I

Old Sergei walked in front. All the conversation Seryozha had, for the space of fifteen miles, was the expression of his father’s neck. The back of Old Sergei’s neck was a little like a tortoise’s neck, but more speaking. The neck spoke of duty about to be done⁠—rapturously unpleasant duty. It was a nagging, over-articulate neck, but of course Seryozha was so well used to it that he did not think of it as anything except just Father’s Neck. He knew, however, without knowing that he knew, that his father was satisfied to be followed on an unpleasant duty by an unwilling son.

The road returned and returned again to the river, crossing and recrossing it. The road and the river could not part because of the narrowness of the gorge; they could not even find room to run peacefully parallel, but got in each other’s way. It was like the mutual irritation of marriage. But it was beautiful. The sunny side of the gorge was lacquered with flowers; the shadowed side was dark and stormy with color. The grass had an electric sheen on it, in memory of rain. Even Seryozha’s dog had picked a flower by mistake; it was caught in the clasp of its collar, a blue two-winged butterfly of a flower.

Every time Seryozha waded across a ford he sang with excitement. The streaked blue-and-yellow water piled up against his thighs, his strong striding legs were like blunt scissors tearing silk. The great patched cliffs, the hills, the fiery flowers, were all very far away, very still and very alien, as though seen through glass, and Seryozha, singing hoarsely, was isolated in a dizzy world⁠—a tall indomitable young rock in a storm, a little god enclosed in a roaring private universe.

“I am wet,” said Old Sergei, standing bent double on a bank, unrolling his wet trousers. “I am just as wet if I roll up my trousers as if I leave them as they are.”

“Then leave them as they are,” said Seryozha, turning himself round to enjoy the feeling of the warm wind on hot legs through wet trousers.

“Then they will shrink.”

“What of it? You are shrinking yourself,” said his son.

Old Sergei flirted his trousers a little petulantly. It was certainly true that he was shrinking. But he thought rather highly of his trousers; it was so long since he had moved among real trousered men that he thought his looked like real trousers. They were made by Anna, his wife; his hair was cut by Anna, his shoes were adapted by Anna from Chinese cloth shoes. He was a homemade old man.

Seryozha watched, without anxiety, his dog valiantly following him across the stream. The dog rushed with high bounds into the swift water, and, after a little wallowing, lost its footing. The water spun it about, noosed it, and dragged it under, but the dog kept its head while losing its dignity and was able to shape some kind of wild course. It ran around, tail first and upside down, on a mudbank, and rose and shook itself complacently as though the crossing had happened exactly as it had intended. It had, however, lost the little flower out of its collar.

“There are some soldiers,” said Seryozha.

“What of it?” said Old Sergei, with a slight nervous twitch in his voice. “They must be Li’s men, certainly.” But he looked with an anxious shortsighted squint across the river at the soldiers. (Anna, his wife, did not know how to make spectacles.)

The Chinese soldiers, sitting on a hooded Manchurian cart, swung, creaked, and clanked round the opposite bend into the river. The jolt, as the cart flopped from the bank into the stream, threw all the soldiers backward, so that their thin shabby shanks waved in the air. This contretemps spoiled their accuracy in hitting off the ford, and hardly had they regained their seating when the current swept their cart off its wheels. The horses, pulling at a right angle, were its only anchor. The five horses strained and clawed at the submerged boulders; some of them stumbled, but their senior horse⁠—the only one pulling in shafts⁠—its strong shoulders heaving under the high arched Russian yoke, saved the situation. That was what it was paid for. The soldiers all laughed as the bank was reached, but the horses hung their heads, blew their noses, and sighed.

Old Sergei, Seryozha, and the soldiers looked at one another. All the soldiers were dressed in gray cotton uniforms made for bigger men. Why is this, I wonder? The Chinese Army Clothing Department must possess a tailor’s dummy of ideal size. I imagine them sitting at the feet of their utopian wax illusion, busy with their sewing-machines, never looking out-of-doors to see their poor actual champions, stunted and bent and lame, trudging like little skeletons across the mud of China’s devastated fields. A little like the Lady of Shalott⁠—but not, on second thoughts, very.

