The Polyglots

by William Gerhardie

  16

  WHEN, TWO WEEKS LATER, BEASTLY WAS LEAVING for Omsk, Aunt Teresa charged him with a mission to her brother Lucy, whom he was to see en route at Krasnoyarsk. ‘Tell him, tell him,’ she enjoined, ‘of the awful, terrible conditions I have to suffer in my sad exile, and of my poor, miserable state of health!’

  ‘I’ll talk to him, never you fear. I’ll tell ’im what I think of ’im,’ said Beastly, guffawing and nodding heavily as if he thought that Uncle Lucy was a poor fish—a silly business man who didn’t know his own silly business.

  Meanwhile, the situation as regards the sheepskin coats was vague and obscure. Obscure and uncertain. Uncertain and hypothetical, to a quite extraordinary degree. The fact was that I could find no trace of any sheepskin coats in the neighbourhood. No one seemed to have heard of such an order. But I liked Harbin and I was in no hurry to return to Vladivostok, and so refrained from telegraphing for instructions and tarried as long as ever possible. For (I make no secret of it) it was nice enough to be with Sylvia, to breathe the same air, eat the same food, lead the same life. Meanwhile, the sheepskin coats, as I said, could not be traced.

  After Anatole’s death Aunt Teresa more madly than ever buried herself in medicine bottles, old photos, hot-water bottles, thermometers, books, buvards, writing-pads, cushions, cosmetics. At the time of Beastly’s illness, Uncle Lucy’s remittance still not having arrived, Aunt Teresa had asked me to speak to Uncle Lucy on the ‘direct wire’, for which privilege, however, special leave had to be obtained from the Commander-in-Chief, General Pshemòvich-Pshevìtski, while the telegraph operator who transmitted the message for me threw out hints that he was fond of smoking English cigarettes. And now again, there being no report from Beastly relative to his démarches at Krasnoyarsk, Aunt Teresa got very fidgety indeed.

  ‘Courage, mon amie!’ said Uncle Emmanuel.

  ‘But, Emmanuel, it’s five months overdue. I can’t be borrowing all the time from Mme Vanderphant. She’s beginning to look quite suspicious.’

  ‘All things come to him who waits. Patience,’ he said. ‘Patience.’

  ‘ “Patience, patience, and once again patience,” said General Kuropatkin,’ said I, ‘as he lost the Russo-Japanese War.’

  ‘Courage! Courage!’ said Uncle Emmanuel, lighting a cigar.

  All these years he had been thriving on the dividends of Aunt Teresa, was always cheerful, and said, ‘Courage, mon amie! Life is worth living!’ But one afternoon as we went out together—Uncle Emmanuel wanted a shirt and a new pair of boots—he looked sad, morose and wretchedly unhappy. His cry ‘My son! My son!’ uttered on that fatal day at Aunt Teresa’s bedside reverberated in my brain at the sight of him, dejected and unnerved. I thought that he was thinking of his son, when he confessed to me that Uncle Lucy had written him a dreadful letter—which practically held him up to ransom, so crudely worded was the document. He showed me the missive. It was incredible. Uncle Lucy, renowned for his unselfishness, Uncle Lucy who liked to play the grand seigneur towards his sisters and their families, Uncle Lucy the insanely generous, had suddenly turned mean and carping, petty and dishonest! Indeed, suddenly he seemed to have turned the corner in his ethics. So far it was he and he alone to whom they looked for dividends. His present missive was as crude a way as if he said, ‘Your purse or your life!’ It was a blunt enough letter demanding that Emmanuel should send him £100 sterling forthwith, and threatening in default of it to send Is. (one shilling) worth of roubles in settlement of all Aunt Teresa’s claims against him. He signed himself: ‘Ton frère qui t’aime, Lucy.’

  It was incredible. I thought: this document will scare her off her perch and send her cackling like a hen. Or she will have a stroke. And indeed my uncle said that he could never show this awful letter to his wife, for fear of a fatal crise de nerfs. And all through his shopping Uncle Emmanuel was very dejected and very morose. He first bought himself the boots and put them straight on, and in the new boots set out in search of the shirt. He was as tiresome and exacting about the shirt as he had been quick and conciliatory about the boots, and the lady who served us became visibly exasperated and asked us how many shirts at least we wanted (implying an expectation in proportion to the trouble we were causing her). ‘Une seule,’ said my uncle. He arrived home utterly exhausted in his stiff new boots and would have done better, in my view, if instead of first buying the boots and going out in them in search of the shirt, he had first purchased the shirt and gone out in it in search of the boots. He was, as I said, utterly exhausted and did nothing more that day.

