The Polyglots (12 page)

Yet in a way it was all very nice.
Dîner à deux
. Shaded lights. Her charming profile. Her fragile young body. Her beautiful gown. Her scent of
Cœur de Jeanette
. And the music was so loud that we shouted at each other as though in a gale at sea. And she laughed. Her laughter was a lovely thing, like dingling silver bells.

After soup (consommé double) there was lobster mayonnaise; noisettes of veal with tiny carrots and sauté potatoes; omelettes en surprise; and Pêche Melba. The enormous head waiter evidently did not catch our order: the wine on being opened turned out to be red. ‘Have this, it’s just as good,’ I advised.

‘No, no. I must have white wine.’

And it had to be changed.

She drank one glass.

‘Darling, some more wine?’

‘No, thank you, darling, I couldn’t. I must have strawberries,’ she added.

I looked round. We were alone in the room. ‘No, you mustn’t.’ A kiss. ‘This is the dessert.’

In due course, I ate ice-cream, and an enormous concoction
on a silver dish of Pêche Melba costing a fortune arrived for Sylvia. She tasted a little—and left it all.

‘Have some more, darling,’ I said, in despair.

‘No, thank you, I couldn’t.’

‘Will you have liqueur?’

‘Yes.’

‘Have you ever had a liqueur before?’

‘No. Only a cocktail.’

‘What will you have? A crème de menthe?’

‘Oh, no!’ She wrinkled her nose—just like her mother. ‘That’s what all the flappers always have.’

I arched my eyebrows and then looked at her steadfastly straight in the eyes. ‘You’re not a student of Arnold Bennett’s works, surely, are you?’ I asked.

She listened, blinking. ‘Why, darling?’

I did not say why.

‘I’ll have a cherry brandy, dear.’

‘All right.’

‘And amber cigarettes.’

‘I have cigarettes.’ I opened my case.

‘No, darling, I want amber ones.’

‘All right,’ I sighed, ‘all right, all right.’ And as time drew out and the courses were removed one after the other, we drew closer to each other, and I felt the warmth of her silk-stockinged leg against my own, and fleeting images flew by from that electric touch.

We ordered coffee. The enormous savage-looking head waiter arrived and said that coffee was no easy matter in these days—that coffee must be
made
. He put down everything to intervention and the blockade. And so he kept us waiting for our coffee quite three-quarters of an hour, and then when he brought it, upset it all over my lap.

And while he removed the tablecloth and dried the table he referred disgruntledly to the political situation as an excuse. ‘Things are not what they used to be, sir. Everything is upset.
Intervention—blockade. The country is no longer what it used to be. People are upset.’

‘Thank you,’ I said, wiping my soaking knees with the table-napkin, ‘I can quite believe it.’

I talked eagerly while I settled the bill—partly to conceal my natural suspicion when dealing with waiters—partly to conceal my apprehension at the cost. Still, it could have been even more expensive.

‘Let me see,’ Sylvia said. (She would ask to see every restaurant bill when we dined out together. The heavier the bill the greater her pride, the more her enjoyment.)

She noted the figure—and seemed content.

We walked a little down the Kitaiskaya before we could hail a cab. On the way Sylvia stopped at a lighted shop window—a jeweller’s. I tried to take her away.

‘Wait, darling,’ she said.

‘How well these imitation necklaces look!’ I observed dispassionately.

‘I prefer these small and short ones: they are more convincing.’ She stared at the glittering objects within.

‘Or would you like to buy me a little bead bag instead?’

My grandfather stirred in his grave.

‘Come away from there. Some day—when I am rich. Or let me send you one later. Come away now.’

‘Let us go to the cinema,’ she said.

We hailed a cab, and nestling to each other drove in search of a movie. The north wind blew a wet drizzling snow into my face, and it was dim and dreary out of doors: but in my heart was gladness.

