The Polyglots

by William Gerhardie

  ‘I askèd dem. Eh bien, ’ow long is ze civil war goin’ to las’, and zey tellèd, “We know not ‘ow long, doan ask us.” Voyons donc, I say, you mus’ know, vous autres militaires!’

  ‘Are they pretty awful, the Bolsheviki?’ asked Mr. Speak, with an air as if he fully expected to hear that they were awful.

  ‘Ah! je crois bien!’ rejoined my uncle with some heat. ‘A nation must protect its ’ome, the family, the sacred hearth. We want our girls to remain girls. If they—the Bolsheviks I mean—are allowed to go on the way they please, why, at that rate soon there won’t be a virgin left in Russia! Ah! c’est terrible!’

  Mr. Speak looked as though he wanted to hear more about the virgins, but Uncle Emmanuel looked grave, and so Mr. Speak too put on a look of gravity.

  Unconsciously, our tales became heroic. We felt they had to be if we were to be equal to his hospitality. And that was very great. Great as it was, though, it seemed to grow in proportion to the magnitude of our tales, and these must needs keep pace with his growing hospitality. ‘Oh, come,’ I said at last, to check Uncle Emmanuel’s extravagant imagination.

  ‘Excuse to me,’ he rejoined, ‘I know of what I’m talking.’

  Mr. Speak could only listen. He shook his head. It seemed incredible. Uncle Emmanuel went on.

  ‘Very truly said,’ Captain Negodyaev chimed in. ‘I have myself two daughters, Mr. Speak: Màsha and Natàsha. Màsha, poor thing, is married, and she has to live in the most miserable conditions in South Russia, with her husband, Ippolit Sergèiech Blagovèschenski. And this—Natàsha!—this is Natàsha.’

  Mr. Speak nodded approvingly, for he regarded Captain Negodyaev as a bulwark against Bolshevism. And he gave Natàsha a round box of chocolates tied with an orange ribbon.

  ‘Oh, look! look! Harry, look! What a beauty thing! Oh, what a lovely!’

  ‘A nice little girl!’ commented Mr. Speak.

  ‘Unfortunately, things being what they are, Mr. Speak, Natàsha’s education is being completely neglected. We simply don’t know what to do.’

  ‘And now. I suppose, we had better all go to bed,’ said my aunt. ‘It’s a quarter-past two.’

  Mr. Speak wished us all a good night.

  On the bedside-table were novels. The dear old thing had put them there for me to read. There they were—Gilbert Frankau, Compton Mackenzie, Stephen McKenna. The house, for all its luxurious magnificence, boasted no water-pipes, the water, cold or hot, having to be carried up by Chinese servants, of whom there was a host at our disposal. The reason for this idiosyncrasy was that nowadays water-pipes were by no means rare, being laid in every decent house, whereas Mr. Speak preferred to see his regiment of Chinese servants really earn their pay at some considerable exertion. During the night the roof, it seemed, had fallen in and burst through the ceilings. (These palaces were not of a substantial build.) And at breakfast Mr. Speak apologized for the disturbance caused during the night. ‘I regret,’ said he, ‘that owing to the roof accident I shall have to put you and your wife into one room.’

  ‘A là guerre comme à la guerre,’ replied Uncle Emmanuel.

  ‘How pale Natàsha looks!’ Aunt Molly observed. Natàsha, according to Mme Negodyaev, had been crying in her sleep. And Natàsha related a dream that had frightened her in the night. A snow-covered hill somewhere in Russia. Tired of walking, she had sat down—and waited. Dusk was falling quickly. And as she waited, what she waited for appeared. Over the snow-clad mountains lost in twilight, in the dim blue distance a black mass was moving towards her. As it approached, her eye could discern that it was a procession of men. ‘Awful mens coming along and not looking at me and carrying something—oh, like a coffin. Oh, I was so frightened. And they came nearer and nearer, not looking at me, and then stopped before me and laid down the coffin, saying nothing. And I saw it was open and empty. I said, “Oh, who have you come for?” And they said: “For you.” Oh—it gave me such a—oh!’ She shuddered, and then suddenly began to cry.