  But next morning he drafted an answer, pointing out that the action which his brother-in-law had seen fit to threaten him with was not only ‘peu fraternelle’, but, nay, also peculiarly ‘criminelle’, and he asked my Uncle Lucy to terminate the painful correspondence. Uncle Emmanuel requested me to take this message to the General Post Office and to transmit it with all priority by ‘direct wire’ to Uncle Lucy at Krasnoyarsk, for which special favour I had to obtain once more the permission of the Russian General in command. Armed with a note from the Commander-in-Chief, General Pshemòvich-Pshevìtski, I proceeded to the General Post Office where a telegraph operator, reading the Commanding General’s note, transmitted Uncle Emmanuel’s message in my presence with a superlative degree of priority, known as ‘Clear the Line’. Uncle Lucy having now arrived at the other end, six thousand versts away, the telegraph operator received Uncle Lucy’s answer, which, ignoring all Uncle Emmanuel’s elaborate arguments, ran as follows:

  ‘Pas criminelle, mais tout en ordre.’

  And once again Uncle Lucy signed himself: ‘Ton frère qui t’aime.’

  I folded the message and put it away in my pocket, while the telegraph operator asked if I could let him have a box of English cigarettes.

  17

  THEN, ONE DAY, CAME UNCLE LUCY’S LETTER, THIS time addressed to Aunt Teresa. The Bolsheviks had occupied Krasnoyarsk and seized his works and all his property. He wanted the £100. He had all his life been paying them more than he had any business to do, and had incurred thereby the grave displeasure of his family which—so they said—he had neglected for the sake of his beautiful three sisters. ‘Why don’t you,’ he wrote, ‘sell your useless jewels and cough up the money?’ Anyhow, the £100 not having come his way, he enclosed Is. (one shilling), the silver bob, at the present favourable exchange, being over and above Aunt Teresa’s capital in roubles in the Diabologh concern which hereby he considered liquidated for all time.

  What a shock to Aunt Teresa! After her son’s death, it was probably the greatest shock of Aunt Teresa’s life. She suffered a complete relapse. She lay prostrate and speechless, and Berthe busied herself about her slender form with hot and cold compresses, with eau-de-Cologne and pyramidon.

  ‘How is she?’

  ‘Ah!’ said Berthe with a sarcastic mien. ‘There is nothing ever the matter with your aunt. She is a malade imaginaire!’

  But even as she spoke Berthe would rush off back to Aunt Teresa and be very kind to her. She would enjoy a malicious laugh at the expense of my poor aunt, about whose ‘miserable health’ she had no illusions and indeed no tears to waste, and sneer behind her back; yet even as she sneered she would suddenly get interested in her again, with a warmth, a pity, an attachment which was as genuine as her cynicism was sincere. She would delight in sharing anyone’s illiberality upon the subject of my aunt; yet all the time she would be at the beck and call of her new friend who had contrived to make a servant of her. From Vladivostok I had written Aunt Teresa a sentimental letter full of ach’s and och’s, ‘poors’ and ‘alases’, a letter in which the sentiment, intended as it was for a notorious sentimentalist, was laid on with a trowel. I was therefore all the more astonished when Berthe now imparted to me that my aunt had been repelled by the odious sentimentality of my letter and looked upon me as a kind-hearted but withal a sentimental fool. ‘A nice boy, George, but too much in the skies, too sentimental, a little mawkish, too. A dreamer of drea
ms!’ she had said.

  ‘The difference between the dreamer and your practical man, as somebody has said, is that the dreamer sees the dawn before the other fellow.’

  ‘Why? Because he sits up all night?’

  ‘That is one of the reasons.’

  ‘But your aunt,’ she said. ‘Why, there’s really nothing the matter with her. Nothing at all. It is all put on. But she is jealous of me even when I say I have caught a chill. But I’ve no more time to waste,’ she hastened. ‘I must go and change her compresses and make her her tisane.’

  ‘This is remarkable!’ exclaimed my aunt as I went in to her. ‘Your Uncle Lucy evidently imagines that our money is his own and that he can do with it whatever he likes! He must have gone off his head! When our father died we each had 100,000 roubles. Two months later your Uncle Lucy, who continued at the head of affairs as managing director, informed us that we each possessed 400,000 roubles, and less than a year hence he wrote to tell us we possessed one million roubles. Fifteen years later he told us that we had just 30,000 each. We never knew what we had! And now he writes to tell me that I’ve nothing.’

