The Polyglots

by William Gerhardie

  Then she came. She did not speak; she only looked anxiously at the door. I went immediately and locked it, once, and then again, thus feeling that we were doubly secure. She put her finger to her lips: ‘S—sh!—If—if anyone should knock you’ll have to go into that cupboard, darling, because I’ll have to open the door.’

  ‘All right, I’ll go into the cupboard, my sweet—I’ll go into the cupboard,’ I said in tender acquiescence. For more than ever before she was in my soul.

  We live in an Anglo-Saxon world. Now, had I been writing these pages in the language of beautiful France, I would have written with a Maupassantian, an incredible, candour. But we live, as I said, in an Anglo-Saxon world—a world of assumed restraint. However that may be, I felt the sharp thrill of the first touch. A vaster power than ourselves threw us together: a combustion of elements outside our ken. We were awed, breathless. Standing behind her, her lovely weight against me, I kissed her in the warm hollow of the shoulder, and she threw back her head. Whimsically:

  ‘I’m your wife?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Her eyes gleamed darkly as I leaned over her, like pools in the evening; and I could even see myself in them, my khaki collar and my tie pulled crooked in the eagerness of our embrace: and the pools reminded me of Oxford, though what I really pictured were not pools at all, but the dark canal that runs outside the wall of Worcester, where I had walked in days gone by. Why should the image of these things thrive to life even as we kiss? Why should our imagination roam so heedlessly? Shall we ever capture anything wholly and completely, and hold it, hold it fast?

  I knelt and kissed her knees. ‘And these lovely little Chinamen!’ I felt as I might feel if I had been privileged to attend a private view of the Royal Academy. I felt elated. I forgave Gustave. I forgave the whole world. ‘It must be all handwork, I imagine.’

  ‘But of course.’

  ‘Why of course?’

  ‘You are so stupid, darling.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘The General got them in Tokyo.’

  ‘God bless the General!’ I cried, embracing her. I felt full of an uncontrollable gratitude. I felt grateful to the world at large. Gustave had been relegated to his appointed place. All was well in this best of all possible worlds! There was a God in heaven after all.

  ‘They have lasted a long time,’ I remarked.

  ‘They are durable.’

  ‘God bless him—the General,’ said I, with redundant heartiness.

  ‘Maman’s are without Chinamen; but they have flowers also embroidered.’

  ‘I know them,’ I said; and, stupidly enough, I blushed—as though I had given myself away. So stupid, since no one in his right mind could suspect that my relations with my aunt could be anything else but cordial.

  ‘Who would have thought—that other pair—maman’s—had seen different days?’

  I bent my head in mute homage. The still angel flew by. ‘Ah, well!—’

  But when she came to me with her real ruby lips and in the unstained whiteness of her skin, I thought—I thought of strawberries and cream. And there rose in my breast an overwhelming feeling of gratitude, gratitude for her old trustfulness. She came to me as my long-awaited bride, without sham protests, taking as it were the implications of our love for granted. What struck me especially was that she yielded herself to me gaily, laughingly, as if indeed the nature of the pleasure was gaiety. She looked felicitous—she wore a holiday air. She smiled all the time. I expect she was having the time of her life: and not the least so because she thought she was the cause of my having it, too. And I loved her.

  Those magical mysteries: the convexities and concavities of the eternally alluring feminine form! A whirl, a dream, a trance. Her warm soft tresses fell round her neck on the white pillow; they were dark brown gold in the moonlight. I am a serious young man, an intellectual, but I confess I felt the savour of existence. She was beautiful, passionate. And I am not a Diabologh for nothing. My uncle married thrice, and could not count his children on the fingers of both hands. My father, Aunt Teresa tells me, had had innumerable love affairs. You know the record of Uncle Emmanuel. Uncle Nicholas was born in circumstances of romance. I admit I haven’t all their blood. However that may be, I felt proud and glad beyond measure. To hold in one’s arms the quivering young body, the warm soft ivory of a woman whom one knows beyond any shadow of a doubt to be a beauty is a pleasure, I can tell you, not to be despised even by an intellectual.

  ‘Isn’t it lovely?’ she purled.

  Well, it was. Very much so.

