The Polyglots

by William Gerhardie

  ‘Wasn’t she!’ exclaimed my aunt, with malice. ‘She just was.’

  ‘But Berthe is awfully nice, isn’t she?’ I said.

  And Aunt Teresa, in a deep, deep baritone, in the voice of the wolf who, masquerading as the grandmother, spoke to Little Red Ridinghood from beneath the bedclothes, drawled: ‘Yes, Berthe has taken pity on me in my illness and she looks after me, poor invalid that I am! She is kind and attentive, but isn’t she a perfect fright to look at?’

  ‘Well, there’s something sympathetic about her face, all the same.’

  ‘No, but isn’t she ugly—that long red beak! And you know she doesn’t know she is ugly. She even fancies herself. She thinks she isn’t at all bad to look at.’

  ‘Well, I’ve seen worse.’

  ‘But, non, mon Dieu!’ she laughed. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone so ludicrously ugly. But, as I say—of course, she is not Constance, but she’s quite kind to me and attentive.’ Aunt Teresa was looking all the while at my shining brown calves, where my servant Pickup had ‘put on’ a ‘Cherry Blossom’ shine. Perhaps she thought of her own youth, regretted that her pigmy husband had never had such calves as mine. For I am strong of limb, my calves especially, and my dark-brown tightly strapped cavalry boots and spurs (in which I cultivate a certain swaggering kick in my walk), polished to a high degree by Pickup, show off my legs to advantage. Women like me. My blue eyes, which I roll in a winning way when I talk to them, look well beneath my dark brows—which I daily pencil. My nose is remotely tilted, a little arched. But what disposes them to me, I think, are my delicate nostrils, which give me a naïve, tender, guileless expression, like this—‘M’m’—which appeals to them.

  ‘That’s enough, George,’ said my aunt.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Admiring yourself in the looking-glass all the time.’

  ‘Not a bit——’

  ‘You will dine with us.’

  ‘Yes. Now I must go back to the hotel to change.’

  ‘Don’t be late,’ she called after me.

  When I descended, Beastly had already gone. At the hotel I found an invitation for me to attend next week a dinner given by the Imperial General Staff. As I drove back to dinner, full of half-apprehended anticipations, the shadows were already black under the wheels, and next to the little dwarf slave there ran another with a longer neck and legs like stilts.

  7

  AND AS I RANG THE BELL AND THE BOY OPENED THE door to me, Sylvia was there, standing in the hall, bright-eyed, long-limbed, graceful as a sylph. We waited for my aunt: some moments afterwards she came down, and in her wake we all went in to dinner. Sylvia sat facing me. She bent her head, closed her eyes (while I noticed the length of the lashes), and bringing her outstretched fingers together, hurriedly mumbled grace to herself. Then took up the spoon—and once again revealed her luminous eyes. And I noticed the exquisite curve of her finely drawn black brows.

  She was so strikingly beautiful that one could not get used to her face: could not rest one’s eyes on her, could not make out what was the matter with it, after all. She was so beautiful that one’s eye could not fix on her—and one asked oneself why the deuce she wasn’t more beautiful still!

  ‘Sylvia! Again!’ said Aunt Teresa.

  And, involuntarily, Sylvia blinked.

  ‘And your friend?’ Mme Vanderphant asked.

  ‘Who? Beastly? He is dining out.’

  ‘Mais voilà un nom!’ laughed my aunt, and revealed her beautiful profile against the light: it was plastered up pretty considerably with powder and paste, but the outlines were intact and lovely enough, I can tell you.

  ‘There are some funny names in the world,’ I agreed, ‘like that of my batman, for instance, who is called Pickup. I didn’t invent them, so I can’t help it.’

  ‘Ah, je te crois bien!’ Uncle Emmanuel agreed.

  ‘He has perfectly vertical nostrils, that man Major Beastly,’ exclaimed Aunt Teresa. ‘I never saw anything like it!’

  ‘He seems a very nice man none the less,’ said Berthe.

  ‘But—a horrible nuisance! When he wasn’t seasick he suffered from acute attacks of dysentery all the way out.’

  ‘Poor man!’ she exclaimed. ‘And nobody to look after him.’

  ‘And instead of shaving in the clean manly way as he should, he used a fiendish contrivance (devised, I think, for the benefit of your sex) for burning off his facial growth, making an unholy stink in the doing—regularly on the fourth day.’

