To Tatiana, the whole problem of the choice between her own comfort and the dog’s seemed perfectly reasonable and entirely insoluble. She lived always in the minute—looked forward to nothing more solid than dreams. Tomorrow’s practical difficulties seemed as unreal as a story about someone else. Tomorrow would dawn—the next chapter of the story must presently be read—but here was today, and everything else was negligible. She habitually presented a passive front to her father’s contentions. This cool docility was one of her father’s chief difficulties in dealing with her; she never defied him and never agreed with him. She seemed to watch his lips moving, rather than to listen to what they said. She knew herself to be a robust and tireless walker, to whom the journey to Chi-tao-kou on foot would be no hardship. But it was a matter of tomorrow, not today, so it did not occur to her to defy her father, any more than it occurred to her to feel offended with her husband for his unflattering and unromantic solicitude for his dog. In answer to her father’s indignant vows that no daughter of his should tramp like a gypsy, she nodded her head. In answer to Seryozha’s simple reiterations that no dog of his should be expected to travel in a box, she nodded her head. She did not care much for an alternative so remotely imbedded in the future; if anything, she cared about the dog’s dignity a little more than her own. Every creature, she took for granted, had a right to its dignity.
Two entirely different airs seemed to enclose Seryozha when he was talking with Tatiana alone and when he was talking with Pavel alone. The young human being is instinctively humble with the arrogant and arrogant with the humble—yet it was not, in Seryozha’s case, so much that he spoke different things with Pavel and with Tatiana—as that he spoke them from a different heart and into a different air. From a high heart and into a consenting air he spoke to Tatiana; from a lowly heart and into a dangerous air he spoke to his father-in-law. He was, in his own reluctant eyes, an essentially different Seryozha with the one and with the other, and his eyes, thus washed with the change in himself, saw not only himself, but the world outside, entirely differently. In Tatiana’s gentle and admiring presence, he saw trees, buildings, clouds, with their faces toward him; the sun shone on him—he accepted it as his sun—the shade was spread for his comfort. But in the presence of Pavel, who imposed uncertainty and immaturity upon him, he was forced to feel as if he were trespassing on another’s air, another’s sunlight and shade—treading on earth indifferent to him; the very wind seemed to turn its back on him and fawn on another. “Face me—fortify me,” the puzzled young heart cries to the wind. “I need support—the old pampered ones don’t. Help me to speak in my own sure voice, out of my equal heart. … Turn to me. …” It was like making a third at a lovers’ meeting—demanding attention which can only be impatient and cold when given.
The remark, “My dog can’t travel in a box,” spoken to Tatiana in the field one day, on the way to the stables, was quite a new remark, expressing a new point of view, new words spoken by a new Seryozha who brushed the sky with his upraised head and kicked the grass with large sure feet. “Your father says it is ridiculous” (a cold air blew on him, shrank his heart’s new stature a little for a second). “Yet sometimes, Tanya, you know, there are ridiculous things that can’t be made different … like” (he sought in his quite obstinate mind)—“like a man not being able to go to his wedding because he’s spilt something on his only clean shirt. He can’t go in a dirty shirt. He hasn’t got a clean shirt. People may laugh, but there’s nothing to be done. Being ridiculous doesn’t make the shirt clean again. I cannot let my dog travel alone, shut up in a box.”
“Why, of course not!” agreed Tatiana, watching the dog take great arch leaps through the long grass. “A dog shouldn’t—couldn’t—be shut up in a box smaller than the size of a meadow. How would it run—or be itself—in a little box?”
“That’s what I mean,” said Seryozha, eagerly. “It isn’t as if my dog had been used to being a kennel dog or tied up. It’s never even worn a collar or seen a chain. You know, Tanya—that dog runs. It’s so sure it may run—it wouldn’t even know enough to distrust the box. It would run into the box wagging its tail—and stop running—stop being the dog it is. … It isn’t that I’m specially fond of the dog—it’s nothing but a dog,” he disclaimed, eagerly, “but I’m bound, somehow, to let it be the dog it is. There’s something about it being such a running kind of dog—I have to respect that. …” Seryozha sweated a little with the effort—not only of making Tatiana understand, but of making himself understand what he meant.
“I know,” said Tatiana. “I know exactly what you mean. It would be even worse than—catching that free lark, for instance, and shutting it in a box. The lark has to be free to be itself, too—but the dog has to be free within reach of our hands to be itself. …”
“Hm!” said Seryozha, rather haughtily. He would have shot that lark without more than a second’s regret—that short reluctant regret he always suffered when he saw the fading smile of an animal dead at his hands. It was certainly true that it would be much worse to stop the dog’s running than to stop the lark’s flying.
They both stood still in the grass and watched the lark. Tatiana’s perfect and instantaneous sight showed her the curious intermittence in the lark’s flight; it shot its wings abroad flashingly, like
