III

Seryozha saw his mother coming home hugging a large bleating linen basket to her stomach.

Seryozha, born in an air too rarefied for most illusions, retained only one⁠—the illusion of his own dignity. He did not mind what strange, boisterous, misunderstood activities the outer Seryozha took part in, as long as the inner Seryozha could explain to himself these seeming pranks by some formula of secret though freakish dignity. One has seen a weighted wooden tumbling toy, knocked down on a flat surface, preserving its integrity and fulfilling its purpose by finding, in the end, its own odd balance regardless of the mockery of the watchers⁠—and only robbed of its birthright of eccentric equilibrium when the gods themselves fight against it and overset it on an unfairly tilted plane. So Seryozha, left to himself, could always account to himself for himself. But outside were parents, gods, insects, landscapes, animals, machines, and the elements⁠—traitors to young individual dignity⁠—all conspiring together unfairly to destroy the balance of valiant dignity.

To lack a camera or a wireless set, to be at home in a wooden Korean house with little squinting windows and a chronic smell, was bad enough, but to see a perspiring mother coming toward the home carrying a goat in a clothesbasket, in the sight of dozens of her less respectable Oriental neighbors, made Seryozha doubt whether he ever would attain to his rightful place in a world full of the rude laughter of inferiors. However, though he did not know it, Seryozha was very fond of his mother and, though she often shamed him, he very seldom punished her. He was much harsher to his father, and the same instinct in him that allowed his mother license to play the fool in her own wholehearted hen-like way, resented the poverty of his father’s vitality. He did not mind, for instance, the fact that his mother’s large blousy bun of hair was always coming down, so much as he minded the way his father cautiously combed four or five streaks of hair from one ear to the other.

“I’ve got something new here, Seryozha,” said Anna, putting down the basket to push a wisp of hair out of her eyes. She spilled the kid very gently out on to the living-room floor. For a moment the little creature did not remember that it knew how to stand. It crouched on the floor, its awkward pale legs crumpled under its body, its neck stretched, its pinched mouth open to utter an almost voiceless bleat.

Seryozha’s grievance against his mother was overlaid for the moment by his pleasure in the color of the kid. Things that were pale below and colored above always looked dramatic and beautiful to his eye, as though he had some secret arctic memory of light growing from a low seed of moon. Japanese orchards of young fruit-trees with trunks painted white; great trees illuminated by a bonfire till they looked like cardboard trees towering over footlights; young horses with milky pale fur on legs and stomach darkening to shining russet along the upper ribs and back; young girls with light stockings and skirts and colored jackets⁠—perhaps he felt a sort of kinship of pantomime youth with these footlight schemes of upslanting color.

He watched the kid and said nothing of his pleasure, however, and underneath his pleasure the feeling of soreness persisted. He knew obscurely that something in his mind was sore; he had forgotten what had wounded him; he did not know that the sore place was his vanity, bruised by his mother’s lack of self-respect. Vanity is so reluctant to identify itself⁠—yet it always is hurt vanity that gives that sense of live yet nameless tragedy.

Anna, having dipped a piece of clean rag in milk, was holding it to the kid’s mouth.

“Ah-yah-yah!” sang Seryozha, loudly, feeling he was achieving something by thwarting his mother. The kid, startled, recoiled from the offered drop.

“Be quiet, child!” cried Anna, jolted into anger by the check in her breathless experiment. Her forehead sweated a little and her hand trembled as she stroked once more the kid’s silly lips with the rag.

“Ah-yah-yah!” sang Seryozha, and shook the floor with a sudden bounce, to make sure.

Tears of anger came into Anna’s eyes as she knelt, ungainly. She was so very whole-souled in all that she did. “Curse you, boy⁠—” but she stopped, for the kid was nibbling with its lips upon the rag. Success was in sight.

