The Polyglots Read online

  ‘The most formidable weapon against Bolshevism,’ said Dr. Murgatroyd, ‘is religion. Here it is that we can truly help. Russia’s salvation lies in the union of the Orthodox and the Anglican Churches. When I was in Moscow and Kiev many years ago I saw Archimandrite Theodosy, Metropolitans Theophanes and Hermogenes and Father Nikon, and they asked me to convey their warmest sentiments to our archbishops.’

  ‘M’yes,’ said the General. ‘M’yes—of course—the Union of the Churches. But why is it that this Captain Negodyaev is so long in coming?’

  He pressed the button in a prolonged, determined manner.

  The aide-de-camp stood in the doorway.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘We’ve sent for the mechanic, your Excellency.’

  ‘What a long time,’ said the General apologetically to Aunt Teresa. ‘Yes—of course—the Union of the Churches. But we must have propaganda for that.’

  ‘Ah, yes, propaganda,’ said Dr. Murgatroyd, and before we could stop him he had launched out on propaganda. This was his other craze.

  He spoke with increasing speed.

  ‘Propaganda is everything; it is almost as important as religion, but the most effective propaganda is propaganda conducted through the medium of the Churches—the union of the two Churches. We must develop a huge organization to counteract the insidious, lying propaganda of the Bolsheviks. The religious note must be struck. This is all-important. The people must be urged to stand fast and not let the Bolshevik forces of Antichrist prevail. In the defence of Christianity, we will argue, the Churches of Russia and England must combine their forces: this will lead us to the union of the Orthodox and the Anglican Churches. But we will not stop at that. This organization—this colossal organization—with headquarters at Vladivostok and London respectively, will be split into two groups: the first for the enlightenment of the Russians concerning their British Ally, the other for the enlightenment of the British concerning things Russian. It is imperative that an exceptionally capable man with an excellent knowledge of the language and conditions be given charge of the entire Association in order to co-ordinate and generally direct the work of this organization. Well, with your approval I am prepared to undertake the task. I have innumerable friends in both countries. I will get the bishops and the archimandrites to work together. Each group will be in uninterrupted communication with the other, acquire all available information on the spot, and pass it on to the people on the other side—and keep the pot boiling. We will buy up all newspapers, periodicals, printing presses in both countries, and so guide public opinion by issuing dailies, weeklies, hourly bulletins, leaflets, pamphlets, magazines, articles, books of every description, printed in large quantities, translated into all languages; some light books, some of them more serious works, some full of pictures, others of maps and diagrams and charts—but one and all directed against Bolshevism. We will mobilize all the best authors, artists, scientists, priests, and other people who know their subjects—sound and vigorous writers—and get them to condemn Bolshevism from the point of view of the peasant, the workman, the co-operator, the Church, the merchant, the schoolmaster, the professor. In a short while I hope a new literature will spring into being. We will then set up numerous libraries comprising all sorts of books on every kind of topic: philosophy, science, psychology, botany, gardening, poultry, mathematics, farming, sport, economics—all and sundry directed against Bolshevism: Bolshevism as a brutal and inhuman science; Bolshevism as a criminal psychology; Bolshevism as a ruinous economic system. Ugly gardening, hopeless botany, impracticable farming, immoral sport, misleading mathematics, impossible poultry—all as the result of the Bolshevik communist system. There is really no limit to which we cannot go! In addition special picture-books can be printed to preserve the coming generation from the insidious penetration of Bolshevik ideas. We will scatter throughout the country a host of photographers to collect scenes of Bolshevik atrocities. We will engage famous artists to paint pictures of rape, murder, pillage and outrage committed by communists. On the other hand, we will praise the courage and loyalty and discipline and devotion of the forces of law and order, and send them constant urgings to be of good cheer and courage.’

  ‘M’yes,’ said the General stroking his chin. ‘M’yes. But why is this Captain Negodyaev not coming?’

  He pressed the electric bell-button.

  The aide-de-camp offspring stood in the doorway.

  ‘Well? Have you telephoned at last?’

  ‘The mechanic’s drunk, your Excellency.’

  ‘Send at once for the other mechanic!’ snapped the General ferociously.

  ‘Very well, your Excellency!’ The aide-de-camp bolted.

