The Polyglots

by William Gerhardie

  But indeed Sylvia is hard to wake. Every time I touched her arm she drew it away with a drowsy frown. ‘Darling,’ I whispered, ‘it’s the last morning: I am leaving today—soon.’ She only murmured into her pillow, ‘I want to sleep.’

  ‘But you will be able to sleep for the rest of your natural life: I am leaving in a few hours!’ I wailed in tones of anguish. She only purred in answer: ‘Mrr-mrr-mrr …’ Sleeping apparently was more important. Sometimes I despair of life.

  ‘I dreamt,’ I said, ‘I dreamt of a beautiful girl in ballet dress, who kissed me, and my heart was full of love. And now she’s gone.’

  ‘Oh!’ she said, quickly awakening. ‘Oh!’

  ‘But, darling, she was fair. You’re dark—and she was fair. I can love you both, can’t I?’

  ‘All the same,’ she replied, not as perturbed as she might be. But she turned her back to me.

  ‘Wake up! It was only a dream.’

  ‘All the same, you shouldn’t have dreamt it.’

  ‘I couldn’t help it!’

  ‘I’m glad I frightened you now.’

  ‘Frightened me?’

  ‘Don’t you remember?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I heard an awful noise outside—maman calling out “Berthe!” Then Berthe’s pantoufles. I leaned over to the little table at your side to strike a match, and you were so frightened you jumped straight out of bed.’

  ‘I didn’t!’

  ‘You did!’

  ‘Did I say anything?’

  ‘You said “Hell!” ’

  ‘I didn’t!’

  ‘You did! You said it five times—like this! “Hell! Hell! Hell! Hell! Hell!” ’

  ‘How queer! I don’t remember a thing. Only being a little frightened in my sleep, perhaps.’

  And when afterwards I saw her take her little toothbrush, the sight of it, dilapidated and red-stained, and of her pathetic squeezed-out toothpaste tube, made me feel sad. Why? Since surely she would be able to afford to buy herself another. Nevertheless, with a heartfelt pang, I said:

  ‘Oh, that little brush …’

  ‘Why, darling?’

  ‘And your teeth and all. Is he to take care of you?’

  ‘All this should have been for you.’

  ‘It should, it should.—But should it?’

  I looked at the clock, at her sad look. The boat sails, your feet sail, your chest with your heart remains—you topple over. Unhappiness!

  ‘This little brush … So pathetic … I see you use red toothpaste.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Carbolic?’

  ‘Yes. Why?’ Sylvia is always suspicious of me.

  ‘Just so. I use white—Pepsodent.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. She always says ‘Yes’—softly, whisperingly.

  ‘Sylvia, darling!’

  A kiss.

  ‘Sylvia-Ninon!’

  A kiss again.

  ‘You little … prince.’

  Twenty-four kisses, mostly in one.

  ‘Ha-ha! I’ve been trying to screw your top on to my toothpaste!’ she laughed.

  ‘Dearest,’ I whispered, ‘I love you as ever, and more than ever—fervently, passionately. I love your frankness, your kindness of heart, your trustfulness. I love these eyes, these curls, your movements. I love you, oh! how I love you—with my soul—with my soul …’

  ‘Darling,’ she said, ‘go and turn the tap on for me in the bathroom.’

  45

  IT WAS THE 29TH OF APRIL, BUT ALREADY SUNNY AND warm. Spring was beginning in real earnest. I broke my front collar-stud, and therefore was later than usual for breakfast. To my surprise, I found Aunt Teresa already dressed and heading the breakfast-table. Usually she took breakfast in bed. And I appreciated the compliment. It was because I could not bear to see Sylvia in the podgy freckled hands of Gustave that I was leaving this Sunday, though the boat on which I had booked my passage did not leave Shanghai till ten days hence, and my plan was to spend a week travelling through China.

  ‘Today it’s warm, hot,’ said Aunt Teresa, ‘you can sleep with the windows open.’

  ‘Did you, ma tante?’

  ‘I didn’t sleep at all.’

