William Gerhardie - The Polyglots

I drove behind and thought: ‘It would be nice to slip away from them all — to go off by myself.’

After the pony race there was a gala dinner and dance, and we danced in the crowded ball-room and then drove back to the hotel through the moist heavy spring night of Peking. It was as though I had been given , for ever given, life, as though the I was the effect of that particular gift, and that the whole world was not itself but through me. Why then was I asking questions? Why always was I asking questions? There was a meaning in it. But what meaning if black death obliterated all? Then a meaning in that, a hidden significance. And if death was silence eternal, there was a significance in that silence. It was as if all — death and all — were in life; and if I thrilled with emotion, feared, prayed, my nerves were somehow linked with the rest of the world: they were like strings of a musical instrument that reverberated to some faint, unknown music; and even now, as in the spidery vehicle, I drove past the palatial legations by the silent queer-smelling canals, the nocturnal foliage glancing in the mirror of black water, at its own sombre visage, the yellow lanterns bobbing on the water and the leaves, I was a traveller, I felt, to whom these lights and shadows were mysterious and strange, but no stranger than the shadows I had seen when, as a particle of light, I coursed my way through space, a planet, a fiery torch lighted at what altar? at what run? before I fell.

Next day there was a treat for us: the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra came and played extracts from Wagner. They received a tremendous ovation, and at the very end, as an extra, played the Overture to Tannhäuser . I thought I should burst. It was so rich, so mighty, so ineffably glorious and majestic. One felt one’s soul standing on tiptoe! Music — I felt that music was life, that music understood what words and thoughts could never convey. There were echoes it wakened, heart-strings it touched. O Music, where have you learnt your secret?

Poor old Aunt Teresa, I thought. Poor old Uncle! Poor old everybody …

I ran into Uncle Emmanuel coming out, and he was red and bright-eyed with excitement. ‘By God,’ he said, ‘that was wonderful. It takes Germans to play Wagner. I got so excited and stirred up I wanted to shout or cry.’

I felt he and I were brothers, in fact all men brothers, and all born to do great things!

The date of sailing of the Rhinoceros having again been postponed, we lingered in Peking for a few days. Siberia — so we read in the newspapers — was red and growing redder. Chita was the one white isle in a sea of red, and thither (and to China) had flocked all that there remained of the refuse of reaction. And Peking was absorbing more than its fair share. White generals, bankrupt ministers, experts in coups d’état , failures, nonentities of every kind had made this spot their headquarters. We found many an old friend. Suddenly, quite unexpectedly, we ran into General ‘Pshe-Pshe’.

‘Your Excellency!’ I greeted him. ‘We thought you had been hanged long ago!’

‘Not till I have done a little myself,’ he replied, smiling a little warily. ‘And how are you?’—he turned to Aunt Teresa, and brushed her pale bejewelled hand against his prickly moustache. Things, it seemed, looked bad in Harbin. The red bandits had wrested the town from him — and now anything might happen to the population. Anything! He himself had deemed it wise to leave the town incognito, overnight. The anarchists and agents of destruction were hard at work all over the world. The only hope lay, he was bound to say, in Mr. Churchill. But that gallant statesman, he thought, had enemies even at home.

I looked at him as he spoke. How he had ever managed to become a General, God only knows! the most probable explanation is that he had appointed himself — in the interests of the fatherland. ‘Pshe-Pshe’, I learnt afterwards, had taken with him a few bars of solid gold from the national exchequer, deeming it to be well out of the hands of the miscreants who opposed him. He was living now with his wife and family at the best hotel in Peking. He was patronizing to the indigent. ‘Money,’ he said on more than one occasion, ‘is no object.’ Asked what were his plans for the future, he said that he was going on to Tsingtao for a cure and a rest, where he would wait till Mr. Churchill’s political star was again in the ascendant, when ‘The Day’ would return, and he would decorate the lamp-posts of the city of Harbin with the corpses of the bandits; for in civilized society law and order came first. He was loyal to the past. But Russia would not mould to his bankrupt dreams. He was sad, taciturn, bitterly disappointed in fate; but the deaths he had occasioned he somehow overlooked. In the train — he left in our company — the General told us that shortly before leaving Harbin news had come through that Dr. Murgatroyd had been captured in Omsk by his enemies the Bolsheviks. And quite apart from the human factor, it was felt by all that the situation was not without humour. But we were sure that the old man in the moujik clothes would eventually stroll down to some place of safety, with a pencil between his teeth and a few sheets of written paper in his hands, perhaps a little wiser for his experience, and perhaps no wiser than before — and eventually produce a book.

‘And how are you?’—the General turned to Mme Negodyaev.

‘Ach!’ she uttered — and sighed.

‘What a life!’ He looked out of the window.

‘Yes, it’s a life in name only. We wait. In the winter we wait for the spring. But spring has come, and I am pestered by flies and mosquitoes. In the spring we wait for the summer. But summer comes — and it rains like in autumn. Ach!’ She waved an abject gesture, and grew silent.

‘You’re a pessimist,’ said he, screwing up one end of his short crisp moustache. ‘I am not entirely so.’

‘I have always, all my life, been on the point of beginning to live, and I haven’t lived. I haven’t, I haven’t, and I haven’t. I had hoped so much, and nothing has come of it. Now I hope no more — so perhaps something may come of it.’ The sun flashed through the glass and lit up her sunken face. ‘I have great hopes,’ she said.

She lived, and the life that should have been went beside her. I thought: hopeless natures, like hers, are easily let down by life, but on the other hand, just as easily consoled by hopes as shadowy and baseless as those which they had just discarded.

At Tientsin — he was going on to Tsingtao — the General got out together with the squinting Corporal Cripple, who now marched on with the kit on his back along to the depôt. The General pressed his prickly moustache against my aunt’s pale fingers; but our train was about to go, and Aunt Teresa, as she waited for him to finish his embrace, looked troubled and impatient. ‘Berthe! I do sincerely hope they haven’t left my medicine-chest behind!’ she wailed across her shoulder. He released her hand. She got in, and the train moved, and the saluting General, with the platform he was standing on, and the sandbank with the squatting Chinese child gaping at the train, and the country road that Corporal Cripple was traversing, moved backwards, and whirled out of sight.

I felt the wind rushing in through the open window, and saw the sun shining purple through the fretful yellow blinds, and the year was awakening and the day stubbornly dying.

Crossing the Yangtsekiang in a steam launch, I looked at the wide yellow river, and then at Aunt Teresa at my side. I loved my aunt — in moderation. But now seeing her, so pale and frail before me, I thought: ‘Poor Aunt Teresa! How long will she survive?’ And it seemed to me that now in this strong light I could see for once beyond her share of foibles. I could see — But, oh, what is there to see in the human soul stripped of outward ornament? Bewilderment, day-dreaming, and hope, unending hope …