VIII
Pavel Ostapenko lifted his dripping face from the washing-basin and looked out of the window, blinking his staring eyes. Two unknown young men with Tatiana—no, on second thoughts, one, for the second was a Chinese. “Funny,” thought Pavel. “I seem to have seen them both before.” “Varitchka,” he called hoarsely to his wife in the next room, “Where have we seen these young men before?”
“What, more young men … ?” moaned Varvara. She looked between the flowers in the window at Seryozha and Wilfred. Seryozha was squatting down, launching the hens into freedom, as though they were little ships. Like little ships in full sail they sprang away from him with wings out and bowsprit necks craning. Tatiana, watching them, had a simple hen’s relief written upon her face. Her fingers fluttered like rudimentary wings.
“The Chinese,” said Varvara, “is the man who came in once, with an Englishman and a French valet, when their car broke down. We gave them tea, you remember. We could only talk to them through the valet. I remember the Chinese because of his one gold tooth. That Russian lad is a stranger to me. So he is to you, Pavlik. You are muddled today. How could you ever have seen him before without me?”
“Yes, I have. His face is absolutely familiar. It is something about that line from jaw to ear; something, too, about his eyes—the lids so deeply tucked in. Who can it be?” He turned Seryozha’s face about in his memory as one turns an unopened letter, testing one’s instinct, yet refusing to prove it by a simple practical act.
“I have it,” said Pavel. “That boy is exactly like my sister’s husband’s cousin, Sergei Dmitrivitch Malinin. He had those eyes and that carriage of the head, exactly. I knew him when I was a child and he was this lad’s age. I may have met him once or twice later, too. He was in my brother-in-law’s business in Moscow. This boy’s height and build and coloring are all quite unlike—yet the eyes and the jaw. … I never saw such a likeness. Sergei Dmitrivitch was a silly lad, I see now, but I thought a lot of him then, because he could move his scalp and his ears by themselves—his hair slipped all of a piece right back, like this. Ah, tschah! I can’t do it. … How well I remember. … I used to say, ‘Wobble your hair, Seryozha,’ and he always did it for me. I think he was flattered by my admiration of his skill.”
“Your cousin Sergei Dmitrivitch,” said Varvara, assent dawning in her face. “The man who said that the seat of the soul was in the nape of the neck? He came to supper with us, in Moscow, soon after we were married. It must be twenty-five years ago. I have never forgotten the way he fingered the back of his neck as he talked, as if he were encouraging his soul. Yes,” she said, leaning tensely between the fuchsias in the window, “I can see what you mean about the eyes of this boy. But it must be imagination, Pavlik.”
Tatiana came in. She felt almost as if she had created Seryozha; it was quite important to her that her parents should approve of this new Russian that she and her hens had conjured out of empty air on a Korean trail where no new Russian had been heard of before. Russians in Far Eastern villages are so well used to living in watertight communities that they forget there are such things as strangers of their own race.
“A Russian young fellow is here,” said Tatiana. “And a Chinese who says he is the one that came with that imbecile Englishman whom you taught to say Za Vashe zdorovye papasha.”
Pavel was now feeling that exalted feeling that comes just after a drink and just before the reaction. He went to the door sparkling with handsomeness and enthusiasm. Seryozha, in the yard, still showing off a little in case someone might be looking out of the window, was making his dog jump over an upraised stick.
“Come in! Come in! Come in!” shouted Pavel Ostapenko. “It is seldom we meet strangers of our race—seldom indeed that we have the pleasure of—”
Wilfred Chew pushed in front of Seryozha and shook one of Pavel’s two generous outstretched hands. “You will remember me, I feel sure, Mr. Ostapenko,” he said in English. “I had the mutual pleasure of calling here with a gentleman called Sir Theo Mustard, of Leeds, England, about a month ago. And now I introduce another gentleman—”
Pavel laughed breezily. “Tell your friend,” he said in Russian to Seryozha, “that I can’t speak or understand English. I can understand it written down, because I have to depend for news on the English newspapers, but spoken it means nothing to me.” As usual, his pleased voice made this ignorance sound like a virtue or a cleverness. The spontaneous reply to the tone of Pavel’s voice explaining one of his shortcomings would have been, “Well, well—I congratulate you. …”
“Where do you come from, my dear sir, and may I know your name?”
“We come from Chi-tao-kou,” mumbled Seryozha, feeling too large for the door as he was drawn in. Wilfred Chew, coming across the sitting-room between the two big Russians, looked like a coconut palm between two oaks.
Then Pavel said, “Do you know my cousin, Sergei Dmitrivitch Malinin?”
“We know him,” said Seryozha, with the young boor’s natural instinct to begin by being disobliging in the giving of information. He added to Wilfred in English, “They speak, do I know my own papa?”
This was the kind of joke that appealed to Wilfred. That someone else should not know something that he himself knew, seemed to him essentially flattering and amusing. (One notices the same ready sense of simple fun in a rustic, directing a stranger through his village—“Turn by Winkler’s Corner. … What, you don’t know Winkler’s Corner where Mrs. Thompson’s mare fell down dead last year? Well, it’s opposite the Glebe Field. … For goodness’ sakes, you don’t know that, either?” etc., etc.) Wilfred Chew laughed with delighted hissings, because these simple Ostapenkos did not know that Seryozha was his father’s son.
Pavel was baffled by Seryozha’s uncommunicative manner. “Is Sergei Dmitrivitch in good health?” he asked, though he really wanted to say: “What’s the matter? Is my old cousin dead or has he turned you out of doors, young man?”
“He is in good health,” said Seryozha, and added, indifferently, “He is my father.”
“Well, well!” shouted Pavel, leaping up and clapping his hands about Seryozha’s shoulders. “My dear, dear boy, you don’t know what it means to us in our exile to have a kinsman walking in like this. We haven’t heard anything of any of our kin since the revolution, and though your father and I are only distant cousins, I used to have the greatest admiration for him. Can he still move his ears and the hair on the top of his head?”
