Sea of Glass (Valancourt 20th Century Classics)

by Dennis Parry

  Oh no, we haven’t, I thought. My shirt is done up in front.

  ‘You also are an orphan—yes?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘We fight alone.’

  ‘I didn’t know your mother was dead too,’ I said, for something to say.

  Varvara rolled up her magnificent eyes until practically only the whites were visible.

  ‘God rest her, my beloved Serafina Filipovna. She had a terrible death. I shall tell you about it and see if you weep.’

  ‘Let’s take a chair,’ I said, feeling that it might be easier to force a few tears from a sitting position.

  We arranged ourselves to look over the Round Pond, above which a faint water-vapour was shimmering in the brilliant heat.

  Varvara began: ‘In the summer at Doljuk it is so hot that nobody can sleep in the houses. At night they go into the cellars which are dug deep beneath the yards. But before you lie down you must be very careful. You must search the Kang and search the ceiling and you must burn along the cracks of the wall. Otherwise the pests will come out and empoison you in your sleep.’

  ‘Bugs?’ I queried.

  ‘Pests,’ said Varvara firmly. ‘Scorpions, many bad flies, and also nobbol.’

  ‘What’s nobbol?’

  It was more easily asked than answered. There was a gap in Varvara’s English about nobbol and not one which could be easily filled by circumlocution or gesture. After several feverish minutes I had accumulated a number of disconnected items about them; for instance that they were about half the size of her palm, they had hair, appeared to be generally unloved and—to make it more difficult—they uttered a noise which she rendered as a sort of bark. But none of this added up to any coherent picture. And since nobbol were clearly essential to the story, it looked as if I might miss the horrible end of Serafina Filipovna.

  Presently, however, a little dejected by her failure to explain, Varvara allowed her eyes to wander. Of a sudden she stiffened and pointed with a cry at the ground beside her chair. I looked down and saw a tiny spider clambering round a piece of stick.

  ‘Nobbol,’ she said triumphantly.

  ‘But they don’t bark.’

  ‘In Doljuk,’ she insisted.

  ‘Well, it’s your story!’

  Here I will admit that subsequent research shows that Varvara was speaking the literal truth. In parts of Sinkiang is found a species of very large spider covered with reddish fur. It is capable of making a noise which natural history books usually compare to the snapping together of two boards. It bites fiercely and injects some sort of venom whose effects are highly unpredictable. Some people suffer very little, but in others the stuff produces intense lassitude followed by swelling and coagulation of the blood round the wound.

  Apparently Varvara’s mother was sleeping alone in the cellar, because her husband and daughter were away on one of the former’s business expeditions. I suspect that Serafina Filipovna may have prepared herself for a lonely night with several hearty drinks. At any rate she fell asleep without making the usual precautionary search. By bad luck not merely one but two nobbol dropped on her and bit her simultaneously on the breast and the side of the neck. She had never been attacked before and neither she nor anybody else knew that she was violently allergic to the poison. Before she could seek aid she fell into a stupor, during which great buboes of stagnant blood came up at the points of injury. Presently fragments broke away from the main clots and were washed round in her circulation till they reached her heart and brain. So I suppose she died from a kind of multiple thrombosis.

  The tale was my first introduction to life in Doljuk, and it indicated the general flavour not badly—the savagery, the inconsequence, and an element of absurdity which prevented the most frightful blows from acquiring any spiritual significance. It is an awful thing to be bitten to death by barking spiders, but it is not tragedy.

  I should have liked to ask Varvara how her father had perished. But I thought it might seem a morbid insistence on the details of her orphanship. Besides I was conscious how very little I had to offer in return: merely one pneumonia and one motor accident.

  After a while we strolled on, going down to the Serpentine and then along its banks as far as Lancaster Gate. From there we cut up into Hyde Park. We were not very far on the way to Marble Arch, and the heat was already making me think of a return by bus, when a few yards ahead of us I recognized a familiar figure.

