But as she walked home, with Old Sergei clinging to her arm, tears ran down her face and she sobbed aloud. “Oi! it’s just that all boys are alike,” she said, roughly and brokenly to her husband. “The same number of fingers and toes … the same silly hearts … the same busy soft bodies … all the boys in the world are really like one huge silly young body. … Yet Seryozha’s still safe. I can’t care much about this poor Alexander.” As for Alexander—let some other mother worry about him. She, Anna, had given him her aunt’s silver cross—and so—away with him!
“We must help the Nikitins to arrange for a decent funeral, even though he did kill himself,” said Old Sergei, fussily. “There was a nice plot of ground next to Alexei Vassileievitch’s grave, wasn’t there? Shall you leave your aunt’s silver cross on his breast, or did you only lend it to him?”
“My aunt’s cross? How do you know I put my aunt’s silver cross on his breast? You did not go near him.”
“How do I know? How should I not know? I saw it, of course.” He was abruptly silent for an astonished moment and then said, “Anna—I saw it.”
Anna’s thoughts always ran in such a bustling hurry along grooves worn by her own experience that for a moment she did not realize the significance of his emphasis—in spite of her first feeling of disconnection between the remark and her reason. He saw it—well, why was that nonsense? She had seen it herself. Why not? He saw it, yes—he saw it? He—saw it? But he was blind!
“How could you have seen it?” she said, irascibly. “How could you see anything? Tell me, how did you really know it was there? You didn’t touch him—you said you couldn’t bear to and you didn’t. What do you mean, you silly old man? How did you know about the cross? Explain. Don’t make silly mysteries.”
“There is no mystery. I saw it,” said Old Sergei. Then the impression began to dim and he added: “Yet, no—that’s absurd. How could I have seen it? Let me see—how did I know it was there?”
Anna’s mind could only digest everythings or nothings. There was no sometimes in her schedule, only always and never. The suicide of Alexander, and her own sense of failure, had inspired in her that futile, sore irritation left by a happening that cannot be revoked—that craving of the heart to say, “Let’s pretend it hasn’t happened,” when the brain answers, “But it has. …” The heart crying, “Come back to yesterday—yesterday he lived,” and the brain insisting, “No. Face today. Today he is dead. …”
“Oh, you old nuisance!” said Anna, while even as she spoke she recognized her accusation as false and unfair. “I believe you can see all the time. You have been pretending blindness all these months, just to be tiresome and make us pity you. … Look, walk by yourself now, you old hypocrite. You can see perfectly well. Let go of my arm.” She threw his clinging hands away from her arm and walked furiously away.
Old Sergei was left in the middle of the street, flapping his arms like a child. He threw all his tremulous householder’s dignity away and began bellowing: “Anna! Anna! Help! Anna, are you a devil? Annitchka, I am lost—I can’t see. Annitchka darling, help me! …” Several Chinese peddlers, shocked and amused at this loud scene between a male and female Big-nose, stood still to watch.
Anna came back to him and snatched at his hand, almost crying with hatred of herself and him: “Tschah! Come along then; come along, you old fool.”
“But, Anna, I swear you are wrong,” twittered the old man, wild with relief at her return, clinging with both hands to her wrist as he stumbled beside her. “Annitchka, I swear I am no hypocrite—I am blind—you can see I’m blind. The doctor said I was blind. I can’t explain about the silver cross, but I am not lying about my blindness—I swear it—Anna—believe it—believe it—believe it!” he cried, shrilly. Her harshness had sent him abruptly back into his childhood again, he shook and pinched her arm, like a naughty child, in a panic of insistence. The Chinese peddlers walked slowly behind them, laughing, fascinated and embarrassed.
“I shall go straight to the hospital,” said Anna, obstinately, “and talk to the Japanese doctor and ask him what really is wrong with your sight … whether it is possible that you are simply pretending, all these months, to be helpless. He called it hysterical from the first. … I shall ask him what all this means—I see—I can’t see—I see—I can’t see. Tschah! you old baby. …”
And she did, after leaving him on his own threshold, walk to the hospital, having nothing else to do, and ask the Japanese doctor to explain this curious intermission in her husband’s blindness—if genuine blindness it was.
The Japanese doctor was a very sparkling young man who had studied medicine and psychology in Chicago. In spite of his American education, he still presented that contradiction or quibble in social convention characteristic of his race, which obliged him continually to hiss inward politely through his teeth for fear of seeming to exhale in the presence of a stranger, yet allowed him to hawk and cough explosively every minute into that stranger’s very eye.
He thought poor fat untidy Anna very uncouth, but he bowed to her neatly and repeatedly and was delighted to talk about his most treasured case—Old Sergei. He was less delighted to hear about him, for, though he spoke beautiful English, he understood very little, unless it was written down. This is a peculiarity of the Japanese as linguists—all have tongues, but few have ears. A Japanese fellow traveler may give you an exhaustive account of the geological history of the Cheddar Gorge, and yet face you with a blank baffled bow when you ask him to pass
