The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories

The Spook

Fear has big eyes.

A SAYING

I

My childhood was spent in Orel. We lived in Nemchinov’s house, somewhere not far from the “little cathedral.” Now I can’t make out exactly where this tall wooden house stood, but I remember that from its garden there was an extensive view over the wide and deep ravine with its steep sides crosscut by layers of red clay. Beyond the ravine spread a big field on which the town warehouses stood, and near them soldiers always drilled in the summer. Every day I watched how they drilled and how they were beaten. That was common practice then, but I simply couldn’t get used to it and always wept over them. To keep that from being repeated too often, my nanny, Marina Borisovna, an elderly soldier’s widow from Moscow, took me for walks in the town garden. There we would sit over the shallow Oka and watch little children swimming and playing in it. I envied their freedom very much then.

The main advantage of their unfettered condition, in my eyes, lay in their wearing neither shoes nor shirts, because they took their shirts off and tied the sleeves to the collar. Adapted like that, the shirts turned into little sacks, and by holding them against the current, the boys caught tiny, silvery fish in them. They were so small it was impossible to clean them, and that was considered sufficient grounds for cooking them and eating them uncleaned.

I never had the courage to find out how they tasted, but the fishing performed by those diminutive fishermen seemed to me the height of happiness that freedom could afford a boy of the age I was then.

My nanny, however, knew some good reasons why such freedom would be completely improper for me. Those reasons consisted in my being the child of a noble family and my father being known to everyone in town.

“It would be a different matter,” my nanny said, “if we were in the country.” There, among simple, boorish muzhiks, I too might be allowed to enjoy something of that sort of freedom.

I think it was precisely because of those restrictive arguments that I began to feel an intense yearning for the countryside, and my rapture knew no bounds when my parents bought a small estate in the Kromy district. That same summer we moved from the big house in town to a very cozy but small village house with a balcony and a thatched roof. Woods in the Kromy district were costly and rare even then. This was an area of steppes and grain fields, well irrigated besides by small but clean streams.

II

In the country I at once struck up a wide and interesting acquaintance with the peasants. While my father and mother were intensely occupied with setting up the estate, I lost no time in becoming close friends with the grown-up lads and the little boys who pastured horses on the “kuligas.”^* The strongest of all my attachments, however, was to an old miller, Grandpa Ilya—a completely white-haired old man with huge black mustaches. He was more available for conversation than all the others because he didn’t go away to work, but either strolled about the dam with a dung fork or sat over the trembling sluice-gate, pensively listening to whether the wheels were turning regularly or water was seeping in somewhere under the gate. When he got tired of doing nothing, he fashioned spare maple shafts or spindles for the cogwheel. But in all the situations I’ve described, he easily left off work and entered willingly into conversation, which he conducted in fragments, without any connection, but with his favorite system of allusions, and in the process making fun maybe of himself, maybe of his listeners.

Through his job as a miller, Grandpa Ilya had rather close connections with the water demon who was in charge of our ponds, the upper and the lower, and of two swamps. This demon had his main headquarters under an unused sluice-gate at our mill.

Grandpa Ilya knew everything about him and used to say:

“He likes me. Even when he comes home angry over some disorder, he does me no harm. If anybody else is lying in my place here on the sacks, he pulls at him and throws him off, but he won’t ever touch me.”

All the young people assured me that the relations I’ve described between Grandpa Ilya and the “old water demon” really existed, but that they held out not at all because the water demon liked him, but because Grandpa Ilya, being a real, true miller, knew a real, true miller’s word, which the water demon and all his little devils obeyed as unquestioningly as did the grass snakes and toads that lived under the sluiceways and on the dam.

I went fishing with the boys for the gudgeons and loaches that abounded in our narrow but clear little river Gostomlia; but, because of the seriousness of my character, I kept company more with Grandpa Ilya, whose experienced mind opened to me a world full of mysterious delight that was completely unknown to a city boy like me. From Ilya I learned about the house demon, who slept on a counter, and the water demon, who had fine and important lodgings under the mill wheel, and the kikimora,¹ who was so skittish and changeable that she hid from any immodest gaze in various dusty corners—now in the threshing barn, now in the granary, now at the pounding mill, where hemp was pounded in the fall. Grandpa knew least of all about the wood demon, because he lived somewhere far away by Selivan’s place and only occasionally visited our thick willow grove, to make a new willow pipe and play on it in the shade by the soaking tubs. Anyhow, Grandpa Ilya saw the wood demon face-to-face only once in all his richly adventurous life, and that was on St. Nicholas’s day, which was the feast day of our church. The wood demon came up to Ilya pretending to be a perfectly quiet little muzhik and asked for a pinch of snuff. And when Grandpa said, “Here, devil take you!” and opened the snuffbox, the demon could no longer keep up his good behavior and played a prank: he hit the snuffbox from underneath, so that the good miller got an eyeful of snuff.

All these lively and interesting stories seemed fully probable to me then, and their dense imagery filled my fantasy to the point that I almost became a visionary myself. At least when I once peeked, at great risk, into the pounding shed, my eye proved so keen and sharp that I saw the kikimora, who was sitting there in the dust. She was unwashed, wearing a dusty headdress, and had scrofulous eyes. And when, frightened by this vision, I rushed out headlong, another of my senses—hearing—discovered the presence of the wood demon. I can’t say for sure exactly where he was sitting—probably on some tall willow—but when I fled from the kikimora, the wood demon blew into his green pipe with all his might and held my foot so fast to the ground that the heel of my boot tore off.

Nearly out of breath, I told about it all at home, and for my candor I was put in my room to read the Holy Scriptures, while a barefoot boy was sent to a soldier in the nearby village who could mend the damage the wood demon had done to my boot. But by then even reading the Holy Scriptures didn’t protect me from belief in the supernatural beings, to whom, it might be said, I had grown accustomed through Grandpa Ilya. I knew well and loved the Holy Scriptures—to this day I willingly read them over—and yet the dear, childish world of the fairy-tale creatures Grandpa Ilya told me about seemed indispensable to me. The forest springs would have been orphaned if they had been deprived of the spirits popular fantasy attached to them.

Among the unpleasant consequences of the wood demon’s pipe was that my mother reprimanded Grandpa Ilya for the course in demonology he had given me, and he avoided me for a while, as if unwilling to continue my education. He even pretended to drive me away.

“Get away from me, go to your nanny,” he said, turning me around and applying his broad, calloused palm to my seat.

But I could already pride myself on my age and considered such treatment incompatible with it. I was eight years old and by then had no need to go to my nanny. I let Ilya feel that by bringing him a basin of cherries left over from making liqueur.

Grandpa Ilya liked cherries. He took them, softened, stroked my head with his calloused hand, and very close and very good relations were restored between us.

“I tell you what,” Grandpa Ilya said to me. “Always respect the muzhik most of all, and listen to him, but don’t go telling everybody what you hear. Otherwise I’ll chase you away.”

After that I kept secret all that I heard from the miller, and I learned so many interesting things that I was now afraid not only at night, when all the house and forest demons and kikimoras become very bold and insolent, but even in the daytime. This fear seized me because it turned out that our house and our whole area were under the sway of a really scary brigand and bloodthirsty sorcerer named Selivan. He lived only four miles from us, “at the fork,” that is, where the big high road divided in two: one, the new road, went to Kiev, and the other, the old one, with hollow willows “of Catherine’s planting,”² led to Fatezh. That road was now abandoned and gone to waste.

Half a mile beyond that fork was a fine oak forest, and by the forest a most wretched inn, completely exposed and half fallen down, in which they said nobody ever stayed. That was easy to believe, because the inn offered no comforts for a stay, and because it was too close to the town of Kromy, where, even in those half-savage times, one could hope to find a warm room, a samovar, and second-rate white rolls. It was in this terrible inn, where nobody ever stayed, that the “empty innkeeper” Selivan lived, a terrible man whom nobody was glad to meet.

III

The story of the “empty innkeeper” Selivan, in Grandpa Ilya’s words, was the following. Selivan was of Kromy tradesman stock; his parents died early, and he lived as an errand boy at the baker’s and sold white rolls at a tavern outside the Orel gate. He was a good, kind, and obedient boy, but people kept telling the baker that he ought to be careful with Selivan, because he had a fiery red mark on his face—and that was never put there for nothing. There were such people as knew a special proverb for it: “Beware of him whom God hath marked.” The baker praised Selivan highly for his zeal and trustworthiness, but everybody else, as his sincere well-wishers, said that all the same real prudence called for wariness and warned against trusting him too much—because “God hath marked” him. If a mark had been put on his face, it was precisely so that all overly trusting people would be wary of him. The baker didn’t want to lag behind intelligent people, but Selivan was a very good worker. He sold his rolls assiduously and each evening conscientiously poured out for his master from a big leather purse all the ten- and five-kopeck pieces he had earned from passing muzhiks. However, the mark was not on him for nothing, but waiting for a certain occasion (it’s always like that). A “retired executioner” named Borka came to Kromy from Orel, and they said to him: “An executioner, Borka, so you was, and now you’ll have a bitter life with us,” and everybody tried the best they could to make these words come true for the man. When the executioner Borka came from Orel to Kromy, he had with him a daughter of about fifteen who had been born in jail—though many thought it would have been better for her not to have been born at all.

They came to live in Kromy by assignment. It’s incomprehensible now, but the practice then was to assign retired executioners to some town, and it was done just like that, without asking anyone’s wishes or consent. So it happened with Borka: some governor ordered that this old executioner be assigned to Kromy—and so he was, and he came there to live and brought his daughter with him. Naturally, the executioner was not a desirable guest for anybody in Kromy. On the contrary, being spotless themselves, they all scorned him, and decidedly nobody wanted to have either him or his daughter around. And the weather was already very cold when they came.

