The Faraway Bride quotes

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.

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 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.

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 …

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.

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.

“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?”

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.

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.

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.

Butters perhaps had not meant her offer of the kid to be accepted so literally and immediately. Anna heard, with her suddenly awakened mind’s ear, her own boisterous voice crying, “Oh, Mrs. Butters, most cheerfully I accept. …” Too soon—too soon—and now too late remembered.

To remember the sound of her own voice was almost always, for poor Anna, to hear a sort of bugle call calling to retreat⁠—and retreat was always, alas, by then impossible.

Every battle was always fought and lost by the time she heard that dreaded call.

He was old, he thought; he was not loved. He loved no one.

He felt the breath climbing foolishly up and down the unsteady shaft that was his body, like an imprisoned bird never losing hope of escape.

Some day the prisoner would find the loophole and fly from his lips. The sooner the better, thought Old Sergei—or rather he thought that he thought so; life was a curse without serenity. Who could be serene by Anna’s side?

… Here am I, a wretched sinner, a reproached sinner, member of a wretched and reproached race. O God, let me die. It’s the only way to make people sorry for me instead of angry with me. …”

He thought of oblivion as a revenge; death, not penitence, seemed to him the apposite answer to a justified reproach; he had no courage for penitence.

He would refuse to be anything more responsible than a pitiful memory in Anna’s mind, and in God’s. “Let my spirit be taken from me … let me be dissolved and become earth.

However, these things are not appreciated until one is dead, and, as I told you, I have been praying for death.”

In order to prove to his wife and son the value of a business head, he had prayed to have it chopped off.

Old Sergei had a different vanity every day. Sometimes he changed twice or thrice a day.

In order to prove to his wife and son the value of a business head, he had prayed to have it chopped off.

Old Sergei had a different vanity every day.

Sometimes he changed twice or thrice a day. When he got up in the morning, Anna and Seryozha usually gleaned—though too often in a rebellious spirit—what fancy aspect of his nature he was displaying for their admiration for the next few hours.

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.

“Yes, of course I will, presently, dear Petya. I must do something I had forgotten, first.”

She always called people dear in a cold voice.

Like her twitched-on, twitched-off smile, the dear was a sort of concession, kind yet shy, to humanity. She walked back to the washtubs and Piotr walked beside her.

She was both too far and too near.

She loved her neighbor as herself because she found herself in her neighbor, but if you were her neighbor, you found that she loved you no better than herself⁠—and therefore not at all.

What a detestable advantage it gave her, to be high on the hill, safe, away from home, yet near enough to hear, with her remote cold senses, your heart beating.

She had a smile that pulled the corners of her lips up and the corners of her eyes down, but it was never meant for you, except secondarily; when you smiled in reply, hers vanished, was twitched away.

Tatiana did not know that she lived on a hill; she only knew that she had no neighbors; her neighbors all must harbor her, but she had no neighbors.

To be approached was entirely unbearable; a desiring or acute glance was in itself an assault; see she must, but to be seen was somehow insult. She loathed touch and always avoided it; the lightest accidental touch rasped her like a cat’s tongue.

It was not a fear—it was not a fleeing away, but a repelling. Somehow she knew without knowing it, that to be alone was to be judged by a strange calm standard—to be judged, in fact, by herself only—the ideal of pride.

Loneliness was in itself a sort of license to live strangely⁠—to live according to an outlaw’s law.

There was a long silence during which Tatiana, her tears drying on her cheeks, watched the caterpillar under the jam-pot. She thought it was arguing to itself: “Now I must keep my head and think clearly.

still, he was a man—the last man in Mi-san—and now he’s turned his back on you. You ought to be ashamed, breaking your father’s and mother’s hearts by your whimsies.”

“Real people like to be nagged at,” thought Tatiana.

“Nagged at by love and other things—asked and asked to give something. Only hills and rivers and flowers and animals are allowed to be free—not to ask for anything. The more you ask of people the more sure they feel that they are people.

I don’t ask for anything, so I’m not allowed to be alive. I’ll be kind to them—I’ll cry for them—I’ll laugh for them—I’ll pretend I’m them—but people don’t want that; they want to claw my me and they want me to claw theirs.

Not to nag is to insult them.

”

… Of course, killing animals was different. Killing was part of the game of life that had a right to go on.

Killing was allowed but snubbing was not.

“And London?” he said, in a grumbling, ungracious voice. “It is a good city?”

Then he thought, Russians pay matchmakers, they say, very much as Chinese do; would not old Ostapenko be prepared to make it worth a man’s while to find a good husband for a girl with seven failures behind her?

Wilfred Chew was quite without guile.

His Christian upbringing had really planted a kind of charity to all men in his naturally affectionate heart. It was part of his vanity to be good—not only to seem good.

