The Polyglots

by William Gerhardie

  In the morning, before I knew the worst, I slipped up in my dressing-gown and slippers. It was very early still, and the decks were being scrubbed; the water rushed out of the hose and streamed in broad floods down the sloping deck. In the saloon doorway stood the ship’s surgeon, looking out to sea, and puffed at the end of his cigarette. His tired eyes twitched in the smoke, and the way he held the cigarette, between forefinger and thumb, spoke of relaxation after extreme strain.

  I dared not ask. I dared not look. He greeted me with a nod, and looked out to sea.

  I waited. ‘How is she?’

  The surgeon first puffed at his cigarette.

  ‘Just died, poor little girl.’ And he looked out to sea.

  ‘We shall drift into a monsoon by tonight. See those two cursed sharks—see them? Been following us these last three days. We shall drift into a monsoon. But the Captain wants to go on and coal at Aden. First Officer thinks we ought to go to Bombay before we run out of coal. Never been on such a ship before! Yes, she’s dead, poor little girl.’

  I did not understand. It was devoid of meaning. I went down into the ward to have a look at her. Natàsha lay perfectly still, and her closed lids made her faint brows look the more naïve, tender and touching. She looked like a wax doll.

  Perhaps all life is but a dream within a dream, and what we call reality is but our dream of waking, of having woken; that presently we shall awake again and find that what we thought to be ‘reality’ is all without existence. Natàsha’s death … I’m dreaming? The sea breeze touches my hair perceptibly: all the same, I may be dreaming that. And if not, what matter? For even as she died she may have woken—wide awake—and smiled, and smiled, over the erstwhile burthen.

  I went back into my cabin, shaved, bathed, and dressed as usual. And all the time it seemed as if all this sudden meaningless disaster was but a bad dream, that in a little while I would really wake and smile at having dreamt of so intolerable, so hideous, a bereavement.

  Yet she was dead. Strange as it was, she was dead. Came a time when it no longer seemed strange. A sharp fact, it had to be faced; and faced, it became a blunt fact. She had gone unharmed through two revolutions, five sieges, two seasons of famine and pestilence. She died on the tropical water, in plenty and comfort and quietude, no one ever knew why.

  The parents felt anxious to postpone the moment of burial; but the Captain’s attitude in the matter was that he would brook no interference with the ship’s routine. At 8 a.m. a procession of men carrying a plank walked down imperturbably to the hospital ward below. Natàsha, sewn up in sail cloth, with weights put inside to prevent her from floating, was placed on the plank, and the Russian tricolour—the obsolete flag of white, blue and red, hurriedly stitched together—was laid on the little body. The same men took up the burthen and carried it out on to the forecastle, followed by the procession of the ship’s officers, who had donned their full-dress uniforms, which looked like glorified frock coats. Here the procession of men halted, the burthen was laid down on two stools. In front stood the Anglican Chaplain, in surplice and hood (for want of an Orthodox priest). Behind stood the taciturn Captain, his staff drawn up at his back: the silent First Officer, shabby and long-legged in his moth-eaten full dress, the Second Officer with black whiskers, the tall Chief-Engineer, the darkish Ship’s Surgeon, the fat little Purser, and others. The Captain looked unpleasant, but yet as though pleased at the opportunity of shining in his gala dress. His look, ominously triumphant, seemed to say: ‘I am the smallest of the bunch, but the boss of you tall ones for all that.’ There was a subtle distinction about it, of which he seemed conscious. He reminded me of little Lloyd George as head of his tall Cabinet. His eyesore, the Commodore, on the contrary, stood gazing down nonchalantly from the upper deck, in a blue river jacket, his hands in his white flannels, and watched dispassionately at what we were ‘up to’. Captain Negodyaev seemed to have shrunken in stature, as he stood there with the inexorable rays of the morning sun beating down on his scantily covered temples and nape of the neck. He was very nervous, and his scraggy longish yellow moustache twitched without cease. Next him stood his wife, a crumpled swooning figure, as though Fate itself this time had stepped on her. Obstinately my mind refused to believe in the reality and the finality of death, until I mocked my own mind, refused to believe she was dead despite the body at my feet. Such things may happen in books, or in nightmares, or in other people’s lives, but not in mine. It was a cloudless morning of extreme heat and stuffiness and damp, and the decks were crowded, noisy and indifferent, and I thought that suffering and death should be in the wind and cold of winter, in the slough and drowsiness of autumn, but not in summer—oh, not in summer. Some curious passengers looked down from the upper decks. I noticed the General with the mad eyes. His own tragedy swept aside to naught, he stood there, his legs considerably apart, his head unkempt, a gaping figure, dirty and uncouth, whose only feeling seemed curiosity.

