The Polyglots

by William Gerhardie

  ‘The war is over, thank God. But I am anxious … about the last six weeks that I’ve been without news of him—I mean before the armistice was signed.’

  I thought: they talk in terms of blood and fire—and then hope for safety and peace.

  Nevertheless, to calm her for the sake of all of us, I said:

  ‘Most of the suffering and pain in the world is imaginary suffering and pain—which is not there. The next story I write will be a tragedy of people who imagine that certain things will happen: they imagine, and their drama is a drama of imagining. Actually nothing happens.’

  ‘It’s you—it’s you—you,’ she said heatedly, ‘who’ve upset me——’

  ‘But, really, ma tante——’

  ‘It’s you—I won’t sleep all night.’

  ‘But listen, ma tante——’

  ‘Oh, why get excited! Why get excited!’ Uncle Emmanuel hastened between us. ‘Peace! Peace in the household.’

  For a while she sat silent in her big soft chair, thoughtful, bent over her fancy needlework. As her tisane was brought in to her by Berthe, she looked at me tragically with her large, sad, St. Bernard eyes, and her lip quivered. ‘How I worry, George! Pity me. Pity me, George! George, understand, can’t you, how dreadfully I worry!’

  ‘That, believe me, is unnecessary. There’s nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so. Nearly all unhappiness in the world is caused by futile recriminations, anticipations, fears, forebodings, remembrances—that is, by the failure to control imagination.’

  She sighed; then bent forward and sipped her tisane.

  ‘What good is it your deliberately spoiling so many days and weeks of your short life by imagining the worst? And if the best occurs instead, you will have cheated yourself out of so many æons of your life, and the knowledge that this dim unhappiness of yours was but a phantom of your ill-controlled imagination will not retrieve a minute of your wasted life.’

  She said nothing, only sipped her tisane.

  ‘Then you will spend the rest of your time being miserable in retrospect for having wasted your days so unprofitably.’

  ‘They will seem sweet then by the very contrast,’ she said, with a sigh. And suddenly she expressed one of those strangely feminine views which always reassured me that Aunt Teresa was, in some ways, not as selfish as I thought, but, in the end, as egotistical as mortal man could be. ‘No,’ she said, ‘if the best happens, and he has come out of it alive, unscathed, I will, by my utmost anxiety now, have paid, and gladly paid, the heaviest dues that may be exacted. I will have squared fate, and I shall be proud and happy to remember that I have not been ungenerous and have secured his safety by my suffering. Therefore I must be worrying now, it is dangerous to be calm and happy. I must pay the dues in advance. I feel I must—I ought to be anxious—and I have been—I don’t know why—all this last month.’

  She rose wearily from her arm-chair and stooped up to bed on the gallant arm of her husband. Aunt Teresa, I learnt, had an attack of nerves after that, ‘une crise’, as Berthe called it, and could not sleep all night.

  I looked at Sylvia. ‘When I saw you in the street to-day I knew at once it was you.’

  ‘Oh—with my shoes unlaced,’ she laughed. ‘I ran out just to buy some sweets.’

  And later, when Sylvia and I played dominoes, I was so fascinated by her presence that I didn’t care a rap about the dominoes, and Sylvia corrected practically my every move, as much as if playing by herself, while I only gazed at her in rapture. In another week her holidays would be over and she would return to Kobe to a boarding-school run by Irish nuns—the ‘Convent of the Sacred Heart’.

  ‘You are a wonderful, unique, great writer, George,’ she said, and then added, in her serious way, with a perfect absence of guile: ‘I must read one of your books some day.’

  Then she too went to bed.

  ‘Ah! the night life of Brussels! Ah!…’ said Uncle Emmanuel over the drinks. ‘It wants some beating!’

  A moment later he came up to me. ‘Mon ami,’ said my uncle, taking hold of me with both hands by the waist and looking up at me frankly, ‘you must see Japan—life—it’s amusing! The night aspect especially.’

