The prince goes on talking with him and says:
“Your place is very nice, Filipp Filippych, I like it—there’s just one thing I simply can’t remember: where and when did I meet or see you, and what sort of favor could I have done you?”
And the supervisor replies:
“Your Excellency certainly did see me, but when—if you’ve forgotten—will become clear later.”
“Why later, if I want to remember you now?”
But the supervisor did not say.
“I beg Your Excellency’s pardon,” he said. “If you don’t remember that yourself, I dare not tell you, but the voice of nature will tell you.”
“Nonsense! What ‘voice of nature’? And why do you not dare to tell me yourself?”
The supervisor replied, “I just don’t dare,” and dropped his eyes.
And meanwhile they had come to the mezzanine, and here it was still more clean and tidy: the floor washed with soap and rubbed with mare’s tail till it gleamed, white runners laid all down the middle of the clean stairway, in the living room a divan, a round table before it with a big, glazed water jug, and in it a bouquet of roses and violets, further on—the bedroom, with a Turkish carpet over the bed, and again a table, a carafe of clean water and a glass, and another bouquet of flowers, and, on a special little desk, a pen, an ink stand, paper and envelopes, wax and a seal.
The field marshal took it all in at a glance, and it pleased him very much.
“It’s clear,” he says, “that you, Filipp Filippych, are a polished man, that you know how things ought to be, and it seems I really did see you somewhere, but I can’t recall it.”
And the supervisor only smiles and says:
“Please don’t worry: it will all be explained by the voice of nature.”
Baryatinsky laughed.
“In that case, brother,” he says, “you are not Filipp Filippovich, but the ‘voice of nature’ yourself”—and he became very intrigued by the man.
IV
The prince lay down on the clean bed, stretched out his legs and arms, and it felt so good that he dozed off at once. He woke up an hour later in an excellent state of mind, and before him already stood a cool cherry sherbet, and that same host asking him to taste it.
“Don’t rely on doctors’ medications, Your Excellency,” he says. “Here with us nature and the breathing of the atmosphere are beneficial.”
The prince cheerfully answers him that that is all very well, “but I must confess to you—I slept splendidly here, but, devil take me, even in my sleep I kept thinking: where did I see you, or maybe I never did?”
But the man replies:
“No,” he says, “you saw me very well, if you please, only in a completely different natural guise, and therefore you don’t recognize me now.”
The prince says:
“Very well, let it be so: there’s no one here now besides you and me, and if there’s anybody there in the next room, send them all out, let them stand on the stairs, and tell me frankly, without hiding anything, who you were and what your criminal secret is—I can promise to solicit for your pardon, and I’ll keep my promise, as I am the true Prince Baryatinsky.”
But the official even smiled and replied that there was not and never had been any guilty secret whatever concerning him, and that he simply did not dare to “abash” the prince for his forgetfulness.
“So you see,” he says, “I constantly remember Your Excellency for your goodness and commemorate you in my prayers; and our sovereign and all the royal family, once they’ve seen and noticed someone, constantly remember him all their lives. Therefore allow me,” he says, “not to remind you of myself verbally, but in due time I will reveal it all to you by clear signs through the voice of nature—and then you will remember.”
“And what means do you have for revealing it all through the voice of nature?”
“In the voice of nature,” he replies, “there is every means.”
The prince smiled at the odd fellow.
“True for you,” he said, “it’s bad to forget, and our sovereign and the royal family do indeed have very good memories, but my memory is weak. I do not override your will, do as you think best, only I would like to know when you are going to reveal your voice of nature to me, because I’m now feeling very well in your house, and I want to leave after midnight, once it cools off. And you must tell me how I can reward you for the rest I’ve had myself here—because that is my custom on such occasions.”
The supervisor says:
“Before midnight I will have time to reveal the voice of nature fully to Your Excellency, if only, in the matter of my reward, you will not deny me something that I hold most precious.”
“Very well,” says the prince, “I give you my word that I will do everything you ask, only don’t ask the impossible.”
The supervisor replies:
“I will not ask the impossible, but I wish more than anything in the world that you would show me this favor—to come to my rooms downstairs and sit at the table with us, and eat something, or even just simply sit for a while, because tonight I am celebrating my silver wedding anniversary, it being twenty-five years since, by your grace, I married Amalia Ivanovna. It will be at eleven o’clock tonight; and at midnight, once it cools off, you may be well pleased to go.”
The prince agreed and gave his word, but all the same he was again simply unable to recall what this man was and where from, and why it was that twenty-five years ago, by his grace, he had married Amalia Ivanovna.
“It will even be a pleasure for me to have supper with this odd fellow,” said the prince, “because he intrigues me very much; and, to tell the truth, I do remember something either about him or about Amalia Ivanovna, but precisely what—I can’t recall. Let us wait for the voice of nature!”
V
By evening the field marshal had quite recovered and even went for a walk with Faddeev, to see the town and admire the sunset, and when he came back to the house at ten o’clock, the host was already waiting for him and invited him to the table.