  The Anglican Chaplain (who looked like a horse) read the service, commending the body to the deep, when Harry whispered loudly in his mother’s ear: ‘The flag is hanging crooked.’

  ‘S—s—sh! You must be quiet,’ Aunt Molly reproved him.

  ‘Why must I?’ he asked.

  ‘Because we’re all sorry.’

  ‘No! I’m glad,’ he said.

  ‘Harry!’ And she slapped his head.

  ‘S’e kicked me,’ he cried grievously.

  ‘But Harry!’

  ‘But s’e kicked me.’

  Slap! came another—nasty one—on the head. (Why always on the head?)

  ‘Ow—a—o—ow—o!’ wailed Harry, issuing a yell disproportionate to the whack—to impress the onlookers and enlist their sympathy on his behalf. And Captain Negodyaev’s face winced as he turned back. As if there were not enough anguish in the air to have to bear this little shrill discordant cry as well!

  ‘Harry, stop it! Stop it at once!’

  ‘Oh, children should never have been brought to see this,’ Berthe wailed aloud. ‘They don’t understand it! They shouldn’t understand it!’

  Our thoughts went out to the parents as they stood beneath the tropic sun, their eyes fixed on their little daughter for ever hidden from them. The sea went out in large ripples. The gulls flew screaming and wheeling above them. And I thought that if at this moment they craved for another last sight of her the Captain would not allow it. Their child had ceased to be theirs, had suddenly become inaccessible. And they deplored that the things they had to say to her they could no longer say, unconscious of the truth that she had now forgotten even all that they had ever said to her. Berthe had tears in her eyes, and murmured:

  ‘Pauvre petite.’

  I have no insight into seamen’s hearts; but Uncle Tom looked grave, stern, dignified, conscious of his duty as with, head uncovered, he stood at the side of the plank, with that curious haughty servility peculiar to the old English servant class. Oxford scouts look like that when of a Sunday evening they serve in hall at the ‘high table’. A piece of rail had been displaced. The ship had been brought to as near a standstill as possible; barely perceptibly she slid along on the deep, deep, flapping sea. The plank was on ropes, like a swing: a seaman at each side—Uncle Tom and a young one. Below loomed the Indian Ocean, stretching its white paws of froth—like a big cat. A sleek pussy cat with green eyes, purring—but treacherous, unreliable.

  They got hold of the ropes—Uncle Tom and the young one. The mother was held up by her husband and Berthe. She looked pale, pasty, she looked awful. Swiftly the flag was pulled off. Then they swung it—once our way, once to the sea. Natàsha slid off, and describing a curve in the air splashed into the water. A few seconds—and she disappeared beneath the foam.

  The mother reeled in a swoon. They took her away down the hatchway, a crushed, crumpled thing, whom fate had struck a blow in addition to her level of burthens. The rail was replaced. Slowly the gathering dispersed.

  It was mournful in the sky and the still
air and on the sunny water, while the liner, stealthily, relentlessly, like life itself, went on. And as we stood there at the rail, involuntarily we gazed back at that lonely far-off spot where the sea sighed in green waves, and the mind went out in that desolate journey in the water, two, three miles, perhaps, to somewhere near the bottom of the sea, where she would sway and bounce and tremble in the current. A little Russian girl in the deep vastness of the Indian Ocean.

  Once more we looked back at the sea, and went down to breakfast. But the table where the girl with the sea-green eyes had sat showed empty, and we avoided looking at it as we ate. They talked of a mishap to one of the boilers, of the ensuing delay in our voyage, and that we might have to drift to Bombay to replenish our vanishing coal supply; but I did not care whither we steamed or whither we drifted, and if we were destined to drift for the rest of our lives and never reach England, or stop drifting, or drift straight into hell, it was to me, in my mood of acute resignation, a matter of welcome indifference. After breakfast Aunt Molly came out on deck with a bottle and tablespoon, and gave Nora her cod-liver oil. Perhaps the burial had wrecked her nerves a little, but she said impatiently, ‘Get on, Nora, don’t waste half an hour over it.’

