XI

Seryozha’s dog, all netted with spiders’ webs and glazed with dew, stood in the doorway, collecting with a high nose the too faint traces of Seryozha’s vicinity. The smell of putrefying fish clinging to Seryozha’s pack in the passageway cheered the dog a good deal; it knew that smell by now as part of the family. The house seemed to be empty of everything but air, and this happy patch of smelly air was a sort of ghost of Seryozha⁠—the next best thing to the presence of that solid and glorious being. The dog stood for a long time with its nose pressed very hard to a spot on the floor on which Seryozha had dropped, hours before, a small shred of fish liver. For quite a minute, the bereaved dog licked this spot slowly, romantically, like a melancholy epicure.

Slanting from the windows were shallow barred slides of sunlight, down and across which raced and blew and eddied the little light glittering typhoons of dust stirred up by Katya’s recent sweeping. The pale floor mats were a rectangular maze of sunlight and shadow; and flies seemed to browse in these square fields of sunlight like cattle seen from an airplane. Now and then this restful illusion was broken by one fly rising and flying petulantly away as another one alighted. A sequin-blue butterfly with a long tail flew uncertainly in from the garden, its shadow dodging across the fields of sun and dikes of shade, and settled on Tanya’s blue cloak which hung on a peg. It opened and closed its wings slowly before its shadow, like a queen trying on a new dress before the glass. Summer morning danced in the house, but, to the dog, human bustle alone spelled morning⁠—and human bustle was disturbingly lacking here. There were so many strangers in the house⁠—the blue butterfly, a couple of thistledowns riding high across the ceiling, a muddy spade with a rather dead section of worm on it, leaning against the wall, a riding-whip smelling of horse, a noisy bee that hovered about the dog’s shrinking ear, an insolent brown hen on the threshold⁠—all strangers⁠—no friends⁠—and the dog loathed strangers. Strangers so often have stings, like bees, or sticks, like beggars, or kicks, like horses; they never smell right.

A smell casts no shadow before; dogs, therefore, who are led through life by the nose, have to be intensely conservative. They can tolerate no new departures because they can know no destinations. Seryozha’s dog, though trying to be brave, felt as far away from its own tried and trusted circumstances as a man might feel who found himself the first to set foot on the moon. To the dog this house seemed as shimmering and appalling and silent as the moon; this bright gloss of sunlit air, speckled with smell-less strangers, lacking the immediate familiar smell of known gods, was as lifeless as the brittle bodiless glare that lays gray shadows at the feet of the moon’s starved peaks. Traveling from place to place, one carried one’s own exciting, flying world along with one; somewhere close in front of one’s thrilled nose was home, or something like home; somewhere close behind one’s tail was one’s own tramping homespun god. But arrival at Mi-san had meant to the dog an elaborate homelessness. That little spot of concentrated rotten fish smell on the floor was all that was left of home.

Tiptoeing on stiff suspicious toes into the living-room, the dog was much pleased to find Wilfred Chew lying asleep on the sofa. As a rule, the dog thought nothing of Wilfred, but this morning the man could certainly be promoted to the rank of an encouraging smell. The dog pushed its nose into Wilfred’s eye, savoring the blessed tang of something known before. Wilfred, with a loud groan, turned over, flinging his arms across his frowning shut eyes, and the dog whipped its precious self away to the other side of the room, fearing a kick.

A very small piece of goose skin, which, under the table, had escaped Katya’s active brush, comforted the dog for a moment, and this snack inspired the lost animal to go to the kitchen. It knew where the kitchen was; any dog could find a kitchen, even in the moon. Katya had gone to market. The kitchen door at the end of the passage was ajar, and the dog pushed in. In a bucket by the pump it found a priceless treasure of goose bones and gravy-splashed scraps.

Seryozha, coming with a dazed, quiet step into the kitchen, saw his dog and loved it as he had never loved it before. That dusty brindled back seemed to shine with a light of blessed familiarity. Seryozha’s tired eyes, looking at it, seemed to be stroked with a kind of home balm. He stood still watching the dog, his consciousness numbed⁠—as it always was⁠—by the thrill of seeing an animal enjoying itself by itself, unaware of his presence. To watch his dog smiling and snorting into its bucket of ambrosia almost made him feel as if this old worried Seryozha were standing here watching his young self, careless and apart⁠—his young lost self, enjoying something as this old watching Seryozha would never enjoy anything again.