The executioner asked to be taken into one house, then another, and then stopped bothering people. He could see that he aroused no compassion in anybody, and he knew that he fully deserved it.

“But the child!” he thought. “The child’s not to blame for my sins—somebody will take pity on the child.”

And Borka again went knocking from house to house, asking them to take not him, but only the girl … He swore that he would never even come to visit his daughter.

But that plea was also in vain.

Who wants to have anything to do with an executioner?

And so, having gone around the little town, these ill-fated visitors asked to be taken to jail. There they could at least warm up from the autumnal wetness and cold. But the jail did not take them either, because they had already served their term and were now free people. They were free to die by any fence or in any ditch they liked.

Occasionally people gave the executioner and his daughter alms, not for their own sake, but for Christ’s, of course, but no one let them in. The old man and his daughter had no shelter and spent their nights in clay pits under the riverbank or in empty watchmen’s huts by the kitchen gardens along the valley. Their hard lot was shared by a skinny dog who had come with them from Orel.

He was a big, shaggy dog, whose fur was all matted. What he ate, having beggarly owners, no one knew, but they finally figured out that he had no need to eat, because he was “gutless,” that is, he was only skin and bones and yellow, suffering eyes, but “in the middle” he had nothing and therefore required no food at all.

Grandpa Ilya told me how this could be achieved “in the easiest way.” Take any dog while it’s still a pup and make it drink melted tin or lead, and it will become without guts and have no need to eat. But, naturally, for that you had to know “a special magic word.” And since the executioner obviously knew that word, people of strict morals killed his dog. This had to be done, of course, so as not to give indulgence to sorcery; but it was a great misfortune for the beggars, because the girl slept with the dog, who shared with her some of the warmth he had in his fur. However, there naturally could be no pandering to magic for the sake of such trifles, and everyone was of the opinion that destroying the dog was perfectly right. Sorcerers should not be allowed to fool right-minded people.

IV

After the destruction of the dog, the executioner himself kept the girl warm in the huts, but he was already old and, luckily for him, did not have to keep up this care, which was beyond his strength, for very long. One freezing night, the child felt that her father was colder than she, and she was so frightened that she moved away from him and even fainted from terror. Till morning she remained in the embrace of death. When the sun rose and people on their way to church peeked into the hut out of curiosity, they saw the father and daughter frozen stiff. They somehow managed to warm up the girl, and when she saw her father’s strangely immobile eyes and wildly bared teeth, she realized what it meant and burst into sobs.

The old man was buried outside the cemetery, because he had lived badly and died without repentance, and his girl they more or less forgot about … Not for long, it’s true, just for a month or so, but when they remembered her a month later, she was nowhere to be found.

One might have thought that the orphan girl had run away to some other town or gone begging in the villages. Far more curious was another strange circumstance connected with the girl’s disappearance: even before she turned up missing, it was noticed that the baker’s boy Selivan had vanished without a trace.

He vanished quite unexpectedly, and more heedlessly, besides, than any other runaway before him. Selivan took absolutely nothing from anybody. All the rolls given him to sell even remained on his tray, and all the money for those he had sold was there as well. But he himself did not return home.

These two orphans were regarded as lost for a whole three years.

Suddenly one day a merchant came back from a fair, the man who also owned the long-abandoned inn “at the fork,” and said he had had an accident: he was driving along a log road, misguided his horse, and was nearly crushed under his cart, but an unknown vagabond saved him.

He recognized this vagabond, and it turned out he was none other than Selivan.

The merchant Selivan had saved was not the sort to be insensitive to a service rendered him: to avoid being accused of ingratitude at the Last Judgment, he wished to do the vagabond a good turn.

“I want to be your benefactor,” he said to Selivan. “I have a vacant inn at the fork: go and settle there as the innkeeper, sell oats and hay, and pay me only a hundred roubles a year in rent.”

Selivan knew that four miles from town on an abandoned road was no place for an inn, and whoever kept it could not possibly expect any travelers; but all the same, since this was the first time he had been offered a place of his own, he accepted.

The merchant let him have it.

V

Selivan arrived at the inn with a small, one-wheeled dung cart in which he had placed his belongings, and on top of which a sick woman, dressed in pitiful rags, lay with her head thrown back.

People asked Selivan:

“Who is she?”

He replied: “She’s my wife.”

“What parts is she from?”

Selivan meekly replied:

“God’s parts.”

“What ails her?”

“Her legs hurt.”

“What caused the hurt?”

Frowning, Selivan grunted:

“The cold earth.”

He didn’t say another word, picked up the ailing cripple in his arms, and carried her inside.

There was no talkativeness or general social affability in Selivan; he avoided people and even seemed afraid of them; he never appeared in town, and nobody saw his wife at all after he brought her there in the dung cart. Since then many years had gone by, the young people of that time had already aged, and the inn at the fork had fallen further into decrepitude and ruin; but Selivan and his poor cripple still lived in it and, to the general amazement, paid some rent to the merchant’s heirs.

Where did this strange man earn all that was necessary for his own needs and what he had to pay for the completely ruined inn? Everybody knew that not one traveler had ever stopped at it, that not one driver had fed his horses there, and yet Selivan, while he lived in want, had not yet died of hunger.

That was the question the neighboring peasants puzzled over, though not for very long. Soon they all realized that Selivan kept company with the unclean powers … These unclean powers set up all sorts of profitable deals for him, which for ordinary people were even impossible.

It’s a known thing that the devil and his helpers have a great eagerness to do people all sorts of evil; but they especially like taking people’s souls out of them unexpectedly, so that they have no time to purify themselves by repentance. If some human being helps them in their schemes, all the unclean powers—that is, all the wood demons, water demons, and kikimoras—willingly do him various favors, though on very stiff conditions. A man who helps demons must follow them to hell himself—sooner or later, but inevitably. Selivan found himself precisely in that fatal situation. In order to live somehow in his ruined little house, he had long since sold his soul to several devils at once, and after that they had begun to use the strongest measures to drive travelers to his inn. No one ever came out of Selivan’s again. It was done in such a way that the wood demons, in collusion with the kikimoras, would suddenly raise a storm or blizzard towards evening, so that the man on the road would get confused and hurry to hide wherever he could from the raging elements. Selivan would at once pull a clever trick: he would put a light in his window, and by that light would draw in merchants with fat moneybags, noblemen with secret strongboxes, and priests in fur hats all lined with banknotes. It was a trap. Of those who went through Selivan’s gates, not one ever came back out. What Selivan did with them nobody knew.

Grandpa Ilya, having come to that point, would just move his hand through the air and say imposingly:

“The owl flies, the hawk glides … nothing to be seen: storm, blizzard, and … mother night—all’s out of sight.”

Not to lower myself in Grandpa Ilya’s opinion, I pretended to understand what the words “The owl flies and the hawk glides” meant, but I understood only one thing, that Selivan was some sort of all-around spook, whom it was extremely dangerous to meet … God forbid it should happen to anybody.

I tried, nevertheless, to verify the terrible stories about Selivan with other people, but they all said the same thing word for word. They all looked upon Selivan as a fearful spook, and, like Grandpa Ilya, they all sternly warned me “not to tell anybody about Selivan at home.” Following the miller’s advice, I observed this muzhik commandment until one especially frightening occasion when I myself fell into Selivan’s clutches.

VI

In winter, when the storm windows were put up, I couldn’t see Grandpa Ilya and the other muzhiks as often as before. I was protected from the frosts, while they were all left to work in the cold, during which one of them got into an unpleasant episode that brought Selivan onstage again.

At the very beginning of winter, Ilya’s nephew, the muzhik Nikolai, went to celebrate his name day in Kromy and didn’t come back, and two weeks later he was found at the edge of Selivan’s forest. Nikolai was sitting on a stump, his chin propped on his stick, and, by the look of it, resting after such great fatigue that he didn’t notice how a blizzard had buried him up to the knees in snow and foxes had taken bites from his nose and cheeks.

Nikolai had obviously lost his way, gotten tired, and frozen to death; but everybody knew it had happened with some hidden purpose and Selivan was behind it. I learned of it from the maids, of whom there were many in our house, almost all of them named Annushka. There was big Annushka, little Annushka, pockmarked Annushka, round Annushka, and also another Annushka nicknamed “Snappy.” This last one was a sort of journalist and reporter among us. She received her pert nickname for her lively and playful character.

There were only two maids who weren’t called Annushka—Neonila and Nastya, whose position was somewhat special, because they were specially educated in Madame Morozova’s fashion shop in Orel; and there were also three errand girls in the house—Oska, Moska, and Roska. The baptismal name of one was Matrena, of another Raïssa, and what Oska’s real name was I don’t know. Moska, Oska, and Roska were still in their nonage and were therefore treated scornfully by everybody. They ran around barefoot and had no right to sit on chairs, but sat low down, on footstools. Their duties included various humiliating tasks, such as cleaning basins, taking out wash-tubs, walking the lapdogs, and running errands for the kitchen staff and to the village. Nowadays there is no such superfluous servantry in country households, but back then it seemed necessary.

All our maids and errand girls, naturally, knew a lot about the fearful Selivan, near whose inn the muzhik Nikolai froze to death. On this occasion they now remembered all of Selivan’s old pranks, which I hadn’t known about before. It now came to light that once, when the coachman Konstantin had gone to town to buy beef, he had heard a pitiful moaning coming from the window of Selivan’s place and the words: “Aie, my hand hurts! Aie, he’s cutting my finger off!”

