The Polyglots (8 page)

‘There’s only one decent place in the whole of Japan, and that’s the British Embassy.’ And guffawed loudly.

A
geisha
girl perched on either of Uncle Emmanuel’s knees,
and he seemed very content. ‘Don’t look!’ he said, as I turned round. And all the time he tried to press the Japanese officers at his side into taking him that very night to the ‘good’ Yoshiwara. But the Japanese officers only laughed and chaffed and promised gingerly. Anyway, I left without him.

When next morning I called to take Sylvia to the station, Uncle Emmanuel had not yet returned.

SHE LEANED OUT OF THE TRAIN WINDOW, AND I came up to say goodbye. My hat nearly came off as we kissed, and so the kiss was too slight; we barely brushed each other’s lips. She stood at the window and looked at me with her large, luminous eyes. Her broad black velvet hat gave her a kind of Spanish appearance, and there was her nose faintly
retroussé
, nearly as good as her mother’s—but too heavily powdered. And pink powder on her cheeks, too.

‘You have a natural complexion,’ I told her, ‘but when you put powder on top you make it seem artificial, and that’s a pity.’

She laughed, and showed a gold crown at the end of her mouth; and even that crown seemed exceedingly sympathetic.

‘Back to the
Sacred Heart
!’ she purled, blinking.

I looked up with something like anguish. ‘What will you do there all these long months without me?’

‘Well—I’ll play hockey,’ she said.

Then the train pulled out.

I stepped into a rickshaw and drove back to my aunt’s. Gladness, like the sun-lit sea, engulfed me, choked me, but the white-winged bird in me came to the surface, saying: ‘I am glad. I am glad.’ So the screaming sea-gull bathes in the pearly air, its white wings glistening in the sun as it turns a
salto mortale
. And God seemed to say: ‘I knew what I was doing.’ When did I love her first? When last? There seemed no beginning and no end. And
as I drove along the yellow sun-bespangled lane, the sun-lit verdure at both sides bowed low to me as I continued my triumphant progress in between, almost impelling me to raise my hat as if I were the Prince of Wales acknowledging the cheers of thronging crowds that lined my way.

I came back whistling. Sylvia’s room being empty, I had cancelled mine at the Imperial Hotel, and at the invitation of my aunt now occupied my cousin’s bedroom. I was happy, and moved, strolling about, breathing in her scent of
Cœur de Jeanette
, examining her
bric-à-brac
, when Berthe came in with a foreboding look on her face and a telegram in her hand. ‘I had feared all along,’ she said. ‘I had a sort of feeling—why, I don’t know, but I had it even when she talked of the Allahs. I had it when I opened the telegram. Your uncle has still not come back. Now what are we to do?’ And she gave me the missive.

I read it—and I sat down, Berthe having done likewise.

‘You’re the only relative here,’ she said. ‘I suppose
you
had better tell her.’

‘I shall wait till Uncle Emmanuel comes home. He’d better tell Aunt Thérèse.’

‘Poor Anatole,’ she sighed. ‘To be killed on the eve of the Armistice.’

‘I pity the mother most.’ And I thought: with opinions like those—opinions that cause murder—what right have they to hope that
their
sons will survive? I saw Anatole but once, when he was on leave in England. Like his little father, he wrote sentimental poems à la Musset, and read them aloud to his intended as he held her white hand in his own and she dropped her fair head on his shoulder. In matters of love he had, like his father, been indefatigable. His mother spoke of him as of an angel imbued with one thought, one feeling—herself. But the only time I saw him he boasted to me that he knew how to ‘get round her all right.’ ‘Oh!—maman; we don’t take her seriously. We don’t tell her things, and wink at what she says.’ And winking he got off a bus at Leicester Square and went away with a young siren. He was dead.

Death is like this: you go along happy-go-lucky and suddenly somebody hits you over the head with a poker:
whack
! That is to mean that you are no more. Why do men die? To make room for others. That is all very well so far as it goes. But what are the other men for? If you think you understand death, I congratulate you.

Uncle Emmanuel was still away at the ‘good’ Yoshiwara. Late that night he returned. We took pity on him and did not tell him.

