The Faraway Bride

I

Old Sergei walked in front. All the conversation Seryozha had, for the space of fifteen miles, was the expression of his father’s neck. The back of Old Sergei’s neck was a little like a tortoise’s neck, but more speaking. The neck spoke of duty about to be done—rapturously unpleasant duty. It was a nagging, over-articulate neck, but of course Seryozha was so well used to it that he did not think of it as anything except just Father’s Neck. He knew, however, without knowing that he knew, that his father was satisfied to be followed on an unpleasant duty by an unwilling son.

The road returned and returned again to the river, crossing and recrossing it. The road and the river could not part because of the narrowness of the gorge; they could not even find room to run peacefully parallel, but got in each other’s way. It was like the mutual irritation of marriage. But it was beautiful. The sunny side of the gorge was lacquered with flowers; the shadowed side was dark and stormy with color. The grass had an electric sheen on it, in memory of rain. Even Seryozha’s dog had picked a flower by mistake; it was caught in the clasp of its collar, a blue two-winged butterfly of a flower.

Every time Seryozha waded across a ford he sang with excitement. The streaked blue-and-yellow water piled up against his thighs, his strong striding legs were like blunt scissors tearing silk. The great patched cliffs, the hills, the fiery flowers, were all very far away, very still and very alien, as though seen through glass, and Seryozha, singing hoarsely, was isolated in a dizzy world—a tall indomitable young rock in a storm, a little god enclosed in a roaring private universe.

“I am wet,” said Old Sergei, standing bent double on a bank, unrolling his wet trousers. “I am just as wet if I roll up my trousers as if I leave them as they are.”

“Then leave them as they are,” said Seryozha, turning himself round to enjoy the feeling of the warm wind on hot legs through wet trousers.