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

“Goodness is a comparative term.”

The fish, as Wilfred began to cook it, became a kind of trysting-place for all the delicacies of the village. Water chestnuts, garlic, sweet corn, peppers, young greens, tender white roots were brought in by businesslike outsiders and bought by Wilfred for a few sen.

In the same way, Tatiana’s only vanity was her whistle. It was sweet and most flexible and versatile; she could give it either the ogling quality of the saxophone or the cold veiled purity of the flute. It was always impeccably accurate.

Her ear heard words in the air which, running through her senses, not through her brain, came out as tunes through her lips⁠—wandering, passing, blind tunes that never went forward and never came back.

It was a foolish and tiny skill, much more akin to a bird’s song than a human sound; the sound mixed lightly with the cooing of doves and the whistling of larks—it had none of the interrupting, creative quality of most human melody.

Varvara looked at him with a sourness that came of expectations disappointed. The trouble was that she had invented a Pavel Ostapenko for herself, to which the actual Pavel seldom conformed.

She was a Procrustean wife.

Pavel looked uneasily at his wife as he pulled at his little red beard. He used his beard as though it were a kind of tab by which to pull his mouth open;

“Unnatural? Unhealthy?” exclaimed Varvara, stitching in tense jerks.

“What is unnatural? What is natural? Only the majority.”

“Well, youth is natural … and girlishness … and warmth and motherhood …” Pavel was shading his eyes with his hand, and from beneath his little finger tears that seemed unwarranted by the matter of what he said ran down his face.

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

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

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

Tatiana looked at her finger. Through the nail, she noticed, the red blood showed purple. Things were hurt, things died, blood ran into burnt fingers and out of cut throats.

Containers of uneasy blood, that’s all we are.

Big and little, male and female, two-legged, four-legged, six legged, many-legged, winged and creeping, wise and foolish, we slide and stride and wiggle about the world until something called death lets the blood out, to be soaked into the ground, to be dried into the …

… Why should there be any of this merging between one skinful of blood and bones and another? Why can’t we get used to the loneliness of having separate blood?

Pitchers may go to the same well, be dipped, and come home full, clinking handles, tinkling together, but always separate, each with its dreadful integrity complete, its inviolate solitary storm of contents.

Not till the pitcher is spilled is there a merging—a cold, loveless merging into thirsty space. These images, quite clear but wordless, passed across the screen of Tatiana’s sight as she looked at her finger, cramping the muscles round her eyes till her forehead smarted.

“She is right,” said Varvara after a moment, with a brisk, hard look, as she folded her sewing. “Seven is too many to cry over.

Seven is like the chorus in comic opera.

You go and lie down, Pavlik; you are overexcited and you talk nonsense. There is no reason why Tanya should try to be any different from what she is.

How rare! how Ostapenko!” She would not have contradicted an outsider’s view of her father. “A simple tipsy man,” you might have said, and so he was. Yes, simple with a precious Ostapenko simplicity; tipsy as a poet without words. …

Even ordinary derogatory words could be twisted by each Ostapenko to feed the family sense of apartness.

“Well,” said Tatiana, “Sasha’s safe and dead now.” Her finger hurt so much, as her mother touched it, that she could almost have wished to die of this injury as Sasha had died of his. Tatiana’s body was always morbidly sensitive to pain.

They were making that curious wailing whistle—almost like a miniature howling—that starlings utter in their migratory restless mood. And as soon as Tatiana noticed this sound, she could see that almost every leaf in the tree had a bird behind it.

The tree was as full of movement as a bonfire; whistling curled up from it like smoke.

Tatiana felt an arch tweak at her instep. She looked down and saw that all the chickens in the yard, thinking that her presence meant a meal, were gathered about her feet.

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.

The three hens hurried from side to side of the track, confusedly flattering themselves that so far they had cleverly outwitted their pursuer.

Tatiana looked at the misunderstood donkey lovingly and wondered if all devils were devilish by mistake.

She pulled the mild devil’s dusty ear as she ran by.

thousands and thousands of them merged into a great giddiness against the blue—a wind for the sight. Their thousands of twitterings and whisperings ran together into one wide shrill sibilance; the rustlings of their countless wings were smoothed into an inimitable breathing.

It was impossible for even Tatiana to think thoughts into such a multitude; it seemed they must fly in a kind of democratic ecstasy or trance, they must think with a multiple me, an ego spread thinly over the whole sky like butter on bread.

Tatiana, dazzled and giddy, watching the birds, heard one of the strangers talking what seemed to her to be English, and in the midst of the unknown words she caught her own family name.

she looked like a child trying to hide a forbidden toy, bending askew, alert to run. There was a just visible twitching of the muscles under the soft bluish skin below her eyes.

