VII

Tatiana’s mother, Varvara Alexeievna Ostapenko, sat in her garden, embroidering silk in bright colors. Varvara was a tall woman, thin and melancholy, with a dark birthmark on one cheek. She had a slow and anxious awkwardness of body; she held her head up often, as though listening, walked on tiptoe, and when, as now, she rested, never leaned back for more than a few seconds. A few seconds slackening and then again there she would be, listening, with her face up, as though expecting a call.

The garden, which had been made by their Japanese landlord, seemed built, fitted together, rather than grown. Curves of asymmetrical disciplined branches looped from sky to ground; the green in-bent horizon of the garden looked like handwriting against the dazzling sky. A young reddening maple, a pine, a Japanese cherry tree, and a stunted self-conscious cedar laid down careful shadows at one another’s feet in a sort of cold courtliness. There were no flowers except Michaelmas daisies frothing in a mauve mist over the brim of a streaked glazed blue urn in a corner of the garden. Flying seedpods, gossamers and birds seemed like untidinesses in the air of a garden where even the shadows were studied. The September heat of the plain boxed in the garden as though in a glass case.

A thread of sound like a flute⁠—the sound of Tatiana whistling⁠—from somewhere in the house, seemed to run like a rill of coolness through the garden.

“Tanya whistles like a boy,” thought Varvara. She imagined Tatiana as the girl must look as she ironed in the washing-shed outside the house⁠—whistling in time with her ironing. “She must be hot, though,” thought Varvara. “There is no draught in the shed.” She imagined the light diamond mustache of tiny drops that appeared always on Tatiana’s upper lip when she was hot⁠—a little delicate hint of heat that, in that still girl, took the place of the raw flush, the bloated mouth, the hair askew, the stare-eyed goggle that in so many other women and men are the symptoms of overheating.

The three members of the Ostapenko family were always very conscious one of another. Their craving that each should be justified, even when wrong, that each should be worthy of each and appear worthy even when unworthy, that none should be hurt or humiliated, even when deserving of rebuff, amounted to a kind of chronic soreness of heart. They all almost hated and quite loved one another⁠—savage in the disappointment of their own hopes of one another, and savage in their anger against outsiders for being disappointed. They had an overbearing family egoism; they felt as if they were set apart, as if they should be judged by a standard different from that to which other families conform. Each thought the other two, for instance, more beautiful than ordinary beauty; even Varvara’s birthmark seemed to her husband and daughter a sort of hallmark of queer beauty. Only Pavel Ostapenko felt real vanity about himself; Varvara and Tatiana each felt it for the other two. In themselves they were more proud of the things they did not do very well than they were about their gifts. With one half of her mind Varvara knew that her designs for her embroidery were not worth the exquisite stitching she put into them. The designs were childish and ungainly⁠—not simple enough to be primitive, not clever enough to be sophisticated. Criticism of her designs, therefore, could make her tremble with anger, and pointed praise of her stitching was almost equally humiliating. She knew⁠—and refused to admit⁠—that she was an interpreter, not a creator, in everything, but she refused to be praised for anything less than creation.

In the same way, Tatiana’s only vanity was her whistle. It was sweet and most flexible and versatile; she could give it either the ogling quality of the saxophone or the cold veiled purity of the flute. It was always impeccably accurate. Her ear heard words in the air which, running through her senses, not through her brain, came out as tunes through her lips⁠—wandering, passing, blind tunes that never went forward and never came back. It was a foolish and tiny skill, much more akin to a bird’s song than a human sound; the sound mixed lightly with the cooing of doves and the whistling of larks⁠—it had none of the interrupting, creative quality of most human melody. Tatiana did not feel that she should be applauded for her whistling, but she herself enjoyed it intensely. It was very close and clear in her own ears and filled up all the lonely space about her. She heard it almost as though it were space singing, not herself, and she looked forward to it whenever she set herself to work with her hands in an empty place. She valued this knack of hers far more than she valued her straight and vivid beauty. She had grown weary now of having her beauty praised, since such praise was always the prelude to a demand⁠—to one of the dangerous approaches she dreaded.

There was a side gate to the garden, opening under a twirl of tufted pine branch. By the care with which the latch was lifted Varvara knew that her husband, Pavel, was a little drunk but not very. Varvara looked at him with a sourness that came of expectations disappointed. The trouble was that she had invented a Pavel Ostapenko for herself, to which the actual Pavel seldom conformed. She was a Procrustean wife.

Pavel looked uneasily at his wife as he pulled at his little red beard. He used his beard as though it were a kind of tab by which to pull his mouth open; tugging at his beard, he pulled his jaw down⁠—snapped it up again⁠—open⁠—shut⁠—open⁠—showing fine teeth and an uneasy tongue.

