Juan in China

by Eric Linklater

  Seeing that Varya and Masha were somewhat puzzled by his allusive and unnecessary periphrasis, he obligingly added, ‘Your arrangements are superb and the sausage is swell.’

  ‘Have some more vodka,’ said Masha. ‘It will not do you any harm.’

  ‘In moderation it would not,’ said Juan. ‘But what are the attractions of moderation, in beauty or anything else? You have put me in a mind for excess and extravagance, and all my thoughts are committing bigamy.’

  He rose from the bed and kissed them in turn, Masha offering her lips and very heartily responding, but Varya turning a prim though not unfriendly cheek. Anna Ivanovna grunted and left them.

  The atmosphere at once became warmer and more intimate. A new easiness informed their demeanour, as though in the minds of Masha and Varya some half-conscious doubt had been resolved, and Juan was no longer a stranger who might criticize and must be entertained, but a friend to be enjoyed. Such virtue is there in a kiss, that rather gives than takes, that throws away all the advantages of aloofness and detachment – the right to question and condemn – and by surrendering the judicial privilege of one who stands apart, wins in exchange the fellowship of the oldest conspiracy of humankind. Not only is it to sensation as a T’ang horse to the eyes or Menuhin’s violin rustling the tufts of the auditory nerve; but in significance it is like a judge who puts off his ermine to share the thirty-shilling waterproof of the prisoner in the dock. With this kiss – so must a man say – I may not wed thee, but to thine arms I yield my strength, and to the numerous beauties of thine aromatic and depilated person I surrender my wits. Judgement is mine, and individuality; but both I forfeit in respect of thine eyes, which are lambent, of the well-contrived volutes of thy hair, the anfractuosities and pneumatic pleasances of thine expedient anatomy. I renounce what is secondary in evolution, which is of the intellect and masculine, in favour of all that is primary, which is emotional, physiological, and feminine. I am, in brief, no longer thy senior and tutor, but for a little space, a specious and happy interregnum, thy postulant and suitor.

  Having thus had the courtesy and good sense to define his position, Juan was rewarded with confidence and amiability. Their curious room enclosed them, and their temporary isolation was made agreeable by their mutual interest. They could hear, muted by walls and the distance, the intermittent sounds of battle. But nobody referred to the war.

  Juan asked the twins to tell him their history, and they responded with willing but often perplexing volubility. They had been born, they said, in the city of Kazan, in the year 1912, their father having been a leather merchant in respectable circumstances. Their mother hac died within a few days of their birth, and during the first three years of their life they had been cared for by the nuns of the Bogoroditsk; Convent, to the great relief of their father, who, a man of conventional ideas, had been greatly shocked by so unexpected a sequel to what he had always regarded as a perfectly normal activity. Had he been allowed his own inclination, the sisters would have remained in the convent, where the nuns indeed were quite willing to keep them.

  Their father, however, had a brother, who was a subordinate teacher of mathematics in the university. He, whom the sisters called Uncle Georgy, was a sentimental bachelor who felt as proud of his exceptional nieces as their father was ashamed of them. Their birth had been one of two notable adventures in a life whose monotony had otherways been variegated only by ascribing, in an odd-numbered year, the quadrature of the parabola to Pythagoras, and to Archimedes when the calendar was even. His previous adventure had been a visit to London. This took place in 1895, immediately after assuring his students that beyond question it was Pythagoras who first quadrated a parabola, and his motive in undertaking so long a journey had been a passionate desire to see Lord Salisbury, for whose Conservative principles he had a great admiration.

  He was so fortunate as to see him on two occasions, and also to witness, in the Agricultural Hall at Islington, an admirable performance by Lord George Sanger and his company. By Uncle Georgy this excellent circus was taken to be part of the enlightened policy of the Conservative Party, and after several weeks of sight-seeing he returned to Kazan with unbounded respect for the way things were going in England. He became an ardent Anglophile, and having already acquired some colloquial knowledge of the language, set himself to become thoroughly acquainted with it, a project in which he succeeded with the help of Hall Caine, Mrs Humphrey Ward, Mis? Marie Corelli, and other novelists of the time whose works he assiduously studied.