“He has no hair to move, now,” said Seryozha. “And he isn’t merry enough to do that kind of thing now. He is blind.”
“Blind!” Pavel’s emotions, always a little exaggerated by the excitement of a drink just over or that of a drink to come, at once materialized in the form of a tear in each eye. “Ah, poor man! poor man! Blind! … I am very tenderhearted. Excuse me.”
“Explain me what he is saying,” said Wilfred, anxiously. But there was no time, for Pavel went on:
“Blindness—the most terrible of all afflictions, especially to a man of your father’s sturdy independence of character. … He used to be so kind to me when I was a young boy and he a youth about town in Moscow. His hair, falling backward, looked like an accident. Lord! How I used to laugh! And now he is blind. Ah, how carefree children are … how little they know. …”
His beautiful deep voice, uttering these sad words, seemed to bring to the minds of all three Ostapenkos the unearthly and tragic glamour of a remembered Ostapenko childhood. Egoists always have unhappy childhoods, and always look back on them in an agony of rapture and emotion. The eyes of both Varvara and Tatiana were wet at the thought of the laughter of little Ostapenkos, unconscious of a threatened doom.
“They are all crying,” said Wilfred, feverishly. “Explain me, please, Saggay Saggayitch, what is being said.”
“It is curious how all members of our family—mine and no doubt yours, Sergei Sergeievitch—” Pavel included Seryozha’s family as a polite afterthought, “are haunted by this sense of doom—this atmosphere of tragedy—from birth till death, and always a tragically sudden death, mind you. A hard-drinking, hard-riding, passionate, gloomy, sensitive, tragic breed. …” He rolled these delicious words in his throat, drew himself up to his full splendid height, and glared at Seryozha, as though scorching into his young kinsman’s intelligence the baneful splendor of his connection with the tragic Ostapenkos. “This air of doom—your father’s blindness is a fearful example of it—seems to affect even those who come in contact with us. My daughter’s betrothed, Alexander Petrovitch Weber—By the way, were you still at Chi-tao-kou when that tragedy culminated?”
“What tragedy? You mean when Alexander Petrovitch lost his papers?”
“He lost his life,” said Pavel. “He cut his throat.”
Seryozha caught his breath and looked at Tatiana. There seemed to him to be no spontaneous connection between this live young woman and that dead young man. For he had an extravagant respect for life; unconsciously, he enshrined it as a holiness. The power of movement, the sight of movement, and the feeling of movement were his trinity.
Tatiana rubbed her hands slowly together and passed the tip of her tongue across her lips, looking here and there, but not at Seryozha.
“It is certainly a curse,” boomed Pavel, standing swinging his weight from one foot to the other, almost as though he were dancing. “It is part of the family curse which you and we, as kinsmen, share. Tanya has had seven admirers, and all have felt the force of the family doom. We are certainly accursed. … If you were not a cousin of ours—and thus involved in any case—I would advise you to keep away from us, young man. Ostapenkos affect all who approach them.”
“Kindly explain what he is saying, Saggay Saggayitch,” twittered Wilfred.
“That case of champagne, Varitchka my dear,” said Pavel, “may be said to have been long waiting to be opened in honor of a kinsman.”
Varvara, frowning with excitement, went out of the room, and as she passed Seryozha she said in a low voice to him, “Sergei Sergeievitch—you mustn’t judge her by love.”
Seryozha turned quickly and looked after her, gaping. “Well, these are queer birds, these Ostapenkos,” he thought, and had an impulse to step to the door and shout after his hostess, “I don’t intend to.”
“What did Mrs. Ostapenko whisper to you, Saggay Saggayitch?” cried Wilfred, rumpling his thick black hair in a frenzy of thwarted enthusiasm.
“Alexander Petrovitch,” said Pavel, “was my darling future son-in-law—the ideal son-in-law. Sometimes I think, Sergei Sergeievitch, that women exist only to suck the blood out of men. … Excuse me a moment …” He could hear that Varvara was looking in the wrong place for the champagne.
“Please, please, what is he talking about, Saggay Saggayitch?” said Wilfred desperately, as their host went out.
“Oi … about mans … and womans … plenty things,” said Seryozha. He was looking blankly at Tatiana’s reflection in a looking-glass. It was an old dark glass that made everything seem twilit and leaden—even Tatiana’s bright hair.
Tatiana, crouched over something on the table, said, “Have you ever noticed that there are always pictures of spotted deer on all Japanese matchboxes? Sometimes in one attitude, sometimes in another, but always under a little tree. I wonder why.”
Seryozha did not know why, so he only grunted humbly. Wilfred Chew, feeling anxiously that an opportunity for wit or sentiment was being missed, leaned forward, grinning with all his teeth, and said, “Horosho, Miss Ostapenko, horosho horosho. …” Horosho was the only Russian word he knew, and of course it was an enthusiastic and ambiguous one. Poor Wilfred, it was torture for him to be left out of talk.
Pavel came back with the hurried gait of one who has thought of several good things to say while he has been away.
“Women, Sergei Sergeievitch, are like a kind of dry rot in a man’s world,” shouted Pavel, who was suffering from one of the momentary spasms of dislike of women that come to a man who lives alone with devoted women to whom he is reluctantly devoted.
“I must say, I don’t understand this grumbling at things for being things,” said Seryozha, feeling very manly. “You can’t grumble even at a louse for being a louse; only if it pretends to be a beetle—then you can grumble. Or if it bites you, you can grumble at the bite. But bite or no bite, it is what it is. I don’t think women are dry rot, or anything but just women. They do what they were born to do, just as we do and lice do.”