“I have some news,” he said, looking down at his wife, rather relieved to be about to put his uneasiness and rancor into words.

Varvara had decided deliberately to sulk a little. She felt that a cold silence now might make him drink one glass less next time.

“I have heard something,” he began again, “that makes me as uncomfortable and guilty as though it were my own fault. Oh, Varitchka⁠—that poor boy, Sasha Weber.⁠ ⁠… I was fond of him. He has cut his throat.”

“Sasha!” exclaimed Varvara, shocked out of her resolve. “But he has left Seoul.⁠ ⁠… How do you know?⁠ ⁠… Who heard?”

“Soloviev heard from the boy’s mother. He had reached Chi-tao-kou, just over the Chinese border.⁠ ⁠… Evidently he found life unbearable, after all, though he made a show of indifference.” Pavel’s tears⁠—for he was an emotional drinker⁠—spilled suddenly over his cheekbones.

“It is not our fault. It is not our fault,” said Varvara, huskily. “What nonsense to cry as if it were our fault! A boy’s folly still remains folly, even if he is dead and will never be a fool again⁠—poor little fool!”

Ostapenko pulled his jaw into a few more gapes. His eyes⁠—brown irises entirely surrounded by whites⁠—glared in a frightened way at his wife.

“Up to now I have tried to think of Tanya as a dear girl⁠—a too charming, too lovely girl.⁠ ⁠… Every lovely girl, I have thought, has these adventures⁠ ⁠… fascinating danger to the young bloods⁠ ⁠… fatal gift of beauty⁠ ⁠… the kind of thing great-aunts in the ’fifties suffered from⁠—love-tokens, duels, rivals sending rosebuds⁠—you know what I mean⁠—quite natural.⁠ ⁠… Now, suddenly, Varitchka, I don’t believe it is natural, or pretty. There’s something wrong. Something unnatural. Something unhealthy.” He said the last word almost in a choking voice. Health was one of his vanities.

“Unnatural? Unhealthy?” exclaimed Varvara, stitching in tense jerks. “What is unnatural? What is natural? Only the majority.”

“Well, youth is natural⁠ ⁠… and girlishness⁠ ⁠… and warmth and motherhood⁠ ⁠…” Pavel was shading his eyes with his hand, and from beneath his little finger tears that seemed unwarranted by the matter of what he said ran down his face. “There’s something about our Tanya that kills decent young creatures like Sasha Weber⁠—even if they don’t cut their throats or join the Chinese army. Look at Piotr Isaev; look at Boris Andreievitch, or Stepan. One can’t wag a finger at all this and say, ‘A-ha! the saucy chit!’ O God! that’s the trouble⁠—she’s not near enough to be saucy. You can’t smile at a thing a hundred miles off.”

Ideas that looked like the long-ignored truth seemed to come with appalling clarity into Pavel’s humming, giddy mind. He seemed to see his daughter all at once as a stillness, an interruption in loud and moving life⁠—something pale suspended like a ghost, just higher than the ground⁠—about which gay coarse heavy-footed life moved in vain, moved and dodged, seeking for glances from eyes that stopped warm hearts beating. A little figure of death surviving life. And this was his daughter. Her existence seemed to him, in his present mood, an insult to the life that dizzied him in himself. “What kind of a creature have I begotten?” he croaked. “Something that is a woman and is not.”

“There you are,” said Varvara, fiercely flattening the silk upon her knee. “There you are! Why should everything be a woman or a man?”

“What do you mean⁠—men⁠—women? What else is there? Out of men and women comes life⁠—the only life there is.”

“Tanya is living.”

“Tanya⁠—ah, tschah!⁠—she is living.” He was silent, listening to the sound of Tanya’s whistling. “Yes,” he said, after a moment, in a different voice, “she is living.” He paused for some time, waving his head a little as though his eyes were trying to follow the twirl of a rather giddy world. “But because of her, Sasha Weber is dead.”

“Not because of her, exactly,” said Varvara, slowly. “Because of a collision between new things and old things⁠ ⁠… Sasha Weber comes at the end of something old⁠—Tanya comes at the beginning, perhaps, of something new.”

“A bad beginning,” said Pavel, “since it seems our line is to stop with her. I don’t know what you mean, Varitchka. And whatever you mean, I’m sure it is unhealthy and ugly.”

“Everything’s unnatural when it begins. Everything’s ugly when we haven’t seen it before.”

“I don’t know what you mean. It is Tanya’s duty⁠—it is every woman’s duty⁠—to be natural and warm and young, not to suck life out of warm natural young things and remain cold as a cat herself.”

“We don’t know what is the duty of new things,” insisted Varvara. “Perhaps they haven’t any. Anyway, new or old, they’re all natural.”

“What is she, then, you silly woman, if she’s not the thing we know⁠—a young woman, born to bear children?”

