William Gerhardie - The Polyglots

‘But, really, ma tante— ’

‘It’s you — I won’t sleep all night.’

‘But listen, ma tante— ’

‘Oh, why get excited! Why get excited!’ Uncle Emmanuel hastened between us. ‘Peace! Peace in the household.’

For a while she sat silent in her big soft chair, thoughtful, bent over her fancy needlework. As her tisane was brought in to her by Berthe, she looked at me tragically with her large, sad, St. Bernard eyes, and her lip quivered. ‘How I worry, George! Pity me. Pity me, George! George, understand, can’t you, how dreadfully I worry!’

‘That, believe me, is unnecessary. There’s nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so. Nearly all unhappiness in the world is caused by futile recriminations, anticipations, fears, forebodings, remembrances — that is, by the failure to control imagination.’

She sighed; then bent forward and sipped her tisane .

‘What good is it your deliberately spoiling so many days and weeks of your short life by imagining the worst? And if the best occurs instead, you will have cheated yourself out of so many æons of your life, and the knowledge that this dim unhappiness of yours was but a phantom of your ill-controlled imagination will not retrieve a minute of your wasted life.’

She said nothing, only sipped her tisane .

‘Then you will spend the rest of your time being miserable in retrospect for having wasted your days so unprofitably.’

‘They will seem sweet then by the very contrast,’ she said, with a sigh. And suddenly she expressed one of those strangely feminine views which always reassured me that Aunt Teresa was, in some ways, not as selfish as I thought, but, in the end, as egotistical as mortal man could be. ‘No,’ she said, ‘if the best happens, and he has come out of it alive, unscathed, I will, by my utmost anxiety now, have paid, and gladly paid, the heaviest dues that may be exacted. I will have squared fate, and I shall be proud and happy to remember that I have not been ungenerous and have secured his safety by my suffering. Therefore I must be worrying now, it is dangerous to be calm and happy. I must pay the dues in advance. I feel I must — I ought to be anxious — and I have been — I don’t know why — all this last month.’

She rose wearily from her arm-chair and stooped up to bed on the gallant arm of her husband. Aunt Teresa, I learnt, had an attack of nerves after that, ‘une crise ’, as Berthe called it, and could not sleep all night.

I looked at Sylvia. ‘When I saw you in the street to-day I knew at once it was you.’

‘Oh — with my shoes unlaced,’ she laughed. ‘I ran out just to buy some sweets.’

And later, when Sylvia and I played dominoes, I was so fascinated by her presence that I didn’t care a rap about the dominoes, and Sylvia corrected practically my every move, as much as if playing by herself, while I only gazed at her in rapture. In another week her holidays would be over and she would return to Kobe to a boarding-school run by Irish nuns — the ‘Convent of the Sacred Heart’.

‘You are a wonderful, unique, great writer, George,’ she said, and then added, in her serious way, with a perfect absence of guile: ‘I must read one of your books some day.’

Then she too went to bed.

‘Ah! the night life of Brussels! Ah!..’ said Uncle Emmanuel over the drinks. ‘It wants some beating!’

A moment later he came up to me. ‘ Mon ami ,’ said my uncle, taking hold of me with both hands by the waist and looking up at me frankly, ‘you must see Japan — life — it’s amusing! The night aspect especially.’

UNCLE EMMANUEL HAD WHISPERED THINGS INTO my ear, and I had nodded, and now we were on our way. Our two rickshaw coolies ran smartly side by side in the abated heat of the evening. The lighted lanterns at the shaft and the side bobbed gaily through the gathering dusk. We went past endless bazaars, through endless lanes lined with shops. Uncle Emmanuel lit a cigar. He wore a brown bowler hat, yellow gloves that had been washed so often that they looked perfectly white, and with his stiff waxed moustache and his gilt-knobbed cane he looked quite a dog as he sat there, contented at last, in the feather-spring vehicle. The interminable progress through the city. Tokyo indeed was like an endless succession of villages. Night fell. The two men ran as smartly as ever. I, with my thoughts full of Sylvia, listened to those queer plaintive chants — A-a-a — y-a-a — yaw — y-o-o — that emanated from every nook and lane; shrinking aback at the touch, disinclined.

At last we drove up before a queer-looking wooden structure on long legs, and at once the hostess and attendants came down the crude wooden staircase to meet us. Our boots were removed at the foot of the stairs, and we were ushered upstairs into a low-ceilinged drawing-room, where I could not even stand up without bumping my head (though Uncle Emmanuel could do so with ease), and I had a feeling as if I had left the company of human beings and had joined that of birds or some undefined species of animals. While we were thus seated on the matted floor, fruit was served round; then a side-door opened, and a small procession of blanch-faced, short-legged women filed before us.

I was repelled by their flat blank Asiatic faces, and by the thick paint thereon. But Uncle Emmanuel smiled as he looked at them.

‘ Elles sont gentilles, eh ?’ he turned to me.

‘M …’ I demurred.

‘Ah!’ he retorted, provoked by my critical attitude, ‘ Ce n’est pas Paris, enfin !’

He said that, say what I might, they were ‘ mignonnes ’. I maintained that their legs were much too short for my liking — a defect that, to me, stripped them of all feminine attraction. ‘ Que voulez-vous ?’ he said philosophically. And we mildly fell out. The women stood before us, awaiting our choice. From outside came the din of the streets, and the plaintive whining chant of Mongol music, and the listlessness of the city stealing on us at the dead of night. I sat listless, too, on the matted floor in the low-ceilinged room, and I felt as if I had been locked up in the upper drawer of a cupboard — locked up and abandoned, in an age and place that were not mine. It was too inhumanly strange, and I longed for what I had left. Then I felt I wanted to cry, cry for what they had done to my soul.…

‘Rum-looking place,’ I said. ‘Rum-looking girls.’

‘ Que voulez-vous ?’ he said. ‘ C’est la vie !’

At this point the hostess came up to us with a book and, pointing at it, exhorted us to register. ‘Police,’ she said, ‘police.’

‘Any name will do,’ said Uncle Emmanuel lightly. But I refused emphatically, and after trying vainly to persuade me to put down my name, the hostess sent for an interpreter — a youth who presently appeared but whose command of our tongue did not appreciably extend over her own. He pointed at the register and said: ‘Ha! Police — zzz — police. Ha! — zzz—’

‘Ha!’ said the hostess.

But I ‘wouldn’t have any’.

They looked at each other, and decided I was mad. But I seized the opportunity as an excuse for going, pretending I had been provoked, and, accompanied downstairs by their propitiatory smiles and bows, and restored once more into my boots, I got into the rickshaw and drove off, and waited for my uncle a few doors away, where I was immediately surrounded by a swarm of street urchins begging alms. The rickshaw coolie greeted me with a happy grin as if to say ‘Ee! the young gentleman has been amusing himself!’

‘Very good?’ he asked, turning round in the shafts and grinning at me broadly.