The dog looked up and saw Seryozha. It cringed and crawled toward him, expecting a kick for thieving, and Seryozha, beaming at it, gave it a little soft kick to oblige it. While he focused his eyes exclusively upon it, blurring from his sight the strange surroundings, he could imagine himself that young happy Seryozha again at home in his mother’s kitchen. He could pretend that he would look up in a minute from the dog’s delighted writhings and see the white pansy face of that old clock in the marbled case on the dresser⁠—that kind foolish dial with the six rubbed out⁠—look up and see that it was time to go to work again⁠—to begin another safe known day.

Seryozha, with the dog hurrying triumphantly at his calf⁠—almost pressing its front teeth against his calf in its anxiety not to lose him again⁠—went out through the kitchen door. He crossed the walled Japanese garden and went out into the acre or so of Ostapenko estate, half of which was a vegetable garden and half a railed enclosure for horses. A Korean in his white puffed clothes⁠—looking like a cream cracker⁠—was filling up a trench in the earth of the garden, and Seryozha, loathing the man because he was the only man in sight⁠—and a stranger⁠—put as much distance as possible between them and sat down on the edge of a little stream that ran at the foot of the fence. The high grass, tufted with wild blue geraniums and scarlet lilies, hid Seryozha from the world as he sat down, dangling his feet over the stream. His dog, pressing its seat as near as possible to his, sat down, too, and blew great hot loving breaths into his ear.

Seryozha threw his arms round the dog’s neck and cried into its shoulder.

For the first time in his life, Seryozha was shaken⁠—shaken in his stalwart anonymity⁠—called home to self-consciousness by a sort of earthquake of the heart. He had been invisible, he had been a matter of course, he had been too close to see, he had been a hollow yet satisfactory person labeled Sergei Sergeievitch Malinin. He had no more known the creature that moved behind that name than he had known the shape of the bones that moved beneath his flesh and skin. The only mystery about the anonymous blank life that lay behind the name Sergei Malinin was found in the repeated utterance of the name itself, curiously enough. A delicious poised strangeness perched on the peak of the soul, when one said that name⁠—Sergei Malinin⁠—Sergei Malinin⁠—a hundred times over. This slippery transparent Seryozha, through whom, as it seemed, one could see the sky, was a hill of glass on which no bird but that winged mystery of his own mesmeric name could find foothold. As for love⁠—women’s love⁠—friend’s love⁠—self-love⁠—a hill of glass afforded no hospitality to such flying visitors.

Now, this earthquake intrusion of a trespasser had shaken him awake⁠—had forced him to turn and meet himself. He was recognized as a man, as he had longed to be recognized; he was traveling, far from his mother, as he had longed to travel; he was married, by his own expressed wish, to the most beautiful and gentle girl he had ever seen. And he felt the lonely fright of a chicken outside the egg, of a fledgeling outside the nest, of a weaned puppy refused its mother’s warm teats. He shook with a fevered longing to go back⁠—to go back into safety⁠—to be warm and careless in little yesterday again, instead of turned loose in this wide draughty today, with no guide but his own reluctant maturity.

Seryozha tried to dislodge a stone in the bank with his heel; he kicked it spitefully, as though he were trying to demolish something menacing. Growing up, then, was a trap; he had been lured into it by an exquisite decoy and must spend the rest of his life pressing his face against iron bars. There was Tanya, the decoy, a prisoner with him⁠—still exquisite⁠—still his. But Seryozha had never felt the need of a friend or a comforter⁠—had never yet desired reinforcement against himself or anyone else; he had not known that even his mother’s affection was valuable to him⁠—he had thought it contemptible, quite negligible⁠—though now he saw it tenderly as part of the furniture of little safe yesterday. He had a mournful senseless vision of himself now, spinning a whipping-top in the street of Chi-tao-kou⁠—a game that needs no partner. And here was Tanya⁠—a spray of orchids handed to a person who needed both his hands for the whipping of his top.

What was that Mr. Chew had said about cold devils? There were no devils, really, but there were strangers. As a boy, yesterday, Seryozha had never noticed strangers. Now, it seemed, a stranger could trespass⁠—could lie in one’s arms all night and yet never be known, never be simple, forgotten, easy, taken for granted. He must live uneasy, now, he must come inside himself and think. This was the result of the cold presence of strangers; no magic smoke⁠—no heart and liver of an enchanted fish⁠—could exorcise that trespassing presence.