“You are like all young people in these days, cousin, full of contradictory arguments,” said Pavel, genially, without giving attention to a word Seryozha had said. “I’ll tell you a story out of my own experience—a story that always seems to me to typify the mean part women play in men’s affairs. Excuse me a moment while I open this bottle. Tanya, the wire-cutter.”
Tatiana, without rising and without lowering her eyes, which were fixed in a kind of blurred stare on the matchbox on the table, pulled out a drawer close to her. She was for a second obliged to focus her eyes on the contents of the drawer as she selected the wire-cutter and handed it to her father. Then she fixed her blurred, trance-like gaze on her father. He was half turned away from her toward the guests, and she could see the layer of healthy fat at the corner of his jaw, his cheek, the side muscle of his neck, and even his ear, wobbling as he talked. She thought, what an inconceivably over-elaborate use we make of these strips of flesh—our lips, our tongues, our hands, our feet … praying, singing, telling lies, explaining philosophies, opening champagne bottles, making watches and guns, dancing, treading out grapes. … What a complicated destiny for something that is, after all, nothing but meat. … The natural thing for lips to utter is a grunt, thought Tatiana—a kind, calm grunt like Seryozha’s. Yet there was the flesh on the sides of her father’s skull all quivering like a jelly to no purpose, the bones all shaking anxiously with superfluous effort.
Pavel poured out three glasses of champagne for his two guests and himself. Wilfred shook his head vigorously. “I never touch alcohol,” he said. “Its dangers have been so well explained to me by Reverend Mr. Oswald Fawcett. And, Miss Ostapenko, I see, does not touch alcohol, either.”
Pavel hesitated and then poured out half a glass for his daughter. His attention was drawn by this to Wilfred, and he said: “Your friend might be interested in my story too. What a pity that he speaks no civilised language.”
Wilfred, feeling that he was being referred to, bowed excitedly several times.
“About ten years ago,” said Pavel, settling down. “Or wasn’t it ten years ago? Anyway, at the time the Japanese and Americans were at Vladivostok, I happened to be buying ponies in Mongolia. Wherever there is war, Sergei Sergeievitch, somebody will be ready to pay for horses, and horses are my skill. All Ostapenkos have an eye for a horse. Some people have skill in writing poetry, some in starching evening dress shirts. I have skill in horses. Those little Mongolian horses are excellent in their way—the English race them and play polo with them in Shanghai, I believe—and in the war I found it several times worth while to go down into Mongolia, leaving my wife and baby in Vladivostok, and buy direct from the Mongolian breeders. An amusing expedition, that; the Mongol horse-breeders are decent, hospitable men if you treat them fairly, though—God!—they smell! They live in tents and feed you on mutton—mutton—mutton—cooked sour, somehow—nothing but mutton (except that once I found a horsetail in the big family stewpot. Lord! I can tell you I went out and vomited).”
“What is all this about, Saggay Saggayitch?”
“He eat sheep and horse’s tail,” said Seryozha, and poor Wilfred, astounded, fell back in his chair, trying to hook this information on to anything that had gone before.
“At the time I crossed the border into Mongolia, the out-of-the-way districts were hardly affected at all, as yet, by the revolution or its after effects. Once one got away from the railway zone, one was off the track of politics. So when I returned into Siberia, with fifty good ponies, I was surprised to come across a troop of Red cavalry—the offshoots of Boudeny’s activities, I suppose—under the command of a scoundrel called Ivanov.”
“Bolshevik horses,” said Seryozha in English, seeing Wilfred drawing breath to bleat another hopeless appeal.
“Now I, Sergei Sergeievitch, am an unsentimental man without any prejudices. I am always ready to receive new ideas. My skill in horses is my only fixed idea. Perhaps I shall shock you by saying that—at any rate at that time—though I had steered clear of politics my sympathies were rather with the revolution than against it. Twenty years before, my younger brother had been sent to Siberia, as a student, for speaking at a meeting in Moscow. I never heard of him again, and naturally that had made an impression on me that was hostile to the Tsarist regime. I always behaved as a good and cautious subject of the Tsar, of course, still, I was open-minded about a change of government. So that when I found myself, without warning, in a camp of Red soldiers, and was detained, with my four Korean grooms, I was able to face Ivanov without prejudice or panic. ‘General,’ I said, ‘I’m a man of no prejudices. I’m not afraid of you, and I tell you straight out, I can see that most of your horses are worn out and only fit for a merciful bullet, and that half your men don’t know how to put a saddle across a horse properly or ride the beast when saddled.’ Ivanov was astounded at my sangfroid. ‘Hmph!’ he said.”
Pavel’s voice was quite enough to make himself the hero of his story, unaided by the sense of his words. He quoted himself in a voice of noble clarion courage, and Ivanov in a barbarous snarl. The hmph of Ivanov whetted Wilfred’s appetite for explanation to an almost unbearable keenness.
“My goodness gracious! Saggay Saggayitch, what does that mmpp mean?”
“He speak, Bolshevik has bad horses.”
“But this story cannot be all about horses,” wailed Wilfred.
Pavel, however, swept on: “Well, of course, Ivanov could see at once what kind of man I was, and, in a word, he not only promised to buy my horses, but, since he was likely to be in that valley most of the hot weather, employed me, informally, to lick his detachment into shape, both horse and man. It was a job. As a rule, our peasants have what I call ‘horse sense,’ but those louts—my God!—they must have been brought up with newts in a swamp or polar bears on an iceberg. They simply didn’t know which end of a horse was which.”
“I thought you said this story was about women,” said Seryozha, who had been rather touched by Wilfred’s last cry. … He added aside to Wilfred, “He speak still about horse.”