Big Annushka, the maid, explained that during a blizzard Selivan had seized a carriage with a whole family of gentlefolk, and he was slowly cutting off the fingers of all the children one by one. This horrible barbarism frightened me terribly. Then something still more horrible, and inexplicable besides, happened to the cobbler Ivan. Once, when he was sent to town for shoemaking supplies and, having tarried, was returning home in the evening darkness, a little blizzard arose—and that gave Selivan the greatest pleasure. He immediately got up and went out to the fields, to blow about in the darkness together with Baba Yaga,³ the wood demons, and kikimoras. And the cobbler knew it and was on his guard, but not enough. Selivan leaped out right in front of his nose and barred the way … The horse stopped. But the cobbler, luckily for him, was brave by nature and highly resourceful. He went up to Selivan, as if amiably, and said, “Hi there,” and at the same time stuck him right in the stomach with his biggest and sharpest awl, which he had in his sleeve. The stomach is the only place where a sorcerer can be mortally wounded, but Selivan saved himself by immediately turning into a stout milepost, in which the cobbler’s sharp tool stuck so fast that the cobbler couldn’t pull it out, and he had to part with the awl, much though he needed it in his work.

This last incident was even an offensive mockery of honest people, and everyone became convinced that Selivan was indeed not only a great villain and a cunning sorcerer, but also an impudent fellow, who must be given no quarter. They decided to teach him a harsh lesson; but Selivan was also no slouch and learned a new trick: he began to “shapeshift,” that is, at the slightest danger, even simply at each encounter, he would change his human look and turn before everyone’s eyes into various animate and inanimate objects. True, thanks to the general uprising against him, he suffered a bit despite all his adroitness, but to eradicate him proved impossible, and the struggle against him even assumed a somewhat ridiculous aspect, which offended and angered everyone still more. Thus, for instance, after the cobbler pierced him as hard as he could with his awl, and Selivan saved himself only by managing to turn into a milepost, several people saw the awl stuck into a real milepost. They even tried to pull it out, but the awl broke off, and they brought the cobbler only the worthless wooden handle.

After that, Selivan walked about the forest as if he hadn’t been stuck at all, and turned himself so earnestly into a boar that he ate acorns with pleasure, as if such fruit were suited to his taste. But most often he came out on his tattered black roof in the guise of a red rooster and from there crowed “Cock-a-doodle-doo!” Everybody knew, naturally, that he was not interested in crowing “Cock-a-doodle-doo,” but was spying out whether anyone was coming, so as to prompt the wood demon or kikimora to stir up a good storm and worry him to death. In short, the local people figured out all his tricks so well that they never got caught in the villain’s nets and even took good revenge on Selivan for his perfidy. Once, having turned himself into a boar, he ran into the blacksmith Savely, who was returning on foot from a wedding in Kromy, and they had a real fight, but the blacksmith came out victorious, because, luckily, he happened to have a heavy cudgel in his hand. The were-boar pretended he had no wish to pay the slightest attention to the blacksmith and, grunting heavily, chomped his acorns; but the keen-witted blacksmith saw through his stratagem, which was to let him go by and then attack him from the rear, knock him down, and eat him instead of the acorns. The blacksmith decided to forestall trouble; he raised his cudgel high above his head and whacked the boar on the snout so hard that it squealed pitifully, fell down, and never got up again. And when, after that, the blacksmith began making a hasty getaway, Selivan assumed his human form again and looked at him for a long time from his porch—obviously having the most unfriendly intentions towards him.

After this terrible encounter, the blacksmith even came down with a fever, and only cured himself by taking the quinine powder sent to him from our house as a treatment and scattering it to the winds.

The blacksmith passed for a very reasonable man and knew that neither quinine nor any other pharmaceutical medication could do anything against magic. He waited it out, tied a knot in a thick string, and threw it onto the dung heap to rot. That put an end to it all, because as soon as the string and the knot rotted, Selivan’s power was supposed to end. And so it happened. After this incident, Selivan never again turned into a pig, or at least decidedly no one since then ever met him in that slovenly guise.

With Selivan’s pranks in the form of a red rooster things went even more fortunately: the cross-eyed mill hand Savka, a most daring young lad, who acted with great foresight and adroitness, took up arms against him.

Having been sent to town once on the eve of a fair, he went mounted on a very lazy and obstinate horse. Knowing his character, Savka brought along on the sly, just in case, a good birch stick, with which he hoped to imprint a souvenir on the flanks of his melancholy Bucephalus. He had already managed to do something of the sort and had broken the character of his steed enough so that, losing patience, he began to gallop a little.

Selivan, not expecting Savka to be so well armed, jumped out on the eaves as a rooster the moment he arrived and began turning around, rolled his eyes in all directions, and sang “Cock-a-doodle-doo!” Savka wasn’t cowed by the sorcerer, but, on the contrary, said to him: “Eh, brother, never fear—you won’t get near,” and without thinking twice he deftly hurled the stick at him, so that he didn’t even finish his “cock-a-doodle-doo” and fell down dead. Unfortunately, he didn’t fall outside, but into the courtyard, where, once he touched the ground, it cost him nothing to go back to his natural human form. He became Selivan and, running out, took off after Savka brandishing the same stick with which Savka had given him the treatment when he sang as a rooster on the roof.

According to Savka, Selivan was so furious this time that it might have gone badly for him; but Savka was a quick-witted fellow and knew very well one extremely useful trick. He knew that his lazy horse forgot his laziness at once the moment he was turned towards home, to his trough. That was what he did. The moment Selivan rushed at him armed with the stick, Savka turned the horse around and vanished. He came galloping home, his face distorted by fear, and told about the frightful incident that had befallen him only the next day. And thank God he started to speak, because they feared he might be left mute forever.

VII

Instead of the cowed Savka, another braver ambassador was dispatched, who reached Kromy and came back safely. However, this one, too, on completing the trip, said it would have been easier for him to fall through the earth than to go past Selivan’s inn. Other people felt the same: the fear became general; but to make up for it they all combined their efforts to keep an eye on Selivan. Wherever and whatever shape he took, he was always found out, and they strove to cut off his harmful existence in all its guises. Let Selivan appear by his inn as a sheep or a calf—he was recognized and beaten anyway, and he couldn’t manage to hide in any of his guises. Even when he rolled out to the road one time as a new, freshly tarred cart wheel and lay in the sun to dry, his ruse was discovered and smart people smashed the wheel to bits, so that both the hub and the spokes flew in all directions.

Of all these incidents that made up the heroic epopee of my childhood, I promptly received quick and highly trustworthy intelligence. The swiftness of the news was owing in large part to the fact that there was always an excellent itinerant public that came to do their grinding at our mill. While the millstones ground the grain, their mouths with still greater zeal ground out all sorts of drivel, and from there all the interesting stories were brought to the maids’ room by Moska and Roska, and were then conveyed to me in the best possible versions, and I would set to thinking about them all night, creating very amusing situations for myself and Selivan, for whom, despite all I had heard about him, I nursed in the depths of my soul a most heartfelt attraction. I believed irrevocably that the time would come when Selivan and I would meet in some extraordinary way—and would even love each other far more than I loved Grandpa Ilya, in whom I disliked it that one of his eyes, namely the left one, always laughed a little.

I simply couldn’t believe for long that Selivan had done all his supernatural wonders with evil intent towards people, and I liked very much to think about him; and usually, as soon as I began to doze off, I dreamed about him—quiet, kind, and even hurt. I had never yet seen him, and was unable to picture his face to myself from the distorted descriptions of the talebearers, but I saw his eyes as soon as I closed my own. They were big eyes, perfectly blue and very kind. And while I slept, Selivan and I were in the most pleasant harmony: we found various secret little burrows in the forest, where we kept a lot of bread and butter and warm children’s coats stashed away, which we would take, run to cottages we knew in the village, place them in a dormer window, knock to get somebody’s attention, and run away.

I think those were the most beautiful dreams of my life, and I always regretted that when I woke up, Selivan turned back into a brigand, against whom every good man had to take every measure of precaution. I admit, I had no wish to lag behind the others, and while I had the warmest friendship with Selivan in my dreams, on waking I considered it not superfluous to protect myself from him even at a distance.

To that end, by way of no little flattery and other humiliations, I talked the housekeeper into giving me my father’s old and very big Caucasian dagger, which she kept in the larder. I tied it to the chinstrap I had taken from my uncle’s hussar shako and cleverly hid this weapon under the mattress at the head of my little bed. If Selivan had appeared at night in our house, I would certainly have confronted him.

Neither my father nor my mother knew of this secret armory, and that was absolutely necessary, otherwise the dagger would, of course, have been taken from me, and then Selivan would have disturbed my peaceful sleep, because I was still terribly afraid of him. And meanwhile he was already making approaches to us, but our pert young girls recognized him at once. Selivan dared to appear in our house as a big red-brown rat. At first he simply made noise in the larder at night, but then he got down into a big tub made from a hollowed linden trunk, at the bottom of which, covered by a sieve, lay sausages and other good things set aside for receiving guests. Here Selivan wanted to cause us serious domestic trouble—probably to pay us back for the troubles he had suffered from our muzhiks. Turning into a red-brown rat, he jumped to the bottom of the tub, pushed aside the stone weight that lay on the sieve, and ate all the sausages. But then there was no way he could jump back out of the high tub. This time, by all appearances, Selivan couldn’t possibly escape the well-deserved punishment that Snappy Annushka, the quickest of the girls, volunteered to mete out to him. For that she appeared with a kettle full of boiling water and an old fork. Annushka’s plan was first to scald the were-rat with the boiling water, and then stab him with the fork and throw the dead body into the weeds, to be eaten by crows. But in carrying out the execution, Round Annushka made a clumsy move: she splashed boiling water on Snappy Annushka’s hand. The girl dropped the fork from pain, and at the same moment the rat bit her finger and, running up her sleeve with remarkable agility, jumped out, and, having put a general fright into all those present, made himself invisible.

