The Polyglots Page 12

  And while he read Natàsha’s letter Aunt Teresa interrupted him, like a deacon in church, with exclamations of beatific wonder, and Berthe’s voice came like a second fiddle in practically the same melody of acclaim. One could see that Aunt Teresa had at once taken a liking to the little girl.

  ‘How old is Natàsha?’ she asked.

  ‘Seven,’ he said.

  ‘But don’t you want to see her awfully?’

  Of course he did. But how? How?

  Aunt Teresa took the tenderest interest in Natàsha.

  ‘There are ways and means,’ she said. And remembering how she had contrived to bring away her husband in the midst of the greatest of all wars, I understood that indeed there must be ways and means.

  Captain Negodyaev looked spiritually intoxicated. ‘How strange! Only yesterday my life seemed grey and dull and hopeless, and today—it’s like a dream come true. These rooms, after living for months on end in a railway coach. These rooms!—He too’—he pointed to his batman Vladislav—‘is pleased, I bet.’

  ‘Yes, there is no doubt,’ said Vladislav, ‘these are good rooms. But a long way off the French!’

  ‘Go along, that will do,’ said Captain Negodyaev sternly. ‘Gone dotty from too much happiness, I expect. Take no notice of him’—he turned to us with a propitiatory smile. ‘Yes, I’d do anything to have Natàsha here. Anything.’

  ‘What of your daughter Màsha? Would she also come?’ It seemed as though my aunt was not too keen on Ippolit.

  ‘Hardly. Màsha is grown up and lives with her husband. She loves her husband.’

  ‘Anyway, we’ve room enough here for Natàsha and your wife. George’—she turned to me quietly—‘you will telephone General Pshemòvich-Pshevìtski and ask him for an interview tomorrow morning.’

  25

  THE GENERAL HAD SENT WORD BY HIS AIDE-DE-CAMP son that he had reserved 11 o’clock for Aunt Teresa and myself; and Aunt Teresa’s carriage had been ordered for 10.30. But at a quarter to eleven Aunt Teresa, finally attired, discovered that she had mislaid her bag, and while she was looking for it Beastly had arrived from Omsk, quite unexpectedly, accentuating the general commotion.

  ‘A letter from your brother Lucy!’ he exclaimed triumphantly.

  ‘No time till I come back from the General,’ she warned him off. ‘Besides, they’ve lost my bag for me.’

  Because just before losing the bag she had had ‘words’ with Berthe, she now blamed Berthe for having lost it.

  ‘But it isn’t I who lost the bag!’ Berthe exclaimed excitedly.

  ‘All the same, you upset me,’ retorted my aunt.

  ‘But you’ve lost it yourself!’

  ‘Ah! if Constance were here!’

  ‘We had better look for it,’ said Berthe appeasingly.

  Beastly’s Anglo-Saxon common-sense, directed towards advising other people how to manage their own silly business, was sometimes too much for Aunt Teresa. Now when she had lost her bag, he thus consoled her, ‘Well, my dear lady, there’s nothing to get excited about; the house isn’t on fire, you know, you’ve only got to find the damned thing: now where the deuce have you put it?’

  ‘Ah, enfin! if I knew I wouldn’t be looking for it!’ wailed my aunt in accents of astonishment and anguish.

  Beastly only nodded his head in that crude sardonic manner of the British sergeant who tells an obviously hopeless recruit who has mislaid his kit or possibly got hold of the wrong end of the rifle: ‘No wonder we’re winnin’!’

  At last the bag was found, hanging on the back of a chair that everybody had been gazing at. The victoria with the two meagre mares and the disreputable coachman Stepàn drew up to the porch. Aunt Teresa and I stepped inside, and we drove off to the General’s train.

  The General’s special train stood on the viaduct, in a commanding military position, as if holding a pistol at the head of the city. Almost opposite lay the train of the Chinese High Commissioner, an amiable gentleman upon whom I had already had occasion to call, and who had treated me to excellent port on that occasion. As we mounted the train we were at once invaded by an official and military atmosphere. A personnel of experts received us—experts in coups d’état. The tall officer on duty escorted us to the aide-de-camp, the General’s son, and the aide-de-camp conducted us into the carpeted interior of the General’s private office. Behind his writing-table sat the General himself, dark, wiry, with a stiff black moustache and closely cropped hair turning grey. With the General was a gentleman whom I at once recognized as Dr. Murgatroyd, an English newspaper correspondent. The General rose with the customary precision of Russian officers, and clicking his spurs introduced himself: ‘Lieutenant-General Pshemòvich-Pshevìtski,’ and politely enquired of what service he could be to us. He wore very high heels, and scented his hands and handkerchief without cease with eau-de-Cologne.

