The Polyglots

by William Gerhardie

  I was working on my thesis A Record of the Stages in the Evolution of an Attitude, when I heard his steps; the door opened and Harry swung in in large hefty strides, looking mighty serious.

  ‘There you are,’ said he, producing an old rusty screw out of his pocket, ‘this is for you.’

  ‘Why aren’t you at school?’

  ‘Don’t you know?’ he said, astonished. ‘It’s Nora’s birthday. Why don’t you come down to have chocolate?’

  ‘I am busy.’

  ‘Well, never mind,’ said he, ‘I can take the present down to her.’ He went over to my typewriter and began fiddling with the keys. ‘I want,’ he said, ‘to type a letter to Mummy.’

  ‘Well.’

  He typed:

  My dear Mummy how ar you getting on don has bit a bit of

  anti Berts nos of uncl is goto sell don. Nora ceeps geting eer ache I can reed books naw. nora can say her abc and can kant up to a hundrid wee hav a grama fon I can draw a kite and an open and klosd umbrela I hav got a woch. do you no hoo hav mee it. well i will tell you anti Bert gav mee it and I can tell the time. I——

  He got stuck with the keys, having pressed several at once. ‘Come, tell me what to say and I’ll type it.’

  He strolled about, swinging, his hands in his breeches-pockets.

  ‘Well?’

  He smiled that old man’s smile of his, and then began:

  My dear Mummy I am very good and have you not forgotten to get that chocolate from the station—have got quite a lot of toys and a bucket and spade. I’ve made a motor with two chairs and a shawl and all my toys are inside. I play very nicely and I am good. Auntie Berthe sleeps where you put the head and I sleep where you put the feet. I see all kinds of pictures in Auntie Berthe’s room on the wall and Auntie Berthe’s got a lamp with a glass on and lamp glass in crackling. I’ve got a water-can and some scales with a little drawer. Ginger always comes up, I always see Don. Ginger bite me. I written this letter myself. There is a little girl called Laurie and behind the barn there is a place with some bricks like a frame and it was all bumpy before and there were no seats before for Laurie to sit on because she was the teacher and all that bumpy earth. This morning I got up early and made it very flat and have put seats there so Laurie can sit down. It looks so nice now it’s flat. Every afternoon we go for long walks and when we get home very tired we have lots of cups of tea and plenty to eat. When I went to the Sunday school treat I got most of the sweets and the others only had two each. I got twenty. And I fished a Noah’s Ark out of a brown tub. Auntie Berthe was hiding behind some bricks the other day. While Auntie was hiding I took the big milk can of lemonade and drank it all up and nearly choked; was all sick back into the can. Auntie laughed so much and Nora stopped crying and laughed at me being sick all over the can. Auntie Berthe’s given me a nice looking glass and some nails. I told Daddy when he’s finished making furniture I told him to make my peddling motor, put a screen on it at the back and tyres on the wheels. Auntie Berthe has got a dark brown cupboard with a big looking glass on it. Auntie Terry’s case that Daddy gave her that she does her nails with I play with. I break nothing. Give my love to Bubby. A thousand pounds of love to you, Mummy. I’ve got real marbles.

  Your son Harry Charles.

  There followed nine big crosses purporting to be kisses.

  I leaned back, exhausted, and yawned, and then gazing at Sylvia’s picture on my table, took it up and, automatically, from habit, kissed it.

  He looked at me brightly.

  ‘Silly!’ he said.

  He pondered a moment, looking round, and then suddenly asked:

  ‘Why is everything?’

  By George! he was taking after me.

  ‘But why is it,’ he said, ‘——everything?’

  I pondered a moment, stuck for an answer, and then answered him:

  ‘Because … why shouldn’t it be?’

  He was satisfied—completely so.

  ‘Harry, your wime!’ Nora called from the steps.

  ‘Silly!’ he said, ‘they tell ’er it’s wine because she’s only a baby. It’s cod-liver oil. Come down,’ he said, ‘Nora has a lot of people for her birthday.’

  ‘People?’

  ‘Children, not people; not grown-ups people.’

  ‘Oh!’

  In the dining-room, as we got down, there were many children. As fresh ones arrived, each, very pleased with itself, handed Nora its little present, which she snatched from them without as much as a ‘thank you’.

  ‘And who is this little boy?’ I asked Harry.

  ‘This is Billy—who pinches her.’

  Nora looked round and smiled, her open mouth full of chewed cake.

  ‘And don’t you fight the boys when they annoy your little sister?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Don’t want to get into trouble,’ he said, looking at Nora the while, who was eating a long chocolate bar all by herself, till Sylvia observed: ‘Won’t you let Harry have a taste?’

  ‘Well, Harry, you know what it tastes like,’ she said, turning away.

