The Faraway Bride

and said nothing of his pleasure, however, and underneath his pleasure the feeling of soreness persisted. 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.

“Ah-yah-yah!” sang Seryozha, loudly, feeling he was achieving something by thwarting his mother. The kid, startled, recoiled from the offered drop.

“Be quiet, child!” cried Anna, jolted into anger by the check in her breathless experiment. Her forehead sweated a little and her hand trembled as she stroked once more the kid’s silly lips with the rag.

“Ah-yah-yah!” sang Seryozha, and shook the floor with a sudden bounce, to make sure.

Tears of anger came into Anna’s eyes as she knelt, ungainly. She was so very whole-souled in all that she did. “Curse you, boy⁠—” but she stopped, for the kid was nibbling with its lips upon the rag. Success was in sight.

“Ah-yah-yah!” yelled Seryozha, almost against his own inclination. He had got into a kind of groove of contradiction; for the moment it was entirely impossible for him to relent. Anna jumped to her feet, treading on her skirt and tearing it. She rushed at her son, swinging the linen basket by the handle, and dealt him a heavy blow which he caught partly on his defensive elbow and partly on the side of his nose. Through this tempest of bustle and anger he saw suddenly the rocklike fact that he was nearly nineteen years old and that this scene was inconsistent with his essential quiet manliness. His nose was scratched now, too.

“Oh, all right,” he said, speaking, on purpose, in a foolish voice as though he had a potato in his mouth, since he was somehow ashamed to regain his amiability too abruptly. “Get the little brute fed, then, and get rid of it out of the house. It smells like the devil.”

“What smells?” asked Old Sergei, feeling his way into the living-room from the yard.

The kid, swept aside and terrified by the bustle and noise, stood drooping on bent, trembling legs in a far corner, and gave a faint creaking bleat.

“A lamb?” cried Old Sergei. “Where did you get a lamb?”

“It is a kid,” said Anna, crouching once more on the floor and taking the kid under her arm again with a gentle impatience. “Give me that cup of milk, Seryozha. Mrs. Butters gave me a kid today, as well as the two yen, for sewing her baby’s dress quite wrongly.”

“Why should she give you a kid for making sewing mistakes?” asked Old Sergei. “You can’t sew; you never could sew.”

Of course, everything he was wearing was sewn by Anna, but he felt that no stitch of it did either him or her credit. Almost all the seams either had, or would soon, burst. Anna never repaired things. She was far cleverer at contriving than at stitching, and mending was a work she never had time for until actual nakedness was in sight. She would always prefer to invent a new cut of trouser, or a new method of fastening a shoe, to patching existing trousers or replacing old laces. She would rather have a new kid or puppy every night to feed, than cook the supper for the same old everyday husband and son.

“You don’t really earn a sen with your sewing,” said Old Sergei, “much less a kid. The missionaries only pay you out of charity, because they know I am blind and cannot support my wife and child as I used to.”

Seryozha made a rude noise.

“So why,” persisted Old Sergei⁠—“why should the missionaries be such fools as to give you a kid in addition to the two yen you don’t earn? I don’t believe they did give it to you.”

“Why, here is the kid. Feel it,” said Anna. “How do you suggest it got here? Did I steal it, do you think?”

“Heaven knows how it got here. Heaven knows what you will do next. How do I know you didn’t steal it? We are sunk so low that nothing would surprise me. Or perhaps Mrs. Butters was joking and did not mean to give it to you at all and you made a mistake, as usual, and walked off with the creature. Why should she give us a smelly kid? We don’t want a kid; we didn’t ask for a kid; and it will make a mess in the house, too. What a place for a kid⁠—in a gentleman’s living-room! And, of course no supper prepared, I am sure, for me and Seryozha.⁠ ⁠… Oh no! the stolen kid must be fed before your husband and son⁠—”

“Be silent, you horrid old man!” cried Anna, now full of anger and a diffident panic, because her sensitive conscience admitted the possibility that Mrs. 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.

“Take the creature,” she said to Seryozha in a broken voice. “Let it die if you like, or take it back to the mission.” She went out, loaded with sadness, to cook the supper.

Seryozha took the kid and the cup of milk out into the yard and sat crooning into its winking ear as he held it in his arms and dipped and redipped the rag. “Yoodle-doodle-doo⁠ ⁠… yoodle-doodle-dido,” he sang