All next day till dusk I rickshawed about Tokyo, with the telegram in my pocket, guarding a dismal secret, wondering whether I should spare them their pain a little longer, and how much longer. The clouds had closed in, hung dark, leaden and foreboding; the weather could not make up its mind. I felt angry with humanity talking murder today only to whine on the morrow, and I felt wretched and miserable at guarding a sorrow I could not lessen. Of course, they’ll make a hero of him, I thought: they will make a hero of that muddy eddy of confusion they call ‘life.’ But they will not apply themselves to the kindling of the divine spark in us, the feeble flame flickering in a void. Anatole too was a militarist at heart. He had the spirit of detached generosity to a cause that would have made him a valuable recruit in the fight for more life and more light. But his cause for which he had fought with a wholly admirable courage and devotion had, centuries ago, ceased to be a holy cause, was a carcass like the man who died for it. It had died centuries before the man who had just sacrificed his life for its hollow sake was born—and now he too was a carcass.

And I thought: the one thing that makes for war is just that speck, that pinpoint of weak thinking in men’s minds which is the pivot of this gruesome cycle of unending war. Somehow, while nobody was looking, the idea had got into the thinking people’s heads that wars were unavoidable. It would be really better at that rate if they did not think at all. But the unthinking people seem to be more interested in the shape of Winston’s hat than in the contents of the brow it hides. I may be an eccentric, but somehow I can’t bring myself to see that my cousin’s death in Flanders is an
event which is perfectly in order. The cold army missive would suggest that it was so. My aunt’s own attitude to this young death would be, I knew, that it was tragically necessary. But she would not see that it was tragically necessary only because the world had men and women of her foolish outlook. Then why these tears? Oh, why these tears, good tears, falling upon ashes where they cannot thrive? I felt embittered that these tears should fall upon the barren ground of human folly and so lend it meaning. One wonders what Jesus died for.

Before I had to impart the message, I asked myself if I would willingly take on the death of a near one were I thereby to save her tribulation—and I felt I would not. Not very chivalrous? What matter, since I would not be called upon. I felt now what it was to be human: what the human heart may be called upon to endure.

I stood at the door before opening it to go in, because I said to myself: now he still lives for her; now she doesn’t know and she knows no pain; but in a moment she will know and feel pain everlasting. I went away and walked about the garden and the terraces, and tarried till evening. The shadows crept up. And I thought: you aren’t even being happy now while you can. The inconsequence of their conversation over lunch and tea had been painful to listen to. At dusk I entered my uncle’s study, and leaving the telegram on the table went out. The lamp was burning, the curtains were drawn, the rain drummed against the window-sill.

He rose, with the telegram in his hand. ‘It can’t be!’ he said, and came out into the corridor.

‘Is it possible that they’ve made a mistake?’ Berthe asked.

He turned hopefully to the interlocutor. ‘Did you say you think it’s a mistake?’

‘I asked, is it possible that it’s a mistake?’

He turned very red, and his little eyes behind the pince-nez glittered with unusual brilliance.

‘It can’t be!’ he said. ‘It can’t be!’ He walked up and down several times, and then, all of a sudden, went back into his study and shut the door behind him.

Some time afterwards he came out and knocked at Aunt Teresa’s door.

‘
Entrez
!’ came her voice. And he went in. Berthe and I stood outside, listening, and I thought that her feeling at hearing his words must be that he and other sympathetic souls were souls assisting at a tragedy not wholly understood; that listening to warm condolences her only thought was that the son whom she had borne she would not see again. And—strange—my aunt, that woman who revelled in self-pity, now controlled herself and did not cry. There was something quiet and austere about her—like sombre music, like deep red wine. The storm had rolled over, but the rain fell quietly, steadily. And as I entered the bedroom I saw the two of them together. He was sitting on her bed, saying, ‘My son! My son!’ He had upset a jug of water which stood on the floor, but it took him some time to realize what he had done. The despair that had come on them with the first news had worn off a little; they were sobbing softly, quietly, timidly. ‘I knew, I knew all the time,’ she said, crying. ‘You had better go and leave us, George; thank you, you can do nothing.’

Too late, I thought, you can’t repair it now, there is no help! I went out quietly, quietly shutting the door. For a while I stood on the terrace, my thoughts circling round and round unprogressively. I noticed now that it was raining heavily.

ON THE 23RD OF JULY, BEASTLY AND I AND PICKUP, my servant, left Tokyo and crossed from Tsuruga to Vladivostok on the s.s.
Penza
of the Russian Volunteer Fleet, whose Captain, as he sat among us at the head of the table, had a meek, resigned look in his eyes, as if he didn’t quite know what he was going to do next, while the ship’s officers, professing disgust for the tedium of their prosaic occupations, speculated with enthusiasm on high
politics, religion, literature, and metaphysics, upon which plane of thought navigation and such-like matters appeared proportionately negligible things. Meanwhile the ship somehow went on, thud after thud—and even reached its destination.