  ‘I have come,’ said Aunt Teresa, sinking by his desk into an arm-chair, ‘about a Russian officer who lives with us at present, whose wife and little daughter—a charming child—are starving, I’m afraid, in Novorossiisk.’

  ‘Quite. Quite,’ said General Pshemòvich-Pshevìtski.

  ‘I so want to get them over here. The father, Captain Negodyaev, is so wretchedly unhappy.’

  ‘Quite.’

  ‘I know you feel as I do in the matter.’ Aunt Teresa wrinkled her nose a little—how becoming!

  ‘Quite,’ said he, surveying her with interest. He stroked his stiff moustache, then sprayed some more eau-de-Cologne over his hands and martial chest bestrewn with decorations. And the oft-heard rumour flashed across my brain again that he had been a constable who had obtained a commission in the war, and had since, while nobody was looking, promoted himself to a General. He seemed much interested in Aunt Teresa’s person—more so than in the subject of her call—and enquired how it was: she was not Russian—and yet, and yet?… And Aunt Teresa plunged with eagerness into her triumphant past and told him all. She was English, born of English parents (her mother was a Spaniard though)—in Manchester, it seemed. But she had been brought up in Russia, where she had also lived her youth and early married life, among the dear old Russian aristocracy, now so unhappily dislodged from their secure positions. Ah! didn’t she remember the old days!

  And the Galìtzins! And the Troubetzkòys! And the Yusùpov-Sumaròkov-Elstons! And the Princess Tènisheva! And the Belosèlski-Belozèrskis! And the Most Illustrious Princess Suvòrov! Ah! she knew them all! And the Viceroy of the Caucasus Count Ilaryòn Vorontzòv-Dàshkov! The Dàshkovs and the Pàshkovs—she knew them all. Aunt Teresa exchanged glances with the General, glances of intimate melancholy reminiscence. The General, who must have been a gendarme constable in those days, perhaps guarding the very street in which some of these aristocrats resided, smiled sadly, a little timidly; but the contrast must also have reminded him of his present undisputed hegemony, of his commanding military position, as he sat in his luxurious armoured train, with the town at his mercy; and so his smile, besides shyness and awkwardness, conveyed a tinge of satisfaction. And in answer to her question if he knew the Troubetzkòys he said (with a beatific look which was to cover such a point-blank question): ‘Ah! who didn’t know them!’

  ‘And the Galìtzins?’

  ‘Mercy! who hasn’t heard of them!’ And added, to consolidate the impression, ‘They were worth knowing! Curious people, you don’t say!’

  Aunt Teresa was a beauty in her day: not merely pretty, handsome, or good-looking, but a beauty recognized and unmistakable. Even now, as the General looked at her, he was, I knew it with a certainty that defies all doubt, swayed by the majesty of that elusive quality which had commanded worship when she was young. He must have felt the throbbing chain of years that linked her back to her disturbing youth, now past, for looking at her he seemed perturbed and animated as if he were in love: gallant, anxious to please. Her lovely nose, though amply powdered, had survived the ruin of the years, remained intact with its delicately-chiselled nostrils; as well as the
superbly-moulded forehead and the chin. Her marked moustache and little beard could not kill one’s adoration!

  Life is full of chip love, strewn with abortive romances, of glances exchanged in a railway carriage that must die premature deaths because at this junction or that our trains take us asunder; because we had met a little too early or else a little too late, or not perhaps in just the right place. In a future age of wireless sight it may be that we shall arrange our love affairs more efficiently. We shall send out and receive SOS calls from love-stricken, love-craving hearts, and we shall never languish alone.

  ‘Then you agree with me, General, about Captain Negodyaev’s wife and daughter?’

  ‘Quite,’ he said. ‘Quite.’ He pressed an electric button.

  His aide-de-camp son stood in the doorway, as if he were in some mysterious way a part of this electrical contrivance.

  ‘Communicate immediately by telephone with Captain Negodyaev at the Censorship Department. Tell him to appear here at once.’