“Have you a cigarette?” said one soldier. Seryozha had one behind his ear. It had already been partly smoked and there was little left of it except the long cardboard mouthpiece, but the soldiers handed it round eagerly from one to another; they were used to makeshifts.

“Are you English?” asked the corporal, after spitting noisily as if to show that whatever they were they weren’t worth much.

“No, we are White Russians.⁠ ⁠… We have a letter,” stammered Old Sergei. “We are friends of your general, Li Lien-ching⁠ ⁠…”

He was much pleased that his sensitive trousers should have been mistaken for English trousers.

All the soldiers summarized his remark one to another, in the Chinese manner. “They are friends of Li Lien-ching. Hao-hao.⁠ ⁠… They are White Big-noses known to the general.⁠ ⁠… General Li knows them; they are Big-noses.⁠ ⁠… They have letters.⁠ ⁠… It is an old Big-nose and his son who say they are friends of Li Lien-ching.⁠ ⁠…” In a few minutes they all found that they had mastered these facts, and the corporal held out his hand for General Li’s letter. The reading of the letter took a very long time. It had a pretty red and black border and was additionally beautified by a few bold characters expressing General Li’s trust in Old Sergei’s integrity. The soldiers looked upon it as an education in itself, and several of them committed to memory those characters which were new to them, writing invisible examples in the palms of their hands for one another’s benefit.

“How much did you pay for the buckle of your belt?” the corporal asked Seryozha magisterially.

“One small frog,” replied Seryozha, who spoke Chinese much better than his father, having lived two-thirds of his eighteen years of life in a Chinese village. “I gave another Russian boy one small tame green frog with a red stomach for this buckle.”

“One small frog⁠—he bought his buckle for one frog.⁠ ⁠… A frog for a buckle.⁠ ⁠… A buckle for a frog.⁠ ⁠… The frog was exchanged for a buckle.⁠ ⁠…” The simple fellows, telling one another the joke, appreciated it more and more. “Ha-ha!⁠ ⁠… Hao-hao!⁠ ⁠… A buckle for a frog!⁠ ⁠… A frog for a buckle.⁠ ⁠… Ha-ha!⁠ ⁠… Hao-hao!⁠ ⁠…”

“Where are you going?” the corporal persisted, hoping against hope that this might elicit another joke⁠—perhaps about frogs again.

“We are going to see if we can help our friends,” said Old Sergei, looking at the soldiers a little doubtfully. “Some White Russian soldiers in the army of your General Li were attacked somewhere near here by Chen’s men, and some were killed and some wounded, we hear. We only heard about it in Chi-tao-kou this morning. We are going to bury our dead.”

“To bury their dead,” said the soldiers one to another, still laughing, since death is among the things that raise a smile in China. “They are going to bury their dead.⁠ ⁠… Big-noses want to bury Big-noses.⁠ ⁠… Ha-ha!⁠ ⁠… Hao-hao!⁠ ⁠…”

“It is forty li from Chi-tao-kou,” said a soldier. “You must have walked fast. Big-noses have long legs. You can sit on our cart. We are going your way.”

“Is Chen’s army still in the neighborhood?”

“No, there was no army⁠—it was only a small party of Chen’s men that found the Big-noses off their guard. They must be two hundred li away by now.”

Old Sergei and Seryozha sat on the cart, their wet legs dangling over the wheels in a row with the soldiers’ weatherbeaten ankles. The cart staggered along to the tune of a titter of bells and a ripping of whips and a snarling of drivers. The road lost itself among boulders. It became merged for miles with the cascading river bed. The cart never had four wheels on the ground at once. Soldiers’ heads were knocked together; somebody’s shoulder came in violent contact with Old Sergei’s front gums. Seryozha, after wondering for a few minutes whether to be footsore was really worse than to be seatsore, jumped off the cart and stumbled down the heaped, gashed trail.

