The Enchanted Wanderer by Nikolai Leskov

Author:Nikolai Leskov [Leskov, Nikolai]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2012-09-05T20:46:40+00:00

XV

You see, Ivan Severyanych began, my prince was good-hearted enough, but he was unsteady. Anything he wanted, he just had to have it immediately, and he’d go off his nut completely if he couldn’t, nothing he wouldn’t do for it – and then, when he finally got whatever it was, it never seemed to bring much happiness. That’s exactly what had happened with this gypsy girl, and her – I mean Grusha’s – father and his gang must’ve been able to tell who they were dealing with from the start, and had extracted such a price for her – a misjudgment of his estate, which, though imposing, was saddled with debts. To get his hands on the kind of money the gypsies were demanding, he’d had to take out loans and quit his post.

Knowing him as well as I did, I didn’t expect much good for Grusha to come of the arrangement, and it didn’t. At first he was very attentive, wouldn’t let her out of his sight, waiting on her hand and foot, and then the yawns started creeping in, and he’d ask me to come along and round out the company.

“Come grab a seat,” he’d say, “listen in.”

So I would; I’d set a stool somewhere close to the doors and sit and listen. More often than not the same thing happened: he’d tell her to start singing and she’d scowl back. “Who should I sing to? she’d ask. You’ve grown so cold. I want my songs to torment somebody, burn up his soul.”

So the prince would call me in, and the two of us would sit there and listen together, and it happened like this so much that after a while Grusha would remind him to call me in, and we got pretty chummy, so that it wasn’t unusual that after she’d finished singing, she and the prince and I would take tea in their bedroom, except that I, of course, would always sit off at my own table, or else at the windowsill, except when she was alone, and then she always invited me to come sit next to her. A lot of time went by like that, the prince getting more and more worried all the time. One day he pulled me aside and said, “You know, Ivan Severyanov, things with me, they aren’t too good.”

“How do you mean? Thanks be to God, you live as you should, and you have what you need.”

But somehow I’d offended him. “Is that right, my nearly-almost-fit-for-society friend? I have everything, do I? Well tell me, what do I have?”

“You have everything, sir, that you need.”

“Oh, that’s rich,” he said. “I’ve grown so poor I have to crunch a list of numbers before I can get myself a bottle of table wine. Tell me – you call that living? Do you?”

“Aha,” I thought, “so that’s what you’re so bent out of shape over,” and I said, “Well, so what if you need to skip the wine from time to time? You’ve got something sweeter than wine, than honey.

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