The Polyglots

by William Gerhardie

  The train raced towards Changchu. Another train hove in sight, and the two trains raced side by side: now one was ahead, now the other; till their ways took them asunder and the other train raced away out of sight.

  At ten o’clock in the morning the train, exhausted, pulled up at Changchu. I looked out. Silence. Dusty foliage. Chinks squatting on the ground and staring at the train. Lemonade and oranges on sale on the platform. Sunshine. What a country! Peace. Relaxation. It goes on in that benevolent, watching, smiling sunshine. We got out and repaired to the hotel for lunch.

  Before lunch Aunt Teresa drank a cocktail with a cherry on a matchstick. It was a lovely day in spring. We sat on the open veranda and talked.

  ‘Now do we live after death?’ asked my aunt.

  ‘The answer,’ said I, ‘is in the affirmative.’

  ‘How can we know?’ Captain Negodyaev interjected. ‘We have so little to go upon.’

  ‘A plain reason for not going upon it. Seeing that, when all is said, life is a miracle, it would be a miracle indeed if the miraculous never occurred.’

  ‘But you seem certain.’

  ‘There are umpteen ways of being alive, but there is only one way of being dead. It follows than the chances of life after death are umpteen to one.’

  ‘When you come to think,’ chimed in Captain Negodyaev, ‘what can we know! If I trust my inspired moments I say, yes, death is not the end. If I trust my stock moods, I say, probably it is.’

  ‘And you, George?’ asked my aunt. ‘How do you really feel about it?’

  I sighed.

  ‘As George Hamlet Alexander Diabologh, author, I shall bow my adieux and never emerge after death; but as rightful shareholder in Life I am immutable, and will go on till the Universe perish with me. Perhaps as one on the board of directors of Cosmos, Unlimited. Perhaps—since I’m a holder of preference shares—as some sort of joint chairman with God. But perish I shall not: since, like any another, I am a holder of shares in the cosmic concern.’

  Aunt Teresa sighed with relief. ‘Ah, if it were so!’

  ‘It is so. You may take my word for it, ma tante.’

  ‘No death?’

  ‘Never.’

  Captain Negodyaev shook his head.

  My aunt looked at him. ‘Why should we live so little,’ she asked, ‘and be dead such a time? Why?’

  ‘No reason at all,’ said my uncle.

  ‘So perhaps Anatole is alive.’

  ‘You bet he is! More alive than before.’

  ‘But does he remember? Does he remember me?’

  ‘He doesn’t remember a damned thing.’

  ‘Oh!’

  ‘We are but vessels of past memories,’ said Captain Negodyaev. ‘When I think of the living things around me which are to me as something that has never been, I am conscious of the nature of obliteration, of the seeds of death I already carry in me. A little more—and death will be complete.’

  ‘So you think,’ I said. ‘Unthinkingly. It is not the memory that lives on in you, it’s that little voice, that little lamp which is immortal. You may lose your memory forthwith and be none the worse for it; you would still go on feeling your I to be you and none else, as you do through every dream and nightmare: because this I is lit at the immortal altar of all life, and so remains immortal, may it immerse in whatever worlds, it is you, a world in itself and for ever.’

  ‘Well, well. It’s time we went in to lunch.’

  A British merchant from Harbin who travelled with us gave us a champagne lunch. ‘You may think it a little extravagant of me,’ said he. ‘But on such occasions one lets oneself go a bit, don’t you know. And I have come to believe that generosity repays itself.’

  ‘Oh, I want the Daily Mail. Can we see the Daily Mail here?’ Sylvia asked.

  ‘Well, unfortunately you can.’

  Then we drove back to the station.

  How, after a champagne lunch on a sweet spring day, standing on the platform—the engine: puff-puff-puff—life is wonderful and miraculous with sweet expectancy.

  At Mukden the last coach of our special train was unhooked, and we took on the ordinary train to Peking. In the early morning hours Sylvia and I rickshawed in the noisy languid din through the pagan gorgeousness of the Manchu capital, and having lost our way we were hard put to it to tell the rickshaw coolies to drive us back to the station. We imitated the sound of a railway engine with our lips, and the look of steam issuing forth from the funnel with our hands. The coolies grinned a ready comprehension, but after driving about for twenty minutes or so, stopped and scratched their heads dubiously, when we hastened to resume overtures, apparently all to no purpose. Till happily two Europeans hove in sight. We caught the train by a split second. Aunt Teresa was in hysterics. Early next morning we saw the Great Wall of China. And at midday the train steamed into Peking.

