The Faraway Bride E-Book

Stella Benson

• Herausgeber: Bu Classics Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2026

Beschreibung

Set against the backdrop of White Russian refugees in China, this retelling of the Book of Tobit explores displacement and the enduring hope of finding home.

Leseprobe

I

Old Sergei walked in front. All the conversation Seryozha had, for the space of fifteen miles, was the expression of his father’s neck. The back of Old Sergei’s neck was a little like a tortoise’s neck, but more speaking. The neck spoke of duty about to be done—rapturously unpleasant duty. It was a nagging, over-articulate neck, but of course Seryozha was so well used to it that he did not think of it as anything except just Father’s Neck. He knew, however, without knowing that he knew, that his father was satisfied to be followed on an unpleasant duty by an unwilling son.

The road returned and returned again to the river, crossing and recrossing it. The road and the river could not part because of the narrowness of the gorge; they could not even find room to run peacefully parallel, but got in each other’s way. It was like the mutual irritation of marriage. But it was beautiful. The sunny side of the gorge was lacquered with flowers; the shadowed side was dark and stormy with color. The grass had an electric sheen on it, in memory of rain. Even Seryozha’s dog had picked a flower by mistake; it was caught in the clasp of its collar, a blue two-winged butterfly of a flower.

Every time Seryozha waded across a ford he sang with excitement. The streaked blue-and-yellow water piled up against his thighs, his strong striding legs were like blunt scissors tearing silk. The great patched cliffs, the hills, the fiery flowers, were all very far away, very still and very alien, as though seen through glass, and Seryozha, singing hoarsely, was isolated in a dizzy world—a tall indomitable young rock in a storm, a little god enclosed in a roaring private universe.

“I am wet,” said Old Sergei, standing bent double on a bank, unrolling his wet trousers. “I am just as wet if I roll up my trousers as if I leave them as they are.”

“Then leave them as they are,” said Seryozha, turning himself round to enjoy the feeling of the warm wind on hot legs through wet trousers.

“Then they will shrink.”

“What of it? You are shrinking yourself,” said his son.

Old Sergei flirted his trousers a little petulantly. It was certainly true that he was shrinking. But he thought rather highly of his trousers; it was so long since he had moved among real trousered men that he thought his looked like real trousers. They were made by Anna, his wife; his hair was cut by Anna, his shoes were adapted by Anna from Chinese cloth shoes. He was a homemade old man.

Seryozha watched, without anxiety, his dog valiantly following him across the stream. The dog rushed with high bounds into the swift water, and, after a little wallowing, lost its footing. The water spun it about, noosed it, and dragged it under, but the dog kept its head while losing its dignity and was able to shape some kind of wild course. It ran around, tail first and upside down, on a mudbank, and rose and shook itself complacently as though the crossing had happened exactly as it had intended. It had, however, lost the little flower out of its collar.

“There are some soldiers,” said Seryozha.

“What of it?” said Old Sergei, with a slight nervous twitch in his voice. “They must be Li’s men, certainly.” But he looked with an anxious shortsighted squint across the river at the soldiers. (Anna, his wife, did not know how to make spectacles.)

The Chinese soldiers, sitting on a hooded Manchurian cart, swung, creaked, and clanked round the opposite bend into the river. The jolt, as the cart flopped from the bank into the stream, threw all the soldiers backward, so that their thin shabby shanks waved in the air. This contretemps spoiled their accuracy in hitting off the ford, and hardly had they regained their seating when the current swept their cart off its wheels. The horses, pulling at a right angle, were its only anchor. The five horses strained and clawed at the submerged boulders; some of them stumbled, but their senior horse—the only one pulling in shafts—its strong shoulders heaving under the high arched Russian yoke, saved the situation. That was what it was paid for. The soldiers all laughed as the bank was reached, but the horses hung their heads, blew their noses, and sighed.

Old Sergei, Seryozha, and the soldiers looked at one another. All the soldiers were dressed in gray cotton uniforms made for bigger men. Why is this, I wonder? The Chinese Army Clothing Department must possess a tailor’s dummy of ideal size. I imagine them sitting at the feet of their utopian wax illusion, busy with their sewing-machines, never looking out-of-doors to see their poor actual champions, stunted and bent and lame, trudging like little skeletons across the mud of China’s devastated fields. A little like the Lady of Shalott—but not, on second thoughts, very.

“Have you a cigarette?” said one soldier. Seryozha had one behind his ear. It had already been partly smoked and there was little left of it except the long cardboard mouthpiece, but the soldiers handed it round eagerly from one to another; they were used to makeshifts.

“Are you English?” asked the corporal, after spitting noisily as if to show that whatever they were they weren’t worth much.

“No, we are White Russians. … We have a letter,” stammered Old Sergei. “We are friends of your general, Li Lien-ching …”

He was much pleased that his sensitive trousers should have been mistaken for English trousers.

All the soldiers summarized his remark one to another, in the Chinese manner. “They are friends of Li Lien-ching. Hao-hao. … They are White Big-noses known to the general. … General Li knows them; they are Big-noses. … They have letters. … It is an old Big-nose and his son who say they are friends of Li Lien-ching. …” In a few minutes they all found that they had mastered these facts, and the corporal held out his hand for General Li’s letter. The reading of the letter took a very long time. It had a pretty red and black border and was additionally beautified by a few bold characters expressing General Li’s trust in Old Sergei’s integrity. The soldiers looked upon it as an education in itself, and several of them committed to memory those characters which were new to them, writing invisible examples in the palms of their hands for one another’s benefit.

“How much did you pay for the buckle of your belt?” the corporal asked Seryozha magisterially.

“One small frog,” replied Seryozha, who spoke Chinese much better than his father, having lived two-thirds of his eighteen years of life in a Chinese village. “I gave another Russian boy one small tame green frog with a red stomach for this buckle.”