My parents, who looked upon this incident with ordinary eyes, ascribed the stupid outcome of the hunt to the clumsiness of our Annushkas; but we, who knew the secret springs of the matter, also knew that it was impossible to do any better here, because it was not a simple rat, but the were-rat Selivan. However, we didn’t dare tell that to the adults. As simple-hearted folk, we feared criticism and the mockery of something we ourselves considered obvious and unquestionable.

Selivan didn’t dare to cross the front doorstep in any of his guises, as it seemed to me, because he knew something about my dagger.

And to me that was both flattering and annoying, because, as a matter of fact, I was tired of nothing but talk and rumors and was burning with a passionate desire to meet Selivan face-to-face.

That finally turned into a languishing in me, in which I spent the whole long winter with its interminable evenings, but when the first spring torrents came down the hills, an event took place that upset the whole order of our life and unleashed the dangerous impulses of unrestrained passions.

VIII

The event was unexpected and sad. At the height of the spring thaw, when, according to a popular expression, “a puddle can drown a bull,” a horseman came galloping from my aunt’s far-off estate with the fateful news of my grandfather’s dangerous illness.

A long journey over such bad spring roads presented a great danger; but that didn’t stop my mother and father, and they set out on their way at once. They had to go seventy miles, and in nothing but a simple cart, because it was impossible to make the trip in any other kind of carriage. The cart was accompanied by two horsemen carrying long poles. They went ahead and felt out the depth of the potholes. The house and I were left in the care of a special interim committee composed of various persons from various departments. Big Annushka was in charge of all persons of the female sex, down to Oska and Roska; but the high moral supervision was entrusted to Dementievna, the headman’s wife. Our intellectual guidance—in the sense of the observing of feasts and Sundays—was confided to Apollinary Ivanovich, the deacon’s son, who, having been expelled from the class of rhetoric in the seminary,⁴ had been attached to my person as a tutor. He taught me the Latin declensions and generally prepared me so that the next year I could enter the first class of the Orel school not as a complete savage likely to show surprise at the Latin grammar of Beliustin and the French grammar of Lhomond.

Apollinary was a young man of worldly tendency and planned to enter the “chancellery,” or, in modern parlance, to become a clerk in the Orel provincial office, where his uncle served in a most interesting post. If some police officer or other failed to observe some regulation or other, Apollinary’s uncle was sent as a one-horse “special envoy” at the expense of the culprits. He rode about without paying anything for his horse, and, besides that, received gifts and offerings from the culprits, and saw different towns and many different people of different ranks and customs. My Apollinary also set his sights on achieving such happiness in time, and could hope to do much more than his uncle, because he possessed two great talents that could be very pleasing in social intercourse: Apollinary could play two songs on the guitar, “A Girl Went to Cut Nettles,” and another, much more difficult one, “On a Rainy Autumn Evening,” and—what was still more rare in the provinces at that time—he could compose beautiful verses for the ladies, which, as a matter of fact, was what got him expelled from the seminary.

Despite our difference in age, Apollinary and I were on a friendly footing, and, as befits faithful friends, we kept each other’s secrets. In this case, his share came out a bit smaller than mine: all my secrets were limited to the dagger under my mattress, while I was obliged to keep deeply hidden two secrets entrusted to me: the first concerned the pipe hidden in his wardrobe, in which of an evening Apollinary smoked sour-sweet white Nezhin roots into the stove,⁵ and the second was still more important—here the matter had to do with verses composed by Apollinary in honor of some “light-footed Pulcheria.”

The verses seemed very bad, but Apollinary said that to judge them correctly, it was necessary to see the impression they produced when read nicely, with feeling, to a tender and sensitive woman.

That posed a great and, in our situation, even insurmountable difficulty, because there were no little ladies in our house, and when grown-up young ladies came to visit, Apollinary didn’t dare suggest that they be his listeners, because he was very shy, and among the young ladies of our acquaintance there were some great scoffers.

Necessity taught Apollinary to invent a compromise—namely, to declaim the ode to “Light-footed Pulcheria” before our maid Neonila, who had adopted various polished city manners in Madame Morozova’s fashion shop and, to Apollinary’s mind, ought to have the refined feelings necessary in order to feel the merits of poetry.

Being very young, I was afraid to give my teacher advice in his poetic experiments, but I considered his plan to declaim verses before the seamstress risky. I was judging by myself, naturally, and though I did take into account that young Neonila was familiar with some subjects of city circles, it could hardly be that she would understand the language of lofty poetry in which Apollinary sang of Pulcheria. Besides, in the ode to “Light-footed Pulcheria” there were such exclamations as “Oh, you cruel one!” or “Vanish from my sight!” and the like. By nature Neonila was of a timid and shy character, and I was afraid she would take it personally and most certainly burst into tears and run away.

But worst of all was that, with the usual strict order of our domestic life, this poetic rehearsal thought up by the rhetorician was absolutely impossible. Neither the time, nor the place, nor even all the other conditions favored Neonila’s listening to Apollinary’s verses and being their first appreciator. However, the anarchy that installed itself with my parents’ departure changed all that, and the student decided to take advantage of it. Now, forgetting all difference in our positions, we played cards every evening, and Apollinary even smoked his Nezhin roots around the house and sat in my father’s chair in the dining room, which offended me a little. Besides that, at his insistence, we played blind man’s buff several times, from which my brother and I wound up with bruises. We also played hide-and-seek, and once even organized a formal fête with lots of food. It seems all this was done “on the house,” as many thoughtless carousers reveled in those days, down whose ruinous path we were drawn by the rhetorician. To this day I don’t know who then made the suggestion that we gather a whole sack of the ripest hazelnuts, extracted from the mouse holes (where one usually finds only nuts of the highest quality). Besides the nuts, we had three gray paper bags of yellow sugar lollipops, sunflower seeds, and candied pears. These last really stuck to your hands and were hard to wash off.

Since this last fruit enjoyed special attention, pears were given only as prizes in the game of forfeits. Moska, Oska, and Roska, being essentially insignificant, got no candied fruit at all. The game of forfeits included Annushka, and me, and my tutor Apollinary, who proved to be very clever and inventive. All this took place in the drawing room, where only very honored guests used to sit. And there, in the daze of passionate merriment, some desperate spirit got into Apollinary, and he conceived a still bolder undertaking. He decided to declaim his ode in a grandiose and even terrifying setting, where the strongest nerves would be subjected to the highest tension. He began inciting us all to go together the next Sunday to pick lily of the valley in Selivan’s forest. And in the evening, when he and I were going to bed, he revealed to me that the lily of the valley was only a pretext, while the main goal was to read the verses in that terrible setting.

On one side would be the effect of the fear of Selivan, on the other the fear of the terrible verses … How would it turn out, and could anyone bear it?

And, imagine, we did venture to do it.

In the animation that gripped us all on that memorable spring evening, it seemed to us that we were all brave and could pull off the desperate stunt safely. In fact, there would be a lot of us, and besides I would, naturally, bring along my huge Caucasian dagger.

I admit, I wanted very much for all the others to be armed according to their strength and possibilities, but I didn’t meet with any due attention or readiness for that. Apollinary took only his pipe and guitar, and the girls went with trivets, skillets, a kettle of eggs, and a cast-iron pot. In the pot they intended to boil wheat porridge with lard, and in the skillets to fry eggs, and in that sense they were excellent; but in the sense of defending ourselves in case of possible mischief on Selivan’s part, they meant decidedly nothing.

To tell the truth, however, I was displeased with my companions for something else as well—namely, that I didn’t feel on their part the same consideration for Selivan that I myself was imbued with. They did fear him, but somehow light-mindedly, and even risked some critical bantering about him. One Annushka said she would take a rolling pin and kill him with it, and Snappy laughingly said she could bite him, and with that she bared her extremely white teeth and bit off a piece of wire. All this was somehow unserious; but the rhetorician surpassed them all. He denied the existence of Selivan altogether—said that there had never even been such a person, and that he was simply a figment of the imagination, like the Python, Cerberus, and their ilk.⁶

I saw then for the first time how far a man was capable of being carried away by negation! What was the use, then, of any rhetoric, if it allowed one to put on the same level of probability the mythological Python and Selivan, the reality of whose existence was confirmed by a multitude of manifest events?

I did not yield to that temptation and preserved my belief in Selivan. More than that, I believed that the rhetorician was certain to be punished for his unbelief.

However, if one did not take this philosophizing seriously, then the projected outing in the forest promised much merriment, and no one either wished or was able to make himself prepare for occurrences of another sort. And yet good sense should have made us highly cautious in that cursed forest, where we would be, so to speak, in the very jaws of the beast.

They all thought only of what fun it would be to wander about in the forest, where everybody was afraid to go, but they were not. They reflected on how we would go through the whole dangerous forest, hallooing and calling to each other, and leaping over holes and gullies where the last snow was crumbling away, and never thought whether all this would be approved of when our higher authorities returned. On the other hand, however, we did have in mind making two big bouquets of the best lily of the valley for mama’s dressing table, and using the rest to make a fragrant extract, which would serve for the whole coming summer as an excellent lotion against sunburn.

