XIII

Whenever Pavel Ostapenko knew that he was likely to meet a friend, old or new, he always automatically inquired of himself whether the meeting was likely to do him credit or no. “Is everything all right? Does he appreciate me? Has he lately seen anyone who might have criticized me or told lies about me? Have I told him the same story as the one current here?” And as soon as he received Wilfred’s telegram from Seoul, announcing his immediate return to Mi-san, accompanied by Isaev, Pavel, testing in his own mind the newcomer by means of this third-degree questionnaire, was annoyed to be obliged to answer, “No. There is danger here. Isaev may very well withhold the requisite smile as he greets me⁠—may even be discourteous. He imagines he has a grievance against my family; he blames his son’s downfall on my daughter. He once called me⁠—(Pavel’s very inmost voice sank to the veriest inmost whisper)⁠—a windbag. Something must be done about Isaev.”

Pavel, of course, disliked Isaev for disliking him, yet he was so sure of his own superiority that his dislike was entirely impermanent. Simply, the man’s disease⁠—dislike of Pavel⁠—must be subjected to immediate treatment and cure. To be deeply offended at being called a windbag, one must suspect uneasily the truth of the indictment, but Pavel had no such suspicion. The man Isaev had made a ridiculous and offensive error⁠—and of his error he must be convinced as soon as possible⁠—not by reproach, but by eloquent proof of Pavel’s essential non-windbagacity. The matter of Tatiana’s guilt, though still urgently in need of readjustment, was less urgent than the windbag misunderstanding, since Tatiana, though certainly a limb of the Ostapenko tree, was an outlying limb. A man, for instance, would be less offended by criticism of the shape of his little toe than of the shape of his nose. Indeed, alone with his daughter, Pavel would have detached her from the Ostapenko body altogether; in speaking to her he would have admitted⁠—and even insisted on⁠—her guilt in the matter of the jilting of young Piotr Isaev. But in speaking to Isaev, Pavel would instinctively graft his daughter on to the main Ostapenko trunk once more, and swear to her inviolate blamelessness of any interference with young Isaev’s peace of mind. And he would prove it too (with as much ease as he could, in Tatiana’s ear, prove her guilt)⁠—prove it to his own satisfaction, and perhaps to the resentful father’s. When speaking neither to sinner nor sinned against, Pavel would not entertain the question of sin or justification, truth or lie, at all. Truth was nonexistent, unless he was engaged in propounding it; in words lay his entire standard of truth, morals, and behavior.

Much of Pavel’s life, therefore⁠—since words were his standard⁠—was spent in getting his word in first. It was, for instance, necessary for him to see Isaev before anyone else in Mi-san should see him. If their first meeting since the family estrangement should be a public one, Isaev’s Ostapenko heresies might be expressed in the hearing of Ostapenko believers before Pavel’s doctrine of reassurance should have time to take effect.

“What on earth is the old fool coming here for?” thought Pavel, irritated by the necessity of riding fifteen miles to the railway station on a very hot day. “I only invited him because I took for granted he wouldn’t come⁠—and because I thought the courtesy might loosen his purse-strings to my young couple’s advantage,” However, he could not afford to question the stark necessity of seeing Isaev alone first. Of course the old snake had probably poisoned Wilfred Chew’s ear already, but incompatibility of language had, one hoped, been a safeguard to a certain extent. Besides, Wilfred was a Chinese, and his approval didn’t matter so very much.

Pavel, never indolent, was as tireless in defense of his vanity’s interests as is a fish-hawk in providing for the inmates of its nest. Before Sunday morning was a morning at all, before the first knot of the parcel that contained this coming week had been cut by the first blade of the sun, Pavel was awake, was forcing the sleepers of his household to be awake, was shattering with a hurrying candle this precious blank dark nothingness between last week and next week.

Seryozha, in the little room behind the kitchen, woke up and sat up, as the noise of a heavy foot stumbling over a heavy metal thing tore him from sleep. He lighted a match; it was just past half past three. He lit the candle and sat for a few minutes, clasping his big knees, looking down at the sleeping Tatiana.

She looked so proud, asleep; her mouth was loosened from its waking anxious, gentle smile, to a slight exquisite sneer. Her cheekbones almost looked like shrugged shoulders. She seemed almost crafty now, as if she had escaped, by wiles and cunning, leaving this pale contemptuous dummy in her place⁠—had escaped and was free now in a trackless wild. Tatiana always looked forward to sleep, although she loved life so much. On waking every morning, she was impatient to be quickly up and living, to get the day soon begun and soon ended, every morning being, to her, a promise of another night and new dreams. The hither bank of every river that we must cross is but a promise of the farther bank⁠—a promise that gives us courage to swim out boldly into the current.

Seryozha looked at her face almost resentfully; he was vaguely conscious that to call her from sleep would be to recall her from a palace to a cottage⁠—and the knowledge hurt him. Her pretty mouth, stopped by sleep, seemed more ruthlessly frank now than when day parted it to say kind, tentative things. Now, asleep, she admitted that most of the words she knew were not to be said to him. Waking, she disguised her refusal by uttering always invented, not known, words⁠—words of timid conscientious love, warmth, interest, consent⁠—words spoken only from a tender heart, not blurted with the lips of a vital body.

