VI

Seryozha and Wilfred Chew began their journey in a happy sunlight swimming with swallows. Neither Seryozha nor Wilfred saw the birds. And indeed, birds are transparent, I think, like the safe anonymous shapes of sheep on hillsides or policemen at city crossings; these things are part of fitness; they are so native to the air that they become glass to the attention. An eagle is different, of course; no one ever looks through an eagle; a piece of the sky is reserved for him, and he moves into his place as a king moves to his throne, with every eye upon him.

“I think it is three meters from this to that,” said Seryozha, becoming for a moment an eagle, spreading his arms to an imperial stretch and pointing his beak to the sun. Unfortunately, his feet unexpectedly remained on earth and tripped over a stone.

“Three meters is nothing for an eagle,” said Wilfred, who was thinking on rather a large scale today. He was feeling exuberant because Anna had listened to him so gladly. Poor Wilfred, everywhere a foreigner with too much to say, living either with people who could not understand his speech or with people who did not want to, might be said to be the one lonely resident of a spiritual city of Babel. Not only was his world afflicted with a hopeless confusion of tongues, but also, the towers of elaborate talk he built, though always designed to reach heaven, only attained a level high enough to give him a depressing view of his audience scattering abroad beyond recall. But Anna had shown herself a sort of honorary compatriot in his lonely city; her understanding, linguistic and spiritual, had been perfect. She had spread herself like a desert, as it were, thirsty for the shadow of his high place. From time to time, to be sure, she had blossomed forth with some trivial and inadequate prattle about her own womanish conclusions and experiences; nevertheless, the atmosphere, on the whole, had been unusually right. Wilfred, that optimistic architect of battlemented follies, had been for once free of the feeling of straining to get his toppling themes buttressed up to some kind of completion in the presence of strangers either wholly untutored or else prepared for flight.

Wilfred and Seryozha felt as if they were walking backward for a moment as they compared their progress with the sweeping speed of the eagle’s shadow across the valley. But they marched stoutly on. The river, broad, polished and set in a pale bed thinly shaded with pink-twigged osiers, ran beside them through the clear light. The whole broad valley was so clearly lighted by the white sun that every stone, tree, and village on the yellow-green mountains stood out with the flat significance of such details in a good nineteenth-century chromo-lithograph.

The colors of the Koreans’ clothes were like bright pins all over the valley, catching at⁠—almost scratching at⁠—the indifferent sight. Koreans in Kanto are worn by custom to the same fine transparency as birds and other lovely and common furnishings of the scene; they are to the eye what the gentle ticking of a clock is to the ear. Yet today, since it was a Korean holiday, the Korean wanderers were so gayly dressed as to catch even an accustomed eye. Favorite colors were arsenic green, poison pink, apple green, and a cheap crude blue⁠—all very unflower-like colors, yet they sowed the roads and fields and paths with an effect of flowers. The little Korean girls wore wide, semitransparent, gaudy skirts hung from the shoulders by embroidered braces⁠—and they wore nothing else. The little boys wore red-flowered silk Eton jackets ending abruptly at the fifth rib⁠—and they wore nothing else. Décolleté for girls down to the waist⁠—dejambé for boys up to the navel. In either case, if the purpose of clothes is to conceal, the purpose was most inadequately fulfilled; if the purpose is to decorate, decorated indeed the wearers were.

The distant paths, plaiting, splitting, and raveling like threads on the hillsides, invited the eye. Some paths look as if they lead away and never come back, but these paths, spotted with gay holidaymakers, seemed to lead in⁠—to lead home⁠—or, at least, to lead out into the flowery sunlight under promise of leading home again soon⁠—home to nights of good food, good digestion, good sleep, and good wives. Comfortable little domestic paths, in spite of their dancing informality.

Round every Korean grave⁠—each a mere bunker on a grass slope⁠—a group of merry descendants chatted, laughed, and ate. It must be delightful for the dead to know that the grassy lumps beneath which their bones lie are rendezvous for joking, feasting friends⁠—are just extensions of the scenes of their living hospitality, now made immortal like their souls. It must be good for the lonely dead to know that their names will never be a wet blanket on laughter and horseplay, and that once a year they may count on being hosts and householders once more.

“These heathens,” said Wilfred Chew, “have no proper respect for the dead. They don’t appreciate the awful position of a dead man after a life of heathenism and sin.”

Seryozha thought a little. It always irritated him to hear any criticism of what was physically natural. “Let them be, let them be,” he wanted to say. “Let them be⁠—why⁠—simply because they are.” But he could not remember any English words that would express this feeling. “Nyet sin,” he said, vaguely, waving his hand vaguely toward the sinner-speckled hills.