Vladivostok, as we surveyed it from the boat, struck me as a city of disgruntled individuals. Dock-labourers sat inertly on the quay, as if disgusted with Red Guards and White Guards and Green Guards alike, and the people, as they moved to and fro in the drizzle, looked tired of their work, of themselves, and of existence as a whole.

Our ‘Organization’, let me say at once, was something without precedent—one of the really comic sideshows of after-armistice confabulation. It was the poor old sentimental military mind, confronted with the task of saving civilization, forced to draw upon the intellect, and finding that in truth it had no such reserves to draw upon, plunging gallantly into a Russian sea of incoherence. And puzzled—daily more puzzled; coming out of it at last, with its tail between its legs, considerably bedraggled. There was really nothing to it but to enjoy the spectacle. The spectacle consisted of a number of departments whose heads amused themselves by passing buff slips one to another, the point of which lay in the art of relegating the solution of the question specified to the resources of another department. It was a kind of game of chess in which ability and wit counted for quite a great deal. The department which could not pass on the buff slip to another and in the last resort was forced to take action itself was deemed to have lost the game. From time to time new officers would be called for: specialists in embarkation, secret service, and so forth, and usually six months or more would elapse before their arrival from England, by which time the need for them would generally have passed. Unwilling to go home, they would prowl about the premises, coveting their neighbours’ jobs, and usually end by establishing a new department of their own, with themselves as heads. A fat, flabby Major prowled about our offices, intriguing
hard to get my job, and I (myself a master of intrigue) intrigued to keep my place by letting it be known that I would soon vacate it on my own account. Meanwhile the Major was content to work under my orders. I favour, on the whole, a mild atmosphere of Bolshevism in public affairs. Accordingly I occupied myself with writing novels and let the office work be run by the two junior clerks. And very well they ran it, I must say! Some readers at this point may feel inclined to censure me a little for my levity. Believe me, they are (if I may say so) talking through their hats. To regard a Government run by Churchills and Birkenheads seriously is not to know how to be serious. At any rate, we cultivated a certain literary spirit in our office as we pursued our silly military tasks, while our elders (after bungling us into the most ludicrous of wars) were building up that monument of foolish greed—the Treaty of Versailles!

After serving under me for some little time, the Major, nervous of being sent home, established a new department of his own—a post office of which he got himself appointed chief. I had to work under Sir Hugo (of Vladivostok fame), of whom you may have heard. My chief was a lover of ‘staff work’, and besides the many ordinary files he had some special files—a file called ‘The Religious File’, in which he kept documents supplied by metropolitans and archimandrites and other holy fathers, and another file in which he kept correspondence relative to some gramophone records which had been taken from the Mess by a Canadian officer. And much of our work consisted of sending these files backwards and forwards. And sometimes the gramophone file would be lost, and sometimes the religious file, and then Sir Hugo would be very upset. Or he would write a report, and the report—so intricate was our organization—would also be lost. Once he wrote a very exhaustive report on the local situation. He had corrected it very carefully, had, after much thought, inserted a number of additional commas, had erased some of the commas on secondary consideration, had had the report typed,
and had corrected it again when it was typed, inserting long sub-paragraphs in the margins which he enclosed in large circles, and so attached them to wherever they belonged by means of long pointed arrows trespassing on each other’s ground, thus giving the script the appearance of a spider’s web. Then he had read it through once again, now solely from the point of view of punctuation. He inserted seven more commas and a full stop which he had previously omitted. Sir Hugo was most particular about full stops, commas and semicolons, and he was very fond of colons, which he preferred to semicolons, by way of being more pointed and incisive, by way of proving that the universe was one chain of causes and effects. In order to avoid any possible mistakes in the typing of his manuscript, Sir Hugo surrounded his full stops with little circles, and in producing commas he would turn his pen so as almost to cause a hole in the paper and then slash it down like a sabre. The colons were two dots, each surrounded by a circle; and a semicolon was a combination of an encircled full stop and a sabre slash of a comma. There could be no possible mistake about Sir Hugo’s punctuation. And would you believe it? After he had dispatched the report, marking the inner envelope in red ink ‘Very Secret and Personal’, and placing the inner envelope in an outer envelope and sealing carefully both envelopes—the report was lost.