“Because of this bitch,” said Isaev, “my son have joined the Chinese army.”
“Indeed! Well, you know, boys will be boys. Your son is not the first fine young man who has turned from disappointed love to a military career, and—mark you—made good. … The soldier’s profession is, after all, considered an honorable one, especially in your country, and I have no doubt that your son will distinguish himself and rapidly gain promotion. Perhaps, indeed, he will some day be able to look back with self-congratulation on his association with the Ostap—”
“He is losed,” said Isaev. “We have losed our son. From the Chinese army Russians never come back. She is a bitch. The whole Ostapenko family is a bitch.”
“Ah,” said Wilfred. He clicked in his throat and a baffled tragic expression filled his face. Then, like a railway engine that has bumped against buffers, he drew several breaths and, having shunted himself out of this unpromising siding, started briskly off again on a new line.
“But this is all by the way. Perhaps I had better come to the business which brought me here. I will take a chair, if I may. How delightfully the morning sun illuminates this room! I referred just now to young Saggay Saggayitch Malinin. His name—or rather his father’s name—is, I believe, familiar to you.”
“Never in my life.”
“It will occur to you in a minute, I am sure, when I recall the circumstances. A busy man, I know, cannot afford to overstock his memory with unnecessary details. This Saggay Dmitrivitch Malinin, now a retail merchant in Chi-tao-kou, Manchuria, once paid a visit to you a long time ago—ten years ago, to be exact, in .”
Isaev was silent. Language had been given to him for the purpose of obstructing his fellow-men—not cooperating with them.
“As I think I have already mentioned, Mr. Isaev, I am a barrister, of the Middle Temple, London. Mr. Malinin has constituted me his man of affairs. Having, by my advice, executed a Power of Attorney in favor of his son, Mr. Malinin commissioned me to accompany this son to Seoul in the capacity of legal adviser—since young Saggay Saggayitch has had no experience in business matters—in order that I might make everything clear to you, and satisfy you as to the details and authenticity of his business with you. I hope I make myself clear?”
There was a long silence.
“I hope, Mr. Isaev, that you take my meaning.”
“I not understand one word what you speak,” said Isaev, looking at him craftily.
Wilfred suddenly became wholeheartedly discouraged. The language bar again. He had no doubt whatever of his capacity to achieve anything at all that a fluent use of the English language could bring about. But remove words from a talker and where is he? This stopping of ears, by means of incompatibility of language, against a talker, is like the stopping of earths against a homecoming hunted fox.
Luckily, at this moment a half-seen piece of furniture, upholstered in striped linen, just inside an inner doorway, suddenly quivered, became human, advanced toward them and turned into Mrs. Isaev. She said something hastily in Russian to her husband and then remarked cheerfully in English to Wilfred: “Ah—you were here before, staying with us. Wait—I remember your name—Mr. Chew, is it not? We are glad of seeing you again, Mr. Chew.”
Wilfred, although he realized she had been listening and might have gleaned this information from what had been said, preferred to feel that he had made an enduring impression during his last visit. “A charming woman,” he thought, building up her, as we all do, from that single flattering aspect of her that faced himself.
Just as a palaeontologist builds up a whole mountainous prehistoric beast from one bone, so we reconstruct our neighbors from a mere glimpse of a ghost. We are doomed to live among ghosts just as surely as we are doomed to see through our own eyes only. All are ghosts—these lovers—these enemies—these passersby. … We see them through the distorting lens of vanity. We traduce our neighbors by the senseless names of friends—of enemies; we divorce them from their realities, bereave them of body, cut them off from their destinations and starting-places, make homeless ghosts of them. If they love us, they are darling ghosts to us; if they injure us, they are bogeys. Yet all the time something that is not a ghost lives at home—far from our sight—dark, changeless men and women built of blood and bone and burning egoism, creatures that neither love us nor hate us—nor even know our names—things that are, not things that are seen by us to be.
Wilfred lived his life largely backwards. The scenes his optimism anticipated glowed so gloriously, sparkled with so flattering a success, that the reality was almost always a diminishing, an anticlimax, a dim and inexact rendering of the bright foreseen event—like the creation of a defective memory, or like the telling of a good story by one who has forgotten the point.
This, the entrance of the acquiescent Isaeva, was the point at which the curtain rose on a scene that Wilfred had already rehearsed on the stage of his hopeful fancy. There had been nothing wrong with the rehearsals; here was the first public performance. Wilfred’s forward-hearing ear could hear his own voice reasonably explaining the circumstances of his mission—Old Sergei’s loan and his wish for its return; he could hear Isaev’s voice grunting agreement, Isaeva’s voice confirming and gracing the accord. Wilfred could never anticipate counterarguments to his own logic; it was too faultless. He was not, therefore, surprised to hear the expected sound of success beginning—a coo of agreement from Olga Isaeva in reply to a grunt in Russian from her