  And now already there was something tragic in this our attainment of happiness, as though we had reached the end of a long and steep lane, behind which loomed a precipice. Now there was nowhere farther to go, and we halted, and wept. ‘Darling!’ I kissed her, and my kisses were not what they should have been—not at all what they should have been. And she felt it.

  Then I laughed.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘You are my bird in hand—’

  ‘I wonder if maman’s asleep?’

  ‘I hope so.’

  ‘I wonder what Gustave is doing?’ she said.

  ‘I hope he’s asleep too.’

  ‘I’m his bird in the bush.’

  How queer! We had at long last succeeded in escaping from the others, in being alone, we two by ourselves; and apparently we could find nothing better to do than to talk of the others. And we were still sad, sad in our meeting, as though we had not met at all. She had only me to talk to. I had only her to talk to. And we did not talk. Happiness is always somewhere else. It is one of the failings of our common nature that our pleasures are chiefly prospective or retrospective.

  ‘Darling, go into the dining-room and bring me the playing-cards out of the drawer in the little table by the window.’

  I went, but could not find them. I can never find anything. She slipped on her pink dressing-gown, and returning, brought the cards, and, spreading them on the quilt, began to play patience with herself, and afterwards telling her own and my fortunes, cooing the while like a pigeon. There was a fair lady who would come into my life; a long voyage; an early death—and the usual prophecies of this kind. I took no heed. Now, it would seem, was the time, the love climax, for which we had always waited, which palpably is the real note on which a novel should be ended: instead Sylvia looked preoccupied with her pack of cards which she had laid out over the quilt, and speculated on what happiness there lay in store for us in years to come.

  I watched her comb her hair and wash her face and brush her teeth; then get into bed—so trustfully. She sat there, a dark-curled, large-eyed, long-limbed little girl. Quickly she raised herself on her knees, and bringing her fingers together and closing her eyes—like an angel child—hurriedly mumbled her prayers; then fell back on to the pillows and pulled the sheet to her chin. Because tomorrow morning we should have to part, we felt that night as though tomorrow morning one of us was going to be hanged. Sylvia lay there, listless, the sheet drawn to her chin, looking at me—so serious, so demure—and as I watched her and heard the clock ticking away the æons, visualized the liner which would relentlessly take me away from her, farther and farther away—until one evening, standing at the rail, I would see the lights of England in the distance as the rolling liner hooted shrilly in the gloom; and at these farthest points apart upon earth’s girth we shall indeed have parted to all eternity!

  ‘Darling,’ she said, ‘you have come to me.’

  I was grateful. Somehow I could never make myself believe that another human being loves me. She looked at me whimsically:

  ‘I’m your wife?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She was warm; she lay there all in a bundle, purring, ‘Mrr-mrr-mrr …’

  ‘I told you you could cuddle me, but you are pinching me.’

  ‘It’s all right—it’s all right—it’s all right,’ I reassured her.

  ‘Fairy!’ she said.

  ‘My darling, my angel, w
hy did you torture me then? Why?’ The wedding-dinner now appeared a happy, happy thing! ‘Why did you torture me?’

  But she purrs, having bundled tightly around me, ‘Mrr-mrr-mrr …’

  And we never gave a thought to Gustave!

  I lay there, surrounded by a mysterious, inexplicable, utterly puzzling universe, and reflected on what it could all mean. What the deuce could it all mean? The moon had gone; and the street was discernible only by its string of lights. I thought of life and love and what they have to offer, and how shamelessly they emulate the methods of commercial advertising. The alluring posters and signboards. The promise of what-not revelations! And what does love reveal! That concavities are concave, and convexities convex. Son of man! Is that all there is for you? Will it ever be so? There is little to choose between hunger and satiety. And as I lay there, the trees now only visible in silhouette behind the glass bowed to me their respects, and the leaves, moving like fingers—‘Tral-la-la!’—beckoned playfully as if to say: ‘There you are on the summits!’ Silly things.

