The Polyglots (19 page)

‘No, Lucy, don’t be a fool,’ Aunt Molly gently dissuaded him.

And Vladislav himself was not anxious. ‘This is no proper work for a gentleman,’ he was telling Uncle Lucy, who was getting in the way with the axe and retarding the man’s work. ‘You, sir, leave this to us who are used to it. In France——’

But Uncle Lucy, brushing the dust off his palms, had returned to the drawing-room, and, for want of anything better, was examining the pictures on the walls: all as dull as life. The children, strutting with a loud hoof-clatter all over the rooms, were saying:

‘I like
this
’.

‘And I like
this
.’

‘And I like
this
.’

‘And I like
this
.’

Till Aunt Teresa issued orders to stop that noise. Nora hopped about on one leg, with her tongue between her teeth in the effort, and her brother Harry, hardly taller, lounged about with an independent mien, his hands in his pockets. ‘I have a dressing-table,’ he said proudly.

‘And I have a dr
a
ssing-table!’ she echoed—and showed me the mantelshelf.

‘Is this your dressing-table?’

‘Yesh.’

Harry came up and whispered in my ear: ‘We tell her so s’e shouldn’t cry. S’e’s only a baby.’

‘And this is my bad,’ she said.

‘Silly! This is not a bed. It’s a sofa,’ he said.

‘This is my shofa,’ she said.

‘I see this is where you sleep?’

‘Yesh.’

‘Isn’t she a lovely little thing? Come, lovie,’ he said, embracing her.

‘Why do you call her lovie? Is that her name?’

‘No, her name is Nora Rose Di-abologh. Her name is Miss Di-abologh. But I call her lovie. S’e’s only a baby,’ he said.

‘And does Nora love you?’

‘Yes. I love her and s’e loves me.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Because when I tell her: “Nora, put your arm round me”, s’e puts her arm round me—and kisses me.’

‘Your little sister is not a fool, Harry, you know.’

‘No, she isn’t.’

‘And you’re not a fool either, are you, Harry?’

‘No, but daddy is.’

‘Why?’

‘Because mammy says so.’

Uncle Lucy stood in the middle of the drawing-room, his hand on his ear-trumpet and close to his ear (but talking himself all the while), and spoke of the heavy losses he had sustained, and
expressed a fear lest soon he would lose all his possessions. ‘Ruin,’ he said. ‘Irretrievable ruin.’

‘
Courage, mon ami! Courage!
’ said Uncle Emmanuel, smoking calmly a long, thick cigar, and he gave a smack on Uncle Lucy’s shoulder—not too hearty, however, because he was still a little uncertain of his
beaufrère
. Although he had suffered material damage at the hands of the Bolsheviks, Uncle Lucy, I noticed, was not unsympathetic to certain aspects of their programme, and hoped that by their publication of secret diplomatic documents they would put an end to the immoral diplomacies of the past. Among other things, he expressed faith in the League of Nations. Uncle Emmanuel, on the other hand, professed a cynical naïveté in regard to human affairs. He did not believe in the League of Nations, laid stress on the inherent wickedness of human nature which he scornfully considered incapable of improvement and, moreover, had no wish to improve. Uncle Emmanuel had never profited materially by his cynical attitude, and had never had a penny of his own, and had all his life been fated to play a cringing role both before his superiors and his own wife. To Uncle Lucy, who had been a bit of a Socialist and withal a very rich man in his days, Uncle Emmanuel said: ‘I respect your ideals, your impractical aspirations; but I am a man of facts, and have no faith in highfalutin theories: my purse is my politics. Yes.’ And he looked round for applause. But as most of us knew that there was nothing in Uncle Emmanuel’s purse, this statement was received without enthusiasm.

The dining-room was reorganized on the principle of treble shifts, and Aunt Molly, a big, full-blooded woman, presided over the long table surrounded by a multitude of her kin. Aunt Teresa, heavily powdered, bejewelled and wrapped in old lace, sat in a great arm-chair, propped up by pillows, a little to the side, to emphasize as it were that, unlike the others, she was an invalid. When she spoke across to Uncle Lucy she raised her voice with an air of self-sacrifice as though it were a cruel strain on her nerves. ‘Ach!’ she sighed, when he did not catch what she said. And when
she repeated louder the words she looked at the others to imply that she did so at the cost of her delicate health. When he spoke to her she closed her eyes, as though it were trying to her to make herself listen to his loud unaccustomed voice, as yet not modulated to her sensitive ear. Uncle Lucy continually asked questions about the progress of the Russo-Polish war, in which he was much interested, but could not hear my answers, and so turned to his wife. But Aunt Molly’s intellectual powers had been sapped by a dozen children to whom she had given birth, and in her rendering of my account she mixed up events and issues in such a way that my uncle, withal a clever man, perceived at once that there was something very wrong about it. In desperation he turned to his son, a lout of eighteen, sitting at his side. ‘What did George say?’ he asked, and listened through the ear-trumpet.

