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.