The Polyglots (6 page)

‘Oh, you are disgusting!’

‘This is cruel! cruel!’ said my aunt.

‘Yes, to you, who would like your wars “respectable”, conducted in good taste, outside in the yard, but please not on the drawing-room carpet! While my own feelings are that in a war soldiers should begin at home with the civilian population, particularly with the old ladies.’

‘That is enough,’ she said.

‘No, I won’t have you run away with a partial picture. Allah, indeed. What of your son in Flanders?’

‘Oh, he is all right. Besides, it is all over now.’

‘M-m … wait a few days.’ I was excited. But I knew that to give the full effect to your sermon you must be calm, let your passion sift through your sentences. When I am righteously angry I let my righteous anger gather, and then put the brake on it, and give vent to it in cool, biting, seemingly dispassionate tones. I harness my anger to do the work of indictment. Turning ever so gently towards her, I fixed an evangelic look upon my aunt. ‘What is the terrible thing in a war? In the war men’s nerves gave way, and then they were court martialled for their nerves having given way—deserted them—and were shot at dawn—as deserters, for cowardice. And the sole judges of them were their superior officers who dared not know any better.

‘And why is it,’ I continued, avoiding momentarily the look which crept into Aunt Teresa’s eyes, ‘that stay-at-homes, particularly women, and more particularly old women, are the worst offenders in this stupid business of glorifying war? Why is it that they are more mischievous in mind, less generous in outlook than their youngsters in the trenches?’

Aunt Teresa closed her eyes with a faint sigh, as if to indicate that it was a strain on her delicate system to listen to my unending flow.

While, ‘I remember,’ I continued, ‘an hotel in Brighton where I stayed two weeks before joining up in the so-called Great War. The inevitable old ladies with their pussy cats were by far the worst of all. They talked in terms of blood. They demanded the extermination of the whole of the German race; nothing less, they said, would satisfy them. They longed to behead all German babies with their own hands for the genuine pleasure, they said, that this would give them. They were not human babies, they argued, but vermin. It was a service they desired to render to their country and the human race at large. They had a right to demonstrate their patriotism. I was not a little shocked, I must confess, at this tardy display of Herodism in old, decaying women. I told them as much, politely, and they called me a pro-German. They discovered unpleasant possibilities in my name that had slipped their attention heretofore—a serious oversight. A danger to the Realm. Diabologh—but in heaven what a name to be sure! One of them went as far as to say that there was—there seemed to be—a distinct suggestion of something—well—diabolical about it that should be watched. They talked of cement grounds prepared by German spies at various vulnerable points in England to serve the purpose of future German heavy guns, ingeniously disguised as tennis courts, and of me in the same breath. “Why don’t you,” said one of the old ladies, a particularly antiquated specimen of her sex, “rather than make that impossible noise on the piano, go and fight for your country?” “Die?” I said, “that you may live? The thought’s enough to make anyone a funk.”

‘Throughout the countries which had participated in the war’ (I continued, because my aunt, breathless at my imputations, had nothing ready with which to interrupt my flow) ‘there is still a tendency among many bereaved ones to assuage themselves by the thought that their dead have fallen for something at once noble and worth while which overtowers somehow the tragedy
of their death—almost excusing it. Mischievous delusion! Their dead are victims—neither more nor less—of the folly of adults who having blundered the world into a ludicrous war, now build memorials—to square it all up with. If I were the Unknown Soldier, my ghost would refuse to lie down under that heavy piece of marble; I would arise, I would say to them: keep your blasted memorials and learn sense! Christ died 1918 years back, and you’re as incredibly foolish as ever you were.’

I subsided suddenly. There was a pause.

‘Thank you. We are much obliged to you for your lecture,’ said Aunt Teresa.

‘Welcome,’ I said, ‘welcome.’

AFTER DINNER WE SAUNTERED OVER INTO THE drawing-room, and Uncle Emmanuel lit a cigar. The open piano beckoned to me as I stood in front of it, sipping my coffee.

‘Do you play?’ asked Mme Vanderphant.

I do not like to say that I don’t, because as a child I had had innumerable piano lessons. But I could never be bothered to learn even to read music with any degree of proficiency. I therefore resent being pressed to play the piano in public. And my shy feeling is wasted, for they think it is merely false modesty, and that I like being asked. When I was at Oxford I took up music as a supplementary subject. I soon gave it up; I simply could not be bothered to learn the rudiments of its technical side, and finally, when I decided to give it up, I was told by my teacher of music that I could do so with no loss to music as a whole. Yet I am intensely musical.