  ‘Love. Either it is a remnant of something degenerating, something which once has been immense, or it is a particle of what will in the future develop into something immense; but in the present it is unsatisfying, it gives much less than one expects——’ Chekhov once noted down in his notebook. And I agree. I am a serious young man, an intellectual. I am so constituted that at these moments when it would seem most proper to expand, to drink life purple, to invoke brass trumpets, I suddenly lose heart. My thoughts went back to my Record of the Stages in the Evolution of an Attitude, which was the central thing round which the world revolved. All this other was—well, inevitable rather than overwhelming—and just a little silly. We two had been separated, had withheld from each other that which, when it had grown into a grievance, seemed nothing less than Paradise lost. And now that we had remedied our grievous deprivation, we found that when we had given all we had to offer, perhaps it was not so very much. The night was long, and sleep was a good thing. Perhaps the great point about these things is that they restore your sense of balance; that unless you have them you will store too high a value of them. And you will think you haven’t lived.

  She was with me—altogether mine; I was assuaged; and I could think of other things. I lay still, and my soul went out to the world. That surging passion in me of a while ago was torn out by the roots, and the memory of it was now no more than of an eaten sweet. Released at last, my soul went forward with another, finer, passion of the mind, and I could see things, near and distant, with a minute acumen teeming in a pool of quivering sunlight. I suddenly perceived the difference between the subjective and objective aspects at the succeeding stages in the evolution of an attitude. And thinking of this difference between two aspects, I just as suddenly fell asleep.

  ‘Oh, my goodness,’ she said, waking me.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You are—you are——’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Oh! But you are leaving, Alexander, tomorrow, and—oh!’

  ‘The best of friends must part.’ I rubbed my eyes.

  ‘Perhaps we shall never see each other again.’

  ‘As your father says, “Que voulez-vous? C’est la vie!” It can’t be helped. But I am awfully sleepy, you know. And tomorrow morning I must be off.’

  ‘Oh! You know you are—you are——’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Well, never mind,’ she said, and turned her back to me. ‘Well, if one can’t sleep then one must do the next best thing—think.’

  I was silent, thinking.

  ‘What are you thinking of?’ she asked, without turning round.

  ‘Well, I was reading this evening—just before I came here—a book that, to my way of thinking, defines very clearly the difference between the subjective and objective attitudes in life and letters.’

  But when I spoke to Sylvia of the confusion of the terms ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’, she looked as though she thought that it was a confusion which I succeeded in confusing further still in my painstaking efforts to elucidate the difference; and I think she felt sorry for me. The trouble was that Sylvia, with all her charm, was not an intellectual; but though I felt that my endeavour to raise the level of our conversation was doomed to failure in advance, I nevertheless went on: ‘What is the meaning of “better”, unless it be “better fitted to survive”? Obviously “better”, on this interpretation of its meaning, is in no sense a “subjective” conception, but is as “objective” as any conception can be. But yet all those who object to a subjective view of “goodness”, and insist upon its “objectivity”, would object just as strongly to this interpretation of its meaning as to any “subjective” interpretation. Obviously, therefore,’ I continued, looking at Sylvia, who only blinked repeatedly the while, ‘Obviously, what they are really anxious to contend for is not merely that goodness is “objective”, since they are here objecting to a theory which is “objective”; but something else. But something else,’ I said, looking at Sylvia.

  ‘Darling, talk of something else,’ she said. ‘This is difficult for me to understand.’

  I am an intellectual, and I do not like to be interrupted in the midst of an elusive analysis, the less so when this analysis is none too clear even for an intellectual.

  ‘I’m an intellectual,’ I said. ‘A purist. I can’t be for ever kissing and cuddling.’

  ‘You talk to me like a teacher,’ she complained.

  ‘All the more reason why you should listen attentively. And so where have we left off? Ah, yes: but something else. And it is this same fact—the fact that, on any “subjective” interpretation, the very same kind of thing which, under some circumstances, is better than another, would, under others, be worse—which constitutes, so far as I can see’—(I looked at her again, and she gave me a bright, anxious gaze, as though frightened that I might lose the thread)—‘so far as I can see, the fundamental objection to all “subjective” interpretations. Is that quite clear?’

  Sylvia only blinked. She looked at me sadly, as if wondering who were these subjective and objective animals that sapped my nervous force, and she had a suspicion, I daresay, that these activities of mine were in excess of life.

  Then I craved for sleep. Sneaking thoughts kept creeping in, that it would be nice to have a bed to yourself and to go to sleep in it royally, as last night and all the nights before to-night. I wanted to sleep diagonally, crumpled up as I always sleep, and her presence across my path annoyed me a little. Then suddenly I began to laugh.

