William Gerhardie - The Polyglots

I shook my head. ‘No good. Girls very bad. Why so bad?’

‘This bad Yoshiwara,’ said the rickshaw man comprehendingly. ‘No good. Good Yoshiwara very good.’

‘Really good?’

‘Ha! Very good.’

‘Why didn’t you take us to good Yoshiwara?’

‘Good Yoshiwara far, far, very far — three hours far.’

At last Uncle Emmanuel was ushered down the steps. He got into his rickshaw, and we drove off. Uncle Emmanuel, as we drove home, held forth to me upon the sanctity of the family, the family hearth, ‘ le ’ome’, as he put it in English, and on the duty of keeping clean at home and of not mixing the two lives.

I returned to the hotel in the early hours. I had a bath in tepid water and went to bed under the white mosquito curtain. I could not sleep; all night I heard the whistling and screeching of the trains passing and halting near by. I lay sleepless, images now of Sylvia, now of the rickshaw man saying: ‘Good Yoshiwara far, far, very far — three hours far’ floating in and out of my brain, with the trains screeching and whizzing through in the night. In the end, sleep had taken its own. I dreamt that I was playing dominoes with Sylvia while a U.S. citizen was fighting with a Jap over the sleeper, and when the train stopped we had arrived in Oxford, which was being ‘opened’ by my mother and Lord Haig. Here there was much noise, like at the Palm Week bazaars to which we went as children in Russia. And suddenly I was confronted by an enormous frog. I am a trainer in a zoo. I am frightened, but they ask me: ‘Can’t you manage a frog better than that?’

‘What must I do?’ I ask.

‘Shoot at it out of this.’

And I am handed a toy gun shooting cranberries.

If we are not a bit surprised at the inconsistencies, the incongruities, the rank ludicrousness of our dreams, perhaps we shall not be any more surprised if we discover that our life beyond the grave has similar surprises in store for us. It will all fall into place, and will not seem strange but inevitable, as our wakeful life of broken images, for some strange reason, even as the strangest of dreams, seems not the least strange but inevitable.

‘Perhaps,’ I said, on wakening with these pictures fresh but quickly fading from my memory, ‘our instruments of measure are illusions, like the rest …’

I had a lavish breakfast, the pleasure of which was enhanced by the thought that the War Office was paying for it.

IT WAS EVENING. I PLAYED THAT VOLUPTUOUS BIT from the Liebestod in Tristan , and Sylvia sat by and listened, absorbed. From the open window the moon swam out, exactly as in a romance, causing me to remember that I was not Hamlet but Romeo.

I played louder and louder till suddenly the door opened and Berthe said:

‘Your aunt asks you to stop playing, as she has a migràine .’

‘Come out on the balcony,’ Sylvia said.

‘Ha, ha! High-heeled shoes at last! How they show off the calves!’

She laughed — a lovely dingling laughter.

‘It’s dishonest to show too much of your legs. It upsets men’s equilibrium. Either don’t go so far, or if you do, then go the whole hog.’

‘Alexander’ (she called me by my third name because George, she thought, was too common and Hamlet a little ridiculous)—‘Alexander, read me something.’

‘What?’

‘Anything. This.’

‘Whose book is this?’

‘ Maman’s .’

I opened and read: ‘ “… Besides, Dorian, don’t deceive yourself. Life is not governed by will or intention. Life is a question of nerves, and fibres, and slowly built-up cells in which thought hides itself and passion has its dream. You may fancy yourself safe, and think yourself strong. But a chance tone of colour in a room or a morning sky, a particular perfume that you had once loved and that brings subtle memories with it, a line from a forgotten poem that you had come across again, a cadence from a piece of music that you had ceased to play — I tell you, Dorian, that it is on things like these that our lives depend.” ’

Sylvia had shut her eyes.

‘Lovely,’ she murmured.

Night, the patron of lovers and thieves, enwrapped us, casting upon us a thin veil of white mist. But the light was on in the corridor, and I had the feeling that every moment the door might fling open and my aunt would come in. This disconcerted me somewhat. A wicked smell, as of burning fishbones, rose from behind the backyard wall which the balcony overlooked.

‘Tomorrow I’m going back to school,’ she said, ‘and — and we’ve never been out by ourselves. What cold hands you have, Alexander.’

‘What is it like at your school?’

‘Quite nice,’ she said. ‘We play hockey.’

A phenomenon of transformation! A Belgian girl, after four years in an Irish Catholic convent in Japan, came out an Irish colleen; there was even a trace of the delicious brogue in her accents. But withal there was a Latin warmth of grace in Sylvia which underlined her naturally acquired anglicism. There was a British freedom in her, but she would remember the restraints of a Latin upbringing, what was at Dixmude, and the ceremonious notions of her parents as to conduct that becomes a Belgian young girl. And there was something ‘taking’ in such discipline, as in a beautiful young horse submitting to the harness, or the discomfiture of ornament upon a lovely female form.

‘ “Play me something. Play me a nocturne, Dorian, and, as you play, tell me, in a low voice, how you kept your youth …” ’

While I read aloud, Sylvia ‘prepared’ an expression of wonderment on her face, to show that she was sensitive to what I read. But she began to fret as I read on, absorbed, and then nestled to me closely. Her nostrils widened as she breathed in the fresh air.

‘ “The tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is young …” ’ And although neither of us had anything to do with the tragedy of old age, here we kissed. A light breeze that moment wafted the smell of the burning fishbones upon us.

‘Isn’t it lovely?’ she purled.

I agreed.

Besides, it was.

‘Lovie — dovie — cats’-eyes,’ she said.

‘ “Why have you stopped playing, Dorian? Go back and give me the nocturne again. Look at that great honey-coloured moon that hangs in the dusky air. She is waiting for you to charm her, and if you play she will come closer to the earth …” ’

We kissed.

And then we kissed again, this time independently of Dorian.

She had soft warm lips, and I held my breath back — at some considerable inconvenience to myself. Then I released her, and began breathing as if I had just climbed up a very steep hill.

‘Go on, darling.’

‘What lovely hair you have!’

‘Wants washing,’ she answered.

I stretched out my legs, my hands in my trouser pockets, and stared at the moon — and suddenly shot out: ‘Art thou not Lucifer?’ (causing Sylvia a little shock):

… He to whom the droves

Of stars that gild the morn in charge were given?

The noblest of the lightning-wingèd loves ,

The fairest and the first-born smile of Heaven?

Look in what pomp the mistress planet moves ,

Rev’rently circled by the lesser seven;

Such, and so rich, the flames that from thine eyes

Oppress’d the common people of the skies .

She stretched herself to my mouth the moment I finished, having, as it were, watched all this time till it was vacant. I kissed her, with considerable passion. ‘What are all your names?’ I asked.

‘Sylvia Ninon Thérèse Anastathia Vanderflint.’