“There are cures for devils,” said Wilfred Chew, thoughtfully. As he spoke, a vague picture of banners and smells disinfecting devil-haunted Chinese houses floated before his eyes. Almost immediately this picture was replaced by one of himself bringing back a gloriously enriched Seryozha to the threadbare, anxious little house in Chi-tao-kou. A Seryozha married to a beautiful heiress. Old Sergei would surely forgive disobedience that led to such a result. And what about the agreement? Ten sen on every yen over and above two hundred yen, he thought—and wished he had it in writing. Then he thought, Russians pay matchmakers, they say, very much as Chinese do; would not old Ostapenko be prepared to make it worth a man’s while to find a good husband for a girl with seven failures behind her?
Wilfred Chew was quite without guile. His Christian upbringing had really planted a kind of charity to all men in his naturally affectionate heart. It was part of his vanity to be good—not only to seem good. He would most certainly have been very sorry to disappoint the Almighty in His (doubtless) high expectations of Wilfred Chew. Still, it was also part of his vanity to be prosperous—and surely this was also part of the Almighty’s plan for him. For instance, Wilfred’s genuine love and reverence for the Reverend Oswald Fawcett had not prevented him from making a good profit, on commission, out of Mr. Fawcett’s passion for buying trashy brass “curios” from the shopkeepers of Yueh-lai-chou. Why should it, indeed? There is so often a point in a Chinese deal at which the seller sells for a little more than he had hoped and the buyer buys for a little less. A fraction of that little less—that little more—is the natural prerogative of the mutual friend, be he Christian or heathen. This was so much a commonplace in Wilfred’s mind that he had never even dreamed of considering himself a less disinterested disciple of his reverend idol for making pocket money out of the latter’s ignorance of the value and quality of brass. So many worshipers have profited out of the weakness of idols, after all. But of course Wilfred did not think of it in this way. He simply wanted to be not only a good Christian, but also a good business man.
He was already quite fond of Seryozha. After all, the boy was of conveniently silent habit, and even, occasionally, seemed impressed by what was said to him. Wilfred was by now for the most part resigned to not expecting much more of an obtuse world than this. He was like the secretary of an impoverished charitable society—satisfied if he got one ambiguous acknowledgment to a score of appeals.
The pirozhki were finished. The teeth of the travelers being now at rest, their feet could plod on. Wilfred wisely said no more about the heiress of Mi-san, for the present. His English law experience had taught him that there were limits to the persuasive powers of the voice, and that explanation was sometimes better dumb. Wilfred spent the afternoon trying to give his companion a rough summary of Roman law, Constitutional law, Criminal law, and Real Property and Conveyancy. He was just passing on to the material of the final examination—Common law, Evidence and Procedure, and Equity, to the tune of a low song from Seryozha—when they realised that Pa-tao-kou lay below them—the village in which they intended to spend the night. They had just climbed over a shoulder of cliff that overhung the river. The roofs of the Korean village lay like a shuffle of brown leaves beside the river. The sandbanks in the broad river looked almost the color of violets in the late night—all the subdued color of the valley, indeed, was overlaid with this smoky violet glaze. The early preparations for sunset were nobly ungorgeous. The sky was a striped bursting confusion of steel and silver—gleaming silver spilled down from a low cloud-masked sun in concentrated pools on far gorges. The most brilliant concentration of all was hidden by a steep broken crag a dozen miles away, so that the crag was backed by a diamond glow, though its topmost rocks were brushed by clouds. The glow behind it was like the radiance by which one might know a holy city—or like the mist of white spray that rises from the unseen deep pool that receives a waterfall.
Seryozha was very hot and looked the hotter for the forensic coolness of his Chinese friend. Sweat patched Seryozha’s brown smocked blouse, his yellow hair was lank and damp, the sockets of his eyes were polished with sweat like well-greased ball-bearings. Yet he led his companion at a cheerful run down the dusty zigzag that sloped to river and village level. From the bottom of the hill the track into the village ran between the river and a narrow deep-set irrigation ditch. Along the track a bullock cart plodded to meet the travelers. The cart’s wheels splayed out like knock-kneed legs; there was no room even for the cart’s own stunted shadow between the wheel and the ditch. Slow floating leaves and sticks in the ditch met and swam through the cart’s shadow, as ships might meet a storm cloud. The Korean driver of the cart was asleep in the bottom of the shovel-shaped, woven-withy basket that formed the body of the vehicle. Wilfred Chew, accustomed to the implacable demands of traffic in cities, prepared to jump the ditch on to a dike that bordered a rice-field. There seemed to be no other alternative. But Seryozha had no respect
