The Polyglots (18 page)

‘Yes, sir,’ he said, and retired.

The reader may think I am unreasonable. But I can assure him (this book is not intended for women) that only last night the chest of drawers was full of vests—and not a pair of drawers in the neighbourhood.

‘Berthe!’ I exclaimed with the utmost demonstrativeness as she came in. ‘How ridiculous! A drawer full of drawers—and not a vest.’ The extent of my anger can be gauged when I say I felt that if I murdered Berthe the jury would acquit me and that I’d murder the jury if they did not. She looked at me blankly.

‘Don’t stand there like that, looking like Buddha.’ This may have been a little rough. But I felt it.

She looked at me askance, and could not decide whether to be offended or not. The fact of the matter was she did not know what Buddha looked like. And I had forgotten.

‘I may not be as handsome as some women,’ she retorted, evidently offended, ‘but, then, neither are you a beauty.’

Strange. What am I to make of it? Even while Berthe was in the room I glanced at the looking-glass: the effect was quite pleasing.

‘Getting me up at this time of the morning,’ she said. There was a slight note of peevishness in her voice which annoyed me.

‘My uncle’s waiting for me,’ I said.

‘And I’ll tell your uncle!’

‘Where’s my vest?’ I cried out in despair.

But Berthe is not a Latin for nothing. Before I could get a word in, she tore away—trr-trr-trr—unloosing torrents of
recrimination, the brunt of which was: ‘What have I to do with your
caleçons
?’

‘Vests!’ I cried madly, ‘not
caleçons
. Vests!
vests
! I’ve a cupboardful of
caleçons
.’

‘You have your man Pickup! You’ve Vladislav! While I’m only a woman!’ she cried.

Perfectly so. I have Pickup. Vladislav is Captain Negodyaev’s servant, but partly under my orders. Yet by some mysterious unwritten law Berthe rules over the laundry of the household. Besides, I do not like finding fault with my man, who is a soldier more than a servant. How like a woman to ignore the very circumstance by which she profits. ‘Trr-trr-trr-trr——’ She tore away, on and on and on, in floods of angry verbosity against which my French, I realized, was helpless. My French is rather like my piano playing—grandiose in conception but just a little blurred in execution. I slide over technicalities of grammar, I mix up cases and tenses, but on top of it all I put on a sort of dare-devil
Parisian
twist and make up for occasional inaccuracies by a really blinding speed. I make French people sit up. But my tactics proved of small avail in my dialectic duel with Berthe. When I was a child, a governess, Mlle Jardelle, would teach us French by insisting on our saying ‘
Passez-moi le sel, s’il vous plaît
’ at table, or doing without it. I like to think that at that time my French was fluent; but I doubt it. In a crisis it deserts me, and I can only cry ‘
Enfin! enfin!
’ And hard up for an effective repartee, I utter: ‘
Sacrebleu
!’

‘
Enfin
!’ she cried. ‘I’m alone for the whole house. None of you do anything. Your servants do nothing.’

‘I favour,’ I said, ‘a mild state of Bolshevism in the household.’

‘Nobody does anything. Your aunt is a
malade imaginaire;
whines all day long.
Cet idiot de capitaine russe
only dresses and undresses, and gets his family into a funk. You are only thinking of your
caleçons——
’

‘Oh, damn
les caleçons
.’

‘Only me for the whole house,’ she wailed, and off she tore—trr-trr-trr—on and on and on and on.

‘I see now I ought to have done you in when I felt like it,’ I said quietly.

‘
À quoi bon?
You would be guillotined.’

‘The jury would acquit me.’

‘I’d like to see it!’ she said, with savage glee.

‘Look here, Berthe,’ I said, making an effort to be serious and reasonable, ‘I am an intellectual, an idealist. I am pained by conduct which falls short of my ideal.’

‘Yes, you have such ideas, Georges.’

I shrugged my shoulders. ‘I am afraid, Berthe, your philology has been neglected.
Ideal
is not quite the same as
idea
, you know.’

‘
À quoi bon? Enfin
,’ she said, ‘I am alone for the whole house. You all sit all day long, no one does anything.’

‘Berthe, my uncle is waiting.’

Dressed at last—without a vest, without even pencilling my brows that morning—I dashed out of the room.

IN THE DINING-ROOM, STANDING STILL FOR A WHILE, was Uncle Lucy, a spectacled individual with a modest sandy moustache and a small pointed beard. He was pale; the only colour in his face was in his nose. ‘Quick. Quick. Quick,’ he said, ‘no time to waste.’ He explained that his family who had arrived late in the night were now at the hotel—all the lot of them quartered in three bedrooms, that the hotel was full to overflowing, and ruinous, and asked if he could bring them all over to our flat.