“Perhaps she’s a thing,” said Varvara. “That maple tree’s a thing. A man can love that without wanting to get into bed with it. Listen.”

Tatiana’s whistle fluted, stopped again, shaped itself into an unthinking trill or two.

“Listen,” said Varvara, “whose voice is that? That’s a thing’s voice.”

And as she applied this cruel word to her daughter, the word became somehow a word of praise⁠—a proud word. It seemed suddenly common to be anything but a thing.

“Ah, tschah!” snorted Pavel, striking the trunk of the little maple tree with an outflung hand. “It is absurd. I have been talking nonsense. So have you. Tanya’s just an unawakened child. The little minx. She has no understanding of her effect on men. Perhaps the shock of hearing of Sasha’s death and knowing it to be the result of her childish heartlessness will⁠—Tanitchka!” he shouted.

Tatiana in the ironing-shed heard his voice with an urgency that almost stopped her heart. She was so lost, so enclosed in her cooing forgetful space, that his voice seemed like a shot suddenly unwarrantably fired in time of peace. Her finger was jerked by surprise from the handle of the iron she was using and pressed for a second on the scorching metal. The pain of the finger sprang up her arm. After the first second, her burnt finger was interesting to her⁠—a possession to be studied, to be proud of. She began prodding it, squeezing it, to make it hurt more. The skin thickened and whitened on the burn; she looked at it closely, feeling the finger grow hotter and hotter⁠—more and more apoplectic, as though it were so full of blood that it would burst.

“Tanya!” roared her father again from the garden.

Tatiana left the iron burning a sheet and went out of the shed, through the house, and into the garden.

Her father stood with his arm crooked round a bough of the little maple, like one with his arm round the shoulders of a friend. He looked at Tatiana anxiously, breathing heavily. Her mother, sitting rigidly, jerking at stitches, did not look up.

“I heard a piece of news today,” said Pavel, “that may interest you. Or it may not.”

“I expect it will, papasha,” said Tatiana in a drowsy voice. She stood rocking a little on her feet, torturing her throbbing finger.

“I expect you hardly think it worth while to remember Alexander Petrovitch Weber,” said Pavel, who had become very angry again directly he saw his daughter. He fixed on her his characteristic glare that islanded his irises in startled white. “Sometimes it seems to me that you don’t distinguish between one young man and another. I suppose you think they’re all alike in their folly⁠—and none worthy of your highness’s attention. My God!” he shouted suddenly, “it would do you good to be raped by one of them.”

Tatiana pinched and tore at her agonising finger.

“Alexander Petrovitch is dead,” he said. “He cut his throat. Just before he killed himself he wrote to his mother that his death would relieve you of a nuisance.”

“That was ridiculous of him,” said Tatiana’s mother in a matter-of-fact voice. “It was also very spiteful and theatrical.”

“At any rate, you wouldn’t waste a tear on Sasha Weber, of course,” said Pavel to his daughter, choking with anger. “Sasha knew that, of course. But he was mistaken, poor fool, in thinking that you would feel anything so active as relief, wasn’t he? Why should you feel anything at all? What does it matter to you that a living young man is dead?”

Tatiana looked at her finger. Through the nail, she noticed, the red blood showed purple. Things were hurt, things died, blood ran into burnt fingers and out of cut throats. Containers of uneasy blood, that’s all we are. Big and little, male and female, two-legged, four-legged, six legged, many-legged, winged and creeping, wise and foolish, we slide and stride and wiggle about the world until something called death lets the blood out, to be soaked into the ground, to be dried into the air, to form again in other containers.⁠ ⁠… Why should there be any of this merging between one skinful of blood and bones and another? Why can’t we get used to the loneliness of having separate blood? Pitchers may go to the same well, be dipped, and come home full, clinking handles, tinkling together, but always separate, each with its dreadful integrity complete, its inviolate solitary storm of contents. Not till the pitcher is spilled is there a merging⁠—a cold, loveless merging into thirsty space. These images, quite clear but wordless, passed across the screen of Tatiana’s sight as she looked at her finger, cramping the muscles round her eyes till her forehead smarted. “Why do I feel my finger and my forehead hurting, and not the wound in Sasha’s throat?” she thought all at once. “What is it that feels one wound so much and another not at all?”

The maple tree rustled as Pavel shook it with his tense arm. His arm was aching to beat his daughter, to break up her exasperating stillness. “I suppose you don’t know why this unhappy young man killed himself,” he croaked.

“No,” said Tatiana. She knew that he had killed himself by way of revenge on her⁠—he had told her that he would, but she did not know why. What were two me’s to each other, that one should be so necessary to another? A sort of accident, it seemed, happened in young men’s blood that made them think that two me’s could be kneaded together into an us. Most of them probably lived to find it a mistake. Only dear Sasha had incredibly thrown his me away⁠—poured it out of a cut throat, because he could not double it into an us. Here in this generous world were a million million me’s⁠—a million million columns of lonely blood and bone. There was no such thing as a real us.

