Pavel’s voice was quite enough to make himself the hero of his story, unaided by the sense of his words. He quoted himself in a voice of noble clarion courage, and Ivanov in a barbarous snarl. The hmph of Ivanov whetted Wilfred’s appetite for explanation to an almost unbearable keenness.
“My goodness gracious! Saggay Saggayitch, what does that mmpp mean?”
“He speak, Bolshevik has bad horses.”
“But this story cannot be all about horses,” wailed Wilfred.
Pavel, however, swept on: “Well, of course, Ivanov could see at once what kind of man I was, and, in a word, he not only promised to buy my horses, but, since he was likely to be in that valley most of the hot weather, employed me, informally, to lick his detachment into shape, both horse and man. It was a job. As a rule, our peasants have what I call ‘horse sense,’ but those louts—my God!—they must have been brought up with newts in a swamp or polar bears on an iceberg. They simply didn’t know which end of a horse was which.”
“I thought you said this story was about women,” said Seryozha, who had been rather touched by Wilfred’s last cry. … He added aside to Wilfred, “He speak still about horse.”
“Wait,” said Pavel, with a breathy laugh. “The women will come—they always do, curse them.” He poured out more champagne. He felt very much alive, as he always felt when he had been more than half drunk and, after a period of irritation and partial sobriety, had begun to drink again. He tingled with a glorious heroism; every muscle, every nerve, every thought felt bright as a sword, after a little hour of rusty eclipse. “They were waiting to be reinforced by some artillery before tackling a stray independent party of White military engineers and miners, in a high mining village in the mountains. The Whites were in a very strong position. The only way up to the village was up a very steep ravine, or in a little dangling gravity trolley on a wire (which had, of course, been cut by Ivanov). The village must have been quite fifteen hundred feet above valley level; you could see it like—like—well, like the gold crown on a tall tooth, if you can imagine it, clamped, one might say, on a tiny peaked plateau. A couple of machine-guns could, and did, easily defend the pass. It was a difficult job for Ivanov, and he was particularly anxious to put it through because Colonel Rodin was said to be in command up there—a colonel of engineers who had given a good deal of trouble up and down that region. The place, too, was a regular magnet to all the miners of White sympathies in those mountains. The only thing Ivanov could do for the present was to stop their valley water supply—an elaborate hydraulic business that fed several of the mines from the river. I remember it being constructed several years before by an American mining engineer. Ivanov, of course, put that out of action, but still they held on, so they must have had mountain streams up there, or pretty big emergency cisterns.”
Wilfred bounced in his chair, performing a little impromptu dance on his buttocks. “What is all this about, please?”
“They stop water-pipe,” said Seryozha, and Wilfred, though profoundly puzzled, was at least relieved that the story had left the subject of horses.
“ ‘My dear Ivanov,’ I said, ‘excuse me, but you simply don’t know the kind of people you’re up against. I know this region; I know these miners; I know dozens of the men in charge of these mines; you’re up against something as stubborn as the mountains themselves, given just these kinds of conditions. They’re adventurers, these miners, and that means they’re individualists, and that again means that in ordinary circumstances every man is for himself—they’re not the “shoulder-to-shoulder” kind, when nothing threatens them; they’d as soon break a man’s nose as shake his hand. Sometimes they’re the sons of political exiles, and sometimes they’ve lived in these mountains so long that they’ve almost forgotten their mother tongue. They don’t sing pretty songs about Holy Russia, or go, with clean faces, to church on Sunday. But once something does happen to bring them together (and you may depend on it, Stepan Rodin knows how to handle them), well, I tell you they’ll never give in. You know what Rodin is—people say he’s the son of a priest, you know, and only the adopted son of old Rodin, and I bet he’s made a holy war of this. … What’s more, I’ll bet they’ve got a priest in that village, praying night and day while we sit here, to a little packed church. They’ve got their women and children to defend up there, too, and that always makes a difference. Once these fellows remember God—once they feel they’ve got God behind them—well,’ I said (and it was a funny thing to say to a Red anarchist like Ivanov), ‘God is behind them. …’ You see, Sergei Sergeievitch, I remembered I