‘But, uncle, we have scarcely any beds,’ I said, with dismay.

He waved his hand—a gesture which reminded me of his sister Teresa. ‘Anything will do,’ he said. ‘We can all sleep on the floor. Plenty of room’—he pointed round at the skirting. ‘Times are different. Come on.’

‘But wait, have some coffee first, Uncle.’

‘No time to waste. Quick. Quick. Quick,’ he said.

The clock on the shelf had just struck half-past six. We helped each other on with our coats, and went out into the street.

At the corner of the street we hailed a cab and drove on to the hotel in the cold early morning air which bit at my ears. My uncle, I noticed, had large hairy ears, and did not turn up his collar. Uncle Lucy was very deaf, and hating to ask me to repeat my questions, replied on the off-chance, or not hearing my answers, nodded and meditated upon them. Before we alighted at the porch of the hotel, Uncle Lucy remarked that the whole back of my British warm had been besmeared with tar by my leaning against the back of the seat, and my uncle became very worried and apologetic as though it had been his fault. ‘A little soap and benzine,’ he said. ‘I’ll get it out for you with soap and benzine when we get back.’ Uncle Lucy kept looking worried and taking another look at my soiled British warm and saying ‘Soap and benzine,’ but I only thought that sitting there without a vest I might catch cold, develop pneumonia, and finally die altogether. He insisted on paying for the cab when we alighted; and took me straight up to his bedroom.

Here I saw Aunt Molly, a tall, stout, milk-and-blood complexioned woman with small, kindly, brown eyes. She kissed me on the cheek, and her own glossy cheeks smelt of scented soap. There were two little girls tucked away in a big bed: one dark, the other fair; for both of whom Uncle Lucy was responsible. Whether Aunt Molly was equally responsible—for both or merely for one, and if so, for which of the two—was altogether less certain. For Uncle Lucy, I believe, was an infidel in these matters. But never mind.

‘Your lost cousins,’ said Aunt Molly.

‘Which is which?’ I asked, bending over them and kissing their wet mouths.

‘This is Bubby—the darkie. And this fair one is Nora, our last.’

‘And how old is Nora?’

‘Two and a half,’ Nora replied for herself.

‘How many children have you got altogether, Uncle Lucy?’ I asked.

He began counting them on his fingers—but got muddled in his score. He had been married more than once. And he had acquired so awfully many.

‘Just wait a moment,’ said Aunt Molly. ‘I will bring Harry to you.’

I waited, and presently I heard muffled exhortations and a stubborn shuffling of feet behind the door. ‘Harry!’ urged my aunt.

‘No!’ said Harry, backing stubbornly and fighting his way out. But she dragged him in by the hand and brought him to me, confused and reluctant—a small boy of four with forget-me-not eyes.

‘This is Harry,’ she said.

He was dreadfully shy; he had seen a photograph of myself in military uniform, and was frightened of the sword. But left alone with me, he soon brightened up and began telling me about a dog he had seen run over in the street. ‘Poor, poor thing!’ he said. ‘It was bleeding all over.’

‘But why didn’t you want to come and see me?’

‘Because I didn’t know what you were like.’

‘Well, am I better than you thought, or worse?’

‘No, I thought you were more worse.

‘Will you play in my room?’ he asked in a while.

‘No. I am—frightened of you.’

He looked at me with encouragement. ‘Why are you frightened of me? I’m very nice. That’s all I can say. Are you frightened of cows?’

We passed into the other rooms. And only now did I understand what it meant to have Uncle Lucy launching on our accommodation. He was accompanied by married daughters, husbands, nurses, fiancées, and relatives-in-law of every sort. I was confronted by strikingly good-looking flappers who turned out to be my own hitherto unseen cousins, by boys of sundry ages, by babes and sucklings, by grown-up men and women, all, I perceived, related to me very closely, and bearing my own
disconcerting name. Besides, there was my uncle’s eldest son, a landscape painter, a promising young lad of about thirty-nine, who spoke a lot and drank a lot and painted little. Their knowledge of the English language was unequal. The little ones, who had an English nurse, conversed like natives. Their elders spoke with difficulty. For this their father was to blame. Uncle Lucy did not share Grandpapa Diabologh’s passion for travel; he had been nowhere. Since his birth in Manchester he had not been out of Russia. The only sort of English people Uncle Lucy knew in Russia were Lancashire mill hands and mechanics who called themselves ‘engineers’—a term which, in Russia, implies a College degree. But as the Russian technical graduates possessed less natural aptitude for machinery than the English mechanics, there was some justification in the Englishmen’s claim to the coveted term ‘engineer’. These English mechanics, however, not having impressed Uncle Lucy by their refinement or education, he decided to send his sons to Switzerland and to Germany—countries of which he had had the highest account—and they returned with cheeks disfigured by sword cuts, and talking of a
Wechsel
in English when what they meant was a bill of exchange. And as Aunt Teresa now greeted them: ‘How are you?’ one of them said: ‘Very nice,’ while the other replied ‘Very good.’

By various means these people and their luggage had been transported to our quarters. In the hall as I arrived was Nora. She stood there—a little mushroom under a mushroom hat. A little walking mushroom grown up in the night, it seemed—while Uncle Lucy wasn’t looking. The children’s overcoats and warm overshoes were removed in the hall, and at once there was heard a loud hoof-clatter—their strutting all over the rooms. Besides, there was a boy of one and a half, Aunt Molly’s half-grandson called Theo, with long flaxen locks, who, having seen Don, at once toddled after him and pulled him by the tail.

I went to the office and returned a little before lunch. But in this short space our flat had already been turned into a squealing nursery and a bear-garden.

There were more human things about than there were beds and chairs and sofas, and when you rose you had to take care lest you stepped on some sprawling little Diabologh. The drawing-room, flooded by a host of relatives, was a babel of voices. Captain Negodyaev was standing talking eagerly to Uncle Lucy, who listened to him, with head slightly bent, through an ear-trumpet. Uncle Lucy had been a bit of a democrat in his day, and when the revolution came he hailed the revolution. But when the revolution, in its evolution, dispossessed him of his property, he thought the revolution was a mistake. Captain Negodyaev also thought the revolution a mistake, and it follows that Uncle Lucy and Captain Negodyaev had that in common that both thought the revolution a mistake. ‘Bolshevism is a state of mind,’ said Captain Negodyaev, with the air of enunciating a profound philosophical truth.

‘An acquisitive state of mind,’ retorted Uncle Lucy, laughing bitterly.

‘Very truly said,’ rejoined the Russian officer, nodding his head. ‘We family men in particular feel the truth of this assertion. I have, Lucy Christophorovich, two daughters: Màsha and Natàsha. Màsha is away with her husband, Ippolit Sergèiech Blagovèschenski, in Novorossiisk. She’s married, as I said, but is not happy. Poor Màsha! But Natàsha’s here. Natàsha!’ he called. ‘This is Natàsha.’

Uncle Lucy beamed at her through his gold-rimmed spectacles, and touched her approvingly with his thumb and forefinger on the delicate chin. He then searched a long time in his pocket-book, and gave her a 200,000 rouble note—then worth about one and a penny. Natàsha curtsied and went away, beaming.

‘Look! Look!’ came her voice from the corridor. ‘Harry, look!’

‘That’s nuffink,’ said Harry. ‘Daddy gives me—oh much more.’

‘Oh, what a nice little girl!’ Aunt Molly patted her cheek.

‘Unfortunately, things being what they are, Marya Nikolaevna, her education is being neglected. Still, she is learning English without knowing it, which pleases me a great deal.’

‘Oh, she can already speak English? What is your name?’ Aunt Molly asked Natàsha in English.

‘I don’t know myself,’ she said. ‘I have two kinds of name, and I don’t know what kinds it is.’

‘She came out under her mother’s maiden name so as to conceal her father’s,’ I explained.

Aunt Molly patted her again on the cheek; then went into her room, and returning gave Natàsha a banana. Natàsha curtsied, and went away beaming.

‘
Ach
! Marya Nikolaevna, my heart aches for poor Màsha,’ Mme Negodyaev was saying. ‘Ippolit is a terrible man. You won’t believe me if I tell you——’

Captain Negodyaev called Harry and gave him a caramel.

‘What do you say?’ said Uncle Lucy.

‘Thank you,’ said Harry.

‘But when they broke into the cabinet and took away the portfolio with all our ready money, well, both Màsha and I don’t think it was a very nice thing to do, anyhow.’

Uncle Lucy, who, after a life of toil and authority, found his enforced idleness very irksome, offered to help Vladislav chop wood. ‘There are so many of us now. All must help.’