Poor Old Sergei was certainly a most uncomfortable old man at that time. His wife could hardly bear him, and yet she was not so cruel to him as she would have liked to be. Kindness was, as it were, at each extremity of her behavior to him; the core of her feeling was kindness and she tossed an exasperated kindness from her finger tips. This surface kindness made her buy him things he liked to eat and serve them with muffled curses, which, being misheard by him, she would change to words of half-ironic gentleness. But between the core and the surface of her mood there was a dark, tortuous area of weariness and hatred of his plaintiveness, his meanness, the contradiction of life that he was. In this intervening confusion of her nature she suffered a sort of contrariness, a doubling back, that made her challenge herself unconsciously to be cruel—to try him a little more—a little more—a little more (will he stand it?)—a little more still (almost like a murderess daring herself to press a trigger)—till he would suddenly feel the prick of her insult, and lose his temper and his dignity. Then she would feel acutely guilty, talk to him gently with elaborate harmlessness, answer his meandering talk for a little while, until the obscurely revengeful impulse came back to hurt him again—a little—a little more—a little more still. …
She would wrench his rheumatic fingers with a half-deliberate pinch as she guided his hand to his food, and then, when he cried out, impulsively and genuinely beg his pardon, pretending, even to herself, that it had been a clumsy accident. She would sit and look at him, grinding her teeth because he was not his son, and all the time make wounding or humiliating retorts to his plaintive prattle. He was not very acute and did not often perceive that he was being worse treated than usual; he only thought that Anna seemed clumsier and stupider than usual, more misunderstanding in her talk and more abrupt in her movements. And, seeing his obtuseness, that strange contrary cruelty in the soft Anna would gloat over its opportunity—the tormenting of a creature too silly to recognize the instrument of torment—“how safe … no one will ever know of this … no one but me …” Then, in the night, she would suddenly wake up, frozen with self-disgust, beat her head with her palm, and throw herself upon her husband, crying: “My darling, I’m sorry, I’m sorry! Forgive me. What a beast I am!” To Old Sergei these violent night-scenes of remorse were much more disturbing than the subtle discomfort of his days.
In order partly to be away as much as possible from her lonely house, and partly to save her old husband from herself, Anna pretended that she had a lot of work to do for Mrs. Butters during the first week of Seryozha’s absence. Really the preparations for the Butters baby were finished now, and Anna was only needed at the mission once a week to help with the darning and mending. Yet every morning, after breakfast, she would murmur a vague word or two about Mrs. Butters’s sewing and disappear, leaving bread, cheese, and beer ready on the table for her husband’s noon meal. Old Sergei would sit drooping alone all day in the street doorway. He had charge of the sale of a few packages of cheap Russian and Japanese cigarettes, matches, sweets, biscuits, bottles of lemonade and clay pipes that were arranged on a couple of trestles outside the living-room door—the last rigor mortis of his dead shop. But only two or three customers a day spent a few sen on his goods and all day he would sit, half in and half out of his door, listening to the shouts of Korean and Chinese children playing, listening to the thin whine of the Japanese photographer next door singing over his work, listening to the clop-ker-clop of the senseless facetious gamboling of the mission kid in the yard behind the house, listening to the unfailing accompaniment of wails, cries, and squeals of thwarted and hurt animals that is always in the background of the hearing in every Chinese town. Sometimes the lonely old man would spend hours trying to lure within reach a dog that he could hear panting and snuffling and snapping at flies and ticks across the street. With a bait of crusts or show of imaginary food, he would patiently fish for the animal, only for the pleasure of touching its rough neck and shoulders when at last it trusted him enough to approach him—touching its mangy ribs, its furtive tail, feeling the drip of sweat from its hanging tongue, assuring himself morbidly of the presence of another prisoner like himself, another life within another lean, sad, and elusive body.
The first day of Seryozha’s absence, Anna’s only impulse in leaving her home was to walk a little way along the path that he had trodden. Perhaps she might see the print of his big shoes or find something that he had dropped—the stub of a cigarette or the paper that had wrapped pirozhki. Perhaps she might learn something about him from a Korean peasant or Chinese peddler who had seen him passing by. At any rate, she could see things that he had seen—notice the patched crops upon the hills, the sharp rocks that slit with a short gash of foam the smooth-running surface of the river, the thin shade under which he had perhaps rested, the bloomy dazzle of reeds in the shallows, the fantastic duplication of crags—reared in groups, as nearly alike as the chimneys of one house—halfway round the horizon, the farm dogs that must have barked at him, that great scrawny sow, dragging her unbeautiful dugs through the dust, that must have made him laugh yesterday. Probably he remembered, when he saw that, that his mother had once said that the fat pink mission school
