The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories

Franz Joseph took the mug in his hand, but didn’t drink from it; while the dance lasted, he went on holding it in his hand, but when the czardas was finished, the emperor silently held out his mug to his neighbor. The man understood at once what he must do: he clinked with his sovereign and, immediately turning to his other neighbor, exchanged clinks with him. Thereupon, as many people as were there, they all stood up, all clinked with each other, and breathed out over the whole lawn a concerted, unanimous “Hoch!”^† This “hoch” is not shouted loudly and boomingly there, but like a good, heartfelt sigh.

The emperor drained his mug in one breath, bowed, and left.

The bay horses carried him back down the same road that we also took, following after him. But now the considerable power of the impression produced by this incident was riding with us, and it was all lodged chiefly in Anna Fetisovna. The maid, to our no little surprise, was crying! … She sat before us, covering her eyes with a white handkerchief and pressing it with her hands.

“Anna Fetisovna, what’s the matter?” the princess addressed her with a kindly and gentle jocularity.

The woman went on crying.

“What are you crying about?”

Anna Fetisovna uncovered her eyes and said:

“Just like that—about nothing.”

“No, really?”

The maid sighed deeply and replied:

“Suchlike simplicity moves me.”

The princess winked at me and said jokingly:

“Toujours servile! C’est ainsi que l’on arrive aux cieux.”^‡

But the joke somehow did not come off. Anna Fetisovna’s emotion endowed this trifling incident with a different meaning.

We returned to the hotel and found there yet another visitor. This was an Austrian baron who was intending to go to Russia and was studying Russian. We had tea, and Anna Fetisovna served us. We talked of many things: of Russia, of Petersburg acquaintances, of our rate of exchange, of who was our best embezzler, and, finally, of our meeting that day with Franz Joseph.

The entire conversation was in Russian, so that Anna Fetisovna must have heard it all word for word.

The princess told me some not entirely “legal” things from court bucolics and political rhapsodies. The baron smiled.

I have no need to recall all this, but one thing I find it appropriate to observe, that my interlocutrice tried to construe many features of the Austrian emperor’s character for me in terms of the seeking of popularity.

This treatise on popularity, or, more correctly, on popularism, was developed with specific details and examples, among which that day’s mug of beer popped up again. And—if I’m mistaken, the fault is mine—it seemed to me that this was done much less for our benefit than for that of Anna Fetisovna, who kept coming in and going out all the time, serving something her mistress needed.

It was some sort of woman’s caprice, which carried my compatriot away so much that she went on from the emperor to the nation, or nations, to the Austrians and us. She even admired the way the “Viennese cobblers” had borne themselves “with dignity,” and then she quickly switched to the motherland, to our Russian people, to their feasts and amusements, to vodka, and again to the tears and upsets of the impressionable Anna Fetisovna.

This last was spoken in French, but even so the baron only went on smiling.

“We shall ask my esteemed Jeanne her opinion again,” said the princess, and when the maid came to take a cup, she said:

“Anna Fetisovna, did you like the local king very much today?”

“Yes, ma’am, very much,” Anna Fetisovna answered quickly.

“She’s angry,” the princess whispered to me, and went on aloud:

“And what would you think if he came to us in Moscow, to the fairground?”

The maid said nothing.

“You don’t want to talk with us?”

“What would he come to us in Moscow for?”

“Well, but suppose he just up and came? What do you think: would he go sitting with our muzhiks?”

“Why should he sit with ours when he’s got his own?” Anna Fetisovna replied and quickly went to her room carrying an empty cup.

“She’s decidedly angry,” the princess said in French and added that Anna Fetisovna was a flaming patriot and suffered from a passion for generalizations.

The baron went on smiling and soon left. I left an hour later.

When I was taking my leave, Anna Fetisovna, with a candle in her hand, went to show me the way to the stairs through the unfamiliar passages of the hotel and asked unexpectedly:

“And do you agree, sir, that our kind are all people without dignity?”

“No,” I said, “I do not.”

“Then why didn’t you say anything?”

“I didn’t want to argue to no purpose.”

“Oh, no, sir, it wouldn’t have been to no purpose … And in front of a foreign baron at that … How come it’s always so hurtful when it’s about your own! As if we like everything bad and nothing good.”

I felt sorry for her, and also ashamed before her.