This still creature could move, then; there was a flutter in this stone.

“This, Saggay Saggayitch,” said Wilfred Chew (who had, you see, made an advance in intimacy), “this is Miss Tatiana Ostapenko whom I mentioned to you once or twice before.

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.

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.

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.

He clung with both hands to her arm as she led him through the streets. His body hung back, for fear of stumbling, but his spirit urged haste for fear of missing something.

He was always in a hurry to be near the dead, forgetting that the dead are the only friends who can be really depended on to wait for us.

The Nikitin tribe, a group of promoted peasants—three or four interrelated families living in a maze of Korean houses that almost amounted to a hamlet—was divided between sentimentality and resentment, in the matter of Alexander Weber’s suicide.

Pavel Ostapenko’s voice trumpeted on. Hardly a word he said was true, but every word exalted him or his family.

He was like a motor engine which, by running, charges continually its own battery.

The more his lips uttered his own praises, the more was his listening heart charged with an exquisite accumulation of vanity, and the more self-flatteries did his lips find to express.

… paper had floated as negligibly as a dead leaf into Varvara’s notice, and now here it was, transmuted by Ostapenko argument into a heavy lawyer’s parchment, a thing to be kept in the safe, a thing solid enough for the future to be built on.

It blew in like a leaf and settled like a stone.

Pavlik’s talk and magic had turned the blowing fancy to stone—to the cornerstone of the house.

… craters, valleys and peaks—the dumb world breaking with a song of thunder, and broken, being clothed with intention at last—clothed with snows and flowers and blue veils of ice and deserts of corn-colored sand and feathers of fire—a world the richer for its broken integrity.

To make a statue was to break a stone. Being alive was a breaking of death. To become something was to shatter the peace of being nothing.

Come home—come home—come home, Tanya. …

… ceiling, a muddy spade with a rather dead section of worm on it, leaning against the wall, a riding-whip smelling of horse, a noisy bee that hovered about the dog’s shrinking ear, an insolent brown hen on the threshold—all strangers—no friends—and the dog loathed strangers.

Strangers so often have stings, like bees, or sticks, like beggars, or kicks, like horses; they never smell right.

A smell casts no shadow before; dogs, therefore, who are led through life by the nose, have to be intensely conservative. They can tolerate no new departures because they can know no destinations.

His dog, pressing its seat as near as possible to his, sat down, too, and blew great hot loving breaths into his ear.

Seryozha threw his arms round the dog’s neck and cried into its shoulder.

For the first time in his life, Seryozha was shaken—shaken in his stalwart anonymity—called home to self-consciousness by a sort of earthquake of the heart.

“Is time of breekfast,” shouted Pavel, feverishly consulting his English notes. “Mistah—quick—awaken.”

Wilfred lay with his eyes wet and callow in their puffed sockets, like newborn kittens in their lair.

His gaze was fixed with a tranced expression on a spittoon; one would have said it was his dearest treasure.

She often had this pitying sense that comers-in were on approval, shrinking behind the transparent, hopefully decorated, adjusted screen of their faces. “Will I do? This is the best me I can show you. Will it do?”

Egoists were even more touching than altruists.

Her father’s precarious challenge to criticism had often wrung her heart. Now here she was—vulnerably visible herself—she who had been unconscious—bodiless—invisible all her life.

The train lurched through the black world with an open-throated, gasping roar. “I really seem to be a kind of guardian angel to these Russians. … What would they do without me?”

As he thought of the Reverend Oswald Fawcett, who had warned him against every sin except complacency, the hundred and fifty yen that Ostapenko had given him seemed to lie not exactly heavily but perceptibly on his bosom.

The money was a foreign body in his conscience, like a splinter of shell in a soldier’s flesh. “There is nothing wrong in being paid for one’s services,” Wilfred replied to the shadow of the Reverend Oswald Fawcett. Poor Wilfred!

… is not a ghost lives at home—far from our sight—dark, changeless men and women built of blood and bone and burning egoism, creatures that neither love us nor hate us—nor even know our names—things that are, not things that are seen by us to be.

Wilfred lived his life largely backwards.

The scenes his optimism anticipated glowed so gloriously, sparkled with so flattering a success, that the reality was almost always a diminishing, an anticlimax, a dim and inexact rendering of the bright foreseen event—like the creation of a defective memory, or like the telling of …

When speaking neither to sinner nor sinned against, Pavel would not entertain the question of sin or justification, truth or lie, at all.

Truth was nonexistent, unless he was engaged in propounding it; in words lay his entire standard of truth, morals, and behavior.

Much of Pavel’s life, therefore—since words were his standard—was spent in getting his word in first. It was, for instance, necessary for him to see Isaev before anyone else in Mi-san should see him.