“You mean,” said Wilfred, who always felt it was his business to explain to people what they meant, “that the heathen cannot help their dreadful darkened condition, if they have not been given any opportunity to see the light. But, Mr. Malinin, every heathen now, I believe, has heard the message of Christianity. Schools like the Wesleyan Academy at Yueh-lai-chou⁠—though not all, perhaps, quite so excellent⁠—are everywhere. Devoted teachers of the Word travel upon bicycles, donkeys, Ford’s motorcars, trains, junks, steamboats, and Peking carts in all directions among the heathen⁠—though I admit that men of such great saintlike influence as Reverend Mr. Oswald Fawcett are rare. Look at my own case. At the age of thirteen I am called to my father’s side⁠—my father was a very wise man, an official in the Sanitary Department of Canton, spending the retirement of his well-earned old age at Yueh-lai-chou. ‘English,’ says my father, ‘is the business language of China. Christianity is a part of English. You shall learn English at the Wesleyan Academy and so be fitted for a life full of advantages. Christians have many advantages in this life.’ Reverend Mr. Oswald Fawcett, when I told him this, laughed his usual merry, hearty laugh and said, ‘Not so many as in the life hereafter.’ Be that as it may, look at the result of my father’s wise Christian ruling. Instead of being a hopeless sinner and perhaps a mere merchant or clerk in Canton, I am taught the Holy Bible by a man like the Reverend Fawcett, as well as clean morals, manliness, mathematics and a thorough grounding in English history and literature, with special attention to the plays of William Shakespeare. By this preparation and moral grounding I am enabled to pass the London Matriculation (‘Matric’ we London scholars say), and to become a student in a London Inn of Court. I am proposed by the well-known bencher, Mr. Winkworth, K. C., and seconded by his renowned colleague, Mr. Weston-North. I eat my dinners⁠—”

“You eat some dinner?” asked Seryozha, suddenly drawing a pirozhok out of his pocket and sitting down to eat it. “Dinner⁠ ⁠… a most good plan.”

A look of intense spiritual hunger came over Wilfred Chew’s face and he swallowed once or twice, as if calling his useless words back into his throat from the unheeding air. Anna had made a packet of rice-filled pirozhki for him and he stood eating, swinging his weight from one foot to the other, looking hungrily from Seryozha’s face to the hills and back again. Yet even utterance uncomprehended was a relief to him, though it was rather like playing squash racquets against oneself. After a moment, therefore, Wilfred began again to utter, with his mouth full, on a rather lower note than before, as he watched Seryozha’s face wistfully for some possible freak of understanding.

“Yes, I eat my dinners. Twice I eat with three other men, namely, Williams, Banks, and Feathers. Feathers invites me⁠—he is very pressing. He says: ‘You must join our mess, Mr. Chew, I will not take no for an answer.’ So of course I bow pleasantly and accept the politeness. When I sit down among them, they say, ‘You do not drink wine, Mr. Chew?’ I say, ‘No, gentlemen, I have been brought up by Reverend Mr. Oswald Fawcett to consider alcohol as a moral danger.’ Feathers, who was not really, I think, a moral man, says, ‘Good egg! (this is a London expression of joy). That’s just as I thought,’ he says; ‘there’ll be all the more moral danger for us.’ Of course he was merely joking. Nevertheless, they did not invite me to take wine again, showing that my words made an impression of moral determination on them. Indeed, Mr. Banks once said to me, ‘It has meant a good deal to us today, Mr. Chew, to have a teetotaller in our mess.’ ”

Seryozha was familiar with the English word “moral” by now, for he had known Mr. Chew three days.

“It is pity you have not seeing our singing girls of Chi-tao-kou,” he said, happily, feeling that he was at last in the swim of this flood of information. “Some are not too bad. The little Matvievna⁠—her skin is most white. Before, when I was young, I thinked, I shall marry her, but after, I find yist only singing girl. A most merry girl.”

“Christians should avoid such women,” said Wilfred Chew, seriously. “They are a moral danger. If you find self-control difficult, Mr. Malinin, you should pray⁠—or perhaps marry.”

“Oi! marry⁠ ⁠…” said Seryozha, spurting out crumbs of pirozhki as he laughed. “I have money nyet. I give all to my mamma.”

His heart, however, warmed to Wilfred in response to this tribute to his maturity. Certainly, he thought, once a man is safely away from his home, the world takes him for the man he is.

“One could marry with a certain amount of worldly wisdom and still remain a Christian,” said Wilfred Chew. “For instance, there is a very delightful young lady of your own race⁠—Miss Ostapenko⁠—who lives at Mi-san, near Seoul. Sir Theo Mustard and myself, when motoring from Seoul on an expedition, asked at Miss Ostapenko’s father’s home for some water for the radiator, and were invited to stay to tea.”