  Andrew Callingham had rooms on the same College staircase as myself. He was a year older than I by birth, and at least a decade by experience. His father was a financier, who received a good deal of mention in the newspapers. I suppose he was what they call cosmopolitan and had brought up his son likewise. At any rate by the age of twenty-one Andrew was at home in London or New York or Paris. Brighton suited him equally well—though this did not dawn on people till later.

  I don’t know why he bothered with me, except perhaps that I was useful whenever he wanted to get rid of a surplus of worldly wisdom. His visits to my rooms were usually paid late at night after his return from some gambling party in Trinity, or, more often, a gallant visit to Town.

  ‘Don’t get caught up in it, David,’ he would say. ‘I dropped eighty tonight,’ or, ‘I thought I should never get rid of the little bitch’—depending on the way he had spent the evening.

  ‘Don’t let yourself be drawn into it,’ he would repeat.

  Simple though I was, I realized at an early stage that if by some chance I disregarded his advice and began to rush round gambling and fornicating, Andrew would be very, very angry. I should have destroyed a delicate but essential constituent in our relationship.

  If I had been in control of our progress, I would have dawdled so that we never caught him up. Unfortunately Varvara set the pace, and it was a brisk one. There was nothing for it but to swallow my mean fear of being laughed at for going about with a wild woman. Andrew did a good deal of quiet sniggering at the comic lack of sophistication around him.

  ‘Hallo,’ I said, as we came level.

  He stopped and raised his pearl-coloured trilby.

  ‘David, my dear chap! And accompanied!’ He smiled at Varvara. ‘David always pretends to be such a woman-hater.’

  ‘This is Miss Ellison,’ I said. ‘From Chinese Turkestan.’

  ‘No!’ said Andrew. ‘Or is that an example of your famous poker-faced humour?’

  ‘He speaks the truth,’ said Varvara. ‘Why should you doubt him?’

  ‘I don’t really,’ said Andrew. ‘It is just that I’ve never met anyone from those parts before. In fact I can’t miss the chance of making good the gap in my education. Why don’t we all go and have tea at Tytlers.’

  Tytlers lay just behind Park Lane. It was one of the most fashionable teashops in London. There, sitting on small gold chairs with bars like harp-strings across the backs, one could eat the nicest ice-creams and cakes which I have ever tasted. Two things only I hoped: first that Andrew would pay, for I had very little money on me; and secondly that Varvara’s dress would not attract stares—though on this point I was somewhat reassured by Andrew’s calm acceptance.

  Accidentally or by design they put us at a secluded table. As usual the place was pretty full and it was not numbers that Andrew was thinking of when he said:

  ‘I don’t know what’s happening to this place. You practically never see anyone here nowadays.’

  ‘To me there seem many,’ said Varvara.

  ‘He means people of importance,’ I said.

  I don’t know why, but I thought this explanation might make her annoyed or contemptuous. Those seemed to be the proper reactions of a Noble Savage. But on the contrary a look of interest animated her face and her fierce blue gaze swept round the room like an arc-lamp.

  ‘They are peasants?’ she said.

  Andrew began to laugh.

  ‘Oh dear!’ he said. ‘That’s very nice. Yes, I see several who could be described as honorary peasants.’

  ‘At first I must
say strange and foolish things,’ said Varvara with dignity and also with an unsuspected humility. ‘But in the end I shall come to speak as a true-born residing native.’

  ‘God forbid!’ said Andrew. ‘It would be a descent from champagne to soda-water.’

  Here I will anticipate a little. From her father she inherited great linguistic gifts which were developed by the hotch-potch of races amidst which she had lived. As well as English, she spoke fluent Russian, French, Chinese, and Turki—the last being a language of quite fantastic difficulty. But like most polyglots she was prevented by the range of her accomplishments from becoming absolutely at home in any of them. Nobody who talked to her for five minutes would have believed that she was English. And yet her actual solecisms were few and her mispronunciations still rarer. It was the odd turn of phrase—the dignified word when one expected a colloquialism—which gave her conversation its foreign ring.

  Her mother knew little English and Russian was usually spoken in their home. Apart from this, there was another reason why, despite the possession of an English father, she grew up without the slipshodness and the slang which mark the indigenous speaker. Fulk Ellison probably went out of his way to avoid teaching her his own habits of speech. He was considered very foul-mouthed in a genial way and no doubt he realized that it would add to his daughter’s handicaps if she returned to civilization cursing like a navvy.

