“But, mah-mah.”
“For God’s sake, child,” said Anna, hoarsely, glaring at the child, “what will not eat what?”
Mrs. Butters put a protective arm round her child and directed a reproachful glance toward Anna. “These foreigners,” she thought. “Even quite nice foreigners … so different. …”
“Betty is talking of the little kid,” she said gently. “The mother goat—we call her Nannie—died yesterday—didn’t she, loveybird? Mah-mah’s loveybird’s poor Nannie doatie went to heaven, and we are wondering if we can rear the kid. It is so difficult to make it take the bottle.”
“And what has your child been giving it?”
“What has mah-mah’s Bettybird been giving poor Nannie doatie’s nitty tiddy to nyum-nyum?”
“Ackles, but it won’t eat no ackles, mah-mah.”
“Oh, she doesn’t know any better, of course; she’s been trying to make the poor little creature eat apples. Ackles, she calls them. …”
“Mah-mah, I opened the tiddie’s moufie, and I pushed little bits of ackle down wiv my finger, and—”
“For God’s sake!” shouted Anna, springing to her feet and knocking down her chair. “Is the child altogether without sense? Can it be possible—”
“Oh, Mrs. Malinin, she’s just a wee thing—only six. How should she know?”
“Mrs. Butters, when I was five my mother and I used to bring up with our hands all the delicate lambs and calves. I could milk good long before that, and when I was seven I have helped my father’s groom to accoucher my mare of a dead colt. All nature’s ways were known by me as they should be by any child who lives in the country and is not blind or imbecile—”
“Mah-mah’s own Bettylove must run away now,” said Mrs. Butters. “And better not give nitty tiddy any more ackles just now, lovey.”
Mrs. Butters, free of Betty’s innocent presence, breathed several deep forgiving breaths through her nose before overcoming her indignation at Anna’s vehemence and vulgarity. “I had no idea you were such a farmer, dear Mrs. Malinin,” she said, folding up her sewing as a sign of mild dismissal. There was only just a trace of reproachful emphasis on the word farmer. “I believe I shall have to give you the little kid to rear. Evidently you know more about it than we do.”
Anna was crossing the room at the moment to fetch a reel of cotton from a drawer. And, although she was fifty-four years old, when she heard that the kid might be hers she leaped into the air and smacked the top of her head. The floor shook. “Oh, how I should enjoy that! How I should enjoy it! And my poor old man to have a kid to stroke and a kid’s heart to feel beating—most joyfully I accept, Mrs. Butters, most joyfully. …”
III
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. One has seen a weighted wooden tumbling toy, knocked down on a flat surface, preserving its integrity and fulfilling its purpose by finding, in the end, its own odd balance regardless of the mockery of the watchers—and only robbed of its birthright of eccentric equilibrium when the gods themselves fight against it and overset it on an unfairly tilted plane. So Seryozha, left to himself, could always account to himself for himself. But outside were parents, gods, insects, landscapes, animals, machines, and the elements—traitors to young individual dignity—all conspiring together unfairly to destroy the balance of valiant dignity.
To lack a camera or a wireless set, to be at home in a wooden Korean house with little squinting windows and a chronic smell, was bad enough, but to see a perspiring mother coming toward the home carrying a goat in a clothesbasket, in the sight of dozens of her less respectable Oriental neighbors, made Seryozha doubt whether he ever would attain to his rightful place in a world full of the rude laughter of inferiors. However, though he did not know it, Seryozha was very fond of his mother and, though she often shamed him, he very seldom punished her. He was much harsher to his father, and the same instinct in him that allowed his mother license to play the fool in her own wholehearted hen-like way, resented the poverty of his father’s vitality. He did not mind, for instance, the fact that his mother’s large blousy bun of hair was always coming down, so much as he minded the way his father cautiously combed four or five streaks of hair from one ear to the other.
“I’ve got something new here, Seryozha,” said Anna, putting down the basket to push a wisp of hair out of her eyes. She spilled the kid very gently out on to the living-room floor. For a moment the little creature did not remember that it knew how to stand. It crouched on the floor, its awkward pale legs crumpled under its body, its neck stretched, its pinched mouth open to utter an almost voiceless bleat.
Seryozha’s grievance against his mother was overlaid for the moment by his pleasure in the color of the kid. Things that were pale below and colored above always looked dramatic and beautiful to his eye, as though he had some secret arctic memory of light growing from a low seed of moon. Japanese orchards of young fruit-trees with trunks painted white; great trees illuminated by a bonfire till they looked like cardboard trees towering over footlights; young horses with milky pale fur on legs and stomach darkening to shining russet along the upper ribs and back; young girls with light stockings and skirts and colored jackets—perhaps he felt a sort of kinship of pantomime youth with these footlight schemes of upslanting color.
He watched the kid