With Tatiana, Seryozha was forced to be conscious of himself. Even side by side with a faraway, sleeping Tatiana, he was obliged to confront himself with naive comparisons, to blunder about among clumsy thoughts of right and wrong. In spite of her remoteness, she had introduced an unwelcome immediacy into his self-knowledge. Being a married man was, for him, to be married to a new critical, shrewish self, that called attention to the slowness of his understanding, the poverty of his experience, the prosaic quality of his love, the size of his hands and feet.⁠ ⁠… And Tatiana stood between him and this new, carping, fretful self, in the guise of an ineffectual friend and peacemaker⁠—murmuring unconvincing, yet exquisite, reassurances, gently decrying injustices and misunderstandings between that newly-married, ill-assorted couple⁠—Seryozha and his soul. And, having flattered both contestants with a tender courtesy, she was gone⁠—a peacemaking neighbor gone to her home, her duty done, leaving Seryozha and that new inward domestic tyrant eyeing each other suspiciously⁠—“Was that right?⁠—was that clumsy?⁠—did that sound stupid?”⁠ ⁠… Oh, never to be alone again.⁠ ⁠…

Seryozha, clasping his knees, looked at his hands. The knuckles were red and not very thoroughly washed. His right thumb was made unshapely by a deep old scar. He was not old enough⁠—first, to value and then to forget the very thickness and strength of his body. The first stage⁠—the stage of living unconsciously in his big body as though it were a twirl of air⁠—was left behind him forever. In the second stage he now was⁠—the stage of feeling responsible for, yet betrayed by, his great limbs and hungry organs and appetites, as a child is embarrassed by the companionship of a gross aggressive elder brother. Soon he would arrive at the third stage⁠—the simple serenity of size, the stage at which the big bones and little soul⁠—lion and lamb⁠—lie down together dreamlessly in their lair.

But now he looked at his scarred useful thumb and sighed.

He got up, and after pulling on his shirt and trousers with a feeling of disgust at their homespun and stained look⁠—a look he had never noticed before⁠—he went into the kitchen and found Varvara and Katya prodding a morose reluctant fire, and Pavel standing over them with a candle, elaborately repressed curses filtering through his beard.

“I am going to the station to meet Mr. Chew and Gavril Ilitch,” said Pavel. “Someone has to take a couple of horses to the station for them to ride, and it would seem discourteous, I think, to send a servant only.” He gabbled a little because he did not want Seryozha to offer to come with him. The whole expedition was arranged largely for the purpose of protecting his son-in-law’s illusions about Ostapenko perfection. But in any case he needed no audience for the feat of dialectics which was to lure the errant Isaev back into the fold of Ostapenko orthodoxy. He would not even have let his wife witness the meeting between himself and a doubtful admirer; he supposed that she had never seen him humiliated. “I leave you, son, in charge of our womenfolk,” he added, boisterously, to Seryozha. “The only pair of trousers in a bundle of petticoats⁠—a great responsibility.⁠ ⁠…”

Seryozha stretched his mouth automatically to filial acquiescence. This robust paternalism was much easier to cope with than was the jejune and bloodless nagging of his own father. Arrogant complacency rebounds from the attention, but false pathos bores into it, like some unwholesome parasite.

Yet when, just as the sun, though still invisible behind a neighbor’s roof, threw stripes of gay fresh gold all over the plain, Seryozha came out to watch the departure of Pavel, the servant Yi, and the four horses, he was filled with an almost uncontrollable longing to go too. Pavel’s jocose reference to the trousers and petticoats had somehow made almost articulate Seryozha’s momentary weariness of women.

Seryozha stood watching Katya giving confused, strident directions to Yi, the Korean servant, about a skein of yarn that she wished him to buy in the town through which the railway ran. Yi, though he had exchanged his billowing white robe for a white riding suit with no superfluity except a discreet drapery about the seat, still retained his horsehair hat⁠—a truncated edition of the traditional Welshwoman’s hat, but as small as a doll’s. It tottered like a belfry on the steepled skullcap that lidded his narrow skull, and gave him a look of tapering neatness⁠—like a well-sharpened pencil. Katya, seen in contrast with that impassive skeleton, typified all that was most exasperatingly petticoaty about women. She fluttered, she wobbled, she sweated, she squawked; streaks of hair shook about the mottled nape of her neck. The lumps of her body were encased in a buttony, patchy, hooky, stitchy material, like turnips in a sack. Above all she talked⁠—she wanted something, and wanted repeated assurances that what she wanted would be brought to her. “Bunamayesh? Bunamayesh?” she yawped to the silent Yi, nagging at him to acknowledge her authority⁠—as women always nag, thought Seryozha. Always their petticoats, their hair, their scent, their bosoms, their voices stuck out from them, encroaching on space and air, imposing an aura of artificial excitement and complexity on life. Men, calmly concave men, walked neatly, sleekly bounded in their decent bones, doing what must be done. These were not the words of Seryozha’s thoughts, but he looked at the great this-way-and-that fuss of women’s footprints on the dewy grass between the door and the road, and glumly reminded himself that only a few purposeful, large, well-aimed marks showed the men’s traces. Of course this was largely because the purposeful feet of Pavel remained still, nobly rooted in manly authority, while his voice commanded women to fetch this⁠—go there⁠—do that⁠—no, not that, this⁠—no, not this, that.⁠ ⁠… And of course it would be fair also to add that Tatiana’s feet had not smirched the dew at all, because they were in bed. Indeed, Tatiana’s encroachment on the world, as Seryozha could not but have admitted, was slighter even than the manliest man’s. No intrusion can aspire to a point more discreet than the vanishing point, and Seryozha’s wife could hardly diminish much more the reticent trace she left without erasing it altogether. Yet a vague sense of his own injustice and poor logic did not make him look with more tolerant eyes on the anxious, hurrying flutter of Varvara and Katya. Indeed, his irritation with these harmless women was merely a revenge for the irritation with men which Tatiana did not confessedly feel. It was a revenge for the gross look that his scarred spatulate hand had taken on in his own eyes, since that hand had been married to the brown, unflawed, flexible strip of bones and muscles that was Tatiana’s hand.