“Ah-yah-yah!” yelled Seryozha, almost against his own inclination. He had got into a kind of groove of contradiction; for the moment it was entirely impossible for him to relent. Anna jumped to her feet, treading on her skirt and tearing it. She rushed at her son, swinging the linen basket by the handle, and dealt him a heavy blow which he caught partly on his defensive elbow and partly on the side of his nose. Through this tempest of bustle and anger he saw suddenly the rocklike fact that he was nearly nineteen years old and that this scene was inconsistent with his essential quiet manliness. His nose was scratched now, too.

“Oh, all right,” he said, speaking, on purpose, in a foolish voice as though he had a potato in his mouth, since he was somehow ashamed to regain his amiability too abruptly. “Get the little brute fed, then, and get rid of it out of the house. It smells like the devil.”

“What smells?” asked Old Sergei, feeling his way into the living-room from the yard.

The kid, swept aside and terrified by the bustle and noise, stood drooping on bent, trembling legs in a far corner, and gave a faint creaking bleat.

“A lamb?” cried Old Sergei. “Where did you get a lamb?”

“It is a kid,” said Anna, crouching once more on the floor and taking the kid under her arm again with a gentle impatience. “Give me that cup of milk, Seryozha. Mrs. Butters gave me a kid today, as well as the two yen, for sewing her baby’s dress quite wrongly.”

“Why should she give you a kid for making sewing mistakes?” asked Old Sergei. “You can’t sew; you never could sew.”

Of course, everything he was wearing was sewn by Anna, but he felt that no stitch of it did either him or her credit. Almost all the seams either had, or would soon, burst. Anna never repaired things. She was far cleverer at contriving than at stitching, and mending was a work she never had time for until actual nakedness was in sight. She would always prefer to invent a new cut of trouser, or a new method of fastening a shoe, to patching existing trousers or replacing old laces. She would rather have a new kid or puppy every night to feed, than cook the supper for the same old everyday husband and son.

“You don’t really earn a sen with your sewing,” said Old Sergei, “much less a kid. The missionaries only pay you out of charity, because they know I am blind and cannot support my wife and child as I used to.”

Seryozha made a rude noise.

“So why,” persisted Old Sergei⁠—“why should the missionaries be such fools as to give you a kid in addition to the two yen you don’t earn? I don’t believe they did give it to you.”

“Why, here is the kid. Feel it,” said Anna. “How do you suggest it got here? Did I steal it, do you think?”

“Heaven knows how it got here. Heaven knows what you will do next. How do I know you didn’t steal it? We are sunk so low that nothing would surprise me. Or perhaps Mrs. Butters was joking and did not mean to give it to you at all and you made a mistake, as usual, and walked off with the creature. Why should she give us a smelly kid? We don’t want a kid; we didn’t ask for a kid; and it will make a mess in the house, too. What a place for a kid⁠—in a gentleman’s living-room! And, of course no supper prepared, I am sure, for me and Seryozha.⁠ ⁠… Oh no! the stolen kid must be fed before your husband and son⁠—”

“Be silent, you horrid old man!” cried Anna, now full of anger and a diffident panic, because her sensitive conscience admitted the possibility that Mrs. Butters perhaps had not meant her offer of the kid to be accepted so literally and immediately. Anna heard, with her suddenly awakened mind’s ear, her own boisterous voice crying, “Oh, Mrs. Butters, most cheerfully I accept.⁠ ⁠…” Too soon⁠—too soon⁠—and now too late remembered. To remember the sound of her own voice was almost always, for poor Anna, to hear a sort of bugle call calling to retreat⁠—and retreat was always, alas, by then impossible. Every battle was always fought and lost by the time she heard that dreaded call.

“Take the creature,” she said to Seryozha in a broken voice. “Let it die if you like, or take it back to the mission.” She went out, loaded with sadness, to cook the supper.

