“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
