The Polyglots (4 page)

‘I owe my recent promotion,’ I said, ‘to having, at a psychological moment, slapped a certain War Office Colonel on the shoulder: just as his ego had touched the height of elation. Had I slapped him a second too early or a second too late, my military career would have taken a different course altogether. I am sure of it.’

Uncle Emmanuel did not take in what I said, but generalizing the topic into a human attitude, murmured: ‘
Que voulez-vous
?’

‘Yes, I wouldn’t be here but for that.’

‘After a big war there are always little wars—to clear up,’ said Uncle Emmanuel, shrugging his shoulders.

‘We sailed three days before the armistice.’

‘We were in mid-Atlantic,’ said Beastly, ‘when the armistice broke out. We did have a binge!’

‘
À Berlin! à Berlin!
’ said my uncle.

A novel is a cumbersome medium for depicting real people. Now if you were here—or we could meet—I would convey to you the nature of Major Beastly’s personality in the twinkling of an eye—by visual representation. Alas, this is not possible. At my
uncle’s remark, as indeed at all remarks, Beastly screwed up his eye and gave a few slow heavy nods and guffaws, as though the thing—the Germans, the Allies, my Uncle Emmanuel, nay, life itself—confirmed his worst suspicions.

Then the door opened, and Sylvia sidled towards us, with her eyes on the floor. I looked at her closely and noticed that in truth she had lips kissable to the point of delectation, asking for nothing better. She had the same St. Bernard eyes as her mother, only perhaps of a younger St. Bernard in the act of wagging his tail.

Having greeted me, she went over to the sofa and began playing dolls by herself—a little insincerely, I thought, perhaps out of shyness. Then: ‘Oh, where’s my
Daily Mail
?’ She got up to get it, spread it out on the sofa, and began to read.

Uncle Emmanuel stood pensive as though meditating before giving utterance to his thoughts.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘yes.’

‘To-day, after the Big War, the world is in as childish a state of mind as before,’ I pursued. ‘I do not even vouch for myself. If tomorrow these silly bugles went off again, calling the manhood of Britain to arms, inviting us to march against some imaginable enemy, and tender girls said “We don’t want to lose you, but we feel you ought to go”, and loved us and kissed us and white-feathered us, I should find it hard to overcome the fascination of donning my Sam Browne belt. I am like that. A born hero.’

Irony was not a strong point with them, I noticed. Uncle Emmanuel again did not take it all in, but, with a gesture indicating ‘
Que voulez-vous
?’ he murmured these words.

While I spoke I was conscious all the time of Sylvia—short-skirted and long-legged, in white silk stockings—playing dolls on the sofa. For my own part I know of nothing so secretly exhilarating as the first meeting with a good-looking cousin of the opposite sex. The rapture of identifying our common relatives, of tracing the lifeblood bondship between us. When I looked at her I felt it was enchanting, amazing that this stripling girl of sixteen summers with the wide-awake lustrous hazel eyes, though with a
slightly frightened look, should be my cousin, that she should call me by the second pronoun singular, be intimate with the details of my childhood. I felt that I should like to dance with her in a crowded ballroom which would throw into relief the intimacy of our movements, gestures, murmurs, looks; that I should like to float away with her down the sleepy river on a Chinese houseboat, or better still, fly away with her to some enchanted island and drink of her, to satiation. What I would ultimately do on such a desert island did not, of course, occur to me.

Aunt Teresa had just got up out of bed on purpose for me, as she explained. Great exertion! And Uncle Emmanuel enquired at intervals if it was not too much for her, if the talk was not tiring her. No, she would stay with us a little longer. In fact, we would sit out on the terrace.

It was too hot to move; so we sat still all day until evening, staring before us with a kind of semi-intelligent look, as we sat in big soft leather chairs on the open veranda, impotent after a heavy lunch, unfit for anything in the heat but day-dreaming.

And so we sat and looked into the garden, and beyond the garden into the street, and all around us seemed weird and unreal. Weirdness, an unearthly charm, cast a spell over the place. And as I dreamt I fancied that these moving statuettes and the weird-coloured landscape were merely a scene from some ballet or a Japanese screen: so unreal they seemed. Even the trees and flowers seemed artificial trees and flowers. Some strange birds or insects made a weird continuous sound. But there was not a breeze, and even the leaves on the trees were motionless, listless with enchantment, lost in unreality.

