The Polyglots (30 page)

‘Yes.’

‘We are going to Aunt Caroline,’ said he. ‘And who’s Aunt Caroline?’

‘S’e is a lady with a dog and two cats,’ answered Harry.

‘And what will the dog think of you, Harry?’ said Aunt Teresa.

‘I don’t know what he’ll think of me in my long trousers.’

In the afternoon, while the children were at Gustave’s, General ‘Pshe-Pshe’ called on Aunt Teresa.

‘I am not understood! not understood!’ he said. ‘Not understood by my wife, not understood by my daughter, not understood by my son; never! You alone——’ He brushed her pale hand with his moustache. ‘Not understood! But this is a harbour of rest, an asylum.’

The last allusion, in view of Uncle Lucy’s sad end, was unpleasant, and Aunt Teresa winced just a little.

Moreover, the General confessed that the political horizon,
till recently so serenely blue, was not too cheerful. He expressed incredulity at the levity of the Allies. ‘I simply cannot understand their folly in ceasing to support me, for surely they must know that I can never hold out without their help, since the entire population of the country is against me. Such want of logic on their part! They must have lost their faculty of reasoning. What
were
they thinking? The Mr. Churchill is the only politician left who sees eye to eye with me. I have always had great faith in the acumen of this brilliant and courageous statesman. Like myself, he is prepared to take chances on behalf of his country, irrespective of all consequences. In our modern world this has become a quality rare among individuals, and therefore all the more to be treasured when it is found. But, I am sorry to say, his own countrymen do not always see eye to eye with him.’

Yes, he marvelled at the Allies. The more he thought of them, the more he marvelled. The General wanted to see law and order established in Russia. The population did not understand him, and—what more simple?—in order to administer the land, the General’s idea (not to put too fine a point upon it) was to invade the land by first killing off the population.

‘How will you do it, General? You have no men.’

The General thrust his hand into the front of his coat, after the manner of Napoleon Bonaparte, and said, in a stern, robust voice, looking ruthless:

‘I will fight on with the pistol and the gibbet.’

‘General,’ I sighed, ‘you can hang or shoot a criminal when public opinion is behind you, but you cannot shoot or hang the public, even though you may think it a criminal public, when its opinion is that
you’re
the criminal.’

He looked at me with infinite reproach, as if to say: ‘
Et tu, Brute
!’ He was silent, and then said: ‘I am doing my duty before God and the fatherland.’

Aunt Teresa’s blanched face with the enormous eyes turned to him. ‘Dear me! How will you do it?’ she asked, not without some concern. ‘How will you fight? You have no men.’

‘To the last man,’ he said, and looked into her eyes, her deep St. Bernard eyes. He loved her, as it were, in retrospect; those years before he met her, when she was young, to him were years of separation, and now! and now! at last they met again, and in the present the whole past was reconstructed for him in this afterword, this evening glow of love. He bent over her slim white hand and brought his lips against it; this touch was to atone for all that he had missed. And she looked up to heaven with her beautiful, her lustrous, large eyes as if this woman who had never loved should pray: ‘I wish I could. I want to do my earnest best—alas! it is not in my power!’

On Friday morning Beastly was to leave for England. He had been laid up with dysentery through the whole of March and first half of April, and was faithfully looked after by Berthe. Dusting his hat for him while he put on his coat, ‘Write to me sometimes, won’t you, Percee,’ she said. ‘You know how precious you are to me.’

He made his last
stink
on a Wednesday, and then left on the Friday. But owing to some misunderstanding regarding his passage, he returned at the end of the week and made
stinks
on the subsequent Tuesday, Friday, Monday, Thursday, and Saturday.

CAME THE WEDDING-DAY, EVEN AS THE DREADED day comes to the condemned, as comes the moment for the trembling rabbit when it must jump for dear life—inexorable, relentless day. Somehow we had hoped that such a day was impossible, but the day came on to prove that it was possible, a bleak day—April the 28th. The snow had not yet been cleared in the streets, but it was already warm and the pavements were dry as in summer.

Since I awoke that morning I was on tenterhooks. A dreary day. I stood at the window, my nose against the cold glass: a time when you would kill yourself for a song. A fly at the window—a mosquito in the damp—looked puzzled with life. We are half alive, half asleep, wondering why we are; could we but grope out of this slimy bog, where we had sunk, into the light from which we fell, perchance we’d find our wings.