He walked more quickly than the laboring cart and at the turn of the gorge waited for it. Great ghostly clouds had been bowling up like smoke out of the peaks of the hills. Raindrops fell on Seryozha’s nose⁠—chin⁠—hand⁠—neck⁠—then a wave of rain leapt over the near hill. He stood just inside a deserted and ruined Korean hut, waiting for the cart, watching the rain. The flowery slopes waved under the flying clouds. Far ahead there was a dwindling horizontal strip of calm blue sky strung like a taut cord over the stormy valley.

The mud floor of the hut was strewn with old sacks, straw, rags, broken crocks, and a crumpled brazier. It must be a very poor thing that is discarded as useless by a Korean. Part of one wall had fallen in and the thatch sagged and dripped. A gawky sunflower hung its silly head in the doorway. There was a smell of dirty humanity mixed with the smell of horse and wet grass.

Seryozha stood in the doorway and looked up a windy slope spotted with scrub-oaks and magenta azaleas. Against the outer wall of the shack, near the door, was a Korean oven, balancing a crooked jointed chimney on its shoulder as a juggler might balance a pile of top-hats. The oven’s gaping lips were smeared with cold damp ashes. From behind the oven, across a puddle in the red mud, protruded a dead hand, palm upward.

Seryozha stared at the hand, his mind making no comment, only registering the fact⁠—a dead man⁠—a dead man⁠—a dead man.⁠ ⁠… In two strides he stood beside the dead man. He looked down at the heavy, fair, unshaven face of a Russian soldier. Raindrops stood on the cheeks like tears; the eyes watched the sky intently and anxiously. The dead man had no boots on and no gun. His tunic was open at the neck to show a broken string. How curious to be robbed and not mind, thought Seryozha, and at once this seemed to him the most startling thing about death⁠—the loss of the delight in possession. He thought of the property he himself loved so anxiously⁠—his silk handkerchief, his spangled gilt picture of the crowned Christ, his English sweater that the missionaries had given him, his marvellously complete sloughed snakeskin (even the skin of the eyeballs unbroken) that lived in an abalone shell in a biscuit-box, the ribbon that Sonia gave him, his chisel with the black handle.⁠ ⁠… It was quite unimaginable that these things might be taken away before his open, indifferent eyes. This was death. The snakeskin would suddenly become no marvel but a thing good only for the rubbish heap; (oh, he would rise from the dead to prevent his mother from using the black-handled chisel as a screwdriver!). This dead man had probably known every wrinkle in his dear boots⁠—poverty means such intimacy between a man and his possessions. Yet now his feet, muddy and swollen and ringed with callouses, bore nakedness without protest. And his boots, shorn of that familiarity which is the sacred soul of things⁠—encased a thief’s irreverent shins.

With a jingle and a splintering screech the cart arrived at the door of the hut. Old Sergei, followed by the soldiers, came round the corner of the ruin. One of the soldiers trod on the dead Russian’s hand before he saw it, but after seeing it he trod on it again, as if to see if the man would mind.

“It is a dead Big-nose,” all the soldiers told one another.

Old Sergei seemed to come alive when he saw the dead man. Death was Old Sergei’s hobby. “How surprised he looks!” he said. “The surprise was soon over, though. Only just lasted long enough to raise his eyebrows. Or one might say it lasted forever⁠—his eyebrows were never lowered again.” Old Sergei sighed. “One forgets,” he said, “that bodies are so soft in a dangerous world⁠—softer than cheese is to the knife. Why do we trust one another so, living in such soft bodies? Of course we must trust one another; we dare not remember the hardness of steel or of men’s hearts⁠—being so soft. If we had steel skins, we should dare to know everything.”

Seryozha listened to his father with some interest, clutching the bosom of his blouse, pinching his chest to feel how soft his skin was. But he put on the mulish, deliberately prosaic expression sons generally wear when their fathers express themselves in a way that seems to the young unelderly.

“His boots have been stolen,” said Seryozha.

“Oh, it is so very interesting,” said Old Sergei, leaning eagerly over the dead man, “to think that this experience cannot escape us. We shall all, some day, know what it is to be dead.”

“It escaped him,” said Seryozha. “The experience must have been over almost before it began.”

“How do you know?”