“Except the Siamese twins,” said Tatiana aloud, absentmindedly.

Pavel boxed her ears.

Varvara got up from her chair, her face twisting, her mind profoundly disturbed. “Oh, what a complicated family I’ve got!” she thought, proudly. “You must stop and think, Pavlik,” she said, in a dry, urgent voice. “Think. Think. It’s impossible to make things one way that really are another. Tanya is Tanya, whether you like it or not, and you know, when you’re sober, you like it. She has as much right to be herself as you have⁠—and even if she hadn’t, you couldn’t change her, either by hitting her or in any other way. She couldn’t change herself. She’s alive.”

“Yes, and Sasha’s dead,” shouted Pavel. “He had just as much right to be alive as she has. More right, because he was natural. He was a man. He should have begotten sons. What is this thing we have called our daughter? A thing⁠—a lifeless thing⁠—killing live men.⁠ ⁠… What about our grandchildren who have a right to be born? A thing that’s not alive is preventing men and women from being alive. She’s cutting us off from our grandchildren. Five times⁠—six times⁠—seven times⁠—she might have been married; she might have been turned into a live woman⁠—a live mother⁠—a live wife. Her face, her body⁠—her woman’s face and body⁠—they’re lies.⁠ ⁠… Yes, she’s crying now⁠—she looks almost like a woman when she cries, doesn’t she⁠—but it’s all lies.⁠ ⁠…”

Tatiana, her head still bent over her hand as though she were obsessed by the phenomenon of her burnt finger, was crying violently⁠—her shoulders jerking, her mouth squared, the muscles round her eyes quivering, tears springing down her cheeks and chin. She was rigid with anger against her father because he was invading her⁠—his words were fettering her, just as his hard hands had clapped an ache round her head.

“And Piotr Gavrilovitch⁠—whom she promised only a month or two ago to marry⁠—where is he now? Gone⁠—turned out, I suppose, since all her promises are lies. I suppose she said, You foolish Petya, that promise of mine was a joke⁠—a thing’s promise.⁠ ⁠… Eh? Eh⁠—? Answer me, girl.”

“What do you want her to answer, Pavlik?” said Varvara, standing within an arm’s-length of her weeping daughter, but not touching her.

“Answer me, girl. Piotr Gavrilovitch, the last young fool you lied to⁠—you showed him the door, I suppose, when you’d sucked him dry. He’s not coming back any more, is he?”

Tatiana shook her head.

“No, of course not. I suppose you said to him, You can go and cut your throat now, Petya, as Sasha did. The joke is over, you said⁠—till another softhearted young fool comes along. It’s a joke you’ve played too often, you little snake. I tell you it’s a stale joke. I wonder you can sleep at night. What about Boris, who went to Shanghai? His father never heard from him again. Did he cut his throat, too, do you think, or just starve to death? It doesn’t matter to you, of course, does it? What about old Soloviev’s son, Stepan? You didn’t manage to turn him out of his home, but I hope you’re proud of what you did do, for I’ve never seen him sober since he left this garden for the last time. What about Vanya, whose eye you nearly blinded for life at that kissing game when he was having a bit of fun? What about⁠—Good God, girl!”

For Tatiana was suddenly laughing. She lifted her eyes at last from her clasped hands and laughed. A picture of a sort of centrifugal burst of young men bouncing from one center had come into her mind. Like a flock of rabbits running from a weasel⁠—jumping off cliffs, plunging into streams, turning head over heels in panic, springing under railway trains⁠—a bomb of furry fugitives bursting as the result of one puny little spark of life inside a separate bag of fur. Certainly seven was too many to cry over. Over one⁠—each one of the seven⁠—tears might be shed. Tatiana knew that as soon as she was quiet again she would be imagining the cruel look of the knife in poor Sasha’s sight⁠—the feel of its pressing edge on his tender throat. But now⁠—seven voices singing in silly unison, “Goodbye forever”⁠—seven twangs of breaking hearts like the snapping strings of balalaikas.⁠ ⁠…

The father and mother stood and looked at their giggling child.