  ‘So it was Uncle Georgy who taught you English?’ said Juan.

  ‘He began when we were three, after we came home from the Bogoroditski Convent,’ said Varya. ‘But he lost all his books in the Revolution, of course, when we had to go away from Kazan.’

  It was Uncle Georgy who had persuaded their father to remove them from the Convent. He adored his geminate nieces, and in childhood, indeed, their doubled prettiness must have been curiously attractive. Their father, that conventional man, had refused to flee when the Red Terror came to Kazan, and had died, it was said, in defence of a side-saddle he had just made for a Countess Orlov. But Uncle Georgy, moving with the same decision as he had shown m 1895, effected with no more trouble than might be expected the escape of the children, himself, and three valuable ikons that he sold at a vet y fair price in Vladivostok. Their journey, of course, had been long and tedious and often dangerous. They had lived for three months, on a lonely siding, in a coach that had gone off the rails and been abandonee. This was a valuable period in their lives, for having nothing else to dr they learnt a great deal of English. Uncle Georgy looked after them with tireless love, and when they came to Vladivostok he found them room where they lived very comfortably for some time on the proceeds of their ikons. Then again they were forced to flee, and found refuge in Harbin, where, eighteen months ago, Uncle Georgy had died peacefully in his sleep. Varya and Masha burst into tears when they told of finding him in the morning, with a little smile on his bloodless lips and a Tauchnitz edition of Robert Elsmere on the pillow beside him; and Juan, after considering whether it would be kinder to acquiesce in their grief or try to dispel it, decided on the latter course and persuaded them to have a little more champagne.

  Uncle Georgy had saved their lives and taught them English. They would always remember him with gratitude and great affection. But he had also, and less successfully, tried to instruct them in singing; and as his ear was defective he had launched them on the mathematical undercurrent of music, beginning, as if he had been Pythagoras himself, by teaching them the numerical proportions of the intervals in the diatonic scale. And this unfortunate introduction had had a disastrous effect on their voices.

  ‘Nobody seems to like our singing,’ said Varya sadly. ‘We haw good strong voices, but people say we do not sing in tune.’

  ‘You must let me hear you some time,’ said Juan kindly. ‘No, not now. Tell me what happened after your uncle died.’

  ‘Varya had an admirer,’ said Masha.

  ‘No, Masha! You are not to talk about that.’

  ‘Oh, come,’ said Juan. ‘A love affair, especially an unhappy love affair, is the best stuff in the world for conversation. It may happen to anyone – and so everyone is interested. Do tell me about your admirer.’

  ‘He was a scientist,’ said Masha.

  ‘Be quiet f cried Varya.

  ‘I was once in love with an ichthyologist,’ said Juan encouragingly. ‘But she always had damp clothes and I used to catch cold.’

  ‘Boganov was a physiologist,’ said Masha, ‘and he used to take our blood pressure.’

  Varya began softly to cry, and Juan, removing the tray from the bed – they had finished their meal, and there was nothing left on the plates but crumbs and heteromorphous moist fragments – sat down beside her and with an embracing arm, a caressing hand, did what he could to comfort her.

  ‘Now,’ he said to Masha, ‘tell me the whole story.’

  ‘Boganov was very good lo
oking,’ said Masha, ‘and when he first began to pay attention to Varya she was awfully well-pleased and I was terribly jealous. But then one day he came and tied something on her wrist that he called a sphygmo—, I do not remember the word.’

  ‘A sphygmomanometer,’ suggested Juan. ‘It tells you how hard your pulse is beating.’

  ‘Of course it does. That is what he put it there for. He made love to her, and looked at the sphygmo – what you said – to see how much it was measuring. Then he put it on my wrist, and made love to Varya again, to see if I also got as excited as she did.’