“Ostapenko⁠ ⁠… ? How is her father called?”

“She is Miss Tatiana Ostapenko. Her father is called Pavel Ostapenko, Esquire.”

“Tscht! Tatiana Pavlovna. She marries nobody. Alexander Petrovitch Weber speaked about her. She is many times betrothed; she is many times saying this, saying that; she is not good for mans. Alexander Petrovitch say she has betrothed seven times⁠—he say that Tatiana is married, perhaps, to a devil. Devil is inside her. He speak so. He speak, yist better to be dead nor to be betrothed to Tatiana Pavlovna.”

“Oh, that is ridiculous! I noticed a sort of shyness about her, but who knows what is in the heart of a pure young girl? She is certainly extremely pure. And perhaps of an icelike nature. Yet she is considered beautiful. As a Chinese I should not think her beautiful, but as a Londoner, I can see that she is a little like the late Queen Alexandra (widow of the late King Edward Seventh) in features. Also, Mr. Malinin, she will have a fortune. It is good for a Christian to make friends a little with the mammon of unrighteousness, though not, of course, to the point of serving two masters.”

“It is more good not to be dead,” said Seryozha. “I like better to be alife with Sonia Matvievna nor to be dead with Tatiana Pavlovna. I have speak much with Alexander Petrovitch Weber these last days in Chi-tao-kou. He speak like this: Tatiana Pavlovna not good. She is like dead. With her a man must not be alife. She make a man dead, like a devil.’ Alexander Petrovitch speak also: ‘She is finish of me. She has taken away my life.’ He was nice chap, too. I hope he will soon be alife again. I speak to him about Sonia Matvievna. He speak, ‘So? She is easy to love? So?’ ”

Seryozha mimicked young Weber’s long-drawn-out “So‑o‑o‑o?” with a question sound at the end of it. “I speak: ‘Indeed yes, she is most easy indeed. More better nor a devil.’ And so I think. My papa speak: ‘I think this girl Tatiana Ostapenko is perhaps child of Pavel Nicholaievitch Ostapenko, the cousin of my papa’s uncle’s wife. Pavel Nicholaievitch always has been bad boy⁠—his child is perhaps bad also,’ my papa speak. ‘Seryozha, do not be making any visitings to such bad people,’ my papa speak. I am the one son of my papa and my mamma⁠—I wish not to be maked dead by devils. I do not love devils.”

“There are cures for devils,” said Wilfred Chew, thoughtfully. As he spoke, a vague picture of banners and smells disinfecting devil-haunted Chinese houses floated before his eyes. Almost immediately this picture was replaced by one of himself bringing back a gloriously enriched Seryozha to the threadbare, anxious little house in Chi-tao-kou. A Seryozha married to a beautiful heiress. Old Sergei would surely forgive disobedience that led to such a result. And what about the agreement? Ten sen on every yen over and above two hundred yen, he thought⁠—and wished he had it in writing. Then he thought, Russians pay matchmakers, they say, very much as Chinese do; would not old Ostapenko be prepared to make it worth a man’s while to find a good husband for a girl with seven failures behind her?

Wilfred Chew was quite without guile. His Christian upbringing had really planted a kind of charity to all men in his naturally affectionate heart. It was part of his vanity to be good⁠—not only to seem good. He would most certainly have been very sorry to disappoint the Almighty in His (doubtless) high expectations of Wilfred Chew. Still, it was also part of his vanity to be prosperous⁠—and surely this was also part of the Almighty’s plan for him. For instance, Wilfred’s genuine love and reverence for the Reverend Oswald Fawcett had not prevented him from making a good profit, on commission, out of Mr. Fawcett’s passion for buying trashy brass “curios” from the shopkeepers of Yueh-lai-chou. Why should it, indeed? There is so often a point in a Chinese deal at which the seller sells for a little more than he had hoped and the buyer buys for a little less. A fraction of that little less⁠—that little more⁠—is the natural prerogative of the mutual friend, be he Christian or heathen. This was so much a commonplace in Wilfred’s mind that he had never even dreamed of considering himself a less disinterested disciple of his reverend idol for making pocket money out of the latter’s ignorance of the value and quality of brass. So many worshipers have profited out of the weakness of idols, after all. But of course Wilfred did not think of it in this way. He simply wanted to be not only a good Christian, but also a good business man.

He was already quite fond of Seryozha. After all, the boy was of conveniently silent habit, and even, occasionally, seemed impressed by what was said to him. Wilfred was by now for the most part resigned to not expecting much more of an obtuse world than this. He was like the secretary of an impoverished charitable society⁠—satisfied if he got one ambiguous acknowledgment to a score of appeals.

