While he was still marveling at the fact that this contagious bowing craze seemed to be affecting his hearing and making sound bow too, a sudden startling silence fell in the room. The light inside Wilfred’s eyelids changed from scarlet to deep purple. Someone must be taking the lamp away. Heavy feet trampled cautiously out of the room, the rhythm of their tread adjusting itself to the rhythm of Wilfred’s throbbing attention. Tramp-ti—tramp-ti—tramp-ti—and then a check, and a woman’s voice “Ah Pavlik!”—a voice of almost unbearable disappointment.
Wilfred lifted his pendulum head only enough to be able to lean his chin instead of his brow upon his hands. His head might actually roll off if he should rear it unsupported into the swinging air again. Across a glimmering silver plain of lampless tablecloth, he saw a perfectly still golden scene framed in the doorway. Pavel Ostapenko, holding the lamp a little crooked but not dangerously so, stood facing his wife in the passage, his eyes stretched to an alert glare, like a squirrel’s eyes. Varvara, in a blue cotton kimono, stood defiantly across the passage, watching her husband with a defiant dark look. Her wine-colored birthmark looked like an eccentric shadow thrown by a more ominous flame than the lamp’s light. Seryozha, against the opposite wall, was drawing a little parcel from his pack. “The fish’s liver and heart,” thought Wilfred. “He is going to face the devil in that red and white Tanya woman. She sleeps behind that door at the top of the little matted slope out of the kitchen. I saw her go in when I was washing at the pump.” “Pavlik!” cried Varvara again with a low violence of voice, but her husband took one step towards her, took Seryozha’s—arm and pointed over his wife’s shoulder—“At the devil’s door,” thought Wilfred. Varvara put both her hands in her mouth, cramming all her fingers between her lips as though frantically trying to tear them to pieces. She looked like a witch, grinning fixedly through the fringe of her fingers. Pavel began talking again. Wow—wow—wow—, heard Wilfred. Wilfred’s heavy eyelids dropped like a curtain on the bright scene, and when next he half lifted them there was no light except the light of the kitchen fire, blurring and quickening on the passage walls, like breath dimming a windowpane. There were distant voices in the kitchen. Wilfred’s perceptive senses became mixed in a drowsiness, and the voices became a cloud, a curious menacing cloud like a wing, each spasm of sound a feather in the wing—the whole flaked cloud coming nearer and nearer on a wind that blew in regular throbbing gusts. Before this wind all the trees in the world bowed, and all the leaves on all the trees were blown so as to show their white linings—white flecks showing silver in a moonlight that streamed from no visible moon. The moonlight had a breathless quality, in spite of the wind. Everything in the world was flawed and burnt with sparks of white; all the stars of the sky, fleeing from that stupendous winged dragon of a cloud, were lying dying in agony in the dust, like fish thrown up by a great departed wave. Trees, houses, deserts, and mountains were caked, clogged, with dying, gasping stars. The pursuing cloud strode across the sky; one could hear now the approaching boom—boom—boom of its wings. And Wilfred, sweating with excitement, addressed the jury, though his voice was a little thick. “I know how you bind dragons, gentlemen,” said Wilfred. “With one hand you take them behind the gills and with the other behind the wingpits—(wingpits? Well, armpits. Why not wingpits?) Yes, with the other firmly under the wingpits and thus they are perfectly helpless.” He said this bravely and the jury was obviously impressed. The jury numbered thousands—their little silver-white faces upturned, all over the twilit limitless hall. One must be brave before such a crowd of puny dying white faces—yet, as the wide earthshaking booming of wings drew closer and closer, Wilfred wondered whether he could really master so frightful an enemy single-handed. Boom! boom! boom! boom!—the monster was upon him; it had only a little blank disc for a face—how much more terrible than gnashing teeth and flashing eyes! Wilfred suddenly shouted in such a great voice that the strong wind was checked and the galloping cloud thrown back on its haunches. Asmodeus. Asmodeus. Asmodeus. Now what? thought Wilfred, mad to show his own monstrous power. One hand pinching the gills and the other the soft bending ribs (a lizard’s ribs), a twirl … round and round the sequin-scaled body whipped the rope, flipped skillfully by Wilfred’s heroic hand. “I am bound—I am bound—I am bound,” piped the little fading disc that was the demon’s face. But, oh, the scales were cold. They burned like naked ice. The great icy body leaped, squirmed, and writhed like a hooked fish. Here, a limb struggled loose—Wilfred lashed it with another loop; there, the tail began sweeping free—it was bound before more than a paltry million stars had been annihilated; here, a claw reached out and was instantly netted. The vast faceless thing heaved, powerless, agonized. … Yet, what was that—boom! boom! boom! boom! again? Was some outlying coil breaking free? A scarlet air was blinding the world, a scarlet pain was riveted like a helmet on the hero’s brow. Walls, a table, lamplight, a smell of roast goose—little dazzling homely things imprisoned him. Here was the room again, safe now from its terrific menace. Pavel Ostapenko was coming in with the lamp. He would want to hear the news of Wilfred’s victory, of course, yet it was difficult to talk through such a taste in the mouth—such a band of pain round the skull.
“I bound Asmodeus!