“One small frog—he bought his buckle for one frog. … A frog for a buckle. … A buckle for a frog. … The frog was exchanged for a buckle. …” The simple fellows, telling one another the joke, appreciated it more and more. “Ha-ha! … Hao-hao! … A buckle for a frog! … A frog for a buckle. … Ha-ha! … Hao-hao! …”

“Where are you going?” the corporal persisted, hoping against hope that this might elicit another joke—perhaps about frogs again.

“We are going to see if we can help our friends,” said Old Sergei, looking at the soldiers a little doubtfully. “Some White Russian soldiers in the army of your General Li were attacked somewhere near here by Chen’s men, and some were killed and some wounded, we hear. We only heard about it in Chi-tao-kou this morning. We are going to bury our dead.”

“To bury their dead,” said the soldiers one to another, still laughing, since death is among the things that raise a smile in China. “They are going to bury their dead. … Big-noses want to bury Big-noses. … Ha-ha! … Hao-hao! …”

“It is forty li from Chi-tao-kou,” said a soldier. “You must have walked fast. Big-noses have long legs. You can sit on our cart. We are going your way.”

“Is Chen’s army still in the neighborhood?”

“No, there was no army—it was only a small party of Chen’s men that found the Big-noses off their guard. They must be two hundred li away by now.”

Old Sergei and Seryozha sat on the cart, their wet legs dangling over the wheels in a row with the soldiers’ weatherbeaten ankles. The cart staggered along to the tune of a titter of bells and a ripping of whips and a snarling of drivers. The road lost itself among boulders. It became merged for miles with the cascading river bed. The cart never had four wheels on the ground at once. Soldiers’ heads were knocked together; somebody’s shoulder came in violent contact with Old Sergei’s front gums. Seryozha, after wondering for a few minutes whether to be footsore was really worse than to be seatsore, jumped off the cart and stumbled down the heaped, gashed trail.

He walked more quickly than the laboring cart and at the turn of the gorge waited for it. Great ghostly clouds had been bowling up like smoke out of the peaks of the hills. Raindrops fell on Seryozha’s nose—chin—hand—neck—then a wave of rain leapt over the near hill. He stood just inside a deserted and ruined Korean hut, waiting for the cart, watching the rain. The flowery slopes waved under the flying clouds. Far ahead there was a dwindling horizontal strip of calm blue sky strung like a taut cord over the stormy valley.

The mud floor of the hut was strewn with old sacks, straw, rags, broken crocks, and a crumpled brazier. It must be a very poor thing that is discarded as useless by a Korean. Part of one wall had fallen in and the thatch sagged and dripped. A gawky sunflower hung its silly head in the doorway. There was a smell of dirty humanity mixed with the smell of horse and wet grass.

Seryozha stood in the doorway and looked up a windy slope spotted with scrub-oaks and magenta azaleas. Against the outer wall of the shack, near the door, was a Korean oven, balancing a crooked jointed chimney on its shoulder as a juggler might balance a pile of top-hats. The oven’s gaping lips were smeared with cold damp ashes. From behind the oven, across a puddle in the red mud, protruded a dead hand, palm upward.

Seryozha stared at the hand, his mind making no comment, only registering the fact—a dead man—a dead man—a dead man. … In two strides he stood beside the dead man. He looked down at the heavy, fair, unshaven face of a Russian soldier. Raindrops stood on the cheeks like tears; the eyes watched the sky intently and anxiously. The dead man had no boots on and no gun. His tunic was open at the neck to show a broken string. How curious to be robbed and not mind, thought Seryozha, and at once this seemed to him the most startling thing about death—the loss of the delight in possession. He thought of the property he himself loved so anxiously—his silk handkerchief, his spangled gilt picture of the crowned Christ, his English sweater that the missionaries had given him, his marvellously complete sloughed snakeskin (even the skin of the eyeballs unbroken) that lived in an abalone shell in a biscuit-box, the ribbon that Sonia gave him, his chisel with the black handle. … It was quite unimaginable that these things might be taken away before his open, indifferent eyes. This was death. The snakeskin would suddenly become no marvel but a thing good only for the rubbish heap; (oh, he would rise from the dead to prevent his mother from using the black-handled chisel as a screwdriver!). This dead man had probably known every wrinkle in his dear boots—poverty means such intimacy between a man and his possessions. Yet now his feet, muddy and swollen and ringed with callouses, bore nakedness without protest. And his boots, shorn of that familiarity which is the sacred soul of things—encased a thief’s irreverent shins.

With a jingle and a splintering screech the cart arrived at the door of the hut. Old Sergei, followed by the soldiers, came round the corner of the ruin. One of the soldiers trod on the dead Russian’s hand before he saw it, but after seeing it he trod on it again, as if to see if the man would mind.

“It is a dead Big-nose,” all the soldiers told one another.

Old Sergei seemed to come alive when he saw the dead man. Death was Old Sergei’s hobby. “How surprised he looks!” he said. “The surprise was soon over, though. Only just lasted long enough to raise his eyebrows. Or one might say it lasted forever—his eyebrows were never lowered again.” Old Sergei sighed. “One forgets,” he said, “that bodies are so soft in a dangerous world—softer than cheese is to the knife. Why do we trust one another so, living in such soft bodies? Of course we must trust one another; we dare not remember the hardness of steel or of men’s hearts—being so soft. If we had steel skins, we should dare to know everything.”

Seryozha listened to his father with some interest, clutching the bosom of his blouse, pinching his chest to feel how soft his skin was. But he put on the mulish, deliberately prosaic expression sons generally wear when their fathers express themselves in a way that seems to the young unelderly.

“His boots have been stolen,” said Seryozha.

“Oh, it is so very interesting,” said Old Sergei, leaning eagerly over the dead man, “to think that this experience cannot escape us. We shall all, some day, know what it is to be dead.”