Seryozha’s body was not accustomed to being used by thought. It scarcely knew how to behave while thinking. His heel kicked and kicked at the stone, and when the stone at last fell with a splash into the stream, his body felt innocently triumphant, and his lips began to whistle by themselves⁠—a low, flat whistle.

His dog was greatly cheered by this sound, and still more delighted to be suddenly pushed off the bank into the water. Seryozha’s body, having achieved one splash, desired another. The dog laughed in the water, rolling its entranced eyes upward, and, finding that it could not jump up to the top of the high bank again from the hampering water, ran gayly a few yards down the current to a point at which the stream flattened out into strands of sand and shallow bubbling rapids over pebbles⁠—a perfect working model of a Manchurian river. Seryozha’s eyes⁠—always alert for miniature things⁠—noticed the fidelity to fact of this toy river. And his eyes remembered the spring in Manchuria⁠—that rolling golden lark-shrill Manchurian spring that was, to him, home and yesterday. He remembered tremendous auburn distances and wide tender curves of marbled colors in varied earth⁠—yellow deepening to orange⁠—orange to red⁠—red paling to sandy⁠—sandy to cream⁠—with here and there the faint green flush of pricking grass⁠—and on every rainbow hillside, a white spot of Korean moving slowly along the edge of a growing parallelogram of new-furrowed land behind a yellow blob of bullock.

“Ah, tschah!” said Seryozha, throwing a stone at a bird. The stone rustled and ricocheted through the bush beneath which the bird sat, but the bird scarcely moved. “A funny thing,” thought Seryozha. “A bird that’s not afraid of a stone.⁠ ⁠…” He took off his shoes and splashed across the stream. The bird⁠—a sparrow⁠—looked at him with an anguished round eye, but it scarcely moved. Seryozha put his hand over it, loving it as soon as he saw it was too sad to be his prey. Caked round one of its claws was a ball of clay as big as a walnut. The bird must have alighted unwarily on some unusually wet adhesive surface⁠—it must have been involved in some combination of circumstances outside common bird-experience⁠—so now it went hopelessly encumbered, a crawling thing about the grass instead of a brown flash in a tree. Seryozha took out his pocket knife, and with his cautious clever blunt hands began flaking off the hard-baked mud, sliver by sliver, till first one little scaly knuckle appeared, then another. The anatomy of birds’ claws he studied by comparison with the free claw, so that the point of his knife knew where to be bold and where delicate. The bird’s eye, bright and silly as a sequin, remained fixed upon him; its little bones, wrapped thickly yet unsubstantially in a warm padding of feathers, seemed swooning in his hand. After half an hour’s delicious mincing work, the whole claw was free; the knife had made no mistake. “Stand up, bird,” said Setyozha impatiently, as the bird reeled on his wrist. Its freed claw remembered, hesitantly, how to grip; it tautened its body, threw a glance of sharp loathing at its savior, and flew a few yards. “Oh, get away now, bird,” said Seryozha, and threw a stone at it.

“The darling thing,” said Tatiana’s voice behind him. “It thinks itself so clever.” She stood in the long grass, biting a blade of grass, her head bold and vivid against the faint blue morning sky. “It thinks it used your knife so neatly⁠—made a fool of you. It thinks you were trying to eat it or something, and freed it by mistake because it was so clever. It’s laughing up its wing at you.”

“It was very kind of me to take so much trouble about a little idiot of a bird,” said Seryozha, throwing stone after stone at the bird as it fluttered from branch to branch of a low tree. “You praise these silly beasts so, but, say what you will, we’re better friends to them than they to us.”

“Oh, of course⁠ ⁠… but what are friends, after all? Just messy things.⁠ ⁠…”

She wondered why he looked so sulky. Had she grieved him? Ought a wife to be somehow different? She thought alternately. “Well⁠—it’s what I am⁠—he must take it or leave it⁠ ⁠…” and, “But was I wrong? ought I to have been different?” She was in two worlds⁠—her heart away in its solitary and exciting wilderness, her body watching for a signal from her lover, and desperately ignorant of how to obey the signal when it should come.

Seryozha was sullenly thinking, who were these two persons discussing nature? Sergei Sergeievitch Malinin, a married man, and Tatiana Pavlovna, his wife, two grown-up people with interesting thoughts. What if he sprang to his feet now, and ran home? He thought of Sonia Matvievna⁠—that easy squeaking creature in Chi-tao-kou. Her conversation was all giggle⁠—one giggle for yes⁠—another giggle for no⁠—no giggle ever meant anything so complicated as a discussion of a sparrow’s reaction to an act of human helpfulness. Then he remembered the consenting Tanya of last night. Sonia Matvievna would have had only a giggle for that, too.

