Old Sergei, Seryozha, and the soldiers looked at one another. All the soldiers were dressed in gray cotton uniforms made for bigger men. Why is this, I wonder? The Chinese Army Clothing Department must possess a tailor’s dummy of ideal size. I imagine them sitting at the feet of their utopian wax illusion, busy with their sewing-machines, never looking out-of-doors to see their poor actual champions, stunted and bent and lame, trudging like little skeletons across the mud of China’s devastated fields. A little like the Lady of Shalott—but not, on second thoughts, very.
“Have you a cigarette?” said one soldier. Seryozha had one behind his ear. It had already been partly smoked and there was little left of it except the long cardboard mouthpiece, but the soldiers handed it round eagerly from one to another; they were used to makeshifts.
“Are you English?” asked the corporal, after spitting noisily as if to show that whatever they were they weren’t worth much.
“No, we are White Russians. … We have a letter,” stammered Old Sergei. “We are friends of your general, Li Lien-ching …”
He was much pleased that his sensitive trousers should have been mistaken for English trousers.
All the soldiers summarized his remark one to another, in the Chinese manner. “They are friends of Li Lien-ching. Hao-hao. … They are White Big-noses known to the general. … General Li knows them; they are Big-noses. … They have letters. … It is an old Big-nose and his son who say they are friends of Li Lien-ching. …” In a few minutes they all found that they had mastered these facts, and the corporal held out his hand for General Li’s letter. The reading of the letter took a very long time. It had a pretty red and black border and was additionally beautified by a few bold characters expressing General Li’s trust in Old Sergei’s integrity. The soldiers looked upon it as an education in itself, and several of them committed to memory those characters which were new to them, writing invisible examples in the palms of their hands for one another’s benefit.
“How much did you pay for the buckle of your belt?” the corporal asked Seryozha magisterially.
“One small frog,” replied Seryozha, who spoke Chinese much better than his father, having lived two-thirds of his eighteen years of life in a Chinese village. “I gave another Russian boy one small tame green frog with a red stomach for this buckle.”
“One small frog—he bought his buckle for one frog. … A frog for a buckle. … A buckle for a frog. … The frog was exchanged for a buckle. …” The simple fellows, telling one another the joke, appreciated it more and more. “Ha-ha! … Hao-hao! … A buckle for a frog! … A frog for a buckle. … Ha-ha! … Hao-hao! …”
“Where are you going?” the corporal persisted, hoping against hope that this might elicit another joke—perhaps about frogs again.
“We are going to see if we can help our friends,” said Old Sergei, looking at the soldiers a little doubtfully. “Some White Russian soldiers in the army of your General Li were attacked somewhere near here by Chen’s men, and some were killed and some wounded, we hear. We only heard about it in Chi-tao-kou this morning. We are going to bury our dead.”
“To bury their dead,” said the soldiers one to another, still laughing, since death is among the things that raise a smile in China. “They are going to bury their dead. … Big-noses want to bury Big-noses. … Ha-ha! … Hao-hao! …”
“It is forty li from Chi-tao-kou,” said a soldier. “You must have walked fast. Big-noses have long legs. You can sit on our cart. We are going your way.”
“Is Chen’s army still in the neighborhood?”
“No, there was no army—it was only a small party of Chen’s men that found the Big-noses off their guard. They must be two hundred li away by now.”
Old Sergei and Seryozha sat on the cart, their wet legs dangling over the wheels in a row with the soldiers’ weatherbeaten ankles. The cart staggered along to the tune of a titter of bells and a ripping of whips and a snarling of drivers. The road lost itself among boulders. It became merged for miles with the cascading river bed. The cart never had four wheels on the ground at once. Soldiers’ heads were knocked together; somebody’s shoulder came in violent contact with Old Sergei’s front gums. Seryozha, after wondering for a few minutes whether to be footsore was really worse than to be seatsore, jumped off the cart and stumbled down the heaped, gashed trail.
He walked more quickly than the laboring cart and at the turn of the gorge waited for it. Great ghostly clouds had been bowling up like smoke out of the peaks of the hills. Raindrops fell on Seryozha’s nose—chin—hand—neck—then a wave of rain leapt over the near hill. He stood just inside a deserted and ruined Korean hut, waiting for the cart, watching the rain. The flowery slopes waved under the flying clouds. Far ahead there was a dwindling horizontal strip of calm blue sky strung like a taut cord over the stormy valley.
The mud floor of the hut was strewn with old sacks, straw, rags, broken crocks, and a crumpled brazier. It must be a very poor thing that is discarded as useless by a Korean. Part of one wall had fallen in and the thatch sagged and dripped. A gawky sunflower hung its silly head in the doorway. There was a smell of dirty humanity mixed with the smell of horse and wet grass.
Seryozha stood in the doorway and looked up a windy slope spotted with scrub-oaks and magenta azaleas. Against