  ‘Quite so, your Excellency!’ The aide-de-camp dashed out of the room.

  A serious situation had arisen, so it appeared meanwhile, and the General, as we waited for Captain Negodyaev’s advent, confided to us his earnest apprehension. The peasants in the Province round about Vladivostok who lived on game had shot-guns; but the General, conceiving guns to be a sign of overt Bolshevism, dispatched a squad to confiscate these guns, whereon the peasants seized the squad and took the officers prisoner. The General had since arranged for a further squad from Russian Island Training School to go forth to the rescue of the prisoners, but last night there had been a storm, and the squad was reported to have well-nigh drowned in crossing. At this point the wires had been cut and the General was still in ignorance of their fate. Yes, an uphill task, he sighed, to attempt to save your country from red ruin!

  ‘I always say,’ said Aunt Teresa, ‘the only hope for Russia lies in a powerful White Army. I feel that when the Whites get the upper hand again, peace and brotherhood will be restored to this long-suffering land. And if you win the Civil War I am sure that you will justify your victory by the wise policy you will pursue after that. Have you a policy?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes,’ said General Pshemòvich-Pshevìtski, a look of eager determination creeping into his eyes. ‘I will decorate the lampposts with the corpses of the bandits. That’s my policy—I give you my word of honour, you can count on me to keep my word.’ He held out his hand. ‘And,’ he added tenderly, ‘you may deny your friendship to me if I fail to keep my promise.’

  Aunt Teresa proffered a reluctant hand. It was not quite what she had meant by ‘saving Russia’. However, she had not the heart to disappoint the sincerity of his emotion.

  ‘Things have gone far,’ he sighed. ‘They have been allowed to drift. You won’t retrieve them now! What I regret,’ he said, ‘is not so much the revolution (too late to lock the stable door after the horse has run away), but the liberation of the serfs in 1861 that caused all the mischief. Yes—but what’s happened about Captain Negodyaev?’ He pressed the button.

  His aide-de-camp stood in the doorway.

  ‘Well? Have you telephoned to Captain Negodyaev?’

  ‘The telephone, your Excellency, is out of order.’

  ‘Repair the telephone!’ the General snapped savagely.

  ‘Very well, your Excellency!’

  ‘Yes,’ said the General, turning round to us again as the aide-de-camp retired with the air of one who had his work cut out. ‘Yes. The Bolsheviks are scoundrels and murderers, and have acquired power by force; they are, in fact, anti-democratic, having thrown over, as you know, the All-Russia Constituent Assembly.’

  But I noticed that just as in his opposition to the liberation of the serfs he had forgotten that in ordinary circumstances he himself would not be a master but a serf, so now he did not detect the contradiction when, a moment later, he remarked:

  ‘Over sixty per cent of the population is illiterate. Russia is not ripe for a Constituent Assembly. The only salvation is a Tsar.’

  Dr. Murgatroyd looked as though he were going to dissent. But Aunt Teresa at once remarked that she had every reason to believe that the peasants would welcome the return of a Tsar. ‘ “Give us back the Tsar,” they say,’ said Aunt Teresa, as it were on behalf of the peasants, although not having come in contact with any peasants ever since she left Russia proper twenty years ago, she could not speak from personal experience.

  But Dr. Murgatroyd intimated that he did not favour emperors, though he did not mind imperialism, so long as it was ‘democratic’. And the General, with startling logic, said that, in his view, the Bolsheviks (which name he prefaced by a string of lurid adjectives) should be opposed by all true democrats, because they were essentially anti-democratic, and that he, General Pshemòvich-Pshevìtski and his kind, would oppose them because they were what he described them to be in his string of lurid adjectives; and so in their opposition to the Bolsheviks he and his kind would have a common platform with the democrats, whose democracy they hated only second to the Bolshevik autocracy.

  Yet the incorrigible General who had learnt nothing from the Revolution sought, as men of his type will, to apply to the future of his country principles that had ruined it in the past. The Imperial Russian Government had denied the people self-government on the plea that they were not educated; and it had denied them education on the plea that they possessed no self-government. And it had denied them both on the ground that ‘they were happy as they were’.

  ‘You do not understand Russia,’ argued General Pshemòvich-Pshevìtski. ‘The people are incapable of governing themselves. They are not ripe for it. Can you imagine the terrible oppression, the unspeakable chaos and misery of a country governed by uneducated workmen, by illiterate peasants? You know the result. It’s Bolshevism.’

