Seryozha, very much slower to receive messages from his senses, saw only a lark fluttering—missed the daring grace with which it committed itself, unresisting, to the pull of earth and air. He wished—but not very keenly—that he had his gun.
“Come,” said Tatiana, suddenly. “We shall be late.” She had seen her father hurrying across the stable-yard.
“What for?” asked Seryozha, running beside her. “It’s not nearly dinnertime.”
“My mare—Tovarka—” gasped Tatiana.
In the yard, Tovarka the mare lay on her side in the throes of foal-birth. She had chosen to lie in the yard, though Pavel and the groom had spent an hour making the loose-box ready for the event. It is rather chilling how animals refuse to conform to man’s arrangements, or to take the hints given them by the works of our hands. Doors to come in at, railings to keep things out, steps to climb up by, tables to eat at—a fig for them, say the birds and beasts. Sparrows ignore the doors and come in at the windows, splashing impertinent droppings on our tables; flies fly into our sacred eyes; kites, leaning from the sky, see our carefully leveled houses upside down and in all the wrong perspectives; magpies mistake the significance of our chimneys; mice hop in through our fences, not even paying them the compliment of defiance; cats jump our paths at right-angles, and spring up walls without the help of stairs, as though the gravel were wild water and the stairways cascades. Air and earth are the only roads for these creatures; they will not learn to read our carefully constructed signposts through the air. Any opening from air to air is a door to them. And so the earth was bed for Tovarka the mare; she was just a creature in pain, lying down on the earth. … To hell with man’s hygienically ventilated loose-boxes, and clean straw, and helpful implements.
“Please, Saggay Saggayitch, translate this to your father-in-law,” said Wilfred, who was beaming on the birth without admitting that it was an event at all, all animals being irrelevances to him. “I have thought of a compromise in the matter of the journey to Chi-tao-kou that should, I think, satisfy all parties.”
Nobody expressed any curiosity. The eyes of all the Russians were fixed upon the mare. She groaned and heaved her body. Headfirst, the foal began cautiously to emerge into the world, wrapped in a strange bluish veil. The veil parted coyly and showed the unexpectedly animated face of the foal—the expression of a creature having an interesting adventure and determined to get through it with credit and dispatch. Seryozha’s dog, after an incredulous look during which all panting was suspended, gave an embarrassed bark and hurried uneasily away. Mare and foal pushed—heaved—writhed. The mare never once looked round; she seemed only interested in her pain. After a few minutes, the foal lay free, leaning against Pavel’s leg, amidst the iridescent and filmy ruins of its past. It lay balanced on its breastbone, its limp double-jointed legs falling upward.
“My idea is,” continued Wilfred, surprised and pleased to find that nobody was interrupting him (the interruption of a new life within twenty feet of him was no interruption at all), “that we should hire a Ford’s motorcar as far as Gensan, then take the steamboat to Seishin, then hire another Ford’s motorcar to the Manchurian border. …”
“Ah, papasha, show the baby to Tovarka,” cried Tatiana. “She doesn’t know what’s the matter with her. She thinks she’s simply dying of a stomachache. …”
Pavel, who was a much humbler, gentler, more silent man, when engaged in caring for horses, signed to the groom to help him to carry the little wet boneless rubber beast round its mother’s sprawling form to her face. It seemed as if Tatiana was right; the mare lifted her drooping head with a look, first of surprise, then of new life. “So this was what was the matter—I’m beginning, not ending. …” With a little soft, falsetto laugh, the mare began to lick the foal all over, snuffling with delighted tenderness into every cranny of its body. “Oh, joy! oh, joy!” whispered Tatiana for her. As its mother caressed it, the foal began to be afflicted with strange senseless jerkings; the first hours of its life were evidently to be spent in passing from one indignity to another. No buffoon could have made more slavish efforts to gain a witless laugh than the foal seemed to make—jerking—humping—hiccuping—all its legs doubling and redoubling—looping like a caterpillar. These jerks presently resolved themselves into more and more determined efforts to stand up, and, after a while, with Pavel’s clasped hands under its stomach, it did stand up, looking like someone completely drunk, yet solemnly hopeful of seeming sober enough to pass in a crowd. Its legs slid and warped in unnatural directions. Its tail was like a little wet wool mat with a lively mouse underneath it. Its hoofs seemed very badly-finished and shoddy, like wads of wet brown paper.
“From that point, Saggay Saggayitch,” Wilfred continued, “the distance to Chi-tao-kou would be negligible. We could hire a wagon for Mrs. Malinin’s use.”
Still Seryozha inexplicably delayed translation. He and Tatiana stood hand in hand, looking with entranced eyes at the foal. Their joy at seeing a new live thing, new eyes open on the air, new feet prepared to run about the earth—was like a rendezvous for Seryozha and Tatiana. This joy was their meeting-place at last; to this trysting-point the compassionate, cold, complicated heart of Tatiana ran to meet the direct, greedy, and simple heart of Seryozha. Living was what things were,