IX

The impatiently awaited Sunday came, we left Dementievna, the headman’s wife, to look after the house, and set out for Selivan’s forest. The whole public went on foot, keeping to the raised shoulders, which were already dry and where the first emerald-green grass was sprouting, while the train, which consisted of a cart hitched to an old dun horse, followed on the road. In the cart lay Apollinary’s guitar and the girls’ jackets, taken along in case of bad weather. I was the driver, and behind me, in the quality of passengers, sat Roska and the other little girls, one of whom carefully cradled a bag of eggs on her knees, while the other had general charge of various objects, but mainly supported with her hand my huge dagger, which I had slung over my shoulder on an old hussar cord from my uncle’s saber, and which dangled from side to side, interfering considerably with my movements and distracting my attention from guiding the horse.

The girls, walking along the shoulder, sang: “I plough the field, I sow the hemp,” and the rhetorician doubled them in the bass. Some muzhiks we met on the way bowed and asked:

“What’s up?”

The Annushkas replied:

“We’re going to take Selivan prisoner.”

The muzhiks wagged their heads and said:

“Besotted fools!”

We were indeed in some sort of daze, overcome by an irrepressible, half-childish need to run, sing, laugh, and do everything recklessly.

But meanwhile an hour’s driving on a bad road began to have an adverse effect on me—I was sick of the old horse, and the eagerness to hold the rope reins in my hands had gone cold in me; but nearby, on the horizon, Selivan’s forest showed blue, and everything livened up again. My heart pounded and ached as Varus’s had when he entered the forest of Teutoburg.⁷ And just then a hare leaped out from under the melting snow on the shoulder and, crossing the road, took off over the field.

“Phooey on you!” the Annushkas shouted after him.

They all knew that meeting a hare never portends anything good. I also turned coward and seized my dagger, but, in the effort of drawing it from the rusty scabbard, I didn’t notice that I had let go of the reins, and I quite unexpectedly found myself under the overturned cart, which the horse, who pulled towards the shoulder to get some grass, turned over in the most proper fashion, so that all four wheels were up, and Roska and I and all our provisions were underneath.

This misfortune befell us in a moment, but its consequences were countless: Apollinary’s guitar was smashed to bits, and the broken eggs ran down and plastered our eyes with their sticky content. What’s more, Roska was howling.

I was utterly overwhelmed and abashed, and so much at a loss that I even wished they would rather not free us at all, but I already heard the voices of all the Annushkas, who, while working to free us, explained the reason for our fall very much to my advantage. Neither I nor the horse was the reason: it was all Selivan’s doing.

This was his first ruse to keep us from coming to his forest, but it didn’t frighten anyone very much; on the contrary, it filled us all with great indignation and increased our resolve to carry out at all costs the whole program we had conceived.

It was only necessary to lift the cart and turn it right side up, wash off the unpleasant egg slime in some brook, and see what remained after the catastrophe of the things we had brought as the day’s provisions for our numerous group.

All this got done somehow. Roska and I were washed in a brook that ran just at the edge of Selivan’s forest, and when my eyes opened, the world seemed very unsightly to me. The girls’ pink dresses and my new blue cashmere jacket were good for nothing: the dirt and egg that covered them ruined them completely and couldn’t be washed off without soap, which we had not brought with us. The pot and the skillet were cracked, the trivet’s legs were broken off and lay about, and all that was left of Apollinary’s guitar was the neck with strings twined around it. The bread and other dry goods were covered with mud. At the very least, we were threatened with a whole day of hunger, to say nothing of the other horrors that could be felt in everything around us. The wind whistled over the stream in the valley, and the black forest, not yet covered with green, rustled and ominously waved its branches at us.

Our spirits sank considerably—especially in Roska, who was cold and wept. But still we decided to enter Selivan’s kingdom, and let come what might.

In any case, the same adventure could not repeat itself without some sort of change.

X

We all crossed ourselves and began to enter the forest. We entered timidly and hesitantly, but each of us concealed his timidity from the others. We all simply agreed to call out to each other as often as we could. However, there was no great need for that, because nobody went very far in, and, as if by chance, we all kept crowding towards the edge and strung ourselves out along it. Only Apollinary proved braver than the rest and went a little further into the depths; he was concerned with finding the most remote and frightening spot, where his declaiming could produce the most terrible impression on the listening girls. But Apollinary had no sooner disappeared from sight than the forest resounded with his piercing, frenzied cry. No one could imagine what danger Apollinary had met with, but everybody abandoned him and ran headlong out of the forest to the clearing, and then, without looking back, ran further down the road home. All the Annushkas fled, and all the Moskas, and after them, still crying out from fear, sped our pedagogue himself; and my little brother and I were left alone.

There was no one left of all our company: not only the people, but even the horse, following the inhuman example of the people, abandoned us. Frightened by their cries, it tossed its head and, turning away from the forest, raced home, scattering over the potholes and bumps whatever was still left in the cart.

This was not a retreat, it was a full and most shameful rout, because it was accompanied by the loss not only of the train, but of all good sense, and we children were thrown on the mercy of fate.

God knows what we would have to endure in our helplessly orphaned condition, which was the more dangerous because we couldn’t find the way home by ourselves, and our footgear consisted of soft goatskin boots with thin soles, not at all convenient for walking three miles over sodden paths, on which there were still cold puddles in many places. To complete the disaster, before my brother and I had time to fully realize all the horror of our situation, something rumbled through the forest and then a breath of cold dampness blew from the direction of the stream.

We looked across the hollow and saw, racing through the sky from the direction where our road lay and where our retinue had shamefully fled, a huge cloud laden with spring rain and the first spring thunder, when young girls wash themselves from silver spoons, so as to become whiter than silver themselves.

Seeing myself in this desperate situation, I was ready to burst into tears, and my little brother was already crying. He was all blue and trembling from fear and cold, and, with his head bent under a little bush, was fervently praying to God.

It seems God heeded his childish prayer and invisible salvation was sent to us. At the same moment when the thunder rumbled and we were losing our last courage, we heard a crunching in the forest behind the bushes, and from the thick branches of a tall hazel the broad face of a muzhik unknown to us peeked out. That face seemed so frightening that we cried out and rushed headlong towards the stream.

Beside ourselves, we crossed the hollow, tumbled down the wet, crumbling bank, and straightaway found ourselves up to the waist in the turbid water, our legs sunk knee-deep in mire.

It was impossible to run any further. The stream further on was too deep for our small size; we couldn’t hope to cross it, and, besides, zigzags of lightning were now flashing terribly on its water—they quivered and meandered like fiery serpents, as if hiding among last year’s reeds.

Finding ourselves in the water, we seized each other’s hands and stood frozen there, while from above us heavy drops of rain were already beginning to fall. But this frozenness saved us from great danger, which we could in no way have avoided if we had gone one step further into the water.

We might easily have slipped and fallen, but fortunately we were embraced by two dark, sinewy arms, and the same muzhik who had looked at us so frighteningly from the hazel said gently:

“Ah, you silly boys, look where you’ve gotten to!”

And with that he picked us up and carried us across the stream.

Coming out on the other bank, he lowered us to the ground, took off his short jacket, which was fastened at the collar by a round brass button, and wiped our wet feet with it.

We looked at him all the while in complete bewilderment and felt ourselves wholly in his power, but—wondrous thing—the features of his face were quickly changing before our eyes. Not only did we see nothing frightening in them now, but, on the contrary, his face seemed to us very kind and pleasant.

He was a sturdy, thickset muzhik with some gray in his hair and mustache—his beard was a clump and also graying, his eyes were lively, quick, and serious, but on his lips there was something close to a smile.

Having wiped as much as he could of the dirt and slime from our feet with the skirt of his jacket, he smiled outright and spoke again:

“You just … never mind … don’t be scared …”

With that he looked around and went on:

“Never mind. There’s a big rainstorm coming!” (By then it had already come.) “You boys won’t make it on foot.”

We only wept silently in reply.

“Never mind, never mind, don’t howl, I’ll carry you!” he said and wiped my brother’s tear-stained face with his palm, which immediately left dirty streaks on it.

“See what dirty hands the muzhik’s got,” our deliverer said and passed his palm over my brother’s face again in the other direction, which didn’t decrease the dirt, but only added shading in the other direction.

“You won’t make it … I’ll take you … No, you won’t make it … and you’ll lose your little boots in the mud. Do you know how to ride?” the muzhik went on again.

I got up enough courage to utter a word and said:

“Yes.”

“Well, all right then!” he said, and in a trice he hoisted me up on one shoulder and my brother on the other, told us to hold hands behind the back of his head, covered us with his jacket, held tight to our knees, and carried us with quick, long strides over the mud, which spread and squelched under his firmly treading feet, shod in big bast shoes.

We sat on his shoulders, covered with his jacket. That must have made for a giant figure, but we were comfortable: the jacket got soaked from the downpour and turned stiff, and we were dry and warm under it. We rocked on our bearer’s shoulders like on a camel, and soon sank into some sort of cataleptic state, but came to ourselves by a spring on our farmstead. For me personally this had been a real, deep sleep, from which I did not awaken all at once. I remember that same muzhik taking us out of the jacket. He was surrounded now by all our Annushkas, and they were all tearing us from his hands and at the same time cursing him mercilessly for something, him and his jacket, which had protected us so well and which they now flung on the ground with the greatest contempt. Besides that, they also threatened him with my father’s arrival, and with running to the village at once to call out the farm people with their flails and set the dogs on him.

I decidedly did not understand the reason for such cruel injustice, and that was not surprising, because at home, under the now ruling interim government, they had formed a conspiracy not to reveal anything to us about the man to whom we owed our salvation.

“You owe him nothing,” our protectresses said. “On the contrary, it was he who caused it all.”

From those words I guessed at once that we had been saved by none other than Selivan himself!

XI

And so it was. The next day, in view of our parents’ return, the fact was revealed to us, and we swore an oath that we would say nothing to our father and mother about the incident that had occurred with us.

