The Polyglots (17 page)

I thought of the nuisance of having them in our crowded flat, and advised against it.

At dinner Aunt Teresa questioned Beastly as to Uncle Lucy.

‘Well, I’ve seen him,’ he said.

‘You’ve seen my brother, Lucy?’ she asked excitedly.

‘I’ve seen him.’

‘Well?’

‘He’s a queer fish,’ he said, ‘and no mistake, your brother Lucy!’

Major Beastly had had a heart-to-heart talk with Aunt Molly, from which indeed it seemed that Uncle Lucy was a ‘queer fish’. His father—so Aunt Molly said—had charged him on his death-bed to look after the remaining family. That death-bed scene seemed to have so impressed itself on Uncle Lucy’s mind that ever since—according to Aunt Molly—he had neglected his own family. All the money he had made he would be sending to his sisters, and when his children were born and Aunt Molly wanted nurses, Uncle Lucy said he didn’t believe in nurses. And when the children grew up and she wanted money for their schooling, Uncle Lucy, in withholding the necessary funds, declared that, with Tolstoy, he didn’t believe in schooling. And when the time arrived for deciding on their future callings and professions, Uncle Lucy said he didn’t believe in callings and professions. Till one day, with the eighth or ninth offspring, Aunt Molly kicked over the fence and managed the estate herself as best she could. Meanwhile, their number had been swelling, and when after having the family group taken at the photographer’s they all marched home through the town garden, Uncle Lucy looked as though he were a guide conducting a crowd of sightseeing tourists through the city grounds, and the family, except the very young ones, felt constrained. But Uncle Lucy’s interest in them was not especially marked, and he would ask the same young daughter as each day he walked a portion of the way to school with her what class she was in.

‘But what about our money?’ interrupted Aunt Teresa.

‘Oh yes. He said that, with Tolstoy, he didn’t believe in money.’

‘That’s nice!’

‘I tried to tackle him. But he said that in his house the subject was taboo.’

Next morning, being the fourth day since he last performed the operation, Major Beastly made a
stink
. Uncle Emmanuel at once lit a cigar, but said nothing. In the dining-room Vladislav shook
his head. ‘Enough to make you carry out the saints. In France,’ he added, ‘such a thing would not be allowed in a decent home.’

Berthe did not mind Beastly’s
stinks
now. ‘He has a tender skin—
il a la peau sensible
,’ she would say, ‘which can’t stand the touch of the blade.’ She confessed to me that she even rather liked his nostrils: there was something very frank, almost touching—
n’est-ce pas
?—about their vertical position, something that oddly reminded you of a dog who, at the command ‘Beg!’, displays himself before you in an unfamiliar pose.

Nevertheless, I thought the time had come to remonstrate with Beastly.

‘I have a perfect right to shave as I like,’ he rejoined.

‘A man’s rights are limited,’ I observed. ‘He has no right to make a
stink
, for instance, unless he be in a desert, alone with God.’

But nothing would shatter his faith in the soundness of his apparatus, and the same day, at tea, he turned to Captain Negodyaev with the offer to make use of his ‘preparat.’

‘Get some of that yellow moss off your face,’ he advised.

‘Thank you, I rarely shave,’ said Captain Negodyaev. ‘I just powder my chin, it’s quite sufficient.’

Beastly suggested Aunt Teresa trying his ‘preparat’ on her own tender lip with a view to removing, as he put it, ‘that moustachio of yours’. But Aunt Teresa’s verdict was that Berthe should try it first. If Berthe came out of it without undue disfigurement, Aunt Teresa would feel justified in applying the method on her own lip and chin.

Towards evening Captain Negodyaev would be looking like a frightened rat. Having served under conflicting governments, he was afraid of persecution, and late at night he used to come into my bedroom and talk mysteriously of Red reprisals on White officers and of White reprisals on officers who, like himself, at one time or another had been forced to serve under a Pink régime. He would sit with me and talk for hours into the night, till the pale dawn mocked our yellow light.

THE PERIOD OF ENGAGEMENT, AS ALL WHO’VE BEEN engaged will know, is a period of transition, not wholly satisfactory. To please my august aunt, each day, for hours at a stretch, we sat in the drawing-room, where Aunt Teresa did her crochet work, I holding Sylvia by the hand; at long intervals exchanging silent looks of tenderness and passion—just as Anatole had done before his end, and Uncle Emmanuel himself in the sentimental days of his engagement to my aunt: when she let drop her head upon his martial shoulder. But my efforts did not meet with the approval they deserved: to Aunt Teresa, in the after light of her own romantic days, I did not seem affectionate enough, nor did she think her daughter adequately tender and responsive, and criticized my fiancée’s dislike of these prolonged and silent attitudes, while Sylvia entreated: ‘Darling, don’t be soppy!’ Aunt Teresa now went out with us (her health permitting, and when it did not so permit, objected to our going out at all). She did not like to leave us by ourselves, though we were cousins, and had been alone no end of times before we were engaged. And we were bored with her, bored with each other, and bored with ourselves. When left alone, after she had gone to bed, for want of something better, we kissed. It was as if, all of a sudden, we had lost our former faculty for making conversation. I sighed. Sylvia sighed. ‘I wish,’ I said, ‘your mother would hurry up with our wedding.’

She thought a little, wondering what she could say.

‘You are very naughty, darling,’ she rejoined.

Sylvia liked to be kissed in short kisses.

‘But don’t you like long kisses, darling?’

‘I can’t breathe, darling, when they’re too long; but I can breathe between each short kiss, if you know what I mean, and you can go on and on and on.’

I gave her a ring on which I had had engraved the message:
Set me as a seal upon thine heart
.

IT WAS THE END OF SUMMER, AND THE RAINS HAD set in. A dark gloomy morning, the electric light burning as though it were evening. At last came the ring at the bell.

Mme Negodyaev, a crumpled lady with a face as though someone had once inadvertently stepped on it, held by the hand a smaller form with a pallid face framed in fair locks, and thin, thin legs. And to all questions Natàsha shrugged her shoulders. When I watched her drinking tea I noticed her faint finely drawn brow. And sitting at table among the grown-ups, sunk low in the chair and her chin not very far removed from the edge of the table, with a look of gravity on her face, she looked like a miniature reproduction of a human being. On board the boat that brought them she had played with English children, and Mme Negodyaev recounted, with pride in her face, that Natàsha could now already speak English. When she did so she spoke of ‘my friends’, ‘my uncle’, ‘my grandmama’. I asked her about the Bolsheviks in Novorossiisk. ‘Bolsheviks? What’s it means Bolsheviks?’ She shrugged her shoulders. ‘Only lot of dirty mens in the street.’

I laughed at that. She laughed back—into the cup of tea, creating a little storm in the tea-cup. ‘But I have lots and lots of my friends there. And my sister and my uncle and my grandmama. Ah! and I have left in Rush-ya my little kitchen—such a beauty thing—and plates my grandmama given me, lots and lots of plates and cups—such a lovely! Ah! such-such pity! Such, such
such
-such pity!’

Tired after the journey, supper over, she was at once put to bed. In her striped flannel nightgown, a slim little figure, she knelt up in bed and, looking towards the ikon of Nicholas the Miracle-worker which her mother had already unpacked and hung up in the corner, she closed her eyes, her thin palms together, and prayed: ‘Dear Little God, pity our poor Russia.’

This over, her father and mother rejoined us in the drawing-room. I watched Mme Negodyaev’s face as she talked. It was a face by courtesy only. ‘My heart aches for poor Màsha,’ she was saying. ‘Hers is a hard life, for Ippolit is so strange. I have felt sorry for Màsha ever since the wedding day, when Ippolit began worrying me over the dowry, which he thought insufficient. I said to myself: “If that’s what he is like now, what will he be like after?” And the very night after they had been married, Ippolit went out to the café by himself and sat there till early morning, drinking and playing cards. He soon took up another woman, and would go away with her for weeks on end. This Màsha tried to forgive him, because she loved him. He bought expensive presents for that woman with Màsha’s own money, but she never said a word, because she loved him. Finally, he began bringing her to our house and, in fact, to Màsha’s bedroom. All this, too, Màsha tried to endure, for she loved him very,
very
much. But when they left—Ippolit and the woman—they broke into the cabinet and took away the portfolio with all our ready money. Both Màsha and I don’t think it was very nice of them to do that after all we’ve done for them; do you?’

I agreed. In fact, I was more emphatic; I said that indeed it wasn’t
at all
nice.

In the morning Natàsha talked a great deal of what she had done in ‘Rush-ya’, as she pronounced that word. She spoke of Màsha with a sigh.

‘And Ippolit?’ I asked.

‘Nasty mans,’ she replied.

At once Natàsha became a great favourite with everybody. Even with the shopmen round about—even Vladislav, who rarely approved of anything that did not emanate from Paris. All day long she sang a sad, sad song of a strong Slavonic flavour that, however, seemed an improvisation, for it had no recognizable melody, though lots and lots of feeling. And as she was a little dull without toys she would come up to me and plead: ‘
Play
with me; oh,
play
with me!’ Or she would steal up from behind, cover your eyes with her cool slender hands and ask: ‘Guess! Guess! Who
is it?’ And she would wrinkle her nose as she laughed straight from the heart, upon recognition, a gurgling, bubbling laugh. Or she would come in sucking a caramel, her bright sea-green eyes sparkling, and command: ‘Shut your eyes and open your mouth!’ She scrambled up to my attic, where I was in the habit of doing my literary work, and overtook me kissing Sylvia’s photograph. ‘Oh, my darling! Oh, my sweetheart!’ I whispered. Natàsha looked on, issuing a long gurgling sound of delight—‘gug-g-g-g-g’—like a pigeon.

‘Do you recognize the portrait?’

‘Oh! how beauty! Oh! what a lovely!’ she exclaimed.

‘And your own photo?’ I asked. ‘Is that beautiful too?’

Natàsha shrugged her shoulders.

‘Mr. Georges!’ she said whimsically. ‘Mr. Georges!’

‘Yes?’

‘Play with me; oh,
play
with me.’

‘I am busy.’

‘Oh, Uncle Georgie,’ she said, pulling me by the hand, ‘I love you. I love you, Uncle Georgie. Because you are so funny!’

Natàsha wrote little stories in Russian about a little boy Vanya who went to school and another little boy Petya who also went to school, but nothing beyond going to school seemed to happen to them, and the stories were all inconclusive. She also wrote a sad little poem about a child looking at the stars and thinking of God; and another of her mother (the woman who looked as though someone had inadvertently stepped on her face) whose great beauty she extolled and compared with a swan’s. Natàsha had two baby goats given her for her birthday by a neighbouring farmer—one of which she called ‘Bobby’ and the other ‘Beauty’.

Now and then Captain Negodyaev suffered from an acute attack of persecution mania, when, often in the middle of the night, he would bid his wife and child get up and dress in readiness for flight at a moment’s notice. And they would sit there, all dressed up, in their furs and overcoats and hats and muffs and warm goloshes, in the heated drawing-room, Mme Negodyaev looking
as if somebody had hit her suddenly between the ears with an umbrella, and she could not quite reconcile the fact with what had taken place immediately before. But Natàsha seemed to take it all for granted. With her parasol in her gloved hands, she would sit there, grave and quiet, one hour, two—until at last he would declare the danger over and send them back to bed.

These incidents, which were recurrent, would always cause my aunt
une crise de nerfs
.

THE PREPARATIONS FOR OUR WEDDING WERE COMPLETE, and cards had been sent out, when one November morning I was wakened ruthlessly by Vladislav at six o’clock (for usually they waken me with deference by first enquiring: ‘Did you go to bed early last night?’) and told by him, ‘Your uncle has arrived and is waiting for you.’

‘Which uncle? Where? What? Why?’

In the adjoining dining-room, Uncle Lucy was pacing the floor up and down excitedly.

I began to dress hurriedly as Vladislav withdrew, but as luck would have it I couldn’t find a vest; while there were drawers innumerable in the drawer. From the dining-room came Uncle Lucy’s low voice to Vladislav:

‘Quick. Quick. Quick. No time to waste.’

I pulled open all the drawers. The third drawer—all drawers, no vest. Why is it that when you look for a pair of drawers you always find another couple of vests instead? and when you look for a vest you can find only drawers? I do not know why it is so: I only know that it is so. It is a minor mystery of which the solution apparently (as of the major mystery of the hereafter) is not yet. But
it damps my spirit, and I acquire a foreboding—which is ascribed sometimes to Thomas Hardy—of a relentless, wicked, mocking and malicious Providence.

Uncle Lucy’s voice came through the closed door: ‘Quick. Quick. Quick,’ and I could fancy him pacing to and fro like a pendulum, with his hands behind his back.

‘Your uncle, your uncle is waiting for you,’ Vladislav came in again.

‘Send at once for Mlle Berthe.’