  9

  UNCLE EMMANUEL HAD WHISPERED THINGS INTO my ear, and I had nodded, and now we were on our way. Our two rickshaw coolies ran smartly side by side in the abated heat of the evening. The lighted lanterns at the shaft and the side bobbed gaily through the gathering dusk. We went past endless bazaars, through endless lanes lined with shops. Uncle Emmanuel lit a cigar. He wore a brown bowler hat, yellow gloves that had been washed so often that they looked perfectly white, and with his stiff waxed moustache and his gilt-knobbed cane he looked quite a dog as he sat there, contented at last, in the feather-spring vehicle. The interminable progress through the city. Tokyo indeed was like an endless succession of villages. Night fell. The two men ran as smartly as ever. I, with my thoughts full of Sylvia, listened to those queer plaintive chants—A-a-a—y-a-a—yaw—y-o-o—that emanated from every nook and lane; shrinking aback at the touch, disinclined.

  At last we drove up before a queer-looking wooden structure on long legs, and at once the hostess and attendants came down the crude wooden staircase to meet us. Our boots were removed at the foot of the stairs, and we were ushered upstairs into a low-ceilinged drawing-room, where I could not even stand up without bumping my head (though Uncle Emmanuel could do so with ease), and I had a feeling as if I had left the company of human beings and had joined that of birds or some undefined species of animals. While we were thus seated on the matted floor, fruit was served round; then a side-door opened, and a small procession of blanch-faced, short-legged women filed before us.

  I was repelled by their flat blank Asiatic faces, and by the thick paint thereon. But Uncle Emmanuel smiled as he looked at them.

  ‘Elles sont gentilles, eh?’ he turned to me.

  ‘M …’ I demurred.

  ‘Ah!’ he retorted, provoked by my critical attitude, ‘Ce n’est pas Paris, enfin!’

  He said that, say what I might, they were ‘mignonnes’. I maintained that their legs were much too short for my liking—a defect that, to me, stripped them of all feminine attraction. ‘Que voulez-vous?’ he said philosophically. And we mildly fell out. The women stood before us, awaiting our choice. From outside came the din of the streets, and the plaintive whining chant of Mongol music, and the listlessness of the city stealing on us at the dead of night. I sat listless, too, on the matted floor in the low-ceilinged room, and I felt as if I had been locked up in the upper drawer of a cupboard—locked up and abandoned, in an age and place that were not mine. It was too inhumanly strange, and I longed for what I had left. Then I felt I wanted to cry, cry for what they had done to my soul.…

  ‘Rum-looking place,’ I said. ‘Rum-looking girls.’

  ‘Que voulez-vous?’ he said. ‘C’est la vie!’

  At this point the hostess came up to us with a book and, pointing at it, exhorted us to register. ‘Police,’ she said, ‘police.’

  ‘Any name will do,’ said Uncle Emmanuel lightly. But I refused emphatically, and after trying vainly to persuade me to put down my name, the hostess sent for an interpreter—a youth who presently appeared but whose command of our tongue did not appreciably extend over her own. He pointed at the register and said: ‘Ha! Police—zzz—police. Ha!—zzz——’

  ‘Ha!’ said the hostess.

  But I ‘wouldn’t have any’.

  They looked at each other, and decided I was mad. But I seized the opportunity as an excuse for going, pretending I had been provoked, and, accompanied downstairs by their propitiatory smiles and bows, and restored once more into my boots, I got into the rickshaw and drove off, and waited for my uncle a few doors away, where I was immediately surrounded by a swarm of street urchins begging alms. The rickshaw coolie greeted me with a happy grin as if to say ‘Ee! the young gentleman has been amusing himself!’

  ‘Very good?’ he a
sked, turning round in the shafts and grinning at me broadly.

  I shook my head. ‘No good. Girls very bad. Why so bad?’

  ‘This bad Yoshiwara,’ said the rickshaw man comprehendingly. ‘No good. Good Yoshiwara very good.’

  ‘Really good?’

  ‘Ha! Very good.’

  ‘Why didn’t you take us to good Yoshiwara?’

  ‘Good Yoshiwara far, far, very far—three hours far.’

  At last Uncle Emmanuel was ushered down the steps. He got into his rickshaw, and we drove off. Uncle Emmanuel, as we drove home, held forth to me upon the sanctity of the family, the family hearth, ‘le ’ome’, as he put it in English, and on the duty of keeping clean at home and of not mixing the two lives.