‘Play us something,’ said Berthe.

‘I don’t feel in the mood.’

‘Oh, do play,’ Sylvia said, coming up to me; her dress touched me, her scent gave me a thrill of something delicate and
beautiful and yet strangely intimate and near. How beautiful she was.

‘What is this scent?’

‘
Cœur de Jeanette
. Oh, do play.’

‘Very well, then.’

I struck some introductory chords, and after repeating them a dozen times or so plunged into that climaxic bit of bursting passion from
Tristan
that I loved. And then stopped. I knew no further.

‘Oh, go on!’

‘I’m not in the mood.’

‘Please, please,’ they entreated.

I played the crest waves twenty times over, and then stopped.

They sighed appreciation.

‘You have such feeling,’ my aunt said.

Well, that’s true. But I am impatient of technicalities. Once while at Oxford I played the same passionate bit from
Tristan
, and a D.Mus. rushed up to me, horror-stricken. ‘Either,’ he cried, ‘I’ve lost my ear—or you are playing in the wrong key!’ I was playing in the wrong key, by ear at that (because I could not tackle it in the original). But they asked me to go on playing, and all through my playing I had a feeling of warmth, as though the sun was shining on the tissues of my skin. Sylvia’s warm eyes followed my every movement. And of this I was pleasurably aware.

Uncle Emmanuel who, while I was playing, looked as if he had something more urgent up his sleeve, immediately I stopped, took the opportunity of saying: ‘Now that the war is over one must rejoice, one must amuse oneself a little.’ And Aunt Teresa, who looked unhappy and preoccupied while I played, replied:

‘The war is over, thank God. But I am anxious … about the last six weeks that I’ve been without news of him—I mean before the armistice was signed.’

I thought: they talk in terms of blood and fire—and then hope for safety and peace.

Nevertheless, to calm her for the sake of all of us, I said:

‘Most of the suffering and pain in the world is imaginary suffering and pain—which is not there. The next story I write will be a tragedy of people who imagine that certain things will happen: they imagine, and their drama is a drama of imagining. Actually nothing happens.’

‘It’s you—it’s you—you,’ she said heatedly, ‘who’ve upset me——’

‘But, really,
ma tante——
’

‘It’s you—I won’t sleep all night.’

‘But listen,
ma tante——
’

‘Oh, why get excited! Why get excited!’ Uncle Emmanuel hastened between us. ‘Peace! Peace in the household.’

For a while she sat silent in her big soft chair, thoughtful, bent over her fancy needlework. As her
tisane
was brought in to her by Berthe, she looked at me tragically with her large, sad, St. Bernard eyes, and her lip quivered. ‘How I worry, George! Pity me. Pity me, George! George, understand, can’t you, how dreadfully I worry!’

‘That, believe me, is unnecessary. There’s nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so. Nearly all unhappiness in the world is caused by futile recriminations, anticipations, fears, forebodings, remembrances—that is, by the failure to control imagination.’

She sighed; then bent forward and sipped her
tisane
.

‘What good is it your deliberately spoiling so many days and weeks of your short life by imagining the worst? And if the best occurs instead, you will have cheated yourself out of so many æons of your life, and the knowledge that this dim unhappiness of yours was but a phantom of your ill-controlled imagination will not retrieve a minute of your wasted life.’

She said nothing, only sipped her
tisane
.

‘Then you will spend the rest of your time being miserable in retrospect for having wasted your days so unprofitably.’

‘They will seem sweet then by the very contrast,’ she said, with a sigh. And suddenly she expressed one of those strangely feminine views which always reassured me that Aunt Teresa was, in
some ways, not as selfish as I thought, but, in the end, as egotistical as mortal man could be. ‘No,’ she said, ‘if the best happens, and he has come out of it alive, unscathed, I will, by my utmost anxiety now, have paid, and gladly paid, the heaviest dues that may be exacted. I will have squared fate, and I shall be proud and happy to remember that I have not been ungenerous and have secured his safety by my suffering. Therefore I must be worrying now, it is dangerous to be calm and happy. I must pay the dues in advance. I feel I must—I ought to be anxious—and I have been—I don’t know why—all this last month.’