  ‘M’yes,’ said the General, once more resuming the subject and turning to Dr. Murgatroyd in particular. ‘Tell the Mr. Churchill, and tell the Mr. Lloyd George, and tell the President Wilson, and tell the whole world that the General Pshemòvich-Pshevìtski is firm, as firm as a rock, and he will fight the Jewish Bolsheviks to the last man,’ he ended—pressing the button with violence.

  The aide-de-camp stood on the threshold.

  ‘Well, what about the telephone?’ the General asked grimly.

  ‘The other mechanic is on leave, your Excellency.’

  ‘In that case,’ said the General, pulling out his watch and looking at Aunt Teresa, ‘dispatch a car for Captain Negodyaev, do you hear? A car immediately!’

  ‘Quite so, your Excellency!’

  The aide-de-camp dashed out of the room.

  ‘M’yes,’ said the General. ‘M’yes—of course …’

  Some ten minutes later Captain Negodyaev appeared in the doorway.

  ‘Aha!’ said the General grandly and graciously. ‘I understand you have a wife and daughter in Novorossiisk.’

  ‘That’s perfectly correct, your Excellency. I have, your Excellency, two daughters,’ Captain Negodyaev was explaining, turning pale as a sheet as he stood to attention:

  ‘Màsha and Natàsha, your Excellency.’

  ‘Quite, quite, quite,’ the General chimed in impatiently.

  ‘Màsha, your Excellency, is married, and lives with her husband, Ippolit Sergèiech Blagovèschenski, away in Novorossiisk, your Excellency. And Natàsha, your Excellency, is only seven, your Excellency.’

  ‘Quite, quite, quite,’ said the General impatiently, and turning fiercely to his aide-de-camp son:

  ‘A telegram to Novorossiisk,’ he snapped, ‘to be dispatched immediately!’

  The aide-de-camp tore off the ground.

  The General pressed the button.

  The aide-de-camp, like a jack-in-the-box, bobbed in again and stood to attention, trembling like a jerboa.

  ‘Priority. Clear the line,’ the General snapped savagely.

  ‘Quite so, your Excellency!’ The aide-de-camp, like a jack-in-the-box, bobbed out again.

  It was as if the General had tarried long enough, and now having bestirred himself would show them that he meant business. He looked at Aunt Teresa to see if all this was pleasing her. She looked tender and vague.

  As Aunt Teresa rose, assured by the General that no stone would be left unturned to comply with her wishes, she turned to Dr. Murgatroyd and thanked him for his most interesting and brilliant discourse. ‘Perhaps you would pay us a visit,’ she said over her shoulder.

  Escorted by the General’s retinue we stepped into the carriage and drove home.

  26

  A TELEGRAM AWAITED ME AS WE ARRIVED. WITH nervous hands I tore it open. It ran: ‘Your scheme approved. Appointed liaison officer and military censor. Instructions follow.’

  ‘And the letter! Where’s the letter?’ Aunt Teresa asked the moment she saw Beastly.

  But the letter was for me. Uncle Lucy wrote to ask me if I thought it would be feasible for them to go and live in England. It was impossible for them to stay in Krasnoyarsk, as well-nigh everything had been taken from them, and he asked me, if I so thought fit, to arrange for an early passage for them from
Shanghai to England.

  I was annoyed. In my irritable mood, I thought: others had perished in the grand commotion of the great world war and revolution. Why not my uncle and family too? This morbid instinct of self-preservation! Why doesn’t he remain and perish? Apparently he thought that going to England was an easy matter. But was it? What annoyed me was the optimism with which some people deem it possible to get out of trouble. I suspected him, with all his surface pessimism, of being a facile optimist of a most distressing kind. When I was joining up to fight in the world war, he wrote to me as follows:

  I advise you to pay a visit to the War Office and see Lord Kitchener personally, and tell him that your constitution is not exactly suitable for the rigour and discomfort of the trenches, but that you are willing to ‘do your bit’ and do your duty by your king and country and are good at foreign languages and could thus be best employed in a sedentary capacity at the War Office itself, to the benefit of all concerned.

  I thought of the nuisance of having them in our crowded flat, and advised against it.

  At dinner Aunt Teresa questioned Beastly as to Uncle Lucy.