“It escaped him,” said Seryozha. “The experience must have been over almost before it began.”

“How do you know?”

But Seryozha’s interest flagged. He did not really believe he would ever die. This was why he so often killed things—birds—beetles—fishes … because he could not imagine death.

“There are probably more of them,” he said, and looked up the hill. The soldiers were quicker-sighted than he was. So was his dog. The soldiers pointed out his dog, shoulder deep in brush, halfway up the hill. The dog, with its ears strained back, its nose waving, pointed doubtfully at a couple of gray mounds among the scrub-oaks.

As soon as Old Sergei and his son left the shelter of the sagging eaves, the rain hammered sharply on their faces and shoulders. Seryozha’s dog, with a skin of wet mud, looking half its natural size, came down the hill to meet him and ask about this disquieting marvel of two dead gods. The dog had not known before that gods could die, but, like all dogs, it was perfectly open-minded about marvels, and, having learned its lesson of divine mortality, would not now have been surprised to see every god in sight fall down dead. Seryozha had carried two spades all the way, corded across his back. Halfway up the hill he unstrapped the spades. Old Sergei selected the site of the three graves.

It was hard work digging, though the northern earth, baked in summer and frozen in winter, was now, under rain, at its softest. The Chinese soldiers stood very close, watching each spadeful eagerly, as though it might disclose gold. They did not move till Seryozha actually came near to cutting the earth from under their feet. To a Chinese, any white man doing anything is an absorbing show.

“I’d rather be burying one of you,” said Seryozha, rudely, to the smiling corporal. “You wouldn’t need so big a hole.” All the soldiers laughed affably.

Old Sergei worked rather weakly with his spade. As he dug he thought with deliberate pathos of the three dead men and presently made himself cry. “No doubt,” he sniffed, “they had women they loved, and perhaps little children, too. Their last thoughts were perhaps of the sunshine filtering through the forests of happy Russia—dark Russian trees in whose shade they wooed their loves. Perhaps their last thought of all was a rapture—I have found my Russia again. …”

The dark trees of Russia meant nothing to Seryozha, who had had a hard-baked dusty north China childhood. He did not even think of it as exile. The word exile to him was just a whining plaint of parents. He grunted indifferently as he dug, the sweat dripping from his yellow forelock.

“You young things have no hearts,” continued Old Sergei, turning over with his spade a few lumps of red earth and then holding his hand out to enjoy the pathos of its senile tremblings. “You have no tears to shed for the desecrated earth of Russia that bore you. You have never even worshiped God in a house of God in company with men and women of your own race. It is nothing to you that these men—no doubt men who feared God and loved His Son—should lie dead in these rough holes without a priest to bless them.”

“Why don’t you bless them yourself, then?” asked Seryozha, straightening his back. “You know so many prayers.”

“How can I?” exclaimed Old Sergei, shocked. “It would be entirely improper for me to take a priest’s words into my mouth.”

In a silence broken only by the scraping of the spades and the sniffing of Old Sergei, they finished their digging. The Chinese watched them, as though in a trance. When, however, Seryozha took the shoulders of the first of the three dead men, and Old Sergei prepared to fumble with the feet, the Chinese corporal said, “Let’s make sure there’s no money on them. It is a pity to bury money.”

“You wicked man,” croaked Old Sergei passionately. “It is much more of a pity to rob the dead. We Russians hold our dead sacred. We shall bury these men with what few poor treasures they have.”

But Seryozha laid the body down and looked at his father. “If we don’t search them,” he said in Russian, “these coolies will wait till we have gone and then come back and open the graves. Better to show them there is nothing.”

“Oi! oi! Sacrilege!” cried Old Sergei. But, seeing Seryozha hesitate, he added on a firmer note, “Oi! Sacrilege! … but have it your own way. You young people always think you know best. You have no hearts. I shall certainly not be a party to your robbery of the dead.” He walked away a few steps and, with his back to his son, bent down and fumbled with the boughs of a dark pink azalea. As he did so he recaptured his checked tearful mood by imagining the little weeping children of the dead men picking flowers in the darling forests of Russia.

The Chinese came and stood very close to Seryozha as he knelt down beside one dead man, then another, then the last. There was no money in their pockets; a cross or amulet had been torn from the neck of one. Their clothes were in rags, their fur caps were moth-eaten. “Ours are better,” said the soldiers, laughing. The boots of all three Russians had already been taken by their assailants. In the pocket of one Seryozha found a bill for a bicycle; another wore a ring that might be gold of poor quality on his little finger. The ring was tightly fixed and for one moment Seryozha sweated cold as the Chinese corporal’s hand went helpfully toward his dagger. But a cracking wrench drew the ring off the wet finger at last. They all looked at it. It was very light and was decorated with two little thin joined hearts. “It is the price of a ride in our cart,” said the corporal, laughing winningly into Seryozha’s face. He took it from Seryozha’s palm as though to examine it, and slipped it into his wallet.

Seryozha stood a moment, thinking, and then called to his father, “The sacrilege is all over now.”

“Oi! oi! Heartless, heartless!” cried Old Sergei, coming fussily back.

Between them, father and son lifted the first man into his grave, and Old Sergei, crying still, was going to shovel the earth into the trench when Seryozha seized his arm.

“Ah no, no, no!” cried Seryozha.

His father gaped at him. “What then? Are we not burying the poor fellow?”

Seryozha said, “But not earth on his face. …” Then, recollecting himself, the boy laughed sheepishly. “Oh, it was just an idea. …” He felt that their faces were their vanity, somehow, and the mud was so ugly. … “Let’s put leaves on his face. … Let’s put flowers on the poor fool …”

There were plenty of flowers. They heaped heads of pink azaleas, purple scabeus, poppies, big blue daisies, scarlet lilies, leaves of scrub-oak, on the dead man’s vanity. Seryozha was very much ashamed of his outburst. He giggled nervously several times, trying to think of something cynical and grown-up to say, to cover his childish mistake.