  ‘Wait—but I like to taste it,’ Nora pleaded, as she licked the spoon.

  ‘Now go and fetch Harry.’

  ‘Harry: your wime!’ came Nora’s voice as she ran off down the slippery deck.

  He frowned. ‘Sickening Mummy,’ he said.

  Clapping her hands she exclaimed: ‘Natàsha has gone to the fishes.’ And bored at playing alone, after luncheon, she asked: ‘Where is Natàsha? Is she still in the sea playing with the fishes?’

  The sharks had gone.

  I lay back in the deck-chair, and stared at the motionless clouds, which looked like huge mountains. And the blue sky was like the sea, and the mountainous clouds like the rocks that loom at the bottom of the deep. And behold, there sailed a small cloud like a grinning monkey—inhabitant of the deep!—it stretched out two muscular arms, and became like the bare back of an athlete, and then changed into—yes, two grinning monkeys with their heads close together, one of them pointing a hand to the sun. Then they lost shape, turned into a vague translucent mass—and behold, it developed fins, changed into a fish, an enormous white shark which swam ever so slowly and cautiously, staring towards me. I watched it, fascinated like a rabbit; like a pedestrian, glued to the spot by the closeness of a vehicle (because, to him, the calamity is already over and beyond repair: fear has done it). And I fancied that if one were to be confronted by a beast so dreadful, the self-same trance would suddenly come over one in the last few fateful seconds, causing one to feel detached from one’s own fate; one would see oneself as some third person, recall in a single moment one’s whole life, regard it over, a closed book, one’s soul returned to whence it came. I have perished: but the Universe is mine.—Then, gazing at the sky, I fancied I saw Natàsha’s little body sewn up in sail cloth coming down out of the blue, swaying lightly. Now she reached the top of the rocks; downward she came into the valley. Today the sea is calm—a dark-green mirror, and the celestial sea, a deep-blue mirror. But when the sea is perturbed, what a hole the waves make, and if they moved asunder—it’s only water—there would be a pit of many miles. What a distance to fall. What a journey to make. Now she lies, maybe, in a valley between high hills, and higher than the hills is the sea, and on the sea sail we …

  The children played on. Aunt Molly knitted a jersey. Aunt Teresa suffered from headache. I basked and dreamt in the sun.

  We were a raft drifting on the sea of eternity. Long, long ago, having seen it face to face, we had fought shy of it. We saw a raft, and made for it. But even safe on the raft we are on the sea of eternity. Three had now been washed off by the sea, but we others still clung to that raft. A crowd of bewildered spirits caught upon a planet. We merely brush against each other’s surfaces, and something deep down, unexplored, is ignored or dismissed. Uncle Emmanuel lit a cigar in the sunset; there was a pink gleam of light in his eye. I wondered if he had a soul. We caught a glimpse of Captain Negodyaev gazing steadfastly to sea, puffing hungrily at the remainder of his cigarette. I looked up at the sky: what shall we take from you for taking this life from us? There was no answer, save a blighting sense of our impotence. ‘Poor man,’ said Aunt Teresa. ‘We must do something for him.’ And looking at this red-eyed creature gazing at a world of red despair, Uncle Emmanuel took the cigar out of his mouth and sighed. ‘Yes, he is a good fellow, le capitaine. I will recommend him to the Ministry of War for the Ordre de Léopold 1er when I get back to Brussels. I am really sorry for him.’ The sky was a pellucid mother-of-pearl—as though through all the shadows and clouds, the suffering, confusion and doubts, God smiled: I still knew what I was doing. And curling up into vistas of space, it spoke of what is beyond time, beyond loss, and the need of redemption.

  The sun had set, and at once the ocean looked dark, the sky was unfriendly: God had gone back to His bunk. Then, strolling about, I came across Captain Negodyaev. He sat very still on a bench at the stern, gazing at the dark trail running away from us, as if asking a meaning from it of a death that had no meaning. In the day-time, half dazed by the sun and the heat, he had braved it somehow, pacing about, avoiding condolences, unable to find a place for himself. But now with the twilight, his grief, like a vulture, descended upon him, and cringing in the corner of the bench he began to cry. I touched him on the shoulder: his face convulsed, he covered it with his hands.