  After lunch I strolled about in the garden. Magnificent trees. A bed of tulips all bending towards the sun, like a corps de ballet. Strange: the Shanghai house was like the house of my dreams. Its shape reminded me of our house in Petersburg, dreaming upon the bank of the wide Neva. I remembered so well how it stood there, a little worse for wear and tear, but infinitely near, as if saying with reproach: ‘You have left me, but I have a soul of my own, and I shall live even when you will not.’ The interior, to some extent, also seemed familiar. This is my sister’s room, I thought. Here on the wide landing I used to wait for her on my tricycle car to come home from school, merely to convey her down this corridor to her room … Here at this window we would sit and wait for the carriage to return from the station with our parents, home from Nice.—All that is over … But is it over?

  Natàsha came running across the path, her sea-green eyes sparkling in the sun. ‘Oh, I have been to the pictures; Mr. Speak took us! Oh, what a lovely!’ she cried. ‘Mary Pickford. Oh, what a beauty boy little Lord Fountainpen! with long beauty hair like that. Oh, and so sad—I so cried! Oh, how I cried all the time! Oh, how beauty! Oh! oh!’ She liked Mr. Speak, but wondered how it was that he who was so rich did not fill all his cupboards with chocolate.

  While in Shanghai Natàsha attended the dentist, and Mr. Speak said that for each tooth she put under the door Mouse would bring her a dollar. Two teeth had been put by her there, and Mouse brought her two dollars. Natàsha’s eyes sparkled with joy as she picked up the coins in the morning. ‘Look, Harry, look!’ she exclaimed. When the third tooth was extracted, Natàsha demurred. ‘Poor Mouse, she can’t get so many dollars,’ she sighed.

  At dinner there was sole dieppoise; saline of partridge with button mushrooms and an orange salad; roast shoulder of mutton with braised celery, potato fritters, red currant jelly, and brown gravy; Coup Jacques; and Angels on Horseback. The table had been set magnificently. The old Chinese butler stood behind our host, mute like a statue, the incarnation of duty and devotion, and saw to it that every whim of his master’s was carried immediately into effect. A procession of servants, whom he marshalled, stole in and out without a sound and served us reverently, as though offering a sacrifice, while the high-priest looked on in awe. The ladies having left us, Uncle Emmanuel talked of the wrongs suffered by Belgium at the hands of the late enemy, as he puffed at a cigar. ‘Ah, figurez-vous,’ he began in a confidential tone, buttonholing Mr. Speak, a tone which implied that he was going to impart something of value. ‘Les crapauds!’ The message died in the cigar smoke as suddenly as it had come to life. Mr. Speak, withal a profiteer who felt a little awkward in the presence of such officers as had ‘done their bit’ in the war but at ease with the confidences of my uncle, told us eagerly of his own work in ousting German merchants from Shanghai and installing himself in their places. He had done his bit. Our host looked at us timidly expectant, anxious for approval of his patriotic work; which he received forthwith from Uncle Emmanuel, who said: ‘Les crapauds! In Belgium they tookèd Bourgmestre Max, they tookèd him and they takèd him, les crapauds!’

  Mr. Speak sighed. ‘A great war’, he uttered.

  ‘Ah, nous autres militaires we have cause to remember it!’ said my uncle. ‘Now we are sailing home vers la patrie.’

  The patriotic business over, our host began telling us joke after joke. But I did not listen because, while he was telling his joke, my time was occupied in preparing my next (I had to be ready or he would go off with his next), and at the end of each of his jokes I laughed automatically with the others. For, as everyone knows, it is much more fun telling your own anecdotes (since anecdotes to be enjoyed must have sunk in, and that needs time) than listening to new ones.

  Next morning Sylvia, in her new clothes and hat, went off without me and had a rattling good time with her new friends. But she returned for the Carlton dance, and I felt the silk glide on her smooth warm limbs as she pressed against me in the tango. And everybody asked: ‘Who is that lovely girl with
the dark-brown locks?’ And I felt she was mine for all time. Now I should have been happy. Yet every hope fulfilled bears its own fatality. What we hoped for has come true; but not quite as we had hoped it. ‘I have been to Confession this morning,’ she said as we danced. ‘To confess my love for Princie. A young priest,’ she added. ‘Quite good-looking.’

  ‘And what did he say?’

  ‘He said: “Everything?”

  ‘I said “Yes.”

  ‘ “But why?” said he.

  ‘ “Because,” said I, “because I love him.”

  ‘ “But who is he?” said he.