Seryozha took the kid and the cup of milk out into the yard and sat crooning into its winking ear as he held it in his arms and dipped and redipped the rag. “Yoodle-doodle-doo⁠ ⁠… yoodle-doodle-dido,” he sang in a small falsetto voice which the kid seemed to like. The breast of Seryozha’s blouse was soon soaked in milk. The kid’s yellow cynical eyes, slotted with vertical irises, were fixed on him as though it were trying to persuade itself that this was some eccentric relation of its late mother’s.

Old Sergei sat alone in the living-room, his trembling veined old hands clasping and unclasping limply between his knees. Anna came to the door, mixing some egg and flour in a bowl, and said: “You horrid old man⁠ ⁠… you wearisome old man⁠ ⁠… running about honoring strangers and then coming home to break my heart. That kid was given to me⁠—it was.⁠ ⁠…”

“God knows whether it was or not,” said Old Sergei, but under his breath, thus satisfying his honor as a Husband with a Righteous Grievance without speaking loud enough to provoke the violence of his wife. Anna sighed petulantly and noisily and returned to the stove. Old Sergei sat drooping, opening and shutting his blind eyes to remind himself that he could not see. He laid his hand on his throbbing throat, for he craved to feel life always under his hand in order to titillate his fancy about death. He swallowed; his Adam’s apple moved under his hand, and his vague thoughts floated round and round the strangeness of life and death.

He was old, he thought; he was not loved. He loved no one. He felt the breath climbing foolishly up and down the unsteady shaft that was his body, like an imprisoned bird never losing hope of escape. Some day the prisoner would find the loophole and fly from his lips. The sooner the better, thought Old Sergei⁠—or rather he thought that he thought so; life was a curse without serenity. Who could be serene by Anna’s side? He felt as homesick for serenity as though he had once enjoyed it. He believed he had left it behind him in old lost Russia. He believed he would find it again in heaven, which was the only province of lost Russia left to him to visit now.

“To die⁠—to die⁠—to die⁠ ⁠…” whispered Old Sergei, enjoying the feeling of tears brimming over the quivering skin of his eye-sockets. He stroked and stroked his too living throat; in his sightless eyes he saw the sad picture of his lovelessness. Clasping his hands together, he laid this sad picture before his God, hoping to soften God’s heart by a prostrate-spirited humility. “I have sinned, O God,” he thought, for his vanity felt defiled by Anna’s reproaches. “I have sinned, I am reproached, so let me die. I am cursed; I am found out⁠ ⁠… all life is too difficult for me, for I belong to a cursed race⁠ ⁠… wretched Russia⁠—exiled and despoiled⁠—a dying race⁠—a reproach to all the nations of the earth among whom we are dispersed.⁠ ⁠… Here am I, a wretched sinner, a reproached sinner, member of a wretched and reproached race. O God, let me die. It’s the only way to make people sorry for me instead of angry with me.⁠ ⁠…” He thought of oblivion as a revenge; death, not penitence, seemed to him the apposite answer to a justified reproach; he had no courage for penitence. He would refuse to be anything more responsible than a pitiful memory in Anna’s mind, and in God’s. “Let my spirit be taken from me⁠ ⁠… let me be dissolved and become earth.⁠ ⁠… Let me go into the everlasting place,” he implored of his God, as a man faced by the irritation of shaving on a cold morning almost decides to go back to bed and sleep the day out.

He was interrupted in this limp ecstasy by hearing Seryozha’s peaceful “Yoodle-doodle-doo,” outside in the yard. He had heard it for some time, but it had not come to the forefront of his attention till now, suddenly, in a pause in Anna’s kitchen clatter.

“Seryozha,” called Old Sergei, “bring me that kid.”

Seryozha, whistling very softly between his teeth, brought the kid, more than half asleep, huddled in a length of sacking, and put it on the floor between his father’s feet. Old Sergei’s hands⁠—tense, as though they expected to find something new⁠—stroked the kid’s hard little brow, the thin ridge of its neck, the harsh hair on its narrow shoulders, the heaving bulging ribs, the upturned hoofs tipping the awkwardly kneeling legs.⁠ ⁠… Old Sergei’s fingers ran up and down the sleepy little animal’s backbone, as though it were an ecstatic instrument.