On the floor lay my kit all spread out, and the Chink boy was packing. I looked down on to the street below—and suddenly I saw a visitor at our door: a bent old lady in a mushroom hat pulled down over a grinning skull. ‘Madame Death.’ And standing on the doorstep, looking at her, was Natàsha. A shiver ran down my back. But Madame Death bent double, and vanished in the backyard.

I resumed my packing. Natàsha knocked at the door, came in, proud and a little confused, put a new shaving-brush on my table—and ran away again. Her gift at my departure!

I called her back.

‘Natàsha, who was that old lady outside?’

She shrugged her shoulders. ‘What’s it means a lady? No lady. Some mens outside—a lot of dirty mens, but no lady.’

I took up the shaving-brush and examined it. You drift along in life, I thought, and you drift into some Captain Negodyaev with a Natàsha. Attachments; partings; the keeping up of correspondence; the dropping of it, the drifting out of sight and call. How queer. And when I think of the sights, the people, the opportunities I miss at every turn, will go on missing, my heart stops dead, I gasp for breath, I clutch a chair …

Uncle Emmanuel had donned his uniform for the occasion, and his full medals, and I attached ‘
le sabre de mon père
’, that silly sword of the 1800 pattern long since discarded for its prohibitive length. At one o’clock the service began. There was sun in the church, but bitterness in my heart. I wore my love, a rosary of pangs, on her behalf and on my own. My soul quailed as I met her eyes. If I had been weak, still, was that a reason why she
should have tied herself for life to this grotesque individual with a canary moustache? I felt offended—but couldn’t say who had offended me. As the organ soared forth, I felt my soul weep for her. I grieved for my Sylvia; the thought that I had in the past offended her racked my heart: I seemed to be in her soul, to feel myself an inmate of her dolorous being. And when it was all over, and they came up to Aunt Teresa to be blessed and kissed and congratulated and Gustave murmured softly from beneath his soft moustache, ‘She has brought joy into my life’, I could not contain myself, and muttered as I pressed her hand: ‘I wish you joy of it!’ I walked home along the windy icy streets, my two legs jerking forward: two wooden sticks propping up a heavy vase of grief—my heavy heart.

I strayed into the dining-room, where the table was being laid under Vladislav’s direction and watched eagerly by Natàsha.

‘There will be turtle soup, duck and mushrooms and pears with ice-cream!’ Natàsha imparted, with glee in her sea-green eyes. I complimented Vladislav on the appearance of the festal dinner-table.

‘Yes, not bad,’ he agreed. ‘But a long way off the French! Paris—that’s a town, you might say. Streets, shops—in a word, a joy to behold! But here—ach!’ He waved his hand with the air of a thwarted artist. ‘What’s the use?’

At dinner there was turtle- as well as ham-flavoured thick soup; sole with sauce made of champagne and cray-fish; saddle of baby lamb; braised duck stuffed with birds’ liver and mushrooms with salad; celery with Parmesan cheese; Cornice pears with cream ice and black currant jam; ‘petits fours’; and baskets of fruit. The dinner was prefaced with sherry and bitter and monkey-gland cocktails, while throughout there was vodka, Château Lafitte 1900, and champagne of the brand ‘Œil de Perdrix’, the feast being wound up with ‘Fine Champagne 1875’, coffee, benedictine, curaçao and salted almonds. Aunt Teresa was anxious that it should be in the Russian custom, for fear of outraging local society. Dinner, accordingly, was at three o’clock in the afternoon.
General ‘Pshe-Pshe’ supplied his batman, his own A.D.C. son, and a quantity of cutlery and china. A brass band (the one that had played at the funeral) had been installed by General ‘Pshe-Pshe’ in the dining-room and played flourishes on every suitable—and unsuitable—occasion during dinner, and the smell of the soldiers’ highly polished boots was no less pronounced throughout the meal. There is in Russia what seemed to me that day an inane custom of bringing in at these nuptial feasts the word ‘bitter’—at which the bride and bridegroom have to kiss.

‘Strange,’ said the General, ‘this bread is bitter, and this wine is bitter.’

‘Bitter! Bitter!’ all the guests shouted exultantly.

Sylvia and Gustave kissed. He just touched her with that absurd canary moustache of his. Imagine my feelings. The General flicked out his thumb at the band, and the band played a flourish.

‘Yes, that’s the real Russian fashion,’ laughed Aunt Teresa.

