William Gerhardie - The Polyglots

The aide-de-camp offspring stood in the doorway.

‘Well? Have you telephoned at last?’

‘The mechanic’s drunk, your Excellency.’

‘Send at once for the other mechanic!’ snapped the General ferociously.

‘Very well, your Excellency!’ The aide-de-camp bolted.

‘M’yes,’ said the General, once more resuming the subject and turning to Dr. Murgatroyd in particular. ‘Tell the Mr. Churchill, and tell the Mr. Lloyd George, and tell the President Wilson, and tell the whole world that the General Pshemòvich-Pshevìtski is firm, as firm as a rock, and he will fight the Jewish Bolsheviks to the last man,’ he ended — pressing the button with violence.

The aide-de-camp stood on the threshold.

‘Well, what about the telephone?’ the General asked grimly.

‘The other mechanic is on leave, your Excellency.’

‘In that case,’ said the General, pulling out his watch and looking at Aunt Teresa, ‘dispatch a car for Captain Negodyaev, do you hear? A car immediately !’

‘Quite so, your Excellency!’

The aide-de-camp dashed out of the room.

‘M’yes,’ said the General. ‘M’yes — of course …’

Some ten minutes later Captain Negodyaev appeared in the doorway.

‘Aha!’ said the General grandly and graciously. ‘I understand you have a wife and daughter in Novorossiisk.’

‘That’s perfectly correct, your Excellency. I have, your Excellency, two daughters,’ Captain Negodyaev was explaining, turning pale as a sheet as he stood to attention:

‘Màsha and Natàsha, your Excellency.’

‘Quite, quite, quite,’ the General chimed in impatiently.

‘Màsha, your Excellency, is married, and lives with her husband, Ippolit Sergèiech Blagovèschenski, away in Novorossiisk, your Excellency. And Natàsha, your Excellency, is only seven, your Excellency.’

‘Quite, quite, quite,’ said the General impatiently, and turning fiercely to his aide-de-camp son:

‘A telegram to Novorossiisk,’ he snapped, ‘to be dispatched immediately !’

The aide-de-camp tore off the ground.

The General pressed the button.

The aide-de-camp, like a jack-in-the-box, bobbed in again and stood to attention, trembling like a jerboa.

‘Priority. Clear the line ,’ the General snapped savagely.

‘Quite so, your Excellency!’ The aide-de-camp, like a jack-in-the-box, bobbed out again.

It was as if the General had tarried long enough, and now having bestirred himself would show them that he meant business. He looked at Aunt Teresa to see if all this was pleasing her. She looked tender and vague.

As Aunt Teresa rose, assured by the General that no stone would be left unturned to comply with her wishes, she turned to Dr. Murgatroyd and thanked him for his most interesting and brilliant discourse. ‘Perhaps you would pay us a visit,’ she said over her shoulder.

Escorted by the General’s retinue we stepped into the carriage and drove home.

A TELEGRAM AWAITED ME AS WE ARRIVED. WITH nervous hands I tore it open. It ran: ‘Your scheme approved. Appointed liaison officer and military censor. Instructions follow.’

‘And the letter! Where’s the letter?’ Aunt Teresa asked the moment she saw Beastly.

But the letter was for me. Uncle Lucy wrote to ask me if I thought it would be feasible for them to go and live in England. It was impossible for them to stay in Krasnoyarsk, as well-nigh everything had been taken from them, and he asked me, if I so thought fit, to arrange for an early passage for them from Shanghai to England.

I was annoyed. In my irritable mood, I thought: others had perished in the grand commotion of the great world war and revolution. Why not my uncle and family too? This morbid instinct of self-preservation! Why doesn’t he remain and perish? Apparently he thought that going to England was an easy matter. But was it? What annoyed me was the optimism with which some people deem it possible to get out of trouble. I suspected him, with all his surface pessimism, of being a facile optimist of a most distressing kind. When I was joining up to fight in the world war, he wrote to me as follows:

I advise you to pay a visit to the War Office and see Lord Kitchener personally, and tell him that your constitution is not exactly suitable for the rigour and discomfort of the trenches, but that you are willing to ‘do your bit’ and do your duty by your king and country and are good at foreign languages and could thus be best employed in a sedentary capacity at the War Office itself, to the benefit of all concerned.

I thought of the nuisance of having them in our crowded flat, and advised against it.

At dinner Aunt Teresa questioned Beastly as to Uncle Lucy.

‘Well, I’ve seen him,’ he said.

‘You’ve seen my brother, Lucy?’ she asked excitedly.

‘I’ve seen him.’

‘Well?’

‘He’s a queer fish,’ he said, ‘and no mistake, your brother Lucy!’

Major Beastly had had a heart-to-heart talk with Aunt Molly, from which indeed it seemed that Uncle Lucy was a ‘queer fish’. His father — so Aunt Molly said — had charged him on his death-bed to look after the remaining family. That death-bed scene seemed to have so impressed itself on Uncle Lucy’s mind that ever since — according to Aunt Molly — he had neglected his own family. All the money he had made he would be sending to his sisters, and when his children were born and Aunt Molly wanted nurses, Uncle Lucy said he didn’t believe in nurses. And when the children grew up and she wanted money for their schooling, Uncle Lucy, in withholding the necessary funds, declared that, with Tolstoy, he didn’t believe in schooling. And when the time arrived for deciding on their future callings and professions, Uncle Lucy said he didn’t believe in callings and professions. Till one day, with the eighth or ninth offspring, Aunt Molly kicked over the fence and managed the estate herself as best she could. Meanwhile, their number had been swelling, and when after having the family group taken at the photographer’s they all marched home through the town garden, Uncle Lucy looked as though he were a guide conducting a crowd of sightseeing tourists through the city grounds, and the family, except the very young ones, felt constrained. But Uncle Lucy’s interest in them was not especially marked, and he would ask the same young daughter as each day he walked a portion of the way to school with her what class she was in.

‘But what about our money?’ interrupted Aunt Teresa.

‘Oh yes. He said that, with Tolstoy, he didn’t believe in money.’

‘That’s nice!’

‘I tried to tackle him. But he said that in his house the subject was taboo.’

Next morning, being the fourth day since he last performed the operation, Major Beastly made a stink . Uncle Emmanuel at once lit a cigar, but said nothing. In the dining-room Vladislav shook his head. ‘Enough to make you carry out the saints. In France,’ he added, ‘such a thing would not be allowed in a decent home.’

Berthe did not mind Beastly’s stinks now. ‘He has a tender skin— il a la peau sensible ,’ she would say, ‘which can’t stand the touch of the blade.’ She confessed to me that she even rather liked his nostrils: there was something very frank, almost touching— n’est-ce pas ? — about their vertical position, something that oddly reminded you of a dog who, at the command ‘Beg!’, displays himself before you in an unfamiliar pose.

Nevertheless, I thought the time had come to remonstrate with Beastly.

‘I have a perfect right to shave as I like,’ he rejoined.

‘A man’s rights are limited,’ I observed. ‘He has no right to make a stink , for instance, unless he be in a desert, alone with God.’