The dog lay in a curve on the floor. Evidently some other dog—probably its last ladylove—was thinking of it, for its ear itched—the traditional symptom. It wriggled and wagged its ear repeatedly. Its eyes were open. It liked the sound of voices. That damn goat, too, was somewhere else. Everything seemed to the dog to be going nicely.
Anna squeezed her face into an upside-down isosceles triangle between her hands, her elbows pressed on the table among the cards. She looked at her son, restless with pity for him, as he stood staring down at the dog, raising his eyebrows in childish and studied indifference, shuffling his toe, pretending to tread on the dog’s tail. She would make him some curd cakes this afternoon; he loved those. Perhaps she could afford that Brownie kodak in the Japanese shop, if she did without her new dress length. After all, he gave her almost all his earnings. It never occurred to her to relent on the Seoul question. All the dangers that lurked for him outside her sight accumulated round the very thought of the ridiculous journey—brigands, swindlers, earthquakes and other convulsions of nature, tigers, brothels, Japanese policemen, prisons, diseases, drownings in rivers. … Seryozha would have been a super-boy to have suffered even a third of them in three weeks. But Anna’s imagination was always over-exuberant. She did not follow up her fears at all because—well, simply, he was not going to Seoul. Curd cakes and perhaps a kodak for him. Still, the sight of his tremulous eyebrows and pursed lips made her throat ache with pity.
Old Sergei felt his way in at the door. “No breakfast yet?” he exclaimed in an unusually high sweet voice. “Ah well, these glorious summer days tempt one to procrastinate. …” It was at once obvious that he was The Perfect Christian; serenity was the password of the moment. Anna and Seryozha were to realize that they had an afflicted saint in their midst. He had had slight qualms in the night, thinking that, if he were really to die, Anna in her present mood would be but a tearless widow and Seryozha an all too resilient orphan.
The kid bleated outside in the shed. The dog mumbled a growl of jealous irritation into its own tail as it lay sleepily curved in a bar of sunlight.
“And the little goat?” asked Old Sergei with a sugared playfulness. “The most important member of the household? Did it sleep well? Has it breakfasted?”
With a loud crude snort, Anna rose and began slamming down bread, cups, knives, and spoons on the bare table among the playing-cards. Old Sergei sat down at the foot of the table. His thin, gaunt hands, like little wan giraffes striding, patted about among the cards. “Playing cards before breakfast? Well, well, well! …” he said in a voice of resignation, but with an effort made no complaining comment. “If we had money,” he added, “we could allow ourselves, perhaps, a little Korean girl as servant. But I dare say you are right, Annitchka my dove, in thinking that we are best as we are—without the money I left with Isaev in Seoul. Of course the interest would have mounted up very considerably in ten years—but as you say, Annitchka, what is money? Poverty is nothing, as long as we have love and peace in our home. It was only for your sake and Seryozha’s that I thought of it. You are not so young as you were, and I thought a little maidservant. … However, it is not to be.”
“It certainly is not,” said Anna, who had never appreciated the effective weight of silence as an argument. “The child is most certainly not going to Seoul by himself, so you had better give up the idea.”
An almost agonizing pang went through Seryozha as he heard this, but he thought, “If they only knew—I wouldn’t go now, even if they went down on their knees to me. Probably I shall run away altogether; they can expect nothing better, treating me as they do. But certainly I will not do their fetching and carrying, either to Seoul or anywhere else.”
“Did you not hear me say, my dove, that I had given up the idea?” said Old Sergei, gently. “I am only explaining to you now, in retrospect, what my idea had been. I had not, of course, thought of sending the child unprotected. If you are a mother, dearest Annitchka, remember that I am a father, and Seryozha’s safety is as much my preoccupation as yours. I had thought of looking for some trustworthy fellow—a superior coolie—who for a small wage—”
“If he found an angel from God to go with him,” said Anna raucously, “I might let him go. Short of that …” Seryozha, who actually stood before her nearly six feet tall and with a slight shimmer of very young beard on his pink cheeks, was shrinking in her imagination with every word of the discussion. He had now almost got back to the weaning stage, and she saw a flashing picture of one of God’s angels pushing her baby away from her in a pram.
“An angel from God, Seryozha,” said Old Sergei, whimsically and plaintively. “You will have to look long to find an angel from God willing to protect a poor Russian. Poor Russians indeed! God has forgotten them—he sends no angels now. … But of course, my dear,” he interrupted himself, cooing, as he turned to Anna, “I was not insisting on the boy’s taking the journey. I had only referred to the fact that it had been for your sake I had entertained the idea. The money would have been useful to you rather than to me. A little maidservant … an oil stove instead of that mud oven. … Such things would have made life easier for you—given you leisure, perhaps, to play cards in