And when at last Pavel could find no more orders to give to his two women, when at last his long legs were astride of the dancing mare and Yi had scrambled up on to the back of one of the impatiently following horses, Seryozha could bear it no longer. He ran after the party and swung himself astride of the last spare horse. “I’m coming too,” he said, grinning at his father-in-law.

Pavel, taken unawares, could think of no explicable reason why the boy should not come, especially as Yi shouted his willingness to walk home and so leave all four horses free on the return ride. It was amazing, thought Pavel, how inconvenient people were. Nobody ever respected the subtle integrity of Ostapenko plans. Simply because it was impossible to explain those plans to common people, common people found them easy to thwart.

Seryozha’s happy and charming look, as the boy set his eager horse to canter down the trail, suddenly touched some forgotten softness in Pavel’s heart, however⁠—it was almost like a homesickness. “Oh, let him come,” he grumbled to himself. “I can think of some way to have a quiet talk with Gavril Ilitch.”

The way lay for the first half-hour along narrow dikes between rice-fields, and the horses must dance⁠—with a slightly sidewise gait⁠—in single file, Pavel now at the head of the procession, Yi and the spare horse behind him, and Seryozha at the tail, so that talk was impossible. The toppling dike shook under the bouncing tread of sixteen hoofs⁠—shook frogs and dew and dragonflies out of the grass into the flooded fields below. The frogs had vermilion stomachs and grass-green backs patched with black. The dragonflies were sequin blue. The frogs and dragonflies sprang out from the dike’s brink into the sunlight; they glittered together between one’s eyes and the dazzling water, like splinters of kingfisher color.

Seryozha’s dog, bursting with happiness, floundered in and out of the water, snapping genially at frogs, dragonflies, pigs, butterflies, bullocks, ponies, and even clods of mere earth in a frenzy of joy. It was a kind dog, but in its excitement it rushed at a brood of day-old chicks near a cottage and set them blowing about the trail like an explosion of yellow thistledowns. It could have swallowed them as one swallows yellow gooseberries, but the hen, completely selfless, instantly made herself terrible⁠—a super-hen⁠—with spread ruff and taut spread wings. Masked thus, she rushed at the enemy, positively roaring with heroic anger, clapped the dog about the muzzle with her wings and after pecking at its eyes, almost thrust herself into its mouth. The dog, extricating its teeth from this ardently offered sacrifice, hurried sheepishly away, pretending to be engaged in some new and worthier chase, but really humiliated⁠—put to flight by the ridiculous and splendid bird.

The trail in front began lifting itself up out of the rice-marshes on to higher land, like a water snake coming out to bask in the sun. No rice, no farms, on the hill⁠—it was an untamed hill, furred with velvety, rather sun-dried grass. Man’s only marks upon it were oblong or square patches of canary-yellow buckwheat here and there, and the headstones of old forgotten Korean graves, like worn-down tree-stumps bristling from the roots of their red mud and grass mounds. As the horses cantered up the diagonally mounting trail, and Pavel, twenty yards in front of Seryozha, reached the top of the ridge, the older man’s rather heroic bright head and upslanting beard towered against the sky. An instant later, all the riders seemed to attain to the level of the low rising sun, and their endless slim elastic shadows laddered down the soft slope as far as the farther valley⁠—seven-league stilts, straddling a dozen distant rice-fields at a stride.

“A fine climate and a fine country,” said Pavel, who was always exhilarated and fortified in his pride by finding himself on a horse’s back. He looked down complacently at his titanic shadow⁠—as big as a rainbow. “Why don’t you stay here, Seryozha⁠—settle down here and help me with the horse business? I’ll write to your father and explain how it is. He’d be delighted, I’m sure, to have you so well settled.”

“Oi⁠—no⁠—no!” said Seryozha, startled. He added, childishly, “You promised I could go home after a fortnight.”

Pavel looked at him, surprised. “Why, my dear boy, you’re a free man! You can go when you please⁠—after Thursday week, of course. We asked you to undertake to stay with us till Thursday week, in case poor little Tanya might feel⁠—Well, thank God, things are going well. Still, you’ve given your word not to take the child away till Thursday week, when the fortnight will be up. After that, of course you’re free to go home or anywhere you like⁠—but I can’t understand why you should want to. Much more opportunity here, in well-governed Korea, than up north, among Chinese brigands in Kanto. And I could be useful to you here. I’m in very good standing with the Japanese; this horse-breeding idea really was an inspiration on my part. The Japanese have such short legs themselves, they’ll give any price for long-legged horses. How often have I tried to get a likely cob off on a policeman, five foot one high; but, no⁠—a taller horse⁠—a taller horse, please.⁠ ⁠…” He imitated the polite hissing of a Japanese. “However, I’m here to supply the demand, and if the Japanese police start using giraffes, I shall be on hand to breed them, you may be sure. They know me now as a man who never lets them down over a horse deal. If you come into the business you could learn the Japanese language and⁠—”

“Oi, no, no!” said Seryozha. “No, but let me go to my father.”

