The Polyglots (5 page)

‘Very well, my angel.’

Aunt Teresa’s way of speaking to her husband reminded me of regimental orders: ‘B Company will parade——. 3rd Battalion will embark——.’ It was neither hectoring nor flustered; it quietly assumed the thing done (in the future), it just did not consider the possibility of non-compliance.

‘
Emmanuel, tu iras——Emmanuel, tu feras——
’

‘
Oui, mon ange
.’ And he went. And he did.

When Aunt Teresa went up to her bedroom to lie down before dinner, Uncle Emmanuel told us that he would be able to procure the autograph of a famous French marshal for anyone who chose to contribute twenty thousand francs to the French Red Cross; and my uncle took the opportunity to ask us if we knew of any possible buyers or, perhaps, of an auction or a war charity where such a bait would prove attractive. ‘Zey askèd me to do it,’ he was telling Major Beastly, with propitiatory gestures, ‘and I takèd it; I tellèd dem: I doèd what I can.’

‘I know a chap,’ said Beastly, ‘an American called Brown, who knows everybody who is anybody. I’ll tackle him, and I am sure
he’ll take it on. But’—he held out a warning forefinger—‘no bunkum, you know.’

‘Please?’ asked my uncle, not understanding the word.

‘No bunkum!’ warned Beastly, who was suspicious of ‘foreigners’.

My uncle did not deign to reply.

SOME LITTLE TIME AFTER MY AUNT HAD GONE UP TO lie down in her bedroom I was called up to her. There was an acute scent of
Mon Boudoir
aroma and of miscellaneous cosmetics in the room. She powdered herself thick—you felt you wanted to scrape it off with a penknife. On the bedside-table were medicine bottles, cosmetics, old photographs, books; and on the quilt a red-leather
buvard
, a writing-pad; behind her, soft pillows; and ensconced in all this, as in a nest, was Aunt Teresa—the incarnation of delicate health. She remembered every birthday and wrote and received a multitude of letters at Christmas and Easter, on occasions of family weddings, births, deaths, confirmations, promotions, appointments, etc., and made careful notes of the dates of all letters and postcards received and dispatched in a little red leather-bound book specially kept for the purpose. It was July—late afternoon, early evening—and melancholy.

‘You look fairly comfortable,’ I observed, gazing round.

‘Ach! if I had
Constance
!’ drawled my aunt. ‘If only I had
Constance
to look after me! Alas! I had to leave her at Dixmude! and I have no trained nurse to look after me in my sad exile!’

Constance was the daughter of a great friend of Aunt Teresa, whom she had befriended after his death, and befriending her, had made a servant of her.

‘They are nice friendly people, the Vanderphants,’ I said after a pause.

‘Yes, but Mme Vanderphant is a bit thick-headed, and doesn’t quite understand about my poor miserable health!—and talks so loud. And she’s terribly greedy. On the boat, four years ago, she ate so much (because she knew that food was included in the fare) that the Captain was quite disgusted, and purposely steered alongside the waves—to make her sick.’

‘And was she?’

‘Wasn’t she!’ exclaimed my aunt, with malice. ‘She just was.’

‘But Berthe is awfully nice, isn’t she?’ I said.

And Aunt Teresa, in a deep, deep baritone, in the voice of the wolf who, masquerading as the grandmother, spoke to Little Red Ridinghood from beneath the bedclothes, drawled: ‘Yes, Berthe has taken pity on me in my illness and she looks after me, poor invalid that I am! She is kind and attentive, but isn’t she a perfect fright to look at?’

‘Well, there’s something sympathetic about her face, all the same.’

‘No, but isn’t she ugly—that long red beak! And you know she doesn’t know she is ugly. She even fancies herself. She thinks she isn’t at all bad to look at.’

‘Well, I’ve seen worse.’

‘But,
non, mon Dieu
!’ she laughed. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone so ludicrously ugly. But, as I say—of course, she is not
Constance
, but she’s quite kind to me and attentive.’ Aunt Teresa was looking all the while at my shining brown calves, where my servant Pickup had ‘put on’ a ‘Cherry Blossom’ shine. Perhaps she thought of her own youth, regretted that her pigmy husband had never had such calves as mine. For I am strong of limb, my calves especially, and my dark-brown tightly strapped cavalry boots and spurs (in which I cultivate a certain swaggering kick in my walk), polished to a high degree by Pickup, show off my legs to advantage. Women like me. My blue eyes, which I roll in a winning way when I talk to them, look well beneath my dark brows—which I
daily pencil. My nose is remotely tilted, a little arched. But what disposes them to me, I think, are my delicate nostrils, which give me a naïve, tender, guileless expression, like this—‘M’m’—which appeals to them.