  ‘I heard an awful noise in the night, maman, and your crying “Berthe! Berthe!” ’ said Sylvia.

  ‘Well you might!’ she groaned.

  No! Emphatically she would not stand this any longer—for the love of anyone. (And at her words it was as if a hand of ice was laid on my heart. Could it be that Aunt Teresa knew about us?) She would put up with it no longer, unless we wished to see her go clean out of her mind! Suddenly in the middle of the night she woke. The door she had shut was half-open. It seemed as if somebody in a white gown had entered the room, holding a candle. She was too frightened to cry out. The light had vanished. But somebody stood at her bedside breathing on her. She stretched her hand for the matches, and as she did so a box was handed to her in the dark. Who did it? She lit the candle on the table at her side: and there was no one there. A picture postcard stood on edge. Who made it stand? Who kept it in that position?

  It was clear enough. She was haunted by him. He lay beneath the sill, with the weight of a massive tombstone upon him. Yet apparently it was not enough. She had burnt her camisole, her knickers, her silk stockings, garters, and the boudoir cap, but it wasn’t any use. He brought them back to her in her dreams. She developed an aversion to all knickers, camisoles and even combinations, whether new or old; she had a secret fear lest in some mysterious way they were all contaminated. She knew not what to do. Give up wearing them? Was it either just or fair? Always she would dream the same awful dream: Uncle Lucy returning to her again and again, showing his teeth (as he had done when listening, without comment, to the local intellectuals), with that last strange grin on his face, intimating by what he carried in his hands that no matter how many camisoles and knickers she might burn, whatever new and different ones she might purchase, they were still the same—the original ones. It was as if he brought them back to her each time out of the flames. Each morning, on waking, they were there across the back of the chair. She didn’t like to touch them. True, she marked every fresh pair she bought in variegated thread. Yet he may have replaced them in the night with the identical marking. She never knew what he might not be up to. Besides, she really could not go on for ever purchasing new underlinen. The moral was: she must leave the haunted house.

  It is well known that far-reaching, lasting decisions are nearly always taken in a whim or mood that will not last.

  ‘Emmanuel!’ she said. ‘We are going back.’

  ‘Going back where, my dear?’

  ‘To Belgium.’

  ‘But, ma tante——’ I chided in.

  ‘No, George, no!’ She was determined to go, whatever the difficulties. She could not stop here another week. Uncle Lucy had breathed on her; she was certain of it.

  I did not oppose.

  ‘It won’t take long to pack. We must all help. I shall write out the labels.’

  I grew alarmed, however, when she turned to me and said: ‘When is the next boat?’

  ‘Which boat, ma tante?’

  ‘The boat sailing for Europe—leaving Shanghai.’

  ‘Oh—well—God only knows. My boat—the Rhinoceros—sails Wednesday week.’ She considered.

  ‘Why not,’ she asked, ‘sail on the Rhinoceros?’

  ‘So soon?’ said Uncle Emmanuel.

  ‘But he breathed on me! I can’t stay here! mon Dieu!’

  ‘Perhaps change the room?’

  ‘He will come to the other room—I am sure of it.’

  ‘But the fare, my dear?’

  She considered.

  ‘Gustave will have to get us a loan at the bank.’

  The door opened and Gustave, with a red rose in his buttonhole and two bouquets in his hand—one for his mother-in-law and one for his bride—entered. And I surveyed him with a feeling of double curiosity.

  ‘Gustave,’ s
he said, accepting the flowers without comment, ‘we are leaving.’

  ‘Leaving where, maman?’

  ‘For Europe—for Belgium.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Soon. At once.’

  He looked first at her, then at his bride.

  ‘Poor child, she will feel the parting.’

  Aunt Teresa looked at him vaguely. ‘Sylvia, oh, she is coming with us, of course.’

  ‘But—my wife——’ he stammered. ‘She must stay with me.’

  ‘Gustave,’ she said very quietly, ‘stop it. I can stand a good deal. But there is one thing I simply cannot stand at all—anyone disagreeing with me. Stop it. Stop it! For God’s sake.’