  ‘He did love me, all the same,’ sobbed Varya.

  ‘Certainly he did. But he was a scientist, and so had many other things to think about. He wanted Varya to have a baby, because he thought it would be interesting if I got sick as well as she did, and also wanted to make little garments. He said that someone had done experiments with rats to show that the maternal instinct could be aroused by sympathy and imitation.’

  ‘So we told him to go and make love to rats,’ said Varya, recovering some of her self-composure.

  ‘But all the same,’ said Masha, ‘he was very useful, because he introduced us to a man who had a cafe cabaret.’

  The man who had a cafe cabaret was a Mr Alzerian, of no recognizable nationality. He had seen potential value in the Sisters Karamazov, and persuading them to sign a three-years contract had found a teacher who instructed them in tap-dancing, and another who taught them some popular songs. Mr Alzerian, as it happened, was tone-deaf, and admired their singing wholeheartedly. Having thus equipped them as popular entertainers, he presented them at his cafe cabaret, where their appearance created a sensation and their duets a riot; for Uncle Georgy’s Pythagorean education, instructing them to find the right key by calculation – and they never did sums alike – had resulted in their always singing in different keys. Mr Alzerian, however, was undismayed, and staking everything on his belief that Masha and Varya were destined for fame, he had had them taught several new steps and some more songs, and then, after exploiting Harbin, had taken them on tour to Mukden, Dairen, Tientsin, and as far as Manila.

  But Mr Alzerian was an artist, and when he found that even their most emotional songs could move an audience only to laughter and this he learnt in Manila beyond hope of forgetting it – he was persuaded to transfer his contract, at a fair profit, to an entrepreneur less sensitive to ridicule. And their new manager had brought them to Shanghai.

  ‘He is a very nice man,’ said Masha. ‘He is going to take us to London and Paris some day, and he says we shall make a great deal of money. But meanwhile we have been appearing at the Continental Night Club, where we do not earn very much.’

  ‘But he is more clever than Mr Alzerian,’ said Varya. ‘He will know how to arrange things. He is a Japanese, and they are all clever.’

  ‘What is his name?’ asked Juan.

  ‘Mr Hikohoki,’ said Varya.

  Chapter 6

  Of Varya’s tears, both those called out by the story of Uncle Georgy and those more saltily evoked from memories of the scientific Boganov, there were now no traces but a few faint flaws in her maquil-lage, like raindrops dried on a bright window. She wore, indeed, an expression of some complacency, leaning against Juan’s shoulder with the air of a young queen negligent in the corner of her familiar throne. But Masha, detecting a hint of permanence in the snugness of her attitude, regarded it with restless misgiving, for she was well aware of the ease with which a habit is formed; and Juan, conscious both of Varya’s contentment and Masha’s restlessness, decided he had done his duty by the former and now owed a little courtesy to the latter. He therefore transferred himself from the right to the left-hand side of the twins, where Masha welcomed him with enthusiasm, so that his status, which had previously been diat of a throne, now more closely approximated to that of a prince consort.

  He had been surprised, but not overwhelmed with surprise, to hear of Hikohoki’s connexion with his new friends. He had been surprised, not with the emotion of Dr Livingstone when Stanley greeted him at Ujiji, but of the guest at a house-party who meets the same people with whom, in other mansions, he has spent the two previous week-ends. The surprise of encountering Hikohoki, or new evidence of his many activities, was fast becoming a familiar surprise, like the unexplained but anticipated plenishment of a Christmas stocking, or the daily pint in the widow’s cruse. Juan partially released himself from Masha’s amorous hold, and inquired, ‘Does he own this house? Hikohoki, I mean?’

  ‘No,’ said Varya. ‘I don’t think so. But he found employment here for two girls that we know.’

  ‘We used to know them in Harbin,’ Masha explained, ‘and since coming to Shanghai we have visited them. That is why, when we found there was a battle in Range Road, we thought we could take refuge here.’

  ‘In Harbin,’ said Varya, ‘they were quite respectable. They were dancing-partners at a night-club.’

