The Polyglots Read online

  Sir Hugo had, of course, made enquiries. He established a chain of responsibility, and it seemed that each link had done its duty: yet the chain had failed. But Sir Hugo would not give in. He had accumulated a pile of unshapely correspondence on the subject of the prodigal report and had collected the papers in a file named ‘The Lost Report of Sir Hugo Culpit’, and when he collected a scrap of evidence on the subject he would scribble it down on a buff slip and then send it in to me (whom he had now entrusted to keep the file), with the words: ‘Please attach this slip, by a pin, to confidential file, entitled “The Lost Report of Sir Hugo Culpit”.’ And in a humorous vein I had written on the slip in imitation of Sir Hugo’s manner:

  Please state what pin:

  1. (a) An ordinary pin; (b) a safety-pin; (c) a drawing-pin; (d) a hair-pin; (e) a linch-pin.

  2. What make and size

  and sent the slip back to Sir Hugo.

  I thought that Sir Hugo would rejoice over this slip, it being so very much in accordance with his own methods of procedure. Not so indeed. Sir Hugo hated people like himself, because they acted as a sort of caricature of himself: served to remind him of a fact of which in his more open moments with himself he was dimly conscious—that he was to a large degree absurd.

  But when I was called before Sir Hugo and reprimanded for my levity, I felt it to be my best course to maintain a sort of honest, stupid face as if in testimony of my innocence; and Sir Hugo may have believed me.

  And yesterday—two months later!—the prodigal report had returned to the office. To the unspeakable horror of Sir Hugo it was found in an empty oat sack at the distant wharf of Egerscheldt, and Sir Hugo now broke his head as to how it could have possibly got there. He was determined to trace back its journey to the office, even if that should cost him his health.

  He had convened a special conference comprising all the heads of departments and told us of the mysterious circumstances. ‘We must begin,’ he said, ‘right at the beginning. There is, in fact, many a worse point to begin at. I am not entirely pessimistic. We’ve got the sack. That is all right. Beyond the sack we know nothing. Now here is the sack.’ He stretched out the sack. ‘I suggest, gentlemen,’ he said, ‘that you work backwards. The first thing to do is to trace the manufacturers of the sack.’ The task was entrusted to me.

  Is it to be wondered at that I fell ill?

  14

  IT WAS WINTER, CLEAN, WHITE, CRISP, IMPENETRABLE. All around me—the bay and the hillocks—was covered as with a tablecloth. I lay in bed, ill, and dreamed into the future, back into the past. Long, peaceful thoughts. In those still twilight hours when you lie on your back you float as if outside and beside life, draw from the deep well of inhibited emotion that dreamy substance which underlies our daily life, remove layer after layer of ‘atmosphere’, veil after veil of mood, cloud after cloud of misty oblivion, till your soul shines forth like a star on a frosty night. What is that soul of yours, and is it you? My I, as I now came to see, has always been changing, was never the same, never myself, but always looked forward—to what? Perhaps we change our souls even as the serpents are said to change their skins. There are feelings awaiting me I know nothing of yet. When I shall know them, they will have added to my ever-changing soul—towards the ultimate totality of God.

  Alone, in the deep silence of the night, we steal up to the door. We pause. We press the handle. The door is locked. We die: the door is open, and we enter. The room is empty, but at the other end we see a door. We press the handle. It is locked.

