The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories

“What’s the matter, auntie? I don’t want to at all.”

“No, you lie down, lie down,” Katerina Lvovna said in a changed, unsteady voice, and, picking the boy up under the arms, she laid him at the head of the bed.

Just then Fedya screamed hysterically: he had seen the pale, barefoot Sergei come in.

Katerina Lvovna put her hand over the frightened child’s mouth, gaping in terror, and shouted:

“Quick now, hold him straight so he doesn’t thrash!”

Sergei held Fedya by the arms and legs, and Katerina Lvovna, in one movement, covered the sufferer’s childish face with a big down pillow and pressed it to him with her firm, resilient breasts.

For about four minutes there was a sepulchral silence in the room.

“It’s all over,” Katerina Lvovna whispered and was just getting up to put everything in order when the walls of the quiet house that concealed so many crimes shook with deafening blows: the windows rattled, the floors swayed, the chains of the hanging icon lamps quivered and sent fantastic shadows wandering over the walls.

Sergei trembled and broke out running for all he was worth; Katerina Lvovna rushed after him, and the noise and din followed them. It seemed as though some unearthly powers were shaking the sinful house to its foundations.

Katerina Lvovna was afraid that, driven by terror, Sergei would run outside and give himself away by his fright; but he dashed straight upstairs.

Having run up the stairs, Sergei struck his head against the half-open door in the darkness and fell back down with a moan, totally crazed by superstitious fear.

“Zinovy Borisych, Zinovy Borisych!” he muttered, flying headlong down and dragging Katerina Lvovna with him, having knocked her off her feet.

“Where?” she asked.

“He just went flying over us with a sheet of iron. There, there he is again! Aie, aie!” Sergei cried. “It’s thundering, it’s thundering again!”

By now it was quite clear that many hands were banging on the windows from outside and someone was breaking down the door.

“Fool! Stand up!” cried Katerina Lvovna, and with these words she herself went flitting back to Fedya, arranged his dead head on the pillow in a most natural sleeping position, and with a firm hand unlocked the door through which a crowd of people was about to crash.

The spectacle was frightening. Katerina Lvovna looked over the heads of the crowd besieging the porch, and there were whole ranks of unknown people climbing the high fence into the yard, and outside there was a hum of human voices.

Before Katerina Lvovna managed to figure anything out, the people surrounding the porch overran her and flung her inside.

XII

This whole alarm came about in the following way: for the vigil before a major feast in all the churches of the town where Katerina Lvovna lived, which, though provincial, was rather large and a trading center, a numberless multitude of people always gathered, and in the church named for that feast, even the yard outside had no room for an apple to fall. Here a choir consisting of young merchants usually sang, led by a special director who also belonged to the lovers of vocal art.

Our people are pious, zealous for God’s church, and, as a result of that, are to a certain extent artistic people: churchly splendor and harmonious “organ-drone” singing constitute one of their loftiest and purest delights. Wherever the choir sings, almost half of our town gathers, especially the young tradesmen: shopkeepers, errand boys, factory workers, and the owners themselves, with their better halves—everybody packs into one church; everybody wants to stand if only outside on the porch or by the window, in scorching heat or freezing cold, to hear how the octave drones and the ecstatic tenor pulls off the most intricate grace notes.

The Izmailovs’ parish church was dedicated to the Entrance of the Mother of God into the Temple, and therefore, on the eve of this feast, just at the time of the episode with Fedya described above, all the young folk of the town were in that church and, on leaving in a noisy crowd, were discussing the virtues of a well-known tenor and the accidental blunders of an equally well-known bass.

But not everyone was interested in these vocal questions: there were people in the crowd who were concerned with other things.

“You know, lads, strange things are told about the young Izmailov woman,” said a young mechanic, brought from Petersburg by a merchant for his steam mill, as they approached the Izmailovs’ house. “They say,” he went on, “that she and their clerk Seryozhka make love every other minute …”

“Everybody knows that,” replied a fleece-lined blue nankeen coat. “And, by the way, she wasn’t in church tonight.”

“Church, ha! The nasty wench has turned so vile, she has no fear of God, or conscience, or other people’s eyes.”

“Look, there’s light in their place,” the mechanic noticed, pointing to a bright strip between the shutters.

“Peek through the crack, see what they’re up to,” several voices called out.