The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories

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, that 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.”