The Polyglots

by William Gerhardie

  ‘I have two daughters,’ he was telling Aunt Teresa. ‘Màsha and Natàsha. Màsha is grown up and married and lives with her husband Ippolit Sergèiech Blagovèschenski. And Natàsha is only seven and lives with her mother also in Novorossiisk. I should like them to come over to Harbin. But there is a great shortage of accommodation in the town. I myself live in a railway carriage. Luckily enough it does not stand out very far from where I work—in the censorship department, you may know.’

  ‘Look here,’ said Aunt Teresa, ‘when our friends the Vanderphants go back to Belgium in May, why not come here? We’ll have lots of room to spare.’

  Captain Negodyaev opened his handkerchief. And, automatically, I whisked out mine and applied it to my nostrils—in order not to suffocate. ‘I would be very glad indeed,’ he said, bowing awkwardly.

  But my time came to an end. One morning as I came down, I found the entrance hall cluttered up to the ceiling with fur caps, so that Berthe grumbled and cursed at me, because she could not get to and fro.

  ‘Ah, que voulez-vous?’ Uncle Emmanuel calmed her. ‘C’est la guerre!’

  ‘How am I to get them to the station? Damn these caps,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t you bother,’ said Captain Negodyaev who had come to see my aunt relative to his forthcoming installation in our flat. ‘My man is here. He will take them to the station for you … Vladislav!’ he called out. ‘This is Vladislav. He will take them and dispatch them for you and do all that’s necessary.’

  I had a talk with Vladislav and found him on the face of it a very capable, smart fellow who inspired confidence. Vladislav had once upon a time been batman to a Russian Colonel who took him with him on a trip to Paris; and his attitude ever since to things Russian was that nothing at home would astonish him. ‘What civilization!’ he was telling me. ‘What education! politeness! A plain cabman, a common izvozchik you might say, and even he, if you please, jabbers in French! Monsieur—madame—s’il vous plaît—comprenez-vous—and all that sort of thing. As for Russia——’ He only waved his hand—an abject gesture. ‘No civilization at all! You live here like a brute—just the same as if in Australia or somewhere.’

  At the hotel where I had called on business, the porter—a good soul with a kind smile—came up to me. Because he was a good soul with a kind smile he fared well at the hands of the generous who took a liking to him and his soul, and he fared badly at the hands of the unscrupulous who took advantage of his smiling good soul; and so, on the whole, he fared no better than others. ‘You have a separate coupé, sir?’ he said. (Harbin is a terrible place.)

  ‘Yes. Why?’

  ‘There’s a lady here who can’t get a berth in the train. Perhaps——’ He paused.

  ‘Good-looking?’

  ‘Awful good-looking!’

  I scrutinized him suspiciously.

  ‘Has travelled with a gentleman before,’ he hastened to assure me eagerly. ‘Gentleman very satisfied.’

  Harbin is a terrible place. Human nature is frail. Men are born in sin—and I suppose I am no exception. But I digress.

  The train was due out at midnight. I paced the platform and surveyed the crowded third-class waiting-room where bundles of unwashed humanity—bearded men, young girls and women with sucking babies—slept on the naked floor in heaps, among their chattels. So insistent was the demand for space in the train that I had ordered Pickup to stand on guard outside my coupé, with fixed bayonet. The prudence of my action was vindicated a few moments later when a strange Polish doctor came up and addressed me in Polish.

  ‘I don’t speak Polish,’ I said.

  ‘Will you send for your Polish interpreter?’

  ‘I haven’t got one. Besides, I observe that you can speak Russian.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said the Polish doctor.

  ‘May I ask why in that case you cannot speak to me in Russian?’

  ‘Because I am a Pole,’ he replied, and beat himself on the chest.

  ‘What can I do for you?’

  ‘I am a Polish doctor,’ said the doctor, ‘and I desire to be admitted to your coupé.’

  ‘We haven’t got any room, I fear.’

  ‘But you must have room for a Polish doctor. You are Allies.’

