The Faraway Bride

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 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.⁠ ⁠…

Tatiana Pavlovna Ostapenko and the servant, Katya, bent side by side over washtubs, looked like a sow and a hind feeding side by side from one trough. Both wore the same kind of headkerchief and faded blue cotton bodice and skirt. But Tatiana bent like someone finding flowers at her feet, and Katya bent like a bear offering a goblin a ride on its back.

A young man watched them from the shade of the wide tree that stood behind the village at the junction of three footpaths across the barley and bean fields. The young man, Piotr Gavrilovitch Isaev, almost wished that Tatiana would never turn round. He knew her face so well and was so much afraid of it. Yet he whistled⁠—do-mi-do⁠—his old call to her, and she turned. He knew she would make no gesture of enthusiasm. She looked at him across fifty yards of shimmering evening sunlight for a long moment and then flapped her hand toward him with an abashed, rather rigid, gesture. He watched her talk for a minute to Katya as she dried her hands on her apron. Then Katya went into the house and Tatiana walked along the raised footpath toward the young man under the tree. He could see her exquisite pale face, her russet hair dragged tightly from her forehead under the kerchief, her rather sunken light eyes, now twitching with nervousness. Twice, as she approached, she smiled, as though rehearsing a smile⁠—just a little abrupt delicate grin⁠—a tautening and an instant slackening of her cheeks. It was a smile that seemed to mean nothing but a good intention, and was obliterated like a duty done.

Next to Seryozha a young Chinese in European clothes lolled superciliously over the balustrade. This young man had a nose that sprang abruptly like a little eagle’s beak from a flatness between very bright black eyes. He lifted his rather negroid upper lip often to show one sparkling gold tooth in the middle of a row of ordinary yellow bone ones. On the top of his very thick, coarse, carefully parted black hair a too small Panama hat cocked a flaunting brim, and round the crown of the hat a ribbon showed what may well have been a medley of the colors of Eton, one of the more refined cycling clubs, and the Salvation Army. The young man had a very lively, acute expression, in spite of his deliberate attitude of scorn, and from the moment when Seryozha settled his elbows on the adjoining yard of balustrade, the sparkling lidless eyes of the young Chinese never left the Russian’s face.

“You speak English?” said the stranger to Seryozha.

For a moment Seryozha, who was in a very bad temper, considered ignoring the remark. He spoke fairly fluent English, taught by his Anglophile mother, and often used that language with her to annoy his father by shutting him out from jokes or secrets. He glowered at the stranger and then, struck in his tender heart by the look of polite confident expectancy on the face of the Chinese, he said, “I speak English⁠—not much, but enough.”

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

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

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

With a good deal of flurry and worry Tatiana drove the chickens⁠—all of them but three⁠—back into the yard.