, if he occasionally went to “the men’s half,” did so only in cases when the count himself gave orders to “paint somebody up in a very noble way.” The main particularity of this artist’s touch with makeup was that he had certain notions, owing to which he could endow faces with the most subtle and diverse expressions.

“It happened that they would call him,” said Lyubov Onisimovna, “and say: ‘There should be such and such an impression on the face.’ Arkady would step back, tell the actor or actress to stand or sit before him, cross his arms on his chest, and think. And meanwhile he himself was the handsomest of the handsome, because he was of average height, but you couldn’t say how well built, a fine and proud little nose, and his eyes—angelic, kind, and a thick lock hung down beautifully over his eyes, so that he used to look as if from behind a misty cloud.”

In short, the toupee artist was handsome and “pleased everybody.”

“The count himself” also liked him and “distinguished him from everybody else, had him charmingly dressed, but kept him in the greatest strictness.” Not for anything did he want Arkady to cut, shave, and comb anyone but him, and for that he always kept him by his dressing room, and, except for the theater, Arkady could not go anywhere.

He was not even allowed to go to church for confession or communion, because the count himself did not believe in God, and could not bear the clergy, and once at Easter he set his wolfhounds on the priests from the Boris and Gleb cathedral as they carried the cross.^*

The count, in Lyubov Onisimovna’s words, was so terribly ugly from his habitual angrying that he resembled all beasts at once. But Arkady was able to endow even that beastlikeness, at least for a time, with such an impression, that when the count sat in his box in the evening, he even seemed grander than many.

Yet what the count’s nature lacked most, to his great vexation, was precisely grandeur and a “military impression.”

Thus, so that nobody else could make use of the services of such an inimitable artist as Arkady, he sat “all his life without leave and never in his born days saw money in his hands.” And he was then already over twenty-five, and Lyubov Onisimovna was going on nineteen. They were acquainted, of course, and there took place between them what happens at that age, that is, they fell in love with each other. But they could not speak of their love otherwise than in front of other people, in distant hints during makeup sessions.

To see each other alone was completely impossible and even unthinkable …

“We actresses,” Lyubov Onisimovna used to say, “were kept in the same way that wet nurses are kept in noble families; we were looked after by older women who had children, and if, God forbid, anything happened with one of us, those women’s children were all subjected to a terrible tyrannizing.”

The rule of chastity could be violated only by “himself”—the one who had established it.

V

Lyubov Onisimovna was at that time not only in the flower of her virginal beauty, but also in the most interesting moment in the development of her versatile talent: she “sang in potpourri choruses,” danced “the lead part in The Chinese Farm Girl,” and, feeling a calling for the tragic, “knew all the roles from looking.”

Precisely what years these were, I don’t know, but it so happened that the sovereign (whether Alexander Pavlovich or Nikolai Pavlovich, I can’t say),⁵ was passing through Orel and spent the night there, and in the evening was expected to be at Count Kamensky’s theater.

The count invited all the nobility to his theater (there was no paying for seats), and the performance put on was the very best. Lyubov Onisimovna was supposed to sing in a “potpourri” and dance in The Chinese Farm Girl, and then suddenly, during the last rehearsal, a flat fell and hurt the foot of the actress who was to perform “the duchesse de Bourblan” in the play.

I have never come across a role with that name anywhere, but Lyubov Onisimovna pronounced it in precisely that way.

The carpenters who dropped the flat were sent to the stable to be punished, and the injured actress was carried to her closet, but there was no one to play the role of the duchesse de Bourblan.

“Here,” Lyubov Onisimovna told me, “I volunteered, because I liked very much how the duchesse de Bourblan begged forgiveness at her father’s feet and died with her hair let down. And I myself had such wonderfully long, light brown hair, and Arkady used to do it up—a lovely sight.”