The Polyglots (47 page)

I sighed.

‘To live at a London hotel is like living in a taxicab with the taximeter leaping all the time—2s. 6d.—3s. 3d.—4s. 9d.—while you breathe. It’s awful.’

There was a pause.

‘The book,’ said my aunt.

‘The book,’ said my uncle.

The sea had calmed down a little, the surges rolled more steadily and more sensibly, as if ashamed of their drunken excesses of the night before.

‘It seems to me I have a soul for music, that possibly I had better chuck the book and start on a sonata, but the thought of crochets, quavers, demi-semi-quavers and what not, necessitates my keeping all my musical emotion to myself.’

‘There is no money in music,’ she said coldly.

‘Or I may conceivably become a psycho-analyst, an architect, a boxer, or a furniture-designer.’

‘No, no,’ she said. ‘The book. The book.’

‘The book,’ said my uncle.

Well, writing has its compensations. For if you cannot put the fire into your manuscript, you can always put your manuscript into the fire. You have written one novel, and you are writing another. Your own particular publisher writes to you at intervals: ‘How goes it? How is the spirit moving you?’ And you reply, with the expression of a hen hatching a rare egg: ‘I think it is all right … I think it is coming out all right. I think we are saved.’ And he retires on tiptoe, frightened, frightened lest he frighten you off this precious gold egg. And then he comes again: ‘How goes it? Nearly ready?’

‘Not yet.’

And he goes and buys the paper and the cardboard and the necessary implements in anticipation of your work which is now ‘in preparation’.

Writing has its compensations. The misguided reviewers who have damned my last book, and who will damn this one, I damn in advance. My last one was a
macédoine
of vegetables. The critics—big dogs, small dogs, hounds and pekingese, came up and sniffed at an unfamiliar vegetable dish, and went away, wagging their tails confusedly. But this should be more beefy. Shall I write it as a moral story with a lesson: pointing out what happens when a selfish aunt is allowed to have it all her own evil way? Or shall I—? No matter. I am not—you won’t misunderstand me—writing a novel: I am asking: will this
do
for a novel?

Suddenly I was seized with energy, filled with dread lest I should lose another moment. After all these months of indolence I suddenly conceived that I was in a hurry. It was as if these wasted months had tumbled over me and were pressing me down with their weight. I longed to see it finished, printed, an accomplished task embodied in between two cardboard sheets of binding, wrapped in a striking yellow jacket, and sold at so much net. This old decrepit ship was so intolerably slow. She literally went to sleep. I wanted to
do
things, to live, to work, to build, to shout. To promote companies, conduct a symphony orchestra, organize open-air meetings, paint pictures, preach sermons, act Hamlet, work in a coal mine, write to the Press. And then Sylvia comes and tells me that my aunt is again as sick as a cat. Gustave—the lucky dog. How I envied him, and how stupid it was that at this very moment, perhaps, he might be envying me.

Bah!

I am mortally sick of them, of immoral old uncles, insatiable women, Belgian duds, impecunious captains, insane generals,
stink
-making majors, pyramidon-taking aunts! Of aspirin,
tisane
, eau-de-Cologne. Of the scent of powder, of
Mon Boudoir
aroma. And when Sylvia steals at night into my cabin and talks of divorce
in order that we may consolidate our union, I visualize the camisole and knickers, my head goes round from her scent
Cœur de Jeanette
, and though I still feel she is very beautiful I say ‘What of it?’ and my thoughts go out to my unfortunate Uncle Lucy with a dawning understanding.

And the end? you will ask. For you may have a morbid taste for a strong dramatic ending which may seem to you appropriate to anv kind of book. I say to you: ‘Bunkum!’ The end? I don’t know and I don’t care. The end depends on what you choose to make it. And I invite the reader to co-operate with me in a spirit of good will to make the end a happy one for all concerned: buy this book. If you have already bought it, buy it again, and get your brother and mother to buy it. And the end, for Aunt Teresa and Aunt Molly and the Negodyaev family, will be different—very different—from what it might otherwise become. So tell your friends, tell all your friends—my aunt wants you to.

