The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories

I don’t know whether my aunt believed or not in Selivan’s evil enchantments, but she understood perfectly well that right now the most important thing for our salvation was that our horses not overstrain themselves. If the horses got exhausted and stopped, and if the cold intensified, we would all certainly perish. We’d be smothered by the storm and frozen to death. But if the horses kept enough strength to plod on somehow, step by step, then we could nurse some hope that, going by the wind, they would somehow come out on the road and bring us to some dwelling. Let it be just an unheated hut on chicken’s legs in a gully, still the blizzard wouldn’t rage so fiercely in it, there’d be none of this jerking that we felt each time the horses tried to move their weary legs … There we could fall asleep … My cousin and I wanted terribly to sleep. In that respect the only lucky one among us was the baby girl, who slept on the nanny’s breast under a warm hare coat, but the two of us weren’t allowed to fall asleep. My aunt knew it was dangerous, because a sleeping person freezes sooner. Our situation was becoming worse by the minute, because the horses could barely walk, the coachman and the footman on the box began to freeze and to speak inarticulately, but my aunt stopped paying attention to me and my cousin, and we snuggled up to each other and fell asleep at once. I even had cheerful dreams: summer, our garden, our servants, Apollinary, and suddenly it all skipped over to our outing for lily of the valley and to Selivan, about whom I either heard something, or merely recalled something. It was all confused … I couldn’t tell what was happening in dream and what in reality. I feel cold, hear the howling of the wind and the heavy flapping of the bast mat on the sleigh’s roof, and right in front of my eyes stands Selivan, his jacket over his shoulder, and holding a lantern towards us in his outstretched hand … Is this an apparition, a dream, or a fantastic picture?

But it was not a dream, not a fantasy, but fate had in fact seen fit to bring us on that dreadful night to Selivan’s dreadful inn, and we couldn’t seek salvation anywhere else, because there was no other dwelling close by. And meanwhile we had with us my aunt’s box, in which lay her thirty thousand roubles, constituting her entire fortune. With such tempting riches, how could we stay with such a suspicious man as Selivan?

Of course, we were done for! However, the choice could only be of which was better—to freeze in the blizzard, or die under the knife of Selivan and his evil accomplices?

XV

As in the brief moment when lightning flashes, the eye that was in darkness suddenly makes out a multitude of objects at once, so at the appearance of Selivan’s lantern shining on us, I saw terror on all the faces in our disaster-stricken sleigh. The coachman and footman all but fell on their knees and remained transfixed in that position; my aunt drew back as if she wanted to push through the rear of the sleigh. The nanny pressed her face to the baby and suddenly shrank so much that she became no bigger than a baby herself.

Selivan stood there silently, but … in his unhandsome face I did not see the slightest malice. Only now he seemed more concentrated than when he had carried me on his shoulder. After looking us over, he asked quietly:

“Want to warm up?”

My aunt came to her senses sooner than the rest of us and answered:

“Yes, we’re freezing … Save us!”

“Let God save you! Drive in—the cottage is heated.”

And he stepped off the porch and lit the way for the sleigh.

Between the servants, my aunt, and Selivan there was an exchange of curt little phrases, betraying mistrust and fear of the host on our side, and on Selivan’s side a deeply concealed peasant irony and perhaps also a sort of mistrust.

The coachman asked whether there was any food for the horses.

Selivan replied:

“We’ll look for some.”

The footman Boris tried to find out if there were any other travelers.

“Come in—you’ll see,” replied Selivan.

The nanny said:

“Isn’t it scary to stay with you?”

Selivan replied:

“If you’re scared, don’t go in.”

My aunt stopped them, saying to each of them as softly as she could:

“Stop it, don’t squabble—it won’t help anything. It’s impossible to go further. Let’s stay, and God be with us.”

And meanwhile, as this exchange was going on, we found ourselves in a plank-walled room, partitioned off from the rest of the spacious cottage. My aunt went in first, and Boris brought her box in after her. Then came my cousin and I with the nanny.

The box was placed on the table, and on the box was placed a tallow-spattered tin candlestick with a small candle end, which might last an hour, not more.

My aunt’s practical quick-wittedness turned immediately to this object—that is, to the candle.

“First of all, my dear,” she said to Selivan, “bring me a new candle.”

“There’s a candle here.”

“No, give me a new, whole candle!”

“A new, whole one?” Selivan repeated, resting one hand on the table and the other on the box.