“Ah, tschah!” said Seryozha, throwing a stone at a bird. The stone rustled and ricocheted through the bush beneath which the bird sat, but the bird scarcely moved. “A funny thing,” thought Seryozha. “A bird that’s not afraid of a stone. …” He took off his shoes and splashed across the stream. The bird—a sparrow—looked at him with an anguished round eye, but it scarcely moved. Seryozha put his hand over it, loving it as soon as he saw it was too sad to be his prey. Caked round one of its claws was a ball of clay as big as a walnut. The bird must have alighted unwarily on some unusually wet adhesive surface—it must have been involved in some combination of circumstances outside common bird-experience—so now it went hopelessly encumbered, a crawling thing about the grass instead of a brown flash in a tree. Seryozha took out his pocket knife, and with his cautious clever blunt hands began flaking off the hard-baked mud, sliver by sliver, till first one little scaly knuckle appeared, then another. The anatomy of birds’ claws he studied by comparison with the free claw, so that the point of his knife knew where to be bold and where delicate. The bird’s eye, bright and silly as a sequin, remained fixed upon him; its little bones, wrapped thickly yet unsubstantially in a warm padding of feathers, seemed swooning in his hand. After half an hour’s delicious mincing work, the whole claw was free; the knife had made no mistake. “Stand up, bird,” said Setyozha impatiently, as the bird reeled on his wrist. Its freed claw remembered, hesitantly, how to grip; it tautened its body, threw a glance of sharp loathing at its savior, and flew a few yards. “Oh, get away now, bird,” said Seryozha, and threw a stone at it.
“The darling thing,” said Tatiana’s voice behind him. “It thinks itself so clever.” She stood in the long grass, biting a blade of grass, her head bold and vivid against the faint blue morning sky. “It thinks it used your knife so neatly—made a fool of you. It thinks you were trying to eat it or something, and freed it by mistake because it was so clever. It’s laughing up its wing at you.”
“It was very kind of me to take so much trouble about a little idiot of a bird,” said Seryozha, throwing stone after stone at the bird as it fluttered from branch to branch of a low tree. “You praise these silly beasts so, but, say what you will, we’re better friends to them than they to us.”
“Oh, of course … but what are friends, after all? Just messy things. …”
She wondered why he looked so sulky. Had she grieved him? Ought a wife to be somehow different? She thought alternately. “Well—it’s what I am—he must take it or leave it …” and, “But was I wrong? ought I to have been different?” She was in two worlds—her heart away in its solitary and exciting wilderness, her body watching for a signal from her lover, and desperately ignorant of how to obey the signal when it should come.
Seryozha was sullenly thinking, who were these two persons discussing nature? Sergei Sergeievitch Malinin, a married man, and Tatiana Pavlovna, his wife, two grown-up people with interesting thoughts. What if he sprang to his feet now, and ran home? He thought of Sonia Matvievna—that easy squeaking creature in Chi-tao-kou. Her conversation was all giggle—one giggle for yes—another giggle for no—no giggle ever meant anything so complicated as a discussion of a sparrow’s reaction to an act of human helpfulness. Then he remembered the consenting Tanya of last night. Sonia Matvievna would have had only a giggle for that, too.
“Ah, Tanya—Tanya—come closer. …”
She knelt by his side at once and kissed him lightly on one eye. His dog, inspired by this, rushed upon him and kissed him, much more clumsily and ardently, on the other. They all laughed.
Seryozha stopped laughing rather soon. In fact only the dog went on. It was insensitive to atmosphere, and knew nothing about the domestic changes in divine Valhalla since yesterday. Tatiana stopped laughing and watched Seryozha’s face. Even the kiss hadn’t been right, she could see.
Seryozha blinked the eye that she had kissed. It felt shocked by that light, quiet kiss; the eyelid fluttered by itself like the skin of a horse’s shoulder. He supposed that he was hungry, though he wasn’t quite sure. The skin of his face felt disappointed. His ears listened for some loud vulgar shout or laugh. Girls were fun, and one was fun to girls. Yet Tanya, though so lovely, so darling, was no fun—nor did she find him fun. What, then, was between them—something more exciting than fun—or nothing? Now, for instance, she suddenly seized his hand. Why should she do this, if it were no joke to her? Why should she want to hold his not very clean hand—so quietly, so seriously? Her thin hand seemed to need no pinching—no activity at all. He held it, with a surprise that gradually changed to pleasure. Vaguely, with no recognition more articulate than a faint prevision of serenity, he began to know that this quiet taking for granted was at least as fit a sequel to last night’s strange joy as the restlessness and roguishness of Sonia Matvievna would have been. Something was born between Seryozha and Tanya at that moment—a taking-for-granted for two—a doubling, instead of a halving, of anonymity and unconsciousness.
“Do people ever have breakfast, in Korea?” asked Seryozha. The sun was quite high. This visit seemed to lack landmarks, somehow. And he had promised to stay for a fortnight. Was it only perhaps hunger that made him feel that he would never be at home in life again?
They walked toward the house. Seryozha’s dog led the way. It hoped that their destination was the bucket full of goose scraps,
