The Faraway Bride

convex mirror, a knight among his father’s chessmen, a sprig of parsley stuck on his fish pie, like an oak tree on a crag⁠—all such small perfect reminders of ordinary unwieldy things could hold his charmed attention. And he still secretly enjoyed playing with the missionary children because he so much enjoyed building their wooden blocks into elaborate houses. Although he was eighteen years old, it was difficult for him not to lose his temper when an uncouth infant missionary kicked down a careful villa in which every staircase led to somewhere and there was a chimney to every room. So he liked to think of an ants’-nest as a nest of little tiny Seryozhas⁠—a convex mirror set in the red earth.

When he first touched the nest a sort of shivering skin of swarming ants suddenly spread over it, but after a few seconds’ panic, every ant remembered its duty, like a good sailor in a shipwreck, and went to its appointed place⁠—to fetch an egg, to warn its queen, to guard the stores, to reopen a ruined doorway.⁠ ⁠… Supposing there was a dogs’ nest, thought Seryozha, run on these lines, how stuffy and cheerful and inefficient!⁠ ⁠… Or a lions’ nest, how slinky and undemocratic!⁠ ⁠… Or a man’s nest, how restful and easy for poor men to be little bits of something ready-made, instead of worried creators⁠—to owe allegiance to a cold queen instead of to a fussy old father and mother!⁠ ⁠…

The rain swept in windy waves down the valley. Seryozha’s cap, which had been made by his mother from an old cloth dress of her own, became so wet that the pasteboard that ingeniously stiffened the peak lost its courage and sagged down over Seryozha’s eyes. He was a mildly vain boy and, on removing the cap to try and make it more worthy of him, was disgusted to find that the color was running. He took his handkerchief from the cap to wipe a navy-blue tear from his brow, and as he did so a twenty-sen note fluttered from a secret place in the cap. The Chinese corporal, who had just come up, was teasing the ants into a new dazzle of frenzied movement. The corporal and Seryozha watched the little piece of paper money flutter down on to the ants’-nest. There for a moment it stirred and turned strangely, floating on the eddy of ants beneath it, and then the rain soaked, flattened, and weighed it down. Seryozha laughed and the corporal laughed. Seryozha picked up the note, folded it, and replaced it in the lining of his cap.

“Big-noses keep their money on the tops of their heads,” said the corporal merrily to his subordinates.

And as Seryozha tossed back his wet yellow flap of hair to cover it with his cap, he met the corporal’s eye and instantly knew that the Chinese was thinking, “We never looked in the dead Russians’ caps for money.⁠ ⁠…”

Old Sergei came up, murmuring something about immortality. He had always loved strangers, and detached himself querulously from people with a claim on him. Now he had been imagining the lonely death and the lonely awakening of the three Russians; if they had sought his sympathy when alive, he would have withheld it. He was kinder to lost dogs than to his wife, and his own son had never seemed to him to come under that touching heading that so often brought tears to his eyes⁠—“Helpless Little Child.⁠ ⁠…”

“We must be going home,” he said. “I shall in any case have an attack of rheumatism after this, but every additional hour spent in this downpour will aggravate it.”

“These soldiers mean to search the graves again for money,” said Seryozha.

“Impossible⁠—impossible!” cried Old Sergei tremulous once more. “They watched us bury them. They know our friends were poor like ourselves.⁠ ⁠…”

“They know something else now,” said Seryozha. “Let’s pretend to go away, and turn back at the pass to see if they have really gone.” Now that the dead men were out of sight, Seryozha did not really very much care whether they were disturbed or not.

The father and son said a polite goodbye to the soldiers and set their cramped faces against the rainy wind that swept down the pass. They reached the corner and, before rounding it, stood a moment and looked back. The soldiers, wilting limply under the eaves of the shed, were looking after the retreating Russians, the distant white points of their faces boring like little gimlets through the intervening air.

“Certainly they seem to be waiting for us to go,” said Old Sergei. “The swine!⁠ ⁠… Oi! I am so tired of wicked men.”

“I am so tired of my wet skin,” said Seryozha. “Let’s pretend we never suspected the soldiers. Let’s pretend they all went away in their cart and are safely out of sight. Let’s go home.”

Old Sergei cautiously considered this proposal. He began pretending to go home. The road home slowly diminished, slowly drew in its vistas inside his imagination. In infinitesimal jerks the new painted temple beside the home river cut sharply into his mind’s sight. The ferry made its usual unlikely arrival, after apparently proceeding for ten minutes in the wrong direction; imaginary caravan ponies, cramped in the familiar rickety old barge of his vision, drooled down the necks of their human fellow-passengers; Korean women squatted in the bows in the middle of their semi-deflated balloon skirts; everyone twittered in his dream ear; here was home.⁠ ⁠… Here was home⁠—the low door, the window cut neatly but unnaturally like a surgical incision, the noise of Anna letting something metallic fall in the back yard.⁠ ⁠…

Seryozha’s mind, as though following a secret groove, ran more quickly home⁠—even more quickly than his dog, who was already several miles nearer supper than they were. Seryozha, who had arrived at the age when one is nothing but a brittle baby encased in a glass shell of cautious maturity, was already seeing himself walking nobly up the village street, being looked at with admiration by the Chinese