‘That’s enough, George,’ said my aunt.

‘What?’

‘Admiring yourself in the looking-glass all the time.’

‘Not a bit——’

‘You will dine with us.’

‘Yes. Now I must go back to the hotel to change.’

‘Don’t be late,’ she called after me.

When I descended, Beastly had already gone. At the hotel I found an invitation for me to attend next week a dinner given by the Imperial General Staff. As I drove back to dinner, full of half-apprehended anticipations, the shadows were already black under the wheels, and next to the little dwarf slave there ran another with a longer neck and legs like stilts.

AND AS I RANG THE BELL AND THE BOY OPENED THE door to me, Sylvia was there, standing in the hall, bright-eyed, long-limbed, graceful as a sylph. We waited for my aunt: some moments afterwards she came down, and in her wake we all went in to dinner. Sylvia sat facing me. She bent her head, closed her eyes (while I noticed the length of the lashes), and bringing her outstretched fingers together, hurriedly mumbled grace to herself. Then took up the spoon—and once again revealed her luminous eyes. And I noticed the exquisite curve of her finely drawn black brows.

She was so strikingly beautiful that one could not get used to her face: could not rest one’s eyes on her, could not make out what was the matter with it, after all. She was so beautiful that one’s eye
could not fix on her—and one asked oneself why the deuce she wasn’t more beautiful still!

‘Sylvia! Again!’ said Aunt Teresa.

And, involuntarily, Sylvia blinked.

‘And your friend?’ Mme Vanderphant asked.

‘Who? Beastly? He is dining out.’

‘
Mais voilà un nom
!’ laughed my aunt, and revealed her beautiful profile against the light: it was plastered up pretty considerably with powder and paste, but the outlines were intact and lovely enough, I can tell you.

‘There are some funny names in the world,’ I agreed, ‘like that of my batman, for instance, who is called Pickup. I didn’t invent them, so I can’t help it.’

‘
Ah, je te crois bien
!’ Uncle Emmanuel agreed.

‘He has perfectly vertical nostrils, that man Major Beastly,’ exclaimed Aunt Teresa. ‘I never saw anything like it!’

‘He seems a very nice man none the less,’ said Berthe.

‘But—a horrible nuisance! When he wasn’t seasick he suffered from acute attacks of dysentery all the way out.’

‘Poor man!’ she exclaimed. ‘And nobody to look after him.’

‘And instead of shaving in the clean manly way as he should, he used a fiendish contrivance (devised, I think, for the benefit of your sex) for burning off his facial growth, making an unholy stink in the doing—regularly on the fourth day.’

Sylvia laughed.

‘The voyage across the Pacific’—I turned to her—‘took us fourteen days, during which time Major Beastly made a stink in our cabin three times.’

‘George!’ said my aunt, calling me to order.

I raised my eyes and looked straight into hers. ‘I use the word advisedly: a smell wasn’t in it!’

‘But,
mon Dieu
! I should have protested against this,’ said Mme Vanderphant.

‘To a senior officer?’ My uncle turned to her sardonically, as one who knew that such things were not done in the Service.

‘Impossible?’

‘
Mais je le crois bien, madame
!’ he said excitedly.

‘As a matter of fact,’ I explained, ‘Beastly was my junior three days before we sailed. But he was promoted in a single day from a sub to a major because he deals in rail and steam, and is just the man they wanted to advise them on the Manchurian railway, I believe.’

‘Sylvia! Again!’ Aunt Teresa interrupted. Sylvia blinked again.

‘His answer when I approached him diplomatically was that he had a very delicate skin which couldn’t stand the scraping of the razor blade.’

‘And nothing happened?’

‘I cannot say what happened. As I was about to press him more definitely, he had an acute attack of dysentery, and the question was indefinitely postponed.’

‘
Pauvre homme
,’ said Berthe.

The two Vanderphant girls were conspicuously well-behaved, and confined themselves to saying, ‘
Oui, maman
,’ and ‘
Non, maman
,’ or possibly, when passing things to Aunt Teresa, who was like a Queen amongst us, they might anticipate her wishes with a coy: ‘
Madame désire
?’ But scarcely anything more. There they sat, side by side, the one dressed exactly like the other and wearing the same fringe across the forehead, neither plain nor yet particularly good-looking, but very well-behaved; while their mother talked to me of Guy de Maupassant and the novels of Zola.

‘It is so good that your parents sent you to Oxford,’ my aunt said.

