“Why do you stay here all alone, daughter?” asked Anna, after huskily beginning to say several other things. “Why don’t you come to our home?”
Tatiana looked at her kindly and warily, as a deer, knowing its retreat safe, looks between the trees of a forest at some strange visitor. “Ai!” she said. “Seryozha isn’t such a very married man, dear Anna Semionovna, that he can’t have his first few minutes at home without his wife. Besides,” she added, “poor Marfa has a sore heel.”
From another chapel of the temple, across the courtyard, Anna could hear a heavy and vulgar groaning—“O God! O God! …” Going forward a few steps, she saw Katya’s niece—a fat, flushed, straw-haired girl, sitting in a lump on a low step at the foot of an unfurnished altar, soaking one gross foot in a basin full of warm water. Beside her stood two kind Chinese priests, dressed like coolies (for they had been interrupted in mason’s work), except for their priestly pillbox hats. The priests, in producing the warm water, had obviously exhausted their resources for dealing with blistered female Big-noses. They looked kind, helpless, and depressed, and Marfa, who was not of martyr stuff, did nothing to spare their sympathetic feelings. “O God!” she groaned, vigorously. “O God! O God!”
“What is it—a blister?” asked Anna.
“O God!” replied Marfa.
Anna, leaning over it, saw that there was indeed a big broken blister on the heel. But she did not care. Her heart was quite hard just now. Not knowing what to do about any of these problems, she resented all of them; she did not know what to do for Marfa’s heel, what to do about welcoming Tatiana, whether to make curd cakes or not, how to find a double bed for Seryozha, whether to tip these kind priests. … Her imagination, usually so ingenious, had come to the end of its supply of ingenuities. Nothing occurred to her for Marfa’s relief except uncompromising amputation of that ugly foot, or immediate strangling of the sufferer. She therefore turned in silence toward Tatiana again.
“I ought to kiss her, I suppose,” thought Anna, desperately. “And she is certainly a most beautiful little creature.” Her thoughts added, “But she is called Death.”
Tatiana’s lack of precedents showing her what to do in these circumstances was even more complete than her mother-in-law’s. Anna had temporarily lost her social resources, but Tatiana had never found hers. Tatiana’s quick heart never prompted her in the solution of personal problems. She kept her heart for other purposes; her heart’s eyes were incurably longsighted. She would never have been at a loss with a trapped mouse, but a trapped mother-in-law seemed to need some subtlety of treatment, the nature of which did not occur to Tatiana at all. She realized that a mouse and a mother-in-law have, in these circumstances, something in common—she saw this in Anna’s eyes, and felt most tenderly sorry. Animals, she knew, were not comforted by touch, but people, she believed, sometimes were. So she leaned forward, round the intervening gods, and lightly stroked Anna’s arm. Then she sat back to watch the result. Anna watched her, without moving.
“She’ll be shaking hands with me next,” thought Anna, remembering things that Alexander Weber had said.
Tatiana, trembling a little, decided to talk. If she were careful to be polite, talk could do no harm, thought poor Tatiana.
“I do think your Manchuria is beautiful,” she said. “Not like land at all—real land is always so surprising round the corner—but like the sea which has no surprises and no corners. But it is a winter country, this, Anna Semionovna, isn’t it—although the sun is so hot now. It looks to me as if winter really lives here, and just sleeps half the year, like a snake.”
“It is a winter country,” admitted Anna, moodily, anxious at once to make the worst of it. “Remembering Manchuria from far off, one would never remember sweating in green still weather, or seeing the coolies in their big straw hats, or fetching water from rivers that run toward the sea. … Smelly furs and cracking black rivers and wind and endlessly sore fingers and melting the water to boil the tea in the dark morning—that’s Manchuria as you’ll remember it some day. A winter country indeed.”
“Some day you must come home with me, dear Anna Semionovna, and see our Korea. Especially our Kongo-san. Ai! ai! you should see the sunny cliffs come forward through the mist to bow, and then go back.” And she began to talk with a tense, trembling enthusiasm about such things as mountains, mists, cascades like stringed harps. It seemed to the surprised Anna that the child’s ardor had no flame in it, but only the stinging quality of ice.
These flowers of sight were furled in Tatiana’s sight like those Japanese toy water-flowers that lie disguised and secret like flakes of sawdust in the hand, but, tossed into water, expand into lilies and roses and orchids. The secret miles flowered in Tatiana’s mind, as she drew them one by one out of silence into this fresh element of words. The path across the Diamond Mountains opened before her, arched with sunlight.
“It was a path through the air,” said Tatiana. “We jumped from rock to rock; we scarcely trod on soil.” She remembered their course with the glowing, almost theatrical, exaggeration characteristic of her—overemphasis of memory combined with under-emphasis of tone. She remembered their flying course from brow to brow of tall boulders, like the course of two clouds from peak to peak, over waters choked and knotted by these bowling boulders—waters jerked this way and that, foaming like horses violently checked in their course—waters dammed into peacock-green pools, to spill over paradoxically, in the wrong direction, by secret