“Now I’ll chant his blessing,” he said, impudently. “I’m no priest, but what of it—he was no Christian, perhaps. Goodbye, little brother, go and search the sky for a heaven. I can climb a tree without a ladder, so you can reach your sky without a prayer. I’ll drink your health, little brother, in Japanese whisky, next time I can afford it. …” He said it in so solemn a tone that the Chinese were rather impressed. “That is a Big-nose prayer,” said one soldier. But, watching the burial of the other two, they were rather disappointed. Over the second Seryozha chanted only, “To our next meeting, brother,” and over the third, “Oi! to sleep with you,” as he patted the last spadeful down.

“It is all sacrilege,” said Old Sergei, who was rather afraid of his son in this boisterous mood. “Do go away for a little while, Seryozha, and take these Chinese pigs away, while I say a real fellow-Christian’s prayer for their peace.”

He bowed his head and Seryozha wandered away with his dog. Near the road was an ants’-nest and Seryozha scratched at it with his boot, and at once forgot everything else. Things in little always delighted him—the reflection in a convex mirror, a knight among his father’s chessmen, a sprig of parsley stuck on his fish pie, like an oak tree on a crag—all such small perfect reminders of ordinary unwieldy things could hold his charmed attention. And he still secretly enjoyed playing with the missionary children because he so much enjoyed building their wooden blocks into elaborate houses. Although he was eighteen years old, it was difficult for him not to lose his temper when an uncouth infant missionary kicked down a careful villa in which every staircase led to somewhere and there was a chimney to every room. So he liked to think of an ants’-nest as a nest of little tiny Seryozhas—a convex mirror set in the red earth.

When he first touched the nest a sort of shivering skin of swarming ants suddenly spread over it, but after a few seconds’ panic, every ant remembered its duty, like a good sailor in a shipwreck, and went to its appointed place—to fetch an egg, to warn its queen, to guard the stores, to reopen a ruined doorway. … Supposing there was a dogs’ nest, thought Seryozha, run on these lines, how stuffy and cheerful and inefficient! … Or a lions’ nest, how slinky and undemocratic! … Or a man’s nest, how restful and easy for poor men to be little bits of something ready-made, instead of worried creators—to owe allegiance to a cold queen instead of to a fussy old father and mother! …

The rain swept in windy waves down the valley. Seryozha’s cap, which had been made by his mother from an old cloth dress of her own, became so wet that the pasteboard that ingeniously stiffened the peak lost its courage and sagged down over Seryozha’s eyes. He was a mildly vain boy and, on removing the cap to try and make it more worthy of him, was disgusted to find that the color was running. He took his handkerchief from the cap to wipe a navy-blue tear from his brow, and as he did so a twenty-sen note fluttered from a secret place in the cap. The Chinese corporal, who had just come up, was teasing the ants into a new dazzle of frenzied movement. The corporal and Seryozha watched the little piece of paper money flutter down on to the ants’-nest. There for a moment it stirred and turned strangely, floating on the eddy of ants beneath it, and then the rain soaked, flattened, and weighed it down. Seryozha laughed and the corporal laughed. Seryozha picked up the note, folded it, and replaced it in the lining of his cap.

“Big-noses keep their money on the tops of their heads,” said the corporal merrily to his subordinates.

And as Seryozha tossed back his wet yellow flap of hair to cover it with his cap, he met the corporal’s eye and instantly knew that the Chinese was thinking, “We never looked in the dead Russians’ caps for money. …”

Old Sergei came up, murmuring something about immortality. He had always loved strangers, and detached himself querulously from people with a claim on him. Now he had been imagining the lonely death and the lonely awakening of the three Russians; if they had sought his sympathy when alive, he would have withheld it. He was kinder to lost dogs than to his wife, and his own son had never seemed to him to come under that touching heading that so often brought tears to his eyes—“Helpless Little Child. …”

“We must be going home,” he said. “I shall in any case have an attack of rheumatism after this, but every additional hour spent in this downpour will aggravate it.”

“These soldiers mean to search the graves again for money,” said Seryozha.

“Impossible—impossible!” cried Old Sergei tremulous once more. “They watched us bury them. They know our friends were poor like ourselves. …”

“They know something else now,” said Seryozha. “Let’s pretend to go away, and turn back at the pass to see if they have really gone.” Now that the dead men were out of sight, Seryozha did not really very much care whether they were disturbed or not.

The father and son said a polite goodbye to the soldiers and set their cramped faces against the rainy wind that swept down the pass. They reached the corner and, before rounding it, stood a moment and looked back. The soldiers, wilting limply under the eaves of the shed, were looking after the retreating Russians, the distant white points of their faces boring like little gimlets through the intervening air.

“Certainly they seem to be waiting for us to go,” said Old Sergei. “The swine! … Oi! I am so tired of wicked men.”

“I am so tired of my wet skin,” said Seryozha. “Let’s pretend we never suspected the soldiers. Let’s pretend they all went away in their cart and are safely out of sight. Let’s go home.”

