The Polyglots

by William Gerhardie

  The boat began to roll.

  The General with the mad eyes had no more plans.—Anyway, he would go on to Egypt—see what happened at Port Said. ‘I think,’ he confided to me, ‘that Churchill and Lloyd George are conferring as to what is to become of me, and I think they will place a residence at my disposal—probably in London, in which case I would apply for your services as my A.D.C.’

  On Thursday night there was to be a fancy-dress ball on board, and my idea was to appear as a scarecrow. Nora was mildly amused at my rehearsal of this part, Natàsha wildly so—she even clapped her hands. ‘Ooh! Ooh! Look! Scarecrow! Look! Scarecrow!’ she cried, while Harry disdained my whole performance. ‘Silly,’ he said. But on Tuesday Captain Negodyaev had another persecution scare, and he made his wife and daughter dress for flight at a moment’s notice, and they sat all dressed up in their furs, in the saloon. Mme Negodyaev looked as though she were loyally performing a necessary act, the necessity of which she did not question, while Natàsha looked confused in our presence, a little ashamed that by virtue of belonging to her Daddy she was in honour bound to participate in this strange rite. The vast, green-coloured ocean was calm, without a ripple. The liner glided noiselessly between the foam. All the long day we lay in deck-chairs and looked out on the sea that stretched everywhere around us. We had not been in sight of land for days and days, and we would not be in sight of land for days and days to come. Natàsha and Nora played nicely together, while Bubby always played by herself. But Harry, who strode as if disdainfully aloof, his hands in his breeches-pockets and with no show of interest in their game, now and then made a sudden unprovoked attack on their hoardings and upset their belongings; and then anguished cries of ‘Harry! Harry!’ resounded on the quiet mirror of the Indian Ocean.

  ‘Where’s that sword?’—he came to me.

  ‘What do you want it for?’

  ‘I want to chop Nora’s head off. I’m sick of her!’

  ‘You can’t have it.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I want it myself.’

  ‘Yes, kill uncle with it. And Auntie Terry. And Nora. And Mummy. And Natàsha. And Aunt Berthe.’

  ‘Uncle Romatism’, old and toothless, came along the deck whistling ‘I’m for ever blowing bubbles’. And passing Natàsha, he winked at her again so merrily that she gurgled with delight.

  ‘Harry! Harry! What for you doing?’

  ‘Harry, leave me alone! Shup up!’

  ‘Whatever is the matter?’ Aunt Molly hastened on the scene.

  ‘Harry kicked me,’ Natàsha cried.

  ‘No, s’e kicked me first.’

  Natàsha was slapped by her father and put in the corner; she cried. And Harry, out of courtesy to the foreigner, was slapped on the head by Aunt Molly: ‘Oh, you naughty boy!’—she slapped him.

  ‘Why are you slapping me?’ And he cried out of the bitterness of his heart. But presently he ran away round the deck as though all was well and nothing was the matter. The hatch opened, and Natàsha, stealing up from behind, covered my eyes with her cool slender hands; and though by her tender touch, her peculiar breathing, by the rustle of her frock you knew it could only be Natàsha, she said in her ecstatic way: ‘Guess! Guess, who is it!’ And there followed upon the correct recognition her bubbling, gurgling laugh. ‘Shut your eyes and open your mouth!’

  Natàsha had grown very tall, slender, a little bashful and reserved. I gave the children some nuts; the rebels took them greedily and asked for more. But Natàsha said each time she had some—‘Thank you.’

  What a nice young girl was growing up, what an observant, graceful little girl, what a sensitive plant. And we were educating her crescendo, forte, fortissimo! Her hair, plaited on account of the extreme heat, exposed the tenderest of white necks. In all creation there is not a more tender, more responsive, soulful, exquisitely graceful thing than a girl-child of nine!

  ‘Tomorrow,’ she said, ‘there will be fancy-dress ball. I am “Night”.’

  Next morning, however, Natàsha had a headache. Whether it was from the excessive heat, or whether because we were educating her at top-speed, but already since breakfast she drooped; she sat still. ‘Headache,’ she said. ‘Headache.’

  I was standing with Sylvia at the stern, watching the foam trail behind us and loose itself asunder.

  ‘Look!’

