The Polyglots Page 24
On Friday morning Beastly was to leave for England. He had been laid up with dysentery through the whole of March and first half of April, and was faithfully looked after by Berthe. Dusting his hat for him while he put on his coat, ‘Write to me sometimes, won’t you, Percee,’ she said. ‘You know how precious you are to me.’
He made his last stink on a Wednesday, and then left on the Friday. But owing to some misunderstanding regarding his passage, he returned at the end of the week and made stinks on the subsequent Tuesday, Friday, Monday, Thursday, and Saturday.
43
THE BADGE
CAME THE WEDDING-DAY, EVEN AS THE DREADED day comes to the condemned, as comes the moment for the trembling rabbit when it must jump for dear life—inexorable, relentless day. Somehow we had hoped that such a day was impossible, but the day came on to prove that it was possible, a bleak day—April the 28th. The snow had not yet been cleared in the streets, but it was already warm and the pavements were dry as in summer.
Since I awoke that morning I was on tenterhooks. A dreary day. I stood at the window, my nose against the cold glass: a time when you would kill yourself for a song. A fly at the window—a mosquito in the damp—looked puzzled with life. We are half alive, half asleep, wondering why we are; could we but grope out of this slimy bog, where we had sunk, into the light from which we fell, perchance we’d find our wings.
On the floor lay my kit all spread out, and the Chink boy was packing. I looked down on to the street below—and suddenly I saw a visitor at our door: a bent old lady in a mushroom hat pulled down over a grinning skull. ‘Madame Death.’ And standing on the doorstep, looking at her, was Natàsha. A shiver ran down my back. But Madame Death bent double, and vanished in the backyard.
I resumed my packing. Natàsha knocked at the door, came in, proud and a little confused, put a new shaving-brush on my table—and ran away again. Her gift at my departure!
I called her back.
‘Natàsha, who was that old lady outside?’
She shrugged her shoulders. ‘What’s it means a lady? No lady. Some mens outside—a lot of dirty mens, but no lady.’
I took up the shaving-brush and examined it. You drift along in life, I thought, and you drift into some Captain Negodyaev with a Natàsha. Attachments; partings; the keeping up of correspondence; the dropping of it, the drifting out of sight and call. How queer. And when I think of the sights, the people, the opportunities I miss at every turn, will go on missing, my heart stops dead, I gasp for breath, I clutch a chair …
Uncle Emmanuel had donned his uniform for the occasion, and his full medals, and I attached ‘le sabre de mon père’, that silly sword of the 1800 pattern long since discarded for its prohibitive length. At one o’clock the service began. There was sun in the church, but bitterness in my heart. I wore my love, a rosary of pangs, on her behalf and on my own. My soul quailed as I met her eyes. If I had been weak, still, was that a reason why she should have tied herself for life to this grotesque individual with a canary moustache? I felt offended—but couldn’t say who had offended me. As the organ soared forth, I felt my soul weep for her. I grieved for my Sylvia; the thought that I had in the past offended her racked my heart: I seemed to be in her soul, to feel myself an inmate of her dolorous being. And when it was all over, and they came up to Aunt Teresa to be blessed and kissed and congratulated and Gustave murmured softly from beneath his soft moustache, ‘She has brought joy into my life’, I could not contain myself, and muttered as I pressed her hand: ‘I wish you joy of it!’ I walked home along the windy icy streets, my two legs jerking forward: two wooden sticks propping up a heavy vase of grief—my heavy heart.
I strayed into the dining-room, where the table was being laid under Vladislav’s direction and watched eagerly by Natàsha.
‘There will be turtle soup, duck and mushrooms and pears with ice-cream!’ Natàsha imparted, with glee in her sea-green eyes. I complimented Vladislav on the appearance of the festal dinner-table.
‘Yes, not bad,’ he agreed. ‘But a long way off the French! Paris—that’s a town, you might say. Streets, shops—in a word, a joy to behold! But here—ach!’ He waved his hand with the air of a thwarted artist. ‘What’s the use?’
