While she talked in her clear soft voice, Anna watched her doubtfully, her mind half-consciously echoing her own last words—“a winter country indeed.” She felt dimly a little flattered by the child’s cool wariness; it seemed a tribute to the definite, un-Anna-like impression she was making, thought Anna. Inside this pink bewildered body was no confidently mature critic—no mother-in-law at all, really, if Tatiana had only known. But Tatiana, luckily, did not know. Tatiana fixed her alert, wild-fawn stare on the outer Anna and tried, with cautious words, to propitiate that outer Anna, that apparently solid symbol of authority. “She thinks my hands know how to do things—my mouth knows how to say things,” thought Anna, feeling proud and surprised, smoothing down her miscontrived, mis-cut apron over her stomach and feeling that it was being gloriously mistaken for a real, bought, mother-in-law’s apron. But still she was not sure. Still that fading illusory glitter of icy ruthlessness hung about Tatiana—a last gleam of the witch-glare thrown on her name by poor Alexander.
“… a little meadow where the abbots were buried,” Tatiana was saying. “The grass was as green as—as a squirrel’s fur is red … and each grave was of black marble, and its throne was a tortoise and its crown was a bandage of twisted dragons. … Even the rough common stones round that place had crowns on, like the roofs of little pagodas. Tame marble tombstones for the tame saints, I suppose, and wild stones over the wild mountain saints. There was a praying mantis on one dragon’s claw, and Seryozha’s dog came sniffing—so—and the praying mantis prayed, ‘O God, make this dog ashamed,’ so God did … the dog sneezed for shame. … We saw the sea and a great thin waterfall from a high path. …” She remembered the silver wire of sea strung across a gorge, hooked tautly from a maple to a pine, and another wire of water—jointed and vertical this time—leaning up a broken precipice across which a frayed intermittent smoke of clouds blew lightly.
“Surely there is nothing to be afraid of here,” thought Anna, hardly listening to the words of this strange, cloudy talk.
But Tatiana, though she realized faintly now that she was not quite so safe as she had hoped, in talking of clouds and cascades to a new mother-in-law, could not forget the clouds. Clouds raced across her eyes, especially those last clouds that had dragged the dwindling mountains from her sight … two strata of clouds—hardly to be called by the same name—cloud—so far apart were they. … There was the still, cushioned world of clouds from which the mountains grew (for the mountains had no roots in the earth). … And in front of the faces of the mountains, adding incredibly to their stature, shreds and skeins of stormlit clouds, torn across the pinnacled air, white on steel-blue, silver on white—clouds rent and raveled on sharp peaks like wool on needles. Somewhere Tatiana had heard God’s beard likened to white wool. “Ah, those mountains are held down by clouds,” said Tatiana, “not held up by earth. You have to believe in clouds when you see them like that—as you have to believe in that bee …”
A big bee on a level with their eyes was pushing her bullying way into a chrysanthemum’s heart, irritably elbowing petals right and left, her furry muscles trembling with rough strength.
“Do you always talk about clouds?” asked Anna.
“Clouds? No. Why should I talk always about clouds? It is so seldom one sees the live bodies of clouds. Generally talk about clouds would be like talk about dead saints—generally they are so still and so high. Who could talk about them then?”
“Can’t you talk about my Seryozha?” asked Anna. “You’re his wife and I’m his mother. He’s more interesting than a cloud, isn’t he?”
Tatiana thought for a minute and then said, “Yes,” in a shamed voice. She was never safe from a sense of guilt, because she had no standard of behavior. She had talked unsuitably to this unknown ear, she now realized. She would not have been surprised if Anna had told her to go back at once to her parents—a wife found wanting, a disgraced daughter-in-law. It would not have occurred to her to assert her rights. The command to turn the other cheek, even, would have been wasted on Tatiana—she knew of no right not to have her cheek slapped—she knew of no rights at all except the right to see out of her eyes.
“He has a little rash on the back of his neck, I see,” said Anna. “How did he get that?”
“Yes, and also on his behind,” said Tatiana, gravely. “It came after he swam in a mountain pool and lay in the sun on a rock.” She turned her accurate mind’s eye on Seryozha’s rash and considered it; she could see the shape of the patch of pinkness on Seryozha’s skin as clearly as, a minute ago, she had seen the shapes of the clouds.
“It is only sunburn, then?” suggested Anna.
“I think it is,” agreed Tatiana.
“He has a sensitive skin.”
“Yes—and bright, like a horse’s. …” Tatiana thought with delight of living bodies as she said this.
Anna sighed. Yet at the same time she thought: “This wife can’t take Seryozha away from his mother. Why, it’s as if he had bought a new telescope, not married a wife. This girl may be new eyes for him, his father may be new ears, but I shall still be in his old heart. Death—tschah! she is not death—she is nothing at all. …”
A priest, with a kind eager bow, brought them two cups of leafy tea. These visitors, the priest thought, had evidently forgotten that they did not
