“Katia?” I said to her across Nuaman who leaned back on his elbows, grinning away. “And where have you sprung from?”
“Please?” she asked blankly in the most un−English of accents. “I mean where do you come from?” I said, more slowly.
She put her hands on her round thighs and leaned forward gazing at me earnestly and sadly. “I am day pay,” she said.
“Day pay?” I said. “Do you mean you come by the day?” She seemed to consider how to explain it.
“You say, dippee,” she announced.
“Dippy!” I exclaimed, and I believe I began to edge away. “What on earth...?”
She turned her head and contemplated the park for a bit, and then, with a sigh and a shrug, as if admitting the worst, “I am a displeased parson,” she said.
They say you have to humour them, I thought, and it was on the tip of my tongue to reply that I was the Pope of Rome and not amused, when light dawned. In some ten minutes of questioning at the wildest cross−purposes I discovered—or thought I did—that she was a Pole who had suffered some complicated displacements during and since the war. We might have got further but I heard Mrs. Sarkissian's voice calling from beyond the shrubs. Katia, exclaiming “My God!” jumped up and fled with the chewed−looking tail still swinging behind her.
Nuaman looked at me and then flung himself on his back and hooted with laughter. I picked up the horned head−gear. It was well−contrived, with the horns fixed on two thin, curved metal bands and a strap to go under the chin and another round the back of the head. The tips of the horns were quite sharp. I looked down at the soft skin of Nuaman's naked tummy and shuddered. I should have a word in private with Katia about this game, I decided.
“Where on earth did you pick up such a dangerous game as this?” I asked.
He took the horns from me. “Oh, it's an old game, that. It's only dangerous with a real bull. But doesn't Katia make a wonderful she−bull?” The memory of her antics convulsed him.
I looked round for his cousins. They had disappeared.
“I say!” he exclaimed, suddenly sitting up. “It's good, isn't it? Now you and Katia are both here.” “Oh, is it? Why?”
“Well, I like you both.”
I asked him where Marvan and Ianthe were.
“They've gone up to the pool to bathe. Then they're going to wrestle. We shall watch them wrestling if you care. But perhaps you don't care for wrestling?*
He seemed so disappointed when I told him that I didn't that to cheer him up I promised to show him some day what I knew about ju−jitsu. That was a mistake, because he was all for having me demonstrate there and then. I could only get out of that by pointing out that we weren't evenly enough matched. He thought for a moment and then started up eagerly as an idea struck him.
“I say! You match Katia!” he exclaimed.
“Oh, so that's why it's good that Katia and I are both here? And what would Miss Katia say, I wonder, if I challenged her to a wrestling match for your amusement? And we don't say 'you match someone', we say 'you are a match for someone'.”
“Yes? But there's another match, isn't there? I mean you and Katia are both the same height, nearly the same weight and you have fair hair and blue eyes and so has she, and when you have been here a bit longer your skin will be the same colour as hers. Isn't that right?”
“Well,” I said, “I suppose the fact is right. And you could say that if we were a pair of horses. But you can't say one person matches another—even displeased persons. Anyway, match or no match, my friend, you're not going to match me against Katia at wrestling, so there!”
He grinned. “At running, then?”
“Nuaman,” I said. “I do believe your spiritual home is the Arena.”
That, too, was ill−considered, because he promptly wanted to know what the Arena was. “I thought you wanted to go and watch your cousins wrestle,” I said. “Oh, never mind them,” he cried. “Sit down and tell me!” So down I had to sit again and rack my brains to recollect all I had ever read about Roman games and gladiators, while he sat, clasping his knees in his arms and resting his cheek on them, listening intently.
(7)
He had his way. Katia and I did race before she had been back at Ringstones long. She seemed to be even more at his beck and call than his two cousins. Heaven knows how she and he understood each other. They talked in what they no doubt thought was English, but it might as well have been Russian for the little I understood of it. When I tried to talk to her I always had the feeling that both of us were capering on the giddy verge of lunacy. And yet we got on. She was as amateurish a maid as I was a governess, and she dealt with the housework, or as much of it as Mrs. Sarkissian would trust her with, in the same unpredictable fashion as she dealt with the English language. By afternoon she had always managed to get herself dismissed from the house, and once outside the door she would kick off her shoes and flee from domestic slavery to fling herself into a slavery far more abject at Nuaman's feet. She called him No Man; and in his absence, usually Sir No Man.
We raced round the park. Katia was strong, and I fancy she must have run a pretty wild career in whatever Polish forest she had been allowed to grow up in. She ran barefoot and I lent her my second pair of shorts which, for all Nuaman's saying we “matched", she distended rather more than I hope I do. First we raced with Nuaman and he beat us both. Then he would have Katia and me race each other. I was for refusing, but Katia pulled me up from the grass where I had stretched myself to get my wind. At that moment I almost wrestled with her without the formality of a challenge. There was no escape, one way or the other Nuaman would have his way! So we ran, and Nuaman loped along behind us as if driving us on, and I won by about a yard.
Now that there were four of us Nuaman's ingenuity in finding things to keep us on the go surpassed all previous flights. My contribution was everything I had learned at Towerton, but still it wasn't enough. I was the only one who did not let him have things entirely his own way. For instance, I stopped the bull−fighting game; but not by telling Katia she was not to play. I tried that and found it was hopeless. She had to if Nuaman said so, she kept insisting. “Hang what Nuaman says,” I cried in exasperation. “You're not to!” “But he must me!” she howled in a desperate effort to convince me. So I asked Nuaman bluntly to stop it. He agreed at once, as he always did when he saw that I had made up my mind firmly about something. Perhaps my mind didn't always stay made up; but I did stick to that. I would not allow the bull−fighting, and I would not wrestle.
I still tried to keep together some shreds of a pretence of teaching the children English, and fortunately Nuaman's frequent absences gave me a chance to make some progress with the girls. Their English, as I had suspected, was not at all bad. It was simply that when they were with Nuaman, or even with each other, they were afraid of making mistakes and being laughed at. If I got one of them by herself she would talk more.
One morning Nuaman was nowhere to be found. He had been busy for a few days down in the old stables and I was wondering what new device he was going to bring forth. I wandered round the park looking for the girls and found Marvan, sitting alone beside the beck, making rosettes out of the pith of rushes.