Old Sergei cautiously considered this proposal. He began pretending to go home. The road home slowly diminished, slowly drew in its vistas inside his imagination. In infinitesimal jerks the new painted temple beside the home river cut sharply into his mind’s sight. The ferry made its usual unlikely arrival, after apparently proceeding for ten minutes in the wrong direction; imaginary caravan ponies, cramped in the familiar rickety old barge of his vision, drooled down the necks of their human fellow-passengers; Korean women squatted in the bows in the middle of their semi-deflated balloon skirts; everyone twittered in his dream ear; here was home. … Here was home—the low door, the window cut neatly but unnaturally like a surgical incision, the noise of Anna letting something metallic fall in the back yard. …

Seryozha’s mind, as though following a secret groove, ran more quickly home—even more quickly than his dog, who was already several miles nearer supper than they were. Seryozha, who had arrived at the age when one is nothing but a brittle baby encased in a glass shell of cautious maturity, was already seeing himself walking nobly up the village street, being looked at with admiration by the Chinese boy neighbors—especially by little Hu-Lien—damn his eyes. … “There goes the Young Big-nose,” thought Seryozha on their behalf, “who has been out on an adventure connected with a battle …” Not that Chinese boys would ever admire a friend on such grounds, but poor Seryozha had no juniors of his own race to impress, so he had to make it all up. And once you begin to make things up, you might as well flatter as blame yourself.

“No,” said Old Sergei. “We will, on second thoughts, not go home at once. We will not desert our friends. We will sit here for five minutes, hidden in the shelter of this rock, and then look back to see if the soldiers are safely gone.”

They sat flattened like lizards against the rock, picking their teeth, though there was nothing much to pick, breakfast being six hours past.

“If I climb up that bank instead of back on to the road,” said Seryozha. “I can look straight down the slope on to the graves.”

“I will climb, too,” said Old Sergei, who never liked to risk letting anyone else see something first. News, however distressing, was far better to give than to receive. They combed the wet scrub-oaks and the matted flowery grass with their legs as they climbed the short slope. Two hundred feet below them, the doubled up forms of six soldiers were knotted round one of the graves. The other grave was an inflamed scar of newly-turned mud.

“Yah!” screamed Old Sergei, and threw himself down the slope, his lank limp arms and legs flying. “You goddamned swine! You sacrilegious sons of tortoises! …”

Seryozha bounced after him, his stomach aching sharply with pleasurable excitement. His thoughts were joggled up and down like medicine in a bottle. Father and son were upon the soldiers as though in one windy stride. Seryozha’s spade came in flat and glorious contact with fleeing Chinese buttocks. One soldier sprawled with his face in the mud; he twisted himself into a sitting position and fanned the air with futile arms, bellowing curses, his mouth a red hole in a mask of mud. Old Sergei, craning his long neck, stamping his silly old foot, stood over the opened grave like a flamingo defending its nest, creaking out curses in Russian and Chinese. The corporal, with a bloody nose, trying to feel safe and comparatively authoritative at a distance of about thirty feet, clung to the frail hut as though ready to whisk it before him as a shield should he be attacked again, and bawled to his men to come away. This they were only too anxious to do, poor things, only they dared not turn their backs for a second on the Russians.

“You shall hear of this again, dogs,” shouted the corporal. “Have you forgotten that you are nothing but filthy Russians—homeless nobodies? … Our general shall teach you your place. …” His nose began to bleed afresh and he buried it in a bunch of sunflower leaves, shouting in a muffled voice to his men to retreat. This they did, assembling with anxious, crooked gait round their cart. How different were the voices that shocked the horses awake from the merry yodelings that gave the poor beasts license to graze an hour ago. A confused grumble and united hiccup of oaths accompanied the mounting of the cart. One soldier, crying shrilly and ostentatiously, lay on his face in the straw of the cart, rubbing his bruised behind.

“Ha-ha!” yelled Seryozha, brandishing his spade triumphantly in their direction as they drove away, but all the same, he felt a little pang when he remembered their peaceful, ingenuous jocosity of only a few short minutes before. He felt, somehow, as though he had taken a folly too seriously.

“Nothing is sacred to these swine—nothing,” chattered Old Sergei. “Even Russian gentlemen … heroes, who have died in some paltry Chinese cause. …”

“Aw, shut up, father!” said Seryozha. “Nothing’s so very sacred as all that to any of us, really … nothing except our vanity. …”

He met the quiet, anxious, opaque eyes of the disturbed dead Russian, leaning with shrugged shoulders out of his new grave. Seryozha caught his breath. “And when we’re dead, our vanity’s dead too, damn it all, so—what of it?”

II

Mrs. Butters’s sinless smile was bracketed a little on one side, like a parenthesis. Even her nose was smiling kindly. Yet she was thinking: “These Russians are really not much use. That hemstitching doesn’t look good.” However the baby whom the hemstitching would adorn would not be her first. First babies need first-rate hemstitching. But Mrs. Butters had had four and the baby she expected in October was only having a new outfit made because its four predecessors had fairly worn the original set to rags.

Mrs. Butters looked over Anna’s shoulder. “My dear Mrs. Malinin, how quick you work! It’s just wonderful! …”

“Quick but not good,” said Anna in a wistfully challenging voice.

“I think you’re doing fine,” said Mrs. Butters firmly, and then she faltered: “But—my dear—why have you drawn the threads out of this hem? That’s the side hem. We don’t want hemstitching up the side hem.”

“Oi! oi!” cried Anna. “Is that the side hem? Oi! oi!”

“It doesn’t matter,” said Mrs. Butters, and then with gathering conviction: “It really doesn’t matter, Mrs. Malinin. It will hardly show.”

“It will show,” said Anna. “It will show very bad indeed. Oi! what a stupid old woman I am! Can I not weave the threads in again, very watchfully?”

“No, really, Mrs. Malinin; that would look worse still. No, it will be all right. After all, why shouldn’t the side hem be hemstitched? Quite original. Don’t think of it again.”

Anna went on sewing in silence for a moment, bending her fat abashed face over her work. Turning remorse in her tender heart like a sword in a wound, she imagined Mrs. Butters secretly broken with disappointment about the spoiled side hem. In her own affairs Anna was an optimist; disappointment never dwelt long with her. But she imagined the hopes of others as being much more susceptible to blight. She saw herself as an iron Anna living in a world of glass. “She will always see that stupid hem as she shows the baby to her missionary friends,” thought Anna, violently. “She will be able to see nothing else. It will spoil the baby for her completely. I am not worth the money I take from these people. I will refuse today’s two yen.”