“Seryozha,” said Old Sergei, turning his face down toward the kid as though he could see it, “if I should die⁠ ⁠…”

Emotion checked his speech, and so long was the pause that Seryozha, who was tapping with his foot the already flat corpse of a cockroach in cold abstraction, as though it deserved to die a hundred deaths, was obliged to say, “Oh, nonsense, papa! There’s no reason why you should die⁠ ⁠…”

“There is every reason,” said Old Sergei, feeling a little baffled as Seryozha began again whistling, almost in a whisper, through his teeth⁠—an unsuitable obbligato to a talk on death. “No one values my presence here⁠—still less do I value it myself. I am a weariness to those around me and to myself.⁠ ⁠…”

“You don’t really think that, papa,” said Seryozha. His father, with some surprise, took this as an affectionate filial disclaimer of his proposition. Really Seryozha meant his remark quite literally. He knew that his father did not mean his statement that the necessity for him to remain in the world was now at an end. “Nobody believes that,” thought Seryozha, “however much they may say so. Papa’s world wouldn’t be there if he weren’t there. My world wouldn’t if I weren’t. This cockroach’s isn’t, now it’s dead. So none of us really thinks our world can do without us. I’m sure it had never before occurred to this cockroach that its world could do without it⁠—that anybody could wish it dead. Its vanity was all comfortable inside itself⁠—it felt valuable. When it saw my foot coming, it thought⁠—‘an unnatural accident is happening to a noble and unreplaceable cockroach⁠—me!’ That’s what papa thinks.” Seryozha scanned his father’s rather tiresome face, his leaking eyes, nose, mouth, dispassionately. “Poor old ass,” thought Seryozha. “His vanity’s a bit uncomfortable, inside him⁠ ⁠… hungry, perhaps.⁠ ⁠…”

“Just now I have been praying to die,” said Old Sergei. (“Pretty safe,” thought his son, arrogantly, “as experience must have shown him. Funny how old people don’t learn by experience. Only we young people do that.”)

“⁠—and as I prayed I remembered how penniless and friendless you and your mother would be were I to leave you. The shop needs a business head, and if I were not here to talk things over with your cousin Andryusha, God knows what would happen. You and your mother do not realize the value of a business head quietly yet actively in the background⁠—an asset quite as necessary to a family’s prosperity, I assure you, as all this cadging of goats and hacking of logs. However, these things are not appreciated until one is dead, and, as I told you, I have been praying for death.”

In order to prove to his wife and son the value of a business head, he had prayed to have it chopped off. Old Sergei had a different vanity every day. Sometimes he changed twice or thrice a day. When he got up in the morning, Anna and Seryozha usually gleaned⁠—though too often in a rebellious spirit⁠—what fancy aspect of his nature he was displaying for their admiration for the next few hours. Since four o’clock today he had been, as Seryozha saw, a Business Man, afflicted with blindness, to be sure, but quietly effective nevertheless.

“And as I prayed⁠—since even in meditation and worship my business sense is awake⁠—I remembered that two hundred rubles I left with Gavril Ilitch Isaev at Seoul, to invest in his hotel, many years ago, at a time when I feared for the safety of Chinese banks and decided that Seoul was safer. He banked the money in his own name, but I have the receipt. I wrote it and he signed it. I think it is in that volume of Pushkin’s poems that props up the short leg of our bed. You see what it is, Seryozha, to have an orderly business mind. You would probably never have remembered that two hundred dollars.”

“I couldn’t have remembered it, since I never heard of it before,” said Seryozha. “And I don’t know now whether you mean dollars or rubles. You say both.”