The pirozhki were finished. The teeth of the travelers being now at rest, their feet could plod on. Wilfred wisely said no more about the heiress of Mi-san, for the present. His English law experience had taught him that there were limits to the persuasive powers of the voice, and that explanation was sometimes better dumb. Wilfred spent the afternoon trying to give his companion a rough summary of Roman law, Constitutional law, Criminal law, and Real Property and Conveyancy. He was just passing on to the material of the final examination⁠—Common law, Evidence and Procedure, and Equity, to the tune of a low song from Seryozha⁠—when they realised that Pa-tao-kou lay below them⁠—the village in which they intended to spend the night. They had just climbed over a shoulder of cliff that overhung the river. The roofs of the Korean village lay like a shuffle of brown leaves beside the river. The sandbanks in the broad river looked almost the color of violets in the late night⁠—all the subdued color of the valley, indeed, was overlaid with this smoky violet glaze. The early preparations for sunset were nobly ungorgeous. The sky was a striped bursting confusion of steel and silver⁠—gleaming silver spilled down from a low cloud-masked sun in concentrated pools on far gorges. The most brilliant concentration of all was hidden by a steep broken crag a dozen miles away, so that the crag was backed by a diamond glow, though its topmost rocks were brushed by clouds. The glow behind it was like the radiance by which one might know a holy city⁠—or like the mist of white spray that rises from the unseen deep pool that receives a waterfall.

Seryozha was very hot and looked the hotter for the forensic coolness of his Chinese friend. Sweat patched Seryozha’s brown smocked blouse, his yellow hair was lank and damp, the sockets of his eyes were polished with sweat like well-greased ball-bearings. Yet he led his companion at a cheerful run down the dusty zigzag that sloped to river and village level. From the bottom of the hill the track into the village ran between the river and a narrow deep-set irrigation ditch. Along the track a bullock cart plodded to meet the travelers. The cart’s wheels splayed out like knock-kneed legs; there was no room even for the cart’s own stunted shadow between the wheel and the ditch. Slow floating leaves and sticks in the ditch met and swam through the cart’s shadow, as ships might meet a storm cloud. The Korean driver of the cart was asleep in the bottom of the shovel-shaped, woven-withy basket that formed the body of the vehicle. Wilfred Chew, accustomed to the implacable demands of traffic in cities, prepared to jump the ditch on to a dike that bordered a rice-field. There seemed to be no other alternative. But Seryozha had no respect for wheels or hoofs as opposed to the pedestrian’s rights; he was also still under the way of his rush downhill. He flapped his arms like a kite and with a loud “Boo-boo!” threw himself toward the bullock. His dog joined in the charge with a supporting shout of “Boo!” The astonished bullock, without altering its sullen and meditative expression, completely lost its head. After curtsying wildly right, left, and right again, it swerved, sprawling, aside and jumped into the river, choosing, it seemed, dishonor rather than death. The jolt of the wheels, whisking over the humped bank of the road, detached the basket body of the cart from its chassis. The driver, still asleep, remained curled up in the basket on the water’s brink, like the infant Moses ready for a rather improbable Pharaoh’s daughter, while the bullock, dragging only a wooden skeleton on wheels, ploughed up and down in the shallows. Its world had come to an end. The string in its nose was loose; there was no cruel safe god to tell it what to do. It shrugged the yoke from its shoulders and, now naked and unattached, swam hysterically out into deep water.

Seryozha, doubled up on the road, squealed and cracked with laughter. His dog, always glad of a chance to show itself amphibious, pursued the enemy into the water, shrieking with delight. A crowd of Korean and Chinese men and boys was instantly present, laughing, arguing, and wailing in vigorous tenor voices. “Eck-eck-eck!” they cried invitingly to the bullock, but the harassed beast, trying to escape the dog, swam outward, swam inward, and was caught by a strong current and carried downstream. It would have given one of its horns, now, to find firm ground under its feet and a firm burden behind its tail, but it did not know how. Staring eyes upcast, nose wide open, curving about foolishly in the current, it swam right and left, right and left, on the strong dragging current. All the villagers ran downstream after it. Only the driver remained, asleep in the basket. Seryozha stood over him, laughing still. His dog, rashly refusing to relinquish the chase, was now helpless, too, being snatched downriver like a hooked fish. Seryozha went on laughing; his dog was expected to look after itself, though by now it looked a mere flea on the great pale body of the river.

