“I shall never be as grown-up as that,” sighed Seryozha, riding humbly after him. And he longed the more fiercely for his own poor inferior old father, as one might long for even a false word of encouragement.
Pavel was still dealing with his triumphant twenty-fifth year when the party reached the station. Seryozha’s impression was that his father-in-law had matured extremely slowly, but no detail of the process remained in the young man’s mind. The station, a humble, flat affair—a mere wooden box on the edge of a couple of metal stripes, distracted Pavel’s attention from his recital.
“Here we are,” he said. “Only twenty minutes to wait. I timed that very neatly.”
The mud strip that acted as platform, was empty except for a Korean woman, who squatted on the ground, crying loudly. Her head was crowned by an elaborate arrangement of napkin that might have been the pride of a suburban butler. Wisps of dusty hair clung to her tear-wet cheeks and she carried a crying baby bound upon her back. Seryozha looked at her with distaste. “These women. … Leave them behind in one place, they crop up in another. Always demanding attention …”
“What can she be crying for?” he asked.
Pavel took no notice of this. “While we are waiting, I will ask about your journey back to Manchuria,” he said. “I want Tanya to travel as comfortably as possible. It is her first real journey since she was a child, and the parting from her parents is bound to be rather a strain, so I want her to be well looked after.” He began talking about the details of the journey—sleeping berths, hotels, steamers, orders telegraphed ahead. …
“Oh, I shall never be man enough to arrange all that,” thought Seryozha. And equally, he felt he must not be child enough to let Wilfred Chew undertake everything.
While Pavel talked in Japanese, with a patronizing affability, to the hissing stationmaster, Seryozha stood near the weeping Korean woman. He wanted either to strangle her or to stroke her dirty neck—it was impossible to be sure which. As he looked at her, his dog bustled up with its usual “So-sorry-I’m-late-I-was-detained-on-business” manner and licked the woman hastily on the ear. She screamed and pushed it away. Seryozha looked at his dog fondly, admiring its savoir-faire. “What about my dog?” he asked Pavel. “How will it travel in a sleeping berth?”
Pavel laughed good-naturedly and spoke to the stationmaster again.
“You will have to put it in a crate and send it as freight,” he said, “if you think the creature’s worth taking home again. But if you like to leave it with Yi at Mi-san—”
“My dog can’t travel in a box,” said Seryozha. The dog cramped itself coyly at his feet, realizing that it was being talked about, but naively confident that the talk was kind. “Nonsense! All dogs travel like that here. It’s a rule on Japanese railways.” Pavel spoke inattentively, for he was straining his sight toward the far sun-dazzled spot where the ostensibly parallel railway lines defied geometry and converged on the horizon.
“Well then, I shan’t go home by train,” said Seryozha. “I shall walk.”
“What do you mean?” asked Pavel. His attention, suddenly recalled, whizzed down the slippery widening perspective of the railway line from the horizon to his son-in-law. “What do you mean—you’ll walk?”
“My dog can’t travel in a box,” said Seryozha, between nervously rigid lips.
“My daughter can’t travel on her feet,” said Pavel, glaring at him in amazement.
There was silence, bounded on the one hand by the continuous duet of the wailing Korean mother and child, and on the other by an insect-like twanging resonance, the sound of the approaching train. Pavel guarded the rather precarious integrity of his last word as the train approached. He knew it had not convinced his incipiently mutinous son-in-law, but still, as long as silence followed it, it could be considered as the last word on the subject. And now the roar of the train might be counted on to drown any further impertinence.
The train’s roar swelled and swelled, just reached the verge of the unendurable, and then broke, like a schoolboy’s voice, into a falsetto of hissings and steamings, as the train stopped.
Wilfred and Isaev climbed down. Pavel hurried toward them; here, the first word rather than the last, was the important one.
“Excellent, excellent,” he shouted, seizing Isaev’s slow hand. “Old friend, you are welcome. You give me the greatest pleasure.” He tried painfully to be economical of words—terse and manly of voice. Windbag was a charge that an amiable taciturnity must disprove. But he could not resist adding something more—and something more—and something more after that. Nothing but words ever occurred to him as relevant; if one arrangement of words seemed in retrospect imperfect or incomplete, nothing but more words seemed adequate to correct it. Pavel would have proved by a week’s argument that he never in any circumstances argued.
Isaev opened and shut his wide mouth not ill-naturedly; he looked inquisitively past Pavel at Seryozha.
Wilfred Chew was welcoming himself back at his post by Seryozha’s side, unaided by Seryozha. “Well, my dear old chap, we seasoned travelers … glad to be
