The Faraway Bride

honest, finished, and sinless⁠—with that of a Korean beggar man⁠—rotted away with mean and complex depravity⁠ ⁠… one had only to compare the fine eager beam of a thirsty horse bending to drink from a pool, with the leer of a Russian approaching his glass of beer⁠—to see the essential golden rightness in an animal’s face and to admit the spoiled spotted thing that man is. Seryozha seemed to Tatiana as flawless and bland as an animal, and she watched him with real delight and imagination, as she often watched her father’s young horses running from end to end of their field. Life beamed from Seryozha direct⁠—not refracted among distorting human angles. Whatever he did would be right, Tatiana thought, just as whatever an animal does is right. Sometimes dangerous, perhaps, sometimes surprising⁠—but always right. And always lovely, if one looked at it not through the complicated spoiled lens of human eyes. Something about an animal was always mercifully far away⁠—by itself, even if the animal was in one’s arms, demanding attention. Something about man was too close, even if that man was far away, even if he was dead in a far country, dead of his own intrusion. Something about Seryozha would always be far away, thought Tatiana, even if his breath were on one’s cheek⁠—something in him would be part of the sunny, sweet, dumb world, happy and living by itself, like a galloping colt.

Pavel Ostapenko’s voice trumpeted on. Hardly a word he said was true, but every word exalted him or his family. He was like a motor engine which, by running, charges continually its own battery. The more his lips uttered his own praises, the more was his listening heart charged with an exquisite accumulation of vanity, and the more self-flatteries did his lips find to express. Seryozha was by now quite established as a grafted twig upon the towering Ostapenko tree. The divine word Ostapenko now included Seryozha and his parents, and the whole great branching growth brushed the clouds.

Neither Seryozha nor Wilfred drank any more wine. This was partly because Pavel Ostapenko had by now drunk so much that he continually forgot to fill any glass but his own. But it was also because Seryozha was warm with a glow of glittering responsibility; he did not want to lose himself in folly and sickness tonight; he was gloriously happy as he was, and everything looked as happy as a flower. He felt that he had climbed to a pinhead peak of happiness, and that to go any farther would be as stupid a descent as to retreat⁠—and almost as impossible. As for Wilfred Chew, the spirit of the Reverend Oswald Fawcett was reestablished on his disciple’s inward throne. Wilfred felt sure that he had not yet done anything wrong. Surely a good Wesleyan could join in the harmless feastings of his friends⁠—especially if the language bar prevented any other sociable interchange. Champagne up till now had been labeled Good Fellowship. But the happy emergency of Good Fellowship being over, the liquid part of the feasting now became alcohol and even moral danger. Wilfred, really anxious to be good, was made aware of the necessity for this change of labels, by noticing that he was talking, involuntarily, in a rather peculiar way. Every time he finished a sentence he clicked in his throat and resolved prudently to say no more. Then, the next minute, that hard-worked and usually impeccable servant, his tongue, would start unexpectedly on a new piece of strangely twisted and thwarted information.

Varvara Ostapenko sat divided between a resentful conviction that her husband was drunk, and a resentful fear that the strangers might have the impertinence to notice that he was drunk. There were drawbacks in being married to such a rare creature as her husband, she thought, and one of the drawbacks was the commonness of the people who dared to pass their common secret judgments on his rarity. Drunkenness was an Ostapenko oddity that she allowed for in the Procrustes frame of her wifely pride, but every time her husband got drunk he got drunk in a slightly different way, and she had to use her ingenuity to lop off something here about his behavior, and stretch something there, to fit her angular, inelastic standard of Ostapenkoism. She felt the necessity of presenting to strangers the sight of each Ostapenko neatly fitted into this frame⁠—“and criticize anything if you dare!” Pavel’s romantic lies were part of her standard for him; his arrogance, his belching, his forgetfulness of his guests’ needs, his occasional rancorous references to his daughter⁠—were excrescences that needed shaping into conformity, and at every example of these unlicensed eccentricities, Varvara looked furiously at Seryozha and Wilfred to see if they had dared to see or hear.

But Seryozha stared only at Tatiana, and Wilfred was listening only for loopholes in the talk into which he might squeeze some uncomprehended remark of his own. So presently Varvara felt that she could trust her rare drunk Pavel alone with these gentle strangers and go to bed. She took Tatiana’s hand to lead her away.

The mutual stare of Tatiana and Seryozha had, it seemed to them, blown a sort of thin glass globe enclosing them⁠—a glittering loneliness in which a miracle of dumb familiarity had been possible. All round it the humming sound of Pavel’s talk had only served to make their apartness more private. Seryozha was even able to leave enough of his unneeded brain outside this crystal bubble to allow him to answer with a suitable grunt the tone of any of Pavel’s remarks that sounded incomplete without a complementary guestly grunt. But all the time he and Tatiana felt as deeply sunk in themselves and in each other as puppies must feel in one litter in the straw while the bustle of the stable goes on above them. And now, by Varvara’s action in rising and taking Tatiana’s hand, their glass house was shattered, their mindless drowsy warmth of shared life