  And so for ever …

  Sir Hugo sent a note to Major Beastly, which ran:

  Please say:

  1. Have you, or have you not, as yet, taken steps to cause a doctor to be sent to see your friend?

  2. If so, (a) what step; (b) what date; (c) what time; (d) what doctor?

  But Major Beastly, as he was about to bestir himself on my behalf, had an attack of dysentery, and the matter was indefinitely postponed. And only my sleepy apathetic batman Pickup was here to look after me as I lay, lost in a cloud of timeless thought, in the last grips of influenza. We are like icebergs in the ocean: one-eighth part consciousness and the rest submerged beneath the surface of articulate apprehension. We are like stars passionately intent on looking at the world and loth to go out; like children resentful of being sent to bed while the party is on. Were I to die now, where would be the meaning of my having lived at all? So once I had feared to die in France away from my real ‘atmosphere’, while not owning my real soul. I felt that if I died then I would take away with me into eternity a soul not truly mine and leave the true one languishing behind—in Petrograd. How absurd! The house was empty. Workmen prowled about redecorating the interior for our impending use. They came and went. Away in the kitchen the Chinese cook sang a plaintive native air, and now and then I seemed to hear the sound of Pickup’s heavy Army Ordnance boots. The smell of paint sent me back some fifteen years, to the time when I was yet a child, and made the memory of it sweet, which the experience had never been. Easter eve. The advent of spring. I return home from a shop where I had bought—oh rapture!—an electric torch. The big, stupendous world enshrouds me. The ice is breaking on the Neva. A moist, languid warmth sets in. The stars in heaven twinkle through the dark. That too has gone. And I remembered suddenly the Island drive in Petersburg, when I was still a boy, how I alighted from my father’s coach and stood and looked out to the Finnish Bay glowing in the evening sunlight. Mysterious light. What life it brought with it, what tortuous life! Surely this gathering gleam evolving into streaks of red, green, pink, gold, lilac, was no hallucination. It was more like a chord, soft, sad and lost. And it was then, before I knew it, that I anticipated love: ‘my wife’, a young woman stranger and more marvellous than anything that I had ever met: those dreams which went with her as I trudged home from school, imagining myself an artist, a great writer, an actor, a famous tenor rendering Faust’s Cavatina, the world’s champion lawn-tennis player, a conductor of orchestra, a composer of music, and withal a banker and a millionaire, living in a marble palace on the banks of the wide Neva, owning a steam yacht, horses, a wife who would desert me—and then die, and I would be pitied as I stood in a tall hat, with a broad black band on the sleeve of my astrakhan coat, at the open grave, having forgiven her. These memories—they too had gone. Where? Why? And, again, I remembered Oxford, how I strolled down Queen’s Lane one evening towards New College, and the glorious twin towers of All Souls stood, wise and quiet, in the nacre-coloured air. They had stood there long before I had come into the world, and they would stand there long after I had ceased to be. And between that and now was Flanders, the war, trench-ladders and parapets, the white wooden crosses we made for ourselves before an impending attack, on a divine June night. Memories, past moods, past souls. They have been and gone. When as a boy I dreamed of love, the type of feminine beauty I cherished was so utterly different from Sylvia’s that I could not have thought I would ever love one like her, who was not at all ‘my type’. To have done it would have been to betray my soul. I have betrayed my soul. And there is nothing left of my former soul: we might have been acquaintances. What matter? I don’t care a rap for my old soul. I have found—I will not say a real—no, a new meaning of love. Bathing in the luxuries of convalescence, I thought no longer of ‘my wife’, but of Sylvia as my wife, dwelling in the marble house with pillared terraces, the leaden water of the Neva lapping at the sloping granite steps. Her letter which I had on wakening was like a desirable but premature caress breaking through receding sleepiness.

  My Own Darling Prince [she wrote]. Here I am in sad, sad Trouble. My lovely brother Anatole Roland Joseph was executed in Flanders on the 22nd of last month. He had gone to sleep on watch duty which he had taken over voluntarily for some soldier who was very tired, and was caught asleep by an N.C.O. who hated him, and court-martialled.

  She enclosed the letters he wrote with an indelible pencil on the night before the execution, and the tears he pour
ed as he wrote to his mother, father and sister, each a separate letter of farewell, stained them in pale-blue blobs. Judging by the size of the blobs, he must have cried freely at the stern injustice of being pushed perforce out of this world, at the thought of never seeing them again. ‘They can kill my body, but they can’t kill my soul,’ he wrote. ‘I shall go to heaven and be with God.’ They sent his clothes home, blood-stained in places, with several bullet punctures about the chest.