There were many toasts drunk, and at the end of each toast the band played a flourish. And even when there were no toasts, now and then, when the General flicked out his thumb, the band played a flourish. Afterwards they played flourishes of their own accord: at the stressing in conversation of a sentence, at the emphasis of a word. At the least ostensible noise of any kind, the band played a flourish.

‘Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!’ Sylvia laughed.

The band played a flourish.

I sat there between Captain Negodyaev and Beastly, and listening to the inner voice in me reproaching me for the barter of my happiness, I reflected thus: the difficulty about happiness is that its technique is thoroughly unsatisfactory; that you cannot get it quickly when you want it, or easily enough to be worth having; the sacrifice demanded for its sake is apt to outweigh the motive, and, knowing that, you are loth to take it on. I was loth to take it on; and here I sit—and suffer. Still, I consoled myself that she was to me a white elephant, that on my journey in search of perfection she was a sort of luxurious trunk, a gorgeous globe-trotter
for which I had no kit. She was a precious stone, a jewel I could not afford to buy. Yet beneath all these consoling reflections there lurked a truth, unheard but still disturbing, that I had missed my greatest chance of happiness in life as I might miss a train.

‘Bitter! Bitter!’ shouted the General exultantly. Sylvia and Gustave kissed. (Oh, where was my sword!) The band played a flourish.

I was not in pain; I only felt a heavy dullness—a spiritual headache. To-day was Saturday. What would I do now? Tomorrow was Sunday. A day of celebration and repose. A red-letter day—yes, red with anguish! And as for my sailing home—I could have only waved my hand!

As the first course was being removed the General rose and proposed the health of the bride and bridegroom, while the band played a flourish. After that, Captain Negodyaev got up and proposed the health of the bride’s parents. Then speeches were made of a national character, and the General drank to the glory of the Belgian Army, the band playing, somewhat inaccurately, the Belgian national anthem. Whereupon Uncle Emmanuel rose and drank to the revival of Russia, the General, as senior Russian officer present, responding, and including England and the Allies generally in his toast (having in his festal mood forgotten their betrayal of him). ‘Turning to our latest ally the Americans,’ he said, ‘I must observe that although they are a godless people they are nevertheless a deuced clever race. Gramophones, goloshes, footwear, vehicles, inventions, and all sorts of rubbish—they can do all that; or construct a railway, let us say, across the ocean—at that they are past-masters. The Americans! Hurrah!’

The band played a flourish. I and Beastly responded for England. Then Colonel Ishibaiashi rose to respond for Japan; everybody leaned forward and strained his attention.

‘I have an honour very much,’ he said, ‘to speak for the honourable officers of the Allied Forces. A band of Bolsheviki that appeared Cikotoa from north-east who proud but weak retired hearing the arrival of our alliance. Perhaps they spied us and felt
very much anxiety, they retired far and far at last. Therefore we can hold the peace of Cikotoa and the safety of the principal line of the railway, unused our swords. Now it has become unnecessary to stay a strong force here any more. Therefore my Commander ordered me let the alliances to return to Harbin. Soon after you will triumph taking a great honour. We accomplished our duty by your a great many assistance. I offer you my thousand thanks for your kind relief——’

Here Beastly, very red in the face, leaned over to Colonel Ishibaiashi. ‘Stop talking shop, old bean,’ he said, ‘and tell us instead something—er—interesting—something about your damned old
geisha
girls, don’t you know.’

Colonel Ishibaiashi showed his teeth. ‘Ha!—Ha!—Iz zas so—zzz?’ and turning to the bridal pair, ‘I wisk,’ he said ‘your happy in this occasion. It is a little entertainment on the battlefield, but I hope you will take much
saké
, speak and sing cheerfully.’ And he sat down—while the band played a flourish.

The General, who only a few moments before had urged Allied solidarity after the war, now, perhaps from excessive drink, all at once displayed a weary cynicism and disenchantment. ‘Ach!’—a weary gesture—‘it’s all talk, all talk. They talk of preferential treatment for the Allies, the best-favoured nation clause, and that kind of rot. But in practice what does it all amount to? We Russians, for example, have done no end of good in Armenia. But when one of our lot went to have a shave in Nahichivan, the barber spat on the soap before lathering his face. He, of course, jumped up, disgusted, and went for him. “Don’t you get flurried, my beauty,” the barber replied. “This is a favour we’re showing you—preferential treatment. With any ordinary bloke we first spit in his snout and then rub on the soap afterwards!” Yes. That’s what it amounts to—no more—he!—he!—he!’ the General laughed feebly.