At dinner there was turtle- as well as ham-flavoured thick soup; sole with sauce made of champagne and cray-fish; saddle of baby lamb; braised duck stuffed with birds’ liver and mushrooms with salad; celery with Parmesan cheese; Cornice pears with cream ice and black currant jam; ‘petits fours’; and baskets of fruit. The dinner was prefaced with sherry and bitter and monkey-gland cocktails, while throughout there was vodka, Château Lafitte 1900, and champagne of the brand ‘Œil de Perdrix’, the feast being wound up with ‘Fine Champagne 1875’, coffee, benedictine, curaçao and salted almonds. Aunt Teresa was anxious that it should be in the Russian custom, for fear of outraging local society. Dinner, accordingly, was at three o’clock in the afternoon. General ‘Pshe-Pshe’ supplied his batman, his own A.D.C. son, and a quantity of cutlery and china. A brass band (the one that had played at the funeral) had been installed by General ‘Pshe-Pshe’ in the dining-room and played flourishes on every suitable—and unsuitable—occasion during dinner, and the smell of the soldiers’ highly polished boots was no less pronounced throughout the meal. There is in Russia what seemed to me that day an inane custom of bringing in at these nuptial feasts the word ‘bitter’—at which the bride and bridegroom have to kiss.
‘Strange,’ said the General, ‘this bread is bitter, and this wine is bitter.’
‘Bitter! Bitter!’ all the guests shouted exultantly.
Sylvia and Gustave kissed. He just touched her with that absurd canary moustache of his. Imagine my feelings. The General flicked out his thumb at the band, and the band played a flourish.
‘Yes, that’s the real Russian fashion,’ laughed Aunt Teresa.
There were many toasts drunk, and at the end of each toast the band played a flourish. And even when there were no toasts, now and then, when the General flicked out his thumb, the band played a flourish. Afterwards they played flourishes of their own accord: at the stressing in conversation of a sentence, at the emphasis of a word. At the least ostensible noise of any kind, the band played a flourish.
‘Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!’ Sylvia laughed.
The band played a flourish.
I sat there between Captain Negodyaev and Beastly, and listening to the inner voice in me reproaching me for the barter of my happiness, I reflected thus: the difficulty about happiness is that its technique is thoroughly unsatisfactory; that you cannot get it quickly when you want it, or easily enough to be worth having; the sacrifice demanded for its sake is apt to outweigh the motive, and, knowing that, you are loth to take it on. I was loth to take it on; and here I sit—and suffer. Still, I consoled myself that she was to me a white elephant, that on my journey in search of perfection she was a sort of luxurious trunk, a gorgeous globe-trotter for which I had no kit. She was a precious stone, a jewel I could not afford to buy. Yet beneath all these consoling reflections there lurked a truth, unheard but still disturbing, that I had missed my greatest chance of happiness in life as I might miss a train.
‘Bitter! Bitter!’ shouted the General exultantly. Sylvia and Gustave kissed. (Oh, where was my sword!) The band played a flourish.
I was not in pain; I only felt a heavy dullness—a spiritual headache. To-day was Saturday. What would I do now? Tomorrow was Sunday. A day of celebration and repose. A red-letter day—yes, red with anguish! And as for my sailing home—I could have only waved my hand!
As the first course was being removed the General rose and proposed the health of the bride and bridegroom, while the band played a flourish. After that, Captain Negodyaev got up and proposed the health of the bride’s parents. Then speeches were made of a national character, and the General drank to the glory of the Belgian Army, the band playing, somewhat inaccurately, the Belgian national anthem. Whereupon Uncle Emmanuel rose and drank to the revival of Ru
ssia, the General, as senior Russian officer present, responding, and including England and the Allies generally in his toast (having in his festal mood forgotten their betrayal of him). ‘Turning to our latest ally the Americans,’ he said, ‘I must observe that although they are a godless people they are nevertheless a deuced clever race. Gramophones, goloshes, footwear, vehicles, inventions, and all sorts of rubbish—they can do all that; or construct a railway, let us say, across the ocean—at that they are past-masters. The Americans! Hurrah!’
The band played a flourish. I and Beastly responded for England. Then Colonel Ishibaiashi rose to respond for Japan; everybody leaned forward and strained his attention.