The prince said:
“Very gladly, I’ll come at once.”
Faddeev said jokingly that it was even opportune, because he had a good appetite after their walk and wanted very much to eat whatever Amalia Ivanovna had cooked up for them.
Baryatinsky was only afraid that the host would seat him in the place of honor and start pouring a lot of champagne and regaling him. But these fears were all quite unfounded: the supervisor showed as much pleasant tact at the table as in all the previous hours the prince had spent in his house.
The table was laid elegantly but simply in a spacious room, with a neat but modest service, and two black cast-iron candlesticks of excellent French workmanship, each with seven candles. And the wines were of good sorts, but all local—and among them were some fat-bellied little bottles with handwritten labels.
These were liqueurs and cordials, and of excellent taste—raspberry, cherry, gooseberry.
The supervisor started seating the guests and here also showed his adroitness: he did not lead the prince to the head of the table, to the host’s place, but seated him where the prince himself wanted, between his adjutant and a very pretty little lady, so that the field marshal would have someone to exchange a few words with and could amuse himself paying compliments to the fair sex. The prince at once fell to talking with the little lady: he was interested in where she came from, and where she had been educated, and what she did for diversion in such a remote provincial town.
She answered all his questions quite boldly and without any mincing, and revealed to him that she was, it seems, mainly occupied with reading books.
The prince asked what books she read.
She replied: the novels of Paul de Kock.3
The prince laughed.
“That,” he said, “is a merry writer,” and he asked: “What precisely have you read? Which novels?”
She replied:
“The Confec
tioner, Moustache, Sister Anne, and others.”
“And you don’t read our Russian writers?”
“No,” she says, “I don’t.”
“And why not?”
“There’s too little high society in them.”
“And you like high society?”
“Yes.”
“Why is that?”
“Because we know all about our own life, and those things are more interesting.”
And here she said that she had a brother who was writing a novel about society life.
“That’s interesting!” said the prince. “I don’t suppose I could see a little something he’s written?”
“You may,” the lady replied, and she left the table for a moment and came back with a small notebook, in which Baryatinsky glanced only at the first page, became all merry, and, handing it to Faddeev, said:
“How’s that for a pert beginning!”
Faddeev looked at the first lines of the society novel and also became merry.
The novel began with the words: “I, as a man of society, get up at noon and do not take my morning tea at home, but go around the restaurants.”
“Wonderful, eh?” asked Baryatinsky.
“Very good,” replied Faddeev.
By then everyone had grown merry, and the host stood up, raised a glass of sparkling Tsimlyanskoe, and said:
“Your Excellency, I beg your permission, for the general good pleasure and for my own, on this day so precious for me, to be allowed to explain who I am, and where I am from, and to whom I am indebted for all the prosperity I have. But I cannot explain it in the cold words of the human voice, because I was educated on very little money, and so allow me by the whole law of my being to emit in all solemnity the voice of nature.”
Here it came time for the field marshal himself to be abashed, and he was so confused that he bent down as if to pick up his napkin, and whispered:
“By God, I don’t know what to tell him: what is it he’s asking of me?”
But the little lady, his neighbor, chirps:
“Don’t be afraid, just allow him: Filipp Filippovich won’t think up anything bad.”
The prince thinks: “Ah, come what may—let him emit the voice!”
“I’m here as a guest,” he says, “like everyone else, and you are the host—do whatever you want.”
“I thank you and everyone,” replies the supervisor, and, nodding to Amalia Ivanovna, he says: “Go, wife, bring you know what with your own hands.”
VI
Amalia Ivanovna went and came back with a big, brightly polished brass French horn and gave it to her husband. He took it, put the mouthpiece to his lips, and in an instant was utterly transformed. As soon as he puffed his cheeks and gave one crackling peal, the field marshal cried:
“I know you, brother, I know you now: you were the musician in the chasseur regiment whom I sent, on account of his honesty, to keep an eye on that crooked commissary.”
“Just so, Your Excellency,” replied the host. “I didn’t want to remind you of it, but nature herself has reminded you.”
The prince embraced him and said:
“Ladies and gentlemen, let us join in drinking a toast to an honest man!”
And they drank well, and the field marshal recovered completely and left feeling extremely merry.
A Little Mistake
A Moscow Family Secret
I
One evening, at Christmastime, a sensible company sat talking about faith and lack of faith. The talk, however, had to do not with the loftier questions of deism and materialism, but with faith in people endowed with special powers of foresight and prophecy, and perhaps even their own sort of wonderworking. Among the listeners was a staid man from Moscow, who said the following:
“It’s not easy, my good sirs, to judge about who lives with faith and who is without faith, for there are various applications of that in life: it may happen in such cases that our reason falls into error.”
