William Gerhardie - The Polyglots

‘Do you recognize the portrait?’

‘Oh! how beauty! Oh! what a lovely!’ she exclaimed.

‘And your own photo?’ I asked. ‘Is that beautiful too?’

Natàsha shrugged her shoulders.

‘Mr. Georges!’ she said whimsically. ‘Mr. Georges!’

‘Yes?’

‘Play with me; oh, play with me.’

‘I am busy.’

‘Oh, Uncle Georgie,’ she said, pulling me by the hand, ‘I love you. I love you, Uncle Georgie. Because you are so funny!’

Natàsha wrote little stories in Russian about a little boy Vanya who went to school and another little boy Petya who also went to school, but nothing beyond going to school seemed to happen to them, and the stories were all inconclusive. She also wrote a sad little poem about a child looking at the stars and thinking of God; and another of her mother (the woman who looked as though someone had inadvertently stepped on her face) whose great beauty she extolled and compared with a swan’s. Natàsha had two baby goats given her for her birthday by a neighbouring farmer — one of which she called ‘Bobby’ and the other ‘Beauty’.

Now and then Captain Negodyaev suffered from an acute attack of persecution mania, when, often in the middle of the night, he would bid his wife and child get up and dress in readiness for flight at a moment’s notice. And they would sit there, all dressed up, in their furs and overcoats and hats and muffs and warm goloshes, in the heated drawing-room, Mme Negodyaev looking as if somebody had hit her suddenly between the ears with an umbrella, and she could not quite reconcile the fact with what had taken place immediately before. But Natàsha seemed to take it all for granted. With her parasol in her gloved hands, she would sit there, grave and quiet, one hour, two — until at last he would declare the danger over and send them back to bed.

These incidents, which were recurrent, would always cause my aunt une crise de nerfs .

AND STILL MORE POLYGLOTS

THE PREPARATIONS FOR OUR WEDDING WERE COMPLETE, and cards had been sent out, when one November morning I was wakened ruthlessly by Vladislav at six o’clock (for usually they waken me with deference by first enquiring: ‘Did you go to bed early last night?’) and told by him, ‘Your uncle has arrived and is waiting for you.’

‘Which uncle? Where? What? Why?’

In the adjoining dining-room, Uncle Lucy was pacing the floor up and down excitedly.

I began to dress hurriedly as Vladislav withdrew, but as luck would have it I couldn’t find a vest; while there were drawers innumerable in the drawer. From the dining-room came Uncle Lucy’s low voice to Vladislav:

‘Quick. Quick. Quick. No time to waste.’

I pulled open all the drawers. The third drawer — all drawers, no vest. Why is it that when you look for a pair of drawers you always find another couple of vests instead? and when you look for a vest you can find only drawers? I do not know why it is so: I only know that it is so. It is a minor mystery of which the solution apparently (as of the major mystery of the hereafter) is not yet. But it damps my spirit, and I acquire a foreboding — which is ascribed sometimes to Thomas Hardy — of a relentless, wicked, mocking and malicious Providence.

Uncle Lucy’s voice came through the closed door: ‘Quick. Quick. Quick,’ and I could fancy him pacing to and fro like a pendulum, with his hands behind his back.

‘Your uncle, your uncle is waiting for you,’ Vladislav came in again.

‘Send at once for Mlle Berthe.’

‘Yes, sir,’ he said, and retired.

The reader may think I am unreasonable. But I can assure him (this book is not intended for women) that only last night the chest of drawers was full of vests — and not a pair of drawers in the neighbourhood.

‘Berthe!’ I exclaimed with the utmost demonstrativeness as she came in. ‘How ridiculous! A drawer full of drawers — and not a vest.’ The extent of my anger can be gauged when I say I felt that if I murdered Berthe the jury would acquit me and that I’d murder the jury if they did not. She looked at me blankly.

‘Don’t stand there like that, looking like Buddha.’ This may have been a little rough. But I felt it.

She looked at me askance, and could not decide whether to be offended or not. The fact of the matter was she did not know what Buddha looked like. And I had forgotten.

‘I may not be as handsome as some women,’ she retorted, evidently offended, ‘but, then, neither are you a beauty.’

Strange. What am I to make of it? Even while Berthe was in the room I glanced at the looking-glass: the effect was quite pleasing.

‘Getting me up at this time of the morning,’ she said. There was a slight note of peevishness in her voice which annoyed me.

‘My uncle’s waiting for me,’ I said.

‘And I’ll tell your uncle!’

‘Where’s my vest?’ I cried out in despair.

But Berthe is not a Latin for nothing. Before I could get a word in, she tore away — trr-trr-trr — unloosing torrents of recrimination, the brunt of which was: ‘What have I to do with your caleçons ?’

‘Vests!’ I cried madly, ‘not caleçons . Vests! vests ! I’ve a cupboardful of caleçons .’

‘You have your man Pickup! You’ve Vladislav! While I’m only a woman!’ she cried.

Perfectly so. I have Pickup. Vladislav is Captain Negodyaev’s servant, but partly under my orders. Yet by some mysterious unwritten law Berthe rules over the laundry of the household. Besides, I do not like finding fault with my man, who is a soldier more than a servant. How like a woman to ignore the very circumstance by which she profits. ‘Trr-trr-trr-trr—’ She tore away, on and on and on, in floods of angry verbosity against which my French, I realized, was helpless. My French is rather like my piano playing — grandiose in conception but just a little blurred in execution. I slide over technicalities of grammar, I mix up cases and tenses, but on top of it all I put on a sort of dare-devil Parisian twist and make up for occasional inaccuracies by a really blinding speed. I make French people sit up. But my tactics proved of small avail in my dialectic duel with Berthe. When I was a child, a governess, Mlle Jardelle, would teach us French by insisting on our saying ‘ Passez-moi le sel, s’il vous plaît ’ at table, or doing without it. I like to think that at that time my French was fluent; but I doubt it. In a crisis it deserts me, and I can only cry ‘ Enfin! enfin! ’ And hard up for an effective repartee, I utter: ‘ Sacrebleu !’

‘ Enfin !’ she cried. ‘I’m alone for the whole house. None of you do anything. Your servants do nothing.’

‘I favour,’ I said, ‘a mild state of Bolshevism in the household.’

‘Nobody does anything. Your aunt is a malade imaginaire; whines all day long. Cet idiot de capitaine russe only dresses and undresses, and gets his family into a funk. You are only thinking of your caleçons— ’

‘Oh, damn les caleçons .’

‘Only me for the whole house,’ she wailed, and off she tore — trr-trr-trr — on and on and on and on.

‘I see now I ought to have done you in when I felt like it,’ I said quietly.

‘ À quoi bon? You would be guillotined.’

‘The jury would acquit me.’

‘I’d like to see it!’ she said, with savage glee.

‘Look here, Berthe,’ I said, making an effort to be serious and reasonable, ‘I am an intellectual, an idealist. I am pained by conduct which falls short of my ideal.’

‘Yes, you have such ideas, Georges.’