Seryozha shifted in his chair, his big limbs tired of stillness. He became aware that a certain activity in the slowly spinning room was to be identified as the appearance of dinner. He saw the bottles fly upward to allow for the laying of the cloth and then descend again, upright, like angels. He saw blue plates settling like leaves upon the cloth. The movements of Varvara and the servant were like a little controlled wind making all these orderly displacements.
“What does dobbri-dyet-il-niar genstchina mean?” asked Wilfred, but not in the manner of one who really wants very much to know. His notebook, like the bottles and glasses, had been mysteriously snatched to heaven, a white cloud of cloth filled his sight, and now the notebook alighted again, ready for use, with a full glass of champagne beside it.
Seryozha could not remember the English words for a virtuous woman. “Nyet singing girl,” he said, uncertainly.
Katya, the servant, leaning over Pavel with a plate, said: “Have you heard the news, Varvara Alexeievna? Piotr Gavrilovitch has joined the Chinese army. He wrote from Mukden yesterday. I heard it from Olga Ivanovna’s niece’s woman.”
Pavel glanced with vindictiveness at his daughter. “Ha, Tanya! News about your Petya. That disposes of another of them, doesn’t it? Tanya, you are listening to my story, aren’t you?” He went on: “Well, Sergei Sergeievitch, when this virtuous woman saw Rodin, she said, ‘Stepan Stepanovitch, what have you said? Five days? You have given God five days to save us in. What blasphemy to set such a limit. If faith can sustain us for five days, why not five hundred? Surely we can wait on God’s will for longer than five days.’ ‘There’s such a thing as being too thirsty to trust in God,’ said Rodin. ‘There’s such a thing as having too dry a throat to pray with. Not for people like you and me, Julia Arcadievna, but for the ordinary ruck. Even five days is something. If you pray for us, perhaps something will happen to help us, even in five days.’ He had a great admiration for Julia Arcadievna. I always say myself that women are in the way when there’s fighting to be done. If it hadn’t been for all those women and children, we could have given up our position and tried our luck against Ivanov’s men in the valley. They outnumbered us, of course, but they were a poor lot, as I knew. Still, Julia Arcadievna was a damned handsome woman, and intelligent, too. She said: ‘I’ve got an idea. I won’t tell you what it is. If it fails, nobody but me loses anything. So don’t ask me any questions, but come to the head of the pass tonight, Stepan Stepanovitch, and wish me luck.’ ‘Why, where will you be going?’ ‘Don’t ask questions, I tell you. I’ve always thought I was born to be a spy.’ Would you believe it, Rodin thought so much of that woman, he let her go. He even told me he had great faith in her. It’s wonderful how good looks in women go to men’s heads. Wonderful,” he repeated in a different and savage tone, turning his white glare on his daughter.
“Rodin was a curious fellow—a fine-looking fellow, but quite bald,” went on Pavel, stroking his own thick auburn hair, glad to establish superiority over the hero he spoke of. “Plenty of hair on his upper lip, but none on his head. He and I went to the sandbag barricade at the top of the pass that evening—for by that time he trusted me absolutely, and certainly it wasn’t likely I should hold any more with these revolutionaries after they’d behaved like that over my horses. At sunset Julia Arcadievna, with her little Korean maid carrying a parcel, came mincing down the pass. Good lord!—what a change! She’d put aside all her widow’s blacks and there she was in a sandy-colored Paris-looking frock with red embroidery, and no hat or veil to hide her pretty yellow hair. She looked stunning. She’d rouged up her lips and blacked her eyes a little. She’d a way of opening her eyes suddenly very wide as she looked at you. … ‘Let your gunners and sentries know I shall be coming back in four days, Stepan Stepanovitch,’ she said. So she went. She went in the evening, I suppose so that she could pretend to Ivanov’s men that she’d slipped away unseen down the pass.”
“Well, did she come back?” asked Seryozha. The widow, Julia Arcadievna, sounded to him almost too mature to be interesting. He imagined a brazen hard-bosomed blonde of thirty—almost an aunt’s age. Seryozha could just remember meeting his mother’s sister in Russia before the revolution, and women admired by older men always ever since appeared in his mind’s sight as shrill, plump, vivacious old women of twenty-nine or so.
“Yes, she came back,” said Pavel, looking almost alarmed at the climax of his story. “She came back on the evening of the fourth day, with a parcel.”
“Well … she went away with a parcel didn’t she?” said Seryozha.
“Yes … but this was a different parcel—bigger and heavier. She opened it in the presence of Rodin and me and a lot of the men, on the terrace looking over the valley. It was wrapped up in an ordinary army blanket. It was Ivanov’s head.”
Seryozha snorted with surprise. “Ivanov’s head! How had she killed him?”
“Tschah! I leave you to imagine. In a woman’s way, of course. Poor devil! Playing on his manhood. That’s a
