William Gerhardie - The Polyglots

WHEN, TWO WEEKS LATER, BEASTLY WAS LEAVING for Omsk, Aunt Teresa charged him with a mission to her brother Lucy, whom he was to see en route at Krasnoyarsk. ‘Tell him, tell him,’ she enjoined, ‘of the awful, terrible conditions I have to suffer in my sad exile, and of my poor, miserable state of health!’

‘I’ll talk to him, never you fear. I’ll tell ’im what I think of ’im,’ said Beastly, guffawing and nodding heavily as if he thought that Uncle Lucy was a poor fish — a silly business man who didn’t know his own silly business.

Meanwhile, the situation as regards the sheepskin coats was vague and obscure. Obscure and uncertain. Uncertain and hypothetical, to a quite extraordinary degree. The fact was that I could find no trace of any sheepskin coats in the neighbourhood. No one seemed to have heard of such an order. But I liked Harbin and I was in no hurry to return to Vladivostok, and so refrained from telegraphing for instructions and tarried as long as ever possible. For (I make no secret of it) it was nice enough to be with Sylvia, to breathe the same air, eat the same food, lead the same life. Meanwhile, the sheepskin coats, as I said, could not be traced.

After Anatole’s death Aunt Teresa more madly than ever buried herself in medicine bottles, old photos, hot-water bottles, thermometers, books, buvards , writing-pads, cushions, cosmetics. At the time of Beastly’s illness, Uncle Lucy’s remittance still not having arrived, Aunt Teresa had asked me to speak to Uncle Lucy on the ‘direct wire’, for which privilege, however, special leave had to be obtained from the Commander-in-Chief, General Pshemòvich-Pshevìtski, while the telegraph operator who transmitted the message for me threw out hints that he was fond of smoking English cigarettes. And now again, there being no report from Beastly relative to his démarches at Krasnoyarsk, Aunt Teresa got very fidgety indeed.

‘ Courage, mon amie !’ said Uncle Emmanuel.

‘But, Emmanuel, it’s five months overdue. I can’t be borrowing all the time from Mme Vanderphant. She’s beginning to look quite suspicious.’

‘All things come to him who waits. Patience,’ he said. ‘Patience.’

‘ “Patience, patience, and once again patience,” said General Kuropatkin,’ said I, ‘as he lost the Russo-Japanese War.’

‘ Courage! Courage! ’ said Uncle Emmanuel, lighting a cigar.

All these years he had been thriving on the dividends of Aunt Teresa, was always cheerful, and said, ‘ Courage, mon amie ! Life is worth living!’ But one afternoon as we went out together — Uncle Emmanuel wanted a shirt and a new pair of boots — he looked sad, morose and wretchedly unhappy. His cry ‘My son! My son!’ uttered on that fatal day at Aunt Teresa’s bedside reverberated in my brain at the sight of him, dejected and unnerved. I thought that he was thinking of his son, when he confessed to me that Uncle Lucy had written him a dreadful letter — which practically held him up to ransom, so crudely worded was the document. He showed me the missive. It was incredible. Uncle Lucy, renowned for his unselfishness, Uncle Lucy who liked to play the grand seigneur towards his sisters and their families, Uncle Lucy the insanely generous, had suddenly turned mean and carping, petty and dishonest! Indeed, suddenly he seemed to have turned the corner in his ethics. So far it was he and he alone to whom they looked for dividends. His present missive was as crude a way as if he said, ‘Your purse or your life!’ It was a blunt enough letter demanding that Emmanuel should send him £100 sterling forthwith, and threatening in default of it to send I s . (one shilling) worth of roubles in settlement of all Aunt Teresa’s claims against him. He signed himself: ‘ Ton frère qui t’aime, Lucy .’