  ‘ “I do not know,” said I. “I love him.” ’

  Before leaving Shanghai, my uncle and aunt deemed it proper to drop cards on the Captains and Ward Room Officers of the Allied cruisers, and Uncle Emmanuel being laid up with indigestion, he requested me to take round his cards for him. I liked being ‘piped’. The American Flag-Lieutenant, a friend of mine, used to pipe me as befits a colonel rather than a captain, and I went on board the U.S. Flagship pretty frequently. Philip Brown met me on the quarter-deck. ‘I am right glad to see you, George,’—he held out his hand. ‘Well, it’s against the regulations of our country to keep any liquor on board, but if you will follow me to my cabin I’ll see to it that you get some all the same.’ And indeed! and indeed! From underneath his bunk he produced a bottle of whisky and a siphon, and Philip used the bottle rather more than the siphon. ‘Come on, you old Cheese. Come, get it down your system! Pour it down your cavity!’

  From the American Flagship I went on the British, from that on the French, the Italian, the Jap, and so forth. Everywhere I was duly ‘piped’ on and off. On the quarter-deck of the Chink ship I was met by a befuddled petty officer who could not comprehend the nature of my visit. ‘What do you want?’ he asked with startling directness.

  ‘Commandant Vanderflint,’ I began, ‘who is ill——’

  ‘Who ill? You ill?’ asked the Chink.

  ‘Great heavens, no! This is his card—for the Captain.’

  ‘Ah—!——Nobody at home,’ he said after a pause.

  As I turned to go something struck a spark between his brows, but he stood there, still dubious and undecided, while I gained the gangway. Then, after some excogitation, he began to screech for a sailor, who, as I stepped ashore, piped after me a solitary miserable thin note.

  On Friday Mr. Cephas Speak took leave of us, for he was due elsewhere over the week-end, and he left his huge palatial house with its retinue of servants, stables, the garage holding his four cars, entirely at our disposal. ‘There,’ he said, handing Nora a box of sweets. ‘And give this to Harry.’ Berthe had been dispatched to spend the night on board the boat to superintend the loading of our luggage in the early morning; and she had taken Harry with her. ‘You had better take charge of my typewriter, Harry,’ I had said to him. When next morning Aunt Molly came down in her new travelling dress which she had ordered locally—‘Oh, mummy, you do look a sight!’ Nora exclaimed. ‘I want to——’

  ‘I have no time, darling.’

  ‘When will you have time to have time?’ Nora persisted. But she would not move, and when urged to put her hat on, she began to cry.

  ‘What are you crying for, Norkins?’

  ‘I want to stop for dinner—that’s the trouble!’ she whined. Natàsha, with her parasol in her gloved hands, walked like a little lady. Then we were sitting in the stately limousine, waiting for the chauffeur to move. The chauffeur had got out of his seat and was fiddling with the engine which was firing shots like a maxim. In the end, his efforts were rewarded. The machine obeyed. He switched in the gear, and the gigantic automobile leapt forward. The man put on speed. Aunt Molly, who was frightened of motor-cars when crossing a street, was no less frightened when sitting inside: lest the car should collide with another. Soon we were speeding down the Bund, hastening towards the docks. ‘What is that boat there?’ asked Aunt Teresa, pointing to a large three-funnelled liner.

  ‘That is our boat, the Rhinoceros, I think.’

  The car stopped. We were at the water’s edge. Another ocean liner was receding steadily towards the sea, receding from the shore that hugged her towards the moody main, till she became a point on the horizon and then was lost to sight.

  48

  SO SOON AS SHE SAW HARRY, NORA BEGAN TO YELP from sheer joy. It was the first time in their lives that they had been parted for so long as a whole day. He stood on the deck and looked down at us—a little man in a big cap.

  ‘Aunt Berthe hasn’t touched your typewriter; it’s all right, nobody’s touched it,’ he said to me first thing I came on board.

  Harry and Nora, meeting again after this their first parting, stood face to face and laughed quietly for a whole two minutes. Then they tore off together all round the deck.

  ‘And where’s that sweet for Harry from Mr. Speak?’ Aunt Molly asked Nora.

  Nora had never once delivered a sweet to Harry since the time she was born.

  ‘You’ve eaten my Easter egg,’ she said lamely—though that was now over two years ago.

  Harry said nothing. He now never smiled—he was so serious, as if the cares of the world were upon him; or if he did, it was more than ever the smile of a very old man—perfectly senile! Harry did not seem to grow, while Nora was fast catching up with him. He looked like a little old man—very wise, cynical, toothless.