“Ah, Tanya⁠—Tanya⁠—come closer.⁠ ⁠…”

She knelt by his side at once and kissed him lightly on one eye. His dog, inspired by this, rushed upon him and kissed him, much more clumsily and ardently, on the other. They all laughed.

Seryozha stopped laughing rather soon. In fact only the dog went on. It was insensitive to atmosphere, and knew nothing about the domestic changes in divine Valhalla since yesterday. Tatiana stopped laughing and watched Seryozha’s face. Even the kiss hadn’t been right, she could see.

Seryozha blinked the eye that she had kissed. It felt shocked by that light, quiet kiss; the eyelid fluttered by itself like the skin of a horse’s shoulder. He supposed that he was hungry, though he wasn’t quite sure. The skin of his face felt disappointed. His ears listened for some loud vulgar shout or laugh. Girls were fun, and one was fun to girls. Yet Tanya, though so lovely, so darling, was no fun⁠—nor did she find him fun. What, then, was between them⁠—something more exciting than fun⁠—or nothing? Now, for instance, she suddenly seized his hand. Why should she do this, if it were no joke to her? Why should she want to hold his not very clean hand⁠—so quietly, so seriously? Her thin hand seemed to need no pinching⁠—no activity at all. He held it, with a surprise that gradually changed to pleasure. Vaguely, with no recognition more articulate than a faint prevision of serenity, he began to know that this quiet taking for granted was at least as fit a sequel to last night’s strange joy as the restlessness and roguishness of Sonia Matvievna would have been. Something was born between Seryozha and Tanya at that moment⁠—a taking-for-granted for two⁠—a doubling, instead of a halving, of anonymity and unconsciousness.

“Do people ever have breakfast, in Korea?” asked Seryozha. The sun was quite high. This visit seemed to lack landmarks, somehow. And he had promised to stay for a fortnight. Was it only perhaps hunger that made him feel that he would never be at home in life again?

They walked toward the house. Seryozha’s dog led the way. It hoped that their destination was the bucket full of goose scraps, and writhed winningly at the back door. But Seryozha and Tatiana walked to the front door and into the living-room.

Pavel Ostapenko sat there, leaning over the still sleeping Wilfred, looking rather like the Doctor in Sir Luke Fildes’ picture, but not feeling like that at all. Pavel was haggard and cross. At the moment of his waking, the thought had broken on his brain like a clap of thunder: “What will happen when Chew wakes up⁠—sober? What if he says the paper is not legal?” Pavel, of course, had not for a moment entertained the thought, “What if I were wrong?”⁠—but only the much more torturing doubt⁠—“What if he says I was wrong, and tells the others so?” He had spent an uncomfortable hour wondering whether the impossible could happen⁠—whether Pavel Ostapenko could be accused of having made a mistake. Every voice in the house, except one, could now be depended on to say, “You were perfectly right, Pavel Nicholaievitch,” and that, of course, was just the same as being right. But, unfortunately, the one voice that remained, so far, silent in this necessary chorus was an indispensable one. And still more unfortunately, the lips that should form these vital words were sealed by intemperate sleep, and the understanding that should evolve the utterance could not be reached by Ostapenko logic, however eloquently expressed, even had it been awake. What on earth was the Almighty about, thought Pavel irritably, to create such a superfluity of human beings who were unfamiliar with the language that Pavel Ostapenko could use so skillfully. Unless something was done, an unthinkable emergency would arise⁠—Pavel Ostapenko would be humiliated in the eyes of his inferiors. It followed that Pavel must somehow, in some language not yet invented, have a talk with Wilfred before anyone else had a chance to do so. Pavel must be ready with a sufficiently persuasive argument to induce Wilfred, the moment he awoke, to admit⁠—“You were perfectly right, Pavel Nicholaievitch, in the course you took,” and to confirm this opinion triumphantly before the family.

Pavel sat with one elbow on his knee, glaring and breathing hotly at the innocent blank face of Wilfred. Beside him on a table were one hundred and fifty yen in notes, a Russian-English dictionary, an elementary English grammar, an illustrated history of the Russian Empire, several large sheets of paper covered with English words in wavering block letters, and the deed drawn up by Wilfred the night before.

