Yet for Seryozha there was something decidedly wrong with the place for the moment. A blankness in the region of his anklebone … a silence … no panting in the background of the hearing … no wagging in the corner of the eye. The panting of Seryozha’s dog was to him what the ticking of a clock is to another man; he did not notice it when it was there, but felt uneasy without it. He walked to the doorway. The dog and the bullock, meek and resigned, still passively colonized the sandbank. The last spears of the sunset pricked the river.
“I am hot,” said Seryozha, wiping his flushed face with his sleeve. “I shall swim in this river.” It would be bad for the dog, he somehow felt, if he admitted that its plight mattered to him.
“Have you brought a bathing costume with you?” asked Wilfred.
“Schto?”
“A bathing costume? A garment for swimming purposes?”
“Schto?”
Wilfred clicked his throat. Seryozha pushed his way out through the crowded door and stumbled down over the rocks to the river’s edge. He pulled off his clothes with a cheerful frankness and walked into the water. The crowd of villagers followed him from the inn, their eyes never leaving him. They added to their numbers, they shouted for their friends and families to join them—especially at the moment when his astonishing nakedness burst upon them—but they could not leave him in order to advertise the entertainment, for fear lest they might miss some item which might never be repeated. And their enthusiasm was rewarded. About seventy of them were able to watch a spectacle that had never before been seen in Pa-tao-kou—the spectacle of a White Man Swimming in the River.
The water climbed up Seryozha’s body as he waded deeper and deeper. The garment of delicious coldness, as it wrapped itself higher and higher about him, seemed to be piped by a wire of almost-pain, a steel hair of ice or fire, climbing up his legs and his body. His thirsty skin gloried. He threw himself flat in the water, his open mouth just held above the surface. He felt strangely level with the world’s floor. All perspective changed to fit eyes only six inches from world level instead of the usual six feet. He saw the darkening sandbanks like clouds, the bullock and the dog like giants, wild geese resting on far distant sandbanks like tall electric gray ghosts.
“Mr. Chew! Mr. Chew!” Seryozha’s voice came with a curious clang across the water to the inn.
Wilfred came rather nervously out on to the shore, but seeing that he need not yet see that Seryozha was naked—since six-sevenths of that nakedness was modestly submerged—he looked relieved and shouted thinly in reply.
“Mr. Chew,” called Seryozha, ploughing this way and that, “tell them—yist some fishes in their nets. I see a jumping.” A thin this-way-and-that bristle of poles, supporting fishing nets against the current, straggled in the middle of the side stream.
Poor Wilfred felt almost a fool. However competent one may feel to address a jury, it is a fact that one is not trained at the English bar to act as communicating medium between naked fellow-men fifty yards away, and peasant compatriots with whom—in spite of their nationality—one has no word of common language. Nevertheless, Wilfred patiently jotted down a few hieroglyphics in his notebook and showed the paper to his Manchurian host. The host, after breathing loudly yet affably for a moment on the message, sketched a dozen characters in reply.
“He says the nets are not yet cleared,” shouted Wilfred, self-consciously. “They are usually examined after sundown.”
“I will examinate in a minute,” shouted Seryozha. Wilfred averted his eyes as Seryozha, tipped with sunburn, began to walk up the far shallows to the sandbank, looking like an ivory saint on which coarse copper extremities had been stuck as a blasphemous joke. The dog threw itself upon him; cries and barkings of joy clanged across the water. The light was growing very quickly dimmer now. Outlines that were sure at one moment must be guessed at in the next, then believed in with the heart of faith, and finally only remembered.
Seryozha was fairly clear to the spectators as he roused the bullock from its rest. The bullock’s behind rose first. Then it indulged in its usual pause, trying to remember what came next. But as Seryozha rushed at it with a facetious cry, its forelegs were inspired and straightened themselves with a plunge. The worried creature took to the water once more, abandoning its new kingdom without wagging a horn. Twilight blurred it; it was there—it was here—no, it was there—it was suddenly much nearer than anyone had expected, splashing meekly up out of shallow water toward the village.
Seryozha could be heard whistling to his dog, exhorting it with a kindly curse. Then there was a gentle flipping noise of swimming. The dusk drew veils across the white blurred water.
Suddenly there was a noise of turbulent water, a squeal—“Oooo‑eeee!” from Seryozha, and then bubblings and churnings and snortings only.
“What has occurred?” quavered Wilfred. “Mr. Malinin—are you involved in some calamity?”
A snorting as of restricted fountains, waterspouts, and whirlpools, was the only answer. The sound, coming across calm water, had a brittle, urgent quality. Then a bubbling squeal from Seryozha. “Yist big fish!”
“You must return to shore immediately, Mr. Malinin,” wailed Wilfred, walking excitedly to the river’s edge and pawing the sand like a thwarted horse. “Your parents would highly disapprove. …”
The bubbling
