The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories

And we started drubbing him Elets-fashion and Orel-fashion. We pummeled him cruelly, so much so that when he tore away from us, he didn’t even cry out, but dashed off like a hare; and only when he had fled as far as the Plautin Well did he shout “Help”; and at once somebody on the other side, on the hill, also shouted “Help.”

“What brigands!” says my uncle. “They rob people, and then shout ‘Help’ themselves on both sides! … Did you take your watch back from him?”

“Yes.”

“Why didn’t you take back my hat as well?”

“Your hat,” I reply, “went clean out of my head.”

“And I’m cold now. I’ve got a bald spot.”

“Put on my hat.”

“I don’t want yours. My hat cost fifty roubles at Faleev’s.”

“Never mind,” I say, “nobody can see it now.”

“What about you?”

“I’ll simply go bareheaded like this. We’re already close—we’ll turn that corner in a moment, and it’ll be our house.”

My hat, however, was too small for my uncle. He took a handkerchief from his pocket and tied it over his head.

And so we came running home.

XII

Mama and my aunt had not gone to bed yet: they were both knitting stockings and waiting for us. When they saw my uncle come in all covered with snow and his head tied with a handkerchief like a woman’s, they both gasped at once and began talking.

“Lord! What’s the matter! … Where’s the winter hat you were wearing?”

“Farewell, good old winter hat! … It’s no more,” my uncle replied.

“Our Lady, most holy Mother of God! Where did it go?”

“Your Orelian priggers took it on the ice.”

“So that’s why we heard you cry ‘Help.’ I said to my sister, ‘Let’s send our fullers—I think I hear Misha’s innocent voice.’ ”

“Oh, yes! By the time your fullers woke up and came out, there wouldn’t even have been a name left to us … No, it wasn’t us crying ‘Help,’ it was the thieves; and we defended ourselves.”

Mama and my aunt boiled up.

“What? Can Misha have shown his strength?”

“Yes, our Misha played the main part—he may have let my hat slip, but he did take back his watch.”

I can see mama is glad that I’ve done so well, but she says:

“Ah, Misha, Misha! And I begged you so not to drink anything and not to stay out late, till the thieves’ time. Why didn’t you listen to me?”

“Forgive me, mama,” I say, “but I didn’t drink anything, and I didn’t dare leave uncle there alone. You can see for yourself, if he’d come home alone, he might have gotten into some big trouble.”

“He’s had his hat taken as it is.”

“Well, so what! … You can always get yourself a hat.”

“Of course—thank God you took back your watch.”

“Yes, mama, I took it. And, oh, how I took it! I knocked him down in a trice, stopped his mouth with my sleeve so that he wouldn’t cry out, put my other hand into his breast pocket and pulled out my watch, and then uncle and I started pummeling him.”

“Well, that was pointless.”

“Not at all! Let the rascal remember it.”

“The watch wasn’t damaged?”

“No, I don’t think so—only the chain seems to be broken …”

And with those words I took the watch from my pocket and examined the chain, but my aunt looks closely and asks:

“Whose watch might that be?”

“What do you mean, whose? It’s mine, of course.”

“But yours had a rim.”

“Well, so?”

And I look myself and suddenly see: in fact, this watch doesn’t have a gold rim, but instead of that it has a silver face with a shepherd and shepherdess on it, and little sheep at their feet …

I started shaking all over.

“What is this??! It’s not my watch!”

And they all just stood there, not comprehending.

My aunt says:

“How about that!”

My uncle reassures us:

“Wait,” he says, “don’t be frightened. The thief must have made off with Mishutka’s watch, and this one he took earlier from somebody else.”

But I flung the filched watch on the table and, so as not to see it, rushed to my room. And there I hear my watch on the wall above my bed ticking away: tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock.

I jump up to it with a candle and see—that’s it, my watch with the rim … Hanging there quite nicely, where it belongs!

Here I slapped myself on the forehead as hard as I could and started, not crying, but howling …

“Lord God! Who have I robbed?”

XIII

Mama, my aunt, my uncle—everybody got frightened, came running, shook me.

“What’s the matter? What’s the matter? Calm down!”

“Please,” I say, “leave me alone! How can I calm down if I’ve robbed a man?”

Mama started crying.

“He’s gone mad,” she says. “He must have seen something horrible!”

“I certainly did, mama! … What do I do now!!”

“What was it that you saw?”

“That there. Look for yourself.”

“What? Where?”

“That, that there! Look! Don’t you see what it is?”

They looked at the wall where I was pointing and saw the silver watch with the gold rim that my uncle had given me, hanging on the wall and ticking away quite calmly …

My uncle was the first to recover his reason.

“Holy God,” he says, “isn’t that your watch?”

“Yes, of course it is!”

“So it must be you didn’t take it with you, but left it here?”

“You can see I did.”

“And that one … that one … Whose is that one you took?”

“How should I know?”