William Gerhardie - The Polyglots

‘There!’ she cried. ‘There he is again — abreast with us. He is following the boat.’

He vanished in the waves. We waited to see if he had gone. But there he was again, coursing his way in our trail. Now and then you could catch a glimpse of his glittering white belly as he half rose from the waves. Now he was to starboard, now to port, but always about fifty yards from our stern, following us as if with a secret resolution.

Natàsha sat still in the deck-chair and frowned. Uncle Tom passed and winked. ‘G-g-g-g-g,’ gurgled Natàsha. But she did not ask him to play with her.

‘What is it, Natàsha?’

‘Headache,’ she said.

Suddenly, towards evening, Natàsha felt worse, and she was put to bed, where she lay with red spots on her cheeks, writhing in fever. After dinner, since her condition was reported to be grave, the fancy-dress ball was put off, and the passengers who had looked forward to it and slept all day so as to be up all night lounged upon deck in ennui. Captain Negodyaev had just come back from his daughter’s cabin.

‘The doctor says she’ll be all right in a few days, after a complete rest in bed. She’s had too much excitement, she’s been running about too much in the sun.’

‘And the cause?’

‘He supposes it to be a mild sort of sunstroke. Who knows?’

‘He isn’t a doctor for nothing; he ought to know.’

‘He doesn’t know.’

We stood at the rail in the moonlight.

‘Tonight I am bored. I don’t think I have ever been so excruciatingly, so overwhelmingly, so outrageously bored as tonight.’

‘Why don’t you,’ he laughed, ‘commit suicide?’

‘It would not be enough. What I’d like to do tonight is to blow up the whole earth, commit suicide for and on behalf of everybody. A short cut to the Kingdom of Heaven on earth is to do away with earth.’ He smiled indulgently.

‘Think what a subject for a painter — what a plot for a story — a scientist secretly at night steals the glowing globe and sends it, lock, stock and barrel, judge, jury and all, to Kingdom Pot. And there is no more sea. What a sublime crime. See his expression. Some lunatic like Balzac could have written it.’

‘Why confine yourself to the earth? Why not the whole universe, the entire cosmos?’

I paused, thinking. ‘I am for it.’

He looked at me. ‘But where would it all go to? All the souls, and so on?’

‘Where? To Glory.’

‘What would God do?’ he asked.

‘Oh, God and all.’

‘It can’t be done,’ he said, on reflection.

‘Ah!’

‘Ah!’

I like the man, he is of the intellectual sort, but for one reason or another our intellectual conversations have a way of ending in the most distressingly practical way, as now when he followed me, all wreathes and smiles, to my cabin and came out crumpling a £5 note and saying nonchalantly, ‘We’ll settle it next week, I promise faithfully,’ having previously given me an I.O.U., signed ‘Peter Negodyaev’. I hate generalities, and I would be the last man to want to create the mistaken impression that all Russians are necessarily impractical; but, speaking broadly, I would give this general advice: let no Scotsman lend money to a Russian if he can help it.

This piece of business over, we returned on deck and continued our conversation on the higher plane. ‘If there is no eternity now,’ he said, ‘mankind may create it after our time. Who knows?’

‘Yes, those who have suffered and loved and found their way back to the founthead may one day redeem us. The trumpet that will call us back to life might be a trumpet made in Birmingham or Massachusetts: what matter? The last trump will sound; but we shan’t appear before God: we shall be God.’

Sylvia came up. ‘Didn’t I tell you, darling, about the Massachusetts trumpet?’

‘You told me of some trumpet, but I understood nothing. It makes me sick to listen to you nowadays. Darling, you’re getting fearfully boring.’

Berthe came to tell Captain Negodyaev that his wife wanted him below, that Natàsha was worse again. He went off hastily. The General with the mad eyes who had been watching us from afar (he was not on speaking terms with Captain Negodyaev) now came up to enquire what was the matter. ‘Cramming a child’s mind with rubbish,’ I replied. ‘That’s what has done it. And now a nervous breakdown, I expect.’

‘But you’ve been teaching her yourself.’

‘I only pretended it was a lesson to set the parents’ mind at rest, but told her funny things instead. She already talks English delightfully. I don’t know what they want.’

‘They don’t know themselves,’ he answered gladly.

‘Here you have a child with the most delicate intuitions, and you are cramming her head with arithmetic! And now she’s gravely ill.’

‘Not from that.’

‘Very likely from that.’

‘Nonsense.’

‘There’s no nonsense about it.’

Suddenly lapsing into English: ‘This is sheer infantry to talk like that!’ he cried.

The General had learnt his English without extraneous aid, relying exclusively on his own deductions — a process that was not without danger. So coming in the dictionary across the word infant and rightly deducing from the well-known Spanish word infanta that infant stood for child , he further deduced (not correctly this time) that what he meant by infancy was infantry in English. So he would often observe, ‘Socialism is as yet only in its infantry.’ I tried to correct him; it was useless: he knew better. Incidentally, himself an infantryman, one would think that he had reserved a word for it in English. He had: he called it, as in Russian, infanteria . Now being angry with me, and wishing to imply that I was childish, he said: ‘It is sheer infantry to talk like this.’

‘General!’ I cried. ‘General! will you please believe me when I tell you that you can’t—’

‘Sheer infantry!’ he shouted, ‘infantry and nothing else!’

‘Well, I ought to know better than you.’

‘You — you,’ he said, ‘you’re no more English than … you polyglot.’

I confess I don’t like this. International as are my sympathies — I do not like this. If you had been born in Japan and brought up in Russia and called Diabologh into the bargain, you would want to be English. When in the war I rode with my troop in Ireland and an old woman called out, ‘The English swine!’ I felt elated, flattered, exhilarated, secretly proud.

‘You cuckoo,’ I said, ‘my father was born in Manchester, and my mother in York.’

‘I thought as much. You Yorkshire pig,’ said he.

There was a pause. The British General, with his eye fixed on the Russian General, passed by in his white tennis shoes and stood off, watching.

‘That idiot of a General!’ the Russian said. ‘Imagine him commanding an army corps!’

‘All generals are mugs.’

The General suddenly looked at me with fierce insight, as if considering his own position and deciding whether to be offended or not. He strolled off a few paces, and returned, deciding to be offended.

‘Get out!’ he shouted suddenly, and stamped his foot.

‘Get out yourself.’

He waited a moment, foaming with fury, and then said, ‘In that case I’ll go myself, Yorkshire pig that you are.’

‘Good riddance to bad rubbish.’

I went away with a heavy heart: why had I offended him? The poor devil was not too happy as it was in our midst. Suffering from qualms of conscience, I went in search of him in order to apologize to him, when, rounding the deck-house, I saw him shuffling along in his sweat-eaten canvas shoes towards me.

‘Oh, forgive me, forgive my rudeness,’ he began, ignoring my apologies. ‘But I feel I am here like a beast in a trap — alone amidst a crowd of enemies. All look at me with suspicion. That idiot of a General of yours is on my heels all day long. I can’t go down to my cabin without his coming down behind me. All talk, whisper about me, point at me. I’m not allowed to go ashore to buy myself a picture postcard; all the secret service agents in the world have been set on my heels. I–I—I — my nerves have all gone to pieces. Forgive me, my friend, do.’ He held out his hand.