‘To-day the air is soft and tender as in spring, and haunts one as in spring; but the cherry blossoms are over.’ Aunt Teresa as she spoke looked at me with a long, sad, silent gaze. Let me say at once that I’m good-looking. Sleek black hair brushed back from the forehead, lips—and something about the mouth, about the eyes, something—an indefinable something—that appeals to women. You think I’m conceited? I think not.

‘You’re very much like Anatole,’ said Aunt Teresa. ‘Neither of you is good-looking, but both have pleasant faces.’

At that I am frankly astonished. I must take an early opportunity to re-examine my face in the looking-glass.

‘And you’re the same age. I remember so well when Anatole was born and we were thinking of a name for him, your mother writing to me and telling me they had decided to christen you Hamlet.’

‘But he’s called George!’ said Sylvia.

‘Georges Hamlet Alexander—those are my names. A certain sense of delicacy, I suppose, prevented my people from actually calling me Hamlet. Instead they call me Georges.’

‘But why Georges and not George?’ asked Sylvia.

‘I really can’t tell,’ I confessed. ‘Not after Georges Carpentier, I hazard, for he could not have been many years old when I was born.’

‘In Tokyo!’ Aunt Teresa gaily exclaimed, looking round at the Vanderphants. ‘
Mais voilà un Japonais
!’

‘
Tiens
!’ said Mme Vanderphant.

‘At the Imperial Hotel. An unlooked-for diversion during my parents’ pleasure trip in the Far East, I fancy.’

‘But you’re British-born, so you’ve nothing to complain of,’ said my aunt.

‘I suppose I am lucky.’

‘Yes, names are a great trouble,’ said my aunt, looking round again at the Vanderphants. ‘My daughter was christened Sylvia because when she was born she was perfectly fair and looked like a fairy. Eventually her hair has turned darker and darker, and is now, as you see, almost black—with gold-brown lights in it.’

‘And light brown after it has been washed,’ Sylvia said.

‘Is it really?’ I asked with genuine interest.

‘Or take the names of my brothers,’ said Aunt Teresa, turning to Mme Vanderphant. ‘Our mother wanted girls at the time, but the first two born happened to be boys: so she christened one of them Connie, and the other Lucy.’

‘
Tiens
!’ said Mme Vanderphant.

‘Connie—his father’—she pointed to me—‘was near-sighted, and Lucy very deaf. And how well I remember it when they took us for a trip on the Neva in a steam launch. Connie, as blind as an owl, was at the steering-wheel, and Lucy, stone-deaf, down below attending to the engine. And when Connie shouted down the speaking tube to Lucy to back engines, Lucy of course could not hear a word, and Connie, who could not see a thing, landed us right into the middle of the Liteiny Bridge. How well I remember it! And then they shouted, shouted at each other, nearly bit each other’s heads off. It was awful. Your mother was on the launch’—she turned to me. ‘I think they were just engaged.’

