She looked so proud, asleep; her mouth was loosened from its waking anxious, gentle smile, to a slight exquisite sneer. Her cheekbones almost looked like shrugged shoulders. She seemed almost crafty now, as if she had escaped, by wiles and cunning, leaving this pale contemptuous dummy in her place—had escaped and was free now in a trackless wild. Tatiana always looked forward to sleep, although she loved life so much. On waking every morning, she was impatient to be quickly up and living, to get the day soon begun and soon ended, every morning being, to her, a promise of another night and new dreams. The hither bank of every river that we must cross is but a promise of the farther bank—a promise that gives us courage to swim out boldly into the current.
Seryozha looked at her face almost resentfully; he was vaguely conscious that to call her from sleep would be to recall her from a palace to a cottage—and the knowledge hurt him. Her pretty mouth, stopped by sleep, seemed more ruthlessly frank now than when day parted it to say kind, tentative things. Now, asleep, she admitted that most of the words she knew were not to be said to him. Waking, she disguised her refusal by uttering always invented, not known, words—words of timid conscientious love, warmth, interest, consent—words spoken only from a tender heart, not blurted with the lips of a vital body.
With Tatiana, Seryozha was forced to be conscious of himself. Even side by side with a faraway, sleeping Tatiana, he was obliged to confront himself with naive comparisons, to blunder about among clumsy thoughts of right and wrong. In spite of her remoteness, she had introduced an unwelcome immediacy into his self-knowledge. Being a married man was, for him, to be married to a new critical, shrewish self, that called attention to the slowness of his understanding, the poverty of his experience, the prosaic quality of his love, the size of his hands and feet. … And Tatiana stood between him and this new, carping, fretful self, in the guise of an ineffectual friend and peacemaker—murmuring unconvincing, yet exquisite, reassurances, gently decrying injustices and misunderstandings between that newly-married, ill-assorted couple—Seryozha and his soul. And, having flattered both contestants with a tender courtesy, she was gone—a peacemaking neighbor gone to her home, her duty done, leaving Seryozha and that new inward domestic tyrant eyeing each other suspiciously—“Was that right?—was that clumsy?—did that sound stupid?” … Oh, never to be alone again. …
Seryozha, clasping his knees, looked at his hands. The knuckles were red and not very thoroughly washed. His right thumb was made unshapely by a deep old scar. He was not old enough—first, to value and then to forget the very thickness and strength of his body. The first stage—the stage of living unconsciously in his big body as though it were a twirl of air—was left behind him forever. In the second stage he now was—the stage of feeling responsible for, yet betrayed by, his great limbs and hungry organs and appetites, as a child is embarrassed by the companionship of a gross aggressive elder brother. Soon he would arrive at the third stage—the simple serenity of size, the stage at which the big bones and little soul—lion and lamb—lie down together dreamlessly in their lair.
But now he looked at his scarred useful thumb and sighed.
He got up, and after pulling on his shirt and trousers with a feeling of disgust at their homespun and stained look—a look he had never noticed before—he went into the kitchen and found Varvara and Katya prodding a morose reluctant fire, and Pavel standing over them with a candle, elaborately repressed curses filtering through his beard.
“I am going to the station to meet Mr. Chew and Gavril Ilitch,” said Pavel. “Someone has to take a couple of horses to the station for them to ride, and it would seem discourteous, I think, to send a servant only.” He gabbled a little because he did not want Seryozha to offer to come with him. The whole expedition was arranged largely for the purpose of protecting his son-in-law’s illusions about Ostapenko perfection. But in any case he needed no audience for the feat of dialectics which was to lure the errant Isaev back into the fold of Ostapenko orthodoxy. He would not even have let his wife witness the meeting between himself and a doubtful admirer; he supposed that she had never seen him humiliated. “I leave you, son, in charge of our womenfolk,” he added, boisterously, to Seryozha. “The only pair of trousers in a bundle of petticoats—a great responsibility. …”
Seryozha stretched his mouth automatically to filial acquiescence. This robust paternalism was much easier to cope with than was the jejune and bloodless nagging of his own father. Arrogant complacency rebounds from the attention, but false pathos bores into it, like some unwholesome parasite.
Yet when, just as the sun, though still invisible behind a neighbor’s roof, threw stripes of gay fresh gold all over the plain, Seryozha came out to watch the departure of Pavel, the servant Yi, and the four horses, he was filled with an almost uncontrollable longing to go too. Pavel’s jocose reference to the trousers and petticoats had somehow made almost articulate Seryozha’s momentary weariness of women.
Seryozha stood watching Katya giving confused, strident directions to Yi, the Korean servant, about a skein of yarn that she wished him to buy in the town through which the railway ran. Yi, though he had exchanged his billowing white robe for a white riding suit with no superfluity except a discreet drapery about the seat, still retained his horsehair hat—a truncated edition of the traditional Welshwoman’s hat, but as small as a