Wilfred Chew stared scornfully down at the sleeping Korean. “Ai!” shouted Wilfred in the man’s ear. “Ai⁠—ai⁠—ai!” He bowed himself down, almost pressing his nose to the small black horsehair top-hat of the sleeper and screamed “Ai!” It was alien to Wilfred’s Chinese instincts to slap or shake the man. But Seryozha knocked the poor fellow’s little hat off. This effected a slight movement of the eyelids of the carter. Communication was now held up, as usual, by the lack of a common language. But, gallant as ever, Wilfred wrote in large Chinese characters on a page in his notebook “Bullock⁠—Floats⁠—Away.” This composition was flaunted before the twitching eyelids of the semiconscious bereaved man.

Opposite the village, the bullock and the dog ran aground on the same sandbank. “Eck-eck-eck!” yawped the watchers in honeyed voices. Only a side strand of the river divided the sandbank from the mainland. The water flowed gently here, and both the marooned animals could have negotiated it easily. But the struggle and strangle of their arrival had frightened both; the bullock had too little imagination and the dog too much, to allow them to contemplate a new aquatic venture for the present. The bullock, still feebly shaking its horns at the silver emptiness round it, stood drooping, puffing, blowing its nose, splaying it legs, firmly rooted on all that seemed left of its old, obscurely known, obscurely trusted world. The dog, sobered and wet, squatted, panting, on the furthest possible promontory of the sandbank from the bullock. It was sick of bullocks. Obviously it was thinking, “Lord! what a companion to be marooned with on a desert island!”

“Come,” said Seryozha, after whistling indifferently to his dog and being interrupted by a new giggle⁠—though his cheeks felt quite strained with giggling already. “Vot hotel? Let us enter.”

As they passed the crowd of men, women, and children on the shore⁠—now some forty strong⁠—all shouting, “Eck-eck-eck!” the bullock on the sandbank suddenly decided to settle down, a bovine imperialist claiming kingship over a newfound land, with only one subject⁠—and that one a rebel. The bullock knelt down clumsily on its forelegs first, and remained for a few puzzled, uncomfortable seconds with its behind tilted up, feeling densely that something still remained undone. Then it remembered its hindlegs, and folded them awkwardly. It sat like a carpet bag on its wet bald island, looking through its thick eyes across the water at the crowd of yelping gods. The dog ran to and fro on the bank, wagging its tail winningly at the river, as if hoping to persuade the obliging stream to part its waters and leave a dry crossing for a poor dog’s exhausted feet.

Seryozha and Wilfred entered the inn and threw their bundles on the kang. The proprietor, with a gray stubble of hair on a thin head, sitting on his haunches in the middle of his mud floor, smoking a very slender pea-size-bowled pipe, bowed as they came in. His wife, tottering across from the fire on stiff bound feet, brought each of the guests a cup of tea. The door became entirely blocked by spectators, coming from the sight of a Bullock on a Sandbank to enjoy the finer spectacle of Strangers Drinking Tea. The smell was very thick, but smoke partly drowned it. It was not a very inviting end to a day’s journey, but Seryozha, it must be remembered, had never known a real hotel. He had never seen a bathtub, a bellboy, a real brass bed, a parquet floor, a poster advertising a seaside resort, a revolving doorway, a lift, or an Axminster carpet. He had never eaten either à la carte or table d’hôte, or leaned against a mahogany bar. Fleas he was accustomed to, bugs he disliked, lice he drew the line at⁠—but he had never within his memory lived in surroundings in which any of these intruders could cause any considerable surprise. The Pa-tao-kou inn, therefore, seemed to him as tolerable as, say, the Red Lion, Bobble-under-Ouse, might seem to the average commercial traveler⁠—a very so-so place, affording at least the luxury of a good deal to grumble mildly at.

Yet for Seryozha there was something decidedly wrong with the place for the moment. A blankness in the region of his anklebone⁠ ⁠… a silence⁠ ⁠… no panting in the background of the hearing⁠ ⁠… no wagging in the corner of the eye. The panting of Seryozha’s dog was to him what the ticking of a clock is to another man; he did not notice it when it was there, but felt uneasy without it. He walked to the doorway. The dog and the bullock, meek and resigned, still passively colonized the sandbank. The last spears of the sunset pricked the river.

“I am hot,” said Seryozha, wiping his flushed face with his sleeve. “I shall swim in this river.” It would be bad for the dog, he somehow felt, if he admitted that its plight mattered to him.

“Have you brought a bathing costume with you?” asked Wilfred.

“Schto?”

“A bathing costume? A garment for swimming purposes?”

“Schto?”