‘I have an honour very much,’ he said, ‘to speak for the honourable officers of the Allied Forces. A band of Bolsheviki that appeared Cikotoa from north-east who proud but weak retired hearing the arrival of our alliance. Perhaps they spied us and felt very much anxiety, they retired far and far at last. Therefore we can hold the peace of Cikotoa and the safety of the principal line of the railway, unused our swords. Now it has become unnecessary to stay a strong force here any more. Therefore my Commander ordered me let the alliances to return to Harbin. Soon after you will triumph taking a great honour. We accomplished our duty by your a great many assistance. I offer you my thousand thanks for your kind relief——’
Here Beastly, very red in the face, leaned over to Colonel Ishibaiashi. ‘Stop talking shop, old bean,’ he said, ‘and tell us instead something—er—interesting—something about your damned old geisha girls, don’t you know.’
Colonel Ishibaiashi showed his teeth. ‘Ha!—Ha!—Iz zas so—zzz?’ and turning to the bridal pair, ‘I wisk,’ he said ‘your happy in this occasion. It is a little entertainment on the battlefield, but I hope you will take much saké, speak and sing cheerfully.’ And he sat down—while the band played a flourish.
The General, who only a few moments before had urged Allied solidarity after the war, now, perhaps from excessive drink, all at once displayed a weary cynicism and disenchantment. ‘Ach!’—a weary gesture—‘it’s all talk, all talk. They talk of preferential treatment for the Allies, the best-favoured nation clause, and that kind of rot. But in practice what does it all amount to? We Russians, for example, have done no end of good in Armenia. But when one of our lot went to have a shave in Nahichivan, the barber spat on the soap before lathering his face. He, of course, jumped up, disgusted, and went for him. “Don’t you get flurried, my beauty,” the barber replied. “This is a favour we’re showing you—preferential treatment. With any ordinary bloke we first spit in his snout and then rub on the soap afterwards!” Yes. That’s what it amounts to—no more—he!—he!—he!’ the General laughed feebly.
And looking at this mixed assorted crew, I thought: why the devil should nations fight? The shallow imbecility of ‘alliances’, of this or that national friendship: all nations were too uncommon and too alike to warrant any natural camping based as it were on personal preference. It was absurd. Yet they all behaved as though there were some real lasting advantage in such a stampede for safety. There were fools who advocated wars for economic reasons, and when, after the war, victors and vanquished alike rotted in the economic morass which the war had made, they forgot the economic argument (till they fomented a new war). It was incredible. No one wanted the war, no one with the exception of a score of imbeciles, and suddenly all those who did not want a war turned imbecile and obeyed the score of imbeciles who had made it, as if indeed there were no alternative to war—the simple common-sense alternative of, at any rate, not going to war about it, whatever happens: seeing that whatever happens cannot in the nature of the case be worse than war.
What a mixture we were, even within each nationality. The Russian batman Stanislav was more of a Pole than a Russian; Brown was more of a Canadian than an American; Gustave more of a Fleming than a Walloon, and I—well, you know who I am. And—to make the gathering more truly representative of the late World War—there was a youthful British officer, one of those young and simple and good chaps who, in wars waged for freedom, civilization, the avengement of national honour, the suppression of tyranny, the restoration of law and order, and such-like blood-exacting sacred causes, are freely sacrificed by the thousand, and their conception of the world is a vague sense that something is wrong somewhere and that somebody ought to be hanged.
So they set off to their doom, cheerfully, on the off-chance that their foe is that evil whose blood they are after, and having set out on their righteous (and adventurous) cause they now care but little about the origin of the wrong. And so they set out to kill and maim, and to be killed and maimed in turn, cheerfully, in the ‘old bean’ sort of fashion. Their mode of thinking, their manner of talking, is at one with the state of their soul. They go about asking everybody all day long: ‘Do barmaids eat their young?’ They strike on a happy phrase like ‘You’re all shot to pieces’, and it becomes a sort of standing sentence applicable to any person at any given moment. Or they pick up some phrase like ‘The odd slab of bread’, and then go on referring to ‘The odd slab of beer’, ‘The odd slab of sleep’, ‘The odd slab of wash’, and the odd slab of everything. Their conversation deteriorates into relating to each other in the morning the number of whisky-and-sodas they have consumed the night before.
