Seryozha, with the dog hurrying triumphantly at his calf—almost pressing its front teeth against his calf in its anxiety not to lose him again—went out through the kitchen door. He crossed the walled Japanese garden and went out into the acre or so of Ostapenko estate, half of which was a vegetable garden and half a railed enclosure for horses. A Korean in his white puffed clothes—looking like a cream cracker—was filling up a trench in the earth of the garden, and Seryozha, loathing the man because he was the only man in sight—and a stranger—put as much distance as possible between them and sat down on the edge of a little stream that ran at the foot of the fence. The high grass, tufted with wild blue geraniums and scarlet lilies, hid Seryozha from the world as he sat down, dangling his feet over the stream. His dog, pressing its seat as near as possible to his, sat down, too, and blew great hot loving breaths into his ear.
Seryozha threw his arms round the dog’s neck and cried into its shoulder.
For the first time in his life, Seryozha was shaken—shaken in his stalwart anonymity—called home to self-consciousness by a sort of earthquake of the heart. He had been invisible, he had been a matter of course, he had been too close to see, he had been a hollow yet satisfactory person labeled Sergei Sergeievitch Malinin. He had no more known the creature that moved behind that name than he had known the shape of the bones that moved beneath his flesh and skin. The only mystery about the anonymous blank life that lay behind the name Sergei Malinin was found in the repeated utterance of the name itself, curiously enough. A delicious poised strangeness perched on the peak of the soul, when one said that name—Sergei Malinin—Sergei Malinin—a hundred times over. This slippery transparent Seryozha, through whom, as it seemed, one could see the sky, was a hill of glass on which no bird but that winged mystery of his own mesmeric name could find foothold. As for love—women’s love—friend’s love—self-love—a hill of glass afforded no hospitality to such flying visitors.
Now, this earthquake intrusion of a trespasser had shaken him awake—had forced him to turn and meet himself. He was recognized as a man, as he had longed to be recognized; he was traveling, far from his mother, as he had longed to travel; he was married, by his own expressed wish, to the most beautiful and gentle girl he had ever seen. And he felt the lonely fright of a chicken outside the egg, of a fledgeling outside the nest, of a weaned puppy refused its mother’s warm teats. He shook with a fevered longing to go back—to go back into safety—to be warm and careless in little yesterday again, instead of turned loose in this wide draughty today, with no guide but his own reluctant maturity.
Seryozha tried to dislodge a stone in the bank with his heel; he kicked it spitefully, as though he were trying to demolish something menacing. Growing up, then, was a trap; he had been lured into it by an exquisite decoy and must spend the rest of his life pressing his face against iron bars. There was Tanya, the decoy, a prisoner with him—still exquisite—still his. But Seryozha had never felt the need of a friend or a comforter—had never yet desired reinforcement against himself or anyone else; he had not known that even his mother’s affection was valuable to him—he had thought it contemptible, quite negligible—though now he saw it tenderly as part of the furniture of little safe yesterday. He had a mournful senseless vision of himself now, spinning a whipping-top in the street of Chi-tao-kou—a game that needs no partner. And here was Tanya—a spray of orchids handed to a person who needed both his hands for the whipping of his top.
What was that Mr. Chew had said about cold devils? There were no devils, really, but there were strangers. As a boy, yesterday, Seryozha had never noticed strangers. Now, it seemed, a stranger could trespass—could lie in one’s arms all night and yet never be known, never be simple, forgotten, easy, taken for granted. He must live uneasy, now, he must come inside himself and think. This was the result of the cold presence of strangers; no magic smoke—no heart and liver of an enchanted fish—could exorcise that trespassing presence.
Seryozha’s body was not accustomed to being used by thought. It scarcely knew how to behave while thinking. His heel kicked and kicked at the stone, and when the stone at last fell with a splash into the stream, his body felt innocently triumphant, and his lips began to whistle by themselves—a low, flat whistle.
His dog was greatly cheered by this sound, and still more delighted to be suddenly pushed off the bank into the water. Seryozha’s body, having achieved one splash, desired another. The dog laughed in the water, rolling its entranced eyes upward, and, finding that it could not jump up to the top of the high bank again from the hampering water, ran gayly a few yards down the current to a point at which the stream flattened out into strands of sand and shallow bubbling rapids over pebbles—a perfect working model of a Manchurian river. Seryozha’s eyes—always alert for miniature things—noticed the fidelity to fact of this toy river. And his eyes remembered the spring in Manchuria—that rolling golden lark-shrill Manchurian spring that was, to him, home and yesterday. He remembered tremendous auburn distances and wide tender curves of marbled colors in varied earth—yellow deepening to orange—orange to red—red paling to sandy—sandy to cream—with here and there the faint green flush of pricking grass—and on every rainbow hillside, a white spot of