  I looked. At first I saw a black surface emerging from the waves. It rose and vanished. The beast emerged once more and flashed its white belly in the sun, and then was gone.

  In the afternoon we saw him again. A black head emerging and submerging at intervals—a shark, like an enormous black dog in the water, with a pair of wicked black eyes, coursing his way in our trail. Then he was gone.

  ‘There!’ she cried. ‘There he is again—abreast with us. He is following the boat.’

  He vanished in the waves. We waited to see if he had gone. But there he was again, coursing his way in our trail. Now and then you could catch a glimpse of his glittering white belly as he half rose from the waves. Now he was to starboard, now to port, but always about fifty yards from our stern, following us as if with a secret resolution.

  Natàsha sat still in the deck-chair and frowned. Uncle Tom passed and winked. ‘G-g-g-g-g,’ gurgled Natàsha. But she did not ask him to play with her.

  ‘What is it, Natàsha?’

  ‘Headache,’ she said.

  Suddenly, towards evening, Natàsha felt worse, and she was put to bed, where she lay with red spots on her cheeks, writhing in fever. After dinner, since her condition was reported to be grave, the fancy-dress ball was put off, and the passengers who had looked forward to it and slept all day so as to be up all night lounged upon deck in ennui. Captain Negodyaev had just come back from his daughter’s cabin.

  ‘The doctor says she’ll be all right in a few days, after a complete rest in bed. She’s had too much excitement, she’s been running about too much in the sun.’

  ‘And the cause?’

  ‘He supposes it to be a mild sort of sunstroke. Who knows?’

  ‘He isn’t a doctor for nothing; he ought to know.’

  ‘He doesn’t know.’

  We stood at the rail in the moonlight.

  ‘Tonight I am bored. I don’t think I have ever been so excruciatingly, so overwhelmingly, so outrageously bored as tonight.’

  ‘Why don’t you,’ he laughed, ‘commit suicide?’

  ‘It would not be enough. What I’d like to do tonight is to blow up the whole earth, commit suicide for and on behalf of everybody. A short cut to the Kingdom of Heaven on earth is to do away with earth.’ He smiled indulgently.

  ‘Think what a subject for a painter—what a plot for a story—a scientist secretly at night steals the glowing globe and sends it, lock, stock and barrel, judge, jury and all, to Kingdom Pot. And there is no more sea. What a sublime crime. See his expression. Some lunatic like Balzac could have written it.’

  ‘Why confine yourself to the earth? Why not the whole universe, the entire cosmos?’

  I paused, thinking. ‘I am for it.’

  He looked at me. ‘But where would it all go to? All the souls, and so on?’

  ‘Where? To Glory.’

  ‘What would God do?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh, God and all.’

  ‘It can’t be done,’ he said, on reflection.

  ‘Ah!’

  ‘Ah!’

  I like the man, he is of the intellectual sort, but for one reason or another our intellectual conversations have a way of ending in the most distressingly practical way, as now when he followed me, all wreathes and smiles, to my cabin and came out crumpling a £5 note and saying nonchalantly, ‘We’ll settle it next week, I promise faithfully,’ having previously given me an I.O.U., signed ‘Peter Negodyaev’. I hate generalities, and I would be the last man to want to create the mistaken impression that all Russians are necessarily impractical; but, speaking broadly, I would give this general advice: let no Scotsman lend money to a Russi
an if he can help it.

  This piece of business over, we returned on deck and continued our conversation on the higher plane. ‘If there is no eternity now,’ he said, ‘mankind may create it after our time. Who knows?’

  ‘Yes, those who have suffered and loved and found their way back to the founthead may one day redeem us. The trumpet that will call us back to life might be a trumpet made in Birmingham or Massachusetts: what matter? The last trump will sound; but we shan’t appear before God: we shall be God.’

  Sylvia came up. ‘Didn’t I tell you, darling, about the Massachusetts trumpet?’

  ‘You told me of some trumpet, but I understood nothing. It makes me sick to listen to you nowadays. Darling, you’re getting fearfully boring.’

  Berthe came to tell Captain Negodyaev that his wife wanted him below, that Natàsha was worse again. He went off hastily. The General with the mad eyes who had been watching us from afar (he was not on speaking terms with Captain Negodyaev) now came up to enquire what was the matter. ‘Cramming a child’s mind with rubbish,’ I replied. ‘That’s what has done it. And now a nervous breakdown, I expect.’