His father, though tiresome, puny, and ugly enough, seemed to him at this moment more part of the dear ugly furniture of his home than did his mother. With his father beside him, as with his clasp-knife or his dog, he could feel himself effective, dignified, taken for granted, not to be surprised unawares into childishness. With his mother he could not always feel this. She was near enough to him to trip up his pride, to prick his youth to self-consciousness, to rouse him to effort. It was quietness, non-adventure, that he hungered for just now⁠—to feast his eyes on the disfigured face of the home clock, on the little crooked window of his bedroom at home, on the helpless, humble, unwandering figure of his father⁠—these were his cravings. He sought everything that was sure to be there⁠—everything that could be depended on not to be suddenly strange and humiliating.

“Go to your father, then,” said Pavel, curtly. “I can tell you, though, when I was your age⁠ ⁠…” And for an hour and a half he did tell him.

The ridge climbed higher, and though the day grew brighter, the valleys, being more deeply sunken, were filled with mist⁠—slung with a canopy of dark steel-colored mist, which presently the sun would first polish to bright silver and then roll away altogether. Flowers of a deep brooding gentian blue burned deep in the grass. Far away, a monstrous pyramidal stalagmite of mountains craned to meet a stalactite of far-flung clouds. Foothills, like dispersed ripples, lay about the great central wave of land⁠—gathered themselves, higher and higher, about the multiple toppling head⁠—like an immense tidal wave, towering above tributary waves to overwhelm the valley. The clouds, an inverted pyramid, seemed to reflect this piled accumulation; there also, in the sky, were the foothills, the swelling base, and the apex of the cloud range, as though the sky were a mirror, answering the stormy earth.

“The Kongo-san,”1 said Pavel.

Their trail ran out upon the spine of a sharp spur of hill, and it seemed impossible to believe that horsemen could ride down from such an airplane flight of land. On three sides⁠—to right, to left, and before⁠—distant fields, rivers, villages, and groves, seen under the horses’ chins, were flattened downby a wide weight of glass air. Yet the path which led the riders, as it seemed, over the brim of this high grassy world into the air, proved to be a reasonably tame descent⁠—a fluent series of zeds and esses, zigzagging and looping down the fluted sides of the hill, in easy, if twisted, gradients.

By the time the instructive tale of Pavel’s youth had brought him to his first business triumph⁠—(“I said to him, ‘No, my dear sir, that’s where you’re wrong. I may be half your age, but I’ve kept my wits about me and you can take it from me.⁠ ⁠…’ ”)⁠—the hoofs of the four horses were rattling over the bleached, water-worn stones of a dry river bed on valley level. Sandpipers found an innocent sport in fluttering invitingly in front of the pursuing dog’s nose; their chicks, nearly independent now, were still obedient enough to heed the mew of command and be frozen into black-and-white pebbles, impossible to identify. A couple of little boys were herding pigs among the boulders, and screamed with pleasure at the artless dog’s confusion.

The father of the little boys came out of his thatched shed to watch the riders. Pleased by their rich look, he hailed them, and, dragging a yellow ground-melon from the tangle of his garden, shuffled toward them, peeling the fruit as he came. So earthy was the hand in which he held up the fruit that black smears were printed all over the pale peeled flesh of the melon. Yi, the servant, shocked at such manners, reproached his compatriot. The peasant, laughing at his social faux-pas, pulled round his even dirtier coattail from behind him, and held the fruit in that. Pavel, delighted at the friendly subservience of the Korean, took the fruit and ate a few mouthfuls of it, nodding in a princely way at the man. Juice and seeds were tangled in his red beard. When he was on horseback, it was evident that he would have made a good king. His chestnut eyes, directed downward at humanity under the proudly lowered lids of a man raised up, lost their staring, round, appealing look. They no longer expressed, “You must believe me”⁠—they took for granted that you would. He spilled a coin or two out of his flat casual palm as he stuck his heels into his horse’s ribs and clattered away.

“I shall never be as grown-up as that,” sighed Seryozha, riding humbly after him. And he longed the more fiercely for his own poor inferior old father, as one might long for even a false word of encouragement.

Pavel was still dealing with his triumphant twenty-fifth year when the party reached the station. Seryozha’s impression was that his father-in-law had matured extremely slowly, but no detail of the process remained in the young man’s mind. The station, a humble, flat affair⁠—a mere wooden box on the edge of a couple of metal stripes, distracted Pavel’s attention from his recital.

“Here we are,” he said. “Only twenty minutes to wait. I timed that very neatly.”

The mud strip that acted as platform, was empty except for a Korean woman, who squatted on the ground, crying loudly. Her head was crowned by an elaborate arrangement of napkin that might have been the pride of a suburban butler. Wisps of dusty hair clung to her tear-wet cheeks and she carried a crying baby bound upon her back. Seryozha looked at her with distaste. “These women.⁠ ⁠… Leave them behind in one place, they crop up in another. Always demanding attention⁠ ⁠…”

“What can she be crying for?” he asked.

Pavel took no notice of this. “While we are waiting, I will ask about your journey back to Manchuria,” he said. “I want Tanya to travel as comfortably as possible. It is her first real journey since she was a child, and the parting from her parents is bound to be rather a strain, so I want her to be well looked after.” He began talking about the details of the journey⁠—sleeping berths, hotels, steamers, orders telegraphed ahead.⁠ ⁠…

“Oh, I shall never be man enough to arrange all that,” thought Seryozha. And equally, he felt he must not be child enough to let Wilfred Chew undertake everything.