But Seryozha’s interest flagged. He did not really believe he would ever die. This was why he so often killed things⁠—birds⁠—beetles⁠—fishes⁠ ⁠… because he could not imagine death.

“There are probably more of them,” he said, and looked up the hill. The soldiers were quicker-sighted than he was. So was his dog. The soldiers pointed out his dog, shoulder deep in brush, halfway up the hill. The dog, with its ears strained back, its nose waving, pointed doubtfully at a couple of gray mounds among the scrub-oaks.

As soon as Old Sergei and his son left the shelter of the sagging eaves, the rain hammered sharply on their faces and shoulders. Seryozha’s dog, with a skin of wet mud, looking half its natural size, came down the hill to meet him and ask about this disquieting marvel of two dead gods. The dog had not known before that gods could die, but, like all dogs, it was perfectly open-minded about marvels, and, having learned its lesson of divine mortality, would not now have been surprised to see every god in sight fall down dead. Seryozha had carried two spades all the way, corded across his back. Halfway up the hill he unstrapped the spades. Old Sergei selected the site of the three graves.

It was hard work digging, though the northern earth, baked in summer and frozen in winter, was now, under rain, at its softest. The Chinese soldiers stood very close, watching each spadeful eagerly, as though it might disclose gold. They did not move till Seryozha actually came near to cutting the earth from under their feet. To a Chinese, any white man doing anything is an absorbing show.

“I’d rather be burying one of you,” said Seryozha, rudely, to the smiling corporal. “You wouldn’t need so big a hole.” All the soldiers laughed affably.

Old Sergei worked rather weakly with his spade. As he dug he thought with deliberate pathos of the three dead men and presently made himself cry. “No doubt,” he sniffed, “they had women they loved, and perhaps little children, too. Their last thoughts were perhaps of the sunshine filtering through the forests of happy Russia⁠—dark Russian trees in whose shade they wooed their loves. Perhaps their last thought of all was a rapture⁠—I have found my Russia again.⁠ ⁠…”

The dark trees of Russia meant nothing to Seryozha, who had had a hard-baked dusty north China childhood. He did not even think of it as exile. The word exile to him was just a whining plaint of parents. He grunted indifferently as he dug, the sweat dripping from his yellow forelock.

“You young things have no hearts,” continued Old Sergei, turning over with his spade a few lumps of red earth and then holding his hand out to enjoy the pathos of its senile tremblings. “You have no tears to shed for the desecrated earth of Russia that bore you. You have never even worshiped God in a house of God in company with men and women of your own race. It is nothing to you that these men⁠—no doubt men who feared God and loved His Son⁠—should lie dead in these rough holes without a priest to bless them.”

“Why don’t you bless them yourself, then?” asked Seryozha, straightening his back. “You know so many prayers.”

“How can I?” exclaimed Old Sergei, shocked. “It would be entirely improper for me to take a priest’s words into my mouth.”

In a silence broken only by the scraping of the spades and the sniffing of Old Sergei, they finished their digging. The Chinese watched them, as though in a trance. When, however, Seryozha took the shoulders of the first of the three dead men, and Old Sergei prepared to fumble with the feet, the Chinese corporal said, “Let’s make sure there’s no money on them. It is a pity to bury money.”

“You wicked man,” croaked Old Sergei passionately. “It is much more of a pity to rob the dead. We Russians hold our dead sacred. We shall bury these men with what few poor treasures they have.”

But Seryozha laid the body down and looked at his father. “If we don’t search them,” he said in Russian, “these coolies will wait till we have gone and then come back and open the graves. Better to show them there is nothing.”

“Oi! oi! Sacrilege!” cried Old Sergei. But, seeing Seryozha hesitate, he added on a firmer note, “Oi! Sacrilege!⁠ ⁠… but have it your own way. You young people always think you know best. You have no hearts. I shall certainly not be a party to your robbery of the dead.” He walked away a few steps and, with his back to his son, bent down and fumbled with the boughs of a dark pink azalea. As he did so he recaptured his checked tearful mood by imagining the little weeping children of the dead men picking flowers in the darling forests of Russia.

