The good-natured Seryozha realized that this part of the story would certainly interest the student from the Wesleyan Academy. “In such high mountains they are praying to God, he speak,” said Seryozha, and was rewarded by Wilfred’s look of bland, if blank, gratification. Wilfred’s glass of champagne was strangely empty. Wrapt away in his emotional prison, he had been absently sipping his wine all this time, for lack of anything better to do with his lips. It was at this point that Wilfred was inspired to get out his notebook and his fountain pen and begin to write in English in his insipid clerkly hand. The plot of Pavel’s story as it filtered through to Wilfred, was so very exiguous as hardly to be able to engage even the most optimistic attention, and Wilfred had thought of another way to reestablish himself in the center of the stage. Hardly had he put pen to tooth when, as by a miracle, his glass was full again. He wrote earnestly on, sipping his wine, sucking his pen, writing again, and only rarely lifting up his voice to inquire affably after the progress of the story.
Seryozha was getting bored. He looked at Tatiana across the stream of her father’s voice that ran between them. She seemed to be getting smaller and smaller; she was sinking lower and lower in her chair. She was really trying to be unobtrusive—to be part of the twilight—because if her father should notice her, she was likely to be sent to help her mother and Katya in the kitchen. Tatiana, when still, was very indolent, afraid to break a spell of peace; when moving, she moved ardently, she danced, she ran. Now she hardly breathed. She listened to the story, lending her faint changes of expression to the changing phases of the story—frowning for Ivanov, tossing her head for Rodin, assuming a delicate insolence for her father’s defiances. She and Seryozha, all the time, looked at each other across the river of talk with eyes endowed by wine with a sort of magnifying intensity of sight.
Pavel was opening a third bottle of champagne, but he did not stop talking. “What I said made Ivanov uncontrollably angry. I’ve often thought since that he must once have been a man of simple orthodoxy, before Bolshevik propaganda filled his stupid mind. That would account for his anger at what I said; one is always more annoyed by hearing something one might once have said oneself. He said a good many things about my infecting his sound men with outworn superstitions—treason to the Soviet—you know the kind of thing … and then he literally kicked me out of camp—unarmed—without a kopek. He’d got my horses, mind you, and not a penny did he pay for them, the dirty scoundrel. You can carry a message to your friends, sitting trusting in their divine cockalorum on that mountain top,’ he shouted. ‘You can tell them that with the hot weather coming on and their water supply in my hands, they’d find it wisest to change sides. … You go there and tell them that and stay there,’ he said. ‘Perhaps I’ll pay you your money when you bring them all down, all with your tongues hanging out, ready to lick our hands for a drink. …’ I really think he wanted me to carry that message—that’s why he let me go. Anyway, I went. I couldn’t do anything else. His men had taken all my money and papers and my grooms had disappeared. I just thrust my chest out and walked up the pass—as well as I could for a kick one of the dirty brutes had given me on the ankle. The defenders wouldn’t waste their machine-gun ammunition on one lame man. I shouted, ‘Don’t shoot,’ and waved my arms, and they let me come. They searched me, and then I had a talk with Rodin. Would you believe it? there were some quite good-looking women in the village—Russian refugee women, I mean, not the miners’ wives—refugees who’d drifted there in Rodin’s wake, I suppose. … Everything was upside down in those days. My God! they were hard up for water. There was a little cascade in the ravine, but it was almost dried up, and their cisterns were almost empty. No likelihood of rain, either, and, of course, not a drop coming up from the valley. Ivanov had seen to that. People were allowed to drink by measure. I saw a woman faint in the street, the day I got there, and next day a young fellow had a kind of fit. I liked Rodin, and he saw at once what kind of man I was. We found we had friends in common. I was with him when a group of men—the village storekeeper, the publican, a couple of mine agents, and some such outsiders, came and asked him to give up the village or take his soldiers somewhere else. ‘Better give up than die of thirst,’ they said. ‘We’ll have to give up some time, at this rate. You said we were to trust in God, but he doesn’t send us water, so it couldn’t be much worse for us if we put our trust in Red Ivanov.’ Rodin said, ‘Wait five days’—just like that—‘wait five days.’ He said it so confidently and so mysteriously that the deputation thought he’d got some idea up his sleeve. When they’d gone I said, ‘My dear Colonel, what in the world do you expect will happen in five days? The Second Advent?’ ‘Oh, anything may happen,’ he said. ‘I never look more than four days ahead; the fifth day is the one I can’t see, so I always expect a