  Needless to tell you how Heartbroken I feel. I have waited for a letter from you: but none. Are you angry with me? Please, please write to me Princie Darling lovely Child. It will be Christmas soon. I will send you a little gift later in the week. I had a fall and hurt my Arm—better now. And here I suffer while His Grace dances gaily on the warships. I just longed for a letter from you, and of course disapp. was Sylvia.

  Ever yours,

  Sadie. New name.

  VERY SAD

  Please wire.

  Aunt Teresa wrote that her poor health was in as miserable a state as ever and that she had resigned herself to spend the remainder of her days in her exile in the Far East. There was little purpose in going back to Belgium now that Anatole was dead, and they were all removing to Harbin, where Countess X., an old Russian friend of hers, who was going back to Europe, would let them have her flat practically free of rent. Uncle Lucy’s remittance had still not arrived, and she was taking Sylvia home from the ‘Sacred Heart’ as she could not afford the fees.

  15

  WHEN, AFTER MY RECOVERY, I RETURNED TO THE OFFICE, I found that the Major had usurped my job. I worked, for a little while, under his orders, and then got sick of it. The clerks (like permanent officials untroubled by a change of Minister) worked unperturbed as before. ‘Chesterton,’ said Sergeant Smith, from his desk. ‘Ah, Chesterton, sir!’

  ‘What about him? He says more than he knows.’

  ‘But,’ rejoined Sergeant Smith, ‘how he walks down Fleet Street, stopping every few paces, lost deep in thought; then suddenly dashes across, stops dead in the middle of the thoroughfare, the buses and taxis and things all whizzing past and around him, then touches his forehead—“Got it”—and having captured the missing link in his thoughts returns to the pavement. A great character.’

  ‘A hair-splitting dud!’ rejoined Sergeant Jones.

  ‘No!’

  ‘Now then,’ said the Major, from my former desk. ‘Now then!’

  Finding it impossible to evict him from my chair (now more amply occupied by his form), I accepted Sir Hugo’s offer of combining a little duty with pleasure, and proceeded on a sheepskin expedition to Harbin to bring back a quantity of sheepskin coats which had been ordered for the Russian Army. As Beastly was returning to Harbin to consult the railway authorities in that city on matters locomotive, we agreed to go together, Pickup and Beastly’s batman Lenaine (the latter a public school boy whose father as he came to see him off at Euston wore a top hat and looked like a lord) travelling with us. It was full winter, and bitterly cold. Two weary nights, impenetrable gloom.

  A lovely morning. I stood on the open platform as the train raced between a forest and a field, both deep in snow. A harsh wind whipped me in the face, but the sky was blue and cloudless and the vast space of snow glittered in the sunshine.

  Sylvia was waiting for me at the station, looked out, and seeing me went in—I suppose out of shyness. Then we met. She had grown. She was taller and more beautiful than she had been in Japan; she looked fresh and strong in her short astrakhan-bordered coat and warm overshoes. And Harbin, which I had visited one summer, seemed full of precious associations; but under the cloak of winter it had acquired an unreal, fantastic appearance. The pines and firs were covered with snow; the ground creaked agreeably under our feet as we walked to their house.

  As we entered the large stone building, a door on the landing was open and a terrific row seemed in progress in one of the flats, as if someone—someone who shouldn’t have been—had been killed. I looked up at Sylvia, in alarm.

  ‘It’s Berthe and Mme Vanderphant,’ she said, ‘talking.’

  And indeed, as we ascended the steps, it transpired that Berthe and Mme Vanderphant were amicably imparting to each other their deep-felt impression that it was very cold in the flat.

  ‘Mais, Mathilde, c’est épouvantable ce qu’il y fait froid!’

  ‘Ah, mais je te crois bien, Berthe!’

  And so on.