“Tschah! Go away,” whispered Pavel, irascibly, to Seryozha and Tatiana as they came hungrily in. The foolish interfering creatures might awaken Wilfred prematurely, and Seryozha⁠—the interpreter⁠—would then have the dangerous first word.

Varvara, hearing the young people come in, joined them at the living-room door, carrying a tray. “Breakfast, Pavlik,” said Varvara. “It is eleven o’clock.”

“Devil take you all!” said Pavel in a furious whisper that scraped his throat. “Who in the world wants breakfast at this time of day? Can’t you leave the poor devil to finish his sleep in peace?”

Varvara, carried forward by the slow impetus of her grave assumption that breakfast was needed, put the tray on the table before she turned to her husband in surprise. “Who wants breakfast, you say!” she echoed. “Why, Pavlik, everyone wants⁠—”

Pavel rose to his feet in a shivering paroxysm of anger, and waved his clenched fists in the air. Varvara snatched the loaded tray up just in time to prevent him from seizing it and throwing it through the door. With the tray in her hands, she recovered her hard calm manner. “Pavel Nicholaievitch is rather tired this morning,” she said to Seryozha and, squaring her angular shoulders, she led the retreat from the room.

Pavel was left with the prostrate Wilfred, whose plaintive expression suggested that he was locked in a prison of disquieting dreams. One could almost see his teased brain beating at the closed shutters of his eyes.

“Should I not wake him?” Pavel asked himself. “He isn’t enjoying himself, wherever he is.”

But just as he leaned forward to say some urgent awakening word, the door opened and Katya, the servant, came in, with an expression of⁠—“Leave him to me; I’ll manage him.” Seryozha’s dog bustled after her. It thought the stout kitchen-smelling Katya a most delightful woman, and innocently mistook her for its hostess.

“Pavel Nicholaievitch,” said Katya, “you must allow me to lay the table for breakfast. It is⁠—”

Pavel rushed upon her with a roar, all his teeth showing, arms and legs sprawling across the air. The outraged old woman fled a few paces, then tried to make a stand in the passage. But Pavel slammed the door in her face with such a bang that the dog squeaked as it fled, believing itself shot.

The noise half roused Wilfred, yet, in spite of the discomfort of his dreams, he was reluctant to wake. He rolled about on the sofa and buried his face in the cushion, trying to drive his struggling consciousness back into the safe imprisoning corridors of sleep again. Pavel stood over him. “Curse him!” he cried. “He must be doing it on purpose.” He seized the cushion and dragged it from under Wilfred’s head. Wilfred substituted an arm for it. Pavel dragged the arm away, too.

“Awaken, Mistah Chew, awaken!” he shouted. He had looked the English word up in his dictionary.

An obstinate sealed look came into Wilfred’s face, then a look of petulance, then a distortion of the most unspeakable agony, then a light of beautiful resignation, then a recollection of the Reverend Oswald Fawcett. Wilfred opened his eyes, himself again, though rather a melancholy self. “Hrrgh?” he inquired in a strangled snort, disappointed with the waking world.

“Is time of breekfast,” shouted Pavel, feverishly consulting his English notes. “Mistah⁠—quick⁠—awaken.”

Wilfred lay with his eyes wet and callow in their puffed sockets, like newborn kittens in their lair. His gaze was fixed with a tranced expression on a spittoon; one would have said it was his dearest treasure.

Pavel thrust a sheet of paper between Wilfred’s eyes and the spittoon. Wilfred took a minute to adjust his drowsy focus, and then he recognized his own writing on the paper. It was the indenture he had drawn up last night. So it had not been a dream, thought Wilfred, surprised.

Pavel pushed his red beard close to Wilfred’s face and said very loudly in pidgin Russian⁠—for he had forgotten most of the English words he had prepared, “Eta⁠—bumaga⁠—horosho⁠—ah?”

“Horosho, horosho,” mumbled Wilfred, vaguely, feeling flattered by the word of approval.

Pavel, encouraged, produced another sheet of paper⁠—his own composition this time. “Tatiana Ostapenko and Sergei Malinin marriaged good ? ? ? Is it? This Indenture Witnesseth true? Is it ? ? ? R.S.V.P. Very Importance.”

