The Polyglots (40 page)

Nora had never once delivered a sweet to Harry since the time she was born.

‘You’ve eaten my Easter egg,’ she said lamely—though that was now over two years ago.

Harry said nothing. He now never smiled—he was so serious, as if the cares of the world were upon him; or if he did, it was more than ever the smile of a very old man—perfectly senile! Harry did not seem to grow, while Nora was fast catching up with him. He looked like a little old man—very wise, cynical, toothless.

Bubby approved of the ship, saying, ‘Thank goodness there are no motor-cars here, mummy’; while Nora spoke of it as ‘This slippery house’. She was blossoming out every day. ‘I don’t say any more “I ’hink”; I say “I
th-th
-think”.’ So pleased with herself.

It was a real long voyage—with children, with a shipload of luggage, a voyage destined to last many weeks; the ending of a life-period, a new beginning in time, of which the fate could not be foreseen. It made me think of that dreaded long voyage to America in
Les Malheurs de Sophie
. The children were delighted. They thought that they were setting out across the water, and that at the other end of the sea, called England, they would meet Daddy, who was waiting for them on the shore.

‘I writed, writed, writed to him—and he never wroted,’ said Nora.

Harry looked on demurely with his forget-me-not eyes. ‘He’ll come if we give him sumfink,’ said he.

‘Ah! little Norkin!’ Natàsha exclaimed. And almost at once, as we stood there, there passed down the deck the inevitable old seaman in a dark-blue blouse; and as he passed us he winked at Natàsha so merrily that it called forth from her a lingering
outburst of gurgling delight. I have no special insight into seamen’s hearts—for that I must refer you to Joseph Conrad—but the old seaman struck me on the face of it—how shall I put it?—as ‘a bit of all right’. Natàsha made friends with him. ‘You just come from England?’ she asked. ‘Have you seen Princess Mary? Oh, how beauty! Oh, what a lovely!’

How she had blossomed out! She became a great favourite of his, and each time he passed her on deck he winked at her so merrily that she issued a gurgling sound of delight.

‘And what is your name?’ she asked.

‘Tom.’

‘And which is your cabin?’ He showed her.

She laughed. ‘Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! Uncle Tom’s cabin!’

He winked.

‘Oh! Oh! I so cried in
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
! Eva—such—such—
such
—such a nice girl! Oh, such a lovely!’

From that moment on she called the old seaman in the dark-blue blouse ‘Uncle Tom’, and since to children everyone is either an uncle or aunt, they all called him now ‘Uncle Tom’. And he liked it.

The
Rhinoceros
was a transport, and presently troops came on board in charge of a sergeant major, who detailed them in two parties. ‘You fellows,’ he said, ‘go to the sharp end of the ship, and you here to the blunt end of the ship.’

The naval ratings looked sarcastic. Oh, they
did
look sarcastic! Even ‘Uncle Tom’ smiled into his chin. ‘They are a hignorant lot, those army chaps,’ he confided to me, shaking his head.

The sergeant major heard him. ‘You hignorant hass!’ he said. ‘You bloody well mind your own bloody business!’

We were moving. From the bows came the regular impassive beat of the piston-rod. We were moving. The land slanted aside, and we were gliding farther and farther away on the green mirror of the sea towards the breeze.

‘Oh, the green green sea!’ Natàsha exclaimed, her sea-green
eyes sparkling in the sun. Everywhere there were visible signs that the War Office had suddenly lost interest in us. The transport provided for us was definitely top-heavy, and as she went, lurched now on this side, now on that.

At lunch I found sitting next to me a Russian major general with wild pale eyes and long black fingernails, who said he had got back to Shanghai from Hong-Kong, but now, on reflection, was going back again to Hong-Kong without leaving the boat. I recognized his face: it was the man who had once called on me on New Year’s Day and had sat in the waiting-room along with other lunatics. His eyes were almost mad, his conversation incoherent. At the outbreak of the Revolution he, a Tsarist general, had sided with the rebels, and assumed command of the revolutionary troops; then his nerves had given way, and now he was adrift in the wide world, without plan and without purpose. If he was mad, there was a little method in his madness. He lived, he said, by issuing I.O.U.s at every port of call. At one place, when nobody would take his I.O.U., he hired a grand piano and then sold it, using the money realized on getting out of mischief. In his view all means were justified by a great end. But after listening to him week after week it struck me that ‘the end’ with him was possibly the weakest portion of it all. Cross-examined by me, he admitted that he scorned programmes, but believed in living from day to day following the dictates of his complex personality. Asked how he reconciled this view with his declared ideal of public service, he answered that he scorned the public.