Wilfred clicked his throat. Seryozha pushed his way out through the crowded door and stumbled down over the rocks to the river’s edge. He pulled off his clothes with a cheerful frankness and walked into the water. The crowd of villagers followed him from the inn, their eyes never leaving him. They added to their numbers, they shouted for their friends and families to join them⁠—especially at the moment when his astonishing nakedness burst upon them⁠—but they could not leave him in order to advertise the entertainment, for fear lest they might miss some item which might never be repeated. And their enthusiasm was rewarded. About seventy of them were able to watch a spectacle that had never before been seen in Pa-tao-kou⁠—the spectacle of a White Man Swimming in the River.

The water climbed up Seryozha’s body as he waded deeper and deeper. The garment of delicious coldness, as it wrapped itself higher and higher about him, seemed to be piped by a wire of almost-pain, a steel hair of ice or fire, climbing up his legs and his body. His thirsty skin gloried. He threw himself flat in the water, his open mouth just held above the surface. He felt strangely level with the world’s floor. All perspective changed to fit eyes only six inches from world level instead of the usual six feet. He saw the darkening sandbanks like clouds, the bullock and the dog like giants, wild geese resting on far distant sandbanks like tall electric gray ghosts.

“Mr. Chew! Mr. Chew!” Seryozha’s voice came with a curious clang across the water to the inn.

Wilfred came rather nervously out on to the shore, but seeing that he need not yet see that Seryozha was naked⁠—since six-sevenths of that nakedness was modestly submerged⁠—he looked relieved and shouted thinly in reply.

“Mr. Chew,” called Seryozha, ploughing this way and that, “tell them⁠—yist some fishes in their nets. I see a jumping.” A thin this-way-and-that bristle of poles, supporting fishing nets against the current, straggled in the middle of the side stream.

Poor Wilfred felt almost a fool. However competent one may feel to address a jury, it is a fact that one is not trained at the English bar to act as communicating medium between naked fellow-men fifty yards away, and peasant compatriots with whom⁠—in spite of their nationality⁠—one has no word of common language. Nevertheless, Wilfred patiently jotted down a few hieroglyphics in his notebook and showed the paper to his Manchurian host. The host, after breathing loudly yet affably for a moment on the message, sketched a dozen characters in reply.

“He says the nets are not yet cleared,” shouted Wilfred, self-consciously. “They are usually examined after sundown.”

“I will examinate in a minute,” shouted Seryozha. Wilfred averted his eyes as Seryozha, tipped with sunburn, began to walk up the far shallows to the sandbank, looking like an ivory saint on which coarse copper extremities had been stuck as a blasphemous joke. The dog threw itself upon him; cries and barkings of joy clanged across the water. The light was growing very quickly dimmer now. Outlines that were sure at one moment must be guessed at in the next, then believed in with the heart of faith, and finally only remembered.

Seryozha was fairly clear to the spectators as he roused the bullock from its rest. The bullock’s behind rose first. Then it indulged in its usual pause, trying to remember what came next. But as Seryozha rushed at it with a facetious cry, its forelegs were inspired and straightened themselves with a plunge. The worried creature took to the water once more, abandoning its new kingdom without wagging a horn. Twilight blurred it; it was there⁠—it was here⁠—no, it was there⁠—it was suddenly much nearer than anyone had expected, splashing meekly up out of shallow water toward the village.

Seryozha could be heard whistling to his dog, exhorting it with a kindly curse. Then there was a gentle flipping noise of swimming. The dusk drew veils across the white blurred water.

Suddenly there was a noise of turbulent water, a squeal⁠—“Oooo‑eeee!” from Seryozha, and then bubblings and churnings and snortings only.

“What has occurred?” quavered Wilfred. “Mr. Malinin⁠—are you involved in some calamity?”

A snorting as of restricted fountains, waterspouts, and whirlpools, was the only answer. The sound, coming across calm water, had a brittle, urgent quality. Then a bubbling squeal from Seryozha. “Yist big fish!”

“You must return to shore immediately, Mr. Malinin,” wailed Wilfred, walking excitedly to the river’s edge and pawing the sand like a thwarted horse. “Your parents would highly disapprove.⁠ ⁠…”

The bubbling and churning continued. Seryozha’s dog came ashore near Wilfred, and began barking anxious injunctions in the direction of the struggle. A few half-forgotten, almost atavistic, Cantonese curses burst from behind Mr. Chew’s English gold tooth. The words were like dark unheard-of deep-sea creatures being churned to the public surface by some profound convulsion of nature. “Return⁠—return,” he wailed, trying to feel English again.

And suddenly, out of smoke-colored blankness, Seryozha returned. With a sudden loud breathless laugh he walked out of the water, towering tall in the dusk, clasping a large fish to his stomach. The fish cramped itself in curves from side to side, goggling voiceless o‑o‑o‑s at the sky.

“Yist this most big fish catched outside the net,” gasped Seryozha. “The nets have catched him by his skin. He has bited me.”