Mrs. Butters, seeing that Anna looked sad, hastened to tell a funny story. “Did I tell you what Betty, my quaint second girlie, said after her last Saturday-night bath, Mrs. Malinin? She said, ‘Mummy, I’d like to say drace now—I’d like to say Thank Dod for a dood hot bath.’ ”

“Having done the stupidity now,” said Anna. “Would it perhaps make it better to do another stupidity to match on the other side?” Then she noticed that she was once more disappointing Mrs. Butters, and added, “Ah—she said that? But she is funny—your little Betti!” She gave a boisterous if belated laugh.

“She is a very sensitive, queer child,” said Mrs. Butters. “She cried when the goat died yesterday. And it wasn’t because she liked the milk, either. She said to me, ‘Mummy, I did love dat doatie.’ ”

“My husband also cries for such things,” said Anna. “He cried when the cat broke its neck. We all cried a little, but my husband most loudly. He is blind, you see, so he must value creatures that he can feel, now that he has lost the seeing of them. When he could see, he did not like creatures. So now we have an orphan kitten, Mrs. Butters, and you an orphan kid.”

“An orphan kid! Haven’t you a quaint way of saying things, Mrs. Malinin! But your English is wonderful, I’m sure. How did you learn such good English?”

“I was for many years a governess in England. I lived in a part of London called Kensington. The little girl I taught was also called Betti; her mother was called Honorable Mrs. Atkinson and wore always pink silk undervests of the most expensive kind. I taught Betti French and German, but I also learned a pretty good deal of English. How cheerfully I remember London! Climbing up the colored stairs on to the roofs of buses, I remember, and sitting on the right-hand corner seat, because in London all carriages drive on the left side, and therefore, sitting so, one may look down on the tops of all carriages going in—out—in—run—stop—in—out, like the ice in our rivers here in April. My little pupil, Betti, had a dog in London and always that dog catched buses before us, and climbed up skippingly to the roof, and sat on the right-hand corner seat. … Even if strangers were already there, that dog sat down on the strangers! Ha-ha-ha! A clever dog, called Paddy. Oh, the Kensington Gardens, Mrs. Butters! Crocuses—such things we never have in this damn country—purple some and white others—all in the green grass. Oh, pretty! … There is a lake in the Kensington Gardens, where Betti and I sailed a boat; sometimes many hours that boat went round foolishly in the middle of the lake, and we wait on the shore, saying, well, give her five more minutes … but sometimes—oh, the wind there! hairs, boats, skirts, dog’s fur, all blowing one way, and sun—cloud—sun—cloud—running across that so rough pond. … And once a duck bit our boat—she was called Die Lustige Witwe.”

“You Russians are such wonderful linguists,” murmured Mrs. Butters. “And I suppose you married then and had a little boy of your own to teach.”

“Yes I marry before Seryozha comes, because I think it is good for a child to have a father—even a father like my old husband. So I marry. We go back to Russia. I have taught Seryozha English as good as I can.” Anna sighed gustily. A few hairpins dropped out as she sighed. “I thought English is the most useful business language in China—and now China is our country, since there is no Russia any more. But he will never be a business man, Seryozha. His father had no business gifts. Also Seryozha was born when I was too old. I was thirty-six. If a woman over thirty bears a child—”

Mrs. Butters was a little puzzled by parts of this sentence. Also she preferred the actual bearing of babies to talking about it.

“But Mr. Malinin must have some business gifts. That little shop flourished well, before his misfortune, didn’t it?”

“It did not,” said Anna, with a bursting laugh. “Nothing that my family does is ever flourishing. Somehow we always bought too much of what nobody wanted and none of what all customers would be asking for. We had much scent last year, and only two Japanese ladies ever bought—each one small bottle at reduced price. They smell of it always—it is never finished. They came in the shop stinking of our scent and asked for German camera films, which we have not. It is true my husband was—how do you say?—compradore? to the Tao-yin for some years, he has buyed for him his foreign goods—woolens, wines, jewels—but he has made very many mistakes, and after that Tao-yin has been dead, the new one wants not my blunderous old man’s help. … Then this new Tao-yin is murdered (do you know people have said it is the two sons of his not-loved concubine have murdered him?); then comes this modern chap who wants no old men anywhere. He buys his foreign goods through our nephew, Andrei Malinin. Our nephew is very trusted by the now Tao-yin. It is Andryusha who has helped my old husband in our trouble by entreating for him. But he cannot entreat our business back. Pitying is kind, yes? but it is not business. Well, it doesn’t matter. My husband has never been good business fellow; now it does not matter, for we have no more business to blunder with.”

“But surely,” said Mrs. Butters, “with your nephew’s help you can get some compensation for the looting of your shop. They had no right to do it.”

“Everyone has the right to do all things to Russians now,” said Anna. “Besides, my husband was certainly very silly. He beat some Chinese soldiers, and so angered them.”

Mrs. Butters tried for a moment, with confused missionary charity, to imagine Old Sergei beating anybody. “I suppose he did it in righteous anger,” she said, hopefully.

“Oi! He did it in foolishness,” said Anna. “There is no need for so much defending of dead Russian heroes. Once a man is dead he is dead and has not much honor to defend. But my husband runs always after dead men; he beat these Chinese for interrupting the peace of Russian dead soldiers—so the Chinese interrupt the peace of his alive wife and son. But alive ones don’t matter to my husband. He is a man full of folly.”