Before Wilfred had time to achieve full understanding of this last message, Pavel⁠—nervous lest the man should prematurely shake his head⁠—thrust the Russian history before his guest, open at a picture of the wedding of Peter the Great. “All same?” shouted Pavel, in a sweating frenzy of suspense and mental effort, rapping his finger first on the picture of the wedding and then on Wilfred’s draft of the deed.

“All same⁠—all same,” said Wilfred, heartily, though still uncertain what was required of him.

Pavel, more and more hopeful, yet still in an agony lest someone should come in before understanding was complete, positively prodded the deed, indicating⁠—so forcibly that Wilfred’s kneecap below was quite bruised⁠—the four signatures⁠—Wilfred’s own, Pavel’s own, Seryozha’s and Tatiana’s.

“Marriaged good, is it? All same church,” he rasped into Wilfred’s ear, consulting his notes again. “Very importance because this night they have sleeped ensemble like marriaged. Now fornication not, is it?”

Wilfred now understood. His brain cleared and began reviewing the results of this premature acceptance of his drafted agreement. His eyes cleared and saw a pile of ten-yen notes on the table. He woke up wholly. He read his draft through carefully, his tongue, as well as his bright eyes, leaning out of his head with a creator’s eagerness.

His first thought was regret that these impetuous people had not waited for him to show what he could really do in the way of drawing up an agreement. This scribble was nothing; it had a blot in the middle of one page; it did not do Wilfred Chew, Esquire, of the Middle Temple, London, any credit at all. Besides, added an afterthought, it was quite worthless. There were no witnesses to the signatures, and very little substance to the matter. Yet⁠—what of it? These were decent people, who were made happy by believing themselves decently folded within the limits of the law. Law-abiding people only too anxious to abide by even this exiguous semblance of the law. Outlaws craving to be in. Supposing Wilfred, as he thought loftily, annulled by a sceptical word this marriage that he had accidentally made, much disturbance of mind would result⁠—and no advantage. “Morally it is a real marriage,” thought Wilfred. “And it must be God’s will, since God has not provided these poor barbarians with their orthodox machinery for getting married.” He felt conscientiously that he was, in this instance, an instrument of God’s will. In fact, since the law, as represented by Wilfred, had more to do with the making of this marriage than Heaven had, he felt himself to be in the position of chief justice in this crown colony of Heaven. His it was, not God’s, to exercise, as it were, the discretion of the court in this case. Reverend Mr. Oswald Fawcett would surely be the last to wish quibbles of church or law to destroy these innocent barbarian illusions. Supposing a baby were to result from last night’s naive precipitancy, would it not be a misuse of Wilfred’s supreme power to make the poor little thing illegitimate by a careless word?

While Wilfred thought all these things, his eye dwelt blankly on the pile of ten-yen notes on the table.

“Are all the parties concerned in the agreement prepared to carry out the various undertakings named?” asked Wilfred, sternly.

“Schto?” asked the anxious Pavel, his chestnut eyes almost leaning out of their sockets. Perhaps, he thought, the whole crux of the matter depends on these unknown words that he is saying.

“Have all the signatories expressed their honest intention of abiding by all the provisions of the indenture?”

“Schto?”

Wilfred clicked in his throat. For a second he considered tearing the silly old paper in half. Then he pointed to the clauses that dealt with the money payment. Pavel’s eyes, like a thirsty proboscis, sucked in the information indicated. Wilfred gave Pavel time to reabsorb the idea under examination, and then leaned over, took the pile of notes, and counted out on to his own knee one hundred and fifty yen.

“Horosho⁠—ah?” yelled Wilfred.

“Horosho⁠—horosho,” replied Pavel in a rival bellow.

“Then in this case the bumaga is perfectly horosho,” said Wilfred, throwing himself with abandon backward on the sofa, to show that the matter was settled.

“Horosho⁠—ah?” queried Pavel, making sure.

“Horosho, horosho.”

“Bumaga horosho⁠—ah?”

“Horosho, horosho.”

“Horosho.”

The storm of sibilant uncertainty died down. Everything was all right. Everything was safe. Wilfred and Pavel sat and looked at each other, a little tired but with glorious faces.

Then Pavel leapt to his feet and threw open the door to let the world come in. “Breakfast⁠—breakfast,” he shouted in Russian, clapping his hands like a kindly sultan summoning slaves.

Varvara and Katya and the dog surged in, without rancor. Tatiana and Seryozha were late. They came in, hand in hand, as Pavel, Varvara and Wilfred began to eat. All three of their seniors looked at them for a moment in an odd silence.