In those days when there were still serfs, it sometimes happened that landowners’ children nursed the most tender feelings for household serfs and kept their secrets faithfully. That was so with us. We even concealed as well as we could the sins and transgressions of “our people” from our parents. Such relations are mentioned in many works describing the landowner’s life of that time. As for me, our childhood friendship with our former serfs still constitutes my warmest and most pleasant memory. Through them we knew all the needs and cares of the poor life of their relations and friends in the village, and we learned to pity the people. But, unfortunately, those good people were not always fair themselves and were sometimes capable of casting a dark shadow on their neighbor for no important reason, regardless of the harmful consequences it might have. That is how “the people” acted with Selivan, of whose true character and principles they had no wish to know anything substantial, but boldly, not afraid of sinning against justice, spread rumors about him, which in the eyes of all made him into a spook. And, surprisingly, everything that was said about him not only seemed probable, but even had some visible tokens which could make one think that Selivan was in fact a bad man and that horrible villainies took place near his solitary dwelling.

That was what happened now, when we were scolded by those whose duty it was to protect us: not only did they shift all the blame onto Selivan, who had saved us from the storm, but they even heaped a new accusation on him. Apollinary and all the Annushkas told us that, when Apollinary noticed a pretty hill in the forest, which he thought it would be good to declaim from, he ran to that hill across a little gully filled with last year’s fallen leaves, and stumbled there over something soft. This “something soft” turned under Apollinary’s feet and he fell, and as he got up he saw that it was the corpse of a young peasant woman. He noticed that the corpse was dressed in a clean white sarafan with red embroidery, and … its throat was cut, and blood was pouring from it …

Such a terrible unexpectedness could, of course, frighten a man and make him cry out—which was what he did; but the incomprehensible and surprising thing was that Apollinary, as I said, was far from all the others and the only one to stumble over the corpse of the murdered woman, yet all the Annushkas and Roskas swore to God that they had also seen the corpse …

“Otherwise,” they said, “why would we be so frightened?”

And I’m convinced to this day that they weren’t lying, that they were deeply convinced that they had seen a murdered woman in Selivan’s forest, in a clean peasant dress with red embroidery, with her throat cut and blood flowing from it … How could that be?

Since I’m not writing fiction, but what actually happened, I must pause here and add that this incident remained forever unexplained in our house. No one but Apollinary could have seen the murdered woman, who, according to his own words, was lying in a hollow under the leaves, because no one but Apollinary was there. And yet they all swore that they had all seen the dead woman appear in the twinkling of an eye wherever any of them looked. Besides, had Apollinary himself actually seen this woman? It was hardly possible, because it had happened during the thaw, when not all the snow had melted yet. The leaves had lain under the snow since autumn, yet Apollinary saw a body dressed in a clean, white, embroidered dress, and blood was still flowing from the wound … Nothing like that could actually be, and yet they all crossed themselves and swore that they had seen the woman just as she’s been described. And afterwards we were all afraid to sleep at night, and we were all horrified, as if we had committed a crime. Soon I, too, became persuaded that my brother and I had also seen the murdered woman. A general fear set in among us, which ended with the whole affair being revealed to my parents, and my father wrote a letter to the police chief—and he came to us wearing the longest saber and secretly questioned everybody in my father’s study. Apollinary was even called in twice, and the second time the police chief reprimanded him so severely that, when he came out, both his ears were fiery red and one was even bleeding.

That, too, we all saw.

But however it was, our tall tales caused Selivan much grief: his place was searched, his whole forest was combed, and he himself was kept under guard for a long time, but nothing suspicious was found, and no traces of the murdered woman we had all seen turned up either. Selivan went back home again, but that didn’t help him in public opinion: after that, everybody knew he was an undoubted, though elusive, villain, and nobody would have anything to do with him. As for me, so that I wouldn’t be exposed to the strong influence of the poetic element, I was taken to a “noble boarding school,” where I began to acquire a general education in perfect tranquillity, until the approach of the Christmas holidays, when it was time for me to go home, again inevitably passing Selivan’s inn, and seeing great horrors in it with my own eyes.

XII

Selivan’s bad repute earned me great prestige among my boarding school comrades, with whom I shared my knowledge of this horrible man. None of my schoolmates had yet experienced such horrific sensations as I could boast of, and now, when I was faced with driving past Selivan again—to that no one could remain unconcerned and indifferent. On the contrary, most of my comrades pitied me and said straight out that they wouldn’t want to be in my place, though two or three daredevils envied me and boasted that they would like very much to meet Selivan face-to-face. But two of them were inveterate braggarts, while the third could very well not fear anyone, because, according to him, his grandmother had an antique Venetian ring with a tavousi stone in it, which made a man “inaccessible to any trouble.”^† In my family there was no such jewel, and, besides, I was supposed to make my Christmas journey not with our own horses, but with my aunt, who had sold her house in Orel just before the holidays and, having received thirty thousand roubles for it, was coming to us to buy an estate in our parts that my father had long ago negotiated for her.

To my vexation, my aunt’s departure had been delayed a whole two days by some important business matters, and we left Orel only on the morning before Christmas.

We traveled in a roomy bast-covered sleigh hitched to a troika, with the coachman Spiridon and the young footman Boriska. In the sleigh were my aunt, myself, my boy cousin, my little girl cousins, and the nanny Lyubov Timofeevna.

With decent horses on a good road, one could reach our estate from Orel in five or six hours. We arrived in Kromy at two o’clock and stopped at a merchant’s we knew, to have tea and feed the horses. This was a usual stopover for us, and it was also necessary for the toilette of my little cousin, who was still in diapers.

The weather was good, close to being a thaw; but while we were feeding the horses, a slight chill set in, and then it began to “smoke”—that is, a fine snow blew low over the ground.

My aunt hesitated whether to wait until it was over or, on the contrary, to hurry up and start sooner, so as to get home before the real storm broke.

We had some fourteen miles left to go. The coachman and the footman, who wanted to see in the holiday with their families and friends, assured us that we had time to make it safely, as long as we didn’t dawdle and set out soon.

My own wishes and my aunt’s also corresponded fully to what Spiridon and Boriska wanted. No one wanted to see in the holiday in a strange house in Kromy. Besides, my aunt was mistrustful and suspicious, and she now had a considerable sum of money with her, placed in a little mahogany box, covered with a slipcase of thick green frieze.

To spend the night in a strange house with such a large sum of money seemed very unsafe to my aunt, and she decided to heed the advice of our faithful servants.

At a little past three, our sleigh was hitched up and left Kromy in the direction of the schismatic village of Kolchevo;⁸ but we had only just crossed the river Kroma over the ice when we felt as if we suddenly didn’t have enough air to take a deep breath. The horses ran quickly, snorting and wagging their heads, which was a sure sign that they also felt a lack of air. Meanwhile the sleigh raced along with a peculiar lightness, as if it were being pushed from behind. The wind was at our backs, and seemed to be urging us on with redoubled speed towards some predestined boundary line. Soon, however, our brisk path began to “stammer”; soft snowdrifts already appeared along the road—they became more and more frequent, and soon enough our former brisk path couldn’t be seen at all.

My aunt peeked worriedly out of the window to ask the coachman whether we had kept to the right road, but drew back at once, all showered with fine, cold dust, and before we managed to catch the attention of the men on the box, snow came rushing past in thick flakes, the sky turned dark in an instant, and we found ourselves in the grip of a real blizzard.

XIII

To go back to Kromy was as dangerous as to go on. It was probably more dangerous behind us, because there was the river, with several ice holes near the town, and we might easily not see them in the snowstorm and fall through the ice, while ahead there was the level steppe and only Selivan’s forest at the fifth mile, which was no more dangerous in a storm, because it must even have been quieter in the forest. Besides, the road didn’t go deep into the forest, but ran along the edge of it. The forest could only serve us as an indication that we were halfway home, and therefore the coachman Spiridon drove the horses more quickly.

The road kept getting more difficult and snowy: the former merry noise of the runners was forgotten; on the contrary, the sleigh crawled over crumbly snowdrifts and soon began lurching now this way, now that.

We lost our calm state of mind and began asking the footman and the coachman all the time about our situation, receiving uncertain and hesitant replies from them. They tried to instill in us a confidence in our safety, while feeling no such confidence themselves.

After half an hour of quick driving, with Spiridon whipping up the horses more and more often, we were cheered by the outcry:

“There’s Selivan’s forest coming in sight!”

“Is it far off?” asked my aunt.

“No, we’ve almost reached it.”

That was as it should have been—we had already been driving for about an hour since Kromy, but another good half hour went by—we kept driving, and the whip snapped over the horses more and more often, but there was no forest.

“What’s wrong? Where’s Selivan’s forest?”

No reply from the box.

“Where’s the forest?” my aunt asked again. “Have we passed it?”

“No, we haven’t,” Spiridon replied in a muffled voice, as if from under a pillow.

“What does it mean?”

Silence.

“Come down here! Stop! Stop!”

My aunt stuck herself out from behind the flap, desperately cried “Stop!” with all her might, and fell back into the sleigh, bringing with her a whole cloud of snowy swirls, which, under the influence of the wind, did not settle at once, but trembled like hovering flies.

The coachman stopped the horses, and it was well he did, because their bellies were heaving heavily and they were staggering from fatigue. If they hadn’t been given a rest at that moment, the poor animals would probably have collapsed.

“Where are you?” my aunt asked Boris, who had climbed down from the box.

He was unrecognizable. Before us stood not a man, but a pillar of snow. The collar of Boris’s wolfskin coat was turned up and tied with a scrap of something. All this was plastered with snow and stuck together in a single lump.