The Chinese came and stood very close to Seryozha as he knelt down beside one dead man, then another, then the last. There was no money in their pockets; a cross or amulet had been torn from the neck of one. Their clothes were in rags, their fur caps were moth-eaten. “Ours are better,” said the soldiers, laughing. The boots of all three Russians had already been taken by their assailants. In the pocket of one Seryozha found a bill for a bicycle; another wore a ring that might be gold of poor quality on his little finger. The ring was tightly fixed and for one moment Seryozha sweated cold as the Chinese corporal’s hand went helpfully toward his dagger. But a cracking wrench drew the ring off the wet finger at last. They all looked at it. It was very light and was decorated with two little thin joined hearts. “It is the price of a ride in our cart,” said the corporal, laughing winningly into Seryozha’s face. He took it from Seryozha’s palm as though to examine it, and slipped it into his wallet.

Seryozha stood a moment, thinking, and then called to his father, “The sacrilege is all over now.”

“Oi! oi! Heartless, heartless!” cried Old Sergei, coming fussily back.

Between them, father and son lifted the first man into his grave, and Old Sergei, crying still, was going to shovel the earth into the trench when Seryozha seized his arm.

“Ah no, no, no!” cried Seryozha.

His father gaped at him. “What then? Are we not burying the poor fellow?”

Seryozha said, “But not earth on his face.⁠ ⁠…” Then, recollecting himself, the boy laughed sheepishly. “Oh, it was just an idea.⁠ ⁠…” He felt that their faces were their vanity, somehow, and the mud was so ugly.⁠ ⁠… “Let’s put leaves on his face.⁠ ⁠… Let’s put flowers on the poor fool⁠ ⁠…”

There were plenty of flowers. They heaped heads of pink azaleas, purple scabeus, poppies, big blue daisies, scarlet lilies, leaves of scrub-oak, on the dead man’s vanity. Seryozha was very much ashamed of his outburst. He giggled nervously several times, trying to think of something cynical and grown-up to say, to cover his childish mistake.

“Now I’ll chant his blessing,” he said, impudently. “I’m no priest, but what of it⁠—he was no Christian, perhaps. Goodbye, little brother, go and search the sky for a heaven. I can climb a tree without a ladder, so you can reach your sky without a prayer. I’ll drink your health, little brother, in Japanese whisky, next time I can afford it.⁠ ⁠…” He said it in so solemn a tone that the Chinese were rather impressed. “That is a Big-nose prayer,” said one soldier. But, watching the burial of the other two, they were rather disappointed. Over the second Seryozha chanted only, “To our next meeting, brother,” and over the third, “Oi! to sleep with you,” as he patted the last spadeful down.

“It is all sacrilege,” said Old Sergei, who was rather afraid of his son in this boisterous mood. “Do go away for a little while, Seryozha, and take these Chinese pigs away, while I say a real fellow-Christian’s prayer for their peace.”

He bowed his head and Seryozha wandered away with his dog. Near the road was an ants’-nest and Seryozha scratched at it with his boot, and at once forgot everything else. Things in little always delighted him⁠—the reflection in a convex mirror, a knight among his father’s chessmen, a sprig of parsley stuck on his fish pie, like an oak tree on a crag⁠—all such small perfect reminders of ordinary unwieldy things could hold his charmed attention. And he still secretly enjoyed playing with the missionary children because he so much enjoyed building their wooden blocks into elaborate houses. Although he was eighteen years old, it was difficult for him not to lose his temper when an uncouth infant missionary kicked down a careful villa in which every staircase led to somewhere and there was a chimney to every room. So he liked to think of an ants’-nest as a nest of little tiny Seryozhas⁠—a convex mirror set in the red earth.