  When we settled down to chocolate, Uncle Lucy was not amongst us. For hours on end he would sit now in his study, brooding, brooding without cease, and we, stirred by curiosity, would open the door and peep inside. This popping in and out of heads irritated him not a little. Once, while going out with him, and passing a Lutheran church on the door of which hung a notice of the hours of service, Uncle Lucy precipitated his steps, concluding that the building was a bank and the notice the current statement of the rates of the money exchange. There was nothing very peculiar about that, but standing on the steps close up to the notice. Uncle Lucy still thought the building a bank, and said he wanted to go in and change 300 yen. He confessed to me one night as he was locking the front door that he must test the door twelve times to know that it was locked; and in the middle of the night, sometimes, he would feel the need to go and test it once again: or—he felt—irrationally—his youngest child might die. Seeing a dachshund across the street, he said, ‘It would be nice to creep down on all fours and to bark like a dog—or else stand on one leg and crow like a cock.’ And when Nora now went in to him to say that chocolate was on the table, her daddy ‘did stand,’ she said, ‘on one leg and said he was a stork,’ and she laughed and thought he was joking. After this, one by one, we all began to peep into his room to see if he was all right. ‘Don’t pop in peeping at me every minute,’ he cried. ‘I might be some uncommon animal in a zoo—people peeping at me through the hole every minute!’

  We stopped peeping but began whispering to each other; for, indeed, Uncle Lucy was getting very strange. He did not come in to chocolate, but went up into the dark-room instead to develop some snaps. Of late, Uncle Lucy was always taking photographs and developing them in the dark-room upstairs. After chocolate, the children began playing together, at first somewhat gingerly, as if sounding one another; then more freely and boisterously. There was a boy with a withered arm, nevertheless very sturdy and strong and twice the size of Harry. Harry, in a wicked mood, came up to him suddenly, and—for no conceivable reason, but merely from an abounding sense of well-being—slapped him in the face. The boy’s impulse was to strike Harry back, but he must have remembered that he was a guest and restrained himself, with a mighty effort. For two minutes or so he brooded over the offence, as if considering whether he should be offended or no. He could not stomach the idea that a boy half his size should have dared to strike him in the face with impunity. At last, he came up to Harry and—mildly, because he was the guest, almost amicably, with a propitiatory, extenuating smile—slapped Harry in the face. Harry looked as if considering whether he should cry, but since the boy with the withered arm smiled, Harry decided to take no offence and smiled too—unconvincingly. Two little girls with a little boy came in—a curly-haired, black-eyed, clean-faced and thoroughly well-brought-up boy, who presently, quite by accident, got a black eye from the boy with the w
ithered arm, and went off crying softly. At once his two little sisters put their arms round his neck, kissing and consoling him: ‘Oh, it was a knock. Oh, it was one!’—A microcosm of the adult world.

  They bandaged the little boy’s head up, and they all went on playing again. In the end, hardly one of them escaped uninjured.

  ‘And now Nora will recite to us,’ said Aunt Teresa, ‘Little fly on the wall.’

  ‘No, “Wee Willie”,’ she said.

  ‘All right, “Wee Willie”, then.’ And placed on a chair, Nora said:

  Wee Willie had a rittle flute

  Which really was so sweet

  That when he went out for a walk

  He played it in the street.

  And when the folks heard Willie play

  They all began to dance,

  The rittle dogs sat down and howled,

  The horses did a prance.

  So Willie’s mother took him home,

  And tucked him up in bed.

  ‘I’ll have to take away your flute,

  It upsets folks,’ s’e said.

  All clapped; and, for an encore, she told us about Bunny who was white and such a size, who had long silky floppy ears and funny wee pink eyes.

  Long after chocolate, Uncle Lucy came down into the drawing-room, where already a number of guests—my friends: local intellectuals—were gathered, and sat facing us, looking on sarcastically, never saying a word. He was pale, but his nose was redder than ever. ‘What is consciousness?’ I was saying. ‘At the point where all the rays meet, there is a spark: that spark is . But the same rays meet in infinity again and again an infinite number of times (all straight lines being crooked in the infinite), and so all these other sparks are all these other I’s. But since we are, each one of us, the sum of the same rays, all I’s have their immortal being in the source of the One, eternally replenished by the fount of the Many: the finest distillation of this comprehension being the spirit we call God.’

  Uncle Lucy as he sat there, listening, looked so wise, so derisively contemptuous in his silence; had such a seer’s look in his eyes (as if indeed he were seeing through our intellectual foibles far into the future) that it silenced even the intellectuals. They felt as if Uncle Lucy had a secret message for ever hidden from their minds. They looked respectfully expectant. Even Dr. Murgatroyd stopped talking. Uncle Lucy’s true secret, however—they did not know—was that he had quietly gone off his chump, indeed was already as mad as a hatter. Yesterday he had taken Aunt Teresa out for a drive and kept calling at shops without number, purchasing things—mostly cumbersome, useless things—without end, so that Aunt Teresa, sitting there beside him in the vehicle, thought that her poor brother had definitely turned the corner, and that his old vein of prodigious generosity was returning to him. But the extraordinary thing about it all was that the things he bought were conspicuously useless and unwieldy things—electric stoves, two ladders, a canary cage—depositing his purchases, as they drove on, at the railway station in charge of porters, at the theatre cloakroom, and suchlike places, which even to Aunt Teresa’s unsuspecting soul appeared a trifle singular. Next day he came into the drawing-room, with that sulky Charlie Chaplin look we grew to know so well, and manifesting the wish to tune up the piano, took it all to pieces, to the minutest particles, so that afterwards he was unable to put it together again. He went out, and Aunt Teresa, frightened of meeting him alone, locked the drawing-room door. He returned, and finding the door locked, smashed the window.

