William Gerhardie - The Polyglots

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?

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 poured 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.