  Having uttered that terrible word, he stopped to examine the effect on the faces of his listeners. All were non-plussed. But I ventured:

  ‘If such be the terrible effect of ignorance and illiteracy, why, may I ask, had the Government denied them the necessary education and enlightenment?’

  The General looked at me with infinite pity. ‘My dear Captain,’ he cried, ‘our Government had enough sense to recognize the danger of superfluous education for a people who profess an autocratic form of government. They realized that to educate the masses was to make them discontented. They were right. Results have proved it.’

  Aunt Teresa nodded emphatically, because this was just the sort of stuff which went down with her. ‘What you want,’ she said with conviction, ‘is an honest man. The Russian people are an apathetic people. They don’t care what government they live under so long as they get food and clothes and—are happy.’

  Of this the General was—he confessed it with a smile—not so very sure, and he did not want us to go home with the idea that he was an out-and-out reactionary. Not a bit of it. We must move with the times. He was all for moderation. He stood (if his politics must be defined) in the middle, between anarchy from the left and anarchy from the right—a centre party, he explained, adhering to the good old sensible ideals of nationalism and honour. Yes. The General thought that the people might still be educated carefully and in moderation, and—who knows?—some day perhaps they may even have a Constituent Assembly and all that this meant. ‘But at present,’ he said in a cheery manner (putting off the evil hour which, if it had to come, well, it simply had to come, but, please God, would come tomorrow), ‘at present’—he held out a paper-knife—‘it is unthinkable—a complete surrender to Bolshevism!’ He brought the paper-knife down with a bang.

  And here at last Dr. Murgatroyd stepped in. The value of education weighed in the balance and found wanting, the utility of self-government reduced to a becoming level, and the worth of either played off against the other till one effectively disposed of both, the field was clear for his pet theory, the exposition of which he felt was now peculiarly appropriate.

  His pet theor
y was the union of the Orthodox and the Anglican Churches. It was a fixed idea with him, the essence and the purpose of his life. For thirty years or more he had accosted archbishops, bishops, patriarchs, archimandrites, metropolitans, and such-like holy fathers in both countries with this obsolete idea. Dr. Murgatroyd was a singularly untidy, unkempt, dishevelled individual, and, no doubt, to advertise his liaison with that country he wore a costume after the style of the Russian moujik. He had been described by his enemies as ‘the only Englishman who never washed’, and he was persistent to a degree scarcely credible even in a correspondent. He had no conscience, no shame. He confronted kings and emperors, prime ministers and ambassadors and commanders-in-chief and every kind of religious enthusiast, and preached to them the union of the Orthodox and the Anglican Churches. Many seemed quite hopeful, and others were polite about it, but he thought it the crowning factor in world politics, the keystone of the Russian situation, the crux of the whole thing. If anything was to bring the two countries together, or avert wars, or promote trade, or kill Bolshevism, or save the world from every kind of evil, it was, he said, with certainty, the union of the Orthodox and the Anglican Churches. In his absent-mindedness it had somehow not occurred to him that the big idea of political domination through the medium of religion had died for ever with the temporal power of the Pope, and that whatever his concern for the Anglican Church at home the ordinary modern Englishman cared no more about the Orthodox faith than the ordinary Russian bothered his mind about the Church of England, should he have ever heard of its existence. But Dr. Murgatroyd was absent-minded to a degree only pardonable in professors. If you had told him at any hour of the day that he had already had his dinner, he would knit his brows and think hard for a moment and then say: ‘Yes, perhaps you are right. Yes, you are right. Yes, I must have had my dinner. Yes, I have had my dinner. Yes, yes, yes, yes.’ But he never kept regular hours for meals. He scarcely ever had any regular meals, or, in fact, any meals at all. He simply felt no need for food. He said: ‘All I want is a little tobacco.’ He was one of that class of people who never have any money; for even if he had had any money, he would not know where he had put it. Similarly all his teeth had gone from wear and tear and lack of all care. But there he lived on without teeth, not that their absence did not cause him to suffer pain and discomfort (for his digestion, as in fact everything else in his constitution, had gone to pieces), but it had simply never occurred to him that something had to be done in the matter. His mind was continually occupied with other things.