  ‘But you’ve been teaching her yourself.’

  ‘I only pretended it was a lesson to set the parents’ mind at rest, but told her funny things instead. She already talks English delightfully. I don’t know what they want.’

  ‘They don’t know themselves,’ he answered gladly.

  ‘Here you have a child with the most delicate intuitions, and you are cramming her head with arithmetic! And now she’s gravely ill.’

  ‘Not from that.’

  ‘Very likely from that.’

  ‘Nonsense.’

  ‘There’s no nonsense about it.’

  Suddenly lapsing into English: ‘This is sheer infantry to talk like that!’ he cried.

  The General had learnt his English without extraneous aid, relying exclusively on his own deductions—a process that was not without danger. So coming in the dictionary across the word infant and rightly deducing from the well-known Spanish word infanta that infant stood for child, he further deduced (not correctly this time) that what he meant by infancy was infantry in English. So he would often observe, ‘Socialism is as yet only in its infantry.’ I tried to correct him; it was useless: he knew better. Incidentally, himself an infantryman, one would think that he had reserved a word for it in English. He had: he called it, as in Russian, infanteria. Now being angry with me, and wishing to imply that I was childish, he said: ‘It is sheer infantry to talk like this.’

  ‘General!’ I cried. ‘General! will you please believe me when I tell you that you can’t——’

  ‘Sheer infantry!’ he shouted, ‘infantry and nothing else!’

  ‘Well, I ought to know better than you.’

  ‘You—you,’ he said, ‘you’re no more English than … you polyglot.’

  I confess I don’t like this. International as are my sympathies—I do not like this. If you had been born in Japan and brought up in Russia and called Diabologh into the bargain, you would want to be English. When in the war I rode with my troop in Ireland and an old woman called out, ‘The English swine!’ I felt elated, flattered, exhilarated, secretly proud.

  ‘You cuckoo,’ I said, ‘my father was born in Manchester, and my mother in York.’

  ‘I thought as much. You Yorkshire pig,’ said he.

  There was a pause. The British General, with his eye fixed on the Russian General, passed by in his white tennis shoes and stood off, watching.

  ‘That idiot of a General!’ the Russian said. ‘Imagine him commanding an army corps!’

  ‘All generals are mugs.’

  The General suddenly looked at me with fierce insight, as if considering his own position and deciding whether to be offended or not. He strolled off a few paces, and returned, deciding to be offended.

  ‘Get out!’ he shouted suddenly, and stamped his foot.

  ‘Get out yourself.’

  He waited a moment, foaming with fury, and then said, ‘In that case I’ll go myself, Yorkshire pig that you are.’

  ‘Good riddance to bad rubbish.’

  I went away with a heavy heart: why had I offended him? The poor devil was not too happy as it was in our midst. Suffering from qualms of conscience, I went in search of him in order to apologize to him, when, rounding the deck-house, I saw him shuffling along in his sweat-eaten canvas shoes towards me.

  ‘Oh, forgive me, forgive my rudeness,’ he began, ignoring my apologies. ‘But I feel I am here like a beast in a trap—alone amidst a crowd of enemies. All look at me with suspicion. That idiot of a General of yours is on my heels all day long. I can’t go down to my cabin without his coming down behind me. All talk, whisper about me, point at me. I’m not allowed to go ashore to buy myself a picture postcard; all the secret service agents in the world have been set on my heels. I—I—I—my nerves have all gone to pieces. Forgive me, my friend, do.’ He held out his hand.

  I hastened with counter apologies, and we were friends once more.

  ‘I hear,’ he said, ‘Natàsha isn’t at all well. I’ve just met Nurse. She seemed worried. And we are likely to run out of coal, in which case we might have to drift to Bombay. I think the Captain will have a meeting to decide the question tonight.’

  Next morning Natàsha was better. Directly after lunch I went to see her. As I entered the hospital ward I saw the ship’s surgeon—a darkish Argentine—making up to the pretty nurse. He had had his eye on her ever since we left Shanghai. And here at last was the opportunity. ‘Well, Nurse,’ he said, ‘let’s put our heads together.’ Which they immediately did, as he shot his hand under her arm, and sitting thus, arm in arm and brow to brow, across Natàsha’s bunk, ‘Well, what the devil d’you think’s the matter with her, Nurse?’ he asked her cheerily.