“She is right,” said Varvara after a moment, with a brisk, hard look, as she folded her sewing. “Seven is too many to cry over. Seven is like the chorus in comic opera. You go and lie down, Pavlik; you are overexcited and you talk nonsense. There is no reason why Tanya should try to be any different from what she is. If seventy lovers instead of seven came along, it wouldn’t be her fault if none of them was the right one. Perhaps she’s just more particular than the rest of us.”⁠ ⁠… She looked at her husband with a wry, unnatural archness. “Or perhaps she’s not the kind of girl that marries. It’s only a habit that makes men and old virgins think so much of love and marriage.⁠ ⁠…”

Varvara stopped speaking, overcome with a sort of despair. All this pain, this weeping, this shouting, was like a blot upon perfection⁠—a blot that must be at the same time erased and accepted by her. This storm must be outwardly stilled, yet inwardly justified; it must be part of the air of the house now⁠—and yet it was leaving ruin in its path. Ruin must henceforth decorate the garden. Part of her pride in the family’s perfection must be Tatiana’s imperfection, just as Pavel’s drunkenness had become a subtlety⁠—an Ostapenko essential⁠—misunderstood though it might be outside. She knew that her husband was often drunk, but ignorant outsiders might think⁠—well, they might think that he drank! She knew there was a fundamental perversity, a passional lack, in her daughter⁠—but, with so many disappointed and spiteful lovers about, Heaven knew what the neighbors might say. They might call the child frigid, undesirable, likely to live and die alone. One must fashion these potential weapons into stones to strengthen the ramparts of family defense.

“What have you done to your finger, Tanya?” she said, awkwardly.

“I burnt it on the iron.”

Pavel was walking a few steps here and a few steps there in the hot shade of the garden, clasping and unclasping his hands, mopping his dripping forehead. “Butter,” he said. “Butter is good for a burn.” Thinking of his Tanya⁠—his claimant for Ostapenko immortality⁠—burning her finger on an iron gave him a sharp pain in the pit of his stomach, though he still longed to beat her and make her scream.

“It is very sore, I suppose,” said Varvara. “If you come in I will put something on it.”

“Butter⁠—butter⁠—” murmured Pavel, rather wildly. He was wondering why this business of Tatiana’s disappointed lovers had seemed to him so important just now. By what logical steps had he reached his present condition of agitation and anger against his daughter? Everything seemed unnaturally separated in his mind now: the talk in the drinking-house with old Soloviev, the news of Sasha’s death at Chi-tao-kou, the sudden discovery that the leaves of the maple in the garden had turned gold, Varvara’s comment on Tatiana’s whistling, Tatiana’s tears, Tatiana’s laughter, Tatiana’s burnt finger, Tatiana’s need of a good whipping, Tatiana’s need of butter, his own need of a wash and a good sleep⁠ ⁠… each of these facts seemed static and ready-made in his mind, none growing out of any other.

Alone with Tatiana, Varvara said as she bent over the wounded finger: “Your papa is overexcited⁠ ⁠… the hot weather.⁠ ⁠… His disappointment is natural. Sasha Weber was the son-in-law he would have liked.”

Tatiana’s throat tautened as she imagined a knife at a throat. Yet really Sasha’s suicide hurt her just about as much as her burnt finger hurt her, no more. Her thoughts were intermittently free of either injury; they played with the shape of the sunlight on the floor, with the angular lines of her father’s coat hanging on a chair, with the blowing, casual design of gusty gold sand blowing across the paper screens. Chairs, tables, cupboards⁠—heavy props for heavy Russian bodies, supports for heavy Russian possessions⁠—looked oddly in the light flat Japanese gold-and-white room. They were like vulgar plums in a cake or cube of light sweet air. The alcove that in a Japanese house should hold a flowery suggestion of an altar framed Katya’s sewing-machine. Tatiana could almost see the surprise of that room, finding itself patched with such heavy shapes and shadows; finding itself looking out at a frank spotted world through the crudeness of glass windows, instead of veiled by the subtle blindness of paper windows set into fretted frames. Though Tatiana was so well used to the room, she saw it freshly today because she remembered that Sasha once knocked his head against the frame of this door. He must have felt the bruise as now she felt her own burnt finger; her own head, she remembered, had ached for an hour in sympathy with his, just as now her throat tingled and throbbed to the slash of a knife against his throat. The strange prisoner feeling still puzzled her⁠—that prisoner, filling his prison with such a flame of superfluous life, pain, and joy, that the neighboring human prisons are almost set alight. And then⁠—suddenly⁠—dead⁠—cold⁠—no feeling⁠—no message from the prisoner ever again. Six months ago the results of the contact of Sasha’s skull against a doorframe were a curse, a blue skin, an hour’s soreness, a little headache, a lot of grumbling, sympathy from Tatiana, a chronic caution when entering by that door afterward. Now, Sasha’s bones could beat against hard stones⁠ ⁠… no protests of skin and blood, no complaint from his quiet lips, no anger in his brain, no sympathy needed from friends and lovers. No sympathy⁠—no sympathy needed; no wandering love whistled in by a master from far fields. She was safe now, she thought, from one more invasion. Sasha could never make her feel guilty again⁠—guilty for being Tatiana Ostapenko.