I lowered my lashes at that. ‘Yes, of course, it is rather an event to go up to Oxford. It’s not as if you went up to Cambridge, or anything like that.’

‘It had always been my ambition,’ said Uncle Emmanuel, ‘to go to the University. Alas! I was sent to the Military Academy instead.’

‘And Anatole, too,’ exclaimed my aunt, ‘would rather have
gone to the University, as his father also would have liked him to go. But I wouldn’t let him—I don’t remember why—and he, good boy that he is, would not have done anything to sadden me. His only thought, his only interest in life is his mother.’

She sighed—while I remembered how Anatole said to me one evening while on leave in England:

‘Oh, you know, I get round mother easily enough.’

‘Still, a university,’ she mused, ‘may have been better for him, now that the war’s over. Like his father he is a poet, though he is his mother’s boy. But I sent him to the Military College instead.’

‘There are as many fools at a university as elsewhere,’ I said to calm her belated qualms of conscience. ‘But their folly, I admit, has a certain stamp—the stamp of university training, if you like. It is trained folly.’

‘Ah!’ said Mme Vanderphant, with a very conscious attempt at being intellectual, ‘is it not always so: one belittles one’s past opportunities if one hasn’t made full use of them?’

‘It’s not a question of belittling anything,’ I said. ‘It’s the attitude which Oxford breeds in you: that nothing will henceforth astonish you—Oxford included.’

And suddenly I remembered summer term: the Oxford Colleges exuding culture and inertia. And I became rhapsodical. ‘Ah!’ I cried, ‘there’s nothing like it! It’s wonderful. You go down the High, let us say, to your tutor’s, enter his rooms like your own, and there he stands, a grey-haired scholar with a beak that hawks would envy, in his bedroom slippers, terribly learned, jingling the money in his trouser pockets and warming his seat at the fire, smoking at you while he talks to you, like an elder brother, of literature. Or take a bump supper. There’s a don nicknamed Horse, and at a bump supper, after the Master has spoken, we all cry: “Horse! Horse! Horse!” and he gets up, smiling, and makes a speech. But there is such a din of voices that not a word can be heard.’

To tell you the truth, when I was at Oxford—I was bored. My impression of Oxford is that I sat in my rooms, bored, and that it
ceaselessly rained. But now, warmed by their interest, I told them how I played soccer, rowed in the Eights, sat in the president’s chair at the Union. Rank lies, of course. I cannot help it. I am like that—imaginative. I have a sensitive heart. I cannot get myself to disappoint expectations. Ah! Oxford is best in retrospect. I think life is best in retrospect. When I lie in my grave and remember my life back to the time I was born, as a whole, perhaps I shall forgive my creator the sin of creating me.

There is this gift of making another feel that there is no one else of any consequence in the world. While I lied ahead, I felt Sylvia exercise that gift—a most subtle kind of flattery this, needing no words, just a look, a touch, a tone. And as I spoke I felt this in the looks which Sylvia cast me. The stars twinkled. The night flushed, listened, as I lied on. And now I felt that my interminable talk already bored them a little.

‘The war is over,’ said my aunt, ‘and yet there will be men, I know, who will regret it. The other day I talked to an English Captain who had been through the thick of the Gallipoli campaign, and he assured me positively that he liked fighting—and simply carried me off my feet. And I don’t know whether he isn’t right. He liked fighting the Turks because, he said, they are such splendid fellows. Mind you! he had nothing at all against them; on the contrary, he thought they were gentlemen and sportsmen—almost his equals. But he said he’d fight a Turk any day, with pleasure. Because they fought cleanly. After all,’ my aunt continued, ‘there’s something splendid, say what you like—a zest of life!—in his account of fighting the Turks. The Turks rush out of the wood with glittering bayonets, chanting: “Allah! Allah! Allah!” as they advance into battle. Because, you see, they think they are already at the gates of Heaven, only waiting to be admitted. So they rush gravely and steadily into battle, chanting: “Allah! Allah! Allah!” I don’t know—but it must be, as he says, exhilarating!’

‘And then,’ I said, continuing the picture, ‘some sportsman sends a cold bayonet blade into the vulnerable parts of the man. You understand what happens?’ I became cool, calculatingly
suave. ‘The intestines are a delicate tissue; when, for example, you eat a lump of something that your stomach cannot digest, you are conscious of pain. Now picture what happens in that human stomach at the advent of a sharp cold blade. It isn’t merely that it cuts the guts; it lets them out. Picture it. And you will understand the peculiar intonation of his last “Allah!” ’