  Nurse looked very thoughtful, and answered: ‘I wonder.’

  They had not heard my steps, and blushed a little as I came up. The air was stifling: it smelt of disinfectant. Natàsha, looking small in her striped flannel chemise, looked up at me and raised her delicate faint brow. ‘Ah! Mr. Georges!’

  The ship’s surgeon had diagnosed her illness as being due to a mild sunstroke, the remedy being complete rest and special diet, for the little girl was very sick and could not eat.

  ‘Well, Natàsha, what is the matter, dear?’

  ‘It is romatism,’ she said—and sighed.

  I stood watching her, at a loss for what to say. When we were left alone, she motioned me to her side. ‘Sit on my bed.’

  I took her warm, perspiring hand, touched her slender fingers.

  ‘No fancy-dress,’ she said. ‘No fancy-dress because of me!’

  ‘Yes. No one wants to have one without you. It’s been put off for a week till you get better again.’

  ‘Oh, goodness gracious! A week! I’ll be up tomorrow——’ And she sighed.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Headache,’ she said. ‘Headache,’ wrinkling her brow.

  ‘Is Harry not breaking my doll?’ she suddenly asked.

  ‘No, I’m keeping an eye on it.’

  ‘Norkins can play with my doll. But tell Harry he mustn’t touch it; he’ll break it—and s’mine.’

  ‘I’ll touch him if he touches it.’

  ‘Gug-g-g-g-g——’ she laughed her gurgling laughter, and then said:

  ‘Have you seen Princess Mary?’

  I had to confess that I had not.

  ‘Give me that paper, please.’

  I stretched across to the opposite bunk and got it for her.

  ‘What are you looking for?’

  ‘Wait.’

  She had seen Princess Mary’s photograph in the Graphic, and had fallen in love with her. Now she found the page. ‘Look! Oh, how beauty!’ she said. ‘Oh, what a lovely—Princess Mary!’

  ‘When we get to London,’ I said, ‘you shall see her.’

  ‘London. What’s it means London? How do you get at London?’
<
br />   ‘We shall get at it all right. It’s a big place with lots of buses and underground trains and moving staircases and things, on which you have only to stand still while up—up—up they take you, straight into the streets.’

  ‘Is that how you get to the King and—his wife?’ she enquired.

  ‘Oh yes. I will take you when we get there.’

  ‘Oh, goodness gracious!’ she said, bubbling all over. She sat up in bed, and pulling me over to her side nestled to me in her warm striped flannel chemise. ‘Oh, you are my uncle, I love you. You are my daddy, when daddy is away … you are my daddy. Headache,’ she said, wrinkling her brow. ‘Headache—headache.’

  I touched her forehead with my own; it was hard, warm, hot, moist. As I got up to go, she held me by the hand: ‘Stay with me.’

  ‘Lie down, Natàsha. You must lie down. Lie down, that’s right.’

  ‘Oh, you are my uncle. Oh, stay with me. Uncle Georgie: I love you. I love you, Uncle Georgie. Uncle Georgie: I love you. Stay with me.’

  I was loth to leave her, and she was loth to let me go; but when her mother came I went away, and smoking, pondered on the nature of her illness. What was it? No one knew. The doctor didn’t really seem to know himself.

  But the third day she only said: ‘Drink Drink Drink …’ The skin was very tight on her face. When in good health she was very pale, had scarcely ever any colour. But now, writhing in fever, her cheeks were like ripe cherries in their warm gloss; she was flushed and more beautiful than I had ever seen her. In her delirium she muttered: ‘These awful mens—take away these awful mens.’ When she came to, she only muttered: ‘Drink. Drink. Drink …’

  Berthe dashed past me as I came up the steps of the saloon. ‘What is it, Berthe?’

  ‘The little one,’ she said, ‘is very bad.’

  I dreamt that what I dreaded most—Natàsha’s death—had come true, and then I dreamt that my fears were false: that I had only dreamt it, and I felt at ease. Later I woke. I woke—and she was dead; and it was unreal like a bad dream.