“The fish is now prepared,” said Wilfred, glittering with the excitement of success.
The fish was indeed good. Seryozha drank some samshu with it. “I wish there is a singing girl in this village,” said Seryozha. From time to time his chewing was checked by a surge of silly memory in his mind, that made him clasp his stomach in an ecstasy of giggle and blurt a high cracking ha-ha into his dish. Then he found that he was sitting on the newspaper packet that contained the heart, gall, and liver of the fish.
“Ah, tschah!” he exclaimed, annoyed. “Mr. Chew, to what use is the heart and the liver and the gall of this fish?”
“You remember,” said Wilfred, “we were talking about devils. Well, the smell of the heart and liver of such a fish is a cure for devils. If a devil or an evil spirit trouble anyone, we must make a smelly smoke of these things before the man or woman, and the party shall be no more vexed.”
“What party?” asked Seryozha, stupidly.
“Well … a cold woman, for instance,” said Wilfred, after buzzing dubiously to himself through his teeth for a moment. “Coldness in a woman means that a devil is in her, and the devil can be frightened away by any husband that takes proper precautions.”
“Ai-ai!” exclaimed Setyozha, feeling that he was acquiring useful knowledge. “Inside such women yist devils! Tcht! tcht! So here is magic—to make smells against devils. Mr. Chew, is this Wesleyan magic, yes—no?”
“It has nothing to do with religion,” said Wilfred, stuttering a little in confusion, as though the Reverend Oswald Fawcett had laid a hand on his shoulder. “Religion is one thing, medicine is another. Chinese medicine is one of the most ancient and profound studies in the world. Western science has proved more and more the real wisdom behind Chinese medicine.”
“Oi—medicine!” sighed Seryozha, nodding several times and thinking of castor oil. “I understand. Yist medicine, nyet magic. You know such plenty Wesleyan things, Mr. Chew, I have forgotten you know also Chinese things.”
“Well, every Chinese knows from early childhood about the devils that obsess human beings. No religious education can alter that knowledge. And also we know it from the Bible, too. The apostles were taught to drive devils out.”
“But with smells nyet,” said Seryozha, not sceptically, but anxiously. He enjoyed acquiring unusual knowledge.
“With smells is one way,” said Wilfred, firmly. “Devils cannot live in smelly smoke. In the western hemisphere also, in old-fashioned times, Papists burned those who did not accept their faith. For the same reason, I think. They burned the body, and so the devils, not liking the smell, fled away. But now, though Christians may not burn the body, there is nothing to forbid them from stinking devils out.”
“Indeed nyet,” agreed Seryozha. “It is all most wise. I shall remember. The heart and the liver of a salmon—yes? But the gall—it is not a right smell, yes—no? Shall I not then throw away this gall? Yist to no use.”
“The gall is extremely useful, too,” said Wilfred. “It cures blindness.” He was raking away in his memories of the servants in his father’s compound at Canton.
“Blindness!” cried Seryozha. “My papa is blind.”
“Some blindness,” said Wilfred, cautiously, “is incurable. Other forms can be cured by surgical operations. But a Chinese doctor once told my old nurse that out of one hundred cases of blindness in his town, he was able to cure ninety-two by a course of treatment that involved a massage of the eyeball with the putrefying gall of a fish.”
“Oi! Yoi! Yoi!” said Seryozha, astounded. “Ninety-two. It is very many. I shall hold this in my mind.”
And he kept the lucky sticky little parcel closely beside him on the kang. But he did not, that evening, hold anything very much in his mind. A tingling, humming restfulness spread over his body; noble aspirations, happily attainable, surged in his contented brain; he felt that he had two pairs of eyes—one seeing charm and beauty in the watching brown faces of the coolies at the door, the other recognizing dreams and secrets in the shapes of shadow, the angles of the smoky little room. His head recovered with a wrench from a slow pendulum droop that he had not noticed had begun. He lay down with his head on his bundle on the kang. His feet must have dreamed they were walking again, for he woke with a jolting sense of stumbling over something. “A little stone,” he thought, drowsily, “with a devil in it.” Then his sleeping still feet went on secretly walking—walking—walking—throb—throb—throb—carrying his comfortable body into darkness.
VII
Tatiana’s mother, Varvara Alexeievna Ostapenko, sat in her garden, embroidering silk in bright colors. Varvara was a tall woman, thin and melancholy, with a dark birthmark on one cheek. She had a slow and anxious awkwardness of body; she held her head up often, as though listening, walked on tiptoe, and when, as now, she rested, never leaned back for more than a few seconds. A few seconds slackening and then again there she would be, listening, with her face up, as though expecting a call.
The garden, which had been made by their Japanese landlord, seemed built, fitted together, rather than grown. Curves of asymmetrical disciplined branches looped from sky to ground; the green in-bent horizon of the garden looked like handwriting against the dazzling sky. A young reddening maple, a pine, a Japanese cherry tree, and a stunted self-conscious cedar laid down careful shadows at one another’s feet in a sort of cold courtliness. There were no flowers except Michaelmas daisies frothing in a mauve mist over