‘By tomorrow evening we shall see the English coast lights.’ I was thrilled at the prospect, and Aunt Teresa—after all, my aunt was born in Manchester—was also thrilled. She had begun a Russian novel about a woman with six husbands, all living. Three husbands, or even four—she could have stood, perhaps. But
six
!—It was too much. ‘I can’t read this,’ she said.

‘
Ma tante
, your attitude to literature is as though you were doing it a favour by touching it at all.’

‘Talking of literature, have you read in yesterday’s
Daily Mail
,’ Sylvia said—‘
Is Woman’s Love Selfish
?’

I looked at the horizon. ‘No land in sight?’ she questioned.

‘What Spanish Fleet are you talking of?’ said Aunt Teresa. My familiarity with quotable literature seems to constrain my family.

‘Ah,
ma tante
, your distinction lies outside the sphere of letters!’

That night we dallied, played bridge, and noted the addresses of our fellow-passengers, earnestly assuring and assured that we would call, or at least write—when early in the morning on the dim horizon we perceived the shore of England.

The approach of England, as if of a sudden, had precipitated the crystallization of our plans. The General with the mad eyes resigned himself to go to London. There must have been a Cabinet meeting, he thought, perhaps a debate in the House of Commons as to what might be the proper thing to do by him in his exile.

‘Why not see Krassin and go back to Russia and serve under the new régime?’

‘Too much honour for Krassin. Let him come to me. If they all come I might consider the invitation.’ The General said he thought the British Government, in concert with their Allies, would accord him the freedom of their countries and place a suite of officers at his disposal, one from each Ally, to accompany him on his travels through Europe; and he repeated his advice to me to apply for the highly enviable post of A.D.C. to him. ‘The war is over,’ said he, ‘and you cannot do better for yourself. I would treat you with all courtesy.’ Failing this, the General thought that he might eke out a handsome living in the British Isles by telling fortunes—disguise himself as the Black Monk of Russia, with long black fingernails and pale, terrible eyes.’ I only thought of it last night. I’d make my headquarters in Bond Street. All the society women would come in swarms. They would think I was Rasputin. I’d make tons and tons of money. What do you think of it?’

‘Not much.’

‘I go by what Carlyle said of the population of England.’

‘That applies to any population. If your recent utterance is to be regarded as at all characteristic it would prove it.’

‘Why, there are so many idiots in England that I would have a royal time!’

‘And the police, of course, are no exception: they would be silly enough to arrest you.’

‘H’m,’ said he, scraping his bristling chin with the black
fingernails. There was silence. His spirits drooped. His usual optimism had deserted him. For a moment he was downcast, without plan, without hope. ‘I don’t know what to do,’ he said, looking at me with pale, desperate eyes.

‘Have you no relations?’

‘I have a wife somewhere, a sister.’

‘Where are they?’

‘Heaven only knows!’

As I strolled off I saw Mme Negodyaev leaning on the rails. It was her first appearance since Colombo.

‘Do you see those white cliffs? This is England,’ I said with a secret sense of proprietorship.

‘Yes. But to us,’ she said, ‘it makes little difference now whether it’s England or Belgium or what. Do we get off tonight?’

‘We shall anchor tonight, very late, but shan’t be allowed on shore till the morning on account of passports and things.’

We were silent; then she said:

‘Now there are only the two of us—and, of course, Màsha. Poor Màsha! Your aunt told me she would see us through. She commands such influence and authority, so we don’t worry. We two don’t need much. We have no one to educate now.’ The tears came to her eyes.

I looked on.

England, my England!

Though we had all looked for it with impatience, it seemed as if nevertheless it had been sprung on us unawares. Passengers suddenly transferred their interest from one another to their luggage. All had found their way into the hold and were opening and shutting up boxes and generally interfering with their fellow-men. (And when I say ‘men’ I also mean women.) People were busy and aloof and not a little irritable, while stewards became conspicuously courteous and obliging. Everyone thought of what he would do next: and that ‘next’ seemed to have little or nothing to do with the man standing next to him. Towards lunch-time the sun came out, but vanished again after lunch.

By four o’clock, while the boat was still moving, passport and quarantine officials came up on a cutter, and, like pirates, climbed up our ship long before the port hove in sight. The white cliffs were now more than ever clearly visible in the distance.

