The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories

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.