Boris did not know the road and replied timidly that it seemed we had lost our way.

“Call Spiridon here.”

To call vocally was impossible: the blizzard shut all mouths and itself roared and howled abroad with terrible violence.

Boriska climbed up on the box to pull Spiridon by the arm, but … he spent a very long time there, before he appeared beside the coach again and explained:

“Spiridon is not on the box!”

“Not on the box! Where is he then?”

“I don’t know. He must have gone looking for the way. Let me go, too.”

“Oh, Lord! No, don’t—don’t go. You’ll both perish, and we’ll all freeze to death.”

On hearing those words, my cousin and I started to cry, but just then another pillar of snow appeared by the carriage beside Borisushka, still bigger and scarier.

This was Spiridon, who had put on a spare bast bag, which stood up around his head all packed with snow and frozen.

“Where did you see the forest, Spiridon?”

“I did see it, madam.”

“Then where is it now?”

“You can see it now, too.”

My aunt wanted to look, but she didn’t see anything, it was all dark. Spiridon assured her that that was because her eyes were “unfamiliarized,” but that he had seen the forest looming up for a very long time, but … the trouble was that, as we moved towards it, it moved away from us.

“Like it or not, it’s all Selivashka’s doing. He’s luring us somewhere.”

Hearing that, in such terrible weather, we had fallen into the hands of the villain Selivashka, my cousin and I cried even louder, but my aunt, who was born a country squire’s daughter and was later a colonel’s wife, was not so easily disconcerted as a town lady, for whom various adversities are less familiar. My aunt had experience and know-how, and they saved us in a situation which, in fact, was very dangerous.

XIV

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.

“Give me a new, whole candle at once.”

“What do you need a whole one for?”

“That’s none of your business—I won’t be going to bed very soon. Maybe the blizzard will pass and we’ll go on.”

“The blizzard won’t pass.”

“Well, it doesn’t matter—I’ll pay you for the candle.”

“I know you’d pay, but I don’t have a candle.”

“Look for one, my dear!”

“No point looking for what’s not there!”

An extremely weak, high voice unexpectedly mixed into this conversation from behind the partition.

“We have no candle, dear lady.”

“Who is that speaking?” asked my aunt.

“My wife.”

My aunt’s face and the nanny’s brightened a little. The nearby presence of a woman seemed to have something cheering about it.

“Is she sick or something?”

“Yes.”

“With what?”

“An ailment. Go to bed, I need the candle end for the lantern. To bring the horses in.”

And no matter what they said to him, Selivan stood his ground: he needed the candle end, and that was that. He promised to bring it back—but meanwhile he took it and left.

Whether Selivan kept his promise to bring the candle end back—I didn’t see, because my cousin and I fell asleep again, though I kept being troubled by something. Through my sleep I heard the occasional whispering of my aunt and the nanny, and in that whispering I most often heard the word “box.”

Obviously, the nanny and our other people knew that this coffer concealed a great treasure, and everybody had noticed that from the first moment it had caught the greedy attention of our untrustworthy host.

Possessed of great practical experience, my aunt clearly saw the necessity of submitting to circumstances, but then she at once gave orders that suited our dangerous situation.

To keep Selivan from murdering us, it was decided that no one should sleep. Orders were given to unharness the horses, but not to remove the collars, and the coachman and footman both had to sit in the sleigh: they mustn’t separate, because Selivan would kill them one by one, and then we would be helpless. Then he would also murder us and bury us all under the floor, where he had already buried the numerous victims of his fiendishness. The footman and coachman couldn’t stay in the cottage with us, because Selivan could then cut the tugs of the shaft horse, so that it would be impossible to harness up, or else simply hand the whole troika over to his comrades, whom he meanwhile kept hidden somewhere. In that case we would be quite unable to escape, but if the storm let up soon, as might very well happen, then the coachman would start hitching up, Boris would rap three times on the wall, and we would all rush to the yard, get in, and drive off. So as to be constantly at the ready, none of us got undressed.

I don’t know whether the time went quickly or slowly for the others, but for us, the two sleeping boys, it flew by like a single moment, which suddenly ended in a most terrible awakening.

XVI

I woke up because I found it unbearably hard to breathe. When I opened my eyes, I saw precisely nothing, because it was dark all around me, but in the distance something seemed to show gray: that was the window. As in the light of Selivan’s lantern I had at once seen the faces of all the people in that terrible scene, so now I instantly recalled everything—who I was, and where, and why I was there, and who were all my near and dear people in my father’s house—and I felt pity, and pain, and fear for everything and everybody, and I wanted to cry out, but that was impossible. My mouth was tightly covered by a human hand, and a trembling voice was whispering to me:

“Not a sound, quiet, not a sound! We’re lost—somebody’s trying to break in.”

I recognized my aunt’s voice and pressed her hand as a sign that I had understood her request.

A rustling could be heard outside the door to the front hall … Someone was softly stepping from one foot to the other and feeling the wall with his hands … Obviously, the villain was looking for the door but couldn’t find it …

My aunt pressed us to herself and whispered that God might still help us, because she had fortified the door. But at that same moment, probably because we had betrayed ourselves with our whispering and trembling, behind the plank partition where the rest of the cottage was and from where Selivan’s wife had told us about the candle, someone ran and fell upon the one who was softly stealing up to our door, and they both started breaking it down; the door cracked, the table, bench, and suitcases my aunt had piled against it fell to the floor, and in the flung-open doorway appeared the face of Borisushka, with Selivan’s powerful hands around his neck …

Seeing that, my aunt shouted at Selivan and rushed to Boris.

“Dear lady! God has saved us!” wheezed Boris.

Selivan took his hands away and stood there.

“Quick, quick, let’s get out of here,” said my aunt. “Where are our horses?”

“The horses are at the porch, dear lady, I was just going to call you … And this brigand … God has saved us, dear lady!” Boris babbled quickly, seizing my and my cousin’s hands and gathering up all he could on his way. We all rushed out the door, jumped into the carriage, and went galloping off as fast as the horses could go. Selivan seemed painfully disconcerted and followed us with his eyes. He obviously knew that this would not go without consequences.

Outside it was now getting light, and before us in the east glowed the red, frosty Christmas dawn.

XVII

We reached home in no more than half an hour, talking incessantly all the way about the frights we had lived through. My aunt, the nanny, the coachman, and Boris kept interrupting each other and constantly crossing themselves, thanking God for our amazing salvation. My aunt told us she hadn’t slept all night, because she kept hearing someone approaching the door and trying to open it. That had prompted her to block it with whatever she could find. She had also heard some suspicious whispering behind Selivan’s partition, and it had seemed to her that he had quietly opened his door more than once, come out to the front hall, and quietly touched the latch of our door. Our nanny had also heard all that, though she, by her own admission, had fallen asleep on and off. The coachman and Boris had seen more than anyone else. Fearing for the horses, the coachman had never left them for a moment, but Borisushka had come to our door more than once, and each time he had come, Selivan had appeared in his doorway at the same moment. When the blizzard had died down towards dawn, the coachman and Boris had quietly harnessed the horses and quietly driven out through the gate, having opened it themselves; but when Boris had just as quietly come to our door again to lead us out, Selivan, seeing that the booty was slipping through his fingers, had fallen upon Boris and begun to choke him. Thank God, of course, he had not succeeded, and now he was no longer going to get off with suspicions alone, as he had so far: his evil intentions were all too clear and all too obvious, and everything had taken place not eye to eye with some one person, but before six witnesses, of whom my aunt alone was worth several owing to her importance, because the whole town knew her for an intelligent woman, and, despite her modest fortune, the governor visited her, and our then police chief owed her the arranging of his family happiness. At one word from her, he would, of course, immediately start investigating the matter while the trail was hot, and Selivan would not escape the noose he had thought to throw around our necks.

The circumstances themselves seemed to fall together so that everything pointed to immediate revenge for us on Selivan and to his punishment for the brutal attempt on our lives and property.

As we approached our house, beyond the spring on the hill, we met a fellow on horseback, who was extremely glad to see us, swung his legs against his horse’s flanks, and, taking off his hat while still some distance away, rode up to us with a beaming face and began reporting to my aunt about the worry we had caused everybody at home.

It turned out that father, mother, and the entire household as well had not slept that night. They had expected us without fail, and ever since the snowstorm had broken out in the evening, there had been great anxiety as to whether we had lost our way, or some other misfortune had befallen us: we might have broken a shaft in a pothole, we might have been attacked by wolves … Father had sent several men on horseback with lanterns to meet us, but the storm had torn the lanterns from their hands and extinguished them, and neither men nor horses could get very far from the house. A man trudges on for a long time—it seems to him that he’s going against the storm, and suddenly—halt, the horse refuses to move from the spot. The rider urges it on, though he is so choked he can hardly breathe, but the horse doesn’t move … The horseman dismounts, so as to take the bridle and lead the frightened animal on, and suddenly, to his surprise, he discovers that his horse is standing with its forehead leaning against the wall of the stable or the shed … Only one of the scouts made it a little further and had an actual encounter on his way: this was the harness-maker Prokhor. They gave him an outrunner, a postillion’s horse, who used to take the bit between his teeth, so that the iron didn’t touch his lips, and as a result became insensible to any restraint. He carried Prokhor off into the very hell of the snowstorm, and galloped for a long time, kicking up his rump and bobbing his head down to his knees, until finally, during one of these capers, the harness-maker went flying over the horse’s head and landed right in the middle of some strange heap of living people, who, however, at first did not show him any friendliness. On the contrary, one of them straightaway fetched him a whack on the head, another made corrections to his back, and a third set about trampling him with his feet and poking him with something cold, metallic, and extremely uncomfortable for his senses.

