The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories

Three years went by that way, and all that time God’s mercy was upon me, that I was not brought back to the theater, but stayed on in the calves’ shed with Auntie Drosida as her helper. And it was very good for me there, because I pitied the woman, and when she happened not to drink too much at night, I liked to listen to her. And she still remembered how our people, and the head valet himself, had killed the old count—because they could no longer suffer his infernal cruelty. But I still didn’t drink at all, and I did a lot for Auntie Drosida, and with pleasure: those little brutes were like children to me. I got so used to the little calves that, when they took one I had milk fed to be slaughtered for the table, I’d make a cross over him and weep for three days afterwards. I was no good for the theater anymore, because my feet had gone bad on me, they hobbled. Before, I’d had a very light step, but after Arkady Ilyich carried me off unconscious in the cold, I probably chilled my feet and no longer had any strength in the toes for dancing. I put on the same calico as Drosida, and God knows how long I’d have lived in such dreariness, when suddenly one time I was there in the shed before evening: the sun was setting and I was unreeling yarn by the window, and suddenly a small stone falls through my window, and it’s all wrapped in a piece of paper.

XVI

I looked this way and that, I looked out the window—nobody was there.

“Most likely,” I thought, “somebody beyond the fence outside threw it and missed, and it landed here with me and the old woman.” And I thought to myself: “Should I unwrap the paper or not? Seems better to unwrap it, because something’s surely written on it. And maybe somebody or other needs it, and I could figure it out and keep the secret, and throw the note with the stone to the right person in the same way.”

I unwrapped it and began to read, and couldn’t believe my eyes …

XVII

There was written:

“My faithful Lyuba! I fought and served the sovereign and shed my blood more than once, and for that I was raised to officer’s rank and granted nobility. Now I have come as a free man on leave to recover from my wounds. I am staying at an inn in the Pushkarsky quarter, and tomorrow I will put on my medals and crosses and appear before the count and bring all the money given me for treatment, five hundred roubles, and I will ask to buy you out, in hopes that we can be married before the altar of the Most High Creator.”

“And further,” Lyubov Onisimovna continued, always with suppressed emotion, “he wrote that ‘whatever calamity may have befallen you and whatever you have been subjected to, I count it as your suffering, and not as sin or weakness, and leave it to God, feeling nothing but respect for you.’ And it was signed: ‘Arkady Ilyich.’ ”

Lyubov Onisimovna burned the letter at once in the stove and did not tell anyone about it, not even the old woman in calico, but only prayed to God all night, without uttering a word about herself, but all for him, because, she said “though he wrote that he was now an officer, with crosses and wounds, all the same I couldn’t possibly imagine that the count would treat him differently than before.

“To put it simply, I was afraid they’d flog him again.”

XVIII

Early in the morning, Lyubov Onisimovna took the calves out into the sun and began to feed them with milk-soaked crusts at the tubs, when it suddenly came to her hearing that “in the open,” outside the fence, people were hurrying somewhere and talking loudly among themselves as they ran.

“I didn’t hear a word of what they were talking about,” she said, “but it was as if their words cut my heart. And just then the dung collector, Filipp, drove through the gate, and I said to him: ‘Filyushka, dear! Did you hear what these people passing by are talking about so curiously?’

“And he replies: ‘It’s them going to the Pushkarsky quarter, to see how the innkeeper murdered a sleeping officer during the night. Slit his throat right through,’ he says, ‘and took five hundred roubles in cash. They caught him all bloody with the money on him.’

“As soon as he told me that, I fell down bang on the spot …

“Here’s what happened: the innkeeper murdered Arkady Ilyich … and they buried him here, in this same grave where we’re sitting now … Yes, he’s now here under us, lying under this ground … And why do you think I keep going for walks here with you … I don’t want to look there,” she pointed to the gloomy and gray ruins, “but to sit here next to him and … take a little drop to commemorate his soul …”

XIX

Here Lyubov Onisimovna stopped and, considering her story told, took a small vial from her pocket and “commemorated,” or “sipped,” but I asked her:

“And who buried the famous toupee artist here?”