“No,” said Old Sergei. “We will, on second thoughts, not go home at once. We will not desert our friends. We will sit here for five minutes, hidden in the shelter of this rock, and then look back to see if the soldiers are safely gone.”
They sat flattened like lizards against the rock, picking their teeth, though there was nothing much to pick, breakfast being six hours past.
“If I climb up that bank instead of back on to the road,” said Seryozha. “I can look straight down the slope on to the graves.”
“I will climb, too,” said Old Sergei, who never liked to risk letting anyone else see something first. News, however distressing, was far better to give than to receive. They combed the wet scrub-oaks and the matted flowery grass with their legs as they climbed the short slope. Two hundred feet below them, the doubled up forms of six soldiers were knotted round one of the graves. The other grave was an inflamed scar of newly-turned mud.
“Yah!” screamed Old Sergei, and threw himself down the slope, his lank limp arms and legs flying. “You goddamned swine! You sacrilegious sons of tortoises! …”
Seryozha bounced after him, his stomach aching sharply with pleasurable excitement. His thoughts were joggled up and down like medicine in a bottle. Father and son were upon the soldiers as though in one windy stride. Seryozha’s spade came in flat and glorious contact with fleeing Chinese buttocks. One soldier sprawled with his face in the mud; he twisted himself into a sitting position and fanned the air with futile arms, bellowing curses, his mouth a red hole in a mask of mud. Old Sergei, craning his long neck, stamping his silly old foot, stood over the opened grave like a flamingo defending its nest, creaking out curses in Russian and Chinese. The corporal, with a bloody nose, trying to feel safe and comparatively authoritative at a distance of about thirty feet, clung to the frail hut as though ready to whisk it before him as a shield should he be attacked again, and bawled to his men to come away. This they were only too anxious to do, poor things, only they dared not turn their backs for a second on the Russians.
“You shall hear of this again, dogs,” shouted the corporal. “Have you forgotten that you are nothing but filthy Russians—homeless nobodies? … Our general shall teach you your place. …” His nose began to bleed afresh and he buried it in a bunch of sunflower leaves, shouting in a muffled voice to his men to retreat. This they did, assembling with anxious, crooked gait round their cart. How different were the voices that shocked the horses awake from the merry yodelings that gave the poor beasts license to graze an hour ago. A confused grumble and united hiccup of oaths accompanied the mounting of the cart. One soldier, crying shrilly and ostentatiously, lay on his face in the straw of the cart, rubbing his bruised behind.
“Ha-ha!” yelled Seryozha, brandishing his spade triumphantly in their direction as they drove away, but all the same, he felt a little pang when he remembered their peaceful, ingenuous jocosity of only a few short minutes before. He felt, somehow, as though he had taken a folly too seriously.
“Nothing is sacred to these swine—nothing,” chattered Old Sergei. “Even Russian gentlemen … heroes, who have died in some paltry Chinese cause. …”
“Aw, shut up, father!” said Seryozha. “Nothing’s so very sacred as all that to any of us, really … nothing except our vanity. …”
He met the quiet, anxious, opaque eyes of the disturbed dead Russian, leaning with shrugged shoulders out of his new grave. Seryozha caught his breath. “And when we’re dead, our vanity’s dead too, damn it all, so—what of it?”
II
Mrs. Butters’s sinless smile was bracketed a little on one side, like a parenthesis. Even her nose was smiling kindly. Yet she was thinking: “These Russians are really not much use. That hemstitching doesn’t look good.” However the baby whom the hemstitching would adorn would not be her first. First babies need first-rate hemstitching. But Mrs. Butters had had four and the baby she expected in was only having a new outfit made because its four predecessors had fairly worn the original set to rags.
Mrs. Butters looked over Anna’s shoulder. “My dear Mrs. Malinin, how quick you work! It’s just wonderful! …”
“Quick but not good,” said Anna in a wistfully challenging voice.
“I think you’re doing fine,” said Mrs. Butters firmly, and then she faltered: “But—my dear—why have you drawn the threads out of this hem? That’s the side hem. We don’t want hemstitching up the side hem.”
“Oi! oi!” cried Anna. “Is that the side hem? Oi! oi!”
“It doesn’t matter,” said Mrs. Butters, and then with gathering conviction: “It really doesn’t matter, Mrs. Malinin. It will hardly show.”
“It will show,” said Anna. “It will show very bad indeed. Oi! what a stupid old woman I am! Can I not weave the threads in again, very watchfully?”
“No, really, Mrs. Malinin; that would look worse still. No, it will be all right. After all, why shouldn’t the side hem be hemstitched? Quite original. Don’t think of it again.”
Anna went on sewing in silence for a moment, bending her fat abashed face over her work. Turning remorse in her tender heart like a sword in a wound, she imagined Mrs. Butters secretly broken with disappointment about the spoiled side hem. In her own affairs Anna was an optimist; disappointment never dwelt long with her. But she imagined
