The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories

The Tula men, intelligent and experienced in metalwork, are equally well known as foremost connoisseurs in religion. Their native land is filled with their glory in this regard, and it has even reached holy Athos:⁹ they are not only masters of singing with flourishes, but they know how to paint out the picture of “Evening Bells,”¹⁰ and once one of them devotes himself to greater service and becomes a monk, such a one is reputed to make the best monastery treasurer and most successful collector of money. On holy Athos they know that Tula men are the most profitable people, and if it weren’t for them, the dark corners of Russia would probably never have seen a great many holy relics from the distant East, and Athos would have been deprived of many useful offerings from Russian generosity and piety. Nowadays the “Tula-born Athonites” carry holy relics all over our native land and masterfully collect money even where there’s none to be had. A Tula man is filled with churchly piety and is a great practitioner in these matters, and therefore the three masters who undertook to uphold Platov, and the whole of Russia along with him, made no mistake in heading, not for Moscow, but for the south. They didn’t go to Kiev at all, but to Mtsensk, the district capital of Orel province, where the ancient “stone-hewn” icon of St. Nicholas is kept, which came floating there in the most ancient times on a big cross, also of stone, down the river Zusha. The icon has a “dread and most fearsome” look—the bishop of Myra in Lycea is portrayed “full-length,” all dressed in gilded silver vestments; his face is dark, and in one hand he holds a church and in the other a sword—“for military conquest.” This “conquest” was the meaning of the whole thing: St. Nicholas is generally the patron of mercantile and military affairs, and the “Nicholas of Mtsensk” is particularly so, and it was him that the Tula men went to venerate. They held a prayer service before the icon itself, then before the stone cross, and finally returned home “by night” and, telling nobody anything, went about their business in terrible secrecy. All three of them came together in Lefty’s house, locked the door, closed the shutters, lit the lamp in front of the icon of St. Nicholas, and set to work.

One day, two days, three days they sat and went nowhere, tapping away with their little hammers. They were forging something, but of what they were forging—nothing was known.

Everybody was curious, but nobody could learn anything, because the workmen didn’t say anything and never showed themselves outside. Various people went up to the house, knocked at the door under various pretexts, to ask for a light or for salt, but the three artisans did not open to any demand, and nobody even knew what they fed on. People tried to frighten them, saying that the neighbors’ house was on fire, to see if they would get scared and come running out, and whatever they had forged there would be revealed, but nothing worked with these clever masters. Only once Lefty stuck his head out and shouted:

“Burn yourselves up, we have no time,” and pulled his plucked head in again, slammed the shutter, and they went back to business.

Through small chinks you could only see that lights were shining in the house and you could hear fine little hammers ringing on anvils.

In short, the whole affair was conducted in such terrible secrecy that it was impossible to find anything out, and it went on like that right up to the Cossack Platov’s return from the quiet Don to the sovereign, and in all that time the masters neither saw nor talked with anyone.

VIII

Platov traveled in great haste and with ceremony: himself in the carriage, and on the box two Cossack odorlies with whips sitting on either side of the driver and showering him mercilessly with blows to keep him galloping. And if one of the Cossacks dozed off, Platov poked him with his foot from the carriage, and they would race on even more wickedly. These measures of inducement succeeded so well that the horses could not be reined in at the stations and always overran the stopping place by a hundred lengths. Then the Cossacks would apply the reverse treatment to the driver, and they would come back to the entrance.

And so they came rolling into Tula—at first they also flew past the Moscow Gate by a hundred lengths, then the Cossacks applied their whips to the driver in the reverse sense, and they started hitching up new horses by the porch. Platov did not leave the carriage, and only told an odorly to bring him the masters with whom he had left the flea as quickly as possible.

Off ran one odorly, to tell them to come as quickly as possible and bring the work with them that was to shame the English, and that odorly had not yet run very far, when Platov sent more behind him one after the other, to make it as quick as possible.