“Wait,” said Pavel, with a breathy laugh. “The women will come—they always do, curse them.” He poured out more champagne. He felt very much alive, as he always felt when he had been more than half drunk and, after a period of irritation and partial sobriety, had begun to drink again. He tingled with a glorious heroism; every muscle, every nerve, every thought felt bright as a sword, after a little hour of rusty eclipse. “They were waiting to be reinforced by some artillery before tackling a stray independent party of White military engineers and miners, in a high mining village in the mountains. The Whites were in a very strong position. The only way up to the village was up a very steep ravine, or in a little dangling gravity trolley on a wire (which had, of course, been cut by Ivanov). The village must have been quite fifteen hundred feet above valley level; you could see it like—like—well, like the gold crown on a tall tooth, if you can imagine it, clamped, one might say, on a tiny peaked plateau. A couple of machine-guns could, and did, easily defend the pass. It was a difficult job for Ivanov, and he was particularly anxious to put it through because Colonel Rodin was said to be in command up there—a colonel of engineers who had given a good deal of trouble up and down that region. The place, too, was a regular magnet to all the miners of White sympathies in those mountains. The only thing Ivanov could do for the present was to stop their valley water supply—an elaborate hydraulic business that fed several of the mines from the river. I remember it being constructed several years before by an American mining engineer. Ivanov, of course, put that out of action, but still they held on, so they must have had mountain streams up there, or pretty big emergency cisterns.”
Wilfred bounced in his chair, performing a little impromptu dance on his buttocks. “What is all this about, please?”
“They stop water-pipe,” said Seryozha, and Wilfred, though profoundly puzzled, was at least relieved that the story had left the subject of horses.
“ ‘My dear Ivanov,’ I said, ‘excuse me, but you simply don’t know the kind of people you’re up against. I know this region; I know these miners; I know dozens of the men in charge of these mines; you’re up against something as stubborn as the mountains themselves, given just these kinds of conditions. They’re adventurers, these miners, and that means they’re individualists, and that again means that in ordinary circumstances every man is for himself—they’re not the “shoulder-to-shoulder” kind, when nothing threatens them; they’d as soon break a man’s nose as shake his hand. Sometimes they’re the sons of political exiles, and sometimes they’ve lived in these mountains so long that they’ve almost forgotten their mother tongue. They don’t sing pretty songs about Holy Russia, or go, with clean faces, to church on Sunday. But once something does happen to bring them together (and you may depend on it, Stepan Rodin knows how to handle them), well, I tell you they’ll never give in. You know what Rodin is—people say he’s the son of a priest, you know, and only the adopted son of old Rodin, and I bet he’s made a holy war of this. … What’s more, I’ll bet they’ve got a priest in that village, praying night and day while we sit here, to a little packed church. They’ve got their women and children to defend up there, too, and that always makes a difference. Once these fellows remember God—once they feel they’ve got God behind them—well,’ I said (and it was a funny thing to say to a Red anarchist like Ivanov), ‘God is behind them. …’ You see, Sergei Sergeievitch, I remembered I was a religious man myself. Political reform is one thing, but I was sick of the blasphemy and filthy twaddle in that camp. I don’t see why you can’t set up an enlightened government and still worship God. Well, that’s what I said, anyway—and it was disastrous for me.”
The good-natured Seryozha realized that this part of the story would certainly interest the student from the Wesleyan Academy. “In such high mountains they are praying to God, he speak,” said Seryozha, and was rewarded by Wilfred’s look of bland, if blank, gratification. Wilfred’s glass of champagne was strangely empty. Wrapt away in his emotional prison, he had been absently sipping his wine all this time, for lack of anything better to do with his lips. It was at this point that Wilfred was inspired to get out his notebook and his fountain pen and begin to write in English in his insipid clerkly hand. The plot of Pavel’s story as it filtered through to Wilfred, was so very exiguous as hardly to be able to engage even the most optimistic attention, and Wilfred had thought of another way to reestablish himself in the center of the stage. Hardly had he put pen to tooth when, as by a miracle, his glass was full again. He wrote earnestly on, sipping his wine, sucking his pen, writing again, and only rarely lifting up his voice to inquire affably after the progress of the story.
Seryozha was getting bored. He looked at Tatiana across the stream of her father’s voice that ran between them. She seemed to be getting smaller and smaller; she was sinking lower and lower in her chair. She was really trying to be unobtrusive—to be part of the twilight—because if her father should notice her, she was likely to be sent to help her mother and Katya in the kitchen. Tatiana, when still, was very indolent, afraid to break a spell of peace; when moving, she moved ardently, she danced, she ran. Now she hardly breathed. She listened to the story, lending her faint changes of expression to the changing phases of the story—frowning for Ivanov, tossing her head for Rodin, assuming a delicate insolence for her father’s defiances. She and Seryozha, all the time, looked at each other across the river of talk with eyes endowed by wine with a sort of magnifying intensity of sight.