Her finger was throbbing, her head was aching from her father’s blow. She still felt coldly angry with her father⁠—and yet proud of him. He had attacked her spiritually and physically, and yet, she though the was so splendid, so queer, so much more colored and individual than other men. He was a part of her; for the moment she hated him as she might hate one’s own rebellious limb. “A lonely and wild father,” she thought, “hitting his daughter because she would take no lover. How rare! how Ostapenko!” She would not have contradicted an outsider’s view of her father. “A simple tipsy man,” you might have said, and so he was. Yes, simple with a precious Ostapenko simplicity; tipsy as a poet without words.⁠ ⁠… Even ordinary derogatory words could be twisted by each Ostapenko to feed the family sense of apartness.

“Well,” said Tatiana, “Sasha’s safe and dead now.” Her finger hurt so much, as her mother touched it, that she could almost have wished to die of this injury as Sasha had died of his. Tatiana’s body was always morbidly sensitive to pain. Little pains, that in other people seemed easily dismissed from attention, often demanded real fortitude of her. That was why she was so much preoccupied with the thought of pain⁠—why she invented stories about pain and death in the night to make her body thrill.

“My darling,” said Varvara, in inquiry, not in criticism, “have you no feelings for other people’s sufferings? Do you not mind very much about poor Sasha?”

Tatiana listened, a little confused. The two questions seemed to her to be quite separate. Minding about a person⁠—no. Minding about people⁠—well, nobody could feel more actually than she felt the very feelings of people, animals, insects, things, ghosts, even the air bruised by shadows.

“No mamma, I haven’t any heart,” she mumbled, feeling this to be the safest claim.

Varvara registered this as a confirmation of a new piece of Ostapenko peculiarity. Her daughter had no heart. Well, were hearts necessary? Men and women⁠—especially women⁠—had been judged too much by their capacity for love. This was because people who love, propagate, thought Varvara, and transmit their vulgar standard of love from generation to generation. Just as rabbits transmit their bobtails. Bobtails are a conventional rabbit standard. A rabbit with a long curly tail would be feared, shunned, trampled to death, so the innovation would die untried, unbequeathed, abortive. But its death didn’t prove the essential wrongness of long curly tails for rabbits. Genius was probably often heartless. But genius did not often propagate. Strangeness meant physical mortality, so strangeness was rare, never reborn, always new in every manifestation. All the stupid things⁠—cruelty, prostitution, womanly modesty, conventional religion, conventional morality⁠—only survived so rampantly because of the excessive fertility of the stupid.

“Well,” she said, lamely, “people with no hearts have no babies.”

“People with no hearts,” said Tatiana, “can be the mothers of⁠—oh⁠—all sorts of things.” She had a vague feeling of tremendous posterity⁠—mountains, clouds, tigers, spiders, flowers, cities⁠—all giving birth.⁠ ⁠… But even as she spoke she knew that this feeling was an easy and false consolation.

Varvara sighed and went out. Tatiana went to her room, her finger greased and bandaged and the more painful for having been treated so seriously. She stood rigidly, looking toward the window. To look out of her window was, with her, almost always a prayer or an act of praise to some unknown God. The window was like the face of God or of a lover to her; she studied every line and shade, as an adoring lover studies a face, or a believer a miraculous manifestation. She marveled so over living things, simply because they lived, moved, breathed, grew, begot, conceived. Yet she was accused of killing, of treachery to that strange quiet empire, the law of which is the beating of the heart. She, who valued things for their independence of herself, for their incomprehensibility, for their magical remoteness⁠—she who so slightly intruded even upon her own life⁠—was reproached for intruding on the lives of others. All the world outside her window was jeweled with impeccable life⁠—and she, trusted in the treasure-house, was a convicted robber. She set her eyes and her face toward that world, but a voice in her heart was crying: “Take me out of the earth, that I may hear no more the reproach.⁠ ⁠… If men who lived are dead, why should I, who never lived, have the right to breathe when every breath I take is a lie? Or if I must live, let me live at last, let me be a woman alive, as these animals around me are animals alive.⁠ ⁠… Let me no longer see only⁠—let me be.⁠ ⁠… It ought to be easy to live,” she thought, desperately, breaking off her prayer and dragging her eyes from the bright window. “Even a worm in the earth can live.⁠ ⁠…” Her finger throbbed and burned. She looked at it, pinched it. “Oh, you liar!” she said.

She went down from her room, through the sunny kitchen and out through the ironing-shed into the yard. She noticed the iron standing on the sheet as she had left it, and, lifting it up, looked at the angular heart-shaped burn on the linen. The sheet was not spoiled in Tatiana’s eyes; the mark was symmetrical, shapely, and of a fine sienna color. The thing, in fact, was simply branded with a signature of oddity. She left the iron tilted upright, and thought that it looked like a creature begging forgiveness for the sin of printing a private and unlicensed mark upon its world.