While Pavel talked in Japanese, with a patronizing affability, to the hissing stationmaster, Seryozha stood near the weeping Korean woman. He wanted either to strangle her or to stroke her dirty neck⁠—it was impossible to be sure which. As he looked at her, his dog bustled up with its usual “So-sorry-I’m-late-I-was-detained-on-business” manner and licked the woman hastily on the ear. She screamed and pushed it away. Seryozha looked at his dog fondly, admiring its savoir-faire. “What about my dog?” he asked Pavel. “How will it travel in a sleeping berth?”

Pavel laughed good-naturedly and spoke to the stationmaster again.

“You will have to put it in a crate and send it as freight,” he said, “if you think the creature’s worth taking home again. But if you like to leave it with Yi at Mi-san⁠—”

“My dog can’t travel in a box,” said Seryozha. The dog cramped itself coyly at his feet, realizing that it was being talked about, but naively confident that the talk was kind. “Nonsense! All dogs travel like that here. It’s a rule on Japanese railways.” Pavel spoke inattentively, for he was straining his sight toward the far sun-dazzled spot where the ostensibly parallel railway lines defied geometry and converged on the horizon.

“Well then, I shan’t go home by train,” said Seryozha. “I shall walk.”

“What do you mean?” asked Pavel. His attention, suddenly recalled, whizzed down the slippery widening perspective of the railway line from the horizon to his son-in-law. “What do you mean⁠—you’ll walk?”

“My dog can’t travel in a box,” said Seryozha, between nervously rigid lips.

“My daughter can’t travel on her feet,” said Pavel, glaring at him in amazement.

There was silence, bounded on the one hand by the continuous duet of the wailing Korean mother and child, and on the other by an insect-like twanging resonance, the sound of the approaching train. Pavel guarded the rather precarious integrity of his last word as the train approached. He knew it had not convinced his incipiently mutinous son-in-law, but still, as long as silence followed it, it could be considered as the last word on the subject. And now the roar of the train might be counted on to drown any further impertinence.

The train’s roar swelled and swelled, just reached the verge of the unendurable, and then broke, like a schoolboy’s voice, into a falsetto of hissings and steamings, as the train stopped.

Wilfred and Isaev climbed down. Pavel hurried toward them; here, the first word rather than the last, was the important one.

“Excellent, excellent,” he shouted, seizing Isaev’s slow hand. “Old friend, you are welcome. You give me the greatest pleasure.” He tried painfully to be economical of words⁠—terse and manly of voice. Windbag was a charge that an amiable taciturnity must disprove. But he could not resist adding something more⁠—and something more⁠—and something more after that. Nothing but words ever occurred to him as relevant; if one arrangement of words seemed in retrospect imperfect or incomplete, nothing but more words seemed adequate to correct it. Pavel would have proved by a week’s argument that he never in any circumstances argued.

Isaev opened and shut his wide mouth not ill-naturedly; he looked inquisitively past Pavel at Seryozha.

Wilfred Chew was welcoming himself back at his post by Seryozha’s side, unaided by Seryozha. “Well, my dear old chap, we seasoned travelers⁠ ⁠… glad to be together again, are we not? You must be longing to know all my news. Take a peep at this.” He archly drew a corner of the sealed envelope out of his pocket. “Knowing me and my gifts of determination, you will have guessed that everything went like a clock working, otherwise, of course, you would not have seen me back so⁠—”

“What is it⁠—the trouble of this woman?” asked Seryozha, who could not take his eyes off the distressed Korean woman. For she was attacking the train in a frenzy⁠—challenging it to single combat; she leapt with desperate agility at one door, was pushed out by the train conductor, and flew to another door. Her baby was shaken like the rider of a bucking bronco. Trainmen stood ready to push her off at every door. But her distraught screams prevented even the iron-hearted train from starting.

Pavel, checked in a spasm of terse eloquence by the obvious inattention of Isaev, looked round. At once seeing whither the center of the stage had shifted, he strode to the woman’s side, spoke nobly to her, held her arm as she gathered herself for a new futile leap at a closed train door, spoke nobly to the trainmen, nodded his head and said “Ah Ah” superbly, pressed money into the guard’s hand. At once the train swallowed and digested the woman, and instant silence swallowed her clamor and that of her baby. Much gratified by the poor creature’s opportune predicament and its picturesque result, Pavel returned to his friends, saying gruffly (as unlike a windbag as possible): “Poor wretch! No money to pay her fare to Gensan⁠—dying husband there⁠—very easily fixed, fortunately.⁠ ⁠…”

“You gave her the money with which to travel!” exclaimed Wilfred, delighted, as he always was, by any improvement in anything. “Your reward will be in heaven.” And in his literal mind he imagined Saint Peter making a little note⁠—Cr. P. N. Ostapenko⁠—Dr. Heaven. To Third class fare to Gensan. ¥1.69.

Isaev, stretching his long thin lips to something that really looked almost like a smile, banged Pavel’s shoulder three or four times with a wooden congratulatory hand. He was of a race and class that is easily touched by cheap charity. Isaev, somewhere inside his impassive body, was rather enjoying this jaunt. His wife’s home in Seoul was something of a prison.

Pavel, delighted (for now everybody loved him safely), sang tunefully as he tightened up the girth of one of the spare horses. It was rather difficult hoisting the massive Isaev on to the back of a horse, and once there, his large hard seat seemed unable to take the curve of the saddle. But the horse was quiet, and Isaev, though not steady, looked calm. Pavel fidgeted with the stirrups, and then, ceasing his humming, looked up sunnily and affectionately into Isaev’s face, saying, “Such old friends as we are, Gavril Ilitch, aren’t going to let a hysterical son and daughter come between us, are we?” Isaev, a simple soul, smiled. He was conquered. Pavel added in a more matter-of-fact voice, “Anyway, the chit’s married now and going to leave us soon. Here’s her husband.”