  The flat was a little dark, but otherwise nice and comfortably furnished, and there was a bath. But when I applied for its use I created a commotion. ‘Allons!’ said Berthe, ‘we must send for the workmen to repair the bath.’ Some hours afterwards they arrived and set to work on the geyser, which gave angry little puffs of explosion—when they all began to curse each other. While the bath was being prepared for my impending use, two homeless dressmakers who had been allowed by Aunt Teresa to use the bathroom as a room for dressmaking were enjoined by Berthe to leave it. They stood in the corridor, surprised and afraid, as if wondering what was ‘up’, and holding their work in their hands, while I washed, slowly, lingeringly, interminably. And I could hear their voices, amid the angry little puffs of the geyser, while in the adjoining room Uncle Emmanuel conversed politely with Mme Vanderphant:

  ‘Monsieur is supporting the cold remarkably well.’

  ‘Ah, madame is truly amiable.’

  ‘Monsieur is too kind.’

  ‘Ah, madame is flattering me!’

  ‘Is monsieur then not afraid of the climate?’

  ‘Ah! not at all.’

  ‘Enfin, monsieur has courage!’

  ‘Ah, madame is flattering me.’ ‘Monsieur is too kind.’

  In the twilight of the cosy drawing-room Sylvia was playing patience and telling fortunes, talking a lot to herself, cooing like a dove—half-audibly. Having finished telling her own fortune she began telling mine—something about a fair lady, an important letter, a long journey, and so forth.

  ‘Darling,’ I said, ‘you only wrote to me once all the time. I wrote three times.’

  She did not answer at once because she was laying out the cards and cooing to herself the while. I thought she hadn’t heard, but presently she replied: ‘I wanted to know.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘When a man loves he writes, writes, writes—goes on writing. I wanted to know.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘If you would go on.’

  ‘Oh!’

  ‘Oh!’ she mimicked. ‘I did.’

  ‘But I’ve no time for writing letters. I like writing for print.’

  ‘You write something about my darling beautiful brother Anatole.’

  ‘But, darling, what am I to write?’

  ‘Write something. I want to have something from you. Write about his little dugout and how he joined at eighteen and—and how they killed him.’ Her eyes filled.

  I thought: we shall forget your sacrifices, curses, vows, and what you went through—and we shall live as though those things had never been. We shall forget the things you died for—and the peace will yet calumniate your deaths.

  We arrived on a Thursday, and on Saturday, it being the fourth day since we left Vladivostok, Major Beastly made a stink. Uncle Emmanuel at once lit a heavy cigar. Aunt Teresa applied her lace handkerchief to her chiselled nostrils. ‘Mais mon Dieu! He wants to kill us,’ she exclaimed. ‘It’s poison gas!’

  ‘Ah, je crois bien, madame!’ cried Mme Vanderphant in tones of acute anguish. And Berthe uttered: ‘Oh la la!’

  Uncle Emmanuel shrugged his shoulders several times in that provoked, astonished way by which the Latin race implies that ‘it’s a bit much!’ and said, ‘Allons donc, allons donc!’

  ‘Ah, mais! he has some cheek!’ echoed Mme Vanderphant.

  To which Uncle Emmanuel could only answer, ‘Ah! Ah——!’ completing with his gestures the unspeakable.

  He had a delicate skin, said Beastly, when I approached him diplomatically, which would not stand the to
uch of the razor-blade. I cannot say what happened. As I was about to press him more definitely to give up this evil-smelling practice, he suddenly fell ill with dysentery, and the question was again indefinitely postponed.

  It fell to Berthe to nurse him. Beastly was no great beauty at the best of times. His nostrils were strictly perpendicular to the ground on which he trod—that is vertical instead of being horizontal; so that when he leaned back in a chair, or now in bed, before you, they were parallel with the incline of his body. You had a full view of them, as though they were drawn up for your inspection. Nevertheless, Berthe took a fancy to him and nursed him with especial care.