Prokhor was nobody’s fool: he realized he was dealing with special creatures and started shouting furiously.

The terror he felt probably lent his voice special force, and he was immediately heard. For his salvation, right there, a couple of steps away from him, a “fiery glow” appeared. This was the light that had been placed in the window of our kitchen, by the wall of which huddled the police chief, his secretary, his messenger, and a coachman with a troika of horses, stuck in a snowdrift.

They, too, had lost their way and, ending up by our kitchen, thought they were somewhere in a field by a haystack.

They were dug out and taken, some to the kitchen, some to the house, where the police chief was now having tea, hoping to get back to his family in town before they woke up and started worrying about his absence after such a stormy night.

“That’s splendid,” said my aunt. “The police chief is the one we need most of all now.”

“Yes, he’s a plucky fellow—he’ll give it to Selivashka!” people chimed in, and we raced on at a gallop and drove up to the house while the police chief’s troika was still standing at our porch.

They would at once tell the police chief everything, and half an hour later the brigand Selivan would already be in his hands.

XVIII

My father and the police chief were struck by what we had endured on the way and especially in the house of the brigand Selivan, who had wanted to kill us and take our things and money …

By the way, about the money. At the mention of it, my aunt at once exclaimed:

“Ah, my God! Where is my box?”

Where, indeed, was that box and the thousands that were in it?

Just imagine, it wasn’t there! Yes, yes, it was the one thing that wasn’t there, either among the things brought inside, or in the sleigh—in short, not anywhere … The box had obviously remained there and was now in the hands of Selivan … Or … maybe he had even stolen it during the night. It would have been possible for him; as the owner, he would know all the cracks in his wretched house, and there were probably not a few of them … He might have a removable floorboard or a loose plank in the partition.

And the police chief, with his experience in tracking down robberies, had only just uttered this last suggestion about the loose plank, which Selivan might quietly have removed at night and reached through to make away with the box, when my aunt covered her face with her hands and collapsed into an armchair.

Fearing for her box, she had hidden it precisely in the corner under the bench that stood against the partition separating our night lodgings from the part of the cottage where Selivan and his wife lived …

“Well, there you are!” exclaimed the police chief, glad of the correctness of his experienced reasoning. “You put the box there for him yourself! … But all the same I’m surprised that neither you, nor your people, nor anybody missed it when it came time for you to leave.”

“My God, we were all so frightened!” my aunt moaned.

“That’s true, that’s true, too; I believe you,” said the police chief. “There was reason to be afraid, but still … such a large sum … such good money. I’ll gallop there, I’ll gallop there right now … He’s probably hiding out somewhere already, but he won’t get away from me! It’s lucky for us that everybody knows he’s a thief, and nobody likes him: they’re not going to hide him … Although—he’s got money in his hands now … he can divvy it up … I’ll have to hurry … People are plain scoundrels … Good-bye, I’m going. And you calm yourself, take some drops … I know their thievish nature, and I assure you he’ll be caught.”

And the police chief was buckling on his saber, when suddenly an unusual stir was heard among the people in the front hall and … Selivan stepped across the threshold into the big room where we all were, breathing heavily and holding my aunt’s box.

Everybody jumped up and stood as if rooted to the spot …

“You forgot your little coffer—here it is,” Selivan said in a muffled voice.

He couldn’t say any more, because he was completely out of breath from the excessively quick pace and, perhaps, from strong inner agitation.

He put the box on the table and, without being invited, sat down on a chair and lowered his head and arms.

XIX

The box was perfectly intact. My aunt took a little key from around her neck, unlocked it, and exclaimed:

“All, all just as it was!”

“Kept safe …” Selivan said softly. “I ran after you … tried to catch up … couldn’t … Forgive me for sitting down in front of you … I’m out of breath.”

My father went to him first, embraced him, and kissed his head.

Selivan didn’t move.

My aunt took two hundred-rouble notes from the box and tried to put them into his hands.

Selivan went on sitting and staring as if he understood nothing.

“Take what’s given you,” said the police chief.

“What for? There’s no need!”

“For having honestly saved and brought the money that was forgotten at your place.”

“What else? Shouldn’t a man be honest?”

“Well, you’re … a good man … you didn’t think of keeping what wasn’t yours.”

“Keeping what wasn’t mine! …” Selivan shook his head and added: “I don’t need what isn’t mine.”

“But you’re poor—take it to improve things for yourself!” my aunt said tenderly.

“Take it, take it,” my father tried to persuade him. “You have a right to it.”

“What right?”

They told him about the law according to which anyone who finds and returns something lost has a right to a third of what he has found.

“What kind of law is that?” he replied, again pushing away my aunt’s hand with the money. “Don’t profit from another’s misfortune … There’s no need! Good-bye!”

And he got up to go back to his maligned little inn, but my father wouldn’t let him: he took him to his study, locked himself in with him, and an hour later ordered a sleigh hitched up to take him home.

A day later this incident became known in town and all around it, and two days later my father and aunt went to Kromy, stopped at Selivan’s, had tea in his cottage, and left a warm coat for his wife. On the way back they stopped by again and brought him more presents: tea, sugar, flour.

He accepted it all politely, but reluctantly, and said:

“What for? It’s three days now that people have begun stopping here … money’s coming in … we made cabbage soup … They’re not afraid of us like they used to be.”

When I was taken back to boarding school after the holidays, things were again sent with me for Selivan, and I had tea at his place and kept looking in his face and thinking:

“What a beautiful, kind face he has! Why is it that for so long he looked to me and others like a spook?”

This thought pursued me and would not leave me in peace … Why, this was the same man whom everyone had found so frightening and considered a sorcerer and an evildoer. And for so long it had seemed that all he did was plot and carry out evil deeds. Why had he suddenly become so good and nice?

XX

I was very lucky in my childhood, in the sense that my first lessons in religion were given me by an excellent Christian. This was the Orel priest Ostromyslenny⁹—a good friend of my father’s and a friend to all of us children, who was able to teach us to love truth and mercy. I told my comrades nothing of what had happened to us on Christmas Eve at Selivan’s, because there was nothing in it all that flattered my courage, while, on the contrary, they might have laughed at my fear, but I revealed all my adventures and doubts to Father Efim.

He stroked me with his hand and said:

“You’re very lucky. Your soul on Christmas Day was like a manger for the holy infant, who came to earth to suffer for the unfortunate. Christ lit up for you the darkness in which the empty talk of dark-minded folk had shrouded your imagination. It was not Selivan who was the spook, but you yourselves—your suspiciousness of him, which kept all of you from seeing his good conscience. His face seemed dark to you, because your eye was dark.¹⁰ Take note of that so that next time you won’t be so blind.”

This was intelligent and excellent advice. In later years of my life I became close with Selivan and had the good fortune to see how he made himself a man loved and honored by everyone.

On the new estate which my aunt bought there was a good inn at a much-frequented point on the high road. She offered this inn to Selivan on good terms, and Selivan accepted and lived there until his death. Then my old childhood dreams came true: I not only became closely acquainted with Selivan, but we felt full confidence and friendship for each other. I saw his situation change for the better—how peace settled into his house and he eventually prospered; how instead of the former gloomy expressions on the faces of people who met Selivan, everyone now looked at him with pleasure. And indeed it happened that, once the eyes of the people around Selivan were enlightened, his own face also became bright.

Among my aunt’s servants, it was the footman Borisushka who disliked Selivan the most—the one whom Selivan had nearly strangled on that memorable Christmas Eve.

This story was sometimes joked about. That night’s incident could be explained by the fact that, as everyone suspected that Selivan might rob my aunt, so Selivan himself had strong suspicions that the coachman and the footman might have brought us to his inn on purpose in order to steal my aunt’s money during the night and then conveniently blame it all on the suspicious Selivan.

Mistrust and suspicion on one side provoked mistrust and suspicion on the other, and it seemed to everyone that they were all enemies of each other and they all had grounds for considering each other as people inclined towards evil.

Thus evil always generates more evil and is defeated only by the good, which, in the words of the Gospel, makes our eye and heart clean.

XXI

It remains, however, to see why, ever since Selivan left the baker, he became sullen and secretive. Had anyone back then wronged and spurned him?

My father, being well disposed towards this good man, nevertheless thought that Selivan had some secret, which he stubbornly kept to himself.

That was so, but Selivan revealed his secret only to my aunt, and that only after he had lived for several years on her estate and after his ever-ailing wife had died.

When I came to see my aunt once, already as a young man, and we started recalling Selivan, who had died himself not long before then, my aunt told me his secret.

The thing was that Selivan, in the tender goodness of his heart, had been touched by the woeful fate of the helpless daughter of the retired executioner, who had died in their town. No one had wanted to give this girl shelter, as the child of a despised man. Selivan was poor, and besides he didn’t dare to keep the executioner’s daughter with him in town, where everyone knew them both. He had to conceal her origin, which was not her fault, from everyone. Otherwise she could not avoid the harsh reproaches of people who were incapable of mercy and justice. Selivan concealed her, because he constantly feared she would be recognized and insulted, and this secretiveness and anxiety pervaded his whole being and partly left their mark on him.

Thus everyone who called Selivan a “spook” was in fact far more of a “spook” for him.

* Kuliga—a place where the trees have been cut down and burned, a clearing, a burn. Author.

† A “tavousi stone”—a light sapphire with peacock feather reflections, in olden times considered a lifesaving talisman. Ivan the Terrible had such a stone in a ring. “A gold finger-ring, and in it a tavousi stone, and in that a look of cloudiness and a sort of effervescence.” Author. (Tavousi is Persian for “peacock.” Trans.)