  ‘They are still respectable,’ said Masha indignantly. ‘They behave themselves very nicely.’

  ‘It is not a nice thing to earn your living in a house like this.’

  But they were getting too old to be dancing-partners. They were growing fat, and they had no money, so they had to do something. You are too self-righteous, Varya.’

  ‘And you are not very dignified, to be hugging someone like that, when I am here to see you.’

  ‘Then why don’t you go to sleep, and then you would see nothing?’

  ‘Because I do not feel sleepy, thank you.’

  ‘When Boganov came to see you I always used to sleep, except when he brought his sphygmo machine.’

  ‘And how often did you open your eyes while you were sleeping?’

  ‘Well, I had to look and see if he was still there before I could wake up, didn’t I?’

  Varya, in a voice and manner that emphasized the difference between her and her sister’s understanding of polite behaviour, inquired of Juan, ‘Have you ever been married, Mr Motley?’

  ‘No,’ said Juan. ‘No, I’ve never been married.’

  ‘It must be very agreeable, if one has found the perfect partner. I, for my part, should like to be married in a cathedral.’

  ‘I don’t care where I get married,’ said Masha. ‘But I should like a nice house to live in afterwards.’

  ‘In England,’ said Varya, ‘there are many cathedrals, are there not?’

  ‘Yes, all over the place,’ Juan answered. ‘They used to build a lot of them.’

  ‘We were in a house in Manila,’ said Masha, ‘where they had a cocktail cabinet, a radio-gramophone, and a frigidaire. I should like to have things like that when I get married.’

  ‘Come and tell me about the English cathedrals, Mr Motley.’

  ‘Oh, go to sleep, Varya!’ cried Masha impatiently. ‘He was hugging you for a long time before he came to hug me. It is my turn now.’

  Varya stretched an inviting hand in front of her sister, but Masha, thrusting it away, imprisoned Juan in a firm embrace. It occurred to him that it might be advisable to prevent an open quarrel between the twins, for though he supposed they were quite firmly attached, he knew neither the precise nature nor extent of the attachment, and he became suddenly alarmed by the possibility of their being hurt, if the dispute became violent. Releasing himself as gently as possible from Masha’s embrace, he rose to open the remaining bottle of champagne.

  ‘There are times,’ he said, ‘when I prefer talking to anything else on earth, and when you consider how rapidly the art of conversation is dying – principally because most of our recent inventions, like aeroplanes and modern music and the radio, are so noisy that all one can do in their presence is to utter loud exclamations – I think you’ll admit that it’s our duty to talk as much as ever we can, in case we sink, in a social way, to the level of small dogs, who only dribble and sniff each other, and give a paw. Didn’t that pop nicely? – I wonder how the war’s getting on? – Have some champagne, Varya. Here’s your gl
ass, Masha.’

  Juan drank his own glass at a gulp, and sighed with relief. The situation was no longer quite so threatening, but both Masha and Varya wore very sulky expressions, and though momentarily quelled by his volubility, they were certainly not yet captured by his arguments. Without giving them time, therefore, to snap even once at the bone of their own contention, he continued his impromptu monologue in defence of conversation.