  ‘Trust your feeling. Remember Turgenev: “Can it be that their prayers, their tears are fruitless? Can it be that love, holy, devoted love, is not all-potent? O no! However passionate, sinful, rebellious, may be the heart that has taken refuge in the grave, the flowers which grow upon it gaze tranquilly at us with their innocent eyes: not alone of eternal repose do they speak to us, of that mighty repose of ‘indifferent’ nature; they speak also of eternal reconciliation and of life everlasting.” ’

  ‘Flowers,’ he said, after a moment’s pensive silence, and looked at the dark burrows that eluded our steady course into the loneliness of the ocean, unafraid. ‘Innocent eyes …’ He choked.

  ‘It didn’t need the war. It didn’t need the revolution.’

  He rose and stalked away. He went back to his wife, who henceforth lay in her cabin, a wounded thing, and was never seen to emerge. Whether he was kind to her, we did not know. I passed the half-open door of Aunt Teresa’s cabin. Aunt Teresa’s going to bed was always rather an event. She took pyramidon for her head, and aspirin for her cold, and pills to counteract the effect of pyramidon on her stomach, and a remedy to counteract the effect of aspirin on her heart, besides which she used lotions: a tooth lotion, a gum lotion, a jaw lotion (to prevent dislocation), and sunflower seed oil as a general lubricant, and of late a lotion to rub into the roots of her hair. She was sitting now in her chemise upon the bunk in an attitude of great distress and, with the help of Berthe, was rubbing coconut oil into the nape of her neck. In the last few days she had suddenly begun to lose her hair at a terrific rate; there was a bare space on the nape as large as the size of an average saucer. ‘C’est terrible,’ she was saying to Berthe, ‘there will be nothing left.’

  I went out on deck. The nocturnal sky, vigilant, soared above me. The stars looked at me kindly, good-humouredly. The ship’s lights twinkled demurely in the dark. I stood very still, following the dark phosphorescent trail that now and then gave a glint of light in the moon. When I was alone I whispered: ‘Can you hear me——?’ But only the wind that ruffled the topmost flag on the mast answered me. The wind and the lazy splash of the waves.

  50

  THE DAY WE CAME TO PERIM I WAS ORDERLY OFFICER, and had to take a party of soldiers, bluejackets and marines to bathe off the island. Aunt Teresa, Sylvia, Uncle Emmanuel, and Berthe (very meagre in her bathing-dress) also came on our launch. There were naked black men and women on the beach, and Aunt Teresa and Berthe cleverly pretended
that they did not see them. They did not look aside; they looked at them as though they were so much air. And a black beauty had taken Uncle Emmanuel’s fancy. We were back on the launch, and nearly alongside the boat, but he was still standing inert, his binocular gaze fixed on the shore, till Aunt Teresa saw fit to interrupt him: ‘Emmanuel! Eh alors!’

  ‘Ah, c’est curieux!’ he said genially, looking round at us, as though inviting assent. ‘There are no trees, not a single one! Extraordinary country!’

  ‘Mind the steps, dear,’ I said tenderly, as we were alongside and climbing the slippery ladder to the quarter-deck.

  I know I felt that there was something ineffably pathetic about our anchoring in the fading sunlight of a scorching afternoon—gliding noiselessly into the silent harbour, still as doom. What spots there were in the world. What places! Aden, the back-stairs of the globe. Sylvia leaned on the rail and looked, and I beside her. It made her want to weep softly and woefully, she could not say why. And when the boat, gliding noiselessly, halted still in this uncanny stillness of moist air and yellow water, she looked at me as though expecting that I too must be aware of her emotion. Beastly looked too. He shook his head slowly. ‘What a black hole to live in!’

  We dined on board, and after dinner stepped into the launch and crossed the tepid shark-infested strip of water to the cheerless shore. Not a tree, not a patch of grass. The sun had sunk into the sea, but the baked desert earth still glowed with heat, and when, driving through the dark of night in a car dashing at full speed, I held out my hand, it was like putting it into an oven. The Sahara was breathing on us from behind. The moon in heaven seemed stifled by the night. The General with the mad eyes who was not allowed to come with us (lest he detract the Arabs from the line of duty to iniquity) asked me to buy a packet of tobacco for him. This done, we visited the famous cisterns deemed to have been built by King Solomon, passed down the many flights of stairs into the hollow depths wherein our steps and even whisper resounded magnified a hundredfold. The night was black, and Aden a dark pit. The car put on speed. We were back at the coast—back on the boat.