‘We shall probably land tonight.’

‘More probably tomorrow morning,’ said Beastly. ‘When a boat comes into port she always begins hooting and messing about for the best part of six hours. High Navigation, I expect! Ha-ha!’ He guffawed loudly. ‘Eye-wash, that’s all it is! Done on purpose to bluff you. They don’t want you to run away with the idea that navigation is as blessedly simple a matter as it really is—that’s about the truth of it! Same with applying for a passport and that sort of silly thing. All done to impress you. So here. You bet we’ll mess about till the morning instead of driving up like in a cab.’

‘And in Russia,’ I observed, ‘the coachman whips up the horse and drives up at the greatest possible speed, pulling up, abruptly, at the porch. It’s supposed to look grand.’

‘I know. Of course, this cannot be done with a car.’

‘Well, I knew a French lieutenant in Russia who did it.’

‘The ass, ruining the tyres!’

‘Therein,’ I observed, ‘lay the whole piquancy of the thing.’

Beastly nodded his head heavily, as if wondering what the world indeed was coming to!
He
knew
what was what
. There was no pessimism, no doubt, no inaction about
him
. He would go back to the Argentine to his railroads; he would go and dig a gold mine in Canada; he would start a company for the developing of the port of Vladivostok and make bags of money, and then go into politics abroad and at home, shout at open-air meetings, build bridges, dig oil wells, exploit forests and coal-fields, and raze the whole earth to the ground; he would—he would turn the world upside down and stand on it, gesticulating and holding forth with authority. He would—But as I listened to him I was certain that, whatever he did, he would miss the essential.

The dismal afternoon was nearing to its close, and still the mild waves ran past us, and the
Rhinoceros
held towards one point
in England like the needle of a compass to the Pole. Already we could see the faint flickering lights of the English coast-line. And still the
Rhinoceros
heaved.

Towards six, when the coast seemed at arm’s length but the boat still moved unabated, and the steward was strapping up my hold-alls in the cabin, I went up on deck. In the marble saloon at the ‘blunt end’ of the ship sat the passport and quarantine officials holding judgment, like inquisitors, on the ‘aliens’. The General with the mad eyes, Captain and Mme Negodyaev looked like helpless buzzing flies fallen a prey to the tentacles of a spider. We—the Commodore among us—had donned uniforms, and otherwise, as British subjects, took up privileged positions at the front of the saloon, at the back of which the ‘aliens’ were rounded up and herded, like hostages in a siege, and pressed to answer hypothetical questions, in shame and iniquity, before they too could be admitted to the promised land.

We had come up. England hove in sight quite plainly now as a green island with houses and people and parks. We were outside the harbour, just going in; the ship listed heavily now on this side, now on that, clumsily turning round, finding her way into the harbour and hooting hoarsely and hideously; while from the funnels columns of black smoke broke into the drizzling sky. The man at the wheel told the man down below to back engines; then the ship stopped; then the engines resumed. And, true to prophecy, we were ‘messing about’ just outside the harbour. All the ship’s officers were at their posts; only the surgeon, his job over, stood idle at the hatch, puffing at a cigarette. A very long time yet she lolled there, hooting and turning about, it seemed aimlessly, while we stood at the rail balancing on our heels, as at last, pitching heavily, she entered the harbour. We went, past the breakwaters, up the long, wide enclosure of Southampton Water, between two rows of green lawn, when the engines, as if tired, gave way and stopped, the big boat drifting on noiselessly of her own momentum, till she cast anchor—lying- to in midstream.

Arrived. The
Rhinoceros
had become very still, her task done, her strength spent, listless and drooping. Sylvia stood at my side
by the rail and cooed a lot of divorcing Gustave and marrying me on the strength of it. But I had long since got used to it and did not listen, but looked out on the handsome trimmed lawns of the banks. She put a sweet in her mouth and looked on, munching. ‘Dinner on board before landing,’ she said.

‘Oh, we shan’t land till the morning.’

‘Oh! Really? Oh! Oh!—Darling,’ she said; ‘I love you. Oh, I love you! I love you! I love you!’

‘And I too.’

A passport official came up to me. ‘Will you kindly interpret for this gentleman; he can’t speak a word of English?’