William Gerhardie - The Polyglots

I looked at him and thought: ‘Your one redeeming point is that you are a Count.’ He bowed again and again, and then vanished, still bowing.

The cold wind cut me in the face and wet snow tell in flecks from the dismal sky and vanished as it reached the ground. I drove home, elated and content. The house was being got ready under the competent direction of Vladislav. Sylvia, radiant, splendid, was dressing for the ball. Her shoes pinched a little at the toe and she was easily tired. I came up from the back. ‘Lovie-doviecats’-eyes.’

‘This is too soppy,’ she wrinkled her nose.

But at the ball one somehow felt (if not behaved accordingly) as though one did the ball a favour by being there at all. ‘Pshe-Pshe fils ’, the General’s aide-de-camp, a short and freckled youth wearing the Don Cossacks’ uniform, danced the mazurka with Sylvia, stamping his feet and jingling his spurs and falling down on one knee with superlative skill. There were many young ladies and as many young men, among them a French naval Lieutenant with a touch of grey on one brow, and Gustave Boulanger, a local Belgian bank official of about thirty-five, with a small yellow moustache, a large broad chin and small teeth. And each time he smiled he revealed a black tooth at each corner of his mouth. ‘Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!’ Sylvia laughed. Surrounded by young men, she would at once begin laughing and be all ‘Ha, ha, ha!’ But Gustave Boulanger never said anything. He only stroked his broad chin with his two fingers and smiled.

By the side of my aunt was Dr. Abelberg, her latest physician. Aunt Teresa was always changing them, because as a general rule they found that there was nothing much the matter with her, and this she could not endure. It was as though they robbed her of her natural prestige. Aunt Teresa had long grown to look on death and sickness as her own peculiar monopoly and told us frequently that we would not have her with us very much longer. When Berthe fell ill with influenza my aunt resented it as an effrontery and gave it out as her opinion that there was nothing much the matter with Berthe. The last doctor but one had told my aunt that she must use her legs, go out and take a lot of exercise, play golf if possible; and she at once dismissed him as a bear. ‘An unfeeling fool,’ was her comment, ‘who doesn’t know his own business!’ Until in Dr. Abelberg it really seemed that she had found her man. And naturally she had asked him to the ball. He stood beside her, a tall man of forty with a head as bald as a billiard ball and black hair on the temples; an affable man with a manner which is acquired from constant attendance on very nervous and difficult patients; a doctor whose sole force of argument in prescribing a medicine was that the medicine he prescribed could not do any harm. I sometimes wonder whether doctors die like flies because they have no layman’s health-imparting illusion in the curative properties of medicine, and by involuntary auto-suggestion hasten their own doom.

‘Must I go to Japan in the spring, Doctor?’ she asked.

‘To Japan … Well …’

‘I know I ought. I ought, I ought!’

‘Well, yes, you ought.’

‘But you know I can’t. How can I?’

‘Well, I don’t think there is any need — yet. It wouldn’t do you any good. In fact, it might cause harm. Stay where you are and listen to my advice.’

‘The Doctor keeps telling me that health is the first thing in life, don’t you, Doctor?’ she said, with a sly smile.

‘Why, you can’t pay too high a price for health.’

‘I guess she pays you quite enough — ha, ha, ha!’ guffawed Beastly.

‘If I had better health,’ she sighed, ‘I would enjoy life. I would go to the Opera. As it is, we’ve only been twice — to Faust and to Aida .’

‘I heard all about it,’ the Doctor observed with a bow.

‘Who from?’

‘Friends. They said you were greatly discussed and looked charming.’

‘When was that?’ asked my aunt.

He looked puzzled and taken aback. ‘Oh … Wednesday night.’

‘Why, that was long ago — in the summer,’ she said. ‘I haven’t been out anywhere since then. I was laid up all Wednesday. I had a most terrible migraine in the night. Indeed, at one time I felt so bad I thought I would not hold out.’

‘I know, I was very anxious about you — very anxious indeed. Hope you feel better now.’

‘Doctor,’ she said, ‘I think I must start taking Ferros ferratinum .’

Raising and dropping his forefinger, ‘Best thing for you,’ he said.

Indeed it seemed that she had found her man.

In the long interval Gustave Boulanger, who had a high but very weak tenor, was enjoined to give us a song. He coughed a little, stroked his throat in a nervous gesture as though adjusting his Adam’s apple. Tuning his wind instrument. One had the feeling that unless he set it to the proper pitch, his voice might break out in quite another clef. His throat adjusted, he sang Ich grolle nicht , to Count Valentine’s able accompaniment on the piano, but out of deference to Aunt Teresa and her deceased son he pretended that the words of the song were not German but Dutch. But my aunt did not care; besides, she knew German, and it was the Belgians themselves who had killed her son in the war.

When he finished, we applauded vociferously. But Gustave never said anything. He only stroked his broad chin with his two fingers and smiled. While Count Valentine was still at the piano the Chinese boys brought trays with little glass plates of ice-cream, and General ‘Pshe-Pshe’ approached to where Aunt Teresa was sitting, with a plate of strawberry-ice in his hand.

‘No, thank you, General. The Doctor has forbidden me to have ice-cream.’

The Doctor looked pensive. Then:

‘It’s all right in my presence,’ he said. ‘Only don’t have the strawberry-ice.’

‘But I hate vanilla!’

‘Well, it is really of no consequence. Only eat it very slowly,’ he said.

While the dance was in full swing and Vladislav had strayed away from the front door, the virgin came in and while nobody was looking fainted in the waiting-room.

‘Impossible! Impossible!’ cried Aunt Teresa when Vladislav reported that a young woman was lying dead on the floor in the waiting-room.

‘Impossible!’ the Doctor echoed.

‘But who is she? I say this is impossible!’

‘Impossible!’

‘But, Doctor, she’s alive!’ cried Aunt Teresa as she beheld the virgin twitching on the floor.

‘Oh, yes, as a doctor I can confirm that fact.’

‘I didn’t believe it.’

‘Nor did I.’

‘Is that because of the heat in the room, Doctor?’

‘Distinctly the heat,’ he bowed.

She sighed. ‘Well — it’s hot in here.’

He sighed too.

‘ Chaleur de diable !’ muttered Uncle Emmanuel.

‘Telephone at once to the hospital,’ commanded Dr. Abelberg.

‘Telephone! — ’ repeated Vladislav in abject tones. ‘Why, you can telephone, of course, or else not telephone. It’s all one. In France there are properly equipped hospitals and things. But here’—an abject gesture—‘you are safer at home than in the hospital. The other day they took my cousin to hospital, which was full up; they put the poor fellow on the floor in the corridor; he was still where they’d put him two days later, and on the third gave up his soul to God. “We’ve no time to bother. Told you we’re full up,” they said. And by the time they looked at him again his skull had split in two against the skirting.’

We tried all the hospitals, but all were full to overflowing; and it fell to Berthe to nurse the virgin back to life.

Aunt Teresa the while had returned to the drawing-room where General ‘Pshe-Pshe’, in a melancholy mood, was saying: