The Polyglots

by William Gerhardie

  In the midst of the Red Sea, Sylvia dreamt of how nice it would be to go on a beautiful voyage together.

  ‘Darling, even in dreams one should observe a certain measure of reality. What is the use of dreaming of future voyages now? We’re in the midst of one and—and it isn’t that we like it awfully.’

  ‘You’re only making a convenience of me.’

  ‘An inconvenience.’

  ‘Kiss me; you never kiss me now.’

  ‘A kiss today, a kiss tomorrow. How it doesn’t tire you!’

  ‘You have got up with the wrong leg this morning, darling.’

  ‘Very likely. Very likely. Captain Negodyaev has borrowed £7 from me this morning.’ I looked into my pocket-book to see what was still there, and suddenly I came across a card with—

  Some day our eyes shall see

  The face we love so well,

  Some day our hands shall clasp,

  And never say ‘Farewell.’

  ‘What is it, darling, let me see?’

  ‘Ah, that was a beautiful evening.’

  ‘It was. Better than any we have had since.’

  ‘It was.’

  ‘But, darling, what will happen to us next when we get back to Europe? Have you thought of it?’

  I sighed. ‘There are in life such concatenations of circumstances when you neither know nor care what happens next or next after.’

  ‘But I want to know.’

  ‘Exactly. I notice, with regret, the same morbid and unhealthy appetite in the readers of novels. How do I know? There is no end to life except death—and so when this boat of ours reaches the shores of England it will merely mark the end of a particular group phase in our individual existence.’

  ‘You speak to me like a teacher,’ she complained.

  ‘I favour a mild measure of uncertainty as regards the future.’

  ‘Gustave,’ she said—and was silent.

  ‘The extradition of Gustave may prove to be a costly business.’

  ‘No. When I get to London I shall go to see my solicitor,’ she said, ‘to arrange a divorce immediately.’

  ‘On what grounds?’

  She thought a while. ‘Desertion.’

  ‘Oh!’

  ‘Restitution of conjugal rights,’ she said knowingly.

  ‘Why divorce? He’s a good man.’

  ‘But I want to marry you.’

  ‘He might die,’ I said, ‘of hydrophobia. Wait and see.’

  ‘How long?’

  ‘Perhaps not very long. All is in the hands of God—and Aunt Teresa.’

  She paused, thoughtful.

  ‘If you go on loving me, and I go on loving you—what else do we want?’

  ‘Oh, that’s all right, we shall go on and on and on!’

  She cooed like a dove.

  From Port Said, Sylvia, Uncle Emmanuel and I set out for Cairo. On the platform at the station I saw Wells’s First and Last Things and bought it.

  ‘Buy me a Daily Mail, darling,’ said Sylvia.

  The hot, weary journey. Restaurant-car like anywhere else, but Arab waiters in red fezes. The head waiter, whose conception of the lunch seemed to be to get it over in order to begin the second lunch, and to get that over in order to get over the third lunch, exhorted us to take our places, and the waiters, urged on by the head waiter, rushed us through our meal. The man next to me winked one eye at me. ‘They don’t ’arf chuck it at yer!’ he remarked; thus, in a second, wafting us to the Thames-side from where he sprang. But we looked out of the window at the whirling fields of Egypt: a white-robed Arab leading a donkey, a dusky young woman flashed by. On, on, and on.

  Cairo at last. We stepped into the victoria and drove off, my knees touching Sylvia’s as I sat on the little seat, facing her. Why had she bought that hideous hat, which was like a helmet, covering wholly the upper portion of her face which was entirely lovely, and revealing but the lower part which was less lovely? And sitting there, I thought, as the carriage wafted us out of the station confines into the splendours of the city, that I shouldn’t have overtipped the Arab porter as I did. But then I could not very well have asked for change with Sylvia and Uncle waiting for me in the carriage. So there you are, and as we drove along I had to make the best of it. Still, why that hat?

  ‘Darling, why that hat?’

  ‘Eighty-seven rupees,’ she said. ‘Besides, it protects against sunstroke.’

  There was a pause. The still angel winged by.

  ‘Poor Natàsha.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why didn’t I bring my uniform? We ought to have called on Lord Allenby,’ observed Uncle Emmanuel.

  Sun-scorched houses, shuttered windows, elegant victorias, red-fezed coachmen. But, withal, distrust verging on hostility. And when we set out, on camels and dromedaries, to see the Sphinx and the pyramids, the look upon my driver’s face was a dark leer, foreboding the rebellion of the Moslem world, and Uncle Emmanuel, balancing himself upon the dromedary’s hump, looked small and frightened, while the white-robed Arabs all the way along kept yelling for ‘Backshish! Backshish!’ or selling us, at intervals, Egyptian coins dating back to 2,000 years B.C. (actually manufactured by an enterprising firm in Sheffield for the benefit of unsuspecting tourists).

  But the failure to fall in with the driver’s offer to backshish him or to buy his coins always meant his giving the dromedary a vicious whack with his big stick which sent the animal a-cantering in a most unpleasant fashion, so that Uncle Emmanuel from the uneasy vantage of the hump, exclaimed: ‘Cessez! Ah! Voyons donc!’ in anguished protest.

  ‘Backshish!’ cried the Arab.

  ‘No!’

  And he whacked the animal again, so that my uncle found it difficult to keep his balance on the hump, which pitched and tossed like the mast of a small schooner in a heavy sea. Arrived at the foot of the pyramids, two Arabs climbed to the top in less than three minutes, and then demanded a backshish. Backshished, they offered to repeat the feat provided we backshished them all over again.

  The Sphinx—what did he think of it all? For, contrary to tradition, the Sphinx, I insist, is male. He was right: life was terrible. He knew that talking, writing, even at its best, was prating. To make a statement, unless it be safeguarded by a thousand definitions (when it were better it had not been made at all), is to prate. To state is to ignore. To maintain a position is to maintain a false position. To maintain no position is to negate existence. To assert is to give oneself the lie. To cease asserting is to give the lie to other men’s assertions—the sanction to that lie. To know, to know all, would mean to be silent; indeed, what is there in the world to do for such as he? Will you have him explain that things are and are not; that we have a will and have not; that we change and change not? There are moments when one feels uncertain about everything, even the essential, fundamental things of life; when one gropes in the darkness waiting for the light to return; when all is transient, vague, unfounded, casual, one’s soul not worth expressing; when every phrase seems arbitrary, every page a string of sentences beginning with ‘perhaps’. It is as if one trod upon an empty world, an atmosphere of void, a universe of nothing. Hush! if the whole world be unreal, by what standard, what undying reality is it so? If we are to be dead for all time, by what living truth is it to be?

  Arrived back from where we had started, the Arab drivers demanded more backshish. We refused—and they cursed our children and our children’s children into the seventh generation.

  Next day we went by motor to the splendid Cairo suburb Heliopolis—the Monte Carlo of the East. How luxurious and for the most part how vain. A faint melancholy summer day was nearing to its close, and there was that other feeling that … a little more, and it would all be over. In the evening we sat in the park, along with others, round in a circle. The flower beds are so symmetrical, so neatly laid out. We watch the flower beds, we watch our sticks and parasols. How dull and how senseless. Among other things, the mosquitoes are biting through the socks atrociousl
y. I think: as days gone by have crumbled into dust beneath my feet, so my future days will crumble—give them time; and the unmeaning present, poising, pale, in the abyss, shall fall—and be no more. I felt sorry for Sylvia and for myself, and for the Arabs, over whom we had come—God knows why—to exercise a perennial fatherly control, and even for the simple-minded, cheerful, military brass-hats who were making asses of themselves. Their band played absurd music in the hot, stifling, melancholy air. One sat and drank against the all-invading heat. And life passed, and one hardly minded its passing.

  At night, when we walked down the dormant Cairo streets, harlots called after us from the balconies, enticing us to come up, and Uncle Emmanuel waved his hand to them. Sylvia in bed, my uncle insisted on my seeing the kan-kan, the danse du ventre, the big black man, and the rest of it. Perhaps I am too much of a puritan, but the sight of the nude Arab woman kan-kaning was enough for me.

  ‘Let us go home.’

  ‘Ah, c’est la vie!’

  And walking home, through the stifling night, all the time there was that feeling that … a little more of this, and we shall go forth into more bleak, more real experiences.

  When we came back from Cairo we found the General with the mad eyes, who had not been allowed on shore, wearily strolling about the deck in his sweat-eaten canvas shoes, like a cat on a deserted raft. He would, he decided, go on to Gibraltar and thence, through Spain, to Italy. We found a cable for us from Gustave, who confirmed Uncle Emmanuel’s appointment as Member of the Dixmude Municipal Films Censorship Committee, with a salary of 300 francs per mensem.

  On Friday morning we left Port Said—the gate into Europe—and passed into the astounding deep blue of the Mediterranean Sea. In the quiet blue waters Beastly had risen, and Berthe and he were standing a good deal together at the rail. But I do not think that anything came of it. At Gibraltar a white motor-boat flying the naval ensign came up cutting the water, with two white-capped sailors standing up at the stern and three naval officers inside in white flannels and white-topped caps. They asked for ‘General Pokhitonoff’, and left word that he should not be allowed on shore.

  Henceforth the General could not make up his mind whether he should go on to Sicily, France, Czecho-Slovakia, Germany, or England. With Gibraltar—across was scorching Africa—the Mediterranean blue was left behind, and the tropical green of the Indian Ocean with Natàsha in it was long out of sight, out of call. No sooner had we turned the ‘corner’ and plunged into the Bay of Biscay than we began to feel the difference. Suddenly it had become cold. We paced the deck in our overcoats. There was the drizzling rain. Then Percy Beastly, as though nothing was the matter with him, walked quickly to his bunk.

  ‘Sylvia wants to have the fancy-dress ball tonight,’ Aunt Teresa observed to me. ‘But I hear the Captain is against it—it being Sunday.’

  ‘That is no reason.

  ‘Of course, it’s too rough.’

  ‘That too is no reason.’ Had they forgotten, so soon forgotten, my little friend?

  ‘The Chaplain is also against having it on a Sunday.’

  ‘If there is a reasonable God in heaven’—and I already felt her shrinking from what she felt to be a coming piece of blasphemy—‘if there is a reasonable God in heaven, He won’t care tuppence if you dance on Sunday or if you don’t.’

  ‘That is so,’ she agreed; and suddenly a cynical look came into her eyes. ‘But if He is unreasonable?’ Her face twitched, her charming powdered nose wrinkled with a touch of devilry; she seemed both frightened lest she should be blaspheming and proud of her original cynicism, as if to say, ‘I can do as well as any, if I want to.’ But the next moment the fear of blaspheming outweighed the other impulse. ‘We ought not to say these things’; adding, after a pause of reflection, ‘And particularly now we’re at sea.’

  Instinctively we both looked at the gathering clouds. The sun had sunk; the waves were getting very black. Twilight at sea! What sadness. I remembered that these things come like bolts from the sky. You come home and find your uncle hanging in the dark-room. Or you wake up to find a child had died at sea. ‘We ought to be at the service, instead of talking like that.’ Away in the saloon, they paid homage and thanks to their Lord. The evening service was nearing to its end, and the hymn resounded, dim and melancholy, through closed doors.

  Abide with me; fast falls the eventide;

  The darkness deepens; Lord, with me abide.

  It was dusk. The sea raged without abating. What was intolerable was that it would evidently go on raging as long as it pleased. It showed no sign of abating with the second, the third, or tenth surge. The waves began, not at the shore, but somewhere in the middle of the Bay, gathering momentum, till they rose in mountains and broke over us, leaving deep yawning gaps that threatened to swallow us. This fury of inanimate nature let loose is awful because it behaves with an unmeaning mercilessness just as if we were not there—as it did before man had stepped out of the slime to try and bridle it. So the waves must have raged when this earth was one ocean. Why this wrath? The inanimate taking on the mood of an animate being; the ocean crouching at you like a tiger. What did it want from us? ‘Ah, he is terrible, the ocean!’ Uncle Emmanuel said, as, after dinner, in the falling dusk, we stood in our overcoats, clenching at the rail and watching the approach of the surges. The waves, like fierce white-maned horses, galloping from afar, crashed down upon us and rushed past without cease, and their flying manes sent a chill through our hearts as, tearing, swelling with rage, they came on.

  I turned in. Aunt Molly sick, Sylvia sick, Berthe sick, Harry sick, Nora sick. Nor was my commission, be it remembered, a naval one. The dark turbulent mass will not rest in the night; the spray splashed at the glass, as I sat on the rocking seat at the rocking desk in the writing-room and coped with my diary.

  I wrote:

  Her prime young loveliness, swift grace, her springtide brightness—it was not for long.—No matter. Her true being was not in that but in her shining star, a light for ever, now dipped into new worlds.

  My thoughts drifted. In years to come she would have been an exquisite young girl. The answer, it may be, to my yearning being. Perhaps—I saw it half-foreshadowed across the cheated years—my one true love. Dreams! Life itself has died with her, and beauty with it, and all the promise of all beings yet to be born.

  The sea swept on heedless of everything. I wrote—I dozed off. I dreamt that I was at Liverpool Street Station, just stepping on the moving stairs and going up to the street level—the way out. The stairs of transcendence; the unchanging spirit of movement and change: if we can get a foot on to this moving staircase, we go towards new wonders without end. And suddenly I saw Natàsha sitting on the step holding fast with both hands, wonder and delight writ in her shining eyes. And a few steps behind sat Anatole, in Belgian uniform, with boots soiled by the mud of Flanders, happy, debonair, waving the national colours, and shouting: ‘Vive la Belgique!’ And then behind him, at a little distance, Uncle Lucy, taciturn and unresponding, in the knickers and the boudoir cap. All racing up—up—up to heaven. Past and past they went, past the street level, past the ‘way out’. For there is no way out as there is no way in: for all is life and there is nothing to get out into.

  ‘Time, sir!’

  I opened my eyes. The steward had come to put out the lights in the writing-room. ‘Of course. Of course.’ I rubbed my eyes. From outside came the melancholy chant of the surges, and the uneven beat—as though of a contrite heart—of the piston rod. Here they still push and shuffle, I thought, and get into one another’s way in the corridors, or some try to run up the stairs, press forward, fall off—irreligious dullards!—when all they need do is to get on and keep still. To escape from this sheer restlessness, to get an abiding place in the eternal newness of the world!

  As the saloon doors leading out on deck were always shut before this hour I was surprised to see them open. But when I spied my aunt crouching in a deck-chair I was not astonished. For one who had
carried clean off her officer-husband in the midst of a great war; who had induced her daughter to break with her lover and marry clean against her will; who on the bridal night had sent the bridegroom home to his solitary bed, and sailed away with his young wife: for a woman who had done these things without forfeiting the least good will, to break the routine regulations of a ship was, I suppose, little more than a routine. I looked at her sitting there, all shrivelled up, crouching, gasping for air. But I was not a little frightened lest she be sick, and the pretty sight of it provoke my own sensitive entrails; so I had no sympathy to waste on her condition.

  She looked at me darkly. ‘Where is Berthe? Here am I, ill and faint and quite alone! Oh, my God! where is she?’

  ‘She’s with Percy. He is indisposed. It’s the sea.’

  ‘Ah! but this is extraordinary! He is a man! and I am a woman, a poor invalid! and I have no one to attend on me!’

  With expiatory gestures I mimicked back at her thus: ‘!!! Que voulez-vous?’

  The ocean still rolled its angry surges. As far as the eye could see it was black night. I paced up and down like a captain on the bridge, on guard—against what? These lines from Goethe:

  Was, von Menschen nicht gewusst

  Oder nicht bedacht,

  Durch das Labyrinth der Brust

  Wandelt in der Nacht

  came into my mind.

  I do not want to sadden you with pessimism; nevertheless it looks—it very much looks, Uncle Emmanuel’s salary as Member of the Dixmude Municipal Films Censorship Committee being a paltry one—as though my royalties on this forthcoming book would be the sole support of Aunt Teresa and her retinue. A sad look-out for an intellectual! Before I left Harbin in the sunshine, my pocket-book was bulging with bank-notes of a high denomination; now after being fleeced and drained by my relations I am again as poor as a curate. I have an insane desire to sneak down the gangway as the boat touches the quay of Southampton, and only let them see my heels.