“A fine climate and a fine country,” said Pavel, who was always exhilarated and fortified in his pride by finding himself on a horse’s back. He looked down complacently at his titanic shadow—as big as a rainbow. “Why don’t you stay here, Seryozha—settle down here and help me with the horse business? I’ll write to your father and explain how it is. He’d be delighted, I’m sure, to have you so well settled.”
“Oi—no—no!” said Seryozha, startled. He added, childishly, “You promised I could go home after a fortnight.”
Pavel looked at him, surprised. “Why, my dear boy, you’re a free man! You can go when you please—after Thursday week, of course. We asked you to undertake to stay with us till Thursday week, in case poor little Tanya might feel—Well, thank God, things are going well. Still, you’ve given your word not to take the child away till Thursday week, when the fortnight will be up. After that, of course you’re free to go home or anywhere you like—but I can’t understand why you should want to. Much more opportunity here, in well-governed Korea, than up north, among Chinese brigands in Kanto. And I could be useful to you here. I’m in very good standing with the Japanese; this horse-breeding idea really was an inspiration on my part. The Japanese have such short legs themselves, they’ll give any price for long-legged horses. How often have I tried to get a likely cob off on a policeman, five foot one high; but, no—a taller horse—a taller horse, please. …” He imitated the polite hissing of a Japanese. “However, I’m here to supply the demand, and if the Japanese police start using giraffes, I shall be on hand to breed them, you may be sure. They know me now as a man who never lets them down over a horse deal. If you come into the business you could learn the Japanese language and—”
“Oi, no, no!” said Seryozha. “No, but let me go to my father.”
His father, though tiresome, puny, and ugly enough, seemed to him at this moment more part of the dear ugly furniture of his home than did his mother. With his father beside him, as with his clasp-knife or his dog, he could feel himself effective, dignified, taken for granted, not to be surprised unawares into childishness. With his mother he could not always feel this. She was near enough to him to trip up his pride, to prick his youth to self-consciousness, to rouse him to effort. It was quietness, non-adventure, that he hungered for just now—to feast his eyes on the disfigured face of the home clock, on the little crooked window of his bedroom at home, on the helpless, humble, unwandering figure of his father—these were his cravings. He sought everything that was sure to be there—everything that could be depended on not to be suddenly strange and humiliating.
“Go to your father, then,” said Pavel, curtly. “I can tell you, though, when I was your age …” And for an hour and a half he did tell him.
The ridge climbed higher, and though the day grew brighter, the valleys, being more deeply sunken, were filled with mist—slung with a canopy of dark steel-colored mist, which presently the sun would first polish to bright silver and then roll away altogether. Flowers of a deep brooding gentian blue burned deep in the grass. Far away, a monstrous pyramidal stalagmite of mountains craned to meet a stalactite of far-flung clouds. Foothills, like dispersed ripples, lay about the great central wave of land—gathered themselves, higher and higher, about the multiple toppling head—like an immense tidal wave, towering above tributary waves to overwhelm the valley. The clouds, an inverted pyramid, seemed to reflect this piled accumulation; there also, in the sky, were the foothills, the swelling base, and the apex of the cloud range, as though the sky were a mirror, answering the stormy earth.
“The Kongo-san,”1 said Pavel.
Their trail ran out upon the spine of a sharp spur of hill, and it seemed impossible to believe that horsemen could ride down from such an airplane flight of land. On three sides—to right, to left, and before—distant fields, rivers, villages, and groves, seen under the horses’ chins, were flattened downby a wide weight of glass air. Yet the path which led the riders, as it seemed, over the brim of this high grassy world into the air, proved to be a reasonably tame descent—a fluent series of zeds and esses, zigzagging and looping down the fluted sides of the hill, in easy, if twisted, gradients.
By the time the instructive tale of Pavel’s youth had brought him to his first business triumph—(“I said to him, ‘No, my dear sir, that’s where you’re wrong. I may be half your age, but I’ve kept my wits about me and you can take it from me. …’ ”)—the hoofs of the four horses were rattling over the bleached, water-worn stones of a dry river bed on valley level. Sandpipers found an innocent sport in fluttering invitingly in front of the pursuing dog’s nose; their chicks, nearly independent now, were still obedient enough to heed the mew of command and be frozen into black-and-white pebbles, impossible to identify. A couple of little boys were herding pigs among the boulders, and screamed with pleasure at the artless dog’s confusion.
The father of the little boys came out of his thatched shed to watch the riders. Pleased by their rich look, he hailed them, and, dragging a yellow ground-melon from the tangle of his garden, shuffled toward them, peeling the fruit as he came. So earthy was the hand in which he held up the fruit that black smears were printed all over the pale peeled flesh of the