  Sylvia laughed.

  ‘The voyage across the Pacific’—I turned to her—‘took us fourteen days, during which time Major Beastly made a stink in our cabin three times.’

  ‘George!’ said my aunt, calling me to order.

  I raised my eyes and looked straight into hers. ‘I use the word advisedly: a smell wasn’t in it!’

  ‘But, mon Dieu! I should have protested against this,’ said Mme Vanderphant.

  ‘To a senior officer?’ My uncle turned to her sardonically, as one who knew that such things were not done in the Service.

  ‘Impossible?’

  ‘Mais je le crois bien, madame!’ he said excitedly.

  ‘As a matter of fact,’ I explained, ‘Beastly was my junior three days before we sailed. But he was promoted in a single day from a sub to a major because he deals in rail and steam, and is just the man they wanted to advise them on the Manchurian railway, I believe.’

  ‘Sylvia! Again!’ Aunt Teresa interrupted. Sylvia blinked again.

  ‘His answer when I approached him diplomatically was that he had a very delicate skin which couldn’t stand the scraping of the razor blade.’

  ‘And nothing happened?’

  ‘I cannot say what happened. As I was about to press him more definitely, he had an acute attack of dysentery, and the question was indefinitely postponed.’

  ‘Pauvre homme,’ said Berthe.

  The two Vanderphant girls were conspicuously well-behaved, and confined themselves to saying, ‘Oui, maman,’ and ‘Non, maman,’ or possibly, when passing things to Aunt Teresa, who was like a Queen amongst us, they might anticipate her wishes with a coy: ‘Madame désire?’ But scarcely anything more. There they sat, side by side, the one dressed exactly like the other and wearing the same fringe across the forehead, neither plain nor yet particularly good-looking, but very well-behaved; while their mother talked to me of Guy de Maupassant and the novels of Zola.

  ‘It is so good that your parents sent you to Oxford,’ my aunt said.

  I lowered my lashes at that. ‘Yes, of course, it is rather an event to go up to Oxford. It’s not as if you went up to Cambridge, or anything like that.’

  ‘It had always been my ambition,’ said Uncle Emmanuel, ‘to go to the University. Alas! I was sent to the Military Academy instead.’

  ‘And Anatole, too,’ exclaimed my aunt, ‘would rather have gone to the University, as his father also would have liked him to go. But I wouldn’t let him—I don’t remember why—and he, good boy that he is, would not have done anything to sadden me. His only thought, his only interest in life is his mother.’

  She sighed—while I remembered how Anatole said to me one evening while on leave in England:

  ‘Oh, you know, I get round mother easily enough.’

  ‘Still, a university,’ she mused, ‘may have been better for him, now that the war’s over. Like his father he is a poet, though he is his mother’s boy. But I sent him to the Military College instead.’

  ‘There are as many fools at a university as elsewhere,’ I said to calm her belated qualms of conscience. ‘But their folly, I admit, has a certain stamp—the stamp of university training, if you like. It is trained folly.’

  ‘Ah!’ said Mme Vanderphant, with a very conscious attempt at being intellectual, ‘is it not always so: one belittles one’s past opportunities if one hasn’t made full use of them?’

  ‘It’s not a question of belittling anything,’ I said. ‘It’s the attitude which
Oxford breeds in you: that nothing will henceforth astonish you—Oxford included.’

  And suddenly I remembered summer term: the Oxford Colleges exuding culture and inertia. And I became rhapsodical. ‘Ah!’ I cried, ‘there’s nothing like it! It’s wonderful. You go down the High, let us say, to your tutor’s, enter his rooms like your own, and there he stands, a grey-haired scholar with a beak that hawks would envy, in his bedroom slippers, terribly learned, jingling the money in his trouser pockets and warming his seat at the fire, smoking at you while he talks to you, like an elder brother, of literature. Or take a bump supper. There’s a don nicknamed Horse, and at a bump supper, after the Master has spoken, we all cry: “Horse! Horse! Horse!” and he gets up, smiling, and makes a speech. But there is such a din of voices that not a word can be heard.’