Pavel was opening a third bottle of champagne, but he did not stop talking. “What I said made Ivanov uncontrollably angry. I’ve often thought since that he must once have been a man of simple orthodoxy, before Bolshevik propaganda filled his stupid mind. That would account for his anger at what I said; one is always more annoyed by hearing something one might once have said oneself. He said a good many things about my infecting his sound men with outworn superstitions—treason to the Soviet—you know the kind of thing … and then he literally kicked me out of camp—unarmed—without a kopek. He’d got my horses, mind you, and not a penny did he pay for them, the dirty scoundrel. You can carry a message to your friends, sitting trusting in their divine cockalorum on that mountain top,’ he shouted. ‘You can tell them that with the hot weather coming on and their water supply in my hands, they’d find it wisest to change sides. … You go there and tell them that and stay there,’ he said. ‘Perhaps I’ll pay you your money when you bring them all down, all with your tongues hanging out, ready to lick our hands for a drink. …’ I really think he wanted me to carry that message—that’s why he let me go. Anyway, I went. I couldn’t do anything else. His men had taken all my money and papers and my grooms had disappeared. I just thrust my chest out and walked up the pass—as well as I could for a kick one of the dirty brutes had given me on the ankle. The defenders wouldn’t waste their machine-gun ammunition on one lame man. I shouted, ‘Don’t shoot,’ and waved my arms, and they let me come. They searched me, and then I had a talk with Rodin. Would you believe it? there were some quite good-looking women in the village—Russian refugee women, I mean, not the miners’ wives—refugees who’d drifted there in Rodin’s wake, I suppose. … Everything was upside down in those days. My God! they were hard up for water. There was a little cascade in the ravine, but it was almost dried up, and their cisterns were almost empty. No likelihood of rain, either, and, of course, not a drop coming up from the valley. Ivanov had seen to that. People were allowed to drink by measure. I saw a woman faint in the street, the day I got there, and next day a young fellow had a kind of fit. I liked Rodin, and he saw at once what kind of man I was. We found we had friends in common. I was with him when a group of men—the village storekeeper, the publican, a couple of mine agents, and some such outsiders, came and asked him to give up the village or take his soldiers somewhere else. ‘Better give up than die of thirst,’ they said. ‘We’ll have to give up some time, at this rate. You said we were to trust in God, but he doesn’t send us water, so it couldn’t be much worse for us if we put our trust in Red Ivanov.’ Rodin said, ‘Wait five days’—just like that—‘wait five days.’ He said it so confidently and so mysteriously that the deputation thought he’d got some idea up his sleeve. When they’d gone I said, ‘My dear Colonel, what in the world do you expect will happen in five days? The Second Advent?’ ‘Oh, anything may happen,’ he said. ‘I never look more than four days ahead; the fifth day is the one I can’t see, so I always expect a good deal of it.’ And that day, while he and I were talking, Julia Arcadievna sent to ask Rodin to spare her a few minutes. She was the widow of a man who’d died of sunstroke during the retreat across Siberia, and there she was drifting east with the refugees, and had somehow drifted here—one never knew where people would turn up in those days—but she was absolutely virtuous, my dear Sergei Sergeievitch, absolutely virtuous.”
Seryozha shifted in his chair, his big limbs tired of stillness. He became aware that a certain activity in the slowly spinning room was to be identified as the appearance of dinner. He saw the bottles fly upward to allow for the laying of the cloth and then descend again, upright, like angels. He saw blue plates settling like leaves upon the cloth. The movements of Varvara and the servant were like a little controlled wind making all these orderly displacements.
“What does dobbri-dyet-il-niar genstchina mean?” asked Wilfred, but not in the manner of one who really wants very much to know. His notebook, like the bottles and glasses, had been mysteriously snatched to heaven, a white cloud of cloth filled his sight, and now the notebook alighted again, ready for use, with a full glass of champagne beside it.
Seryozha could not remember the English words for a virtuous woman. “Nyet singing girl,” he said, uncertainly.
Katya, the servant, leaning over Pavel with a plate, said: “Have you heard the news, Varvara Alexeievna? Piotr Gavrilovitch has joined the Chinese army. He wrote from Mukden yesterday. I heard it from Olga Ivanovna’s niece’s woman.”
Pavel glanced with vindictiveness at his daughter. “Ha, Tanya! News about your Petya. That disposes of another of them, doesn’t it? Tanya, you are listening to my story, aren’t you?” He went on: “Well, Sergei Sergeievitch, when this virtuous woman saw Rodin, she said, ‘Stepan Stepanovitch, what have you said? Five days? You have given God five days to save us in. What blasphemy to set such a limit. If faith can sustain us for five days, why not five hundred? Surely we can wait on God’s will for longer than five days.’ ‘There’s such a thing as being too thirsty to trust in God,’ said Rodin. ‘There’s such a thing as having too dry a throat to pray with. Not for people like you and me, Julia Arcadievna, but for the ordinary ruck. Even five days is something. If you pray for us, perhaps something will happen to help us, even in five days.’ He had a great admiration for Julia Arcadievna. I always say myself that women are in the way when there’s fighting to be done. If it hadn’t been for all those women and children, we could have given up our position and tried our luck against Ivanov’s men in the valley. They outnumbered us, of course, but they were a poor lot, as I knew. Still, Julia Arcadievna was a damned handsome woman, and intelligent, too. She said: ‘I’ve got an idea. I won’t tell you what it is. If it fails, nobody but me loses anything. So don’t ask me any questions, but come to the head of the pass tonight, Stepan Stepanovitch, and wish me luck.’ ‘Why, where will you be going?’ ‘Don’t ask questions, I tell you. I’ve always thought I was born to be a spy.’ Would you believe it, Rodin thought so much of that woman, he let her go. He even told me he had great faith in her. It’s wonderful how good looks in women go to men’s heads. Wonderful,” he repeated in a different and savage tone, turning his white glare on his daughter.
“Rodin was a curious fellow—a fine-looking fellow, but quite bald,” went on Pavel, stroking his own thick auburn hair, glad to establish superiority over the hero he spoke of. “Plenty of hair on his upper lip, but none on his head. He and I went to the sandbag barricade at the top of the pass that evening—for by that time he trusted me absolutely, and certainly it wasn’t likely I should hold any more with these revolutionaries after they’d behaved like that over my horses. At sunset Julia Arcadievna, with her little Korean maid carrying a parcel, came mincing down the pass. Good lord!—what a change! She’d put aside all her widow’s blacks and there she was in a sandy-colored Paris-looking frock with red embroidery, and no hat or veil to hide her pretty yellow hair. She looked stunning. She’d rouged up her lips and blacked her eyes a little. She’d a way of opening her eyes suddenly very wide as she looked at you. … ‘Let your gunners and sentries know I shall be coming back in four days, Stepan Stepanovitch,’ she said. So she went. She went in the evening, I suppose so that she could pretend to Ivanov’s men that she’d slipped away unseen down the pass.”