  ‘Well, I’ve seen him,’ he said.

  ‘You’ve seen my brother, Lucy?’ she asked excitedly.

  ‘I’ve seen him.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘He’s a queer fish,’ he said, ‘and no mistake, your brother Lucy!’

  Major Beastly had had a heart-to-heart talk with Aunt Molly, from which indeed it seemed that Uncle Lucy was a ‘queer fish’. His father—so Aunt Molly said—had charged him on his death-bed to look after the remaining family. That death-bed scene seemed to have so impressed itself on Uncle Lucy’s mind that ever since—according to Aunt Molly—he had neglected his own family. All the money he had made he would be sending to his sisters, and when his children were born and Aunt Molly wanted nurses, Uncle Lucy said he didn’t believe in nurses. And when the children grew up and she wanted money for their schooling, Uncle Lucy, in withholding the necessary funds, declared that, with Tolstoy, he didn’t believe in schooling. And when the time arrived for deciding on their future callings and professions, Uncle Lucy said he didn’t believe in callings and professions. Till one day, with the eighth or ninth offspring, Aunt Molly kicked over the fence and managed the estate herself as best she could. Meanwhile, their number had been swelling, and when after having the family group taken at the photographer’s they all marched home through the town garden, Uncle Lucy looked as though he were a guide conducting a crowd of sightseeing tourists through the city grounds, and the family, except the very young ones, felt constrained. But Uncle Lucy’s interest in them was not especially marked, and he would ask the same young daughter as each day he walked a portion of the way to school with her what class she was in.

  ‘But what about our money?’ interrupted Aunt Teresa.

  ‘Oh yes. He said that, with Tolstoy, he didn’t believe in money.’

  ‘That’s nice!’

  ‘I tried to tackle him. But he said that in his house the subject was taboo.’

  Next morning, being the fourth day since he last performed the operation, Major Beastly made a stink. Uncle Emmanuel at once lit a cigar, but said nothing. In the dining-room Vladislav shook his head. ‘Enough to make you carry out the saints. In France,’ he added, ‘such a thing would not be allowed in a decent home.’

  Berthe did not mind Beastly’s stinks now. ‘He has a tender skin—il a la peau sensible,’ she would say, ‘which can’t stand the touch of the blade.’ She confessed to me that she even rather liked his nostrils: there was something very frank, almost touching—n’est-ce pas?—about their vertical position, something that oddly reminded you of a dog who, at the command ‘Beg!’, displays himself before you in an unfamiliar pose.

  Nevertheless, I thought the time had come to remonstrate with Beastly.

  ‘I have a perfect right to shave as I like,’ he rejoined.

  ‘A man’s rights are limited,’ I observed. ‘He has no right to make a stink, for instance, unless he be in a desert, alone with God.’

  But nothing would shatter his faith in the soundness of his apparatus, and the same day, at tea, he turned to Captain Negodyaev with the offer to make use of his ‘preparat.’

  ‘Get some of that yellow moss off your face,’ he advised.

  ‘Thank you, I rarely shave,’ said Captain Negodyaev. ‘I just powder my chin, it’s quite sufficient.’

  Beastly suggested Aunt Teresa trying his ‘preparat’ on her own tender lip with a view to removing, as he put it, ‘that moustachio of yours’. But Aunt Teresa’s verdict was that Berthe should try it first. If Berthe came out of it without undue disfigurement, Aunt Teresa would feel justified in applying the method on her own lip and chin.

  Towards evening Captain Negodyaev would be looking like a frightened rat. Having served under conflicting governments, he was afraid of persecution, and late at night he used to come into my bedroom and talk mysteriously of Red reprisals on White officers and of White reprisals on officers who, like himself, at one time or another had been forced to serve under a Pink régime. He would sit with me and talk for hours into the night, till the pale dawn mocked our yellow light.