  To tell you the truth, when I was at Oxford—I was bored. My impression of Oxford is that I sat in my rooms, bored, and that it ceaselessly rained. But now, warmed by their interest, I told them how I played soccer, rowed in the Eights, sat in the president’s chair at the Union. Rank lies, of course. I cannot help it. I am like that—imaginative. I have a sensitive heart. I cannot get myself to disappoint expectations. Ah! Oxford is best in retrospect. I think life is best in retrospect. When I lie in my grave and remember my life back to the time I was born, as a whole, perhaps I shall forgive my creator the sin of creating me.

  There is this gift of making another feel that there is no one else of any consequence in the world. While I lied ahead, I felt Sylvia exercise that gift—a most subtle kind of flattery this, needing no words, just a look, a touch, a tone. And as I spoke I felt this in the looks which Sylvia cast me. The stars twinkled. The night flushed, listened, as I lied on. And now I felt that my interminable talk already bored them a little.

  ‘The war is over,’ said my aunt, ‘and yet there will be men, I know, who will regret it. The other day I talked to an English Captain who had been through the thick of the Gallipoli campaign, and he assured me positively that he liked fighting—and simply carried me off my feet. And I don’t know whether he isn’t right. He liked fighting the Turks because, he said, they are such splendid fellows. Mind you! he had nothing at all against them; on the contrary, he thought they were gentlemen and sportsmen—almost his equals. But he said he’d fight a Turk any day, with pleasure. Because they fought cleanly. After all,’ my aunt continued, ‘there’s something splendid, say what you like—a zest of life!—in his account of fighting the Turks. The Turks rush out of the wood with glittering bayonets, chanting: “Allah! Allah! Allah!” as they advance into battle. Because, you see, they think they are already at the gates of Heaven, only waiting to be admitted. So they rush gravely and steadily into battle, chanting: “Allah! Allah! Allah!” I don’t know—but it must be, as he says, exhilarating!’

  ‘And then,’ I said, continuing the picture, ‘some sportsman sends a cold bayonet blade into the vulnerable parts of the man. You understand what happens?’ I became cool, calculatingly suave. ‘The intestines are a delicate tissue; when, for example, you eat a lump of something that your stomach cannot digest, you are conscious of pain. Now picture what happens in that human stomach at the advent of a sharp cold blade. It isn’t merely that it cuts the guts; it lets them out. Picture it. And you will understand the peculiar intonation of his last “Allah!” ’

  ‘Oh, you are disgusting!’

  ‘This is cruel! cruel!’ said my aunt.

  ‘Yes, to you, who would like your wars “respectable”, conducted in good taste, outside in the yard, but please not on the drawing-room carpet! While my own feelings are that in a war soldiers should begin at home with the civilian population, particularly with the old ladies.’

  ‘That is enough,’ she said.

  ‘No, I won’t have you run away with a partial picture. Allah, indeed. What of your son in Flanders?’

  ‘Oh, he is all right. Besides, it is all over now.’

  ‘M-m … wait a few days.’ I was excited. But I knew that to give the full effect to your sermon you must be calm, let your passion sift through your sentences. When I am righteously angry I let my righteous anger gather, and then put the brake on it, and give vent to it in cool, biting, seemingly dispassionate tones. I harness my anger to do the work of indictment. Turning ever so gently towards her, I fixed an evangelic look upon my aunt. ‘What is the terrible thing in a war? In the war men’s nerves gave way, and then they were court martialled for their nerves having given way—deserted them—and were shot at dawn—as deserters, for cowardice. And the sole judges of them were their superior officers who dared not know any better.

  ‘And why is it,’ I continued, avoiding momentarily the look which crept into Aunt Teresa’s eyes, ‘that stay-at-homes, particularly women, and more particularly old women, are the worst offenders in this stupid business of glorifying war? Why is it that they are more mischievous in mind, less generous in outlook than their youngsters in the trenches?’

  Aunt Teresa closed her eyes with a faint sigh, as if to indicate that it was a strain on her delicate system to listen to my unending flow.