  We saw what there was to see; climbed up the pagodas; visited the Summer Palace; a couple of Buddhist temples. Aunt Teresa lifted her feet high up to prevent horrible large ants from climbing up her legs.

  ‘And what is that?’ Berthe asked.

  ‘That is Buddha.’ I looked into her eyes with glee.

  ‘H’m,’ said she. ‘H’m.—Well, well!’

  We visited the cemeteries of rank, and Uncle Emmanuel even signed his name in the register as well as on the wall and on the painted wooden pillars. Whereupon we got into our rickshaws and drove back to the hotel.

  I drove behind and thought: ‘It would be nice to slip away from them all—to go off by myself.’

  After the pony race there was a gala dinner and dance, and we danced in the crowded ball-room and then drove back to the hotel through the moist heavy spring night of Peking. It was as though I had been given, for ever given, life, as though the I was the effect of that particular gift, and that the whole world was not itself but through me. Why then was I asking questions? Why always was I asking questions? There was a meaning in it. But what meaning if black death obliterated all? Then a meaning in that, a hidden significance. And if death was silence eternal, there was a significance in that silence. It was as if all—death and all—were in life; and if I thrilled with emotion, feared, prayed, my nerves were somehow linked with the rest of the world: they were like strings of a musical instrument that reverberated to some faint, unknown music; and even now, as in the spidery vehicle, I drove past the palatial legations by the silent queer-smelling canals, the nocturnal foliage glancing in the mirror of black water, at its own sombre visage, the yellow lanterns bobbing on the water and the leaves, I was a traveller, I felt, to whom these lights and shadows were mysterious and strange, but no stranger than the shadows I had seen when, as a particle of light, I coursed my way through space, a planet, a fiery torch lighted at what altar? at what run? before I fell.

  Next day there was a treat for us: the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra came and played extracts from Wagner. They received a tremendous ovation, and at the very end, as an extra, played the Overture to Tannhäuser. I thought I should burst. It was so rich, so mighty, so ineffably glorious and majestic. One felt one’s soul standing on tiptoe! Music—I felt that music was life, that music understood what words and thoughts could never convey. There were echoes it wakened, heart-strings it touched. O Music, where have you learnt your secret?

  Poor old Aunt Teresa, I thought. Poor old Uncle! Poor old everybody …

  I ran into Uncle Emmanuel coming out, and he was red and bright-eyed with excitement. ‘By God,’ he said, ‘that was wonderful. It takes Germans to play Wagner. I got so excited and stirred up I wanted to shout or cry.’

  I felt he and I were brothers, in fact all men brothers, and all born to do great things!

  The date of sailing of the Rhinoceros having again been postponed, we lingered in Peking for a few days. Siberia—so we read in the newspapers—was red and growing redder. Chita was the one white isle in a sea of red, and thither (and to China) had flocked all that there remained of the refuse of reaction. And Peking was a
bsorbing more than its fair share. White generals, bankrupt ministers, experts in coups d’état, failures, nonentities of every kind had made this spot their headquarters. We found many an old friend. Suddenly, quite unexpectedly, we ran into General ‘Pshe-Pshe’.

  ‘Your Excellency!’ I greeted him. ‘We thought you had been hanged long ago!’

  ‘Not till I have done a little myself,’ he replied, smiling a little warily. ‘And how are you?’—he turned to Aunt Teresa, and brushed her pale bejewelled hand against his prickly moustache. Things, it seemed, looked bad in Harbin. The red bandits had wrested the town from him—and now anything might happen to the population. Anything! He himself had deemed it wise to leave the town incognito, overnight. The anarchists and agents of destruction were hard at work all over the world. The only hope lay, he was bound to say, in Mr. Churchill. But that gallant statesman, he thought, had enemies even at home.