She rose wearily from her arm-chair and stooped up to bed on the gallant arm of her husband. Aunt Teresa, I learnt, had an attack of nerves after that, ‘une
crise
’, as Berthe called it, and could not sleep all night.

I looked at Sylvia. ‘When I saw you in the street to-day I knew at once it was you.’

‘Oh—with my shoes unlaced,’ she laughed. ‘I ran out just to buy some sweets.’

And later, when Sylvia and I played dominoes, I was so fascinated by her presence that I didn’t care a rap about the dominoes, and Sylvia corrected practically my every move, as much as if playing by herself, while I only gazed at her in rapture. In another week her holidays would be over and she would return to Kobe to a boarding-school run by Irish nuns—the ‘Convent of the Sacred Heart’.

‘You are a wonderful, unique, great writer, George,’ she said, and then added, in her serious way, with a perfect absence of guile: ‘I must read one of your books some day.’

Then she too went to bed.

‘Ah! the night life of Brussels! Ah!…’ said Uncle Emmanuel over the drinks. ‘It wants some beating!’

A moment later he came up to me. ‘
Mon ami
,’ said my uncle, taking hold of me with both hands by the waist and looking up at me frankly, ‘you must see Japan—life—it’s amusing! The night aspect especially.’

UNCLE EMMANUEL HAD WHISPERED THINGS INTO my ear, and I had nodded, and now we were on our way. Our two rickshaw coolies ran smartly side by side in the abated heat of the evening. The lighted lanterns at the shaft and the side bobbed gaily through the gathering dusk. We went past endless bazaars, through endless lanes lined with shops. Uncle Emmanuel lit a cigar. He wore a brown bowler hat, yellow gloves that had been washed so often that they looked perfectly white, and with his stiff waxed moustache and his gilt-knobbed cane he looked quite a dog as he sat there, contented at last, in the feather-spring vehicle. The interminable progress through the city. Tokyo indeed was like an endless succession of villages. Night fell. The two men ran as smartly as ever. I, with my thoughts full of Sylvia, listened to those queer plaintive chants—A-a-a—y-a-a—yaw—y-o-o—that emanated from every nook and lane; shrinking aback at the touch, disinclined.

At last we drove up before a queer-looking wooden structure on long legs, and at once the hostess and attendants came down the crude wooden staircase to meet us. Our boots were removed at the foot of the stairs, and we were ushered upstairs into a low-ceilinged drawing-room, where I could not even stand up without bumping my head (though Uncle Emmanuel could do so with ease), and I had a feeling as if I had left the company of human beings and had joined that of birds or some undefined species of animals. While we were thus seated on the matted floor, fruit was served round; then a side-door opened, and a small procession of blanch-faced, short-legged women filed before us.

I was repelled by their flat blank Asiatic faces, and by the thick paint thereon. But Uncle Emmanuel smiled as he looked at them.

‘
Elles sont gentilles, eh
?’ he turned to me.

‘M …’ I demurred.

‘Ah!’ he retorted, provoked by my critical attitude, ‘
Ce n’est pas Paris, enfin
!’

He said that, say what I might, they were ‘
mignonnes
’. I maintained that their legs were much too short for my liking—a defect that, to me, stripped them of all feminine attraction. ‘
Que voulez-vous
?’ he said philosophically. And we mildly fell out. The women stood before us, awaiting our choice. From outside came the din of the streets, and the plaintive whining chant of Mongol music, and the listlessness of the city stealing on us at the dead of night. I sat listless, too, on the matted floor in the low-ceilinged room, and I felt as if I had been locked up in the upper drawer of a cupboard—locked up and abandoned, in an age and place that were not mine. It was too inhumanly strange, and I longed for what I had left. Then I felt I wanted to cry, cry for what they had done to my soul.…

‘Rum-looking place,’ I said. ‘Rum-looking girls.’

‘
Que voulez-vous
?’ he said. ‘
C’est la vie
!’

At this point the hostess came up to us with a book and, pointing at it, exhorted us to register. ‘Police,’ she said, ‘police.’

‘Any name will do,’ said Uncle Emmanuel lightly. But I refused emphatically, and after trying vainly to persuade me to put down my name, the hostess sent for an interpreter—a youth who presently appeared but whose command of our tongue did not appreciably extend over her own. He pointed at the register and said: ‘Ha! Police—zzz—police. Ha!—zzz——’