  Presently Varvara got up and went to the Ladies. Andrew looked at me with quizzically raised eyebrows.

  ‘Well, well,’ he said. ‘You tempt one to coin a phrase about dark horses. What a striking, not to say staggering, young piece!’

  ‘She’s very simple,’ I said deprecatingly.

  ‘So’s a tidal wave. But it doesn’t make any the less impression.’

  I now began to see that I had acquired prestige instead of losing it. So far from being ashamed of my previous cowardice, I was puffed up with smug complacency.

  ‘She still has a lot to learn. For instance about dressing,’ I said.

  ‘But nothing, nothing. If you take away that sack and those delicious boats she has on her feet, you’ll destroy half the effect.’

  ‘Oh well,’ I said rather gruffly, ‘if you merely regard her as a sort of comic turn!’

  ‘Me!’ said Andrew in an outraged voice. ‘I think she’s one of the most magnificent creatures I’ve ever seen. I can tell you, David, some pretty crude thoughts have been passing through your Uncle Beastly’s brain.’

  ‘I doubt if there’d be much doing in that way.’

  ‘Why?’

  I did not really know, but I managed to improvise an answer.

  ‘I rather think that at present she’s preoccupied with other things.’

  ‘For instance?’

  ‘Well . . . she seems to imagine that someone is trying to murder her.’

  ‘Oh, lovely!’ said Andrew, closing his eyes in ecstasy. ‘How right! A dash of persecution mania is just what’s needed to bring out the values in that face. . . . By the way, have you discovered who’s supposed to be after her?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Well, it doesn’t matter. I prefer to supply my own assassins. I think that before she fled from Sinkiang she pinched the gigantic ruby which formed the eye of an idol worshipped by a particularly foul and esoteric cult. Their yellow slant-eyed priests have followed her to England . . .’

  Andrew did not do this kind of foolery badly. He practised it a good deal—largely, as he once told me, for the benefit of that wide range of young women who were in love with Dornford Yates’s Berry characters. It often got results which would never have been countenanced at White Ladies.

  On this occasion he was interrupted by the return of Varvara. He called for the bill and waved aside my offer of a contribution. He was a generous chap in a way which is too often and too lightly despised: there is still virtue in giving what one can well afford.

  On the baking pavement our ways parted. Andrew was going back to his father’s flat in St. James’s and I intended that Varvara and I should catch a bus at Marble Arch. Before he said goodbye, Andrew took the telephone number of the house in Aynho Terrace.

  ‘One day soon,’ he said, addressing Varvara, ‘I’m going to offer my services as a guide. I’m sure David does his best but I believe I could drag you down at least two circles lower in the pit of iniquity.’

  Varvara did not reply; but when we had progressed about twenty yards on our way home, she suddenly said:

  ‘He is one of the children of this world. What is the name of that smelling stuff which he puts on his hair?’

  As was her custom, Mrs. Ellison came down to dinner. I was a little surprised that she had been allowed to do so this evening, for she looked old and tired and worried. The last expression was new to me and it conflicted with my conception of her unshakable aristocratic calm. Whilst she was taking some medicine at the beginning of the meal, I whispered to Varvara who was sitting next to me that her grandmother looked rather ill.

  ‘Is it strange?’ she replied. ‘All afternoon the fiend is with her and she wears herself out against his snarlings and persuasions.’

  ‘What do you mean—the fiend?’

  ‘My uncle,’ said Varvara.

  She spoke rather louder than she intended. Mrs. Ellison looked up at us over a glass of frothy pinkish liquid. In her regard there seemed to be a curious and subtly disquieting mixture of emotions: sympathy, disapproval, and the cold quiet amusement of the ancient who know that very soon now somebody else will have to hold the baby. All she said was:

  ‘Did you have a nice walk, my dear?’

  ‘Yes, Grandmother,’ replied Varvara in a subdued voice.

  Mrs. Ellison turned to me.