When he first touched the nest a sort of shivering skin of swarming ants suddenly spread over it, but after a few seconds’ panic, every ant remembered its duty, like a good sailor in a shipwreck, and went to its appointed place⁠—to fetch an egg, to warn its queen, to guard the stores, to reopen a ruined doorway.⁠ ⁠… Supposing there was a dogs’ nest, thought Seryozha, run on these lines, how stuffy and cheerful and inefficient!⁠ ⁠… Or a lions’ nest, how slinky and undemocratic!⁠ ⁠… Or a man’s nest, how restful and easy for poor men to be little bits of something ready-made, instead of worried creators⁠—to owe allegiance to a cold queen instead of to a fussy old father and mother!⁠ ⁠…

The rain swept in windy waves down the valley. Seryozha’s cap, which had been made by his mother from an old cloth dress of her own, became so wet that the pasteboard that ingeniously stiffened the peak lost its courage and sagged down over Seryozha’s eyes. He was a mildly vain boy and, on removing the cap to try and make it more worthy of him, was disgusted to find that the color was running. He took his handkerchief from the cap to wipe a navy-blue tear from his brow, and as he did so a twenty-sen note fluttered from a secret place in the cap. The Chinese corporal, who had just come up, was teasing the ants into a new dazzle of frenzied movement. The corporal and Seryozha watched the little piece of paper money flutter down on to the ants’-nest. There for a moment it stirred and turned strangely, floating on the eddy of ants beneath it, and then the rain soaked, flattened, and weighed it down. Seryozha laughed and the corporal laughed. Seryozha picked up the note, folded it, and replaced it in the lining of his cap.

“Big-noses keep their money on the tops of their heads,” said the corporal merrily to his subordinates.

And as Seryozha tossed back his wet yellow flap of hair to cover it with his cap, he met the corporal’s eye and instantly knew that the Chinese was thinking, “We never looked in the dead Russians’ caps for money.⁠ ⁠…”

Old Sergei came up, murmuring something about immortality. He had always loved strangers, and detached himself querulously from people with a claim on him. Now he had been imagining the lonely death and the lonely awakening of the three Russians; if they had sought his sympathy when alive, he would have withheld it. He was kinder to lost dogs than to his wife, and his own son had never seemed to him to come under that touching heading that so often brought tears to his eyes⁠—“Helpless Little Child.⁠ ⁠…”

“We must be going home,” he said. “I shall in any case have an attack of rheumatism after this, but every additional hour spent in this downpour will aggravate it.”

“These soldiers mean to search the graves again for money,” said Seryozha.

“Impossible⁠—impossible!” cried Old Sergei tremulous once more. “They watched us bury them. They know our friends were poor like ourselves.⁠ ⁠…”

“They know something else now,” said Seryozha. “Let’s pretend to go away, and turn back at the pass to see if they have really gone.” Now that the dead men were out of sight, Seryozha did not really very much care whether they were disturbed or not.

The father and son said a polite goodbye to the soldiers and set their cramped faces against the rainy wind that swept down the pass. They reached the corner and, before rounding it, stood a moment and looked back. The soldiers, wilting limply under the eaves of the shed, were looking after the retreating Russians, the distant white points of their faces boring like little gimlets through the intervening air.

“Certainly they seem to be waiting for us to go,” said Old Sergei. “The swine!⁠ ⁠… Oi! I am so tired of wicked men.”

“I am so tired of my wet skin,” said Seryozha. “Let’s pretend we never suspected the soldiers. Let’s pretend they all went away in their cart and are safely out of sight. Let’s go home.”

Old Sergei cautiously considered this proposal. He began pretending to go home. The road home slowly diminished, slowly drew in its vistas inside his imagination. In infinitesimal jerks the new painted temple beside the home river cut sharply into his mind’s sight. The ferry made its usual unlikely arrival, after apparently proceeding for ten minutes in the wrong direction; imaginary caravan ponies, cramped in the familiar rickety old barge of his vision, drooled down the necks of their human fellow-passengers; Korean women squatted in the bows in the middle of their semi-deflated balloon skirts; everyone twittered in his dream ear; here was home.⁠ ⁠… Here was home⁠—the low door, the window cut neatly but unnaturally like a surgical incision, the noise of Anna letting something metallic fall in the back yard.⁠ ⁠…