He threw the fish on the rocks, where it whipped and lashed itself about, taut and terrible, mouthing its suffocated appeal. “I think,” said Seryozha, pulling his trousers on, “that we shall soon be biting him. Fkuzna! Good biting, yes⁠—no?”

“I did not know,” said Wilfred Chew, examining the dying fish gravely, “that salmon could be plucked out of rivers by hand in this way. In England, I have heard, people fish for such fish with tame flies tied to rods.”

Seryozha spouted river water out of his mouth, hawking crudely in his throat. He then sucked his bleeding finger and spat a little diluted blood. “In China,” he said, shrugging himself and dancing a little to make his clothes hang easily on his wet body, “salmons are rare to be caught so, round their waist. Never before, I think. This was a misfortune to salmon⁠—the net have catched such little cracks of his skin⁠—so.” He touched the straining gills and then stood up and looked down, feeling, as he always felt after such deeds were done, that he had spoiled a joke. A smiling salmon in the water had become solemn and sorry now on land⁠—because of him. “He bited me,” he murmured in doubtfulness and obstinacy. “Now I shall be biting him.”

“Such a fish would indeed make a successful dish,” said Wilfred, who had no such qualms. He did not really know that animals were alive. To him they were either ambulant food or else inferior substitutes for wheels. Sometimes they were just things with a smell, like dogs. “Yet, Mr. Malinin, legally the fish does not belong to us.”

Seryozha began arguing with the innkeeper, whose nets, it seemed, had originally detained the fish. The fish, one gathered, was not for sale at all; perhaps the innkeeper had been considering having it stuffed for his wife’s delight; perhaps he would have given it to the pigs. Seryozha, however, expressed the opinion that the fish should not only be sold to him, but sold very cheap, since he had gone to the trouble of bringing it out of the water (thus saving the innkeeper a trip in his boat), and had, in addition, been actually injured by the fish. Seryozha suggested that the innkeeper was lucky not to be asked to pay for the damage caused by his dangerous and uncontrolled fish. It then appeared that the fish, on second thoughts, might be sold as supper for the travelers⁠—but at an immense price. Argument continued. The price began shrinking, like a flower from which the petals were being plucked. I buy it⁠—I buy it not⁠—I sell it⁠—I sell it not.⁠ ⁠… Finally Seryozha said, “I have buy the half of this fish for eighty sen.”

“Which half?” asked Wilfred.

“Is this important⁠—which half?” exclaimed Seryozha, surprised but willing to be informed.

“Very important,” answered Wilfred, judicially.

A new argument began between Seryozha and the innkeeper. After about ten minutes Seryozha said, “I have buy the behinder half of the fish for seventy-five sen. The before half shall cost ninety sen.”

“The behind is better for our purpose,” said Wilfred. “You can clean the fish and I will cook it.”

The fish was divided by lantern-light, on the inn kang, in the presence of about thirty witnesses.

“Take the heart and the liver and the gall,” said Wilfred, “and put them up safely.”

“Nyet good,” said Seryozha, wrinkling his nose at the mess in question.

“Please do as I advise,” said Wilfred, sharply. “It is most important.”

Seryozha, making a slightly mutinous noise in the back of his nose, wrapped the heart, the liver, and the gall of the fish in a piece of newspaper. “It shall smell,” he said.

“Some smells are good.”

“This smell nyet.”

“Goodness is a comparative term.”

“Oi-oi!” said Seryozha.

The fish, as Wilfred began to cook it, became a kind of trysting-place for all the delicacies of the village. Water chestnuts, garlic, sweet corn, peppers, young greens, tender white roots were brought in by businesslike outsiders and bought by Wilfred for a few sen. The smell of cooking became a smell that ought certainly not to be omitted from Paradise.

What would heaven be like, in fact, without happy empty stomachs and the smell of a good supper getting ready? thought Seryozha, as he sat in the doorway and watched the stars of heaven. A half-moon was rising above the rice-fields; its reflection swam like a fish in the water of the rice-fields, appearing and disappearing, striped and coy, among the blades of rice⁠—a fish swimming very deeply and secretly. There was enough light to show the rice, bleached of its jewel-like green, all upright, all still, brushing the sight upward like soft fur. Softer than the softest fur, pearly pale like a Persian kitten’s fur.