  Bubby approved of the ship, saying, ‘Thank goodness there are no motor-cars here, mummy’; while Nora spoke of it as ‘This slippery house’. She was blossoming out every day. ‘I don’t say any more “I ’hink”; I say “I th-th-think”.’ So pleased with herself.

  It was a real long voyage—with children, with a shipload of luggage, a voyage destined to last many weeks; the ending of a life-period, a new beginning in time, of which the fate could not be foreseen. It made me think of that dreaded long voyage to America in Les Malheurs de Sophie. The children were delighted. They thought that they were setting out across the water, and that at the other end of the sea, called England, they would meet Daddy, who was waiting for them on the shore.

  ‘I writed, writed, writed to him—and he never wroted,’ said Nora.

  Harry looked on demurely with his forget-me-not eyes. ‘He’ll come if we give him sumfink,’ said he.

  ‘Ah! little Norkin!’ Natàsha exclaimed. And almost at once, as we stood there, there passed down the deck the inevitable old seaman in a dark-blue blouse; and as he passed us he winked at Natàsha so merrily that it called forth from her a lingering outburst of gurgling delight. I have no special insight into seamen’s hearts—for that I must refer you to Joseph Conrad—but the old seaman struck me on the face of it—how shall I put it?—as ‘a bit of all right’. Natàsha made friends with him. ‘You just come from England?’ she asked. ‘Have you seen Princess Mary? Oh, how beauty! Oh, what a lovely!’

  How she had blossomed out! She became a great favourite of his, and each time he passed her on deck he winked at her so merrily that she issued a gurgling sound of delight.

  ‘And what is your name?’ she asked.

  ‘Tom.’

  ‘And which is your cabin?’ He showed her.

  She laughed. ‘Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! Uncle Tom’s cabin!’

  He winked.

  ‘Oh! Oh! I so cried in Uncle Tom’s Cabin! Eva—such—such—such—such a nice girl! Oh, such a lovely!’

  From that moment on she called the old seaman in the dark-blue blouse ‘Uncle Tom’, and since to children everyone is either an uncle or aunt, they all called him now ‘Uncle Tom’. And he liked it.

  The Rhinoceros was a transport, and presently troops came on board in charge of a sergeant major, who detailed them in two parties. ‘You fellows,’ he said, ‘go to the sharp end of the ship, and you here to the blunt end of the ship.’

  The naval ratings looked sarcastic. Oh, they did look sarcastic! Even ‘Uncle Tom’ smiled into his chin. ‘They are a hignorant lot, those army chaps,’ he confi
ded to me, shaking his head.

  The sergeant major heard him. ‘You hignorant hass!’ he said. ‘You bloody well mind your own bloody business!’

  We were moving. From the bows came the regular impassive beat of the piston-rod. We were moving. The land slanted aside, and we were gliding farther and farther away on the green mirror of the sea towards the breeze.

  ‘Oh, the green green sea!’ Natàsha exclaimed, her sea-green eyes sparkling in the sun. Everywhere there were visible signs that the War Office had suddenly lost interest in us. The transport provided for us was definitely top-heavy, and as she went, lurched now on this side, now on that.

  At lunch I found sitting next to me a Russian major general with wild pale eyes and long black fingernails, who said he had got back to Shanghai from Hong-Kong, but now, on reflection, was going back again to Hong-Kong without leaving the boat. I recognized his face: it was the man who had once called on me on New Year’s Day and had sat in the waiting-room along with other lunatics. His eyes were almost mad, his conversation incoherent. At the outbreak of the Revolution he, a Tsarist general, had sided with the rebels, and assumed command of the revolutionary troops; then his nerves had given way, and now he was adrift in the wide world, without plan and without purpose. If he was mad, there was a little method in his madness. He lived, he said, by issuing I.O.U.s at every port of call. At one place, when nobody would take his I.O.U., he hired a grand piano and then sold it, using the money realized on getting out of mischief. In his view all means were justified by a great end. But after listening to him week after week it struck me that ‘the end’ with him was possibly the weakest portion of it all. Cross-examined by me, he admitted that he scorned programmes, but believed in living from day to day following the dictates of his complex personality. Asked how he reconciled this view with his declared ideal of public service, he answered that he scorned the public.

  During lunch, Harry made audible remarks about the passengers: ‘That boy over there has a fat head.’