The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories

“Well, there,” he replies, “my half-esteemed fellow, you are talking most stupidly and inartistically … Is she worth it? A woman is worth everything in the world, because she can inflict such a wound that you won’t be cured of it for a whole kingdom, but she alone can cure you of it in a single moment.”

I keep thinking it’s all true, and keep shaking my head and saying:

“Such a sum! A whole fifty thousand!”

“Yes, yes,” he says, “and don’t go on repeating it, because thankfully they took it, otherwise I’d have given more … as much as you like.”

“You should have spat on it,” I say, “and left it at that.”

“I couldn’t, brother,” he says, “I couldn’t spit on it.”

“Why not?”

“She stung me with her beauty and talent, and I need to be cured, otherwise I’ll go out of my mind. But tell me: she is beautiful, isn’t she? Eh? Isn’t she? Enough to drive you out of your mind? …”

I bit my lips and only nodded silently:

“Right, right.”

“You know,” says the prince, “I could even die for a woman, it would be nothing to me. Can you understand that I think nothing of dying?”

“What’s there not to understand?” I say. “It’s beauty, nature’s perfection.”

“How do you understand that?”

“Like this,” I reply, “that beauty is nature’s perfection, and from that ravishment a man can perish—even joyfully!”

“Good for you,” my prince replies, “good for you, my almost half-esteemed and most greatly insignificant Ivan Severyanych! Precisely, sir, precisely, it is joyful to perish, and it now feels sweet to me that I overturned my whole life for her: resigned my commission, mortgaged my estate, and from now on I’ll live here, seeing nobody, but only looking in her face.”

I lowered my voice still more and whispered:

“How are you going to look in her face?” I say. “You mean she’s here?”

And he answers:

“What else? Of course she’s here.”

“Can it be?” I ask.

“Wait here,” he says, “I’ll bring her right now. You’re an artist—I’m not going to hide her from you.”

And with that he left me and went out the door. I stood there, waiting and thinking:

“Eh, it’s not good your insisting that you only want to look at her face! You’ll get bored!” But I didn’t reason about it in detail, because when I remembered that she was there, I immediately felt that my sides were even getting hot, and my mind became addled, and I thought: “Can it be that I’m going to see her now?” And suddenly they came in: the prince came first, carrying a guitar on a broad red ribbon in one hand, and with the other dragging Grusha by both hands, and she walked downcast, reluctantly, without looking, and only those huge eyelashes of hers fluttered against her cheeks like a bird’s wings.

The prince led her in, picked her up in his arms, and seated her like a child, with her legs tucked under, in the corner of a wide, soft sofa; he put one velvet pillow behind her back, another under her right elbow, threw the ribbon of the guitar over her shoulder, and placed her fingers on the strings. Then he himself sat on the floor by the sofa, leaned his head against her red morocco bootie, and nodded for me to sit down, too.

I quietly lowered myself to the floor by the doorway, also tucked my legs under, and sat looking at her. It became as quiet as if the room were empty. I sat and sat, my knees even began to ache, and I glanced at her, she was still in the same position, and I looked at the prince: I see he’s gnawing his mustache from languor, but he doesn’t say a word to her.

I nod to him, as if to say: tell her to sing! And in response he does me a pamtomine, meaning: she won’t listen to me.

And again we both sit on the floor and wait, but suddenly it’s as if she starts raving, sighing, and sobbing, and a little tear flows from her lashes, and her fingers crawl and murmur over the strings like wasps … And suddenly she begins to sing very, very softly, as if she’s weeping: “Good people, listen to my heartfelt grief.”

The prince whispers: “What?”

And I whisper back in French:

“P’tit-comme-peu”—and have nothing more to say, but at that same moment she suddenly cries out: “And for my beauty they’ll sell me, they’ll sell me,” and she flings the guitar far from her knees, and tears the kerchief from her head, and falls facedown on the sofa, covers her face with her hands, and weeps, and I weep, looking at her, and the prince … he, too, begins to weep, and he takes up the guitar, and, not really singing but more like intoning in church, moans: “If you but knew all the fire of love, all the anguish in my ardent soul”—and he bursts into sobs. He sings and sobs: “Comfort me, the comfortless one, make me happy, the unhappy one.” As he becomes so cruelly shaken, I see that she begins to heed his tears and singing and grows quieter, calmer, and she suddenly takes her hand quietly from under her face and, like a mother, tenderly embraces his head …