  The reiterated pertinacity of this man annoyed me. It annoyed me in particular that he should intrude on my privacy and space at a time when I expected … never mind what I expected. In short, it annoyed me. ‘My dear sir,’ I replied, quietly but with a subtle side-smile, conscious of a short and easy road to victory, ‘it is not a question of your being a doctor, a Pole, or a Polish doctor, but a matter of there being no room for a man, woman or child of whatever profession or nationality or combination of both. Good evening to you.’ It seemed to me that I had settled both the Polish nationality and the medical profession.

  Tired of pacing the platform, I got into my coupé, took out a book and scanned the pages. I am a serious young man—an intellectual. I was plunged in thought, when Pickup interrupted me.

  ‘Who? What?… Ah, yes.’

  Then the train drew out.

  20

  ‘HAVE YOU, OR HAVE YOU NOT, AN INTELLIGIBLE account of the present situation?’ Sir Hugo asked when I reported two days later.

  ‘Yes, sir. It is quite simple.’ I shuffled. ‘You see, sir, it’s like this. Irkutsk is now once again in the hands of the Whites who are being driven by the Reds towards Irkutsk. The Reds at Irkutsk, you will recollect, had taken it over by a coup de main from the Social-Revolutionaries after these had captured the town from the Kolchakites and had later defeated Semënov. Now the Kappel Whites, I think, will join in with Semënov, but being hard pressed by the main Red forces will, I think, strive east and may possibly recapture Vladivostok from the Reds, I mean the Social-Revolutionaries, at the same time evacuating Irkutsk, should they have been compelled to seize it, which will then, I think, be recaptured by the Reds. Is that quite clear, sir?’

  Sir Hugo closed his eyes and laid his fingers on the lids in order as it were to yield the maximum concentration. ‘M’m!… It is at least as clear as the situation seems to be at present,’ he said.

  ‘Of course, sir, I have said nothing of the Poles, the Letts, Latvians, and Lithuanians, the Czechs, Yanks, Japs, Rumanians, French, Italians, Serbians, Slovenes, the Jugoslavians, the German, Austrian, Hungarian and Magyar war-prisoners, the Chinese, the Canadians and ourselves, and many other different nationalities, whose presence rather tends to complicate the situation in view of the several politics they follow.’

  ‘The devil they do,’ grunted Sir Hugo.

  ‘It’s a fact they do, sir.’

  ‘I know they do.’

  ‘Of course,’ I said, ‘the position of the Czechs is probably the most difficult of all.’

  ‘Excuse me,’ Sir Hugo interrupted me. ‘I think I caught you saying “Letts, Latvians and Lithuanians”. Now, when you say “Letts, Latvians and Lithuanians”, do you mean … what the dickens do you mean?’

  ‘They are kindred races … in a way,’ I said lightly, by way of evading an embarrassing question on which, in fact, I was not very clear myself.

  ‘Now, when you say “kindred races in a way” do you mean “kindred people”—and in what way?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ I said cheerfully, as a way out of the difficulty. ‘The position of the Czechs,’ I continued, ‘is a very difficult one——’

  ‘Now I was inclined to ask you,’ Sir Hugo interrupted, ‘if you are aware of the relation between the so-called nationalities such as the Letts, Latvians, Lithuanians, and so forth, and the so-called countries as Lettland, Latvia, Lithuania, Esthonia, Livonia, Esthland, Kurland, Livland, and so forth, and whether or not, in fact, they are not all, or if not all, largely the same people. But let this drift. To return to the subject at issue, what were you going to say about the Czechs?’

  ‘The position of the Czechs,’ I proceeded happily, ‘is a very difficult one. Two years ago they fought the Bolsheviks and were involuntarily d
riven into the camp of the reactionary old-régimists. They stuck it for a year till they could stick it no longer, being a democratically-minded people; they then, by way of atoning for their sins, helped the Social-Revolutionaries against the old-régimists. The S.-R.’s by the aid of their Czech brethren established themselves, but all too late in the season, and so lost their identity amidst the Bolsheviks.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Well, you see, sir, the Czechs had to fight the Bolsheviks.’

  ‘Why?’ said Sir Hugo, somewhat defiantly, as the smoke from his Japanese cigarette curled round his ruddy face and his eyes assumed a kind of roguish expression.

  ‘Because the Bolsheviks fought them.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Sir Hugo with the same intonation and expression.

  ‘As their traditional enemy of two years’ duration.’

  ‘Oh!’ said Sir Hugo.