  To Uncle Lucy, I daresay, it must have seemed that all he had done was to present the case to them in a new and startling light, but to his sister he was now worse than a criminal. Uncle Emmanuel drafted a reply in French and stood over her as she translated it hurriedly and not very efficiently into English. From long disuse Aunt Teresa’s English had become very foreign; but assuredly Uncle Lucy’s was no better. Opening her red-leather buvard and placing the writing-pad upon it, she began, without deigning to address him:

  I duly received your insultent [so she spelt it] wicked and unjust letter dated 17th inst. I cannot realize that you, a gentleman, could have written in that shameful way to your poor old sister you have known enough to state she was true, honest and straightforward! You seem to have forgotten that when our father died we all inherited the same sum which you begged of us to leave in the business which you undertook to manage! I perfectly admit you made it prosper the first years and paid us a very good dividend, of which you profited more than any of us, as you lived in a palace as you may say—in the greatest luxury—spending money wholesale—this was of course your business. We lived plainly and spent the money on our children’s education, added what Emmanuel earned, as he has never lived doing nothing as you seem to think!

  My jewels are the only thing I will have to leave to my daughter after my death! Emmanuel is trying to sell my silver, as we are head over heels in debt to the Belgian lady and family who share our flat with us, but he must consider the future when no more able to work and a sick wife to support, and the comfort and care my poor miserable state of health requires. And still I cannot afford consulting a first-class specialist, nor having sufficient strengthening food in my sad exile! We live in no luxury and I have to struggle hard to make ends meet. I do all the correspondence and write to all our relations for Christmas and Easter and birthdays as I cannot on account of my poor miserable state of health do house work—you have been able to shake my poor health, which is still worse since my poor son’s death!

  If Major Beastly told you we live in luxury, it is not true, of course. We tried to give him a good time during his stay in Tokyo and here, in depriving ourselves—at great sacrifice to ourselves, not knowing that he was to show himself a turncoat and informer!—and at very great inconvenience, too, for this man, as you may know yourself by now, doesn’t shave but—oh, makes such a smell with a hair-burning apparatus that we have been obliged to open all windows in the house, and I caught a chill in consequence, which is terribly dangerous in my miserable state of health!

  If you had no wife or sons to help you, I assure you I would give anything to allow you a small sum, but as it is, and having no money of my own, I cannot do so.

  Well, this is the last you will ever hear from me—you have hurt and offended me too cruelly, too unjustly! I shall never forget your shameful insultent letter I certainly never deserved!

  Uncle Emmanuel suggested her signing it at this point. But Aunt Teresa felt that this was not really enough.

  ‘May God forgive you!’ she added, and then signed it:

  ‘Teresa Vanderflint.’

  Uncle Emmanuel, writing his letter in French, began thus:

  To my brother-in-law Lucy Diabologh.

  I have just read the abusive letter which you have had the audacity to write to your sister Teresa who had nothing but the tenderest feelings towards you. Allowing for your own feelings in the matter, I choose to tell you that you have surpassed the measure of decent behaviour and that your letter has completely wrecked the health of my poor wife whose precarious state impels constant care and attention, and for whom, I must warn you, such emotions may prove fatal. If my income was inferior to that derived by my wife from the money inherited from her father, it does not yet follow that I have lived on your money, as you imply. Nevertheless, your offer to settle your debt to us of 500,000 roubles by one shilling appears to me so indescribably odious that I decline to discuss the matter with you any further. I repeat that I have never had the privilege of living on you, as you imagine, but that my family benefited by an advantageous (?) investment in a Russian industry at a time of prosperity of a capital of 100,000 roubles which belonged to my wife and that you were in duty bound to do your best for all of us. The facts have proved, alas! that the too absolute confidence that we have reposed in the ability and judgment of our brother-in-law has resulted in a catastrophe which must have occurred even if the war and revolution had not intervened. It must not, therefore, be forgotten by you that we are your creditors and not you ours, as you erroneously suppose.

  I regret that for the first time that I have to correspond with a brother-in-law whom I had never had the occasion to meet I must be called to give him a lesson in savoir vivre. I ask him to cease all malignant polemics in regard to his brother-in-law and to spare his sister emotions so painful as those caused by his last missive.