“I mean neither,” said Old Sergei. “Really, Seryozha, you are not using your mind. What is the currency of Korea? Yen, of course. Should I be likely to have my savings put away in a bank in a currency not native to the country in which the bank does business? Yours is the kind of question which shows me how ill able to look after your mother you would be were I to leave you. You should certainly cultivate a business sense. Now my idea is that you should go on foot over the mountains to Seoul and fetch that money from Gavril Ilitch.”

“Why don’t you write and ask him to send it?”

“I did, of course, write to him, some time ago, in the summer of 1924, I think it was. Isaev did not answer. He is by no means a business man and I should say hardly knows how to put pen to paper except just to sign his name. He is a peasant⁠—was my brother’s gardener before the revolution, in Vladivostok. A devoted creature, but evidently deficient in business methods. Since I wrote to him my mind has been occupied with other matters and I only thought of the money just now, when praying to die. But, having once thought of it, I have no difficulty at all in recollecting every detail of the transaction, and in deciding on the best and most businesslike solution of the problem⁠—which is that you should walk to Seoul and⁠—”

“Why in the world did you give your two hundred yen to a peasant who could neither read nor write? That wasn’t very businesslike, it seems to me.”

“Seryozha, you are not using your mind. Surely you cannot expect me to explain all my business dealings to a raw lad like you, without financial experience of any kind. As a matter of fact, it was the best thing to do; I was in Seoul buying stock for the shop, and found that, since the goods I expected could not be delivered, I had two hundred yen too much⁠—more than was safe to carry across the robber-infested Manchurian border. Isaev had had a good position as coachman to the Japanese bank-manager and was thinking of starting a hotel. His savings were banked in the Chosen Bank. Naturally I gave him my savings, too, to invest with his own until I should ask for them. I dare say the poor fellow is wondering every day why I do not return to claim my money.”

“After ten years of wondering every day I should have thought he might have got a friend who could write to try and get in touch with you,” said Seryozha, sulkily, but his mind was already, as it were, packing its wits for the journey; his toes were already throbbing with the starting fever. Every day in his unpromising life he woke up feeling “perhaps something great will happen today,” and here was something great⁠—a lonely, dignified journey, without any father and mother to be ashamed of at every turn.

Old Sergei straightened his back, and in doing so awoke the kid, which, after innocently making a little mess on the floor, tottered on unsteady legs toward Seryozha, who, it seemed to the kid, gave forth an inviting smell of milk and mother. Old Sergei did not notice the departure of his toy, he was so much interested in the deathbed advice he was determined to give his son before his fount of tears and high principles should be dried up by the arid discomforts of an actual deathbed.

“I have a feeling,” he said, his words dipping under his shaking upper lip like chickens escaping under a rabbit-wire fence, “I have a feeling that this is the last talk we shall have together, Seryozha.⁠ ⁠… If, when you return, I should be already no more, I entreat you, my boy, to be good to your mother. Remember the dangers she went through for your sake in bearing you⁠—”

“That wasn’t for my sake, papa⁠—she didn’t know me then⁠—it was for her pleasure and yours that she bore me,” said Seryozha.

“Let her lie by my side in the grave,” said Old Sergei, trying to ignore the possibility of an interval of healthy widowhood for poor Anna, “as she has lain so many nights by my side in the big bed.”

“Oh, don’t worry, papa,” said Seryozha. “You’ll both of you live till ninety, I’m sure.” And he began to whistle softly through his teeth again.

Tears squeezed between Old Sergei’s eyelids as he half-realized his impotence in imposing his posthumous pathos on the living. How could he force his wife and son to regret him all their lives? There was no way. There was no love or loyalty in the world.

“Supper is ready,” said Anna, and stood in the doorway, suddenly thinking of something else, her eyes fixed on a fly on the wall. She was trying to think what had irritated and hurt her just before she began cooking the fish pie. Somehow she craved to identify that scar on her temper. But she could not trace any thought to its source because the tiresome wilderness of her old husband’s presence kept on blossoming into silly words that distracted her attention. To stop him talking she said again, “Supper is ready.” But Old Sergei went on talking. Anna went on thinking. Seryozha went on whistling. Anna caught words.