  I looked at him as he spoke. How he had ever managed to become a General, God only knows! the most probable explanation is that he had appointed himself—in the interests of the fatherland. ‘Pshe-Pshe’, I learnt afterwards, had taken with him a few bars of solid gold from the national exchequer, deeming it to be well out of the hands of the miscreants who opposed him. He was living now with his wife and family at the best hotel in Peking. He was patronizing to the indigent. ‘Money,’ he said on more than one occasion, ‘is no object.’ Asked what were his plans for the future, he said that he was going on to Tsingtao for a cure and a rest, where he would wait till Mr. Churchill’s political star was again in the ascendant, when ‘The Day’ would return, and he would decorate the lamp-posts of the city of Harbin with the corpses of the bandits; for in civilized society law and order came first. He was loyal to the past. But Russia would not mould to his bankrupt dreams. He was sad, taciturn, bitterly disappointed in fate; but the deaths he had occasioned he somehow overlooked. In the train—he left in our company—the General told us that shortly before leaving Harbin news had come through that Dr. Murgatroyd had been captured in Omsk by his enemies the Bolsheviks. And quite apart from the human factor, it was felt by all that the situation was not without humour. But we were sure that the old man in the moujik clothes would eventually stroll down to some place of safety, with a pencil between his teeth and a few sheets of written paper in his hands, perhaps a little wiser for his experience, and perhaps no wiser than before—and eventually produce a book.

  ‘And how are you?’—the General turned to Mme Negodyaev.

  ‘Ach!’ she uttered—and sighed.

  ‘What a life!’ He looked out of the window.

  ‘Yes, it’s a life in name only. We wait. In the winter we wait for the spring. But spring has come, and I am pestered by flies and mosquitoes. In the spring we wait for the summer. But summer comes—and it rains like in autumn. Ach!’ She waved an abject gesture, and grew silent.

  ‘You’re a pessimist,’ said he, screwing up one end of his short crisp moustache. ‘I am not entirely so.’

  ‘I have always, all my life, been on the point of beginning to live, and I haven’t lived. I haven’t, I haven’t, and I haven’t. I had hoped so much, and nothing has come of it. Now I hope no more—so perhaps something may come of it.’ The sun flashed through the glass and lit up her sunken face. ‘I have great hopes,’ she said.

  She lived, and the life that should have been went beside her. I thought: hopeless natures, like hers, are easily let down by life, but on the other hand, just as easily consoled by hopes as shadowy and baseless as those which they had just discarded.

  At Tientsin—he was going on to Tsingtao—the General got out together with the squinting Corporal Cripple, who now marched on with the kit on his back along to the depôt. The General pressed his prickly moustache against my aunt’s pale fingers; but our train was about to go, and Aunt Teresa, as she waited for him to finish his embrace, looked troubled and impatient. ‘Berthe! I do sincerely hope they haven’t left my medicine-chest behind!’ she wailed across her shoulder. He released her hand. She got in, and the train moved, and the saluting General, with the platform he was standing on, and the sandbank with the squatting Chinese child gaping at the train, and the country road that Corporal Cripple was traversing, moved backwards, and whirled out of sight.

  I felt the wind rushing in through the open window, and saw the sun shining purple through the fretful yellow blinds, and the year was awakening and the day stubbornly dying.

  Crossing the Yangtsekiang in a steam launch, I looked at the wide yellow river, and then at Aunt Teresa at my side. I loved my aunt—in moderation. But now seeing her, so pale and frail before me, I thought: ‘Poor Aunt Teresa! How long will she survive?’ And it seemed to me that now in this strong light I could see for once beyond her share of foibles. I could see—But, oh, what is there to see in the human soul stripped of outward ornament? Bewilderment, day-dreaming, and hope, unending hope …

  Landed on the other side, we mounted the coach and sat mute as if bound by some mysterious sense of fraternity, while the train raced on to Shanghai. Suddenly, as though some huge bird had eclipsed the sun, it grew dark. And we felt as if a shadow had fallen on the clear still-water surface of our souls. Gloom. Rain; hail drummed at the pane. The world was a sorrowful place to live in!

  I watched Beastly pull up the window, and I thought it was characteristic of us that he should be the first to be aroused to the necessity of action. It was of value. I meditated.

