The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories

by Nikolai Leskov

  “Why won’t it be of use?”

  “Nobody will understand it, sir, because for that nothing else but a natural gift will do, and more than once I’ve had the same experience, that I teach, but it’s all in vain. But, excuse me, we’ll get to that later.”

  When my fame was noised around the fairs, that I could see right through a horse, a certain remount officer, a prince, offered me a hundred roubles:

  “Reveal the secret of your understanding, brother,” he says. “It’s worth a lot of money.”

  And I reply:

  “I have no secret, I have a natural gift for it.”

  But he persists:

  “Reveal to me, anyway, how you understand these things. And so you don’t think I want it just like that—here’s a hundred roubles for you.”

  What to do? I shrugged my shoulders, tied the money up in a rag, and said:

  “All right, then, I’ll tell you what I know, but please learn and follow it; and if you don’t learn and you get nothing useful from it, I won’t answer for it.”

  He was content with that, anyway, and said:

  “How much I learn is not your problem, just tell me.”

  “The very first thing,” I say, “if it’s a matter of knowing a horse and what goes on inside it, is that you’ve got to have a good position for examining it and never depart from it. From the first glance you have to look intelligently at the head and then at the whole horse down to the tail, and not paw it all over the way officers do. They touch it on the withers, the forelock, the nose bridge, the chest artery, the breastbone, or whatever they land on, and all senselessly. Horse dealers love cavalry officers terribly for this pawing. When a horse dealer spots such a military pawer, he immediately starts twisting and twirling the horse, turning it in all directions, and whichever part he doesn’t want to show, he won’t show for anything, and it’s there that the flaw lies, and there’s no end to these flaws. Say a horse is lop-eared—they cut away a strip of skin on the crown, pull the edges together, sew them up, and paint the seam over. The horse’s ears perk up, but not for long: the skin stretches and the ears droop again. If the ears are too big, they cut them, and to make them stand up, they put little props in them. If somebody’s looking for a match for his horse, and if, for instance, his horse has a star on its forehead, the dealers make sure to fix him up with another that has the same star: they rub the hide with pumice, or apply a hot baked turnip to the right spot, so that white hair will grow, and it does at once, only if you bother to look closely, hair that’s been grown that way is always slightly longer than normal, and it frizzes up like a little tuft. Horse dealers offend against the public even more over eyes: some horses have little hollows above their eyes, and it’s not pretty, but the dealer punctures the skin with a pin and then puts his lips to the place and blows, and the skin inflates, and the eye looks more fresh and pretty. That’s easy to do, because a horse likes the feel of warm breath on its eyes, and it stands there without moving, but then the air leaks out and there are hollows above the eyes again. There’s one remedy for that: to feel around the bone and see whether air is coming out. But it’s still funnier when they sell blind horses. That’s a real comedy. Some little officer, for instance, is stealing up to the horse’s eye with a straw, to test whether the horse can see the straw, but he himself doesn’t see that, just when the horse should shake its head, the dealer punches it in the belly or the side with his fist. Or another is stroking the horse quietly, but has a little nail in his glove, and while he seems to be stroking it, he pricks it.” And I explained this to the remount officer ten times more than I’ve been telling you now, but none of it proved any use to him: the next day I see he’s bought such horses that one nag’s worse than the other, and then he calls me over to look and says:

  “Come, brother, look at my expert knowledge of horses.”

  I glanced, laughed, and replied that there was nothing to look at:

  “This one’s got fleshy shoulders—it’ll catch its hooves in the dirt; this one tucks its hoof under its belly when it lies down—in a year at most it’ll work itself up a hernia; and this one, when it eats oats, stamps its foreleg and knocks its knee against the trough”—and I criticized his whole purchase away like that, and it came out that I was right.

  The next day the prince says:

  “No, Ivan, I really can’t understand your gift. You’d better work for me as a conosoor and do the choosing, and I’ll just pay out the money.”

  I agreed and lived excellently for a whole three years, not like a hired servant, but more like a friend and helper, and if these outings hadn’t got the better of me, I might even have saved up some capital for myself, because, in remounting practice, whenever a breeder comes to make the acquaintance of a remount officer, he sends a trusty man to the conosoor, so as to cajole him as much as possible, because breeders know that the real power is not with the remount officer, but in his having a real conosoor with him. And I was, as I told you, a natural conosoor and fulfilled that natural duty conscientiously: not for anything would I deceive the man I worked for. And my prince felt that and had great respect for me, and we lived together with full openness in everything. If he happened to lose at cards somewhere during the night, he would get up in the morning and come to me in the stable, still in his robe, and say:

  “Well, now, my almost half-esteemed Ivan Severyanych! How are things with you?” He always joked that way, calling me “almost half-esteemed,” though, as you’ll see, he esteemed me fully.

  I knew what it signified when he came with such a joke, and I’d reply:

  “Not bad. Things are fine with me, thank God, but I wonder about Your Serenity—how are your circumstances?”

  “Mine,” he says, “are so vile, you couldn’t even ask for worse.”

  “What you mean to say, I suppose, is that you blew it all again yesterday, like the other time?”

  “A good guess, my half-esteemed fellow,” he replies. “I blew it, sir, I blew it.”

  “And how much lighter is Your Honor now?” I ask.

  He would tell me at once how many thousands he had lost, and I would shake my head and say:

  “Your Serenity needs a good spanking, but there’s nobody to do it.”

  He would laugh and say:

  “That’s just it, there’s nobody.”

  “Lie down here on my cot,” I say, “and I’ll put a clean little sack under your head and whip you myself.”

  He, naturally, starts getting around me, so that I’ll lend him money for the revanche.

  “No,” he says, “better not thrash me, but give me some of our spending money for a little revanche: I’ll go, win everything back, and beat them all.”

  “Well, as to that,” I reply, “I humbly thank you, playing is one thing, winning back is another.”

  “Hah, you thank me!” he begins by laughing, but then he gets angry: “Well, I’ll thank you not to forget yourself,” he says. “Stop playing the guardian over me and bring me the money.”

  We asked Ivan Severyanych if he ever gave his prince money for the revanche.

  “Never,” he said. “I either deceived him, saying I’d spent all the money on oats, or I simply quit the premises.”

  “I suppose he got angry with you for that?”

  “That he did, sir. He’d announce straight off: ‘It’s all over, sir. You no longer work for me, my half-esteemed fellow.’

  “I’d reply:

  “ ‘Well, that’s just fine. My passport, please.’

  “ ‘Very well, sir,’ he says. ‘Kindly make your preparations: you’ll get your passport tomorrow.’

  “Only there was never any more talk about that tomorrow between us. In no more than an hour or so, he’d come to me in a totally different state of mind and say:

  “ ‘I thank you, my greatly insignificant fellow, that you stood firm and did not give me money for the revanche.’

  “And he always had such feelings about these things that, if anyt
hing happened to me during my outings, he also made allowances for me like a brother.”

  “And what happened to you?”

  “I already explained to you that I used to have these outings.”

  “And what do you mean by ‘outings’?”

  “I’d go carousing, sir. Having learned about drinking vodka, I avoided drinking it every day and never just took it in moderation, but if I happened to be troubled, then I’d get a terrible zeal for drinking, and I’d immediately go on an outing for several days and disappear. And you’d never notice why it came over me. For instance, we’d let go of some horses, and it’s not that they’re brothers to you, but I’d miss them and start drinking. Especially if you send away a very handsome horse, then the scoundrel just keeps flashing in your eyes, so you hide from him like some sort of obsession and go on an outing.”

  “Meaning you’d start drinking?”

  “Yes, sir, I’d go and drink.”

  “And for how long?”

  “Mmm … they’re not all the same, sir, these outings: sometimes you drink until you’ve drunk up everything, and either somebody gives you a beating, or you give somebody a beating, but another time it turns out shorter, you just get taken to the police station or sleep it off in a ditch, and it’s enough, the mood goes away. On such occasions I went by the rules, and if I happened to feel I needed an outing, I’d go to the prince and say:

  “ ‘Thus and so, Your Serenity, kindly take the money from me, and I’ll disappear.’

  “He never argued, he’d just take the money, and sometimes ask:

  “ ‘Does Your Honor contemplate being at it for a long time?’

  “So I’d give him a reply depending on how zealous I felt, for a big outing or a short one.

  “And I’d leave, and he’d run things by himself and wait until my outing was over, and it all went quite well; only I was terribly sick of this weakness of mine, and I resolved suddenly to get rid of it; and it was then that I went on such a last outing that even now it’s frightening to remember it.”

  XI

  We naturally insisted that Ivan Severyanych crown his amiability by telling us all about this new ill-fated episode in his life, and he, in his goodness, of course did not refuse us that, and of his “last outing” told the following:

  We had a mare named Dido that we bought from a stud farm, a young golden bay for an officer’s saddle. A marvelous beauty she was: pretty little head, comely eyes, nostrils delicate and flared—just breathe away; light mane; chest sitting smartly, like a boat, between her shoulders; supple in the flanks; and her legs light in their white stockings, and she flings them out as if she’s playing … In short, if you were a fancier and had an understanding of beauty, the sight of such a creature could make you ponder. As for me, she was so much to my liking that I never even left her stable and kept caressing her from joy. I’d brush her and wipe her all over with a white handkerchief, so that there wasn’t a speck of dust anywhere on her coat, and I’d even kiss her right on the forehead, where her golden hair turned into a little swirl … At that time we had two fairs going on at once, one in L——, the other in K——, and the prince and I separated: I did one, and he went to the other. And suddenly I received a letter from him, saying: “Send such-and-such horses and Dido to me here.” I didn’t know why he was sending for my beauty, in whom my fancier’s eyes rejoiced. But I thought, of course, that he had traded or sold my darling to someone, or, still more likely, had lost her at cards … And so I sent Dido off with the stablemen and started pining away terribly and longed to go on an outing. And my situation at that moment was quite unusual: I told you I had made it a rule that, whenever the zeal for an outing came over me, I would present myself to the prince, give him all my money, since I always had large sums on my hands, and say: “I’m going to disappear for this many or that many days.” Well, but how was I going to arrange it this time, when my prince wasn’t with me? And so I thought to myself: “No, I’m not going to drink anymore, because my prince isn’t here, and it’s impossible for me to go on a regular outing, because I have no one to give my money to, and I’ve got a considerable sum on me, more than five thousand.” So I decided it was not to be done, and I held firmly to that decision, and did not give way to my zeal for going on an outing and disappearing good and proper, but all the same I felt no weakening of that desire, but, on the contrary, craved more and more to go on an outing. And, finally, I came to be filled with a single thought: how can I arrange things so as both to fulfill my zeal for an outing and to safeguard the prince’s money? And with that aim I began hiding it and kept hiding it in the most incredible places, where it would never occur to anyone to put money … I thought: “What to do? It’s clear that I can’t control myself. I’ll put the money in a trustworthy place, to keep it safe, and then I’ll do my zeal, I’ll go on an outing.” Only I was overcome by perplexity: where should I hide this cursed money? Wherever I put it, the moment I stepped away from the place, the thought would at once come to my head that someone was stealing it. I’d go and quickly take it again and hide it again … I simply wore myself out hiding it, in haylofts, and in cellars, and under the eaves, and in other such unsuitable hiding places, and as soon as I stepped away, it immediately seemed to me that someone had seen me hide it and would certainly find it, and I would go back again, and get it again, and carry it around with me, and again think: “No, basta, I’m clearly not fated to fulfill my zeal this time.” And suddenly a divine thought occurred to me: it’s the devil who keeps tormenting me with this passion, so I’ll go and drive the scoundrel away with holiness! And I went to an early liturgy, prayed, and as I was leaving the church, I saw the Last Judgment painted on the wall, and there in a corner the devil in Gehenna being beaten with flails by angels. I stopped, looked, and prayed zealously to the holy angels, and, spitting on my fist, shoved it into the devil’s mug.

  “Here’s a fig for you, buy what’ll do, and a lot of it, too”—and after that I suddenly calmed down completely and, having given all the necessary orders at home, went to a tavern to have tea … And there in the tavern I saw some rascal standing among the customers. The most futile of futile men. I had seen the man before, too, and considered him some sort of charlatan or clown, because he kept dragging himself around to the fairs and begging gentlemen for a handout in French. He was supposedly of the nobility and had served in the army, but had squandered all he had and gambled it away at cards, and now went around begging … There, in that tavern I came to, the waiters wanted to throw him out, but he refused to leave and stood there saying:

  “Do you know who I am? I’m no equal of yours, I had my own serfs, and I’ve whipped a great many fine fellows like you in the stable just because I felt like it, and if I’ve lost everything, it’s because there was some special divine will for it, and there’s a seal of wrath upon me, which is why nobody dares to touch me.”

  They didn’t believe him and laughed at him, but he told them how he used to live, and rode around in carriages, and drove all the civilians out of the public garden, and once came naked to the governor’s wife, “and now,” he says, “I’ve been cursed for my willfulness, and my whole nature has turned to stone, and I have to wet it constantly, so give me vodka! I’ve got no money to pay for it, but instead I’ll eat the glass.”

  One of the customers ordered vodka for him, so as to watch how he would eat the glass. He tossed off the vodka at once, and, as promised, honestly began to crunch the glass with his teeth and ate it right in front of us, and everybody was amazed at it and laughed heartily. But I felt sorry for him, because here was a nobleman who, from his zeal for drink, would even sacrifice his insides. I thought he should be given something to rinse the glass out of his guts, and I ordered him another shot at my expense, but I didn’t make him eat the glass. I said: never mind, don’t eat it. He was touched by that and gave me his hand.