  ‘But—she—she’s my wife.’

  My aunt gave him one furtive look.

  ‘You want to kill me?’ she asked.

  Gustave said never another word.

  ‘Today is Sunday. We leave on Wednesday,’ ordered my aunt.

  ‘But all the packing,’ Berthe wailed. ‘And all the thousand and one little things we leave unsettled.’

  ‘Gustave can wind up our affairs.’

  Gustave sat silent, as if a little dejected.

  ‘Gustave!’ said my aunt. ‘You must try and obtain a transfer to Brussels as soon as you can—and, to start with, a long annual leave.’

  Gustave only smiled, and showed a black tooth at either corner of his mouth, and there was perhaps an indication in his faintly sardonic nod that Gustave regarded such a contingency a remote one.

  ‘Courage!’ said Uncle Emmanuel.

  ‘Alors, en avant!’ commanded my aunt. ‘I can’t endure this exile any longer. I must have a complete change. And at Dixmude I shall at least have Constance to look after me.’

  ‘Hasn’t Berthe then looked after you?’ I asked, looking across at Berthe with a twinkle.

  ‘Berthe,’ said my aunt, ‘is not a trained nurse.’

  ‘What about the flat?’

  ‘Gustave will look after it.’

  Then the packing began. It began in real fury. For we had only three days. We worked as if stripped to the waist. All the boxes and hold-alls and cases and trunks had been hauled down from the attic, and were being filled, filled to overflowing, to the point of bursting, tightly strapped up—and still the travail went on night and day: while Aunt Teresa, ensconced in her soft bed, was writing out the labels. Captain Negodyaev, hearing of our sudden flight, had a violent relapse of persecution mania and begged us piteously, for the love of all saints, to take him with us to Europe.

  ‘Why, man, you’re all shot to pieces,’ Beastly observed, surveying the Russian’s tremulous frame with compassion. ‘I daresay you had better come along.’

  ‘And my wife and Natàsha?’

  ‘Yes—why not?’

  Captain Negodyaev was wringing Beastly’s hand with gratitude. But the question of their going with us in the last resort depended—though why it should so depend no one really knew—on Aunt Teresa. And finally my aunt said: ‘Yes.’ Gustave was to see his bank manager and director the same day (though it was Sunday and the bank was closed) to arrange for a substantial loan; and Gustave came back to say that he could do this only on the strict condition that on his return to Brussels Père Vanderflint took instant steps to sell his pension.

  ‘Yes, sell the pension,’ Sylvia agreed.

  ‘Well—yes.’ said Aunt Teresa.

  ‘Yes, my angel,’ Uncle Emmanuel rejoined, not without some concern. ‘What shall we live on, however?’

  She did not answer at once. ‘There are ways and means,’ she replied.

  This too, it seemed, could be got round. Gustave had relations who had an interest in a number of cinematographs in Dixmude, and an uncle on the city council, and possibly—he could not say for certain—but possibly some sort of post as films censor or something could be promised his father-in-law on arrival in Dixmude, carrying with it a modest stipend, which would, however, compensate him for the loss of the pension.

  ‘Yes, that will do very well,’ Sylvia said gaily.

  Between Sunday and Wednesday we lived in a whirl and a trance. Removing. Here they had settled, by all accounts for a long stay, and were gradually nearing the inevitable doom—flagging, sagging, fizzling out. And now—suddenly—removing, living again, beginning anew, planning, struggling, bracing. ‘Oh, my God!’ Berthe, wedged in between trunks, wailed aloud. And, with this, spring was beginning. Spring was beginning. Over half the globe it was beginning, a verdant hope renewed. I hardly saw Sylvia. The moral issues were happily out of our hands. If there is a seat of justice, a day of judgment, Aunt Teresa will, in her own good time, answer for this curious mismanagement of the convenances. Meanwhile I decline to discuss this delicate subject any further. I wash my hands of the whole business. Gustave was not an eagle. And if I were Sylvia I should not have gone back to him. But then, nor would I have married him in the first place. She married him, and she went back to him—till Wednesday morning. It was her affair. I have no comment to make. Indeed, I have nothing further to say.

