The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories

The guard at the palace was mounted by a company of the Izmailovsky Regiment, commanded by a young officer of brilliant education and very good standing in society, Nikolai Ivanovich Miller (later a full general and director of the lycée).¹ He was a man of the so-called “humane” tendency, a fact which had long been noted by his superiors and which had been slightly detrimental to his career.

In fact, Miller was a good and trustworthy officer, and the palace guard at that time presented no danger. It was a most quiet and untroubled period. Nothing was required of the palace guard except a punctual standing at their posts, and yet right then, during Captain Miller’s turn on guard at the palace, there took place a highly extraordinary and alarming incident, which is now barely remembered by its few surviving contemporaries.

III

At first everything went well in the guard: the posts were distributed, people were placed in them, and everything was in perfect order. The sovereign, Nikolai Pavlovich,² was in good health, took a drive in the evening, returned home, and went to bed. The palace, too, fell asleep. A most quiet night set in. The guardroom was silent. Captain Miller pinned his white handkerchief to the high and always traditionally greasy morocco back of the officer’s chair and sat down to while away the time over a book.

N. I. Miller had always been a passionate reader, and therefore he was not bored, but read and did not notice how the night slipped by; but suddenly, towards two o’clock in the morning, he was roused by a terrible disturbance: before him the sergeant on duty appears, all pale, gripped by fear, and babbles rapidly:

“Disaster, sir, disaster!”

“What is it?!”

“A terrible misfortune has befallen us!”

N. I. Miller leaped up in indescribable alarm and was barely able to find out clearly what the “disaster” and “terrible misfortune” consisted in.

IV

The matter consisted in the following: a sentry, a private of the Izmailovsky Regiment by the name of Postnikov, standing watch outside of what is now the Jordan entrance,³ heard a man drowning in a pool filled by the Neva just opposite that place and desperately calling for help.

Private Postnikov, a former house serf, was a very nervous and very sensitive man. He had long been listening to the distant cries and moans of the drowning man and was petrified by them. In terror he looked this way and that over the whole expanse of the embankment visible to him, and neither here, nor on the Neva, as ill luck would have it, did he catch sight of a single living soul.

There was no one who could help the drowning man, and he was sure to go under …

And yet the sinking man was putting up a terribly long and stubborn struggle.

It seemed there was only one thing left for him—not to waste his strength, but to go to the bottom—and yet no! His exhausted moans and cries for help first broke off and ceased, then began to ring out again, and each time closer and closer to the palace embankment. It was clear that the man was not lost yet and was moving in the right direction, straight towards the light of the streetlamps, though, of course, all the same he would not save himself, because the Jordan ice hole lay precisely in his way. There he would duck under the ice and—the end … Now he is quiet again, and a moment later he is splashing and moaning once more: “Help, help!” And now he is already so close that you can even hear the lapping of the waves as he splashes …

Private Postnikov began to realize that it would be extremely easy to save this man. If he runs out onto the ice now, the drowning man is sure to be right there. Throw him a rope, or reach him a pole, or hand him his gun, and he’s saved. He’s so close that he can take hold of it and climb out. But Postnikov remembers his duty and his oath: he knows that he is a sentry, and a sentry dare not desert his sentry box for anything or under any pretext.

On the other hand, Postnikov’s heart is very recalcitrant: it aches, it pounds, it sinks … He’d like to tear it out and throw it under his own feet—so troubled he is by the moans and howls … It is a dreadful thing to hear another man perishing, and not give the perishing one help, when, as a matter of fact, it is perfectly possible to do so, because the sentry box is not going to run away and nothing else harmful is going to happen. “Shouldn’t I run down there, eh? … They won’t see me … Ah, Lord, only let it be over! Again he’s moaning …”