  I returned to the hotel in the early hours. I had a bath in tepid water and went to bed under the white mosquito curtain. I could not sleep; all night I heard the whistling and screeching of the trains passing and halting near by. I lay sleepless, images now of Sylvia, now of the rickshaw man saying: ‘Good Yoshiwara far, far, very far—three hours far’ floating in and out of my brain, with the trains screeching and whizzing through in the night. In the end, sleep had taken its own. I dreamt that I was playing dominoes with Sylvia while a U.S. citizen was fighting with a Jap over the sleeper, and when the train stopped we had arrived in Oxford, which was being ‘opened’ by my mother and Lord Haig. Here there was much noise, like at the Palm Week bazaars to which we went as children in Russia. And suddenly I was confronted by an enormous frog. I am a trainer in a zoo. I am frightened, but they ask me: ‘Can’t you manage a frog better than that?’

  ‘What must I do?’ I ask.

  ‘Shoot at it out of this.’

  And I am handed a toy gun shooting cranberries.

  If we are not a bit surprised at the inconsistencies, the incongruities, the rank ludicrousness of our dreams, perhaps we shall not be any more surprised if we discover that our life beyond the grave has similar surprises in store for us. It will all fall into place, and will not seem strange but inevitable, as our wakeful life of broken images, for some strange reason, even as the strangest of dreams, seems not the least strange but inevitable.

  ‘Perhaps,’ I said, on wakening with these pictures fresh but quickly fading from my memory, ‘our instruments of measure are illusions, like the rest …’

  I had a lavish breakfast, the pleasure of which was enhanced by the thought that the War Office was paying for it.

  10

  IT WAS EVENING. I PLAYED THAT VOLUPTUOUS BIT from the Liebestod in Tristan, and Sylvia sat by and listened, absorbed. From the open window the moon swam out, exactly as in a romance, causing me to remember that I was not Hamlet but Romeo.

  I played louder and louder till suddenly the door opened and Berthe said:

  ‘Your aunt asks you to stop playing, as she has a migràine.’

  ‘Come out on the balcony,’ Sylvia said.

  ‘Ha, ha! High-heeled shoes at last! How they show off the calves!’

  She laughed—a lovely dingling laughter.

  ‘It’s dishonest to show too much of your legs. It upsets men’s equilibrium. Either don’t go so far, or if you do, then go the whole hog.’

  ‘Alexander’ (she called me by my third name because George, she thought, was too common and Hamlet a little ridiculous)—‘Alexander, read me something.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Anything. This.’

  ‘Whose book is this?’

  ‘Maman’s.’

  I opened and read: ‘ “… Besides, Dorian, don’t deceive yourself. Life is not governed by will or intention. Life is a question of nerves, and fibres, and slowly built-up cells in which thought hides itself and passion has its dream. You may fancy yourself safe, and think yourself strong. But a chance tone of colour in a room or a morning sky, a particular perfume that you had once loved and that brings subtle memories with it, a line from a forgotten poem that you had come across again, a cadence from a piece of music that you had ceased to play—I tell you, Dorian, that it is on things like these that our lives depend.” ’

  Sylvia had shut her eyes.

  ‘Lovely,’ she murmured.

  Night, the patron of lovers and thieves, enwrapped us, casting upon us a thin veil of white mist. But the light was on in the corridor, and I had the feeling that every moment the door might fling open and my aunt would come in. This disconcerted me somewhat. A wicked smell, as of burning fishbones, rose from behind the backyard wall which the balcony overlooked.

  ‘Tomorrow I’m going back to school,’ she said, ‘and—and we’ve never been out by ourselves. What cold hands you have, Alexander.’

  ‘What is it like at your school?’

  ‘Quite nice,’ she said. ‘We play hockey.’

  A phenomenon of transformation! A Belgian girl, after four years in an Irish Catholic convent in Japan, came out an Irish colleen; there was even a trace of the delicious brogue in her accents. But withal there was a Latin warmth of grace in Sylvia which underlined her naturally acquired anglicism. There was a British freedom in her, but she would remember the restraints of a Latin upbringing, what was at Dixmude, and the ceremonious notions of her parents as to conduct that becomes a Belgian young girl. And there was something ‘taking’ in such discipline, as in a beautiful young horse submitting to the harness, or the discomfiture of ornament upon a lovely female form.

