The Faraway Bride

doll’s. It tottered like a belfry on the steepled skullcap that lidded his narrow skull, and gave him a look of tapering neatness⁠—like a well-sharpened pencil. Katya, seen in contrast with that impassive skeleton, typified all that was most exasperatingly petticoaty about women. She fluttered, she wobbled, she sweated, she squawked; streaks of hair shook about the mottled nape of her neck. The lumps of her body were encased in a buttony, patchy, hooky, stitchy material, like turnips in a sack. Above all she talked⁠—she wanted something, and wanted repeated assurances that what she wanted would be brought to her. “Bunamayesh? Bunamayesh?” she yawped to the silent Yi, nagging at him to acknowledge her authority⁠—as women always nag, thought Seryozha. Always their petticoats, their hair, their scent, their bosoms, their voices stuck out from them, encroaching on space and air, imposing an aura of artificial excitement and complexity on life. Men, calmly concave men, walked neatly, sleekly bounded in their decent bones, doing what must be done. These were not the words of Seryozha’s thoughts, but he looked at the great this-way-and-that fuss of women’s footprints on the dewy grass between the door and the road, and glumly reminded himself that only a few purposeful, large, well-aimed marks showed the men’s traces. Of course this was largely because the purposeful feet of Pavel remained still, nobly rooted in manly authority, while his voice commanded women to fetch this⁠—go there⁠—do that⁠—no, not that, this⁠—no, not this, that.⁠ ⁠… And of course it would be fair also to add that Tatiana’s feet had not smirched the dew at all, because they were in bed. Indeed, Tatiana’s encroachment on the world, as Seryozha could not but have admitted, was slighter even than the manliest man’s. No intrusion can aspire to a point more discreet than the vanishing point, and Seryozha’s wife could hardly diminish much more the reticent trace she left without erasing it altogether. Yet a vague sense of his own injustice and poor logic did not make him look with more tolerant eyes on the anxious, hurrying flutter of Varvara and Katya. Indeed, his irritation with these harmless women was merely a revenge for the irritation with men which Tatiana did not confessedly feel. It was a revenge for the gross look that his scarred spatulate hand had taken on in his own eyes, since that hand had been married to the brown, unflawed, flexible strip of bones and muscles that was Tatiana’s hand.

And when at last Pavel could find no more orders to give to his two women, when at last his long legs were astride of the dancing mare and Yi had scrambled up on to the back of one of the impatiently following horses, Seryozha could bear it no longer. He ran after the party and swung himself astride of the last spare horse. “I’m coming too,” he said, grinning at his father-in-law.

Pavel, taken unawares, could think of no explicable reason why the boy should not come, especially as Yi shouted his willingness to walk home and so leave all four horses free on the return ride. It was amazing, thought Pavel, how inconvenient people were. Nobody ever respected the subtle integrity of Ostapenko plans. Simply because it was impossible to explain those plans to common people, common people found them easy to thwart.

Seryozha’s happy and charming look, as the boy set his eager horse to canter down the trail, suddenly touched some forgotten softness in Pavel’s heart, however⁠—it was almost like a homesickness. “Oh, let him come,” he grumbled to himself. “I can think of some way to have a quiet talk with Gavril Ilitch.”

The way lay for the first half-hour along narrow dikes between rice-fields, and the horses must dance⁠—with a slightly sidewise gait⁠—in single file, Pavel now at the head of the procession, Yi and the spare horse behind him, and Seryozha at the tail, so that talk was impossible. The toppling dike shook under the bouncing tread of sixteen hoofs⁠—shook frogs and dew and dragonflies out of the grass into the flooded fields below. The frogs had vermilion stomachs and grass-green backs patched with black. The dragonflies were sequin blue. The frogs and dragonflies sprang out from the dike’s brink into the sunlight; they glittered together between one’s eyes and the dazzling water, like splinters of kingfisher color.

Seryozha’s dog, bursting with happiness, floundered in and out of the water, snapping genially at frogs, dragonflies, pigs, butterflies, bullocks, ponies, and even clods of mere earth in a frenzy of joy. It was a kind dog, but in its excitement it rushed at a brood of day-old chicks near a cottage and set them blowing about the trail like an explosion of yellow thistledowns. It could have swallowed them as one swallows yellow gooseberries, but the hen, completely selfless, instantly made herself terrible⁠—a super-hen⁠—with spread ruff and taut spread wings. Masked thus, she rushed at the enemy, positively roaring with heroic anger, clapped the dog about the muzzle with her wings and after pecking at its eyes, almost thrust herself into its mouth. The dog, extricating its teeth from this ardently offered sacrifice, hurried sheepishly away, pretending to be engaged in some new and worthier chase, but really humiliated⁠—put to flight by the ridiculous and splendid bird.

The trail in front began lifting itself up out of the rice-marshes on to higher land, like a water snake coming out to bask in the sun. No rice, no farms, on the hill⁠—it was an untamed hill, furred with velvety, rather sun-dried grass. Man’s only marks upon it were oblong or square patches of canary-yellow buckwheat here and there, and the headstones of old forgotten Korean graves, like worn-down tree-stumps bristling from the roots of their red mud and grass mounds. As the horses cantered up the diagonally mounting trail, and Pavel, twenty yards in front of Seryozha, reached the top of the ridge, the older man’s rather heroic bright head and upslanting beard towered against the sky.