  While, ‘I remember,’ I continued, ‘an hotel in Brighton where I stayed two weeks before joining up in the so-called Great War. The inevitable old ladies with their pussy cats were by far the worst of all. They talked in terms of blood. They demanded the extermination of the whole of the German race; nothing less, they said, would satisfy them. They longed to behead all German babies with their own hands for the genuine pleasure, they said, that this would give them. They were not human babies, they argued, but vermin. It was a service they desired to render to their country and the human race at large. They had a right to demonstrate their patriotism. I was not a little shocked, I must confess, at this tardy display of Herodism in old, decaying women. I told them as much, politely, and they called me a pro-German. They discovered unpleasant possibilities in my name that had slipped their attention heretofore—a serious oversight. A danger to the Realm. Diabologh—but in heaven what a name to be sure! One of them went as far as to say that there was—there seemed to be—a distinct suggestion of something—well—diabolical about it that should be watched. They talked of cement grounds prepared by German spies at various vulnerable points in England to serve the purpose of future German heavy guns, ingeniously disguised as tennis courts, and of me in the same breath. “Why don’t you,” said one of the old ladies, a particularly antiquated specimen of her sex, “rather than make that impossible noise on the piano, go and fight for your country?” “Die?” I said, “that you may live? The thought’s enough to make anyone a funk.”

  ‘Throughout the countries which had participated in the war’ (I continued, because my aunt, breathless at my imputations, had nothing ready with which to interrupt my flow) ‘there is still a tendency among many bereaved ones to assuage themselves by the thought that their dead have fallen for something at once noble and worth while which overtowers somehow the tragedy of their death—almost excusing it. Mischievous delusion! Their dead are victims—neither more nor less—of the folly of adults who having blundered the world into a ludicrous war, now build memorials—to square it all up with. If I were the Unknown Soldier, my ghost would refuse to lie down under that heavy piece of marble; I would arise, I would say to them: keep your blasted memorials and learn sense! Christ died 1918 years back, and you’re as incredibly foolish as ever you were.’

  I subsided suddenly. There was a pause.

  ‘Thank you. We are much obliged to you for your lecture,’ said Aunt Teresa.

  ‘Welcome,’ I said, ‘welcome.’

  8

  AFTER DINNER WE SAUNTERED OVER INTO THE drawing-room, and Uncle Emmanuel lit a cigar. The open piano beckoned to me as I stood in front of it, sipping my coffee.

  ‘Do you play?’ asked Mme Vanderphant.

  I do not like to say that I don’t, because as a child I had had innumerable piano lessons. But I could never be bothered to learn even to read music with any degre
e of proficiency. I therefore resent being pressed to play the piano in public. And my shy feeling is wasted, for they think it is merely false modesty, and that I like being asked. When I was at Oxford I took up music as a supplementary subject. I soon gave it up; I simply could not be bothered to learn the rudiments of its technical side, and finally, when I decided to give it up, I was told by my teacher of music that I could do so with no loss to music as a whole. Yet I am intensely musical.

  ‘Play us something,’ said Berthe.

  ‘I don’t feel in the mood.’

  ‘Oh, do play,’ Sylvia said, coming up to me; her dress touched me, her scent gave me a thrill of something delicate and beautiful and yet strangely intimate and near. How beautiful she was.

  ‘What is this scent?’

  ‘Cœur de Jeanette. Oh, do play.’

  ‘Very well, then.’

  I struck some introductory chords, and after repeating them a dozen times or so plunged into that climaxic bit of bursting passion from Tristan that I loved. And then stopped. I knew no further.

  ‘Oh, go on!’

  ‘I’m not in the mood.’

  ‘Please, please,’ they entreated.

  I played the crest waves twenty times over, and then stopped.

  They sighed appreciation.

  ‘You have such feeling,’ my aunt said.

  Well, that’s true. But I am impatient of technicalities. Once while at Oxford I played the same passionate bit from Tristan, and a D.Mus. rushed up to me, horror-stricken. ‘Either,’ he cried, ‘I’ve lost my ear—or you are playing in the wrong key!’ I was playing in the wrong key, by ear at that (because I could not tackle it in the original). But they asked me to go on playing, and all through my playing I had a feeling of warmth, as though the sun was shining on the tissues of my skin. Sylvia’s warm eyes followed my every movement. And of this I was pleasurably aware.

  Uncle Emmanuel who, while I was playing, looked as if he had something more urgent up his sleeve, immediately I stopped, took the opportunity of saying: ‘Now that the war is over one must rejoice, one must amuse oneself a little.’ And Aunt Teresa, who looked unhappy and preoccupied while I played, replied: