The Polyglots (25 page)

‘Can I be——’ The last word was not spoken.

‘Can’t he, Emmanuel?’

‘
Ah, mais non, alors
!’ exclaimed Uncle Emmanuel, in tones of outraged military propriety.

‘Strange! These people at the War Office understand nothing!’

The wedding had been fixed provisionally for April the 13th, but Aunt Teresa seemed sad, reluctant, and avoided all discussion tending towards any definite decision on this point. ‘You never think of me, you never think of your poor ailing Aunt Teresa,’ she complained, insinuating that my impending theft of her one remaining child was hard on her.

‘I do. I always think of you,
ma tante
. I think: “Lord, how lucky for her to have such a splendid nephew!” ’

My aunt did not behave as though she thought this was a superlatively brilliant joke; and, on second thoughts, I was inclined to agree with her that it wasn’t.

‘Naughty! Naughty!’ Natàsha said, after a pause, shaking her finger at me. ‘Naughty!’

‘Georgie-Porgie, pudding and pie,’ said my aunt.

‘Georgie-Porgie,’ she laughed her bubbling laughter: ‘Georgie-Porgie-g-g-g-g-g.’

I looked at my aunt with compassion. Poor woman, she seemed to me a mental, moral, physical, and above all financial, wreck! ‘You see,’ I said, conceiving suddenly the thought of curing her by auto-suggestion, ‘there’s really nothing much the matter with you except what you yourself imagine. What you have to say is: “Every day, in every way, I am feeling better and better.” ’

‘But I don’t.
Enfin, c’est idiot
! How can I say I feel better if I feel worse?’

‘Take care: you
will
feel worse if you say so.’

‘But I do.’

‘And I wish you joy of it,’ said I, exasperated.

‘But what
can
I say if I feel worse and worse? Do you want me to lie to myself?’

‘Then say: “I feel the reverse of better and better.” ’

‘Is that all right?’

‘Well, at any rate it’s better.’

But nothing came of it. Aunt Teresa told me that she had
une crise de nerfs
from my auto-suggestion. She assured me she felt worse. My aunt was not a good disciple of Monsieur Coué. The crux of it, of course, was that she did not want to feel better, or in fact to make us think she did so. But the small children took to Coué like duck to water. While my aunt felt worse and worse, Nora told us she felt ‘b
a
tter and b
a
tter’. What it came to, anyhow, was that those of us who had felt bad didn’t feel so well, and those who had felt well, felt well and better. The Doctor said that Aunt Teresa was not really ill. But Aunt Teresa thought that she was ill, and to all intents and purposes she felt the same as if she had been ill. Clearly then she had a ‘complex’. I began to think of using for her benefit the discoveries of Freud and Jung with a view to liberating Aunt Teresa’s ‘complex’. I had only read a few pages of Freud’s Introductory Lecture to Psycho-Analysis, while waiting at the Oxford Union for a friend. I knew, however, that the pith of the whole thing was that the ‘complex’ had to be dissolved to free the patient of his particular delusion or affliction. Clearly Aunt Teresa was in love with her own person. This, at any rate, was my diagnosis of her case. To ‘side-track’ my aunt’s affections from Narcissus into normal channels had now become my earnest purpose. But I was not a little nervous lest, according to Freud, my aunt’s Narcissus were ‘side-tracked’ on to me and she began to love me with a passion not entirely becoming to an aunt. I began by delivering a lecture on psychology. I spoke of motor-centres
and bus centres and railway centres and the reflections of the conscious and subconscious mind—and that sort of drivel—for an hour and a half. My aunt listened strenuously and tried to look as if she understood. ‘There is something in you that wants an outlet and cannot find it, and because of that is worrying you.’ I took her hands into mine. ‘Aunt Teresa dear, tell me.’

She was very still, but said nothing. And again I had the fear lest my aunt’s Narcissus should begin loving me ‘by transference’. My mood at that time was, in proportion to the preparations being made, steadily declining against marriage. I am not a cynic; but from what I’ve seen of married life in our own home, it has definitely put me off it for the remainder of my life. Only yesterday I heard a married man compare marriage to a rotten egg. ‘Because,’ he said, ‘it looks all right from the outside, and before you taste it you do not know that it is rotten. ‘You may reproach me for fickleness in love. But what writer is sure of his livelihood with so fickle a public as ours? You may, for example, be reading this book—but it does not follow that you have bought it. Latterly my tongue would loiter with persistence round about my canine tooth. I came up to my shaving-glass, opened my mouth and looked in. What a cavity! Yes, wars were not to be fought with impunity. It was some time since I had been to the dentist. And it occurred to me that if I married Sylvia (who already had a gold crown at the end of her mouth) I would have to pay her dentists’ bills in addition to my own, for all the fillings, crowns, fantastic bridges, and so forth, with which she would palliate the encroaching ruin of the years, ward off the desolation, till, one day, the disaster could be forestalled no longer, and she would order a complete set of artificial teeth—an upper and a nether plate—for which I, too, should have to foot the bill. Out of what? Out of literature, forsooth!… My grandfather rose in his grave.

Poverty—and the children catch measles. Winter—and a shortage of coal. From bad to worse, until you sit in your shirt-sleeves, maybe, in a one-roomed lodging, and having pushed aside the pans and saucers begin to write your book,
A Psychological
Analysis of the Succeeding Stages in the Evolution of an Attitude
, the children howling ‘I doan want to!’ Sylvia, thin and angry and exhausted, perhaps turned into a shrew. To keep them from starvation you set your teeth and write a novel. At last it’s finished. You send it to Pluckworth on the 7th of November and it comes back on the 15th of December, on which date you send it to Jane Sons, and Jane Sons return it to you on the 3rd of January, on which date you send it to Norman Elder, who sends it back on the 15th of March.

Suddenly I fell asleep. I dreamt that we were dining in a restaurant and Sylvia protested: ‘I want French wine!’ The waiter came, I had no money, and began to cry. I woke up in a sweat.

No, I did not want to get married.

After tea I went up to my attic, intent on settling down to a prolonged spell of solid work. But my tangled thoughts, revolting stubbornly, chased after those running streams of life which found their spring in Sylvia. Then, finally, I laid aside my papers and went to her. As I saw her, again I visualized our future life when I might be unkind to her; and because I wanted to be kind to her I craved to have this union broken before it was too late; and yet I knew that she, unconscious of future painful hours thus evaded, would suffer from the knowledge of a happiness missed; and it distressed me that I could not, without wounding her, explain these manifold considerations.

‘Darling, frankly: do you want to marry me?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

‘It’s so nice to be married, darling. To be always together. To live in the same house. To feel the same things. To have the same thoughts.’

Sylvia playing the
Four Seasons of the Year
. I take her for a walk, but think my own thoughts: though we couldn’t be nearer, we couldn’t be farther apart.

‘This we can have without marrying.’

‘But I want to have children … by you.’

‘We’ll send our son to New College.’

‘Yes, yes.’

I used to say to Aunt Teresa in the course of our psychoanalytical experiments: ‘If there is something that worries you try to isolate it and to tell me what it is—and we shall endeavour to side-track it.’ I swear I never brought this on with an ulterior motive. And for some little time to come my experiments proved unsuccessful. Only as the time was nearing for our wedding and subsequent departure for Europe did Aunt Teresa tell me: ‘I begin to believe in psycho-analysis. Something is worrying me, and that is why I feel so very ill.’

She sent for Dr. Abelberg and asked him whether there was anything in psycho-analysis.

The Doctor agreed.

After he had left she confessed to me:

‘Dr. Abelberg asked me what it was that worried me. And when I told him that it was the dread of separation from my only daughter after the death of my only son, he said it was fatal for me to have anything like that to worry me.’

Poor Aunt Teresa! We did not show any sense of what we were doing to her. It did not occur to us that this was at all hard on her: to bring up her child, and then, suddenly, to see her go. She foresaw no prospect of following us to Europe. Most likely Uncle Emmanuel would enter Gustave Boulanger’s bank, and then the last hope of seeing her daughter again would have gone. But we thought not of that. I boiled at the mere thought of a ‘selfish’ intervention on her part. Yet I knew that if I went away with Sylvia I would feel profoundly sorry for my aunt. That I did not feel so argued that I did not seriously believe I’d go away with her. If we had mingled our tears with hers and asked her to forgive us, she might have done so and resigned herself to her sad fate. But we did not do so; and once she had, with my aid, isolated her ‘complex’, there was no forgetting it.

The next I learnt was from Sylvia herself—when she told me ‘It’s all off’—crying, trying to restrain herself, and I, no longer
knowing whether to be glad or to be sorry, or rather sorry against my very gladness, did my best to make her marry me, half satisfied, half mortified at my apparent failure to persuade her. We would get married first, I would leave and then return for her.

‘No.’

At one time it seemed as though Sylvia resolved to take advantage of her whip hand—to avenge her suffering—and strike a blow for her own freedom, the feelings of her mother notwithstanding. But she collapsed in the doing.

Sylvia and Aunt Teresa mingled tears. But they were different kinds of tears. The daughter was a real heroine. She cried, but made a brave show, and only listened, blinking; and she never showed her wound, and sacrificed her happiness completely and without reproach.

And it was accepted promptly, without much ado.

‘Sylvia! again!’ said Aunt Teresa.

Sylvia blinked.

The tragedy of our position was not that Aunt Teresa dominated us into surrender, but that taking every circumstance into account—Aunt Teresa included—we could not make up our minds one way or another. My motive split: one portion of it became allied with Aunt Teresa; the other remained loyal to my love. But it is little use explaining the multifarious motives of one’s thoughts and actions. I think this is a general mistake that novelists fall into. Why should I whitewash my conscience with your boredom, or waste my time in making the haphazard course of life seem rational in print? Why should I try to vindicate myself? Why pretend that I was reasonable or even logical? My conduct was confused, irrational. Who cares?

I considered the question from separate points of view—from the point of view of my present happiness, my future happiness, Sylvia’s happiness if I married her, Sylvia’s happiness if I did not marry her—and arrived at independent conclusions. I considered the question while I was undressing to go to bed, and while thinking of it, found that I had dressed again, put on my boots, and
was tying my tie. Undressing myself once again, I considered the question again from all points of view simultaneously, displayed a truly Balfourian multi-sidedness. But, like my royal namesake from Shakespeare, I finally arrived at no conclusion at all. I am cursed with a Hamletian inaction. Russia has bitten me much too deeply. Why was I named Hamlet? Why this heart-splitting dilemma? Like him, I had an uncle—I had two uncles—but there was no clear reason why I should have murdered either of them. No such crude necessity in my case. Though perhaps it was my duty rather to murder my aunt. If it was, the reader must try to forgive me: I didn’t do it.

AND ALREADY—AS THE SENTENCE ONCE PROCLAIMED is proceeded with without respite—so Aunt Teresa, once I was definitely off the cards, showed us her hand. I had suspected all along that she had someone up her sleeve. But her choice astonished me. To her, however, Gustave Boulanger seemed a candidate pre-eminently suitable. He was a Belgian, and he lived in the Far East. But sooner or later, his home would be in Belgium, and she still hoped that sooner or later they would all return to Belgium. Aunt Teresa’s method of inveigling Gustave into marriage with her daughter was both swift and efficient and, if you remember my own case, not without precedent. She waited till they were to be found alone together, chatting innocently enough, when she dropped upon them, like an eagle from the blue, with her heartiest congratulations and best wishes for their future happiness. ‘I’m so glad,
so
glad indeed,’ she said, kissing them both on the cheek and taking them completely by surprise. Gustave coughed a little and adjusted his Adam’s apple; but said nothing, only stroked his broad chin with his two fingers and smiled. And Gustave had to see his way to buy Sylvia a ring which she wore next to my
own—that very same one which I once exhorted her to set me as a seal upon her heart.

It was difficult to know what Sylvia thought of it. Unlike myself, Gustave was not handsome. He had small podgy hands covered with freckles, and an absurd canary moustache. His large head had a bald patch on the crown which he vainly tried to cover up with what little hair he had left, and his teeth were ridiculously small considering the width of his chin. Gustave was a confirmed bachelor, and probably he did not favour the impending marriage. But it was difficult to know what Gustave really thought of it. It was difficult to know what Gustave thought of anything. For Gustave never said anything. He only stroked his chin with his two fingers and smiled. And each time he smiled he revealed a black tooth at each corner of his mouth.

I thought: We have lived our days carefully, sparingly, grudgingly. We have been cowards, preferring our life as a drab, moderate compromise rather than coloured in vivid stripes of joys and griefs. And now, she, my aunt, who has lived fully and recklessly and has landed on the rocks, wants to thrive upon the little savings of our happiness.—No more of it! No!