William Gerhardie - The Polyglots

‘There are some funny names in the world,’ I agreed, ‘like that of my batman, for instance, who is called Pickup. I didn’t invent them, so I can’t help it.’

‘ Ah, je te crois bien !’ Uncle Emmanuel agreed.

‘He has perfectly vertical nostrils, that man Major Beastly,’ exclaimed Aunt Teresa. ‘I never saw anything like it!’

‘He seems a very nice man none the less,’ said Berthe.

‘But — a horrible nuisance! When he wasn’t seasick he suffered from acute attacks of dysentery all the way out.’

‘Poor man!’ she exclaimed. ‘And nobody to look after him.’

‘And instead of shaving in the clean manly way as he should, he used a fiendish contrivance (devised, I think, for the benefit of your sex) for burning off his facial growth, making an unholy stink in the doing — regularly on the fourth day.’

Sylvia laughed.

‘The voyage across the Pacific’—I turned to her—‘took us fourteen days, during which time Major Beastly made a stink in our cabin three times.’

‘George!’ said my aunt, calling me to order.

I raised my eyes and looked straight into hers. ‘I use the word advisedly: a smell wasn’t in it!’

‘But, mon Dieu ! I should have protested against this,’ said Mme Vanderphant.

‘To a senior officer?’ My uncle turned to her sardonically, as one who knew that such things were not done in the Service.

‘Impossible?’

‘ Mais je le crois bien, madame !’ he said excitedly.

‘As a matter of fact,’ I explained, ‘Beastly was my junior three days before we sailed. But he was promoted in a single day from a sub to a major because he deals in rail and steam, and is just the man they wanted to advise them on the Manchurian railway, I believe.’

‘Sylvia! Again!’ Aunt Teresa interrupted. Sylvia blinked again.

‘His answer when I approached him diplomatically was that he had a very delicate skin which couldn’t stand the scraping of the razor blade.’

‘And nothing happened?’

‘I cannot say what happened. As I was about to press him more definitely, he had an acute attack of dysentery, and the question was indefinitely postponed.’

‘ Pauvre homme ,’ said Berthe.

The two Vanderphant girls were conspicuously well-behaved, and confined themselves to saying, ‘ Oui, maman ,’ and ‘ Non, maman ,’ or possibly, when passing things to Aunt Teresa, who was like a Queen amongst us, they might anticipate her wishes with a coy: ‘ Madame désire ?’ But scarcely anything more. There they sat, side by side, the one dressed exactly like the other and wearing the same fringe across the forehead, neither plain nor yet particularly good-looking, but very well-behaved; while their mother talked to me of Guy de Maupassant and the novels of Zola.

‘It is so good that your parents sent you to Oxford,’ my aunt said.

I lowered my lashes at that. ‘Yes, of course, it is rather an event to go up to Oxford. It’s not as if you went up to Cambridge, or anything like that.’

‘It had always been my ambition,’ said Uncle Emmanuel, ‘to go to the University. Alas! I was sent to the Military Academy instead.’

‘And Anatole, too,’ exclaimed my aunt, ‘would rather have gone to the University, as his father also would have liked him to go. But I wouldn’t let him — I don’t remember why — and he, good boy that he is, would not have done anything to sadden me. His only thought, his only interest in life is his mother.’

She sighed — while I remembered how Anatole said to me one evening while on leave in England:

‘Oh, you know, I get round mother easily enough.’

‘Still, a university,’ she mused, ‘may have been better for him, now that the war’s over. Like his father he is a poet, though he is his mother’s boy. But I sent him to the Military College instead.’

‘There are as many fools at a university as elsewhere,’ I said to calm her belated qualms of conscience. ‘But their folly, I admit, has a certain stamp — the stamp of university training, if you like. It is trained folly.’

‘Ah!’ said Mme Vanderphant, with a very conscious attempt at being intellectual, ‘is it not always so: one belittles one’s past opportunities if one hasn’t made full use of them?’

‘It’s not a question of belittling anything,’ I said. ‘It’s the attitude which Oxford breeds in you: that nothing will henceforth astonish you — Oxford included.’

And suddenly I remembered summer term: the Oxford Colleges exuding culture and inertia. And I became rhapsodical. ‘Ah!’ I cried, ‘there’s nothing like it! It’s wonderful. You go down the High, let us say, to your tutor’s, enter his rooms like your own, and there he stands, a grey-haired scholar with a beak that hawks would envy, in his bedroom slippers, terribly learned, jingling the money in his trouser pockets and warming his seat at the fire, smoking at you while he talks to you, like an elder brother, of literature. Or take a bump supper. There’s a don nicknamed Horse, and at a bump supper, after the Master has spoken, we all cry: “Horse! Horse! Horse!” and he gets up, smiling, and makes a speech. But there is such a din of voices that not a word can be heard.’

To tell you the truth, when I was at Oxford — I was bored. My impression of Oxford is that I sat in my rooms, bored, and that it ceaselessly rained. But now, warmed by their interest, I told them how I played soccer, rowed in the Eights, sat in the president’s chair at the Union. Rank lies, of course. I cannot help it. I am like that — imaginative. I have a sensitive heart. I cannot get myself to disappoint expectations. Ah! Oxford is best in retrospect. I think life is best in retrospect. When I lie in my grave and remember my life back to the time I was born, as a whole, perhaps I shall forgive my creator the sin of creating me.

There is this gift of making another feel that there is no one else of any consequence in the world. While I lied ahead, I felt Sylvia exercise that gift — a most subtle kind of flattery this, needing no words, just a look, a touch, a tone. And as I spoke I felt this in the looks which Sylvia cast me. The stars twinkled. The night flushed, listened, as I lied on. And now I felt that my interminable talk already bored them a little.

‘The war is over,’ said my aunt, ‘and yet there will be men, I know, who will regret it. The other day I talked to an English Captain who had been through the thick of the Gallipoli campaign, and he assured me positively that he liked fighting — and simply carried me off my feet. And I don’t know whether he isn’t right. He liked fighting the Turks because, he said, they are such splendid fellows. Mind you! he had nothing at all against them; on the contrary, he thought they were gentlemen and sportsmen — almost his equals. But he said he’d fight a Turk any day, with pleasure. Because they fought cleanly. After all,’ my aunt continued, ‘there’s something splendid, say what you like — a zest of life! — in his account of fighting the Turks. The Turks rush out of the wood with glittering bayonets, chanting: “Allah! Allah! Allah!” as they advance into battle. Because, you see, they think they are already at the gates of Heaven, only waiting to be admitted. So they rush gravely and steadily into battle, chanting: “Allah! Allah! Allah!” I don’t know — but it must be, as he says, exhilarating!’

‘And then,’ I said, continuing the picture, ‘some sportsman sends a cold bayonet blade into the vulnerable parts of the man. You understand what happens?’ I became cool, calculatingly suave. ‘The intestines are a delicate tissue; when, for example, you eat a lump of something that your stomach cannot digest, you are conscious of pain. Now picture what happens in that human stomach at the advent of a sharp cold blade. It isn’t merely that it cuts the guts; it lets them out. Picture it. And you will understand the peculiar intonation of his last “Allah!” ’