And as we plunged into reminiscence I took the opportunity of asking Aunt Teresa to enlighten me concerning my paternal ancestors. Whether what she said was fact or partly fiction I cannot truly vouch. I learnt, however, that originally, centuries ago, our fathers sprang from a Swedish knight who came to Finland to introduce Christianity and culture to the white-haired race; that subsequently he betrayed his stock and went over to the Finns and was disowned by his own clan without ever really being assimilated by the Finns, who, because of his forbidding looks, suspected him of being the devil’s envoy and called him old
Saatana Perkele
, which name—von Altteuffel—he adopted as he strayed into Esthonia and joined the missionary Teuton knights, I daresay in sinister extravagance, perhaps in evil irony, a dark romantic pride—who knows?—and chose two devils with twisted interlocking tails as his new coat-of-arms. His son, a Finn, but domiciled in northern Italy, had changed his name from Altteuffel to Diabolo.
His
son, an Italian born, but persecuted on account of his Protestant faith, had fled to Scotland, where
his
son, a Shetlander by birth, to make the name appear more Scottish, added a ‘gh’ ending to it, after the manner of MacDonogh—‘Diabologh’, to give it a more native air, but only succeeded in so estranging it from its original philology that it was neither fish nor flesh nor good red herring. So much so that when I, a distant offspring
(born in far Japan), was joining up a Highland regiment to fight in the World War (for the freedom of small nationalities), the recruiting sergeant looked at it, and looking at it looked at it again, and as he looked at it he looked—well—puzzled. His face began to ripple, changed into a snigger, developed into a grin. He shook his head—‘
Gawddamn
,’ he said. Just that—and then no more. I took the oath and the King’s shilling—which then was eighteen-pence. My grandfather, who had been born in London and was of a restless disposition, after travelling in Spain, Holland, France, Denmark and Italy, settled in Siberia, where he had bought a large estate in the vicinity of Krasnoyarsk, where later he developed a successful business in exporting furs. In his diary there are curious references to the bull fights which he saw in Barcelona, where he also met his future wife, a Spanish lady who, after marriage, followed him to Manchester where, prior to settling on the Krasnoyarsk estate, she gave birth to my father, Aunt Teresa, Uncle Lucy, and half a dozen other offspring. My grandfather, who outlived his wife, provided in his will that the Krasnoyarsk estate (known by the Russian rendering of our surname ‘Diavolo’) should be equally divided among his many children. ‘But your father could not get on with your Uncle Lucy,’ Aunt Teresa told me, ‘and he withdrew his share of money and set up his cotton-spinning mills in Petersburg. And of course, he has also done very well.’ And as she spoke, I saw myself as a child back in the magnificent white house overlooking the Neva and contrasting strangely with the desolating quay on which it stood. Outside the snow was falling. The wind sweeping across the quay was hard, defiant. The ice-chained Neva looked cold and menacing. And looking at me, Aunt Teresa said, ‘You, George, are not a business man, you’re’—she made gestures with her blanched bejewelled hand towards the heavens—‘you’re a poet. Always in the clouds. But your father—ah, he was a business man!’ And Aunt Teresa, to uphold her personal prestige among her friends from Belgium, gave it to be understood that both her brothers had been rich as mischief. ‘If you went to Petersburg,’ she said to Berthe, ‘and asked
for the works of Diavolo, why, any cabman would take you to my brother Connie’s place at once.’

‘
Tiens
!’ said Berthe, with a very conscious look of reverence for the prestige of Connie coming on her face.

‘And now we’ve lost everything!’ she sighed, ‘in the revolution!’

‘
Courage! Courage!
’ said Uncle Emmanuel.

My aunt was very proud of the achievements of her clan, and exaggerated a little when talking to strangers. Mme Vanderphant at this point intervened to say that an uncle on their mother’s side also had big works in the vicinity of Brussels, and incidentally, a lovely house in the capital. But Aunt Teresa dismissed her lightly. That was nothing, she implied. Mme Vanderphant should have seen Connie’s house in Petersburg! As if talking to me, but really to impress the audience, in a deep contralto voice she said:

‘Your father’s house in Petersburg. Ah, that was a palace! And now, alas, all gone, all gone.’

‘
Courage! Courage!
’ said Uncle Emmanuel.

While Aunt Teresa talked of the glorious past, the Vanderphants, with their own thoughts far away, assumed a polite interest: Mme Vanderphant feigned to attend, with an unconvincing smile of humility on her face. Berthe, half-closing her eyes, listened to what I said and exchanged frequent glances with Aunt Teresa—little nods of intimate reminiscence, of warm approval and understanding. She could not have shared these memories, but in this assumption lay the secret of a personality too kind and sensitive even to think of chilling us with any attitude to our memories less intimate than our own.

‘Sylvia! Don’t blink!’ said Aunt Teresa sternly.

Sylvia made an inhuman effort—and blinked in the doing.

‘Of course, your father is independent of us,’ said Aunt Teresa, ‘and we can’t expect him to be sending us any remittances. But your Uncle Lucy has been our trustee ever since our father died, and is obliged to see that we receive our dividends as they are due to us.’

‘And has he managed well?’

‘Well, yes,’ she said. ‘I must confess that he has been very generous. Very, very generous. Only lately——’

‘Lately——?’

‘Lately he hasn’t been sending us any dividends.’

‘Oh?’

‘It’s very strange,’ she said.

‘Of course, his business is paralysed by what is going on in Krasnoyarsk.’

‘Quite. But we can’t be living on nothing. And in Japan where everything is so dear! Sylvia’s convent alone eats up half of my money! It’s over two months overdue. It’s very strange,’ she said. ‘We’ve waited, waited …’

‘All things come to him who waits,’ said Uncle Emmanuel.

‘Emmanuel,’ said my aunt, ‘you will go tomorrow morning to the General Post Office, and enquire if our telegram has been received by Lucy.’