So on coming to town I went straight to her, to this good lady, and said:
“My dear Evgenia Semyonovna, I am going to stay with you.”
She replies:
“Well, of course, I’m very glad. But why aren’t you going to the prince’s place?”
“Ah,” I say, “is he here in town?”
“Yes, he is,” she replies. “It’s already the second week he’s been here, setting up some kind of business.”
“What kind of business?” I ask.
“He wants to lease a fulling mill,” she says.
“Lord,” I say, “what will he think up next?”
“Why,” she says, “is there something wrong with it?”
“Not at all,” I say, “only it surprises me a little.”
She smiles.
“No,” she says, “but here’s something that will really surprise you: the prince has sent me a letter asking me to receive him today, because he wants to have a look at his daughter.”
“And you, my dearest Evgenia Semyonovna,” I say, “are going to let him?”
She shrugs her shoulders and replies:
“Why not? Let him come and look at his daughter”—and with that she sighs and turns thoughtful; she sits with her head lowered, and she’s still so young, fair and full-bodied, and her manners are quite unlike Grusha’s … who knows nothing besides her “ruby-jewel,” while this one’s quite different … I became jealous for her.
“Oh,” I think, “while he’s here looking at his child, his greedy heart may notice you as well! Not much good will come of that for my Grushenka.” And in such reflections I was sitting in Evgenia Semyonovna’s nursery, where she had told the nanny to serve me tea, when I suddenly heard the doorbell, and the maid ran in all joyful and said to the nanny:
“Our dear prince has come!”
I was about to get up and go to the kitchen, but the nanny Tatyana Yakovlevna was a talkative old woman from Moscow: she passionately loved to tell all and on account of that didn’t want to be deprived of a listener, so she said:
“Don’t leave, Ivan Golovanych, let’s go to the dressing room there behind the wardrobes, she’ll never bring him there, and we can chat some more.”
I agreed, because, given Tatyana Yakovlevna’s talkativeness, I hoped to find out something useful for Grusha from her, and since Evgenia Semyonovna had sent me a little lodicolone bottle of rum to have with tea, but by then I was no longer drinking, I thought: “If I lace the blessed old woman’s tea with a bit of chat from this little bottle, maybe, in her goodness, she’ll let slip to me something she wouldn’t tell otherwise.”
We left the nursery and went to sit behind the wardrobes, and that little dressing room was so narrow it was more like a corridor with a door at the end, and that door gave directly onto the room where Evgenia Semyonovna was receiving the prince, and even right onto the sofa they were sitting on. In short, all that separated me from them was that closed door with its cloth curtain on the other side, so that I heard everything just like I was sitting in the same room with them.
As soon as he comes in, the prince says:
“Greetings, my old friend, tried and true!”
And she replies:
“Greetings, Prince! To what do I owe the pleasure?” And he to her:
“Of that we shall speak later, but first let me greet you and allow me to kiss you on your little head”—and I hear him give her a smacking kiss on the head and ask about their daughter. Evgenia Semyonovna replies that she is at home.
“Is she well?”
“Quite well,” she says.
“And grown, most likely?”
Evgenia Semyonovna laughs and replies:
“Naturally, she’s grown.”
The prince asks:
“You’ll show her to me, I hope?”
“Why not?” she replies. “With pleasure”—and she gets up, goes to the nursery, and calls for this same nanny, Tatyana Yakovlevna, with whom I’m having tea.
“Nanny,” she says, “bring Lyudochka to the prince.”
Tatyana Yakovlevna spits, puts the saucer down on the table, and says:
“Oh, dash it all! You just sit down, in the right appetite for talking with a man, and they’re sure to interrupt you, they never let you enjoy anything the way you’d like to!” And she quickly covers me with her mistress’s skirts, which are hanging on the walls, and says: “Sit here”—and she herself goes out with the girl, and I’m left there alone behind the wardrobes, and suddenly I hear the prince kiss the girl a couple of times and dandle her on his knee and say:
“My anfan, would you like to go for a ride in the carriage?”
The girl makes no reply. He says to Evgenia Semyonovna:
“Zhe voo pree, please let her and the nanny go out for a ride in my carriage.”
She also says something to him in French, what for and poorkwa, but he says something like “It’s absolutely necessary,” and so they exchange words some three times, and then Evgenia Semyonovna reluctantly says to the nanny:
“Get her dressed and go for a ride.”
They left, and these two remained alone, with me there listening in secret, because I couldn’t come out from behind the wardrobes, and I thought to myself: “My time has come, and now I’ll really discover if anyone has bad thoughts against Grusha.”
XVI
Having come to this decision to eavesdrop, I didn’t content myself with that, but wanted to see what I could with my own eyes, and I succeeded in that as well: I quietly climbed onto a stool, and at once found a little chink above the door and put my greedy eye to it. I see the prince sitting on the sofa, and the lady standing by the window and probably looking at her child being put in the carriage.
The carriage drives off; she turns and says:
“Well, Prince, I’ve done everything as you wanted: tell me now, what business do you have with me?”
