Anna thought, “Of course I mustn’t mention Alexander Weber. That would be a thing I should regret very much afterwards.” But even while she was congratulating herself on having—just this once—been wise in time, she heard her own voice saying, “You know, I saw a good deal of Alexander Weber before he died. He talked a great deal about you.”
“Ah, poor Sasha!” said Tatiana in a low voice—though, as a matter of fact, she cared scarcely at all now about Sasha’s death. He was dissolved from her thoughts. She had such a short, thin-spun memory that her mind’s eye never saw ghosts. “Perhaps he told you, Anna Semionovna, that I was possessed by a devil.”
Tatiana hesitated and shuddered. Seryozha, who felt that his feats of magic were not to be hidden under a bushel, had told her his story of the magic smoke. Like all such vague, unlikely stories, it had taken on an aspect both more startlingly magic and more convincingly prosaic, on Seryozha’s lips. The further it retreated into the realm of legend, the more facts were remembered by Seryozha to prove its solid truth. Every conscientious liar who has an occult experience to relate must have noticed this curious posthumous skeleton of facts that materializes to uphold a fading ghost of fiction. (“I know I wasn’t dreaming,” we say, “because I remember I’d just got up to let the cat out, and I noticed distinctly it was raining, and I was just going to tell my wife so when I saw a curious light in the corner—just there—I can show you the exact spot. I know because I could see the corner of the piano and said to myself that it needed dusting—so that shows you …” etc., etc. In just such a hard mold of facts, the faint fluidity of an uncertain, unexplained experience sets into the jelly of a ghost-story.)
The first lie that Tatiana had ever told herself was this—that the story of her possession by a devil—now cast out—was true. This lie—this illusory salvation from an illusory devil—was her desperate anchor to normality, her license to believe herself a woman now—a woman plucked out of shameful fairyhood, her defense against being an outlaw and alone. Did Andromeda, chained to her rock, dream through the dark night of a lover beside her, unloosing her chain—and smile uneasily in her sleep—half awake, yet clinging to her dream, trying to believe that she was no longer a dragon’s prisoner beside the lonely sea, but brought home to a lover’s arms? In such a dream Tatiana lived, her heart stirring awake, her lids shut firmly against waking.
Every time Tatiana repeated this lie to herself, she shuddered—such a shudder as makes people say, “Someone walked over your grave.” She shuddered now as she said to Anna: “It was true, what he said. I was possessed by a devil. I was so much afraid of men—they were the only animal that didn’t seem lovely to me … that was a devil’s teaching. But Seryozha drove the devil away—by magic, he says, and also, Anna Semionovna, by being so lovely himself. …” She was her father’s daughter. She sought in her mind for a password to Anna’s credulity—a word that should once and for all prove her lying claim of fleshliness to be true. “I’m as much a woman now, Anna Semionovna … as a sow is a sow …”
“Ah, tschah, child!” cried Anna, startled. She looked at her small, trembling daughter-in-law and noticed that she had become very white. “Presently,” thought Anna, “she’ll be horrified to remember that she said that.” And instantly she felt at ease with Tatiana.
Wilfred Chew approached them. “Ladies,” he said, “I don’t wish to butter in on your family conversation, but don’t you think we had better be getting home? The foot of this girl Marfa will not be better in a minute; she might as well make the effort to arrive at your home and perhaps treat it with some kind of healing plasters. Shall we not now begin our little walk?”
Tatiana came to her feet with a dancing spring, feeling vaguely that a dreaded word had been spoken and swept into the unmattering past. As she did so, Anna felt a rush of gratitude and tolerance toward her. She seized her clumsily by the arm.
“You pretty child, don’t be afraid of me. … I’m not brave, either,” she mumbled, her tongue stumbling over her teeth.
Tatiana ducked her shoulder away, though, having done so, she smiled a bewildered and compassionate smile. She hated touch; she instinctively looked upon hands as so many traps. Still, having withdrawn herself, she felt tender. What should she say? What should she say?
“I did enjoy seeing the porpoises from the boat, too,” she said. “They were such well-made porpoises—and they didn’t seem to know we were looking at them.”
A slope waving with standing kaoliang eight feet high, overripe for harvest, lay all about the new temple. A path from the temple door to the gate of Chi-tao-kou tunneled straight through this rigidly vertical jungle. One looked along a golden corridor, upheld by a million delicate pillars, intersected by a thousand passages. Even the sunlight lay geometrically, in neatly recurring diamond shapes, on the ruled red soil.
As Anna, Tatiana, Wilfred, and the wailing Marfa entered under the first arch of this long shimmering aisle, two tiny figures appeared at the further end. They seemed snapshotted through that far starry lens that focused the sunlight.
“Here are your respective husbands,” said Wilfred. “A family reunion indeed.” He thirsted for gratitude and praise. “I have brought you a very nice daughter-in-law, Mrs. Malinin, have I not?”
“Ah, well enough,” snorted Anna and gave a croaking laugh. As she turned to smile at Tatiana, she caught a glimpse of a bar of sunlight combing the girl’s chestnut hair. “I am wishing my old husband could see her,” she added, warmly and remorsefully, remembering that she had called
