William Gerhardie - The Polyglots

‘Yes?’

‘I must have black ink. I can’t write in violet ink!’

‘Why not?’

‘How insensitive!’

There were a great number, but she was warming to her task. To answer letters was her mission, joy, and gift in life. If you wrote to Aunt Teresa on any subject whatsoever you always had a letter by return of post. ‘ Mon pauvre frère !’ she wrote, and stopped. She used a lot of exclamation marks. But even so, her task today was not easy. ‘He had complained of sleeplessness!’ she wrote. She stopped. The trouble was to say it all without making a farce of him and her. He had hanged himself, to Aunt Teresa’s lasting shock, in her clothes. She could not forget this. And she did not mourn him as she felt she should have done, because she secretly resented the highly unconventional manner of his end. It did not follow the canons of good taste. It was not pre-eminently a respectable death. It was so irregular. It was awkward to tell people how he died. What made it worse was that the crêpe-de-Chine camisole and knickers — green, embroidered with flowers — were the General’s souvenir brought back from Japan. The most astonishing thing about it, the most distressing, too, was that it was — well, funny. It required feats of self-restraint to bear down an involuntary impulse to giggle as she wrote about his death: ‘… I do so miss my poor brother Lucy!’; or, when she told about it to a sympathetic listener, to suppress a sudden chuckle as she thought of her poor brother in her knickers and the boudoir cap; so hard to keep your face straight. It seemed so wanton, so extraordinarily unnecessary. The absence of any trace of logic in his choice of conduct baffled her. She wanted to feel sorry, she did feel sorry for him, but it was so — deuced funny, and she reproached herself for that. She did not know that one could laugh and be serious at the same time. Aunt Teresa was never violent, always spoke calmly, quietly. She said: ‘Other people get excited. Your Uncle Lucy, for example — he is dead, and I don’t want to say anything against my poor brother — but I — (she cried softly) — I am different. I have to keep it all here (she pressed her palm to the heart), all to myself!’ She had taunted him with her approaching death, and once he was affected and even cried — but he died before her. And I thought that Aunt Teresa could still be sighing and complaining when the youngest of us would be pushing up the daisies.

A decent (but not too long an) interval having elapsed after Uncle Lucy’s death, Aunt Teresa sent out cards, the first half of which read: ‘Commandant and Madame Vanderflint have the honour to inform you of the forthcoming marriage of Mademoiselle Sylvia Vanderflint, their daughter, with Monsieur Gustave Boulanger’, while on the second half of the parchment Mademoiselle Boulanger stated, in identical terms, that she had the honour to announce the forthcoming marriage of Monsieur Gustave Boulanger, her brother, with Mademoiselle Sylvia Vanderflint. These cards were placed in large parchment envelopes and dispatched to Count Valentine, Dr. Murgatroyd, Colonel Ishibaiashi, Philip Brown, Percy Beastly, General ‘Pshe-Pshe’ et fils , Dr. Abelberg, and others, even to the legendary General and Madame Pan-Ta-Loon.

And already ties were being artificially cemented. Aunt Teresa had paid a visit to Mlle Caroline Boulanger, an elderly spinster, heavily powdered, and the children had been asked to tea.

‘Uncle Gustave will take us to the Logical Gardens to see the lion this afternoon,’ Harry said, strutting about in his long trousers.

‘Are you afraid of the lion?’

‘Yes,’ he confessed.

‘And where have you been all this morning?’

‘To Sunday school,’ he said. ‘What have you been doing there?’

‘Singing,’ he answered. ‘Hymns?’

‘No.’ He wrinkled his nose. ‘Sumfink about Jesus.’

‘And what was the sermon about?’

‘Oh, all about hell.’ He reflected a moment. ‘Any ice-cream at hell? No? Only at heaven?’

‘Yes.’

‘We are going to Aunt Caroline,’ said he. ‘And who’s Aunt Caroline?’

‘S’e is a lady with a dog and two cats,’ answered Harry.

‘And what will the dog think of you, Harry?’ said Aunt Teresa.

‘I don’t know what he’ll think of me in my long trousers.’

In the afternoon, while the children were at Gustave’s, General ‘Pshe-Pshe’ called on Aunt Teresa.

‘I am not understood! not understood!’ he said. ‘Not understood by my wife, not understood by my daughter, not understood by my son; never! You alone—’ He brushed her pale hand with his moustache. ‘Not understood! But this is a harbour of rest, an asylum.’

The last allusion, in view of Uncle Lucy’s sad end, was unpleasant, and Aunt Teresa winced just a little.

Moreover, the General confessed that the political horizon, till recently so serenely blue, was not too cheerful. He expressed incredulity at the levity of the Allies. ‘I simply cannot understand their folly in ceasing to support me, for surely they must know that I can never hold out without their help, since the entire population of the country is against me. Such want of logic on their part! They must have lost their faculty of reasoning. What were they thinking? The Mr. Churchill is the only politician left who sees eye to eye with me. I have always had great faith in the acumen of this brilliant and courageous statesman. Like myself, he is prepared to take chances on behalf of his country, irrespective of all consequences. In our modern world this has become a quality rare among individuals, and therefore all the more to be treasured when it is found. But, I am sorry to say, his own countrymen do not always see eye to eye with him.’

Yes, he marvelled at the Allies. The more he thought of them, the more he marvelled. The General wanted to see law and order established in Russia. The population did not understand him, and — what more simple? — in order to administer the land, the General’s idea (not to put too fine a point upon it) was to invade the land by first killing off the population.

‘How will you do it, General? You have no men.’

The General thrust his hand into the front of his coat, after the manner of Napoleon Bonaparte, and said, in a stern, robust voice, looking ruthless:

‘I will fight on with the pistol and the gibbet.’

‘General,’ I sighed, ‘you can hang or shoot a criminal when public opinion is behind you, but you cannot shoot or hang the public, even though you may think it a criminal public, when its opinion is that you’re the criminal.’

He looked at me with infinite reproach, as if to say: ‘ Et tu, Brute !’ He was silent, and then said: ‘I am doing my duty before God and the fatherland.’

Aunt Teresa’s blanched face with the enormous eyes turned to him. ‘Dear me! How will you do it?’ she asked, not without some concern. ‘How will you fight? You have no men.’

‘To the last man,’ he said, and looked into her eyes, her deep St. Bernard eyes. He loved her, as it were, in retrospect; those years before he met her, when she was young, to him were years of separation, and now! and now! at last they met again, and in the present the whole past was reconstructed for him in this afterword, this evening glow of love. He bent over her slim white hand and brought his lips against it; this touch was to atone for all that he had missed. And she looked up to heaven with her beautiful, her lustrous, large eyes as if this woman who had never loved should pray: ‘I wish I could. I want to do my earnest best — alas! it is not in my power!’

On Friday morning Beastly was to leave for England. He had been laid up with dysentery through the whole of March and first half of April, and was faithfully looked after by Berthe. Dusting his hat for him while he put on his coat, ‘Write to me sometimes, won’t you, Percee,’ she said. ‘You know how precious you are to me.’