“Well, did she come back?” asked Seryozha. The widow, Julia Arcadievna, sounded to him almost too mature to be interesting. He imagined a brazen hard-bosomed blonde of thirty—almost an aunt’s age. Seryozha could just remember meeting his mother’s sister in Russia before the revolution, and women admired by older men always ever since appeared in his mind’s sight as shrill, plump, vivacious old women of twenty-nine or so.
“Yes, she came back,” said Pavel, looking almost alarmed at the climax of his story. “She came back on the evening of the fourth day, with a parcel.”
“Well … she went away with a parcel didn’t she?” said Seryozha.
“Yes … but this was a different parcel—bigger and heavier. She opened it in the presence of Rodin and me and a lot of the men, on the terrace looking over the valley. It was wrapped up in an ordinary army blanket. It was Ivanov’s head.”
Seryozha snorted with surprise. “Ivanov’s head! How had she killed him?”
“Tschah! I leave you to imagine. In a woman’s way, of course. Poor devil! Playing on his manhood. That’s a woman’s way, Sergei Sergeievitch. And what do you think she told Rodin and me? That she hadn’t actually slept with Ivanov. She hadn’t even given the poor beast that satisfaction. Lord! it was a disgusting thing to see her holding up that head—all bloody it was—with both hands, smiling a smug, rouged, womanly smile.”
“Well, what happened? I suppose the revolution didn’t stop for lack of Ivanov’s head,” said Seryozha, prosaically.
“No, but the troop moved off in the dawn of the next day. I watched them go—little lolloping specks in loose formation. I knew why, of course—they were nothing but raw louts; only Ivanov held them together; they were lost without him. Some of our miners went out along the mountains and sniped them when they came to the narrow head of the valley. They even got back some of my horses.”
Varvara watched her husband. Only she knew how little of his story was true, and she did not mind. On the contrary, the story seemed to her a wonderful and brilliant fruit to have grown out of the seed of a little drab anecdote about a miner’s Yakut woman who went out spying. Nobody was like Pavel, thought Varvara. He was her contribution to the sum of things—and, through him, Tatiana. She made no other contribution, and therefore had no other return. She sat self-contained, contributing no smile, no wit, no generosity, no money, no tyranny, no song—none of those forms of invested capital which alone pay dividends of friendship, fear, gratitude, love, or power. Nothing comes to the heart that hasn’t first gone from it; Varvara knew that. But she didn’t mind, because Pavel and Tatiana were her songs, and the voices of Pavel and Tatiana the returning echoes of her songs.
“Is this the end of the story?” asked Wilfred, noticing a silence, in spite of a slight fogginess of perception.
“Yist. She cutted off Bolshevik head.”
“Good!” said Wilfred, feeling himself at last in possession of the facts. “Horosho, horosho,” he added, nodding brightly to Pavel.
“Did you listen to my story, Tanya?” asked Pavel, suddenly turning on his daughter.
“Yes, papasha.”
“A good one, wasn’t it?”
“Good, but perhaps a little long,” said Tatiana’s mother, hastily.
“I’m glad, at least, she kept herself clean of him,” said Tatiana between trembling lips.
“What?” roared Pavel.
The usually restrained Varvara suddenly made a great noise, clapping her hands, rapping the table, speaking in a shrill brisk voice: “Do you know what we are going to have for dinner? A gosling—a gosling in honor of our young cousin.” She looked desperately at her husband and spoke more loudly still: “Oh, so good—you’ll never guess how good, Pavlik! … You’ve all been talking so long, you men, that Katya and I had plenty of time to roast it to a turn. A gosling—a gosling—oh so good!” She banged the table for her husband’s attention.
“What is she saying?” asked Wilfred, startled.
“She speak, we bite goose for dinner.”
“My goodness gracious!” breathed Wilfred. “I thought she was announcing some calamity. So loud.” He looked ruefully at his notebook, for the sudden noise had caused his shocked hand to make a little blot in the middle of one page of his neat writing.
Pavel, though his impulse of anger was a little softened by the goose, would not allow his attention to be entirely distracted by his wife’s irrelevance. “Very well done, Varitchka. A gosling. Very good. But, Tanya—what was your comment on my story?”
Tatiana was silent. “Tanya made no comment,” said Varvara.
Yet in Seryozha’s hearing was ringing quite clearly the comment that Tatiana had made. I’m glad, at least, she kept herself clean of him.
What a curious word—“clean”—he thought, and his thoughts went round and round it in a slow spin. Clean—clean—clean … women clean of men—men clean of women. He was young enough to be very impressionable by words, and the word “clean” did not strike him as being a euphemism for something much less attractive. On the contrary, in his present thin-spun, rarefied, wine-blessed mood, it seemed to him to express an ideal of some sort. That was the word that fitted his own rare moon-washed feeling—that hunger in the presence of quietness and color for something that would not appease the demands of either stomach, brain, or sex. Poor Seryozha! He almost recognized that hunger of his at that moment, though he could give it no other word than “clean.” It was his body hungering to be free of talk and understanding—hungering to be a bit of world, a blade of grass, a tiger—anything that was not dirtied by talk and thought. Everything between men and women was dirty—except one thing. “That girl—one could eat that girl, and remain clean,” thought Seryozha.
He was obsessed with the image of hunger, since the gosling had been mentioned.
“Tanya,” said Varvara, clearing away the zakuska, “come and help me dish up the goose.”
The two women went to the door. As Tatiana passed Seryozha, he expected her to smile at him; he felt so sure that an understanding had been established between them, that she would be grateful to him for so keenly appreciating her word “clean.” But she did not smile at all. She walked past him, meeting his eager eyes without a change of expression, grave, blank, as though thinking of something else. And so strange was the chill that this blank look gave him, that his memory, shocked, threw back to the context of her remark, and he knew instantly that he had entirely misunderstood her words. She kept herself clean of him.
