William Gerhardie - The Polyglots

During lunch, Harry made audible remarks about the passengers: ‘That boy over there has a fat head.’

‘Harry!’ uttered Aunt Teresa.

‘S-s-s-sh!’ Aunt Molly hissed.

The General’s nails took away some of our appetite, and I tried, diplomatically, to propel the conversation into some such channels. ‘The Chinese,’ I remarked, ‘have extraordinarily long nails.’

‘It’s a sign of aristocracy,’ he replied complacently. ‘To show that they do no work.’

‘But they are black!’

‘What matter? The colour is immaterial.’

The General confessed that he never took a bath, ‘Because,’ he said, ‘once a bath, always a bath — it opens the pores.’

At dinner, the General with the mad eyes grew tearful and melancholy. Surveying his hands and his clothes—‘I have sunk,’ he said. ‘God! how low I have sunk! My nerves have all gone to pieces. I am pursued from one end of the world to the other.’ Tears were in his eyes.

A war — a pre-eminently stupid business — is run by stupid people (all the wise ones having set their minds on stopping it as soon as possible); and men who ordinarily would be in the shade rise to the surface and set to organize a ‘Secret Service’ whose agents spend their time in sending one another information about all sorts of lunatics and innocents, and Vice-Consuls and so-called M.C.O.s do their level best to impede the traffic of the world years after the war is over. And some such cuckoo — I think it was Philip Brown — reported our friend the General with the mad eyes, and another cuckoo apprised the Foreign Office, and the Foreign Office notified the Admiralty and the War Office, and zealous officers had begun to send each other slips of information about this ‘dangerous revolutionary’.

The sea was a green mirror. All the way from Shanghai to Hong-Kong it was a green mirror. Not a sound reached our ears but the impassive beat of the piston-rod: proof of the unremitting toil of the engine. The infinite sea conduces to infinite thoughts about God and Man and the Universe. There is nothing to do, so one talks. Captain Negodyaev was philosophically inclined. I did not find that out till we fell into each other’s company more intimately on board the Rhinoceros . He stood there, leaning back against the rail, a rat on its hind legs, a rat in khaki, philosophizing. ‘If you go half the way of logic,’ he said, ‘and stop there, you have come as near the truth as you are likely to get this side of the grave. But describe the circle, and you are nowhere again. I—’

‘You mean,’ I said (as we are in the habit of saying when we interrupt to say what we mean), ‘you mean it simply comes to this: you wander till you find a barrier. Then you allow your soul to grow mature, satiate within the barrier. (When the gruel begins to brew, make haste and set to work: write, paint, experiment.) Then, some time afterwards, the barrier will break down — and again you will begin to wander in the meadow until again you find your way to the high-road.’ We talked unostentatiously, quietly, affecting, perhaps half-consciously, the pose of people of seasoned intellect that everything was understood between us, that we took for granted on the part of each all knowledge hitherto available about all things. His attitude to life was a dark smile — the smile of one who is pleased at the opportunity of recognizing a little additional evidence of the vileness which he had all along maintained pervaded life. Fundamentally, I believed in hope, he in despair. It was as if he said, ‘ Tant pis !’ ‘You say it is impossible to despair. But it is possible to despair. I believe in despair. I live on it,’ he said.

‘You doubt the possibility of immortality, because—’

‘Captain Diabologh,’ he interrupted. ‘Lend me £15. I’ll pay it back to you — upon my word of honour — when we get to England.’

‘You doubt it because you have a wrong idea of what is real.’

‘I really will.’

‘The external world seems real to you because you see and hear and smell and feel it. But it is because your senses are so focused and conditioned and attuned that you see and feel and hear and smell it as you do. Actually it consists merely of certain illusory vibrations marking time in nothing — a form of mathematics to sustain the figment of Time made flesh. It is merely a world of appearance in which your I has immersed, like a fallen star which has mistaken the clouds for reality and doubts its own light. As a drop of water from the ocean contains identical properties with those of the ocean itself, so that light in you — your real I —has the immortal faculties of a timeless sun.’

Beastly, hearing our arguments, butted in with: ‘Jabbering like two old washerwomen!’

Captain Negodyaev smiled a propitiatory smile: ‘We the philosophers of life are merely the naughty children, while the others are the good children. In the end, Mother Nature puts us all to bed.’

Beastly nodded his head heavily and guffawed loudly as he did so. While Captain Negodyaev talked philosophy, an English dame who read a Ouida novel looked at him disapprovingly through her lorgnon . ‘You mustn’t talk quite so loud and gesticulate quite so much,’ I advised him. ‘These people think it shocking bad form to get so excited about mere God and the Universe.’

‘Well,’ he rejoined, ‘if it really comes to that, I never laughed so much as when I saw your English people playing cards last night. Not a sound, not a movement, as though they were in church. The monotony of it would be enough to kill any normal human being. In Russia somebody would long have jumped up, expostulated and called another a cheat and a liar. But these here — they sit like stones. Incorrigible people!’

At first I had to share a cabin with Beastly, but unable to stand his stinks any longer, I got Uncle Emmanuel to change places with me. But he got out, holding his nose. ‘ C’est assez !’ he said. ‘How I understand you!’ Nobody wanted to share a cabin with Beastly. So, in the end, the General with the mad eyes was induced to try his luck, and emerged successfully out of the experiment, remarking that to him all stinks were immaterial. But, anyhow, most of the voyage Percy Beastly was ill, and Berthe attended to him.

In the morning we entered the harbour of Hong-Kong. The clouds mixed with the mountains, so that one could hardly tell which were the clouds and which were the mountains. Two red-tabbed staff-officers in pale khaki drill came on a white steam launch flying the Union Jack and asked: ‘Is there a General Pokhitonoff on board?’ They were informed that there was one. And the General with the mad eyes, lest he should stir the native races into rebellion against the British Crown, was not allowed to land.

The General was a man who invariably agreed to everything — under protest; and so, having registered his protest in a letter to the Captain, he remained on board, while Sylvia and I went on shore. We took the Peak railway. And as we ascended the hill in it, ‘You look upon the Other World,’ I said, ‘as a sort of furnished flat where everything has been prepared for our arrival. I believe that world is more like music seeking its rebirth in its own inspiration; and man like a composer who awakens life to make it echo to the cadence he has plucked out of its own deep sleep, to suggest to him new secrets and new melodies.’

‘Darling, you speak so loud that everybody can hear you.’

‘I don’t care. I am speaking the truth.’

‘Oh!’

‘What?’

‘Bother this fly,’ she said.

‘There is more impudence in a fly than in many a grown man or woman.’

‘Do we get out here?’