  On Tuesday afternoon Aunt Molly paid her last visit to Uncle Lucy’s grave; and on Wednesday morning at quarter to ten we were ready to drive to the station.

  ‘There are only two more questions,’ said Aunt Teresa, as she was putting on her hat. ‘One is Vladislav.’

  ‘That’s all right,’ said Uncle Emmanuel. ‘I’ve spoken to the General about Vladislav. And I have recommended him for the Cross of Saint Stanislav.’

  ‘And the other is Stepàn.’

  ‘I went to Stepàn,’ I said. ‘He is still in his bunk.’

  ‘Gustave,’ she said, ‘you might keep an eye on Stepàn.’

  ‘Oui, maman,’ said Gustave, and touched his Adam’s apple.

  ‘And now we can be off.’

  ‘Come on, Harry. Come on, Nora,’ Aunt Molly called.

  ‘Oh, where’s my umbelera?’ wailed Natàsha.

  ‘There it is.’

  ‘Come on.’

  On the stairs as we went down we were stopped by the daughter of the actual-state’s-councillor.

  ‘No time’—I held out a warning hand. ‘We’re leaving.’

  ‘I won’t be long. The main feature of our proposition for the reform——’

  ‘Quite so, but, you see, we are pressed for time; we have to catch a train.’

  ‘Yes, yes, yes. I won’t be long. We want, if the Allied Governments will assist us with our alphabet——’

  ‘Quite, but we are afraid to miss our train.’

  ‘Yes, yes, yes. I won’t be many minutes. Primarily, we want to introduce phonetic——’

  ‘But, really, we shall miss the train——’

  ‘Madame, nous sommes pressés. We have no time; our train is leaving,’ intervened my uncle.

  ‘I will be brief and outline the scheme in a few concise——’

  ‘Good-bye!’

  We swept past her.

  46

  GENERAL ‘PSHE-PSHE’ WAS AT THE STATION IN HIS grey coat with a scarlet lining, and I instructed our guards—two Hungarian prisoners-of-war awaiting repatriation and dressed up as Tommies and led by an old squinting British corporal—Corporal Cripple—now proceeding to his Tientsin station for discharge—to accord the General the requisite military honours. But they were a sleepy lot of fellows, and presented arms to an excise clerk instead, much to his delight. We made what military display we could, but the War Office had long since withdrawn our men, and our parade was not redeeming. Colonel Ishibaiashi had sent a guard of honour. The little Nippons in their red-banded caps looked smart enough, but the officer, every time that he shrieked the word of command, sounded just as though he were being skinned alive, so that the Russian peasants who gazed on from behind the fence laughed aloud in derision.

  The General had ordered the meagre Russian military band to come and play us off, and we could see them coming: the movement of the drummer’s arms, the puffing of the soldiers’ cheeks, but not a sound of it c
ould be heard before they were actually abreast of us. There are perhaps few things spectacularly more pitiable than the disintegration of a once resplendent army. Count Valentine also came and conversed fluently in florid French with Berthe, tapping the while his new leggings, procured from the British ordnance stores, with a light bamboo cane (likewise of English make). The Metropolitan also came. Dr. Abelberg came. Philip Brown, who was going to Shanghai by train to join his ship which had already sailed from Vladivostok, wanted to be photographed in the act of saying farewell to ‘his girl’. He was being seen off by his cousin, who was only a sergeant in the American Expeditionary Force, but told his Russian sweetheart that it was more than being an officer. It was a lovely day in spring. We were going by a special train given us by General ‘Pshe-Pshe’, who presented Aunt Teresa with a whistle on a white silk lanyard which she was to blow as soon as she wished to set the train in motion. It was the most luxurious train at his disposal, and was manned by Czech personnel. The engines, ready to start, breathed: puff-puff-puff. The Czech drivers looked at us from above their perches with a dare-devil air: ‘We’ll drive you as you’ve never been driven before!’ That was their look.