We settled down in a dark cosy box, and turned our eyes on the screen. Harbin was a speck on the globe of the earth, and I was a speck in Harbin; but that moment my love circumscribed and encompassed the earth and all living creatures upon it: and I blessed them all. The orchestra was a large one for a cinema. Hebrews they were, all—dark as Spaniards, twenty-one strong: and
I blessed them all, the one-and-twenty. Good old Judaea! Blessed be the Jews! What emotion. How the violins sobbed. We sat back in the box. Sylvia clung to me, but did not speak. The ‘cellos wept bitterly, they wept for those who were dead, and for those who were living. And I discovered a thing utterly new to me: I discovered that they all had souls independent of mine, and I saw those souls, and I blessed them. We nestled close, close to each other, and that all this—our love—besides being ineffably glorious was also absurd did not detract from it. And I remembered my mother, saw her when she was a young girl with eyes very blue, and I blessed her dear memory and her love for my father, as fragrant as ours. And I laughed with happiness. I thought of old men who, bidding us carry on, had stepped into their graves, and I perceived that each soul asked only for a working modicum of happiness, and my mind’s eye went out into the street and blessed them all. And I thought of Sylvia at my side, without passion, through a film of laughter and tears and my pure love of her, and of my uncle and aunt, of Berthe and Mme Vanderphant, of winter and summer and autumn and spring, and of the sheer joy of being alive. I wanted to do for them, build up their happiness by my overpowering strength. I wanted to harness my thoughts, to imbue the world with ideas. I wanted to preach to a multitude from street corners, from a very high hill, to bless babies; I wanted mothers to bring them to me, for if any man had
I
had, that moment, the pure power of blessing them: legitimate, illegitimate, all, I would bless them, consecrate marriages, with the holiness that was in me but which was not mine. The orchestra wept. The broad rays beat on the screen and projected a sort of gala pitch-battle. Bang! bang! Men and women were shot, turned head over heels, multitudes scrambled, pushed forward, unloading revolvers in the flesh of their brethren: bang! bang! bang! tumbling over each other—Red Indians, cowboys, tigers, leopards, horses, giraffes. The orchestra, merely twenty-one strong, played something—it didn’t matter what—my own ears made up the deficiency, adding twenty bass instruments, thirty trombones: sixty fiddles sobbed
in my heart. But the people who died in the pictures I had no sympathy for—a sure indictment of the screen! Had there been a real play with real actors I would have felt the same human pity for them as for all living things, and would have blessed them. I looked at Sylvia, so silent at my side, and the heart in my bosom went wild. I wanted to shout, yell at the top of my voice, aiding the orchestra, crack whips, roar with the lions and leopards, fire off maxims! Such was my love.

When it was all over, I hailed a cab and helping Sylvia to step into the vehicle, stepped into a ditch. ‘Asia!’ I swore. And driving home I had a very nasty feeling: a soaking sock in the left shoe, which meant, of course, that I would catch a chill. There are fifty-two weeks in the year, during thirty of which I have a sneezing cold. And, of course, so it was.

At home I found a telegram for me: ‘Regret misunderstanding. No coats ordered. 50,000 fur caps instead. Arrange transportation and return forthwith with caps. Urgent.’

THERE ARE TIMES WHEN, AFTER FEEDING MY MIND and soul upon ideas of our most hopeful evolutionists, I suddenly experience a spiritual relapse and think that after all, perhaps, human beings are a race of biped rats—that human destiny on earth doesn’t greatly matter. I meditated thus as I recalled the 50,000 caps intended for 50,000 soldiers intended to restore by their commanders some of that ‘law and order’ in the land and so preserve the continuity of our glorious humanity. This nonsense was hatched by strong silent men, men ‘with no nonsense about them’. Rats, I thought, 50,000 rats in fur caps, sacks of flesh and disease, bundles of incoherent urgings, rapacious beasts. The rats had crept out of their holes and went for each other. All out of silliness. Rats, I thought, rats.

In the drawing-room as I entered stood a Russian officer
whom I had seen before, so far as I could remember, at the local censorship department. And indeed the officer looked like a rat on its hind legs—a rat in khaki. At my approach he clicked his heels, introducing himself: ‘Captain Negodyaev.’ What a passport for a man! The name translated into English would read Captain Scoundrelton or Blackguardson—ominous enough. Yet Captain Negodyaev was meek and servile, humble and very timid, but was said to bully his wife. He had a long narrow head with a scanty growth of yellowish hair and a small scraggy moustache with wrinkles round his mouth, and eyes as if he had stolen somebody’s cuff-links and feared to be found out. His chin was shaven—I mean on days when it was shaven; on other days one could surmise that this at all events was roughly what he aimed at. He had a wooden leg which he liked to pass off as an honourable war wound. But everybody knew that he had fallen off a tram at Vladivostok while the ground was slippery and broken his left leg which later, owing to blood-poisoning that had set in, had been amputated for him. He was always spurting scent on his handkerchief, and every time he opened it to blow his nose there was an all-pervading odour in the atmosphere.

‘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.