Seryozha stared at the lovely world, feeling cooler and cooler after his hot busy day, thinking of nothing. Yet all his senses, all his limbs and members, were straining after rapture; his ears were open for a great harmony; his eyes for some light they would never see; his tongue and his throat were tense to utter some unspeakably true word; his feet on tiptoe for a leap beyond the starriest athlete’s dream; his stomach was hungry for some super-food, his sex sense aching for nothing less than a goddess. The moon and the stars seemed like little seeds of some stupendous flower⁠—seeds sterilized, embalmed in a coffin built of the limiting substance of space and thought. Seryozha panted, stirred, panted again, spat.⁠ ⁠… “I am hungry,” he said uncertainly, after some time, turning to Wilfred.

“The fish is now prepared,” said Wilfred, glittering with the excitement of success.

The fish was indeed good. Seryozha drank some samshu with it. “I wish there is a singing girl in this village,” said Seryozha. From time to time his chewing was checked by a surge of silly memory in his mind, that made him clasp his stomach in an ecstasy of giggle and blurt a high cracking ha-ha into his dish. Then he found that he was sitting on the newspaper packet that contained the heart, gall, and liver of the fish.

“Ah, tschah!” he exclaimed, annoyed. “Mr. Chew, to what use is the heart and the liver and the gall of this fish?”

“You remember,” said Wilfred, “we were talking about devils. Well, the smell of the heart and liver of such a fish is a cure for devils. If a devil or an evil spirit trouble anyone, we must make a smelly smoke of these things before the man or woman, and the party shall be no more vexed.”

“What party?” asked Seryozha, stupidly.

“Well⁠ ⁠… a cold woman, for instance,” said Wilfred, after buzzing dubiously to himself through his teeth for a moment. “Coldness in a woman means that a devil is in her, and the devil can be frightened away by any husband that takes proper precautions.”

“Ai-ai!” exclaimed Setyozha, feeling that he was acquiring useful knowledge. “Inside such women yist devils! Tcht! tcht! So here is magic⁠—to make smells against devils. Mr. Chew, is this Wesleyan magic, yes⁠—no?”

“It has nothing to do with religion,” said Wilfred, stuttering a little in confusion, as though the Reverend Oswald Fawcett had laid a hand on his shoulder. “Religion is one thing, medicine is another. Chinese medicine is one of the most ancient and profound studies in the world. Western science has proved more and more the real wisdom behind Chinese medicine.”

“Oi⁠—medicine!” sighed Seryozha, nodding several times and thinking of castor oil. “I understand. Yist medicine, nyet magic. You know such plenty Wesleyan things, Mr. Chew, I have forgotten you know also Chinese things.”

“Well, every Chinese knows from early childhood about the devils that obsess human beings. No religious education can alter that knowledge. And also we know it from the Bible, too. The apostles were taught to drive devils out.”

“But with smells nyet,” said Seryozha, not sceptically, but anxiously. He enjoyed acquiring unusual knowledge.

“With smells is one way,” said Wilfred, firmly. “Devils cannot live in smelly smoke. In the western hemisphere also, in old-fashioned times, Papists burned those who did not accept their faith. For the same reason, I think. They burned the body, and so the devils, not liking the smell, fled away. But now, though Christians may not burn the body, there is nothing to forbid them from stinking devils out.”

“Indeed nyet,” agreed Seryozha. “It is all most wise. I shall remember. The heart and the liver of a salmon⁠—yes? But the gall⁠—it is not a right smell, yes⁠—no? Shall I not then throw away this gall? Yist to no use.”

“The gall is extremely useful, too,” said Wilfred. “It cures blindness.” He was raking away in his memories of the servants in his father’s compound at Canton.

“Blindness!” cried Seryozha. “My papa is blind.”

“Some blindness,” said Wilfred, cautiously, “is incurable. Other forms can be cured by surgical operations. But a Chinese doctor once told my old nurse that out of one hundred cases of blindness in his town, he was able to cure ninety-two by a course of treatment that involved a massage of the eyeball with the putrefying gall of a fish.”

“Oi! Yoi! Yoi!” said Seryozha, astounded. “Ninety-two. It is very many. I shall hold this in my mind.”

And he kept the lucky sticky little parcel closely beside him on the kang. But he did not, that evening, hold anything very much in his mind. A tingling, humming restfulness spread over his body; noble aspirations, happily attainable, surged in his contented brain; he felt that he had two pairs of eyes⁠—one seeing charm and beauty in the watching brown faces of the coolies at the door, the other recognizing dreams and secrets in the shapes of shadow, the angles of the smoky little room. His head recovered with a wrench from a slow pendulum droop that he had not noticed had begun. He lay down with his head on his bundle on the kang. His feet must have dreamed they were walking again, for he woke with a jolting sense of stumbling over something. “A little stone,” he thought, drowsily, “with a devil in it.” Then his sleeping still feet went on secretly walking⁠—walking⁠—walking⁠—throb⁠—throb⁠—throb⁠—carrying his comfortable body into darkness.