They rode off. Pavel rode beside Isaev, cautiously piling charm on charm. They were halfway home before he thought it safe to detach himself from Isaev and come back to where Seryozha trailed behind the party.

“You couldn’t have been serious, my boy,” said Pavel to Seryozha, “in what you said just now about the journey back to Chi-tao-kou.”

So the argument began. It ended as they rode up to the gate of the house in Mi-san, with Seryozha saying, “My dog can’t travel in a box.”

Somehow the question had become almost a religious one with Seryozha now. The askingness of women⁠—the commandingness of men, had obscurely fermented in his simple mind, and resulted in this explosion of philocanism. His dog was the only unbroken reed in sight⁠—the only treasure saved from the wreck of yesterday. It was absolutely out of the question to shut the dog up in a box and leave it to the mercy of Japanese freight porters.

During the next few days the dispute became chronic, and sadly marred the wedding festivities which the Ostapenkos tried to revive in honor of Isaev’s visit. At every meal the question came up.

“Seryozha wants to walk back to China because he won’t shut his moth-eaten old wonk in a box.”

“Well, I won’t shut it up in a box,” Seryozha said. He seldom ventured further into the intricacies of debate than this.

“Why should the poor dog be shut up in a box?” Tatiana always asked. Though the matter had been explained to her at length, she could not manage to bear in mind the implications of her husband’s determination.

“Seryozha would rather that his wife should walk her feet off, than that his dog should be shut up in a box.”

“Well, I won’t shut my dog up in a box.”

“Surely there must be some way both to keep my feet on and to keep the poor dog out of the box,” said Tatiana. She was fond of the dog by now, and usually at this point called it to her knee and began interrogating it, while trying to tie its ears in a knot on the top of its head or to fit her wedding-ring on to the tip of its tail. The dog, heartily enjoying these mild diversions, slobbered appreciatively down her shin.

Whenever Tatiana spoke, Isaev looked at her, blankly and intensely, thinking of his son. Wilfred, watching him at these moments, nervously felt that just inside the big clenched trap of Isaev’s mouth the word “bitch” was only precariously detained. Apart from this unspoken contribution, Isaev said almost nothing. He ate a great deal and drank cautiously. He hardly replied, even when Varvara, determined to keep conversation as equable and normal as possible, said in her harsh, uninviting voice, “I suppose Seoul is a good deal hotter than Mi-san at this time of year,” or, “Does Olga Ivanovna bake her own bread?”

To Tatiana, the whole problem of the choice between her own comfort and the dog’s seemed perfectly reasonable and entirely insoluble. She lived always in the minute⁠—looked forward to nothing more solid than dreams. Tomorrow’s practical difficulties seemed as unreal as a story about someone else. Tomorrow would dawn⁠—the next chapter of the story must presently be read⁠—but here was today, and everything else was negligible. She habitually presented a passive front to her father’s contentions. This cool docility was one of her father’s chief difficulties in dealing with her; she never defied him and never agreed with him. She seemed to watch his lips moving, rather than to listen to what they said. She knew herself to be a robust and tireless walker, to whom the journey to Chi-tao-kou on foot would be no hardship. But it was a matter of tomorrow, not today, so it did not occur to her to defy her father, any more than it occurred to her to feel offended with her husband for his unflattering and unromantic solicitude for his dog. In answer to her father’s indignant vows that no daughter of his should tramp like a gypsy, she nodded her head. In answer to Seryozha’s simple reiterations that no dog of his should be expected to travel in a box, she nodded her head. She did not care much for an alternative so remotely imbedded in the future; if anything, she cared about the dog’s dignity a little more than her own. Every creature, she took for granted, had a right to its dignity.

Two entirely different airs seemed to enclose Seryozha when he was talking with Tatiana alone and when he was talking with Pavel alone. The young human being is instinctively humble with the arrogant and arrogant with the humble⁠—yet it was not, in Seryozha’s case, so much that he spoke different things with Pavel and with Tatiana⁠—as that he spoke them from a different heart and into a different air. From a high heart and into a consenting air he spoke to Tatiana; from a lowly heart and into a dangerous air he spoke to his father-in-law. He was, in his own reluctant eyes, an essentially different Seryozha with the one and with the other, and his eyes, thus washed with the change in himself, saw not only himself, but the world outside, entirely differently. In Tatiana’s gentle and admiring presence, he saw trees, buildings, clouds, with their faces toward him; the sun shone on him⁠—he accepted it as his sun⁠—the shade was spread for his comfort. But in the presence of Pavel, who imposed uncertainty and immaturity upon him, he was forced to feel as if he were trespassing on another’s air, another’s sunlight and shade⁠—treading on earth indifferent to him; the very wind seemed to turn its back on him and fawn on another. “Face me⁠—fortify me,” the puzzled young heart cries to the wind. “I need support⁠—the old pampered ones don’t. Help me to speak in my own sure voice, out of my equal heart.⁠ ⁠… Turn to me.⁠ ⁠…” It was like making a third at a lovers’ meeting⁠—demanding attention which can only be impatient and cold when given.