During lunch, Harry made audible remarks about the passengers: ‘That boy over there has a fat head.’

‘Harry!’ uttered Aunt Teresa.

‘S-s-s-sh!’ Aunt Molly hissed.

The General’s nails took away some of our appetite, and I tried, diplomatically, to propel the conversation into some such channels. ‘The Chinese,’ I remarked, ‘have extraordinarily long nails.’

‘It’s a sign of aristocracy,’ he replied complacently. ‘To show that they do no work.’

‘But they are black!’

‘What matter? The colour is immaterial.’

The General confessed that he never took a bath, ‘Because,’ he said, ‘once a bath, always a bath—it opens the pores.’

At dinner, the General with the mad eyes grew tearful and melancholy. Surveying his hands and his clothes—‘I have sunk,’ he said. ‘God! how low I have sunk! My nerves have all gone to pieces. I am pursued from one end of the world to the other.’ Tears were in his eyes.

A war—a pre-eminently stupid business—is run by stupid people (all the wise ones having set their minds on stopping it as soon as possible); and men who ordinarily would be in the shade rise to the surface and set to organize a ‘Secret Service’ whose agents spend their time in sending one another information about all sorts of lunatics and innocents, and Vice-Consuls and so-called M.C.O.s do their level best to impede the traffic of the world years after the war is over. And some such cuckoo—I think it was Philip Brown—reported our friend the General with the mad eyes, and another cuckoo apprised the Foreign Office, and the Foreign Office notified the Admiralty and the War Office, and zealous officers had begun to send each other slips of information about this ‘dangerous revolutionary’.

The sea was a green mirror. All the way from Shanghai to Hong-Kong it was a green mirror. Not a sound reached our ears but the impassive beat of the piston-rod: proof of the unremitting toil of the engine. The infinite sea conduces to infinite thoughts about God and Man and the Universe. There is nothing to do, so one talks. Captain Negodyaev was philosophically inclined. I did not find that out till we fell into each other’s company more intimately on board the
Rhinoceros
. He stood there, leaning back against the rail, a rat on its hind legs, a rat in khaki, philosophizing. ‘If you go half the way of logic,’ he said, ‘and stop there, you have come as near the truth as you are likely to get this side of the grave. But describe the circle, and you are nowhere again. I—’

‘You mean,’ I said (as we are in the habit of saying when we
interrupt to say what
we
mean), ‘you mean it simply comes to this: you wander till you find a barrier. Then you allow your soul to grow mature, satiate within the barrier. (When the gruel begins to brew, make haste and set to work: write, paint, experiment.) Then, some time afterwards, the barrier will break down—and again you will begin to wander in the meadow until again you find your way to the high-road.’ We talked unostentatiously, quietly, affecting, perhaps half-consciously, the pose of people of seasoned intellect that everything was understood between us, that we took for granted on the part of each all knowledge hitherto available about all things. His attitude to life was a dark smile—the smile of one who is pleased at the opportunity of recognizing a little additional evidence of the vileness which he had all along maintained pervaded life. Fundamentally, I believed in hope, he in despair. It was as if he said, ‘
Tant pis
!’ ‘You say it is impossible to despair. But it is possible to despair. I believe in despair. I live on it,’ he said.

‘You doubt the possibility of immortality, because——’

‘Captain Diabologh,’ he interrupted. ‘Lend me £15. I’ll pay it back to you—upon my word of honour—when we get to England.’

‘You doubt it because you have a wrong idea of what is real.’

‘I really will.’

‘The external world seems real to you because you see and hear and smell and feel it. But it is because your senses are so focused and conditioned and attuned that you see and feel and hear and smell it as you do. Actually it consists merely of certain illusory vibrations marking time in nothing—a form of mathematics to sustain the figment of Time made flesh. It is merely a world of appearance in which your
I
has immersed, like a fallen star which has mistaken the clouds for reality and doubts its own light. As a drop of water from the ocean contains identical properties with those of the ocean itself, so that light in you—your real
I
—has the immortal faculties of a timeless sun.’