On waking every morning, she was impatient to be quickly up and living, to get the day soon begun and soon ended, every morning being, to her, a promise of another night and new dreams.

The hither bank of every river that we must cross is but a promise of the farther bank⁠—a promise that gives us courage to swim out boldly into the current.

Seryozha looked at her face almost resentfully; he was vaguely conscious that to call her from sleep would be to recall her from a palace to a cottage—and the knowledge hurt him.

Seryozha stretched his mouth automatically to filial acquiescence. This robust paternalism was much easier to cope with than was the jejune and bloodless nagging of his own father.

Arrogant complacency rebounds from the attention, but false pathos bores into it, like some unwholesome parasite.

Yet when, just as the sun, though still invisible behind a neighbor’s roof, threw stripes of gay fresh gold all over the plain, Seryozha came out to watch the departure of Pavel, the servant Yi, and the four horses, he was filled with an almost …

“What do you mean?” asked Pavel. His attention, suddenly recalled, whizzed down the slippery widening perspective of the railway line from the horizon to his son-in-law. “What do you mean—you’ll walk?”

“My dog can’t travel in a box,” said Seryozha, between nervously rigid lips.

“My daughter can’t travel on her feet,” said Pavel, glaring at him in amazement.

“My dog can’t travel in a box,” said Seryozha, between nervously rigid lips.

“My daughter can’t travel on her feet,” said Pavel, glaring at him in amazement.

There was silence, bounded on the one hand by the continuous duet of the wailing Korean mother and child, and on the other by an insect-like twanging resonance, the sound of the approaching train.

But he could not resist adding something more—and something more—and something more after that. Nothing but words ever occurred to him as relevant; if one arrangement of words seemed in retrospect imperfect or incomplete, nothing but more words seemed adequate to correct it.

Pavel would have proved by a week’s argument that he never in any circumstances argued.

Isaev opened and shut his wide mouth not ill-naturedly; he looked inquisitively past Pavel at Seryozha.

She did not care much for an alternative so remotely imbedded in the future; if anything, she cared about the dog’s dignity a little more than her own.

Every creature, she took for granted, had a right to its dignity.

Two entirely different airs seemed to enclose Seryozha when he was talking with Tatiana alone and when he was talking with Pavel alone.

In the yard, Tovarka the mare lay on her side in the throes of foal-birth. She had chosen to lie in the yard, though Pavel and the groom had spent an hour making the loose-box ready for the event.

It is rather chilling how animals refuse to conform to man’s arrangements, or to take the hints given them by the works of our hands.

Doors to come in at, railings to keep things out, steps to climb up by, tables to eat at—a fig for them, say the birds and beasts. Sparrows ignore the doors and come in at the windows, splashing impertinent droppings on our tables;

our sense has told us something, not hinted at something. The dog, smelling traces of a past event, is a witness of that event; time is no obstacle; as long as a smell clings, so long is yesterday—to a dog—current news.

A dog could surely make some contribution to the theory of relativity.

“Here,” mused Seryozha’s dog, “that horrid little goat lay down … here, the old woman dropped an egg … here stood that Korean water-carrier whom I always bite … in this chair a missionary sat, carrying a parcel of clothes the paper of which once …

The new temple was so new that it was not yet finished. The molded mud gods were already enthroned, but they were not colored yet. To make up for this rather ungodlike nakedness, somebody had put a fresh hollyhock in each god’s hand.

They looked like ladies trying on their engagement rings in their baths.

On a ledge between one god and another sat Tatiana. Anna was quite shocked to see how light and small and beautiful her son’s bride was.

Now, naive anticipation of endless flawless happiness rushed into her heart. “Let’s have a party tonight,” she said, giggling with pleasure. “The Malinin wedding-feast. We can ask your cousin Andryusha, my darling, and Mitya Nikitin with his balalaika. …”

“Excuse me,” said Wilfred. “I will wait here and guide the carter with the luggage to your house.”

He wanted time to think of some subterfuge that might excuse him from presence at the feast. He had eaten and drunk one Russian feast too many, and the thought of another made his Chinese stomach turn.

He was transfigured by the splendor of himself—his self-satisfaction had found a new self to be satisfied with. The Reverend Oswald Fawcett was for the time being undisputed king of his soul.

It was absurdly easy to be good.

“I refuse this present,” repeated Wilfred, “as I would refuse the half of your fortune, should you offer it to me. I am above presents. I have no fear of poverty, believing in the following motto—‘Do good and no evil shall touch you.’

…” His lips twitched. “I think now that this is a good adventure that we have had. … I want people to know about it so as to be helped to be good. I feel that in going I leave goodness with you. …”

But as he walked away, tense with excitement, goodness went with him down the street.

The ghost of the Reverend Oswald Fawcett held his hand.