The remark, “My dog can’t travel in a box,” spoken to Tatiana in the field one day, on the way to the stables, was quite a new remark, expressing a new point of view, new words spoken by a new Seryozha who brushed the sky with his upraised head and kicked the grass with large sure feet. “Your father says it is ridiculous” (a cold air blew on him, shrank his heart’s new stature a little for a second). “Yet sometimes, Tanya, you know, there are ridiculous things that can’t be made different⁠ ⁠… like” (he sought in his quite obstinate mind)⁠—“like a man not being able to go to his wedding because he’s spilt something on his only clean shirt. He can’t go in a dirty shirt. He hasn’t got a clean shirt. People may laugh, but there’s nothing to be done. Being ridiculous doesn’t make the shirt clean again. I cannot let my dog travel alone, shut up in a box.”

“Why, of course not!” agreed Tatiana, watching the dog take great arch leaps through the long grass. “A dog shouldn’t⁠—couldn’t⁠—be shut up in a box smaller than the size of a meadow. How would it run⁠—or be itself⁠—in a little box?”

“That’s what I mean,” said Seryozha, eagerly. “It isn’t as if my dog had been used to being a kennel dog or tied up. It’s never even worn a collar or seen a chain. You know, Tanya⁠—that dog runs. It’s so sure it may run⁠—it wouldn’t even know enough to distrust the box. It would run into the box wagging its tail⁠—and stop running⁠—stop being the dog it is.⁠ ⁠… It isn’t that I’m specially fond of the dog⁠—it’s nothing but a dog,” he disclaimed, eagerly, “but I’m bound, somehow, to let it be the dog it is. There’s something about it being such a running kind of dog⁠—I have to respect that.⁠ ⁠…” Seryozha sweated a little with the effort⁠—not only of making Tatiana understand, but of making himself understand what he meant.

“I know,” said Tatiana. “I know exactly what you mean. It would be even worse than⁠—catching that free lark, for instance, and shutting it in a box. The lark has to be free to be itself, too⁠—but the dog has to be free within reach of our hands to be itself.⁠ ⁠…”

“Hm!” said Seryozha, rather haughtily. He would have shot that lark without more than a second’s regret⁠—that short reluctant regret he always suffered when he saw the fading smile of an animal dead at his hands. It was certainly true that it would be much worse to stop the dog’s running than to stop the lark’s flying.

They both stood still in the grass and watched the lark. Tatiana’s perfect and instantaneous sight showed her the curious intermittence in the lark’s flight; it shot its wings abroad flashingly, like a bomb of feathers, then completely shut them against its sides, before spreading them again and throwing itself like a little stone into the air. In these wingless intervals, Tatiana could see the lark perched in the air, unsupported, as though sitting on an invisible nest of air⁠—then, as its momentum failed, it shot its wings asprawl again, to catch and toss up once more its little, smooth, confident body.

Seryozha, very much slower to receive messages from his senses, saw only a lark fluttering⁠—missed the daring grace with which it committed itself, unresisting, to the pull of earth and air. He wished⁠—but not very keenly⁠—that he had his gun.

“Come,” said Tatiana, suddenly. “We shall be late.” She had seen her father hurrying across the stable-yard.

“What for?” asked Seryozha, running beside her. “It’s not nearly dinnertime.”

“My mare⁠—Tovarka⁠—” gasped Tatiana.

In the yard, Tovarka the mare lay on her side in the throes of foal-birth. She had chosen to lie in the yard, though Pavel and the groom had spent an hour making the loose-box ready for the event. It is rather chilling how animals refuse to conform to man’s arrangements, or to take the hints given them by the works of our hands. Doors to come in at, railings to keep things out, steps to climb up by, tables to eat at⁠—a fig for them, say the birds and beasts. Sparrows ignore the doors and come in at the windows, splashing impertinent droppings on our tables; flies fly into our sacred eyes; kites, leaning from the sky, see our carefully leveled houses upside down and in all the wrong perspectives; magpies mistake the significance of our chimneys; mice hop in through our fences, not even paying them the compliment of defiance; cats jump our paths at right-angles, and spring up walls without the help of stairs, as though the gravel were wild water and the stairways cascades. Air and earth are the only roads for these creatures; they will not learn to read our carefully constructed signposts through the air. Any opening from air to air is a door to them. And so the earth was bed for Tovarka the mare; she was just a creature in pain, lying down on the earth.⁠ ⁠… To hell with man’s hygienically ventilated loose-boxes, and clean straw, and helpful implements.

“Please, Saggay Saggayitch, translate this to your father-in-law,” said Wilfred, who was beaming on the birth without admitting that it was an event at all, all animals being irrelevances to him. “I have thought of a compromise in the matter of the journey to Chi-tao-kou that should, I think, satisfy all parties.”

Nobody expressed any curiosity. The eyes of all the Russians were fixed upon the mare. She groaned and heaved her body. Headfirst, the foal began cautiously to emerge into the world, wrapped in a strange bluish veil. The veil parted coyly and showed the unexpectedly animated face of the foal⁠—the expression of a creature having an interesting adventure and determined to get through it with credit and dispatch. Seryozha’s dog, after an incredulous look during which all panting was suspended, gave an embarrassed bark and hurried uneasily away. Mare and foal pushed⁠—heaved⁠—writhed. The mare never once looked round; she seemed only interested in her pain. After a few minutes, the foal lay free, leaning against Pavel’s leg, amidst the iridescent and filmy ruins of its past. It lay balanced on its breastbone, its limp double-jointed legs falling upward.

