At the end of a fortnight they received a letter from Seryozha to say that he had married Tatiana Pavlovna Ostapenko.
It was a very bald letter. Seryozha was not a literary boy. Anna found it when she came in from a long walk out into the country—out on to the road by which she hoped to see, far across the valley, two distant figures returning home.
“He has married that woman whom Alexander Weber called death,” said Anna, putting down the letter. Now she knew why the outlines of young Alexander’s body had seemed so empty and expectant to her. Seryozha had been drawn away, like life through the door of a wound, drawn across deserts to love death, drawn by the lure of a ghost—a cruel ghost who sucked life. That was the end of Anna’s son. He had been stolen away, to lie at last dead, far from home, married to death. That blank that was Alexander had been waiting—to be filled by Seryozha’s glowing body. Anna’s eyes, unprompted by her sense, now filled in a him in the place of the it that had lain on Nikitin’s table—that pale death—that wan vision—that thing only casually labeled Alexander Petrovitch, as it might have been labeled with a number—that obscurely anonymous seventh doomed lover of a ghost. Anna knew now what dear color that pallor waited for—the bright dead face of Seryozha—astounded, desolate, haloed with white, alone, and married to death.
“My son is dead. Now I care for nothing—my son—since I have let you go—the light of my eyes. …”
X
The night of the goose and champagne—the night of Seryozha’s arrival at the Ostapenkos’ house—seemed the longest night in the whole realm of time—a sort of Methuselah of a night. The days of a man’s life, thought Seryozha, are of different ranks—counts, princes, fat bourgeois days, rough peasant days—but this was a grand, duke of a day, a giant of rank, quite outside the standard of ordinary days. Each royal minute was like an hour, each hour like a crowned year. All the other days of his life should bow before this—the day that promoted him to be a king, to be married, to drink champagne.
Wilfred’s great day, which, for some little time, may be said to have been in eclipse, rose again when the goose was served. Wilfred, on being tactfully roused by Seryozha and led away to put his head under the pump, assumed a guiltily bright manner, to prove to the world, and to the absent Reverend Oswald Fawcett (who was Wilfred’s conscience) that he had not drunk any wine to speak of. He did not notice that his legal document had disappeared from in front of him; he hardly remembered having written it, though it remained a settled plan in his mind; his tongue felt a little knotted and uncertain, but that did not matter, since scarcely anyone would have understood anything he said in any case. He enjoyed the goose.
Varvara’s goose took three and a half hours to eat. It was when they finally could eat no more, and even then there was no childish suggestion of going to bed. The day was recognized by common consent as a great day, and allowed to occupy its throne indefinitely. It scarcely seemed to the happy and excited Seryozha to move at all. when the goose was finished and, hours later, only . The time that had elapsed since his proposal to marry Tatiana had been accepted seemed so enormous that he was as well reconciled to it as though his parents had arranged it in his childhood. Age had matured and mellowed it to the status of a reasonable sanctioned thing.
He found Tanya more and more beautiful each minute, and each long minute gave him time to learn something new and delightful about her face. At first it embarrassed him to look at her across the brown hill of goose carcass that stood between them, because she, on her part, never took her eyes off his face. But after a while he found that somehow, though her eyes were on him, their two pairs of eyes never seemed to meet. She seemed to be looking at him in a blind way, as a painted picture looks, and he could watch her without self-consciousness, as one might bravely cross glances with a painted queen. Seryozha had never in his life had such an opportunity to look at a beautiful girl. He had no words to say all the things he noted about her. “Supple,” he thought, anxiously, “clean—even—ivory—bones like carved curves—hollows under cheekbones, carved again—something pulling outer corners of eyes down and lips up—accurate—keen—sun always dazzling eyes. …” He saw that her skin was like faintly tinted ivory, but, never having approached real civilization, was not surprised at that pale gloss that would have showed you or me that Tatiana had never come in contact with a powder puff.
As for Tatiana, she had never seen that odd animal, man, presented in such fair colors and with such striking inoffensiveness of detail. I dare say that the fact that Seryozha had never yet needed to shave (though he did shave, sometimes, on Sundays, when his mother was unusually forgetful of his manliness) had, at the beginning, more part in his fascination for her than any other factor. He seemed to her so well sewn up in his nice skin. Men, she had always found, were such a clumsy piece of work compared with animals. They were so flawed, so pitted with pores and discolorations, so smoky, so hot, so shiny bald or sticky-haired—like a child’s stitching on canvas, whereas any animal was like Chinese embroidery on silk. One had only to compare the face of a Korean beggar dog—crawling with ticks, yet
