Tatiana, crouched over something on the table, said, “Have you ever noticed that there are always pictures of spotted deer on all Japanese matchboxes? Sometimes in one attitude, sometimes in another, but always under a little tree. I wonder why.”
Seryozha did not know why, so he only grunted humbly. Wilfred Chew, feeling anxiously that an opportunity for wit or sentiment was being missed, leaned forward, grinning with all his teeth, and said, “Horosho, Miss Ostapenko, horosho horosho. …” Horosho was the only Russian word he knew, and of course it was an enthusiastic and ambiguous one. Poor Wilfred, it was torture for him to be left out of talk.
Pavel came back with the hurried gait of one who has thought of several good things to say while he has been away.
“Women, Sergei Sergeievitch, are like a kind of dry rot in a man’s world,” shouted Pavel, who was suffering from one of the momentary spasms of dislike of women that come to a man who lives alone with devoted women to whom he is reluctantly devoted.
“I must say, I don’t understand this grumbling at things for being things,” said Seryozha, feeling very manly. “You can’t grumble even at a louse for being a louse; only if it pretends to be a beetle—then you can grumble. Or if it bites you, you can grumble at the bite. But bite or no bite, it is what it is. I don’t think women are dry rot, or anything but just women. They do what they were born to do, just as we do and lice do.”
“You are like all young people in these days, cousin, full of contradictory arguments,” said Pavel, genially, without giving attention to a word Seryozha had said. “I’ll tell you a story out of my own experience—a story that always seems to me to typify the mean part women play in men’s affairs. Excuse me a moment while I open this bottle. Tanya, the wire-cutter.”
Tatiana, without rising and without lowering her eyes, which were fixed in a kind of blurred stare on the matchbox on the table, pulled out a drawer close to her. She was for a second obliged to focus her eyes on the contents of the drawer as she selected the wire-cutter and handed it to her father. Then she fixed her blurred, trance-like gaze on her father. He was half turned away from her toward the guests, and she could see the layer of healthy fat at the corner of his jaw, his cheek, the side muscle of his neck, and even his ear, wobbling as he talked. She thought, what an inconceivably over-elaborate use we make of these strips of flesh—our lips, our tongues, our hands, our feet … praying, singing, telling lies, explaining philosophies, opening champagne bottles, making watches and guns, dancing, treading out grapes. … What a complicated destiny for something that is, after all, nothing but meat. … The natural thing for lips to utter is a grunt, thought Tatiana—a kind, calm grunt like Seryozha’s. Yet there was the flesh on the sides of her father’s skull all quivering like a jelly to no purpose, the bones all shaking anxiously with superfluous effort.
Pavel poured out three glasses of champagne for his two guests and himself. Wilfred shook his head vigorously. “I never touch alcohol,” he said. “Its dangers have been so well explained to me by Reverend Mr. Oswald Fawcett. And, Miss Ostapenko, I see, does not touch alcohol, either.”
Pavel hesitated and then poured out half a glass for his daughter. His attention was drawn by this to Wilfred, and he said: “Your friend might be interested in my story too. What a pity that he speaks no civilised language.”
Wilfred, feeling that he was being referred to, bowed excitedly several times.
“About ten years ago,” said Pavel, settling down. “Or wasn’t it ten years ago? Anyway, at the time the Japanese and Americans were at Vladivostok, I happened to be buying ponies in Mongolia. Wherever there is war, Sergei Sergeievitch, somebody will be ready to pay for horses, and horses are my skill. All Ostapenkos have an eye for a horse. Some people have skill in writing poetry, some in starching evening dress shirts. I have skill in horses. Those little Mongolian horses are excellent in their way—the English race them and play polo with them in Shanghai, I believe—and in the war I found it several times worth while to go down into Mongolia, leaving my wife and baby in Vladivostok, and buy direct from the Mongolian breeders. An amusing expedition, that; the Mongol horse-breeders are decent, hospitable men if you treat them fairly, though—God!—they smell! They live in tents and feed you on mutton—mutton—mutton—cooked sour, somehow—nothing but mutton (except that once I found a horsetail in the big family stewpot. Lord! I can tell you I went out and vomited).”
“What is all this about, Saggay Saggayitch?”
“He eat sheep and horse’s tail,” said Seryozha, and poor Wilfred, astounded, fell back in his chair, trying to hook this information on to anything that had gone before.
“At the time I crossed the border into Mongolia, the out-of-the-way districts were hardly affected at all, as yet, by the revolution or its after effects. Once one got away from the railway zone, one was off the track of politics. So when I returned into Siberia, with fifty good ponies, I was surprised to come across a troop of Red cavalry—the offshoots of Boudeny’s activities, I suppose—under the command of a scoundrel called Ivanov.”
“Bolshevik horses,” said Seryozha in English, seeing Wilfred drawing breath to bleat another hopeless appeal.
“Now I, Sergei Sergeievitch, am an unsentimental man without any prejudices. I am always ready to receive new ideas. My skill in horses is my only fixed idea. Perhaps I shall shock you by saying that—at any rate at that time—though I had steered clear of politics my sympathies were rather with the revolution than against it. Twenty years before, my younger brother had