‘Bitter! Bitter!’ shouted the General.
The band played a flourish.
Sylvia and Gustave kissed.
I have often read in novels and I have heard it said ‘How prettily she laughs’, and it has always left me cold, because I could not conceal the thought of the underlying artificiality of such a pretty laugh. A laugh to be pretty, it seemed to me, must be natural and unconscious. But now, though I had seen her laugh no end of times before, I thought with eagerness, I thought in exultation: ‘How prettily she laughs!’
What a beauty, what a treasure, for sure, I was giving away. And to whom, of all people! How stupid. To miss one’s happiness by worse than an oversight, to surrender heedlessly the one thing that one should have kept. And the devils of hell, ten thousand strong, hissed into my ear from every hidden crevice of my brain: ‘You have missed your chance, missed it! missed it! missed! missed! missed!’
‘Bitter!’ shouted the General.
Sylvia and Gustave kissed.
The band played a flourish.
Facing me sat Harry, and suddenly he asked:
‘Where is God? Is He everywhere?’
‘I suppose so.’
‘Is He in this bottle?’
‘I suppose so.’
‘But how has He got in with the cork on?’
‘He was there, I suppose, before the bottle was made.’
‘But how is it He hasn’t got drowned in the wine?’
‘He can exist anywhere, I suppose.’
‘But I can’t see Him,’ said he, peering through the Château Lafitte 1900.
‘Nor can I,’ I confessed, ‘as yet.’
But having found an opening, Harry would not shut up any more, and for the rest of the meal kept pestering us with questions, such as: ‘Is the halo fastened to God’s head with an elastic?’ Or ‘What would God do if a big tiger suddenly rushed at Him?’ Or, descending to a lower plane, ‘Why can’t you chew milk?’
Dr. Murgatroyd had just arrived, after a particularly trying journey, travelling six thousand versts from Omsk in an old cattle-truck without springs. In the present state of things it was indeed a rare occasion when the train did not stop every few versts in consequence of some congestion on the line. But as it happened, Dr. Murgatroyd’s truck had been hooked on to the special train of a certain combative general who was grimly intent on making his way through to Harbin with as few stops as possible, and to make his determination more grimly felt by others he had an armoured train in front of him and another at the back of him. And Dr. Murgatroyd, seated for days on end on the floor of his cattle-truck, alone amid shells of sunflower seeds and peel of oranges—the sole food on which he
lived—careless and indifferent as he was, he yet prayed to heaven that the train might stop if only for a moment. But the warlike general, in his grim determination, voted otherwise, and so seated and shaken to pieces, Dr. Murgatroyd finally arrived in Harbin. When the door of the cattle-truck was pulled open, the railway authorities beheld the curious spectacle of Dr. Murgatroyd, unshaven and unwashed, lying on an enormous heap of sunflower seed shells and orange peels, perusing a book. Dr. Murgatroyd had intended to give a lecture at the local Institute on the subject of the Union of the Orthodox and the Anglican Churches, but, cruelly shaken by the journey in the cattle-truck, he hesitated.
‘And what was Omsk like just before the evacuation? I can well imagine!’ asked Captain Negodyaev at the dinner-table.
Dr. Murgatroyd expressed a look of ominous significance. ‘These days,’ said he, ‘we live on a volcano.’
‘Very truly said. I have myself two daughters, Dr. Murgatroyd, and I feel anxious for their future. Màsha, poor thing, is married. But Natàsha is here. That is Natàsha over there.’
Dr. Murgatroyd looked across the table absently and pitched his fork into a sardine.
‘I regret that in the present unsettled state of affairs her education is being neglected. But then she is still only eight, and already speaks English like a native.’
‘That is very necessary,’ said Dr. Murgatroyd. ‘A closer knowledge of the two languages will inevitably draw the two countries together and facilitate the reunion of the Orthodox and the Anglican Churches. At Omsk I had a conversation with Metropolitan Nicholas and Archimandrite Timothy, and both ecclesiastics seemed struck with what I had to say.’