  ‘They are pursuing the Czechs in their retreat east.’

  ‘The devil they are,’ said Sir Hugo.

  ‘Well, sir, there were still certain reactionaries, the remnants of what used to be the Kolchak Army, under the command of General Kappel, who retreated to the east along the railway track and fought a rearguard action against the Bolsheviks who were pursuing them. The Czechs were in the same boat, so they identified themselves with that section of the Whites and fought their cause against the pursuing Reds.

  ‘But there was another section of the Whites of whom Ataman Semënov was the nucleus whom the Czechs had antagonized by their support of the Social-Revolutionaries against Semënov.’

  ‘Well,’ said Sir Hugo, with eyes closed, ‘it is all perfectly clear to me. Where is the confusion?’

  ‘The real confusion came when their friends the Social-Revolutionaries turned as red as their advancing foes the Bolsheviks, and their comrades the remnants Kappelites as white as their bitter enemy Semënov.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Well, they didn’t quite know then where they stood, sir.’

  ‘The devil they didn’t,’ he said.

  We both sighed.

  ‘And the caps?’ he said. ‘Have you got the caps?’

  In truth, I hadn’t thought of the caps since I had delegated the matter to Vladislav; but I presumed that they were there, nevertheless. ‘Yes, sir,’ I said, somewhat uncertainly.

  ‘You have?’ he questioned.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ I said—somewhat more certainly. For it seemed to me a rum thing indeed if the caps weren’t there. Why shouldn’t they be there?

  The Major was still in charge of my late office as I got back; but as luck would have it, a week later when crossing a steep frozen path, he slipped and broke his leg—and once again I was in charge of the office. When, two months later, he came out of hospital he was hard put to it to regain his place, and finally gave up the struggle and went back to his post office. But the office, which by now contained a score of shell-shocked officers, my seniors in age and service, was no easy thing to run, and so insidious and powerful grew the revolt that, in the end, I found it necessary to erect a ‘buffer-state’ within, a sub-department, so to speak, containing the unruly officers in charge of an ambitious ‘sub’, who, while responsible to me, now bore directly the full pressure of their discontent: the price of his ambition. From time to time buff slips would be passed on to me from other sections and departments, which ran: ‘Please state whereabouts of 50,000 fur caps dispatched by you in February from Harbin.’ And according to the rules of the game, I must confess, I lost it every time, for in the nature of the case there was nowhere I could pass the buff slip on to for action. The action was unquestionably mine. And the drama of it was that I could not act on it. These are the tears of things! For the caps were not there.

  ‘Enquiries still pending’, I would reply ignominiously—and so on until the next buff slip. Enquiries had been pending for over two months; but the caps were not there.

  Another thing, I waited for a letter from Sylvia—but no letter came. These are the tears of things! Once, only once, a long time ago, she had sent me a postcard—a coloured English landscape. ‘Something artistic. Alexander will like it,’ she must have thought to herself. Below was the printed inscription:

  ‘Soft green pastures, gay with innocent flowers’, and then in her own hand:

  ‘Ever yours,

  ‘Bébé (new name).

  ‘P.S.—I’ve sent you a Hanky—this is a little gift.’

  The ‘Hanky’ had arrived. But never anything since. What was the reason? What could be the reason? I felt I wanted to take the first train to Harbin, to send a messenger, to telegraph, at least to write; but I could not even get myself to write to her, as this simple effort was damped by the thought that at any moment the postman might stroll into the office with the long-awaited letter. And thus relieved, I was made to suffer by another thought, that, with equal justice, no letter might arrive by the next post or indeed by any after.

  ‘What is it, Sergeant?’

  He laid a buff slip on my desk.

  ‘Oh bother!’

  It ran:

  ‘Please state whereabouts of 50,000 fur caps dispatched by you three months ago from Harbin. Urgent.’ To which I answered:

  ‘Enquiries still pending.’

  I wondered: who was the most capable and energetic person in Harbin to whom I could safely entrust the task of moving heaven and earth to find the 50,000 fur caps. And suddenly my mind recalled the little red-leather book with the dates of receipt and dispatch of correspondence, and I decided that the most capable and energetic person in Harbin was Aunt Teresa. I found it quite an easy matter to write to Aunt Teresa, because I thought that Sylvia might read my letter, although I found it difficult to write to Sylvia direct. At last, unable to bear the torture of suspense any longer, I wrote a letter to her, entreating Sylvia by all that was holy in the world to write to me at once. To this I had a telegram from her. Not a word about her having written or of her going to do so now.