  He signed with a flourish:

  ‘Emmanuel Vanderflint.’

  Aunt Teresa’s and Uncle Emmanuel’s letters were so long and explicit that Uncle Lucy as he read them must have felt he wanted to dine in between.

  18

  THE DOVE

  MEANWHILE, THE SITUATION AS REGARDS THE sheepskin coats was still uncertain. Vague and perplexing. Dubious and undetermined. Confused and unsettled. Oracular, ambiguous, equivocal. Bewildering, precarious, embarrassing and controvertible, mysterious and undefinable, inscrutable and unaccountable, impenetrable, hesitant—apparently insoluble. Incredible! Incomprehensible! My orders were to ascertain their whereabouts and to arrange for their dispatch by rail to—I didn’t quite remember where. This I tried to arrange. ‘But where are the coats?’ the railway authorities questioned. Alas, this was more than I knew. For the sheepskin coats, as I said, could not be traced.

  At last I telegraphed:

  ‘Sheepskin coats cannot be traced. Wire instructions.’ And tired out by this exertion of duty and feeling the need of wholesome recreation, I said to Sylvia:

  ‘Come out and dine with me.’

  ‘Oh! Oh! Really? Oh! Indeed! I see! Oh! Very nice!’ she said in tones of roguish whimsicality which that moment made her irresistible.

  I added: ‘Without further cost to yourself, as they say in the business world.’

  ‘Without further cost to yourself, as they say in the business world.’ She learnt my expressions, I noticed, and repeated them. A very good sign.

  I looked at her tenderly. ‘My Irish darling! Mein irisch Kind!’

  ‘Oh! Oh! Indeed,’ she said. She was brimming all over with life and wanted to be naughty like a child, but didn’t quite know how to set about it, and so only hopped about on tiptoe, while I wondered if I had sufficient money in my pocket-book, and if so, whether I could not spend it better than by dining out—buying a new pair of cavalry boots, for example. And my spirit clouded. Like my old grandfather on my mother�
�s side, I was not over-fond of spending money, and now at this extravagant resolution to distract myself with Sylvia by an expensive meal, my old grandfather called to me from the grave. His motto had been: ‘Bargain, bargain, bargain hard, and when you’ve done, beg a hank of thread.’ He was never tired of warning: ‘When poverty comes through the door, love flies out of the window.’ Or he would buy a pennyworth of paper clips and demand a guarantee. He had spent his whole nervous force in life in seeing that he always got full value for his money, and he died unconscious of the fact that he had not received the value for the life that he had spent. But in moments of wanton extravagance, my grandfather would be calling to me from the grave.

  At the big shop in the Kitaiskaya—I have forgotten the name—I bought Sylvia a bottle of scent. In another shop she bought a piece of elastic; sat down and examined the articles with a proud, competent air and sent the girl about her business. And again I noticed her astoundingly charming profile. As the elastic was being wrapped up for her she took hold of her little vanity-bag, a little insincerely, perhaps, while I was looking dreamily away; then I bestirred myself and anticipated her action with a wholly admirable gallantry. And possibly because the amount was something like tuppence, for once my grandfather did not stir.

  As we entered the restaurant ‘Moderne’ we were confronted by an enormous savage-looking head waiter—the sort of man of whom you tell yourself at once, ‘That man’s an ass.’ And subsequent events confirmed our worst suspicions. The waiter looked at us with that savage dubious look, as though he were not quite certain whether Sylvia and I were human beings or some other animals. He displayed the greatest inefficiency in the seemingly simple task of finding us an empty table, of which the number, in proportion to the tables occupied, was vast. Around us stood the waiters—internationals all: a race unto themselves—with that look of theirs betraying that their minds were only set upon a share of what I had in my breast-pocket. And because I was palpably allergic to such menials as porters, waiters and the like, I talked in a loud unconcerned voice, calculated also to reassure myself, and generally assumed the attitude of a gastronomic connoisseur and a man of the world—as though I were Arnold Bennett. Sylvia was studying the menu, and the enormous head waiter bent over her chair. And I looked at him with dark hatred. Among other things, Sylvia wanted chicken. There were two kinds of chicken. A whole chicken cost 500 roubles. A wing, 100 roubles. The rate of exchange, be it remembered, at that time was only 200 roubles to £1 sterling. The enormous head waiter strongly recommended the whole chicken. ‘Straight from Paris in an aeroplane,’ he said. I felt cold in the feet.