“Very good of him, I’m sure,” said Mrs. Butters vaguely, though she did not really think Old Sergei good. He had some inconvenient foreign religion which inspired him to talk about God at missionary high-tea parties almost before the canned clam chowder was on the table, but he never came to church. “He did suffer for his championship of his dead friends, didn’t he, for I suppose in the tussle he got a blow on the head which finally made him go blind. …”

“His head was not in the least blowed,” said Anna in a high, rather exasperated voice. “He came home very happy, smacking his chest for pride, saying, ‘I have beaten these sacrilegious openers of heroes’ graves—I have beaten them well’ … and then some Russian man came and told us that the soldiers would come and beat him or perhaps put him in prison, for revenge. So my husband went away quickly, out of fear. Fortunately, it was good weather—in wet weather he becomes stiff and painful in his sitting down and must not go out, but this time the weather was dry and the poor silly old man went forty li to the house of a Korean cow-grower who is his friend. When he was gone the Chinese soldiers come to our house and ask where he is. My Seryozha knows Chinese people well—better than his father or I know them—and he can make Chinese laugh. So the soldiers laugh and go away. But in the night they come back, and they break the shutters and the door and took away all the tobacco and then the tins of vegetables and fruits, and the sweets and the cheap jewelry, but the bottles of hairwash and medicine and scent they broke after they had tasted. They took also eighty yen worth of cotton stuffs. The letter-paper they make dirty by treading on it, they spill the ink over the books, and the complexion oils they throw through the window. I would have beaten them myself. They were little soldiers and my hands are hard—I would rather use my hands to protect my properties than to protect dead men—but Seryozha would not let me. All the time he stood in the shop door and pretended to say different ideas what to do next, and pretended to remind them of goods they were forgetting—but really he tried, by talk, to pull their notice away from things more precious. He is a clever boy, Seryozha.”

“But it was very wrong of the soldiers,” said Mrs. Butters. “Somebody ought to do something about it. Surely you can get them punished and claim some redress.”

“We are Russians,” said Anna with an unintentionally loud snort. She had her limbs, her larynx, her stomach, her imagination under poor control, and often found herself doing things that she had not intended. “In the morning Seryozha and I went to the magistrate’s yamen and complained, but we only saw an under man, and he said he will inquire of the colonel and ask to have the soldiers punished, and he would send our askings for the price of our goods to Kirin to be thought about. But there will be little thinking, I think, and no paying. Especially since the Tao-yin who knew my husband, is now dead. The new Tao-yin knows nothing about our complaints. My husband’s nephew, Andrei Malinin, who is a friend of the new Tao-yin and builds bridges and trains horses and buys automobiles for him, said to us, ‘Let Dyadya come back now to his home; no one will hurt him now. But let him ask no more for compensations.’ So my husband came back.”

“But I don’t understand,” said Mrs. Butters, who was saving up all this to tell her husband in the evening, entitled, “The Truth of the Malinin Story.” “What made Mr. Malinin go blind so suddenly, if the soldiers did not hurt him?”

“God alone understands why he went blind,” said Anna. “My husband, poor old man, thinks he understands too, but all he says is folly. That same day he came home he began again his follies. I had a good dinner for him that day—bortsch and a fine fat chicken—and when my husband saw, he said to Seryozha, ‘Run now and fetch Alyosha; he loves good food and has no money.’ But that was a very strange thing, Mrs. Butters, for my husband does not often love poor men—while they live. Seryozha went to the house of Alexei Vassileievitch, and there he was—the saddlemaker, you remember?—making bets with all his friends that he could drink more beer more fastly than they could drink. Perhaps you remember hearing—it was a very hot day, and Alexei Vassileievitch fell down dead—”

“I remember,” said Mrs. Butters, shuddering. “Such a terrible judgment—a terrible death—with his sins upon him.”

“Our sins are always upon us,” said Anna. “They are more tight buttoned upon us than our clothes. Whenever we die—drinking at the first supper or the Last Supper—our sins are always upon us, Mrs. Butters. I did not like Alyosha the saddlemaker; he bought a floor mat from us and would not pay because it had a small smell. I am not sorrowing because of his death but only because of the more trouble it brought upon us. Seryozha was a long time away, watching the drinking game, and at home my old husband would not eat, though the soup became cold—waiting, waiting—for a poor man he never thinks of feeding in his life before. So Seryozha comes running to say, ‘Alyosha is dead.’ ‘Sht boy,’ I say, ‘shsht—he will hear,’ but my old husband has already heard. Oi, what folly begins at once. My husband runs to Alyosha’s house and I runs after him—though the dinner would spoil and spoil—and there were Chinese policemen asking and examining in Alyosha’s house and Alyosha himself lying on the floor with his tongue out all crookedly and a bluely red swollen face. My old Sergei pushed away the police, saying, this man is of my race, he is mine to bury. Oi! what a curse are these drunkard dead that they must be made so honorable. Two friends helped to carry Alexei Vassileievitch’s body to our house; the Chinese police did not stop them, though they talked much, thinking perhaps Alyosha had been murdered, so they followed behind, talking angrily to my old fool, saying, ‘Always you interfere with Chinese police officers doing their duties.’ … My husband made Alyosha be carried in our house and all my nice dinner be swept off the table and the body be laid down on it, all red and dirty and dead, and no friend of ours, Mrs. Butters—just a drunken saddlemaker, God forgive him. I tell you he smelled of leather and horses, but he was on our table, like a joint of meat that was no meat, so all day we ate our meals on the bed, though the goodness of the dinner I had prepared was all gone. And in the evening my husband buried that poor damn man in the open green space behind our house—after dark, that thieves might not know. Because he had it fixed in his thoughts that the Chinese would again try to open the grave. So all night long he lay on a blanket outside, against the wall of our yard. Three times—four times—five times—I went out and said, ‘Come in, stupid man; you will have rheumatism again; tomorrow you will not have power to bend,’ but he is stubborn like a goat, and early in the morning, as the sun rose up, I heard him scream, high like a child—like this—‘E-e-e-e! Oi! I am blind!’ … It was when he felt the sun on his cheek, then he knew it was day and he was blind. He says it was the sparrows’ droppings from the top of the wall, but the Japanese doctor says no, it cannot be. The Japanese doctor says it is a nervous—a hysteric. I do not know—but sparrows I do not blame. So now my poor old fool he sits there all the time sorrowing. There is no amusement or interest he can do—only feel with his hands things that are alive, and that makes him cry, but he always loves being made to cry. He was in love with dead men when he could see—but now that he must sit at home, the dead do not come to him. … So now he cries over alive things that he can feel—it is all the same really—he only seeks tears. He feels Seryozha’s ankle, and the cat, and puppies, and Seryozha found some little small young birds in a nest—anything that moves he must feel, that he may think the sad thoughts he wants to think.”