  ‘Sorry. Love. Sylvia.’

  That was all.

  And then, one morning, came her letter. Her handwriting was like her nature: those thin, swift, naïvely, irresponsibly confident strokes seemed to say: here am I, Sylvia Ninon Thérèse Anastathia Vanderflint, a woman of the world! There was, moreover, an unconscious kittenish quality about her curves, but the exaggerated length and confidence of the fine stroke was splendid out of all proportion.

  I loved her letters. What attracted me was that she did not even pretend to think that her unintellectuality could be anything but interesting to me, an intellectual. Her style was inspirational. Obviously she never troubled to read through her writing, and the capitals she used recognized no law save that of impulse. Sylvia would put a dot inconsequently after any word, just as the fancy took her; or suddenly she would put a dash with two dots beneath it. She would suddenly—for no apparent reason—insert a mark of interrogation, or more often three at a time. This freedom, this utter disregard of punctuation and the fact that I was, in a way, a man who specialized in prose, delighted me exceedingly. Enclosed was another envelope marked, ‘Please read carefully!’

  Dear Alexander. Your Letter was Lovely and cheery and beautifully Long and for once you were not in a ‘Temper’? and also that you are well and happy. Are you delighted to be back? It must be Perfect now. flowers etc. and so forth in full Bloom. I do want to come and see you. But what can I do if I run away my Father will run after me. Mr Brown has just come back from there and he said. ‘It is perfectly glorious down there. the Harbour is a Picture.’ He came to see Papa about the Marshal’s autograph which he wants to sell at an American Red Cross auction. I asked about you. I said you asked me to come boating. ‘Oh,’ said He, ‘he will drown you.’ I was disapp. when you did not send me the little bead bag. If you really wanted to see me Love finds a way. Your weak excuse ‘Broke’ I absolutely ignore. Back of my hand to you 6 Times. There is a Porter here and he came in about 10–15 days ago to see Mr Brown and I asked him about you
and he told me. I won’t mention names. but he told me you had gone off with a woman on the train when you left us, and that He was sorry. Why oh why are you doing such to me. Can it be possible George Hamlet Alexander? knowing perfectly well in your heart that I would not be at the train. If such is the Case, don’t you dare write me or even wish to see me again. I would write and ask your General if he knew about such. tho’ on second thoughts you at Least have the Honour I hope to tell me from Your heart. Have you ever thought in your mind. how Little you study me. now just think. Very Probably the Wonderful woman you travelled with, is taking my Place now. You forbid me to write, speak or visit any of my men Friends. I must slave at Home while you enjoy yourself in the Army???? What beautiful exclamations. Admire them please. Maman is always laid up and Mme Vanderphant is also ill and my Poor Nerves. are quite scattered [she wrote] and I am so tired of sick Individuals. Mr Brown is going to Omsk and I want to run away with him I think. Seeing the interest you take in me and how you study me I had better go. I’ve told you once well to be correct 79,000 times my intentions towards you. ‘The many times I’ve told you.’ I can quite see you never Listen to anything I tell you just Like water on a ducks back. and you are getting more and more selfish. Words or Letters. nothing could explain how angry I am with you.

  Very Disapp. with you.

  Good Bye.

  I had in my letter, referring to the difficulty of extracting a reply from her, said she was ‘impossible’. And now she signed herself:

  Sincerely yours

  Sylvia the Impossible Woman.

  PPPSSSS.

  and I am not Kitten.

  Enclosed in the outer envelope was another letter.

  Alexander Darling Prince of Angels. You see how very angry I am with you and you can Prepare for Punishment. This is just a tiny note to wish you Very many happy returns of Tomorrow the 27th You Little treasure. How many years are you now? 21 Yes No. Yes. And I am writing to tell you how very disgusted I feel with the Rotten Idiots of Photo foolery People. My Photos are not finished how disapp. you will be Alexander. I simply cried with vexation and Berthe shrieked with laughing, not because Photographs were not done, but because of my delightful ‘face.’