  ‘ “Play me something. Play me a nocturne, Dorian, and, as you play, tell me, in a low voice, how you kept your youth …” ’

  While I read aloud, Sylvia ‘prepared’ an expression of wonderment on her face, to show that she was sensitive to what I read. But she began to fret as I read on, absorbed, and then nestled to me closely. Her nostrils widened as she breathed in the fresh air.

  ‘ “The tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is young …” ’ And although neither of us had anything to do with the tragedy of old age, here we kissed. A light breeze that moment wafted the smell of the burning fishbones upon us.

  ‘Isn’t it lovely?’ she purled.

  I agreed.

  Besides, it was.

  ‘Lovie—dovie—cats’-eyes,’ she said.

  ‘ “Why have you stopped playing, Dorian? Go back and give me the nocturne again. Look at that great honey-coloured moon that hangs in the dusky air. She is waiting for you to charm her, and if you play she will come closer to the earth …” ’

  We kissed.

  And then we kissed again, this time independently of Dorian.

  She had soft warm lips, and I held my breath back—at some considerable inconvenience to myself. Then I released her, and began breathing as if I had just climbed up a very steep hill.

  ‘Go on, darling.’

  ‘What lovely hair you have!’

  ‘Wants washing,’ she answered.

  I stretched out my legs, my hands in my trouser pockets, and stared at the moon—and suddenly shot out: ‘Art thou not Lucifer?’ (causing Sylvia a little shock):

  … He to whom the droves

  Of stars that gild the morn in charge were given?

  The noblest of the lightning-wingèd loves,

  The fairest and the first-born smile of Heaven?

  Look in what pomp the mistress planet moves,

  Rev’rently circled by the lesser seven;

  Such, and so rich, the flames that from thine eyes

  Oppress’d the common people of the skies.

  She stretched herself to my mouth the moment I finished, having, as it were, watched all this time till it was vacant. I kissed her, with considerable passion. ‘What are all your names?’ I asked.

  ‘Sylvia Ninon Thérèse Anastathia Vanderflint.’

  ‘Ninon,’ I said, and then repeated lingeringly, sipping the flavour:

  ‘Sylvia Ninon. Sylvia Ninon. Sylvia,’ I said, and took her hand. ‘Be not afear’d; the isle is full of noises, sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not.

  Sometimes a thousand twangli
ng instruments

  Will hum about mine ears; and sometimes voices,

  That, if I then had waked after long sleep,

  Will make me sleep again; and then, in dreaming,

  The clouds, methought, would open and show riches

  Ready to drop on me: that when I wak’d

  I cried to dream again.

  ‘Who wrote this?’

  ‘Shakespeare.’

  ‘It’s—very lovely.’

  I trotted out such quotations as I could remember—my Sunday best, so to speak. And, presently, grasping her passionately by the hand—‘Adorable dreamer,’ I whispered, ‘whose heart has been so romantic! who has given thyself so prodigally, given thyself to sides and to heroes not mine, only never to the Philistines! home of lost causes and forsaken beliefs and unpopular names and impossible loyalties!’

  ‘Who wrote it?’

  I wanted to say that I wrote it; but I told the truth. ‘Matthew Arnold wrote it. It’s about Oxford.’

  ‘Oh!’ She was a little disappointed. ‘And I thought it was about a woman—who’—she blushed—‘who gave herself to some hero.’

  ‘No, darling, no.’

  After that I recited the passage about Mona Lisa who, like the vampire, has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants; and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary; and to whom all this has been but as the sound of lyres and flutes, that lives only in the delicacy with which it has moulded the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands.

  ‘Oh, darling, let us talk of something else.’

  ‘But I thought you liked—literature?’

  ‘Well, darling, I listened—for your sake. But you are so long, you’ve never finished.’

  ‘But good heavens!’ I exclaimed. ‘I’ve been trotting it out for your sake! I thought you liked books.’