And after that introduction he told us a curious story, which I shall try to convey in his own words:
My uncle and aunt were both equally devoted to the late wonderworker Ivan Yakovlevich.1 Especially my aunt—she wouldn’t undertake anything without asking him. First she would go to him in the madhouse and get his advice, and then she would ask him to pray for her undertaking. My uncle kept his own counsel and relied less on Ivan Yakovlevich, though he also confided in him occasionally and did not hinder his wife’s bringing him gifts and offerings. They were not rich people, but quite well-to-do—they sold tea and sugar from a shop in their own house. They had no sons, but there were three daughters: Kapitolina Nikitishna, Katerina Nikitishna, and Olga Nikitishna. They were all quite pretty and were good at housekeeping and all sorts of handwork. Kapitolina Nikitishna was married, only not to a merchant, but to a painter—though he was a very good man and earned money enough: he took profitable commissions for decorating churches. One unpleasant thing for the whole family was that, while he worked on godly things, he was also versed in some sort of freethinking from Kurganov’s Pistnovnik.2 He liked to talk about Chaos, about Ovid, about Prometheus, and was fond of comparing fables with sacred history. If not for that, everything would have been fine. Another thing was that they had no children, and my uncle and aunt were very upset about it. They had seen only their first daughter married, and suddenly she remained childless for three years. Owing to that, suitors started avoiding the other sisters.
My aunt asked Ivan Yakovlevich how it happened that her daughter did not have children: “They’re both young and handsome,” she said, “yet there are no children?”
Ivan Yakovlevich began to mutter:
“There’s a heaven of heavens, a heaven of heavens.”
His women prompters translated for my aunt: “The dear father says to tell your son-in-law to pray to God, for it must be that he’s of little faith.”
My aunt simply gasped: “Everything’s revealed to him,” she said. And she started badgering the painter to go to confession; but to him it was all horsefeathers! He treated it all very lightly … even ate meat on fast days … and besides that, they heard indirectly, he supposedly ate worms and oysters. Yet they all lived in the same house and were often distressed that in their merchant family there was such a man of no faith.
II
So my aunt went to Ivan Yakovlevich to ask him to pray that the servant of God Kapitolina’s womb be opened and that the servant of God Lary (that was the painter’s name) be enlightened by faith.
My uncle and aunt asked it together.
Ivan Yakovlevich began to babble something that couldn’t be understood at all, and the attendant women sitting around him explained:
“He’s not very clear today,” they said, “but tell us what you’re asking, and we’ll give him a little note tomorrow.”
My aunt began to tell them, and they wrote down: “Servant of God Kapitolina to have womb opened, and servant of God Lary to have faith increased.”
The old folk left this petitionary little note and went home stepping lightly.
At home they said nothing to anyone except Kapochka alone, and then only so that she shouldn’t tell her husband, the faithless painter, but simply live with him as tenderly and harmoniously as possible, and watch to see if he would get closer to faith in Ivan Yakovlevich. But he was a terrible man for cursing and as full of little sayings as a clown from Presnya.3 Everything was jokes and quips with him. He’d come to his father-in-law of an evening: “Let’s go and read the fifty-two-page prayer book,” he’d say, meaning play cards … Or he’d sit down and say: “On condition that we play till the first swoon.”
My aunt simply couldn’t listen to such words. My uncle said to him, “Don’t upset her so: she loves you and has made a promise for you.” He started laughing and said to his mother-in-law:
“Why do you make unwitting promises? Or don’t you know that because of such a promise John the Baptist had his head cut off?4 Watch out, t
here may be some unexpected misfortune in our house.”
This frightened his mother-in-law still more, and every day, in her anxiety, she went running to the madhouse. There they calmed her down—said things were going well: the dear father read their note each day, and what was now written there would soon come true.
And suddenly it did come true, but how it came true I’m reluctant to say.
III
My aunt’s second daughter, Katechka, comes to her, and falls right at her feet, and sobs, and weeps bitterly.
My aunt asks:
“What’s wrong—has someone offended you?”
The girl answers through her tears:
“Dearest mama, I myself don’t know what it is or why … it’s the first and last time it’s happened … Only conceal my sin from papa.”
My aunt looked at her, poked her finger right into her belly, and said:
“Is it here?”
Katechka replies:
“Yes, mama … how did you guess … I myself don’t know why …”
My aunt only gasped and clasped her hands.
“My child,” she says, “don’t even try to find out: it may be that I’m guilty of a mistake, I’ll go at once and find out,” and she flew off at once in a cab to Ivan Yakovlevich.
“Show me the note,” she says, “with our request that the dear father ask the fruit of the womb for the servant of God: how is it written?”
The hangers-on found it on the windowsill and handed it to her.
My aunt looked and nearly went out of her mind. What do you think? It all actually came about through a mistaken prayer, because instead of the servant of God Kapitolina, who was married, there was written the servant of God Katerina, who was still unmarried, a maiden.
The women say:
“Just imagine, what a sin! The names are very similar … but never mind, it can be set right.”
But my aunt thought: “No, nonsense, you can’t set it right now: Katya’s been prayed for,” and she tore the note into little pieces.
IV
The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories Page 53