‘The Russkis have defeated the Polyakis,’ the lout said right into the ear-trumpet.

‘Speak up. Can’t hear you.’

‘George says,’ shouted the lout, ‘the Russkis have defeated the Polyakis.’

‘Shame!’ cried my uncle. ‘Shame!’ And I wondered what was a shame and why my uncle’s Russophile sympathies should have turned Pole. ‘Shame!’ said my uncle, ‘that you, an Englishman, can’t talk English better than that.’

The lout shrugged his shoulders. Seeing that he had never been out of Russia and never spoke English at home, it was a wonder he spoke it as well as he did. Towards the end of lunch Vladislav brought my coffee machine. In forty-five minutes the coffee machine yielded enough for one small cup. Nevertheless, being polite, I asked Uncle Lucy if he wanted coffee, and devoutly hoped that he did not. But, as usual, he did not hear what I said. He had not as yet got used to my voice.

‘Do you want coffee?’ I asked.

‘What?’

‘Do you want coffee?’ I cried.

‘What?’

‘Do you want coffee?’ I yelled across the table, so that my own voice reverberated in my ears.

‘Speak up. Can’t hear you,’ he said.

‘George asks,’ shouted Aunt Molly, to whose voice Uncle Lucy happened to be peculiarly susceptible, ‘if you want coffee.’

‘Coffee?… Yes.’

‘Curse you!’ I thought.

Luncheon over, Aunt Molly rose, followed by her offspring, like a hen by her innumerable chicks—‘Chuck-chuck-chuck-chuck-chuck …’ They ran in front, behind, and to both sides of her, as she moved into the drawing-room where she sat down on a soft chair, an ample, milk-and-blood-complexioned woman with small, kindly, brown eyes, her chicks surrounding her. She had been married a long time, but they kept arriving each year like a birthday present, or sometimes for Christmas or Easter. And when you saw her surrounded by cherubim with the same brown eyes (or blue like Uncle Lucy’s) you felt moved, you spoke and treaded softly, reverently, feeling you had stepped into a sanctum, the holihood of motherhood, as if into the presence of that picture of Raphael. Some were by other mothers, and some, no doubt, fruits of Uncle Lucy’s infidelities. Even so, you could never tell by her demeanour. To her all were alike. She had protested against Uncle Lucy’s love affairs by ignoring him. But she ignored him so gently and meekly that he never noticed it.

And here I overheard a fragment of a conversation between Uncle Emmanuel and Uncle Lucy which I judged had some small connection with the financial nature of their recent correspondence. Uncle Emmanuel, the officer—which suggests swords, courage, honour (of sorts)—said to Uncle Lucy, the landowner—skins, mills, commerce, bills of lading—‘I respect you more than I like you.’ And Uncle Lucy surprised me by his ready wit in replying, ‘And I like you more than I respect you.’ Uncle Lucy, though he held forth a good deal on his poverty, had a pocket-book bulging with bank-notes of a high denomination—foreign as well as Russian. He had small deposits abroad,
that was all. The Bolsheviks had taken the bulk of his money.

Aunt Teresa came up to her brother, put her head on his shoulder and said, ‘Oh, Lucy, pity me! I am so faint, so ill, so weak, so miserable! I won’t live long!’

‘Speak up! Can’t hear you,’ he said.

‘Oh, my God,’ sighed my aunt, and looked up to heaven. ‘If father were alive and saw the plight we were in!’

He looked at her with compassion. ‘That’s all right,’ he said. ‘You will receive your dividends as before.’

There was a pause, our hearts beat as if in a hollow.

‘We are in debt,’ she said in a whisper.

‘That’s all right, you will get your arrears.’

There were tears in her eyes. ‘I must sit down,’ she said. Uncle Emmanuel lit a cigar.

‘What a pretty and well-mannered girl—Natàsha,’ Aunt Molly observed.

‘Yes, I am very fond of her,’ said Aunt Teresa, with a brightness and gaiety unusual in her, ‘and I rather like her mother. Her father is a queer fellow, quite harmless, though I must confess I’m not enamoured of his face, and I wonder what he does with himself all day. He’s very meek and mild and servile with everybody, but at home he bullies his wife. He suffers from a kind of mania of persecution, and every now and then he sounds the alarm, wakes up his wife and child in the middle of the night and bids them dress—ready for flight at a moment’s notice. And there they sit, all packed and ready, in their fur coats and muffs and hats and warm goloshes. Then he declares “All Clear!” and sends them back to bed. This happens about once a month or so.’

