The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories

Taking my passport, I went off without any intentions for myself, and came to the fair, and there I see a Gypsy trading horses with a muzhik and deceiving him godlessly. He started testing their strength, and hitched his own nag to a cart loaded with millet, and the muzhik’s horse to a cart loaded with apples. The loads, naturally, were of equal weight, but the muzhik’s horse got in a stew, because the smell of the apples stupefied it, since horses find that smell terribly repulsive, and, besides that, I could see that the Gypsy’s horse was prone to fainting, and you could tell it at once, because it had a mark on its forehead where it had been seared by fire, but the Gypsy said, “It’s a wart.” But I, naturally, felt sorry for the muzhik, because it would be impossible for him to work with a fainting horse, since it would fall over and that would be that, and besides I had a mortal hatred of Gypsies then, because it was from them that I first got tempted to ramble, and I probably also had a presentiment of things to come, which proved true. I revealed this flaw in the horse to the muzhik, and when the Gypsy began to argue that it wasn’t a mark from searing but a wart, to prove I was right I jabbed the horse in the kidney with a little awl, and it flopped to the ground and thrashed. Then I went and chose the muzhiks a good horse according to my understanding, and for that they treated me to food and drink and gave me twenty kopecks, and we had some good carousing. And it went on from there: my capital was growing and so was my zeal for drinking, and before the month was out, I saw that things were good. I hung myself all over with badges and horse doctor’s trappings and began going from fair to fair, giving guidance to poor people everywhere, and collecting income for myself, and wetting the good deals; and meanwhile I became just like the wrath of God for all the horse-trading Gypsies, and I learned indirectly that they intended to beat me up. I tried to avoid that, because they were many and I was one, and never once could they catch me alone and give me a sound beating, and with muzhiks around they didn’t dare, because they always stood up for me on account of the good I’d done them. Then they spread a bad rumor about me, that I was a sorcerer and it was not through my own powers that I knew about animals, but, naturally, that was all nonsense: as I told you, I have a gift for horses, and I’m ready to teach it to anybody you like, only the main thing is that it won’t be of use to anybody.

“Why won’t it be of use?”

“Nobody will understand it, sir, because for that nothing else but a natural gift will do, and more than once I’ve had the same experience, that I teach, but it’s all in vain. But, excuse me, we’ll get to that later.”

When my fame was noised around the fairs, that I could see right through a horse, a certain remount officer, a prince, offered me a hundred roubles:

“Reveal the secret of your understanding, brother,” he says. “It’s worth a lot of money.”

And I reply:

“I have no secret, I have a natural gift for it.”

But he persists:

“Reveal to me, anyway, how you understand these things. And so you don’t think I want it just like that—here’s a hundred roubles for you.”

What to do? I shrugged my shoulders, tied the money up in a rag, and said:

“All right, then, I’ll tell you what I know, but please learn and follow it; and if you don’t learn and you get nothing useful from it, I won’t answer for it.”

He was content with that, anyway, and said:

“How much I learn is not your problem, just tell me.”