And he replies:
“Ah, why talk of business! … It won’t run away. Come here to me, first: we’ll sit next to each other and talk nicely, like the old times, like we used to.”
The lady stands there, hands behind her back, leaning against the window, and says nothing. She is frowning. The prince asks:
“What’s the matter? I beg you: we must talk.”
She obeys, goes to him; seeing that, he at once jokes again:
“Well, let’s sit, let’s sit like the old times”—and he goes to embrace her, but she pushes him away and says:
“Business, Prince, talk business: what can I do for you?”
“What’s this?” asks the prince. “You mean I should just lay it out openly, without any preamble?”
“Of course,” she says, “explain straight out what the business is. You and I are close acquaintances—there’s no need to stand on ceremony.”
“I need money,” says the prince.
She says nothing and looks at him.
“Not a lot of money,” he says.
“How much?”
“Just twenty thousand this time.”
Again she doesn’t reply, and the prince starts painting it on, saying: “I want to buy a fulling mill, but I don’t have a penny. If I buy it, though, I’ll be a millionaire. I’ll redo the whole thing,” he says. “I’ll throw all the old stuff out and start making bright-colored fabrics and sell them to the Asiatics in Nizhny.33 From the most trashy materials,” he says, “but dyed bright colors, and it will sell well, and I’ll make big money, but now I need only twenty thousand in down payment for the mill.”
Evgenia Semyonovna says:
“Where are you going to get it?”
The prince says:
“I don’t know myself, but I must get it, and then my calculations are quite correct: I have a man, Ivan Golovan, an army connoisseur, not very bright, but a solid gold muzhik—honest, and zealous, and he was held captive for a long time by the Asiatics and knows all their tastes very well, and now there’s the Makary fair, I’ll send Golov
an there to take orders and bring samples, and there’ll be down payments … then … first thing, I’ll immediately pay back the twenty thousand …”
And he fell silent, and the lady said nothing for a moment, then sighed and began:
“Your calculations are correct, Prince.”
“Aren’t they, though?”
“Correct,” she says, “correct. Here’s what you’ll do: you’ll pay the down payment for the mill, after which you’ll be considered a mill owner; there’ll be talk in society that your affairs have improved …”
“Right.”
“Right. And then …”
“Golovan will take a lot of orders and down payments at the fair, and I’ll return my debt and become rich.”
“No, please, don’t interrupt me: first, you’ll use all that to flimflam the marshal of the nobility,34 and, while he thinks you’re rich, you’ll marry his daughter, and then, having taken her dowry along with her, you’ll indeed become rich.”
“You think so?” the prince says.
And the lady replies:
“And do you think otherwise?”
“Ah, well, if you understand everything,” he says, “then God grant we see it all come true.”
“We?”
“Of course,” he says, “then it will be good for all of us: you’ll mortgage the house for me now, and I’ll give our daughter ten thousand in interest on the twenty thousand.”
The lady replies:
“The house is yours: you gave it to her, take it if you need it.”
He starts saying: “No, the house isn’t mine; you’re her mother, I ask you … of course, only in the event that you trust me …”
But she replies:
“Ah, enough, Prince, I trusted you with more than that! I entrusted you with my life and honor.”
“Ah, yes,” he says, “you mean that … Well, thank you, thank you, excellent … So, then, tomorrow I can send you the mortgage papers for signing?”
“Send them,” she says, “I’ll sign them.”
“You’re not afraid?”
“No,” she says, “after what I’ve already lost, I’m not afraid of anything.”
“And you’re not sorry? Tell me: you’re not sorry? It must be that you still love me a tiny bit? What? Or you simply pity me? Eh?”
She merely laughs at these words and says:
“Stop babbling nonsense, Prince. Wouldn’t you like it better if I served you some steeped cloudberries with sugar? Mine came out very tasty this year.”
He must have been offended: he had clearly expected something else. He gets up and smiles:
“No,” he says, “you eat your cloudberries yourself, I can’t be bothered with sweets now. Thank you and good-bye”—and he started kissing her hands, and just then the carriage came back.
Evgenia Semyonovna gave him her hand in farewell and said:
“And how are you going to deal with your dark-eyed Gypsy girl?”
He suddenly slapped himself on the forehead and cried out:
“Ah, true! What a smart one you’ve always been! Believe it or not, I always remember your intelligence, and I thank you for reminding now of that ruby!”
“And you had forgotten her just like that?” she says.
“By God,” he says, “I had. She’d gone clean out of my head, but I really do have to set the foolish girl up.”
“Set her up,” Evgenia Semyonovna replies, “only good and proper: she’s got no cool Russian blood half mixed with milk, she won’t be meekly pacified, and she won’t forgive anything for the sake of the past.”
“Never mind,” he says, “she’ll be pacified somehow.”
“She loves you, doesn’t she, Prince? They say she even loves you very much?”
“I’m awfully sick of her; but, thank God, luckily for me, she and Golovan are great friends.”
“What do you gain by that?” asks Evgenia Semyonovna.