She leaned on the gate of her father’s yard, looking out at the valley, at the crisscrossing paths, the yellow mud-walled houses, the tree where she had parted from Piotr Isaev, the last of her lovers. She leaned one cheek on the top bar of the high gate, and looked at the world sideways, under the blurred arch formed by the bone of her nose and brow. Seen sideways, thus framed, everything in sight looked separate and significant⁠—to be seen by itself. The barley looked as if it were being brushed upward by an impossible perpendicular wind. The soft hills changed their angles and were now built of precipices down which the clouds rolled like avalanches. And, as if the freshness of this sideways view quickened also her hearing, she could hear with a sudden urgency the starlings in the big tree preparing for autumn flight. They were making that curious wailing whistle⁠—almost like a miniature howling⁠—that starlings utter in their migratory restless mood. And as soon as Tatiana noticed this sound, she could see that almost every leaf in the tree had a bird behind it. The tree was as full of movement as a bonfire; whistling curled up from it like smoke.

Tatiana felt an arch tweak at her instep. She looked down and saw that all the chickens in the yard, thinking that her presence meant a meal, were gathered about her feet. Each hen looked incredulously at the unexpectedly uneatable dust about her feet, first with one eye and then with the other. Tatiana, watching them, putting thoughts into their narrow heads, presently became aware that, leaning on the gate, she had opened it a little, and the disappointed hens were wandering out into the road.

Tatiana, dancing on her toes as she always did, ran out after them, and as she did so, a further block of hens squeezed out with a rustle and a cackle. “Chok-chok-chok,” she called, throwing imaginary grain in the gateway. A few hens went in and a few more came out. “Supposing they were men,” thought Tatiana. “Men that I was trying to lead⁠—like Joan of Arc⁠—to some great enterprise. I should have to fail, with such silly rebels as these behind me.” Her supposings always promoted her to a first place. “Friend, go up higher” was always the note of her imaginative orgies, although in actual life she never asserted herself. But in her imagination she never knew herself as a mere Tanya.

In her mind, now, the indecision of the hens was as articulate as her own predicament. “What does she want us to do?” she thought for the hens. “This way⁠—that way⁠—which way? I’m trying to do right, but⁠—what is right? Oh, what a puzzling world this is, outside our gate⁠ ⁠… !”

With a good deal of flurry and worry Tatiana drove the chickens⁠—all of them but three⁠—back into the yard. There they were, that group of cackling conservatives, trying to collect their wits after their daring excursion into novelty, scratching feverishly at the dust and, in their excitement, hardly looking at what their scratching had turned up. Tatiana thought they all must have that bathed, naked feeling that comes on getting safely home after a new experience. But she had no time to enjoy their relief, for the three exceptions were hurrying away into the world. They believed that they were being chased by a perfectly unconscious and absentminded donkey which was carrying a load along the track, side by side with its small boy tyrant. The three hens hurried from side to side of the track, confusedly flattering themselves that so far they had cleverly outwitted their pursuer.

Tatiana looked at the misunderstood donkey lovingly and wondered if all devils were devilish by mistake. She pulled the mild devil’s dusty ear as she ran by.

The hens redoubled their efforts. Two devils were evidently after them now, they thought. They had entirely forgotten which way the peaceful cabbage-stalks and fish-heads of home lay. Their lives had suddenly become one huge delirium. Tatiana giggled as she ran. Who would have thought that three hens could run so fast and so far. She imagined her mother saying to her father, “Where can our Tanya have got to, Pavlik? Can she have gone to weep on Sasha’s grave at Chi-tao-kou?” And then the efficient Japanese police telephoning, “Ano ne⁠ ⁠… ano ne⁠ ⁠… moshi⁠—moshi⁠—ano ne. Your daughter was last seen climbing the rocks of the Umi-Kongo in pursuit of three hens.⁠ ⁠…”

Every time Tatiana burst into a wily gallop, hoping to outrun the hens in one spurt, the hens did the same and outran her. It was a hopeless situation; Tatiana wasted a lot of breath in giggling.

Passersby were quite unhelpful. None of the Koreans on the road lifted a finger to shock the errant fowls into a return. The only Korean that helped at all did it unwittingly. He was lying quite drunk on his side near the ditch, his top-hat tilted over one temple; he was singing in a smiling little whine to himself, and when the hens found themselves looking into a human face on a level with their own beaks, they very nearly decided to turn back. But on second thoughts they made a wide detour and hurried on.

But about a hundred yards farther on, the hens met two pairs of boots which danced menacingly about the road, while voices thundered, “Chok-chok-chok.” The hens turned back. The odds were too heavy⁠—devils before and devils behind. How can hens die better than facing fearful odds? Almost any way⁠—much better⁠—thought the hens. Tatiana, close on their tails⁠—for the hens were getting tired⁠—saw for a moment only the boots of the approaching strangers shuffling helpfully in front of the hens. Then she managed to seize one hen by the wing and snatch it to her bosom in a storm of flying feathers and dying yawps. The other hens rushed round in circles. They were caught by the strangers.