  27

  THE PERIOD OF ENGAGEMENT, AS ALL WHO’VE BEEN engaged will know, is a period of transition, not wholly satisfactory. To please my august aunt, each day, for hours at a stretch, we sat in the drawing-room, where Aunt Teresa did her crochet work, I holding Sylvia by the hand; at long intervals exchanging silent looks of tenderness and passion—just as Anatole had done before his end, and Uncle Emmanuel himself in the sentimental days of his engagement to my aunt: when she let drop her head upon his martial shoulder. But my efforts did not meet with the approval they deserved: to Aunt Teresa, in the after light of her own romantic days, I did not seem affectionate enough, nor did she think her daughter adequately tender and responsive, and criticized my fiancée’s dislike of these prolonged and silent attitudes, while Sylvia entreated: ‘Darling, don’t be soppy!’ Aunt Teresa now went out with us (her health permitting, and when it did not so permit, objected to our going out at all). She did not like to leave us by ourselves, though we were cousins, and had been alone no end of times before we were engaged. And we were bored with her, bored with each other, and bored with ourselves. When left alone, after she had gone to bed, for want of something better, we kissed. It was as if, all of a sudden, we had lost our former faculty for making conversation. I sighed. Sylvia sighed. ‘I wish,’ I said, ‘your mother would hurry up with our wedding.’

  She thought a little, wondering what she could say.

  ‘You are very naughty, darling,’ she rejoined.

  Sylvia liked to be kissed in short kisses.

  ‘But don’t you like long kisses, darling?’

  ‘I can’t breathe, darling, when they’re too long; but I can breathe between each short kiss, if you know what I mean, and you can go on and on and on.’

  I gave her a ring on which I had had engraved the message: Set me as a seal upon thine heart.

  28

  MORE POLYGLOTS

  IT WAS THE END OF SUMMER, AND THE RAINS HAD set in. A dark gloomy morning, the electric light burning as though it were evening. At last came the ring at the bell.

  Mme Negodyaev, a crumpled lady with a face as though someone had once inadvertently stepped on it, held by the hand a smaller form with a pallid face framed in fair locks, and thin, thin legs. And to all questions Natàsha shrugged her shoulders. When I watched her drinking tea I noticed her faint finely drawn brow. And sitting at table among the grown-ups, sunk low in the chair and her chin not very far removed from the edge of the table, with a look of gravity on her face, she looked like a miniature reproduction of a human being. On board the boat that brought them she had played with English children, and Mme Negodyaev recounted, with pride in her face, that Natàsha could now already speak English. When she did so she spoke of ‘my friends’, ‘my uncle’, ‘my grandmama’. I asked
her about the Bolsheviks in Novorossiisk. ‘Bolsheviks? What’s it means Bolsheviks?’ She shrugged her shoulders. ‘Only lot of dirty mens in the street.’

  I laughed at that. She laughed back—into the cup of tea, creating a little storm in the tea-cup. ‘But I have lots and lots of my friends there. And my sister and my uncle and my grandmama. Ah! and I have left in Rush-ya my little kitchen—such a beauty thing—and plates my grandmama given me, lots and lots of plates and cups—such a lovely! Ah! such-such pity! Such, such such-such pity!’

  Tired after the journey, supper over, she was at once put to bed. In her striped flannel nightgown, a slim little figure, she knelt up in bed and, looking towards the ikon of Nicholas the Miracle-worker which her mother had already unpacked and hung up in the corner, she closed her eyes, her thin palms together, and prayed: ‘Dear Little God, pity our poor Russia.’

  This over, her father and mother rejoined us in the drawing-room. I watched Mme Negodyaev’s face as she talked. It was a face by courtesy only. ‘My heart aches for poor Màsha,’ she was saying. ‘Hers is a hard life, for Ippolit is so strange. I have felt sorry for Màsha ever since the wedding day, when Ippolit began worrying me over the dowry, which he thought insufficient. I said to myself: “If that’s what he is like now, what will he be like after?” And the very night after they had been married, Ippolit went out to the café by himself and sat there till early morning, drinking and playing cards. He soon took up another woman, and would go away with her for weeks on end. This Màsha tried to forgive him, because she loved him. He bought expensive presents for that woman with Màsha’s own money, but she never said a word, because she loved him. Finally, he began bringing her to our house and, in fact, to Màsha’s bedroom. All this, too, Màsha tried to endure, for she loved him very, very much. But when they left—Ippolit and the woman—they broke into the cabinet and took away the portfolio with all our ready money. Both Màsha and I don’t think it was very nice of them to do that after all we’ve done for them; do you?’