  ‘ “The one thing in the world of value,” said Emerson,’ said I, ‘ “is the active soul.” ’

  ‘Very truly said,’ rejoined Captain Negodyaev.

  Natàsha sat facing me, and as I looked into her sparkling sea-green eyes I thought—I knew not why—I thought of death. Why, looking at her, should I think of death? This camping-ground that we call life: our turn, and we go forth into those bleak immensities. And behind us, at the port which growing distance separates us from, the church bells are tolling mournfully, solemnly, as out we sail into the boundless misty sea … Where? Why? Ah, now we know these questions do not arise. They are not; they were unreal.

  It had stopped raining and the sun had come out.

  ‘Look, my girls, it’s a lovely day!’ said Harry.

  The sun had come out, and at once all had become radiant and gay. I closed my eyes and fell asleep in the sun.

  47

  THE PARIS OF THE FAR EAST

  WHEN I WOKE IT WAS PAST MIDNIGHT, AND THE train was already nearing Shanghai. Berthe was busy packing the hand-luggage of my aunt, and we were hauling down our baggage from the rack and putting on our hats and coats, when the train rushed into the station. It was a station much like any other station. It might have been Victoria or Charing Cross for all the difference I noticed. Two motors—so we learnt from a chasseur—awaited us. It seemed we could choose between the Cephas Speaks and the Septimus Pecks—two merchant princes of Shanghai, who, imagining that we were heroes who had won the war, in fact competed for the opportunity of offering us their hospitality. We chose the Cephas Speaks, and stepped into a luxurious limousine, with the aid of a smartly arrayed chasseur, and drove off. I think we chose them on account of the imposing look of the chasseur, and drove in the luxurious motor through the dark shimmering city, which is called, with a degree of truth, the Paris of the Far East. I looked out at the nocturnal streets with their many lights, that curious blend of Europe and the Orient, so disquieting and enchanting as though just on account of that blend, as the great big car rolled magnificently through the warm, moist air of spring. Through beautiful well-kept lanes which in the moonlight looked as if covered with snow, between deep walls of dark foliage we moved. The big car rolled along swiftly, but its size and grandeur gave its very swiftness a look of leisure, as though it said, with a self-contented, patronizing air: ‘That is nothing to me.’

  And thinking of our curious destinies, I said: ‘Life is a chance cross-section—with chance encounters happening to come our way. Events come casually, b
egin discordantly, and end abruptly: they hinge entirely on chance; but within each event which comes our way we develop our inner harmony wholly and coherently.’

  ‘Darling, why don’t you talk to me of something interesting instead?’ Sylvia demurred.

  Melancholily, the car rolled along, and then giving forth a small hoot of the horn, turned into another lane of deeper foliage and more moon. The car drove into a courtyard. Servants rushed to our feet. And, helped out on all sides, we alighted and mounted the steps into the palace of the hospitable merchant prince.

  In the hall, despite the late hour, stood Mr. Cephas Speak, a crude but shy, diffident man, with extended hand (he would have liked to extend both, but he was too shy), and a hearty solicitude for our welfare and comfort. Having apparently done nothing in the war but fill his own pockets, he felt the more diffident with people like ourselves whom, on account of our heroic-looking uniforms, he imagined to be warriors without fear and without reproach. As I came down from my bedroom, Mr. Speak was already listening to Uncle Emmanuel’s highly coloured accounts of our bleak experiences.

  ‘You’ve had a pretty rough time, I can see, at the hands of the Bolsheviki,’ observed Mr. Speak, and filled Uncle Emmanuel’s glass and passed round the sandwiches.

  ‘Ah! mais je crois bien!’ agreed my uncle, swallowing a cocktail and pieces of a sandwich.

  ‘The trials, the perpetual excitements and uncertainties, the tribulations of this life of my sad exile,’ said Aunt Teresa, ‘have completely wrecked my poor nerves.’

  ‘Ah, c’est terrible,’ echoed my uncle.

  Our host surveyed us all with infinite compassion. ‘Now you must have a thorough rest and pull up if you can. You must try and completely forget the Bolsheviki.’ And he passed round the sandwiches. It was as though we had been shipwrecked and were now picked up, and Mr. Speak was administering first-aid. Aunt Teresa heaved a deep sigh, and Uncle Emmanuel said: