William Gerhardie - The Polyglots

‘Speak up. Can’t hear you.’

‘George says,’ shouted the lout, ‘the Russkis have defeated the Polyakis.’

‘Shame!’ cried my uncle. ‘Shame!’ And I wondered what was a shame and why my uncle’s Russophile sympathies should have turned Pole. ‘Shame!’ said my uncle, ‘that you, an Englishman, can’t talk English better than that.’

The lout shrugged his shoulders. Seeing that he had never been out of Russia and never spoke English at home, it was a wonder he spoke it as well as he did. Towards the end of lunch Vladislav brought my coffee machine. In forty-five minutes the coffee machine yielded enough for one small cup. Nevertheless, being polite, I asked Uncle Lucy if he wanted coffee, and devoutly hoped that he did not. But, as usual, he did not hear what I said. He had not as yet got used to my voice.

‘Do you want coffee?’ I asked.

‘What?’

‘Do you want coffee?’ I cried.

‘What?’

‘Do you want coffee?’ I yelled across the table, so that my own voice reverberated in my ears.

‘Speak up. Can’t hear you,’ he said.

‘George asks,’ shouted Aunt Molly, to whose voice Uncle Lucy happened to be peculiarly susceptible, ‘if you want coffee.’

‘Coffee?… Yes.’

‘Curse you!’ I thought.

Luncheon over, Aunt Molly rose, followed by her offspring, like a hen by her innumerable chicks—‘Chuck-chuck-chuck-chuck-chuck …’ They ran in front, behind, and to both sides of her, as she moved into the drawing-room where she sat down on a soft chair, an ample, milk-and-blood-complexioned woman with small, kindly, brown eyes, her chicks surrounding her. She had been married a long time, but they kept arriving each year like a birthday present, or sometimes for Christmas or Easter. And when you saw her surrounded by cherubim with the same brown eyes (or blue like Uncle Lucy’s) you felt moved, you spoke and treaded softly, reverently, feeling you had stepped into a sanctum, the holihood of motherhood, as if into the presence of that picture of Raphael. Some were by other mothers, and some, no doubt, fruits of Uncle Lucy’s infidelities. Even so, you could never tell by her demeanour. To her all were alike. She had protested against Uncle Lucy’s love affairs by ignoring him. But she ignored him so gently and meekly that he never noticed it.

And here I overheard a fragment of a conversation between Uncle Emmanuel and Uncle Lucy which I judged had some small connection with the financial nature of their recent correspondence. Uncle Emmanuel, the officer — which suggests swords, courage, honour (of sorts) — said to Uncle Lucy, the landowner — skins, mills, commerce, bills of lading—‘I respect you more than I like you.’ And Uncle Lucy surprised me by his ready wit in replying, ‘And I like you more than I respect you.’ Uncle Lucy, though he held forth a good deal on his poverty, had a pocket-book bulging with bank-notes of a high denomination — foreign as well as Russian. He had small deposits abroad, that was all. The Bolsheviks had taken the bulk of his money.

Aunt Teresa came up to her brother, put her head on his shoulder and said, ‘Oh, Lucy, pity me! I am so faint, so ill, so weak, so miserable! I won’t live long!’

‘Speak up! Can’t hear you,’ he said.

‘Oh, my God,’ sighed my aunt, and looked up to heaven. ‘If father were alive and saw the plight we were in!’

He looked at her with compassion. ‘That’s all right,’ he said. ‘You will receive your dividends as before.’

There was a pause, our hearts beat as if in a hollow.

‘We are in debt,’ she said in a whisper.

‘That’s all right, you will get your arrears.’

There were tears in her eyes. ‘I must sit down,’ she said. Uncle Emmanuel lit a cigar.

‘What a pretty and well-mannered girl — Natàsha,’ Aunt Molly observed.

‘Yes, I am very fond of her,’ said Aunt Teresa, with a brightness and gaiety unusual in her, ‘and I rather like her mother. Her father is a queer fellow, quite harmless, though I must confess I’m not enamoured of his face, and I wonder what he does with himself all day. He’s very meek and mild and servile with everybody, but at home he bullies his wife. He suffers from a kind of mania of persecution, and every now and then he sounds the alarm, wakes up his wife and child in the middle of the night and bids them dress — ready for flight at a moment’s notice. And there they sit, all packed and ready, in their fur coats and muffs and hats and warm goloshes. Then he declares “All Clear!” and sends them back to bed. This happens about once a month or so.’

Aunt Molly sighed. ‘I’m sorry for him. He looks so pathetic hopping on his wooden leg.’

The children’s manner of acquaintance making, in its directness, reminded one of that of dogs. Seeing a photo of Uncle Lucy on Harry’s ‘dressing-table’, Natàsha said, ‘Oh, is that your daddy? He is very nice.’

‘Ah, but he’s not nice to mummy,’ Harry said.

‘I have a daddy too,’ Natàsha said.

‘No, you haven’t.’

‘I have ! That Rush-yan gentleman — he my daddy.’

‘I know, but we don’t like his face, and we wonder what he does.’

‘ Ooh —! Nasty, nasty, nasty!’

‘He’s not your daddy at all,’ said Harry. ‘He’s the stork that brought you.’

Open-mouthed, she asked, ‘What’s it means stork?’

‘Because he hops about on one leg.’

‘Sylvia, don’t wink!’ said Aunt Teresa. ‘The wedding’—she turned to Aunt Molly—‘will have to be put off till after Christmas.’

Sylvia, grave and timid in the presence of elderly ladies, was all ‘Ha, ha, ha!’ at the approach of her many boy cousins.

‘Do you mind putting off the wedding till after Christmas?’ I asked.

She stopped laughing. ‘Just as you like, darling. Ha, ha, ha!’ She at once became lively again.

Entering the dining-room on my return from the office, I saw a roomful of baby cousins at their evening meal. Napkined at the neck, they sat close at table on chairs that were too low for them, their chins touching the edge of the table, gaping around and swinging their legs. Behind stood their mothers and nurses, who urged them on with fine exhortations. Nora ate an egg beaten up in a cup; she held a teaspoon in her mouth upside down and sucked off the egg that clung to its convex surface, while her eyes wandered all over the ceiling. ‘Some more brad, mummy.’

‘Say please .’

‘Please.’

‘Isn’t she a mess!’ said Beastly loudly, and nodded heavily and guffawed several times in the doing.

Harry’s forget-me-not eyes matched the blue-lilac rim of the cup and saucer out of which he was drinking, holding it in his two little fists and looking out from above, his eyeballs rolling all over the room.

As she finished eating Nora crawled off the chair, and at once there was the sound of her hoof-clatter. Natàsha ran after her: ‘Ah! little Norkin!’ Nora’s legs were something in the way of a ship’s screw: they worked evenly enough, but somehow did not modulate their pace to the peculiarities of the surface, thus often, for sudden lack of resistance, performing in the air with unexpected precipitation, like a ship’s screw when it is jerked out of the water. In the same inconsequential way, she ran into Aunt Teresa’s bedside medicine table, which was more than Aunt Teresa’s nerves could stand. And Aunt Teresa took the opportunity to tell Nora what a sweet, obedient little girl she, Aunt Teresa, had been herself when of Nora’s age. Nora didn’t seem to care a bit, and while Aunt Teresa talked to her, was making very deliberate movements with her arms, as though affecting to fly. Aunt Molly, who was tired out, and had seemed angry with the noisy children, now that she had a moment to sit down, related tenderly their intimate histories from the earliest years. Aunt Teresa and Berthe professed a polite but unconvincing amazement at these confidences. A certain lady in Krasnoyarsk, Aunt Molly related, had organized a drawing competition, and Harry won a prize.