“Nothing. I’ll buy them a house and register Ivan as a merchant, they’ll get married and start a life.”
But Evgenia Semyonovna shakes her head, smiles, and says:
“Ah, dear Prince, dear Prince, dear muddleheaded Prince: where is your conscience?”
But the prince replies:
“Kindly leave my conscience out of it. By God, I can’t be bothered with it now: I’ve somehow got to bring Ivan Golovan here today.”
The lady told him that Ivan Golovan was in town and was even staying with her. The prince was very gladdened by that, told her to send me to him as soon as possible, and left her house at once.
After that everything went at a spanking pace, like in a fairy tale. The prince gave me warrants and certificates that the mill was his, taught me how to talk about the fabrics he produced, and sent me straight from town to the fair, so that I couldn’t even see Grusha, only I was all offended at the prince over her: how could he say she’d be my wife? At the fair I had a run of good luck: I gathered up orders, and money, and samples from the Asiatics, and I sent all the money to the prince, and came back myself and couldn’t recognize his place … It was as if everything there had been changed by some kind of magic: it was all done up new, like a cottage decorated for a feast, and there was no trace of the wing where Grusha used to live: it had been torn down, and a new house had been built in its place. I just gasped and went rushing around: where’s Grusha? But nobody knew anything about her. And the servants were all new, hired, and very haughty, so that I no longer had my former access to the prince. He and I used to deal with each other in military fashion, simply, but now it had all become politics, and if I had to say something to the prince, I could only do it through his valet.
I detest that sort of thing so much that I wouldn’t have stayed there for a minute and would have left at once, only I felt very sorry for Grusha, and I couldn’t find out what had become of her. I asked some of the old servants—they all said nothing: clearly they were under strict orders. I finally managed to get out of an old serving woman that Grushenka had been there still recently, and it was only ten days ago that she had gone off somewhere in a carriage with the prince and hadn’t come back since. I went to the coachmen who had driven them: I started questioning them, but they wouldn’t tell me anything. They said only that the prince had changed horses at a station and sent his own back, and he and Grusha had gone on somewhere with hired ones. Wherever I rushed, there was no trace, and that was it: the villain might have put a knife in her, or shot her and thrown her into a ditch somewhere in the forest and covered her with dry leaves, or drowned her … From a passionate man, all that could easily be supposed; and she was a hindrance to his marrying, because Evgenia Semyonovna had spoken truly: Grusha loved this villain with all her passionate, devastating Gypsy love, and she was incapable of enduring and submitting like Evgenia Semyonovna, a Russian Christian, who burned her life like an icon lamp before him. In her, I thought, that great Gypsy flame had flared up like a smoldering bonfire when he told her about his wedding, and she must have made the devil’s own row, and so he finished her off.
The more I entertained this thought in my head, the more convinced I was that it couldn’t be otherwise, and I couldn’t look at any of the preparations for his marriage to the marshal’s daughter. And when the wedding day came, and the servants were all given bright-colored neckerchiefs and new clothing, each according to his duties, I put on neither the neckerchief nor the outfit, but left it all in my closet in the stables, and went to the forest in the morning, and wandered about, not knowing why myself, till evening, thinking all the while: maybe I’ll happen upon her murdered body? Evening fell, and I came out on the steep riverbank and sat there, and across the river the whole house is lit up, shining, and the feast is going on; guests are making merry, music resounds, echoing far away. And I go on sitting and looking, not at the house now, but into the water, where that light is all reflected and ripples in streams, as if the columns are moving, like watery chambers opening out. And I felt so sad, so oppressed, tha
t I began to speak with the invisible power—something that hadn’t happened to me even in captivity—and, as it’s told in the tale of little sister Alyonushka, whose brother called out to her,35 I called out to my little orphan Grunyushka in a pitiful voice:
“My dear sister, my Grunyushka! Answer me, call out to me; answer me; show yourself to me for one little moment!”—And what do you think: I moaned these words three times, and I began to feel eerie, and fancied somebody was running towards me, was coming close, was fluttering around me, whispering in my ears, and peeking over my shoulder into my face, and suddenly, out of the darkness of night, something comes shooting at me! … And hangs right onto me and throbs against me …
XVII
I almost fell down from fright, but I was not quite unconscious, and I felt something alive and light, like a shot-down crane, fluttering and sighing, but saying nothing.
I recited a prayer to myself—and what then? Right in front of my face I see Grusha’s face …
“My own!” I say. “My little dove! Are you alive, or have you come to me from the other world? Don’t hide anything,” I say. “Tell me the truth: I won’t be afraid of you, my poor orphan, even if you’re dead.”
And she sighs deeply, deeply, from deep down in her breast, and says:
“I’m alive.”
“Well, thank God for that.”
“Only,” she says, “I’ve escaped in order to die here.”
“What are you saying, Grunyushka?” I say. “God help you: why should you die? Let’s go and live a happy life: I’ll work for you, and I’ll set up a special little chamber for you, my dearest orphan, and you’ll live with me like my own sister.”
The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories Page 28