Olga disregarded her public. She strode over the rickshaw shafts and hurried away down the street, still ejaculating, Ah—ah—ah! and slapping her clenched knuckles of one hand into the palm of the other.
Wilfred was paralyzed with astonishment. Feeling quite sure that Olga Isaeva liked him, he could only suppose that she was suffering from some kind of fit or convulsion. Isaev stood looking mildly at the tattered receipt in his hand, as though wondering whether something in its wording had provoked her. He remained on the lowest step of the bank for a few minutes, as though built there, the thin, craning coolies standing round him like scaffolding. “My wife is sometimes a little bit angry …” he said.
After a moment he began. “Tonight my wife will—” and stopped, evidently feeling that what he had begun to say was not worth finishing. Then he said, firmly, “I think I come with you to Mi-san tonight, Mr. Chew, yes—no?”
XIII
Whenever Pavel Ostapenko knew that he was likely to meet a friend, old or new, he always automatically inquired of himself whether the meeting was likely to do him credit or no. “Is everything all right? Does he appreciate me? Has he lately seen anyone who might have criticized me or told lies about me? Have I told him the same story as the one current here?” And as soon as he received Wilfred’s telegram from Seoul, announcing his immediate return to Mi-san, accompanied by Isaev, Pavel, testing in his own mind the newcomer by means of this third-degree questionnaire, was annoyed to be obliged to answer, “No. There is danger here. Isaev may very well withhold the requisite smile as he greets me—may even be discourteous. He imagines he has a grievance against my family; he blames his son’s downfall on my daughter. He once called me—(Pavel’s very inmost voice sank to the veriest inmost whisper)—a windbag. Something must be done about Isaev.”
Pavel, of course, disliked Isaev for disliking him, yet he was so sure of his own superiority that his dislike was entirely impermanent. Simply, the man’s disease—dislike of Pavel—must be subjected to immediate treatment and cure. To be deeply offended at being called a windbag, one must suspect uneasily the truth of the indictment, but Pavel had no such suspicion. The man Isaev had made a ridiculous and offensive error—and of his error he must be convinced as soon as possible—not by reproach, but by eloquent proof of Pavel’s essential non-windbagacity. The matter of Tatiana’s guilt, though still urgently in need of readjustment, was less urgent than the windbag misunderstanding, since Tatiana, though certainly a limb of the Ostapenko tree, was an outlying limb. A man, for instance, would be less offended by criticism of the shape of his little toe than of the shape of his nose. Indeed, alone with his daughter, Pavel would have detached her from the Ostapenko body altogether; in speaking to her he would have admitted—and even insisted on—her guilt in the matter of the jilting of young Piotr Isaev. But in speaking to Isaev, Pavel would instinctively graft his daughter on to the main Ostapenko trunk once more, and swear to her inviolate blamelessness of any interference with young Isaev’s peace of mind. And he would prove it too (with as much ease as he could, in Tatiana’s ear, prove her guilt)—prove it to his own satisfaction, and perhaps to the resentful father’s. When speaking neither to sinner nor sinned against, Pavel would not entertain the question of sin or justification, truth or lie, at all. Truth was nonexistent, unless he was engaged in propounding it; in words lay his entire standard of truth, morals, and behavior.
Much of Pavel’s life, therefore—since words were his standard—was spent in getting his word in first. It was, for instance, necessary for him to see Isaev before anyone else in Mi-san should see him. If their first meeting since the family estrangement should be a public one, Isaev’s Ostapenko heresies might be expressed in the hearing of Ostapenko believers before Pavel’s doctrine of reassurance should have time to take effect.
“What on earth is the old fool coming here for?” thought Pavel, irritated by the necessity of riding fifteen miles to the railway station on a very hot day. “I only invited him because I took for granted he wouldn’t come—and because I thought the courtesy might loosen his purse-strings to my young couple’s advantage,” However, he could not afford to question the stark necessity of seeing Isaev alone first. Of course the old snake had probably poisoned Wilfred Chew’s ear already, but incompatibility of language had, one hoped, been a safeguard to a certain extent. Besides, Wilfred was a Chinese, and his approval didn’t matter so very much.
Pavel, never indolent, was as tireless in defense of his vanity’s interests as is a fish-hawk in providing for the inmates of its nest. Before Sunday morning was a morning at all, before the first knot of the parcel that contained this coming week had been cut by the first blade of the sun, Pavel was awake, was forcing the sleepers of his household to be awake, was shattering with a hurrying candle this precious blank dark nothingness between last week and next week.
Seryozha, in the little room behind the kitchen, woke up and sat up, as