By clean she meant cold, dead—all life was dirty to her. Her ideal was coldness. No tiger of life could hunger for that white unsmiling ghost. Seryozha thought, “If I had her, she’d melt like ice in my arms—she’d be clean of me, then.” The word cold occurred to him many times—cold—cold—cold—before he realized what it suggested to him, and then he got up, a little unsteadily, and followed mother and daughter toward the kitchen. In the passage he paused beside where his pack of possessions hung on a peg. As he unstrapped the buckle of the pack he heard Wilfred, in the sitting-room, begin to entertain Pavel Ostapenko in a bright voice. Wilfred was not sober enough to mind that his host did not understand a word that he was saying; his automatic reaction to the silence was an impulse to emit information. Pavel was not sober enough to mind not understanding, and in any case he had something else to think of.
“The Japanese police, Mr. Ozz …” said Wilfred, “show themselves indeed marticrats—(marticrats? Yes, mautonets)—to travelers crossing the border, and at one point I really began to think, I really began to think that I really began to think—oh, well, Mr. Ozzabanko, you know all that without really beginning to think—I mean, without my telling you. But being a barrister-at-law of the Middle Temple, London, I could say to them. … And the Diamond Mountains—Kongo-san—though honeysuckled with soup—I mean soupstition—su‑per‑stit‑ion—Saggay Saggayitch said ‘Buddhanok on every up-look,’ twelve thousand peaks, you know, but not really more than—well—what would be a conservatory estimate?” He began to think very deeply.
Seryozha in the passage took out of his pack the little smelly package that contained the heart, gall, and liver of the fish he had caught at Pa-tao-kou. It was in a perfectly disgusting condition, yet to Seryozha the smell was a smell of fate and magic; everything that Wilfred had said about it seemed to fit the circumstances so well. Blindness. Woman’s coldness. Real magic indeed. The thing must have other powers besides its powerful smell. With his clasp-knife he cut a small piece from the heart and another small piece from the liver, and then, wrapping the rest in its paper, he replaced it in his pack. The two small flabby chunks he concealed in his hand and, striding into the kitchen, dropped them in the fire.
“What a curious smell!” said Varvara at once. Tatiana, pouring sauce into a bowl on the table, made no comment. She held her body too upright—almost bent a little backward; her head was high and she was looking down over her pale cheeks at the sauce as though she despised it. Really she was thinking of Seryozha’s skin. As he had stood for a second at the fireplace, she had noticed that the skin at the back of his neck was not pitted or pimpled like Sasha’s or Petya’s. This meant a great deal to her. His neck was as neat as the fur of a dog, or the charming behind of a well-kept horse, she thought.
The servant, Katya, seized the dish that bore the gosling in her brawny bare arms and carried it towards the sitting-room. Varvara followed with the vegetables.
Tatiana still stood at the table, but now, instead of looking down at the sauce, she looked sidelong at Seryozha, soberly tightening her lips.
“Why do you look like that, Tatiana Pavlovna?” asked Seryozha, holding the corner of the table, for he felt extremely dizzy.
Tatiana was silent for an unexpectedly long second, and then, “O Christ!” she exclaimed in a high sudden voice. “Can I not even look like myself without being asked questions—without surprising somebody, offending somebody, hurting somebody’s feelings, making somebody reproach me? Even if I do nothing—good or bad—only just be—my being’s not allowed.”
“Who doesn’t allow it?” asked Seryozha, swaying over the table toward her, feeling very uneasy.
“You—papa—mamma—Petya—Sasha. Why do you look like that, Tanya? Why do you do like that, Tanya? Why are you alive in that way, Tanya? Why aren’t you alive in this way, Tanya? What can I do less than just be born, breathe, and at last die? I’m not attacking, not pretending … I just am. I only ask to leave you all alone and be left alone.”
“Oh, not be left alone, surely!” exclaimed Seryozha, shocked to imagine such a small creature growing old alone.
“No, not to be left alone any more than a common sparrow is left alone because it is a sparrow,” said Tatiana, violently. “Just to be allowed to walk on the earth in my natural way, as a sparrow is allowed to fly in the air. No bird cuts its throat for the sake of another bird. No father bird nags at his egg for just lying quiet in the nest.”
They both smiled for a second or two at this.
“I could leave you alone,” said Seryozha. “God knows it’s a thing I ought to understand. I only want things to walk about and fly about by themselves. … I like my dog to go on laughing at his own jokes without me. … What am I saying? I’d never cut my throat for anybody, Tatiana Pavlovna.”
“Come, children, come,” called Varvara from the sitting-room.
But as Tatiana and Seryozha, carrying plates and sauce, joined their elders, Pavel said, “Here’s this snake of a daughter of mine … here’s this virtuous murderous heroine coming back with the head of a new murdered lover in her hands. Here’s this—”
“Pavlik! Pavlik! Think! Think!” said Varvara, in a low violent voice.
“Come, everybody,” she added, clapping her hands with a relapse into her unnatural shrill vivacity. “Gosling to eat—good gosling to eat. Come and eat gosling.”
“I won’t eat,” said Seryozha, suddenly seizing the end of the table and bending, with an insolent but tremulous grin, toward his host and hostess—“I won’t eat until you say I can marry Tanya. Please, Mr. Chew, help me. Oh, but, damn it, he can’t speak the language! Well, there it is. … Pavel Nicholaievitch, may I marry your daughter?”
“God bless you, why not?” shouted Pavel. “I’ve told you the truth once and I’ll tell it to you again. She’s been betrothed seven times and all seven men are dead—dead, aren’t they, Tanya? Or if not all, what do you care? She kills lovers for pleasure. She bites them when they kiss her. She slits their throats when they touch her. She cuts off their heads when—”
“Pavlik! Pavlik!” said Varvara. “Think! You are talking nonsense.”