“It is all very sad,” said Mrs. Butters. “It must make life very difficult for you, Mrs. Malinin.”

“Oh, not so difficult. Seryozha works—not every day, but sometimes—on the new bridge. Our nephew, Andrei Malinin—that engineer who I told you is friend to the new Tao-yin—he helps us a little. I think he arranged, too, so that my old husband was not attacked by the Chinese policemen for taking Alyosha’s body. And I come and sew—oi! but how bad I sew—for you and the other mission families.”

“You certainly have known a great deal of trouble,” said Mrs. Butters, who had been punctuating the story with clickings of her tongue and low abstracted moans. Then she remembered the Christian duty of reassurance. “Oh, but I think you sew very nicely.”

“Hemstitching all down the baby’s ribs—oh yes—very nice,” mourned Anna. The imperfection made a sore place in her self-esteem. “How easy it would have been to think before—not to pull those threads out. Never, never do I think before. All my life is full of being sorry for not thinking before.”

“Oh, please don’t worry yourself,” said Mrs. Butters, almost irritated by this extreme remorse.

One of the Butters children came in, talking in the aggrieved whine peculiar to the children of missionaries.

“Mah-mah!”

“It is so difficult for our finite minds to understand,” said Mrs. Butters, “the omnipotent wisdom which sometimes sees fit—”

“Mah-mah.”

“—to load so many grievous burdens on one—”

“Mah-mah.”

“—shrinking sinner’s shoulders. All we can do is—”

“Mah-mah.”

“—to feel that behind it all shines—”

“Mah-mah.”

“—a love that—”

“Mah-mah.”

“Surely your child wishes to speak with you,” said Anna, with difficulty restraining her hands from boxing the ears of both mother and child. A conflict of noises could always crack her temper as, it is said, some discords can crack a glass.

“Mah-mah’s busy, lovey,” said Mrs. Butters. “What does mah-mah’s lovey want to ask mah-mah?”

“Mah-mah … it won’t eat no ackles.”

“Won’t it, darling? … And it seems to me, Mrs. Malinin, that if—”

“But, mah-mah.”

“—we could only learn to cast all our troub—”

“Mah-mah.”

“—bles on that great heart that is so ready to bear them, we could turn and face the world with a perfect—”

“Mah-mah.”

“Your child seems still to have some matter on its mind,” said Anna between ground teeth.

“What is it, mah-mah’s prettybird?”

“Mah-mah, it won’t eat no ackles.”

“No, darling, just fancy that! … And another thing, Mrs. Malinin—”

“But, mah-mah.”

“For God’s sake, child,” said Anna, hoarsely, glaring at the child, “what will not eat what?”

Mrs. Butters put a protective arm round her child and directed a reproachful glance toward Anna. “These foreigners,” she thought. “Even quite nice foreigners … so different. …”

“Betty is talking of the little kid,” she said gently. “The mother goat—we call her Nannie—died yesterday—didn’t she, loveybird? Mah-mah’s loveybird’s poor Nannie doatie went to heaven, and we are wondering if we can rear the kid. It is so difficult to make it take the bottle.”

“And what has your child been giving it?”

“What has mah-mah’s Bettybird been giving poor Nannie doatie’s nitty tiddy to nyum-nyum?”

“Ackles, but it won’t eat no ackles, mah-mah.”

“Oh, she doesn’t know any better, of course; she’s been trying to make the poor little creature eat apples. Ackles, she calls them. …”

“Mah-mah, I opened the tiddie’s moufie, and I pushed little bits of ackle down wiv my finger, and—”

“For God’s sake!” shouted Anna, springing to her feet and knocking down her chair. “Is the child altogether without sense? Can it be possible—”

“Oh, Mrs. Malinin, she’s just a wee thing—only six. How should she know?”

“Mrs. Butters, when I was five my mother and I used to bring up with our hands all the delicate lambs and calves. I could milk good long before that, and when I was seven I have helped my father’s groom to accoucher my mare of a dead colt. All nature’s ways were known by me as they should be by any child who lives in the country and is not blind or imbecile—”

“Mah-mah’s own Bettylove must run away now,” said Mrs. Butters. “And better not give nitty tiddy any more ackles just now, lovey.”

Mrs. Butters, free of Betty’s innocent presence, breathed several deep forgiving breaths through her nose before overcoming her indignation at Anna’s vehemence and vulgarity. “I had no idea you were such a farmer, dear Mrs. Malinin,” she said, folding up her sewing as a sign of mild dismissal. There was only just a trace of reproachful emphasis on the word farmer. “I believe I shall have to give you the little kid to rear. Evidently you know more about it than we do.”

Anna was crossing the room at the moment to fetch a reel of cotton from a drawer. And, although she was fifty-four years old, when she heard that the kid might be hers she leaped into the air and smacked the top of her head. The floor shook. “Oh, how I should enjoy that! How I should enjoy it! And my poor old man to have a kid to stroke and a kid’s heart to feel beating—most joyfully I accept, Mrs. Butters, most joyfully. …”

III

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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