“Why don’t you write for the money? If Isaev is really willing to repay it, he could send it.”
“You do not understand the ins and outs of the affair, dear Annitchka. How should you—a trusting, sweethearted woman like yourself? It is for the head of the family to wrestle with such sordid problems—to protect those he loves from the miseries of—”
“I don’t want any breakfast,” said Seryozha, suddenly. “And I shall not go to work . My back aches. I am going out.”
His dog, as ready for its call as a good fireman, reached the door as soon as he did. Their shadows merged in a muddle of wagging, striding black and white at the door. Seryozha and the dog stood together in the doorway, looking out at the bright day.
Anna looked at Seryozha and felt, on his behalf, an elaborate fanciful female version of the boy’s impotent disappointment. She sat hacking violently at the bread, muttering and hiccuping to herself, clapping her knees together under her absurd petticoat. She was always hurting someone, she thought, making some mistake or being obliged to correct someone else’s mistake in a painful way. She so seldom managed to feel that she was giving satisfaction; wherever she went she imagined people thinking, “Why doesn’t Anna … ? Why does Anna … ? If it weren’t for Anna. …” She felt that she had been endowed with a superfluity of power to hurt and thwart people. Curd cakes and a kodak would be nothing but a bribe to her son—a bribe to persuade him to overlook her accursed genius for being an obstacle.
“I’m making some curd cakes for tea,” she said in a defiant cross voice toward her son’s defiant cross back in the doorway.
“I don’t like curd cakes. I was sick last time I ate your curd cakes,” said Seryozha. Simply because he had loved curd cakes as a child, he thought, she retained her obsession that they were a poultice for all the austere wounds of his maturity.
He walked away into the wide, straggling, pitted street. His dog burst out of the yard like a torpedo and exploded in facetious barkings at the tail of the debased but nimble Korean dog that lived next door. The Korean dog had such short legs that they were little more than four bumps on its lower corners—nevertheless, it fled with the lowly agility of a lizard. Seryozha’s dog walked with the stiffness of pride for a few minutes after that, and followed its master to the river.
The river was crossed by a wooden bridge with a sort of petticoat of dog-toothed wooden frill prudishly concealing the upper part of its piers. This decoration showed that it was a Russian-built bridge, and, in fact, Seryozha’s own hands had sawed and planed some of its planks. One could not say, however, that it was well built. A Russian refugee, a military engineer, a heroic but untrustworthy creature, had contracted for and designed the work only the year before, and now the thing was, unfortunately, tumbling down. The Chinese local authorities did not mind very much; they were well used to things tumbling down immediately after they were finished. Obstinately proud, therefore, of their petticoated but frail bridge, they quite cheerfully paid for endless pinnings together, proppings up and general coddlings of their treasure. At present the river was in flood, and logs rushing down the swollen stream from far lumber camps were a constant menace to the knock-kneed piers of the bridge, so, clinging to the toe of every pier, a coolie sat, chivalrously pushing fierce logs away with a pole. Wherever one person is found doing something definite in China, there also are found a score of people watching him do it. The sagging balustrade of the bridge was lined with shaven heads bending over to watch the defense against the blundering attack of the logs.
Seryozha thrust himself into this line of watchers, his strong square shoulders and forearms wedged between two skinny Chinese torsos. Seryozha’s dog swaggered along the line of human behinds and calves, sniffing lightly at each leg, as if playing with the idea of biting a piece out of one—though of course it had too sacred a respect for the integrity of human skin actually to lift a tooth against it. Still, it would be a damn good joke, thought the dog, opening and shutting its nose jovially against one calf after another.
Next to Seryozha a young Chinese in European clothes lolled superciliously over the balustrade. This young man had a nose that sprang abruptly like a little eagle’s beak from a flatness between very bright black eyes. He lifted his rather negroid upper lip often to show one sparkling gold tooth in the middle of a row of ordinary yellow bone ones. On the top of his very thick, coarse, carefully parted black hair a too small Panama hat cocked a flaunting brim, and round the crown of the hat a ribbon showed what may well have been a medley of the colors of Eton, one of the more refined cycling clubs, and the Salvation Army. The young man had a very lively, acute expression, in spite of his deliberate attitude of scorn, and from the moment when Seryozha settled his elbows on the adjoining yard of balustrade, the sparkling lidless eyes of the young Chinese never left the Russian’s face.
“You speak English?” said the stranger to Seryozha.
For a moment Seryozha, who was in a very bad temper, considered ignoring the remark. He spoke fairly fluent English, taught by his Anglophile mother, and often used that language with her to annoy his father by shutting him out from jokes or secrets. He glowered at the stranger
