William Gerhardie - The Polyglots

Poverty — and the children catch measles. Winter — and a shortage of coal. From bad to worse, until you sit in your shirt-sleeves, maybe, in a one-roomed lodging, and having pushed aside the pans and saucers begin to write your book, A Psychological Analysis of the Succeeding Stages in the Evolution of an Attitude , the children howling ‘I doan want to!’ Sylvia, thin and angry and exhausted, perhaps turned into a shrew. To keep them from starvation you set your teeth and write a novel. At last it’s finished. You send it to Pluckworth on the 7th of November and it comes back on the 15th of December, on which date you send it to Jane Sons, and Jane Sons return it to you on the 3rd of January, on which date you send it to Norman Elder, who sends it back on the 15th of March.

Suddenly I fell asleep. I dreamt that we were dining in a restaurant and Sylvia protested: ‘I want French wine!’ The waiter came, I had no money, and began to cry. I woke up in a sweat.

No, I did not want to get married.

After tea I went up to my attic, intent on settling down to a prolonged spell of solid work. But my tangled thoughts, revolting stubbornly, chased after those running streams of life which found their spring in Sylvia. Then, finally, I laid aside my papers and went to her. As I saw her, again I visualized our future life when I might be unkind to her; and because I wanted to be kind to her I craved to have this union broken before it was too late; and yet I knew that she, unconscious of future painful hours thus evaded, would suffer from the knowledge of a happiness missed; and it distressed me that I could not, without wounding her, explain these manifold considerations.

‘Darling, frankly: do you want to marry me?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

‘It’s so nice to be married, darling. To be always together. To live in the same house. To feel the same things. To have the same thoughts.’

Sylvia playing the Four Seasons of the Year . I take her for a walk, but think my own thoughts: though we couldn’t be nearer, we couldn’t be farther apart.

‘This we can have without marrying.’

‘But I want to have children … by you.’

‘We’ll send our son to New College.’

‘Yes, yes.’

I used to say to Aunt Teresa in the course of our psychoanalytical experiments: ‘If there is something that worries you try to isolate it and to tell me what it is — and we shall endeavour to side-track it.’ I swear I never brought this on with an ulterior motive. And for some little time to come my experiments proved unsuccessful. Only as the time was nearing for our wedding and subsequent departure for Europe did Aunt Teresa tell me: ‘I begin to believe in psycho-analysis. Something is worrying me, and that is why I feel so very ill.’

She sent for Dr. Abelberg and asked him whether there was anything in psycho-analysis.

The Doctor agreed.

After he had left she confessed to me:

‘Dr. Abelberg asked me what it was that worried me. And when I told him that it was the dread of separation from my only daughter after the death of my only son, he said it was fatal for me to have anything like that to worry me.’

Poor Aunt Teresa! We did not show any sense of what we were doing to her. It did not occur to us that this was at all hard on her: to bring up her child, and then, suddenly, to see her go. She foresaw no prospect of following us to Europe. Most likely Uncle Emmanuel would enter Gustave Boulanger’s bank, and then the last hope of seeing her daughter again would have gone. But we thought not of that. I boiled at the mere thought of a ‘selfish’ intervention on her part. Yet I knew that if I went away with Sylvia I would feel profoundly sorry for my aunt. That I did not feel so argued that I did not seriously believe I’d go away with her. If we had mingled our tears with hers and asked her to forgive us, she might have done so and resigned herself to her sad fate. But we did not do so; and once she had, with my aid, isolated her ‘complex’, there was no forgetting it.

The next I learnt was from Sylvia herself — when she told me ‘It’s all off’—crying, trying to restrain herself, and I, no longer knowing whether to be glad or to be sorry, or rather sorry against my very gladness, did my best to make her marry me, half satisfied, half mortified at my apparent failure to persuade her. We would get married first, I would leave and then return for her.

‘No.’

At one time it seemed as though Sylvia resolved to take advantage of her whip hand — to avenge her suffering — and strike a blow for her own freedom, the feelings of her mother notwithstanding. But she collapsed in the doing.

Sylvia and Aunt Teresa mingled tears. But they were different kinds of tears. The daughter was a real heroine. She cried, but made a brave show, and only listened, blinking; and she never showed her wound, and sacrificed her happiness completely and without reproach.

And it was accepted promptly, without much ado.

‘Sylvia! again!’ said Aunt Teresa.

Sylvia blinked.

The tragedy of our position was not that Aunt Teresa dominated us into surrender, but that taking every circumstance into account — Aunt Teresa included — we could not make up our minds one way or another. My motive split: one portion of it became allied with Aunt Teresa; the other remained loyal to my love. But it is little use explaining the multifarious motives of one’s thoughts and actions. I think this is a general mistake that novelists fall into. Why should I whitewash my conscience with your boredom, or waste my time in making the haphazard course of life seem rational in print? Why should I try to vindicate myself? Why pretend that I was reasonable or even logical? My conduct was confused, irrational. Who cares?

I considered the question from separate points of view — from the point of view of my present happiness, my future happiness, Sylvia’s happiness if I married her, Sylvia’s happiness if I did not marry her — and arrived at independent conclusions. I considered the question while I was undressing to go to bed, and while thinking of it, found that I had dressed again, put on my boots, and was tying my tie. Undressing myself once again, I considered the question again from all points of view simultaneously, displayed a truly Balfourian multi-sidedness. But, like my royal namesake from Shakespeare, I finally arrived at no conclusion at all. I am cursed with a Hamletian inaction. Russia has bitten me much too deeply. Why was I named Hamlet? Why this heart-splitting dilemma? Like him, I had an uncle — I had two uncles — but there was no clear reason why I should have murdered either of them. No such crude necessity in my case. Though perhaps it was my duty rather to murder my aunt. If it was, the reader must try to forgive me: I didn’t do it.

AND ALREADY — AS THE SENTENCE ONCE PROCLAIMED is proceeded with without respite — so Aunt Teresa, once I was definitely off the cards, showed us her hand. I had suspected all along that she had someone up her sleeve. But her choice astonished me. To her, however, Gustave Boulanger seemed a candidate pre-eminently suitable. He was a Belgian, and he lived in the Far East. But sooner or later, his home would be in Belgium, and she still hoped that sooner or later they would all return to Belgium. Aunt Teresa’s method of inveigling Gustave into marriage with her daughter was both swift and efficient and, if you remember my own case, not without precedent. She waited till they were to be found alone together, chatting innocently enough, when she dropped upon them, like an eagle from the blue, with her heartiest congratulations and best wishes for their future happiness. ‘I’m so glad, so glad indeed,’ she said, kissing them both on the cheek and taking them completely by surprise. Gustave coughed a little and adjusted his Adam’s apple; but said nothing, only stroked his broad chin with his two fingers and smiled. And Gustave had to see his way to buy Sylvia a ring which she wore next to my own — that very same one which I once exhorted her to set me as a seal upon her heart.