  ‘What are you laughing at?’ Sylvia looked up, surprised.

  ‘Because this reminds me of my grandfather when, having just joined up in the war, I visited him at Colchester, just before his death. I wanted him to notice me in my uniform, but he would talk of nothing else but his dead father and how he had fought at Waterloo—and never took any notice of my uniform.’—At which I laughed again.

  ‘Why are you laughing?’

  ‘Well, you see, there were only two beds in the house: my grandfather’s and my aunt’s. As it was contrary to custom that I should share a bed with my maiden aunt, I had perforce to share it with my maternal grandfather.’

  ‘But why are you telling me all that, darling?’

  ‘Well, because, you see, he rolled himself round twice in all the available blankets—just like you now, in fact—monopolizing the whole of the bed, so that I had to lie on the iron side-bar—just like now, in fact—and “Keep warm, George,” he said; “ah! there is nothing like keeping warm!” He died a week later. He was ninety-two, good old chap!’

  Sylvia tickled me.

  ‘Go to sleep,’ I said tenderly.

  ‘Kiss me good night.’

  I kissed her tenderly on the left eye. Beautiful, beautiful eye!

  ‘You are leaving tomorrow,’ she said woefully.

  I kissed her again, close on the mouth, with considerable passion, and then said:

  ‘Go to sleep.’

&nbs
p; And she purred as she curled up close to my side:

  ‘Mrr-mrr-mrr …’

  The light was out. My thoughts went out to some imaginary girl, stranger and less obvious than Sylvia—some other girl in some other stranger and remoted place, some other place where I could lose this thing, this cursed thing, my soul. The clock on the table at my side ticked away the æons. It was dark, and I could hear the measured rhythm of Sylvia’s breathing. A black mosquito, like a black shark, swam up in the air and attacked me with a pertinacity astonishing in one so frail. But he had forgotten to silence his engine, and his buzzing announced his approach at my ear with the blare of a brass trumpet; which proved his undoing. In a flash I dispatched him back to his forefathers! Then, unnoticed, I lapsed into sleep. I dreamt that my old teacher of mathematics, whom I had hated at school, was trying to sell me a number of Corona typewriters, and that though I already had one I was constrained into buying another—and suffered deeply. If we can suffer thus in sleep—meaninglessly and unnecessarily—perhaps in life we also suffer meaninglessly and unnecessarily. And as I was suffering thus in my sleep, bemoaning the expense of a superfluous Corona, suddenly I must have jumped clean out of bed.

  ‘Oh, darling, I’m sorry I frightened you,’ I heard Sylvia’s voice as if coming from another world.

  ‘What! Where! What!’ Then, still in a trance, I got back into bed and at once fell into a sound dreamless sleep.

  To wake in the morning and to see her profile; a head framed in dark locks, all locks to the shoulder, a delightful nose, ever so slightly retroussé, her eyes closed, clearly defined, thin, as if pencilled black brows; her dark head thrown into relief by the white pillow on which it rests sideways—these are the sweets of life. To hold a fragrant lovely warm body in your arms, to inhale the delicious scent of Cœur de Jeanette, to murmur sweet, tender, whispered things, and to know all the time that she is yours, your Sylvia-Ninon—oh, it was good to be born, good to be born, good to be born! Those pursed red lips, her face against your face, and when she winks you feel the impish movement of her lashes on your cheek, and without seeing it you feel her smile—oh, what a fund of secret gladnesses, of intimate delights! You roll over and kiss her closed eyes, and she, half reluctantly—for she is awfully sleepy, awfully hard to wake—smiles at you, purring the while like a kitten: ‘Mrr-mrr-mrr …’ This is meet, this is meet, I say, even for an intellectual. And her nose! That exquisitely shaped little nosy! The lovely outline of her nose as her head rests sideways on the pillow. How is it that I did not notice it before? If you cannot catch my exultation, if you needs must present a cold front of indifference, it is, I know, because not having seen it you do not know. I know: because I’ve seen it. (It is absolutely necessary that we should understand each other on this point before we can go any farther.) It was like a fairy-tale, and Sylvia, with her locks and childish face, was like a fairy child. And I felt a pang of pity at the thought that I shouldn’t have perceived its charm till that last morning when I was leaving her for ever: that the first time must needs also be the last.