“Well, you can’t say I haven’t told you the truth, young man. My daughter’s a snake. If you want a snake for a wife—God bless you, boy, you can follow the rest. I’ll dig your grave in my meadow tomorrow. Nevertheless, for the present, be merry …”
“I won’t eat till it’s all properly arranged and signed,” cried Seryozha, bravely, though his heart sank. This was the first transaction he had ever made all by himself, and he felt dimly that it was not being made in the grown-up, businesslike way he would have wished to boast of to his mother. “Mr. Chew, listen. Ah, tschah! Mr. Chew is asleep!”
For Wilfred, overcome by the wine, sat forward, his body telescoped upon itself, his elbows wide, his hands clasped upon his plate, his chin on his hands. His eyes had been shut, but now, as he heard his name, he opened them and rolled them roguishly at Seryozha. He opened his mouth, too, and waved his tongue, but no words came forth. He tapped his notebook with an idiotic significance.
There was a pause. Varvara looked nervously at her speechless guest. Pavel did not seem to notice Mr. Chew’s unusual demeanor, but he drew the notebook from beneath his guest’s plate and focused his frowning eyes on it at arm’s-length, inviting Seryozha to read over his shoulder. With care, Pavel, who was accustomed to reading English newspapers, could read what Wilfred had written. It was this:
This indenture made the between Sergei Sergeievitch Malinin of Chi-tao-kou in the Province of Kirin Manchuria timber worker (hereinafter called the husband which expression shall unless the context otherwise determine herein include his heirs executors administrators and assigns) of the first part Tatiana Pavlovna Ostapenko of Mi-san Korea Spinster (hereinafter called the wife which expression shall unless the context otherwise determine herein include her heirs executors administrators and assigns) of the second part Wilfred Chew (Ch’u Wei-Fu) of the Middle Temple London England Barrister-at-Law (hereinafter called the Agent which expression shall unless the context otherwise determine include his heirs executors administrators and assigns) of the third part and Pavel Nicholaievitch Ostapenko of Mi-san in Korea Equitable Merchant (hereinafter described as the settlor which expression shall unless the context otherwise determine herein include his heirs executors administrators and assigns) of the fourth part whereas a marriage is intended shortly to be consummated between the husband and the wife and whereas the said marriage has been arranged so to be consummated as aforesaid at the suggestion and with the assistance of the agent now in consideration of the services rendered and to be rendered (at the desire express or implied of the parties hereto other than the agent) in the premises by the agent this indenture witnesseth that the settlor agrees to pay to the agent on the consummation of such marriage as aforesaid the following sums (that is to say) ¥100 (one hundred Yen) in consideration of his services in arranging the said marriage and ¥50 (fifty Yen) in consideration of professional services in the negotiation preparation and execution of these presents and in consideration of the natural love and affection of the husband for the wife and of divers other good and valuable considerations him hereunto moving and enabling this indenture further witnesseth and it is hereby agreed and declared as follows
The said husband agrees to accept the said wife as his wife and to support her as such in that state of life to which it has pleased God to call her to have and/or to hold to love and/or to cherish until death do her part (note fill in formal parts as respects wife)
The husband further agrees in consideration as aforesaid to settle on the said wife by will or otherwise within a reasonable period of time the sum of ¥250 (two hundred and fifty Yen) at present at his disposal and/or under his control in the Bank of Chosen Seoul.
And in consideration of the love and affection of the said Settlor for the said wife and in further consideration of the natural gratitude of the said settlor to the said husband for offering the said marriage in spite of the 7 (seven) previous unfortunate circumstances the said settlor agrees on the consummation as aforesaid to pay as dowry the sum of ¥2,000 (two thousand Yen) to the said husband
Nothing in this Deed shall disentitle the said agent from receiving any sum of money thereunder or from charging his reasonable professional fees in connection therewith in witness whereof the parties hereto have hereunto set their respective hands and seals the day and year first above written (Note Query add clause re agent performing Wesleyan marriage ceremony query ¥25 fee)
“But I don’t understand,” said Pavel, suddenly realizing that he was drunk. “Have we talked about this before?”
“Not we, but he,” said Seryozha, sheepishly. “He talked of it several times—being a friend of both of us. I took little notice of him, as at that time I didn’t consider myself a marrying man. He’s a good chap, Chew,” added Seryozha, sentimentally. “Of course being a Chinese and a lawyer, he must drive a bargain. But he is a good honest chap. Twice he lent me his blanket, when I was cold after swimming. I shall sign this. I have sworn not to eat until I have signed something, and I am very hungry.” He wrote his name on the paper, his tongue-tip writing in the air above the pen.
“We will not sign it till ,” said Varvara. She could not read the agreement, but she was dubiously watching her husband’s glazed red face.
“Tanya and I will sign it now,” said Pavel, the uncertain lines of his face stiffening all at once to obstinacy. “It’s not every day one gets the chance to have a hero for a son-in-law.”
He splashed his signature under Seryozha’s large blotched name. “Tanya,” he added, putting the pen into his daughter’s hand.
For a moment Tanya wrote with it on the air, as though in a dream. Her father and mother watched her. Seryozha paused childishly, with his mouth full, to watch her. Her lips were set in a little smile. She leaned back in her chair and looked down her cheeks at the paper. Then she wrote her name in tiny letters—Tatiana Pavlovna Ostapenko, and under her name she suddenly drew a little alert picture of a sparrow taking flight.
Her father looked guiltily at the signatures and the drawing. He folded up the paper and put it in his pocket. “Ah, tschah!” he said, as he seized a new bottle of champagne. “It means nothing. We still have tomorrow. … Varitchka, let’s eat your goose.”