  ‘Take, for instance, the business of making love,’ he said. ‘No one who has studied the history of social relations can deny that the art of love-making is decadent, and its decadence is directly due to the fact that modern lovers are generally inarticulate. When girls were all tied-up like a registered parcel or a stowed topsail, their suitors would talk for hours and hours, because they couldn’t do anything else; but nowadays, when there’s no obstacle but an elastic belt and a couple of suspenders, the whole thing’s over by eleven o’clock, mainly because the poor young men are tongue-tied, and can’t do anything else. And do you think that’s progress? Of course it isn’t. It’s no more progress than flying to Paris so that you can get back to Tooting in time for dinner. In my opinion – and God knows I’m not proud, but whenever I think of other people’s opinions I’m increasingly pleased with my own – in my opinion, if a man’s in love with a girl he ought to learn, not only how to talk to her, but how to talk about her. About her eyebrows, and the shape of her nose, and the precise inflexion of her lips, and the little undulations, like moonlight on a slow river, on her companionable bottom when she goes out to powder her nose. He needn’t be afraid of having no one to talk to, because she’ll listen to that sort of conversation till the milkman comes. And why shouldn’t she? You find great oafs of men, and pinheaded splinters of men, and tedious tiresome old men, who go to infinite trouble to acquire the technicalities of golf, so that they can talk about club-faces and loft, and what they do with their hips and elbows and wrists; and they’ll have scores of equally gravel-blind and dismal companions to listen to them. Well then; do you mean to suggest that the face of a beautiful woman isn’t more interesting than the face of a Number Two iron? Is anyone so totally bereft of reason as to think that the hips of some scrawny old medal-winner, or the disgusting forearms of a hulking baffy-addict, are more engaging than the corresponding parts of a girl so lovely that daffodils look dowdy beside her? But where’s the golfer who could describe her movement, the beauty of her stillness, the little lofting of her up, with the minute particularity he would use in discussing his favourite chip-shot? There isn’t one. And isn’t that an insult to women, and a sign of the degeneracy of men as well as of conversation? I give it you as an absolute fact – and St John is with me in this – that you can’t make love properly, because you don’t realize what love is, until you have put your feelings into words. St John’s support of this apparently rash statement may be found in the sentence: “In the beginning was the word.” Words are the beginning of everything. Primitive man could hardly tell the difference between such various and fundamental matters as hunger, love, death, and a rainy day, till someone had invented names for them. All he realized was that the inherent discomforts of life sometimes made themselves evident in one part of his body, sometimes in another, and sometimes all over. And that’s by no means an adequate appreciation either of love or a shower of rain, though it’s what we’re returning to unless our golfers take a pull at themselves and learn a few more words than “birdie” and “windcheater” and “God blast that bloody foursome in front of us!” I’m a feminist – I say it with as little apology as a Quaker would use in declaring himself a pacifist – and it grieves me to think that women, in spite of their so-called emancipation, are probably worse off to-day than they were in Elizabethan times, when their lovers prefaced every caress with a sonnet. They weren’t always good sonnets, but at least they were an indication that the young man had studied the appearance of his young woman and tried to analyse the emotions she roused in him; which was flattering to her. Anyone, moreover, who has taken the trouble to compose fourteen pentameters on half a dozen rhymes is going to stick around the fair recipient of his verses a good deal more closely than the casual donor of a couple of cocktails; and that’s the difference between a proper love affair and half an hour’s untidiness on the sofa. Of course you may object that an Elizabethan sonnet wouldn’t cut much ice to-day, because the figures of speech are out of date – summer’s honey breath, for example, largely consists of carbon monoxide, and directional wireless is much more useful than a star to every wandering bark – but we must cut our metaphors according to our cloth, and I daresay a really ingenious wooer could make quite a good impression by comparing his lover’s brow to a radiator, her legs to cylinders, and her bosom to a graph of commodity prices in America before and after the slump, with a pretty reference to the rosy hue of 1929. At any rate the principle is clear, and what we need to-day is a more ample vocabulary, a greater fluency of speech, and such an exact understanding of things as can only be acquired by talking about them in a precise, accurate, and spacious manner, and going to as much trouble to give the proper words to the component parts of emotion and the innumerable articulations of thought as golfers do in describing their unnatural attitude on a tee. Let us once again conscribe verbosity in the service of love, and remember that when Ben Jonson said, “There goes more to matrimony than four bare legs in bed,” he spoke a granary of wisdom in a single grain; and what he meant was that every young husband should study a first-rate dictionary so as to acquire a plenitude of good words with which to adorn his pillow-conversation, and above all to equip himself for capacious, vivacious, but not necessarily veracious discussion of that which will be of perennial interest to the wife of his bosom, which is to say her own person and personality.’