Tatiana had the sense that they⁠—two humble victims of a strangeness⁠—were offering themselves tentatively to these eyes. She often had this pitying sense that comers-in were on approval, shrinking behind the transparent, hopefully decorated, adjusted screen of their faces. “Will I do? This is the best me I can show you. Will it do?” Egoists were even more touching than altruists. Her father’s precarious challenge to criticism had often wrung her heart. Now here she was⁠—vulnerably visible herself⁠—she who had been unconscious⁠—bodiless⁠—invisible all her life. Here she was at the mercy of eyes, having dangerously taken body on herself through the big solid body of Seryozha beside her.

It was as though the old story of the magic cloak of invisibility had been reversed; by wrapping her water-clear impersonality in this wide cloak of reality that Seryozha was, she was seen⁠—seen⁠—a woman at last⁠—obliged to offer herself for acceptance or rejection by the eyes of strangers⁠—obliged to ask humbly for tolerance, from eyes.

And as she looked at Seryozha going shyly round the table to his place, hitching up one shoulder awkwardly as though one of his legs were heavier than the other, patting down the brassy crest of hair on the crown of his head, she felt almost as if she were in his body, protecting it from the cold challenge of eyes⁠—as if she were with him inside his too visible body which quailed, yet hoped for the best⁠—which preened itself, yet feared rebuff. She felt herself the true traditional wife⁠—helping him to strengthen his ramparts, arming and encouraging the tender I inside that tough body.

And when Seryozha said to her father, “Thank you, I won’t have any honey,” Tatiana could almost have cried, so suddenly obsessed was she by the thought of that I⁠—alone all its life till now⁠—hoping for the best possible results from its little notions of making itself charming⁠—or at least inoffensive; trying to feel confident of victory in its humble struggles to impress itself; keeping its body clean, its nose wiped, its mind wistfully yet imperfectly adjusted to the minds of others; walking in and out of the presence of strangers, saying, “Will I do?” and then, “Did I pass?” When Seryozha said, “I won’t have any honey, thank you,” she saw him clinging forlornly to his rights and prejudices, daring to refuse honey, to like ham, to be different from other people, presenting himself cautiously as an individual to the round ruthless eye of her father.

Seryozha, unaware of the pathetic picture he was presenting to his wife, ate a very hearty breakfast and felt better, in spite of a slight spasm of indigestion. His father and mother were on his mind; he believed that he was pitying them, but really he was homesick for them. How could he combine the keeping of his promise to Varvara⁠—to stay at Mi-san for a fortnight⁠—with his determination to get home as quickly as possible? And there was that money still to be fetched from Isaev in Seoul. His life seemed to him now so complicated that he sweated a little all the time. He gave inarticulate consideration to a letter that he would write to his mother⁠—Dearest mamma, I am married to Tatiana Pavlovna Ostapenko.⁠ ⁠… That wouldn’t take long; he knew how to spell all the words. In the meantime, he drew Wilfred aside.

“My mamma and my papa, Mr. Chew, they thinks I come back soon.”

“Well, you will, will you not?”

“Nyet. Pavel Nicholaievitch speak me I wait here fourteen day.”

“Very hospitable, I’m sure.”

“Da da da. But I speak him, Yes, I shall stop.”

“Well, it is for you to say.”

“Nyet. My papa and my mamma thinks I come back more soon.”

“Well really, my dear Saggay Saggayitch, I cannot grasp your difficulty. It is impossible for you to be in two places at once.”

“Most impossible, indeed. Nu, if I shall wait here fourteen day, then, after, I must go to Isaev to speak him to give me my papa’s money.”

“Well, what of it? That was what you came for, primarily, was it not?”

“Yes indeed, very primarily. Yet yist too long time. My papa and my mamma very sad. Fourteen day here. Three four day Seoul. Ten day walking to Chi-tao-kou. Too long time.”

“Well, why not make a quick trip to Seoul today or tomorrow, get your money and come back here?”

“But I speak Pavel Nicholaievitch and Varvara Alexeievna most certain sure I wait here fourteen day.”

“We seem to be arguing in a circle, my dear chap,” said Wilfred, still anxious to be helpful, yet conscious of a deadlock.

“Mr. Chew, I give you my papa’s paper. You go to Seoul and speak Isaev give you my papa’s money. So you bring back to me this money and after fourteen day, we go home.”

“With the greatest pleasure, my dear Saggay Saggayitch,” said Wilfred Chew, immediately.