“Just now I have been praying to die,” said Old Sergei. (“Pretty safe,” thought his son, arrogantly, “as experience must have shown him. Funny how old people don’t learn by experience. Only we young people do that.”)
“—and as I prayed I remembered how penniless and friendless you and your mother would be were I to leave you. The shop needs a business head, and if I were not here to talk things over with your cousin Andryusha, God knows what would happen. You and your mother do not realize the value of a business head quietly yet actively in the background—an asset quite as necessary to a family’s prosperity, I assure you, as all this cadging of goats and hacking of logs. However, these things are not appreciated until one is dead, and, as I told you, I have been praying for death.”
In order to prove to his wife and son the value of a business head, he had prayed to have it chopped off. Old Sergei had a different vanity every day. Sometimes he changed twice or thrice a day. When he got up in the morning, Anna and Seryozha usually gleaned—though too often in a rebellious spirit—what fancy aspect of his nature he was displaying for their admiration for the next few hours. Since he had been, as Seryozha saw, a Business Man, afflicted with blindness, to be sure, but quietly effective nevertheless.
“And as I prayed—since even in meditation and worship my business sense is awake—I remembered that two hundred rubles I left with Gavril Ilitch Isaev at Seoul, to invest in his hotel, many years ago, at a time when I feared for the safety of Chinese banks and decided that Seoul was safer. He banked the money in his own name, but I have the receipt. I wrote it and he signed it. I think it is in that volume of Pushkin’s poems that props up the short leg of our bed. You see what it is, Seryozha, to have an orderly business mind. You would probably never have remembered that two hundred dollars.”
“I couldn’t have remembered it, since I never heard of it before,” said Seryozha. “And I don’t know now whether you mean dollars or rubles. You say both.”
“I mean neither,” said Old Sergei. “Really, Seryozha, you are not using your mind. What is the currency of Korea? Yen, of course. Should I be likely to have my savings put away in a bank in a currency not native to the country in which the bank does business? Yours is the kind of question which shows me how ill able to look after your mother you would be were I to leave you. You should certainly cultivate a business sense. Now my idea is that you should go on foot over the mountains to Seoul and fetch that money from Gavril Ilitch.”
“Why don’t you write and ask him to send it?”
“I did, of course, write to him, some time ago, in the summer of , I think it was. Isaev did not answer. He is by no means a business man and I should say hardly knows how to put pen to paper except just to sign his name. He is a peasant—was my brother’s gardener before the revolution, in Vladivostok. A devoted creature, but evidently deficient in business methods. Since I wrote to him my mind has been occupied with other matters and I only thought of the money just now, when praying to die. But, having once thought of it, I have no difficulty at all in recollecting every detail of the transaction, and in deciding on the best and most businesslike solution of the problem—which is that you should walk to Seoul and—”
“Why in the world did you give your two hundred yen to a peasant who could neither read nor write? That wasn’t very businesslike, it seems to me.”
“Seryozha, you are not using your mind. Surely you cannot expect me to explain all my business dealings to a raw lad like you, without financial experience of any kind. As a matter of fact, it was the best thing to do; I was in Seoul buying stock for the shop, and found that, since the goods I expected could not be delivered, I had two hundred yen too much—more than was safe to carry across the robber-infested Manchurian border. Isaev had had a good position as coachman to the Japanese bank-manager and was thinking of starting a hotel. His savings were banked in the Chosen Bank. Naturally I gave him my savings, too, to invest with his own until I should ask for them. I dare say the poor fellow is wondering every day why I do not return to claim my money.”
“After ten years of wondering every day I should have thought he might have got a friend who could write to try and get in touch with you,” said Seryozha, sulkily, but his mind was already, as it were, packing its wits for the journey; his toes were already throbbing with the starting fever. Every day in his unpromising life he woke up feeling “perhaps something great will happen today,” and here was something great—a lonely, dignified journey, without any father and mother to be ashamed of at every turn.
Old Sergei straightened his back, and in doing so awoke the kid, which, after innocently making a little mess on the floor, tottered on unsteady legs toward Seryozha, who, it seemed to the kid, gave forth an inviting smell of milk and mother. Old Sergei did not notice the departure of his toy, he was so much interested in the deathbed advice he was determined to give his son before his fount of