“… and giving to those who are poorer than yourself. God remembers it even if the ungrateful forget it. He will repay.⁠ ⁠…”

“An investment only⁠—not a gift,” thought Anna, and stood in abstraction, scratching her head, till the next words intruded:

“… sleeping with women, Seryozha. Remember your Russian blood is a pure sacred inheritance⁠ ⁠… an insult to the land of your fathers to mix your blood with⁠ ⁠…”

“For poor Seryozha,” thought Anna, “Russia is unluckily becoming nothing but that⁠—the land of his fathers⁠—‘father’⁠—‘Russia’⁠—boring peevish words. And yet the high Russian fields⁠ ⁠…”

“Supper is ready,” she said aloud. Seryozha, goaded by his empty stomach, got up so abruptly that he knocked his chair over. But still Old Sergei went on talking⁠—commanding them to stay, with his weak, blind, upraised face.

“… worth your while to earn, as I have earned, the reputation of a sound man⁠—a man with a stake in the community⁠—one who pays what he owes, no more, no less.⁠ ⁠…”

Anna’s thought ran off to the little shop on the other side of the matchwood partition she leaned against⁠—a place of business closed since the Chinese soldiers’ raid, but still containing a tall pile of unwanted tins of Milkex, two dozen fancy diaries, four or five dozen celluloid hand mirrors in pastel shades, a case of comic can-openers in the form of bulldogs, a hundred or so silk-padded coat-hangers, and a few other temptations that could not even tempt thieves. These goods, Anna felt, shone in an idealized form in her old husband’s imagination, and gave him the right, in his own eyes, to claim a stake in the community.

“… and never was drunk in my life, Seryozha,” she heard. It was true, she knew, the taste of alcohol had always made him feel sick. “Some young men think that manliness is found in drunkenness and coarseness and fornication, but there is a truer manliness⁠—”

“For God’s sake!” said Anna. “Supper is ready, I tell you.” As Old Sergei’s blind face turned to her, Anna remembered what it was that had offended her: he had suggested, by accident, what was probably true, that the offer of the kid had been accepted more precipitately than Mrs. Butters had intended. “Do you want to starve yourself as well as talk yourself hoarse, you silly old man?” she said, vehemently.

Old Sergei was conscious of an indecorous anticlimax to a Dying Man’s Advice to His Son. “My son is going on a journey and I am giving him a few parting words of advice, since I am an old man and by the time he comes back I may have been called away on the long⁠—”

“What journey do you mean?”

Old Sergei felt that her horrified question gave him an opportunity for tragic drama such as he seldom wrested from his family. “What journey? Why, death, Anna.”

“No. I mean what journey is Seryozha taking, idiot?” said Anna, stamping irritably with both feet.

“I’m going to Seoul,” said Seryozha, happily, “to fetch some money that papa forgot⁠—”

“Forgot, Seryozha!” exclaimed his father. “It is you that forget⁠—”

“But Seoul is four days’ journey by train and road even when you get to the train,” said Anna. “And on foot.⁠ ⁠… The police in Korea are most dangerous to poor Russians.⁠ ⁠… The bandits on the border⁠—”

“Oh, that’s all quite easy,” said Seryozha. “Three weeks’ walking will do it. And I’d like to see the Japanese policeman or the Chinese bandit that⁠—”

“You will see neither,” said Anna. “You will take no such journey. The idea!⁠ ⁠… Only a couple of imbeciles would have such an idea. Dancing off alone into nowhere. What a notion⁠—and you a mere child still! Let us hear no more of it. Come, must I tell you for the hundredth time that supper is ready? For God’s sake, old man, are you glued to your chair?”