Aunt Molly sighed. ‘I’m sorry for him. He looks so pathetic hopping on his wooden leg.’

The children’s manner of acquaintance making, in its directness, reminded one of that of dogs. Seeing a photo of Uncle Lucy on Harry’s ‘dressing-table’, Natàsha said, ‘Oh, is that your daddy? He is very nice.’

‘Ah, but he’s not nice to mummy,’ Harry said.

‘I have a daddy too,’ Natàsha said.

‘No, you haven’t.’

‘I
have
! That Rush-yan gentleman—he my daddy.’

‘I know, but we don’t like his face, and we wonder what he does.’

‘
Ooh
——! Nasty, nasty, nasty!’

‘He’s not your daddy at all,’ said Harry. ‘He’s the stork that brought you.’

Open-mouthed, she asked, ‘What’s it means stork?’

‘Because he hops about on one leg.’

‘Sylvia, don’t wink!’ said Aunt Teresa. ‘The wedding’—she turned to Aunt Molly—‘will have to be put off till after Christmas.’

Sylvia, grave and timid in the presence of elderly ladies, was all ‘Ha, ha, ha!’ at the approach of her many boy cousins.

‘Do you mind putting off the wedding till after Christmas?’ I asked.

She stopped laughing. ‘Just as you like, darling. Ha, ha, ha!’ She at once became lively again.

Entering the dining-room on my return from the office, I saw a roomful of baby cousins at their evening meal. Napkined at the neck, they sat close at table on chairs that were too low for them, their chins touching the edge of the table, gaping around and swinging their legs. Behind stood their mothers and nurses, who urged them on with fine exhortations. Nora ate an egg beaten up in a cup; she held a teaspoon in her mouth upside down and sucked off the egg that clung to its convex surface, while her eyes wandered all over the ceiling. ‘Some more brad, mummy.’

‘Say
please
.’

‘Please.’

‘Isn’t she a mess!’ said Beastly loudly, and nodded heavily and guffawed several times in the doing.

Harry’s forget-me-not eyes matched the blue-lilac rim of the cup and saucer out of which he was drinking, holding it in his two little fists and looking out from above, his eyeballs rolling all over the room.

As she finished eating Nora crawled off the chair, and at once there was the sound of her hoof-clatter. Natàsha ran after her: ‘Ah! little Norkin!’ Nora’s legs were something in the way of a ship’s screw: they worked evenly enough, but somehow did not modulate their pace to the peculiarities of the surface, thus often, for sudden lack of resistance, performing in the air with unexpected precipitation, like a ship’s screw when it is jerked out of the water. In the same inconsequential way, she ran into Aunt Teresa’s bedside medicine table, which was more than Aunt Teresa’s nerves could stand. And Aunt Teresa took the opportunity to tell Nora what a sweet, obedient little girl she, Aunt Teresa, had been herself when of Nora’s age. Nora didn’t seem to care a bit, and while Aunt Teresa talked to her, was making very deliberate movements with her arms, as though affecting to fly. Aunt Molly, who was tired out, and had seemed angry with the noisy children, now that she had a moment to sit down, related tenderly their intimate histories from the earliest years. Aunt Teresa and Berthe professed a polite but unconvincing amazement at these confidences. A certain lady in Krasnoyarsk, Aunt Molly related, had organized a drawing competition, and Harry won a prize.

‘Fancy that!’ drawled Aunt Teresa, lifting for a second her eyes from the fancy needlework at which she was an adept and letting them fall at once.

‘How clever of him!’ said Berthe.

‘And when Bubby was barely one, and we used to ask her, “What has Bubby got good?”—“Good appetite,” she said.’

‘Fancy that—remarkable,’ said Aunt Teresa, and at once began counting the stitches.

‘
Charmant
,’ echoed Berthe.

‘When Nora was barely two, one day I asked her, “Do you love me?” And she said, “Would you care me to love you?” “Yes, I would.” “Then I love you
dearly
,” she said.’

Berthe beamed and purred like a cat, and Aunt Teresa first counted the stitches. ‘Fancy that,’ she said, and smiled rather belatedly.

‘Well, Bubby,’ drawled Aunt Teresa, ‘are you a good little girl? And do you love your mummy?’

‘Yes, I love her very much. I have a little pram,’ she said, ‘and now all my doggies can have rides in it, because if they are always running about and walking they will get so thin, you know.’