Seryozha’s mind, as though following a secret groove, ran more quickly home⁠—even more quickly than his dog, who was already several miles nearer supper than they were. Seryozha, who had arrived at the age when one is nothing but a brittle baby encased in a glass shell of cautious maturity, was already seeing himself walking nobly up the village street, being looked at with admiration by the Chinese boy neighbors⁠—especially by little Hu-Lien⁠—damn his eyes.⁠ ⁠… “There goes the Young Big-nose,” thought Seryozha on their behalf, “who has been out on an adventure connected with a battle⁠ ⁠…” Not that Chinese boys would ever admire a friend on such grounds, but poor Seryozha had no juniors of his own race to impress, so he had to make it all up. And once you begin to make things up, you might as well flatter as blame yourself.

“No,” said Old Sergei. “We will, on second thoughts, not go home at once. We will not desert our friends. We will sit here for five minutes, hidden in the shelter of this rock, and then look back to see if the soldiers are safely gone.”

They sat flattened like lizards against the rock, picking their teeth, though there was nothing much to pick, breakfast being six hours past.

“If I climb up that bank instead of back on to the road,” said Seryozha. “I can look straight down the slope on to the graves.”

“I will climb, too,” said Old Sergei, who never liked to risk letting anyone else see something first. News, however distressing, was far better to give than to receive. They combed the wet scrub-oaks and the matted flowery grass with their legs as they climbed the short slope. Two hundred feet below them, the doubled up forms of six soldiers were knotted round one of the graves. The other grave was an inflamed scar of newly-turned mud.

“Yah!” screamed Old Sergei, and threw himself down the slope, his lank limp arms and legs flying. “You goddamned swine! You sacrilegious sons of tortoises!⁠ ⁠…”

Seryozha bounced after him, his stomach aching sharply with pleasurable excitement. His thoughts were joggled up and down like medicine in a bottle. Father and son were upon the soldiers as though in one windy stride. Seryozha’s spade came in flat and glorious contact with fleeing Chinese buttocks. One soldier sprawled with his face in the mud; he twisted himself into a sitting position and fanned the air with futile arms, bellowing curses, his mouth a red hole in a mask of mud. Old Sergei, craning his long neck, stamping his silly old foot, stood over the opened grave like a flamingo defending its nest, creaking out curses in Russian and Chinese. The corporal, with a bloody nose, trying to feel safe and comparatively authoritative at a distance of about thirty feet, clung to the frail hut as though ready to whisk it before him as a shield should he be attacked again, and bawled to his men to come away. This they were only too anxious to do, poor things, only they dared not turn their backs for a second on the Russians.

“You shall hear of this again, dogs,” shouted the corporal. “Have you forgotten that you are nothing but filthy Russians⁠—homeless nobodies?⁠ ⁠… Our general shall teach you your place.⁠ ⁠…” His nose began to bleed afresh and he buried it in a bunch of sunflower leaves, shouting in a muffled voice to his men to retreat. This they did, assembling with anxious, crooked gait round their cart. How different were the voices that shocked the horses awake from the merry yodelings that gave the poor beasts license to graze an hour ago. A confused grumble and united hiccup of oaths accompanied the mounting of the cart. One soldier, crying shrilly and ostentatiously, lay on his face in the straw of the cart, rubbing his bruised behind.

“Ha-ha!” yelled Seryozha, brandishing his spade triumphantly in their direction as they drove away, but all the same, he felt a little pang when he remembered their peaceful, ingenuous jocosity of only a few short minutes before. He felt, somehow, as though he had taken a folly too seriously.

“Nothing is sacred to these swine⁠—nothing,” chattered Old Sergei. “Even Russian gentlemen⁠ ⁠… heroes, who have died in some paltry Chinese cause.⁠ ⁠…”

“Aw, shut up, father!” said Seryozha. “Nothing’s so very sacred as all that to any of us, really⁠ ⁠… nothing except our vanity.⁠ ⁠…”

He met the quiet, anxious, opaque eyes of the disturbed dead Russian, leaning with shrugged shoulders out of his new grave. Seryozha caught his breath. “And when we’re dead, our vanity’s dead too, damn it all, so⁠—what of it?”