This was the kind of joke that appealed to Wilfred. That someone else should not know something that he himself knew, seemed to him essentially flattering and amusing. (One notices the same ready sense of simple fun in a rustic, directing a stranger through his village—“Turn by Winkler’s Corner. … What, you don’t know Winkler’s Corner where Mrs. Thompson’s mare fell down dead last year? Well, it’s opposite the Glebe Field. … For goodness’ sakes, you don’t know that, either?” etc., etc.) Wilfred Chew laughed with delighted hissings, because these simple Ostapenkos did not know that Seryozha was his father’s son.
Pavel was baffled by Seryozha’s uncommunicative manner. “Is Sergei Dmitrivitch in good health?” he asked, though he really wanted to say: “What’s the matter? Is my old cousin dead or has he turned you out of doors, young man?”
“He is in good health,” said Seryozha, and added, indifferently, “He is my father.”
“Well, well!” shouted Pavel, leaping up and clapping his hands about Seryozha’s shoulders. “My dear, dear boy, you don’t know what it means to us in our exile to have a kinsman walking in like this. We haven’t heard anything of any of our kin since the revolution, and though your father and I are only distant cousins, I used to have the greatest admiration for him. Can he still move his ears and the hair on the top of his head?”
“He has no hair to move, now,” said Seryozha. “And he isn’t merry enough to do that kind of thing now. He is blind.”
“Blind!” Pavel’s emotions, always a little exaggerated by the excitement of a drink just over or that of a drink to come, at once materialized in the form of a tear in each eye. “Ah, poor man! poor man! Blind! … I am very tenderhearted. Excuse me.”
“Explain me what he is saying,” said Wilfred, anxiously. But there was no time, for Pavel went on:
“Blindness—the most terrible of all afflictions, especially to a man of your father’s sturdy independence of character. … He used to be so kind to me when I was a young boy and he a youth about town in Moscow. His hair, falling backward, looked like an accident. Lord! How I used to laugh! And now he is blind. Ah, how carefree children are … how little they know. …”
His beautiful deep voice, uttering these sad words, seemed to bring to the minds of all three Ostapenkos the unearthly and tragic glamour of a remembered Ostapenko childhood. Egoists always have unhappy childhoods, and always look back on them in an agony of rapture and emotion. The eyes of both Varvara and Tatiana were wet at the thought of the laughter of little Ostapenkos, unconscious of a threatened doom.
“They are all crying,” said Wilfred, feverishly. “Explain me, please, Saggay Saggayitch, what is being said.”
“It is curious how all members of our family—mine and no doubt yours, Sergei Sergeievitch—” Pavel included Seryozha’s family as a polite afterthought, “are haunted by this sense of doom—this atmosphere of tragedy—from birth till death, and always a tragically sudden death, mind you. A hard-drinking, hard-riding, passionate, gloomy, sensitive, tragic breed. …” He rolled these delicious words in his throat, drew himself up to his full splendid height, and glared at Seryozha, as though scorching into his young kinsman’s intelligence the baneful splendor of his connection with the tragic Ostapenkos. “This air of doom—your father’s blindness is a fearful example of it—seems to affect even those who come in contact with us. My daughter’s betrothed, Alexander Petrovitch Weber—By the way, were you still at Chi-tao-kou when that tragedy culminated?”
“What tragedy? You mean when Alexander Petrovitch lost his papers?”
“He lost his life,” said Pavel. “He cut his throat.”
Seryozha caught his breath and looked at Tatiana. There seemed to him to be no spontaneous connection between this live young woman and that dead young man. For he had an extravagant respect for life; unconsciously, he enshrined it as a holiness. The power of movement, the sight of movement, and the feeling of movement were his trinity.
Tatiana rubbed her hands slowly together and passed the tip of her tongue across her lips, looking here and there, but not at Seryozha.
“It is certainly a curse,” boomed Pavel, standing swinging his weight from one foot to the other, almost as though he were dancing. “It is part of the family curse which you and we, as kinsmen, share. Tanya has had seven admirers, and all have felt the force of the family doom. We are certainly accursed. … If you were not a cousin of ours—and thus involved in any case—I would advise you to keep away from us, young man. Ostapenkos affect all who approach them.”
“Kindly explain what he is saying, Saggay Saggayitch,” twittered Wilfred.
“That case of champagne, Varitchka my dear,” said Pavel, “may be said to have been long waiting to be opened in honor of a kinsman.”
Varvara, frowning with excitement, went out of the room, and as she passed Seryozha she said in a low voice to him, “Sergei Sergeievitch—you mustn’t judge her by love.”
Seryozha turned quickly and looked after her, gaping. “Well, these are queer birds, these Ostapenkos,” he thought, and had an impulse to step to the door and shout after his hostess, “I don’t intend to.”
“What did Mrs. Ostapenko whisper to you, Saggay Saggayitch?” cried Wilfred, rumpling his thick black hair in a frenzy of thwarted enthusiasm.
“Alexander Petrovitch,” said Pavel, “was my darling future son-in-law—the ideal son-in-law. Sometimes I think, Sergei Sergeievitch, that women exist only to suck the blood out of men. … Excuse me a moment …” He could hear that Varvara was looking in the wrong place for the champagne.
“Please, please, what is he talking about, Saggay Saggayitch?” said Wilfred desperately, as their host went out.
“Oi … about mans … and womans … plenty things,” said Seryozha. He was looking blankly at Tatiana’s reflection in a looking-glass. It was an old dark glass that made everything seem twilit and