  ‘I am sure you saw that she did not over-excite herself. It is all so novel and stimulating for her.’

  The cool, faintly astringent tone was certainly intentional. The old lady knew a good deal more about the cross-currents in her household than one would have expected.

  After dessert it appeared that I, as the solitary male in the company, was expected to sit on for an indefinite time in front of a decanter of port. Very wearisome my solitude would have been if Turpin had not appeared after about five minutes. He had poured some interesting-looking sauce which I could not remember figuring on our recent menu over his wasp-striped waistcoat.

  ‘Mrs. E. pops off right after,’ he said.

  ‘You mean, goes to bed?’

  He nodded.

  ‘There’s not much doing in the evenings round ’ere—unless you’d like to warm up the Fillet.’

  I must not let down Aunt Edna, I thought, by exchanging lewdities with the servants.

  ‘Turpin—’ I began severely.

  But like the rabbits and birds which I had occasionally hunted he would not remain still whilst I took my shot.

  ‘What about the Gorgeous East, though? All right, eh? Lot of character and body like this Château Ickham.’

  He held up a bottle of the rich aromatic Yquem which we had been drinking at dinner.

  ‘About four years ago,’ he continued, ‘we had another young chap come ’ere. Mr. Sampson, the Honourable Elwood Sampson. Sounds a bit starchy, eh? That’s why I ’ave to laugh. Because you’d never guess. This young Honourable, every night ’e was down in my pantry ’aving a cag with me.’

  Having dropped his tactful and unassuming invitation, Turpin swept up an armful of tableware and loped through the door, trailing one decanter at the full stretch of his arm, like a Neanderthal man with his club.

  At first it seemed that convention was going to win the day. Against my inclination I went upstairs. But I found it was quite true that the social life of the house broke up immediately after dinner. The big sitting-room stood empty and so did the roof-garden beyond. There was no indication of Varvara’s whereabouts. Perhaps she was upstairs sharpening her knife. Anyway, Turpin’s comparison between her and Château Yquem made contact at another point: both had a very strong f
lavour and the palate could temporarily become surfeited with it.

  What finally decided me was the risk that Nurse Fillis, freed from her evening duties, would come into the sitting-room. Turpin did not impress me as a man who often spoke at random, and I wondered whether he had meant to implant some warning in his jest about warming up the Fillet. She was obviously an emotional young woman. At that age I had a marked fear of becoming involved for life with some female who was totally unattractive to me. This was, I think, largely the work of Aunt Edna; when I was eighteen, she had delivered a long lecture about various men of her acquaintance who had been trapped and compromised into marriage with designing hussies. Neither I nor even she realized that these stories dated back fully thirty years, to an utterly different social climate: and that all the victims were covered in strawberry leaves and dripping with money. ‘Poor Jack Froggett,’ she would say, ‘he was only the second son, but he had ten thousand a year and the place in Gloucestershire. Still, it didn’t go far with that woman and her relatives on his back!’

  I could have saved myself a lot of trouble if I had realized that anybody who trapped me would be doing so for the sake of a Cambridge scholarship tenable for four years and a capital sum producing £286 a year at 3½ per cent which I would inherit on my twenty-first birthday.

  I made for the pantry. Above-stairs and below-stairs probably differed far more in an eighteenth- or nineteenth-century mansion than the hall and the dungeons in a medieval castle. The basement at Aynho Terrace was not intrinsically sordid: it was the seemingly deliberate imposition of certain disadvantages which rather shocked me. For instance, need it have been dug so deep that only the last quarter of the barred windows peeped up above ground-level? And why line all the passages with grey stone, when a facing of coloured plaster would have cost hardly more?

  Whatever the case had once been the hardships were now more aesthetic than practical. I looked in at the kitchen where the enormous leaded range still occupied most of one wall, but the work was done on an electric cooker of the most modern design. A little further on a door was ajar and inside another large room—the servants’ hall, I suppose—a whole covey of females were seated round a table sipping cups of tea, as earlier in the day, I had seen some of them sipping away the dust with brush and pan from the bric-à-brac upstairs.