  Now he pulled out his watch and, declaring that it was half-past twelve o’clock, said that he had some snaps to develop in the dark-room.

  ‘But, Uncle Lucy, it isn’t six! What is the matter with your watch?’

  ‘I’ve got to go by my watch—such as it is,’ he replied very gravely and earnestly, and went off to the dark-room.

  I went back to my office, and Uncle Emmanuel, who had lit a cigar, said that in spite of the rain he would come out with me. The pavement was a glittering sheet, like a wet waterproof, but the evening was misty and dark and the rain that wetted my face was completely invisible, and only as you came up to a lamp-post could you see how, in the radius of yellow light, the silver rain fell steadily from the sky. We took refuge in the barred doorway of a hosiery shop, whose windows were shuttered. A young woman was standing there, and my uncle took the opportunity of ogling at her through his pince-nez. And when I returned, after having vainly looked for a cab, Uncle Emmanuel was already speaking to her in his own tongue, while she only giggled and simpered. Presently we all moved along, Uncle Emmanuel holding his new friend by the arm. I parted with them at the back stairs of a shabby building, which they slowly ascended, but the rain having now become a torrent, I returned and stood under the porch, waiting for it to subside. Then, as I stood there, I heard strange menacing sounds from the back of the stairs up which my uncle had vanished. After a while, fearing that he might be in danger, I followed the sound of the menacing voice and gingerly knocked at a door on the second landing. There was no answer, but the thick drunken voice still boomed out menacing words, punctuated, as I now distinctly discerned, by Uncle Emmanuel’s, as it seemed to me, feeble exhortations which sounded rather like ‘Allies! Allies!’ With an inward thrill of trepidation, I pushed open the door and, entering, perceived a huge fierce drunken Cossack ‘carrying on’ in the face of my uncle’s clearly unwarranted presence, while the woman was doing her best to restrain him.

  ‘This is my husband,’ she turned to me. ‘Returned unexpectedly.’

  But here, again, I am in difficulties. My uncle was, as you may guess, the hero of an unseemly situation. I warn the reader to put down the book, for I refuse to hold myself responsible for the doings of my uncle. I am a serious young man, an intellectual. I blush all over, my very paper blushes as I think of him standing there—I can’t. You must not press me to go any further. For there, if you please, stood my uncle—No; the less said of it the better. A veil over my uncle’s private life. A veil! A veil!

  ‘Cut you to pieces! Mince you up!’ shouted the Cossack, his hand on his sword-hilt, while Uncle Emmanuel meekly repeated: ‘Allies! We’re Allies! Vive la Russie! Allies!’

  ‘Allies!’ shouted the Cossack, coming close up to him with savage glee. ‘Allies! I’ll show you some allies!’

  ‘He’ll kill him,’ whispered the lady. ‘He’ll kill him, sure. Better give him something—some money quick! He’ll kill him!’

  ‘Give him some money,’ I cried in French. ‘For God’s sake give him some money, quick!’

  Uncle Emmanuel fiddled with his pocket-book for a moment, and then producing a 500,000 rouble note (at that time worth about 80 centimes) gave it to the Cossack, who grabbed it with his huge sabre-scarred fist, his body swaying uncertainly as he did so. ‘Allies!’ he snorted. ‘H’m!’

  He calmed down. ‘Call yourself Allies!’ he said, in a grumbling tone, no longer dangerous, and turning to go. ‘Allies! H’m! That’s right. Allies—in name.’ He paused. ‘I’ll go and have a drink,’ he said. And he went out, slamming the door after him.

  My uncle looked at me, with confusion. ‘Que voulez-vous!’ he said. ‘C’est la vie.’

  But a veil over my uncle’s doings. I went out at last, leaving him there. A nice lesson for a purist and no mistake!

  I was sitting in my office, working on my book, A Record of the Stages in the Evolution of an Attitude, when the telephone rang shrilly at my side. I took up the receiver. It was Berthe.

  ‘Georges, come home at once.’

  She did not say why, but I sensed a tone of calamity in her voice. Before I could make myself ask she had hung up the receiver.

  The rain had stopped and the big orange moon hung in the sky. The funny old man in the moon, as I drove home, looked sly in the extreme, and the road was all orange and unreal, and our whole life that moment seemed a series of ludicrous antics which we took so seriously to heart because—because we could not see, because we did not know. And then I tho
ught that if when I got home I found Berthe standing on her head or Uncle Lucy standing on one leg and crowing, ‘Cock-cock-cock-cock-orikoo!’ I would not turn a hair, finding it in strict accordance with this orange light, this orange night, this orange moon.

  When I arrived, I saw Harry, very tiny, very serious, below, proudly watering the flowers in the kitchen-yard out of a crooked tin; and two street urchins hanging on to the fence and gazing down at him with envy. The sight of him reassured me, but the absence of his little sister Nora made me feel uneasy.