It was incredible. I thought: this document will scare her off her perch and send her cackling like a hen. Or she will have a stroke. And indeed my uncle said that he could never show this awful letter to his wife, for fear of a fatal crise de nerfs . And all through his shopping Uncle Emmanuel was very dejected and very morose. He first bought himself the boots and put them straight on, and in the new boots set out in search of the shirt. He was as tiresome and exacting about the shirt as he had been quick and conciliatory about the boots, and the lady who served us became visibly exasperated and asked us how many shirts at least we wanted (implying an expectation in proportion to the trouble we were causing her). ‘ Une seule ,’ said my uncle. He arrived home utterly exhausted in his stiff new boots and would have done better, in my view, if instead of first buying the boots and going out in them in search of the shirt, he had first purchased the shirt and gone out in it in search of the boots. He was, as I said, utterly exhausted and did nothing more that day.

But next morning he drafted an answer, pointing out that the action which his brother-in-law had seen fit to threaten him with was not only ‘ peu fraternelle ’, but, nay, also peculiarly ‘ criminelle ’, and he asked my Uncle Lucy to terminate the painful correspondence. Uncle Emmanuel requested me to take this message to the General Post Office and to transmit it with all priority by ‘direct wire’ to Uncle Lucy at Krasnoyarsk, for which special favour I had to obtain once more the permission of the Russian General in command. Armed with a note from the Commander-in-Chief, General Pshemòvich-Pshevìtski, I proceeded to the General Post Office where a telegraph operator, reading the Commanding General’s note, transmitted Uncle Emmanuel’s message in my presence with a superlative degree of priority, known as ‘Clear the Line’. Uncle Lucy having now arrived at the other end, six thousand versts away, the telegraph operator received Uncle Lucy’s answer, which, ignoring all Uncle Emmanuel’s elaborate arguments, ran as follows:

‘ Pas criminelle, mais tout en ordre .’

And once again Uncle Lucy signed himself: ‘ Ton frère qui t’aime .’

I folded the message and put it away in my pocket, while the telegraph operator asked if I could let him have a box of English cigarettes.

THEN, ONE DAY, CAME UNCLE LUCY’S LETTER, THIS time addressed to Aunt Teresa. The Bolsheviks had occupied Krasnoyarsk and seized his works and all his property. He wanted the £100. He had all his life been paying them more than he had any business to do, and had incurred thereby the grave displeasure of his family which — so they said — he had neglected for the sake of his beautiful three sisters. ‘Why don’t you,’ he wrote, ‘sell your useless jewels and cough up the money?’ Anyhow, the £100 not having come his way, he enclosed I s . (one shilling), the silver bob, at the present favourable exchange, being over and above Aunt Teresa’s capital in roubles in the Diabologh concern which hereby he considered liquidated for all time.

What a shock to Aunt Teresa! After her son’s death, it was probably the greatest shock of Aunt Teresa’s life. She suffered a complete relapse. She lay prostrate and speechless, and Berthe busied herself about her slender form with hot and cold compresses, with eau-de-Cologne and pyramidon.

‘How is she?’

‘Ah!’ said Berthe with a sarcastic mien. ‘There is nothing ever the matter with your aunt. She is a malade imaginaire !’

But even as she spoke Berthe would rush off back to Aunt Teresa and be very kind to her. She would enjoy a malicious laugh at the expense of my poor aunt, about whose ‘miserable health’ she had no illusions and indeed no tears to waste, and sneer behind her back; yet even as she sneered she would suddenly get interested in her again, with a warmth, a pity, an attachment which was as genuine as her cynicism was sincere. She would delight in sharing anyone’s illiberality upon the subject of my aunt; yet all the time she would be at the beck and call of her new friend who had contrived to make a servant of her. From Vladivostok I had written Aunt Teresa a sentimental letter full of ach ’s and och ’s, ‘poors’ and ‘alases’, a letter in which the sentiment, intended as it was for a notorious sentimentalist, was laid on with a trowel. I was therefore all the more astonished when Berthe now imparted to me that my aunt had been repelled by the odious sentimentality of my letter and looked upon me as a kind-hearted but withal a sentimental fool. ‘A nice boy, George, but too much in the skies, too sentimental, a little mawkish, too. A dreamer of dreams!’ she had said.