“Well, what happened? I suppose the revolution didn’t stop for lack of Ivanov’s head,” said Seryozha, prosaically.
“No, but the troop moved off in the dawn of the next day. I watched them go—little lolloping specks in loose formation. I knew why, of course—they were nothing but raw louts; only Ivanov held them together; they were lost without him. Some of our miners went out along the mountains and sniped them when they came to the narrow head of the valley. They even got back some of my horses.”
Varvara watched her husband. Only she knew how little of his story was true, and she did not mind. On the contrary, the story seemed to her a wonderful and brilliant fruit to have grown out of the seed of a little drab anecdote about a miner’s Yakut woman who went out spying. Nobody was like Pavel, thought Varvara. He was her contribution to the sum of things—and, through him, Tatiana. She made no other contribution, and therefore had no other return. She sat self-contained, contributing no smile, no wit, no generosity, no money, no tyranny, no song—none of those forms of invested capital which alone pay dividends of friendship, fear, gratitude, love, or power. Nothing comes to the heart that hasn’t first gone from it; Varvara knew that. But she didn’t mind, because Pavel and Tatiana were her songs, and the voices of Pavel and Tatiana the returning echoes of her songs.
“Is this the end of the story?” asked Wilfred, noticing a silence, in spite of a slight fogginess of perception.
“Yist. She cutted off Bolshevik head.”
“Good!” said Wilfred, feeling himself at last in possession of the facts. “Horosho, horosho,” he added, nodding brightly to Pavel.
“Did you listen to my story, Tanya?” asked Pavel, suddenly turning on his daughter.
“Yes, papasha.”
“A good one, wasn’t it?”
“Good, but perhaps a little long,” said Tatiana’s mother, hastily.
“I’m glad, at least, she kept herself clean of him,” said Tatiana between trembling lips.
“What?” roared Pavel.
The usually restrained Varvara suddenly made a great noise, clapping her hands, rapping the table, speaking in a shrill brisk voice: “Do you know what we are going to have for dinner? A gosling—a gosling in honor of our young cousin.” She looked desperately at her husband and spoke more loudly still: “Oh, so good—you’ll never guess how good, Pavlik! … You’ve all been talking so long, you men, that Katya and I had plenty of time to roast it to a turn. A gosling—a gosling—oh so good!” She banged the table for her husband’s attention.
“What is she saying?” asked Wilfred, startled.
“She speak, we bite goose for dinner.”
“My goodness gracious!” breathed Wilfred. “I thought she was announcing some calamity. So loud.” He looked ruefully at his notebook, for the sudden noise had caused his shocked hand to make a little blot in the middle of one page of his neat writing.
Pavel, though his impulse of anger was a little softened by the goose, would not allow his attention to be entirely distracted by his wife’s irrelevance. “Very well done, Varitchka. A gosling. Very good. But, Tanya—what was your comment on my story?”
Tatiana was silent. “Tanya made no comment,” said Varvara.
Yet in Seryozha’s hearing was ringing quite clearly the comment that Tatiana had made. I’m glad, at least, she kept herself clean of him.
What a curious word—“clean”—he thought, and his thoughts went round and round it in a slow spin. Clean—clean—clean … women clean of men—men clean of women. He was young enough to be very impressionable by words, and the word “clean” did not strike him as being a euphemism for something much less attractive. On the contrary, in his present thin-spun, rarefied, wine-blessed mood, it seemed to him to express an ideal of some sort. That was the word that fitted his own rare moon-washed feeling—that hunger in the presence of quietness and color for something that would not appease the demands of either stomach, brain, or sex. Poor Seryozha! He almost recognized that hunger of his at that moment, though he could give it no other word than “clean.” It was his body hungering to be free of talk and understanding—hungering to be a bit of world, a blade of grass, a tiger—anything that was not dirtied by talk and thought. Everything between men and women was dirty—except one thing. “That girl—one could eat that girl, and remain clean,” thought Seryozha.
He was obsessed with the image of hunger, since the gosling had been mentioned.
“Tanya,” said Varvara, clearing away the zakuska, “come and help me dish up the goose.”
The two women went to the door. As Tatiana passed Seryozha, he expected her to smile at him; he felt so sure that an understanding had been established between them, that she would be grateful to him for so keenly appreciating her word “clean.” But she did not smile at all. She walked past him, meeting his eager eyes without a change of expression, grave, blank, as though thinking of something else. And so strange was the chill that this blank look gave him, that his memory, shocked, threw back to the context of her remark, and he knew instantly that he had entirely misunderstood her words. She kept herself clean of him.
By clean she meant cold, dead—all life was dirty to her. Her ideal was coldness. No tiger of life could hunger for that white unsmiling ghost. Seryozha thought, “If I had her, she’d melt like ice in my arms—she’d be clean of me, then.” The word cold occurred to him many times—cold—cold—cold—before he realized what it suggested to him, and then he got up, a little unsteadily, and followed mother and daughter toward the kitchen. In the
