William Gerhardie - The Polyglots

At first we drove by the side of the quay, then through queer, narrow, evil-smelling Yokohama streets. To sit with hat and stick in the spidery rickshaw, and sniff at the atmosphere of a strange place — oh, what a rare, what an exquisite pleasure! ‘This is Japan,’ I said to myself. And it was. Now if I had been brought up in Japan, schooled there and lived there these twenty-one years, it would be about as interesting to me now as Manchester. The dream is more real than the substance. And thus when I travel in a strange land I get out at the station, sniff at the ‘atmosphere’—and get back into the train. It is enough. So now immediately I felt that I had ‘got’ the atmosphere. Besides, there was one. Leaning back in the rickshaw, first I had a feeling that I was too heavy for these delicate toys, as I watched the little man, who was half my size, run before me, his shirt gradually betraying signs of perspiration as he covered mile after mile in a steady trot. I soon got used to it. Once or twice we lost our way, and when we made enquiries in English some Japanese invariably replied to all our questions, ‘Ha!..’ and showed his teeth and sucked his breath in, and bowed politely, and walked away.

‘Hi!’ cried my companion.

‘I always understood that the Japanese spoke English,’ I observed.

‘And if they do they are the only ones to understand it,’ he rejoined sardonically.

No, my companion did not like Japan. He called it a tin-kettle nation. He had been annoyed, and with his delicate digestion he could ill-afford to be annoyed in the heat. He tried to ring up Tokyo on the telephone, and was interrupted by an absurd ‘ Mashi, mashi ?’ which he did not understand, and so shouted ‘Damn!’ into the receiver.

But already we were bound for Tokyo. The train raced on through green fields and pastures that might have been England or anything else. And, behold! a kimonoed gentleman reading an impossible newspaper. The whole thing was like a dream, and my impending meeting with relatives I had never seen — that too seemed like meeting unseen relations in dreamland, a place so utterly foreign and strange it might have been Mars. I sat very still, my eyes fixed on the whirling landscape — the engine whistled, the train went fast — while my thoughts went faster still, sending forth incalculable impulses of torment and delight. I thought of my aunt, of my lovely girl cousin whom I was to meet for the first time. In Tokyo I would get out, and then — what strange — what unthought-of things might begin!

I WONDERED WHAT MY AUNT WAS REALLY LIKE. I HAD heard so much about her life that I was strangely curious to see her in the flesh. I chortled at the thought of her puny consort with a waxed moustache, whose faded photograph in Belgian uniform with a row of medals on his military chest I well remembered. They had always lived at Dixmude, uncle being a Belgian Commandant . In the so-called Great War, however, in the year of grace 1914, my aunt decreed that Belgium — indeed, Europe — was no fit abode for her, and together with her husband and her daughter set out in flight for the Far East. The Far East, I think, was chosen on the ground that it was far — as far at least as my aunt conceivably could get without coming back across the other side of our round globe. I shall be told, of course, that it is against all military precedent for officers to be allowed to leave their country in the midst of a great war. To that, in the light of after-knowledge, I have but one reply to make: you do not know my aunt. And let me say at once that I would not have you think my uncle other than an honourable and gallant officer. He had even been at the siege of Liège; but deciding, I suppose, that he had tempted Providence enough, he left the front of battle and acquiesced in his wife’s arrangement that he should leave the country, as she was far too weak and ill to go alone, their daughter at that time being still a child. But if they all left Dixmude at the sound of the first gun, don’t blame my uncle for it, rather blame my aunt who, to say the least of it, was a woman with a will. At the age of twelve she had been adopted, while in Russia, by an old Princess who brought her up with her own daughter, and no doubt because of her marvellous beauty Aunt Teresa was spoiled and treasured by them out of all proportion. They married her off to a young good-for-nothing, born in circumstances of romance. Her husband, to be sure, was the son of a young heir (of the highest in the land) and his erewhile governess, Mlle Fifi, and his arrival — the flower of spontaneous exultation — caused both parents at the time profound astonishment. Whether he took more after his father or his mother, it is hard for me to say. Nicholas (for this was his name) seemed to combine a grand-ducal recklessness with a truly Parisian gaiety. There was no end to his antics. He flourished loaded pistols into people’s faces, firing at random. He took up with wild gipsy girls and drove about with them madly in troikas . He was at home in every kind of orgy, and thoroughly neglected my aunt. He played practical jokes on policemen, and on one occasion tied a constable to a tame bear and threw them both in the canal and held them floating on a rope. Another time, returning in the small hours of the morning, he encountered on the bridge a young giraffe which was being led from the railway station to the zoo, bought it on the spot and brought it up to Aunt Teresa’s bedroom. And, in the circumstances of the case, my aunt suffered. For years she suffered silently, kept going by the hope that some day they might be raised to princely rank. And, as she had foreseen, Nicholas was about to be legitimized and granted princely status, when, following the precedent of a milliard others, he gave up his soul to God. And Aunt Teresa missed the cherished prize by the skin of her teeth. But the dignity that she had missed she somehow managed to retain, and when Uncle Emmanuel met her in Brussels he addressed his letters to ‘Madame la Princesse’—although this had never been her rank. It was her beauty rather and her manner that suggested it, and all his people could not but think that Emmanuel, clever chap, had contrived to marry right into the Russian aristocracy. Her sisters, on the other hand, were not a little pained to learn that she — their pride and hope — had married an insignificant little Belgian officer, who, however satisfactory as a husband and a lover, was a poor fish (they said) as an officer and a money-maker. This was the more disappointing because all my aunts on my father’s side — all singularly fascinating women — of whom, however, Aunt Teresa was incomparably the queen — had married duds. Her father, a pioneer British merchant in Siberia, beholding his new son-in-law Emmanuel for the first time, thought that he was ‘no great shakes’. Beholding him the second and last time, he found no cause to alter his opinion.

And now the train was racing towards Tokyo.

THE VANDERFLINTS AND THE VANDERPHANTS

WE STEPPED OUT AT TOKYO AS THOUGH IT WERE Clapham Junction, and repaired to the Imperial Hotel. Tokyo, too, seemed a weird city. The houses were weird; men, women and children moved about on weird bits of wood like some mechanical dolls. The sun was blazing hot as we stepped into our rickshaws and drove in search of my aunt’s house.

As we drove up round the corner, I saw an apparition of short skirt, dark-brown curls and ruby lips, moving on seductive legs. There was a soft smiling look in her eyes which had a violet glint in the sun. Her head slightly bent, she flitted past us — with her brogues unlaced — and disappeared round the corner.

I guessed that it was Sylvia — perhaps on an errand to a shop across the way. I had seen one or two not very good snaps of her, and there was something sweet about her mouth that made me recognize her in a flash. How she had grown! What a ‘find’, to be sure! You read of such in novels by Miss Dell, but you did not often come across them in real life. But what had always rather stirred my blood, long before I ever saw her picture, was that she bore this lovely name — Sylvia-Ninon.