Beastly, hearing our arguments, butted in with: ‘Jabbering like two old washerwomen!’

Captain Negodyaev smiled a propitiatory smile: ‘We the
philosophers of life are merely the naughty children, while the others are the good children. In the end, Mother Nature puts us all to bed.’

Beastly nodded his head heavily and guffawed loudly as he did so. While Captain Negodyaev talked philosophy, an English dame who read a Ouida novel looked at him disapprovingly through her
lorgnon
. ‘You mustn’t talk quite so loud and gesticulate quite so much,’ I advised him. ‘These people think it shocking bad form to get so excited about mere God and the Universe.’

‘Well,’ he rejoined, ‘if it really comes to that, I never laughed so much as when I saw your English people playing cards last night. Not a sound, not a movement, as though they were in church. The monotony of it would be enough to kill any normal human being. In Russia somebody would long have jumped up, expostulated and called another a cheat and a liar. But these here—they sit like stones. Incorrigible people!’

At first I had to share a cabin with Beastly, but unable to stand his
stinks
any longer, I got Uncle Emmanuel to change places with me. But he got out, holding his nose. ‘
C’est assez
!’ he said. ‘How I understand you!’ Nobody wanted to share a cabin with Beastly. So, in the end, the General with the mad eyes was induced to try his luck, and emerged successfully out of the experiment, remarking that to him
all stinks
were immaterial. But, anyhow, most of the voyage Percy Beastly was ill, and Berthe attended to him.

In the morning we entered the harbour of Hong-Kong. The clouds mixed with the mountains, so that one could hardly tell which were the clouds and which were the mountains. Two red-tabbed staff-officers in pale khaki drill came on a white steam launch flying the Union Jack and asked: ‘Is there a General Pokhitonoff on board?’ They were informed that there was one. And the General with the mad eyes, lest he should stir the native races into rebellion against the British Crown, was not allowed to land.

The General was a man who invariably agreed to everything—under protest; and so, having registered his protest in a letter to the Captain, he remained on board, while Sylvia and I went on
shore. We took the Peak railway. And as we ascended the hill in it, ‘You look upon the Other World,’ I said, ‘as a sort of furnished flat where everything has been prepared for our arrival. I believe that world is more like music seeking its rebirth in its own inspiration; and man like a composer who awakens life to make it echo to the cadence he has plucked out of its own deep sleep, to suggest to him new secrets and new melodies.’

‘Darling, you speak so loud that everybody can hear you.’

‘I don’t care. I am speaking the truth.’

‘Oh!’

‘What?’

‘Bother this fly,’ she said.

‘There is more impudence in a fly than in many a grown man or woman.’

‘Do we get out here?’

‘Yes. This is where all the snobby people live—up hill,’ I said, stepping out. ‘And all the plain folk (the Governor excepted) live down hill, being conveniently looked down upon (the Governor excepted) by their brethren up the hill.’

I walked arm-in-arm with Sylvia, and because I did not want the ants to climb up my trousers, I walked quicker and quicker, the ants, like all other creatures of God, having to take their level chance, some of them perishing under my heels. They ran along quickly, with a serious preoccupied air, over the stony ruins even as we humans climbed the hills—the rotting eruption of nature among which we had come to life. And, behold, a solitary beetle who, too, had come out for a walk this lovely spring day, traversed the path, seeking indolently whom he might devour.

‘Darling, please don’t run so fast, please don’t pull me along—
please
!’

‘Do you want these damned things to climb up your legs?’ I slackened my pace, and at once one of the accursed creatures, who hurt out of all proportion to their size, climbed up my ankle and did his worst. I shook him off. If I could, I reflected aloud, I would come to an understanding with the ants, a
modur vivendi
,
and let them live—while they work out their salvation, whatever it may be! But I cannot be bothered to—and so I crush them under foot rather than be incommoded. And so do we all one another. What a ludicrous world!

Then we found ourselves in a park, with the sea stretched at our feet. What a lordly feeling! A gust of wind stirred amidst the trees and shook some green leaves from their branches; for a moment they remained tremulous. The hot sun dipped its beams into the cool green waters below, and they sparkled with enjoyment. The sky, responsively playful, sent white downy clouds chasing each other across the azure. Sylvia looked at me with that infinitely tender look reserved for the only man who really matters in the world.