Tatiana had an impression of clumsy size in the man nearest to her, but she hardly saw his face because at that moment all the sky became full of birds, keeping a vast rendezvous in the sky. Thousands and thousands of birds decided at that moment to fly back to their lost summer; thousands and thousands of them merged into a great giddiness against the blue⁠—a wind for the sight. Their thousands of twitterings and whisperings ran together into one wide shrill sibilance; the rustlings of their countless wings were smoothed into an inimitable breathing. It was impossible for even Tatiana to think thoughts into such a multitude; it seemed they must fly in a kind of democratic ecstasy or trance, they must think with a multiple me, an ego spread thinly over the whole sky like butter on bread.

Tatiana, dazzled and giddy, watching the birds, heard one of the strangers talking what seemed to her to be English, and in the midst of the unknown words she caught her own family name. She looked then at the two men with the shocked, half-insulted puckered look with which she instinctively met any approach⁠—a look of, “Sir, pray unhand me.” She saw Wilfred Chew’s gold tooth. Where had she seen that strange thing before? Of Seryozha she only saw that his eyelids were very much tucked in under the brow bones, and that his hair was bleached and rough.

Seryozha saw very much more of Tatiana than she saw of him. A feeling of quick interest seemed now to establish itself in his mind with the familiarity of an old feeling, though he had not realized that he had paid much attention to the talk of either Alexander Weber or Wilfred Chew. She was a little too odd-looking for his rather childish taste; her face was too white, her hair too dark a red, her eyes too light and wide. Yet he felt instantly in touch with a new and manly experience; the expression of her face, puckered, he thought, against the sun⁠—though really it was against himself⁠—seemed to be laughing and young, but laughing through a mist. There was something in her eyes that reminded him of his father’s blindness⁠—or, he thought, of that queer glare in the moon’s face that gave him, on a clear night, that sense of inexplicable hunger. She was bowed a little on one side to hold the horrified chicken under her arm; she looked like a child trying to hide a forbidden toy, bending askew, alert to run. There was a just visible twitching of the muscles under the soft bluish skin below her eyes. This still creature could move, then; there was a flutter in this stone.

“This, Saggay Saggayitch,” said Wilfred Chew (who had, you see, made an advance in intimacy), “this is Miss Tatiana Ostapenko whom I mentioned to you once or twice before. She, unfortunately, in common with the rest of her family, speaks no English, but I believe she will remember that we had the mutual pleasure of meeting, some time ago, when I called on her father with Sir Theo Mustard. Kindly recall this to her mind in Russian.”

Seryozha at once withdrew his eyes from Tatiana, since he was about to address her. He looked at a stone on the ground, at the vanishing cloud of birds. “This Chinese fellow says you know him,” he mumbled.

“I remember,” said Tatiana, remembering suddenly. “He came in a motorcar with an imbecile English lord.”

“She remembers, does she not?” said Wilfred, complacently. “I thought she would. I was right.”

It was impossible for Tatiana to carry three hens under two arms. She carried one, Seryozha carried the other two. Tatiana walked a step in front⁠—she was never quite with anyone. Seryozha did not look at her. He slouched along, looking at his shoes⁠—the toe of one of which was completely worn away⁠—looking down at the hens. The hens were looking at each other across his lower chest with an unexpectedly calm expression. Seryozha, who suddenly felt much cleverer than usual, remembered another English idiom. “Look,” he said to Wilfred, “Mrs. Hen say, ‘Keep stiff upper beak, sister.’ ”

He swung along, pleased with his wit, looking at everything except Tatiana. Nobody said anything else.

But just as they passed the village tree, emptied now of its birds, Tatiana looked up and, with one little dancing step, broke the rhythm of their silent walk. And Seryozha looked at her then, looked at her straight young back, her headkerchief, which had slipped back to her nape, looked at the clothes and trifles that encased her⁠—the comb that held her red hair, the faded blouse, the full, uneven cotton skirt, her brown bare legs, her feet shod with cloth shoes. He saw these things clinging to her slim dancing body⁠—this rustling cloud of faded cotton swinging round her body. She didn’t know that little tape was showing at her neck he thought gently. She was suddenly real to him, because he could imagine the homely habit by which she would put on those touching clothes⁠—a comb here, a button there, and then a look in the mirror to see, anxiously, if everything was pleasant and decent. That little tape, the day-worn look of the hem of her skirt, the dust on her blunt Chinese shoes, humbled her charmingly in his sight. He strutted behind her; the hens seesawed under his arms, sharing involuntarily in his swagger.