“My idea is,” continued Wilfred, surprised and pleased to find that nobody was interrupting him (the interruption of a new life within twenty feet of him was no interruption at all), “that we should hire a Ford’s motorcar as far as Gensan, then take the steamboat to Seishin, then hire another Ford’s motorcar to the Manchurian border.⁠ ⁠…”

“Ah, papasha, show the baby to Tovarka,” cried Tatiana. “She doesn’t know what’s the matter with her. She thinks she’s simply dying of a stomachache.⁠ ⁠…”

Pavel, who was a much humbler, gentler, more silent man, when engaged in caring for horses, signed to the groom to help him to carry the little wet boneless rubber beast round its mother’s sprawling form to her face. It seemed as if Tatiana was right; the mare lifted her drooping head with a look, first of surprise, then of new life. “So this was what was the matter⁠—I’m beginning, not ending.⁠ ⁠…” With a little soft, falsetto laugh, the mare began to lick the foal all over, snuffling with delighted tenderness into every cranny of its body. “Oh, joy! oh, joy!” whispered Tatiana for her. As its mother caressed it, the foal began to be afflicted with strange senseless jerkings; the first hours of its life were evidently to be spent in passing from one indignity to another. No buffoon could have made more slavish efforts to gain a witless laugh than the foal seemed to make⁠—jerking⁠—humping⁠—hiccuping⁠—all its legs doubling and redoubling⁠—looping like a caterpillar. These jerks presently resolved themselves into more and more determined efforts to stand up, and, after a while, with Pavel’s clasped hands under its stomach, it did stand up, looking like someone completely drunk, yet solemnly hopeful of seeming sober enough to pass in a crowd. Its legs slid and warped in unnatural directions. Its tail was like a little wet wool mat with a lively mouse underneath it. Its hoofs seemed very badly-finished and shoddy, like wads of wet brown paper.

“From that point, Saggay Saggayitch,” Wilfred continued, “the distance to Chi-tao-kou would be negligible. We could hire a wagon for Mrs. Malinin’s use.”

Still Seryozha inexplicably delayed translation. He and Tatiana stood hand in hand, looking with entranced eyes at the foal. Their joy at seeing a new live thing, new eyes open on the air, new feet prepared to run about the earth⁠—was like a rendezvous for Seryozha and Tatiana. This joy was their meeting-place at last; to this trysting-point the compassionate, cold, complicated heart of Tatiana ran to meet the direct, greedy, and simple heart of Seryozha. Living was what things were, after all⁠—living⁠—and nothing else, really. In this these two contrary lovers agreed, sinking their contrariness; they agreed to let things live⁠—let things be. This being was the Unknown God, to whom both, obscurely, owed homage⁠—this exquisite inhumanity⁠—immorality⁠—impudence⁠—oblivion⁠—urgency⁠—this tremendous relevance called life. To the admission It Is, nothing is irrelevant except It Ought To Be. To Tatiana and Seryozha, thinking no thoughts but standing outside themselves watching a creature that had been still now learning to move, it seemed that they were entirely free and entirely together for the first time. No thought was relevant to their lives; they were nothing except alive⁠—borne far and strongly on that sea from the shore of which the silly callow foal had just embarked.

Wilfred decided to explain the matter himself to Pavel. He had picked up a dozen or so words of Russian, his imaginative ear naturally selecting the words whose Russian sound seemed to him appropriate to their English meaning. Cobaka, the word for dog, for instance, printed on his retina as S’barker, made him feel that a high reputation as a linguist was not immeasurably beyond his reach. Poyezd, a train, too, was encouraging⁠—it could be nothing else but a puffing thing.

“Listen⁠—vot compromise-ski,” he cried, addressing Pavel urgently across the prostrate form of the mare. “Nyet poyezd⁠—ufftermobile horosho. Ufftermobile, s’barker nichevo. Ufftermobile from Mi-san to Gensan. Then parry-hot,” (Parakhot was also obviously a steamer in his mind, which connected the name Parry with a coal merchant in London.) “Parry-hot s’barker nichevo. Parry-hot to Seishin. Then droshky. S’barker by this route completely nichevo. That’s my idea⁠—take it or leave it, as Londoners say. Ufftermobile horosho, ah?”

Pavel straightened his back. His face was very happy and kind and running with sweat. Horses were the only selfless delight he knew. His chestnut eyes were soft⁠—almost rapturous.

“Avtomobil horosho, ah?” his lips uttered vaguely in a benevolent, expressionless voice. After a moment, first the meaning and then the possibilities of Wilfred’s compromise-ski began to take shape in his mind. Intelligence seeped into his spellbound face. “Avtomobil⁠ ⁠… nu⁠ ⁠… da-da-da⁠ ⁠… horosho.⁠ ⁠…” On the word of approval he began to nod his head. The continued nodding of his head seemed to shake his natural complacent nature back into position, as a watch is shaken to start its ticking again. “Avtomobil⁠ ⁠… da-da-da⁠ ⁠… horosho⁠ ⁠…” He thought with pleasure that his daughter would appear to the neighbors to be scorning a mere train⁠—leaving home proudly in a car.

“Good idea, isn’t it? Ufftermobile horosho, ah?” Wilfred insisted, much pleased.

“Horosho⁠—horosho.”

“Horosho? Really horosho?”

“Horosho.” Wilfred clasped his hands together, congratulating himself. So like Russians, he thought, consenting to the most expensive, least practical, plan⁠—without even inquiring what the expense would be. And all for the sake of a smelly dog. Still, who was he, Wilfred, to complain? He would travel grandly. The Korean motor proprietor spoke some Chinese, and perhaps would consider a small commission⁠—but No⁠—a guardian angel he would remain to the end. He looked round for more applause from the bride and bridegroom. But they were no longer there.