William Gerhardie - The Polyglots

The sun had set, and at once the ocean looked dark, the sky was unfriendly: God had gone back to His bunk. Then, strolling about, I came across Captain Negodyaev. He sat very still on a bench at the stern, gazing at the dark trail running away from us, as if asking a meaning from it of a death that had no meaning. In the day-time, half dazed by the sun and the heat, he had braved it somehow, pacing about, avoiding condolences, unable to find a place for himself. But now with the twilight, his grief, like a vulture, descended upon him, and cringing in the corner of the bench he began to cry. I touched him on the shoulder: his face convulsed, he covered it with his hands.

‘Trust your feeling. Remember Turgenev: “Can it be that their prayers, their tears are fruitless? Can it be that love, holy, devoted love, is not all-potent? O no! However passionate, sinful, rebellious, may be the heart that has taken refuge in the grave, the flowers which grow upon it gaze tranquilly at us with their innocent eyes: not alone of eternal repose do they speak to us, of that mighty repose of ‘indifferent’ nature; they speak also of eternal reconciliation and of life everlasting.” ’

‘Flowers,’ he said, after a moment’s pensive silence, and looked at the dark burrows that eluded our steady course into the loneliness of the ocean, unafraid. ‘Innocent eyes …’ He choked.

‘It didn’t need the war. It didn’t need the revolution.’

He rose and stalked away. He went back to his wife, who henceforth lay in her cabin, a wounded thing, and was never seen to emerge. Whether he was kind to her, we did not know. I passed the half-open door of Aunt Teresa’s cabin. Aunt Teresa’s going to bed was always rather an event. She took pyramidon for her head, and aspirin for her cold, and pills to counteract the effect of pyramidon on her stomach, and a remedy to counteract the effect of aspirin on her heart, besides which she used lotions: a tooth lotion, a gum lotion, a jaw lotion (to prevent dislocation), and sunflower seed oil as a general lubricant, and of late a lotion to rub into the roots of her hair. She was sitting now in her chemise upon the bunk in an attitude of great distress and, with the help of Berthe, was rubbing coconut oil into the nape of her neck. In the last few days she had suddenly begun to lose her hair at a terrific rate; there was a bare space on the nape as large as the size of an average saucer. ‘ C’est terrible ,’ she was saying to Berthe, ‘there will be nothing left.’

I went out on deck. The nocturnal sky, vigilant, soared above me. The stars looked at me kindly, good-humouredly. The ship’s lights twinkled demurely in the dark. I stood very still, following the dark phosphorescent trail that now and then gave a glint of light in the moon. When I was alone I whispered: ‘Can you hear me—?’ But only the wind that ruffled the topmost flag on the mast answered me. The wind and the lazy splash of the waves.

THE DAY WE CAME TO PERIM I WAS ORDERLY OFFICER, and had to take a party of soldiers, bluejackets and marines to bathe off the island. Aunt Teresa, Sylvia, Uncle Emmanuel, and Berthe (very meagre in her bathing-dress) also came on our launch. There were naked black men and women on the beach, and Aunt Teresa and Berthe cleverly pretended that they did not see them. They did not look aside; they looked at them as though they were so much air. And a black beauty had taken Uncle Emmanuel’s fancy. We were back on the launch, and nearly alongside the boat, but he was still standing inert, his binocular gaze fixed on the shore, till Aunt Teresa saw fit to interrupt him: ‘ Emmanuel! Eh alors! ’

‘ Ah, c’est curieux !’ he said genially, looking round at us, as though inviting assent. ‘There are no trees, not a single one! Extraordinary country!’

‘Mind the steps, dear,’ I said tenderly, as we were alongside and climbing the slippery ladder to the quarter-deck.

I know I felt that there was something ineffably pathetic about our anchoring in the fading sunlight of a scorching afternoon — gliding noiselessly into the silent harbour, still as doom. What spots there were in the world. What places! Aden, the back-stairs of the globe. Sylvia leaned on the rail and looked, and I beside her. It made her want to weep softly and woefully, she could not say why. And when the boat, gliding noiselessly, halted still in this uncanny stillness of moist air and yellow water, she looked at me as though expecting that I too must be aware of her emotion. Beastly looked too. He shook his head slowly. ‘What a black hole to live in!’

We dined on board, and after dinner stepped into the launch and crossed the tepid shark-infested strip of water to the cheerless shore. Not a tree, not a patch of grass. The sun had sunk into the sea, but the baked desert earth still glowed with heat, and when, driving through the dark of night in a car dashing at full speed, I held out my hand, it was like putting it into an oven. The Sahara was breathing on us from behind. The moon in heaven seemed stifled by the night. The General with the mad eyes who was not allowed to come with us (lest he detract the Arabs from the line of duty to iniquity) asked me to buy a packet of tobacco for him. This done, we visited the famous cisterns deemed to have been built by King Solomon, passed down the many flights of stairs into the hollow depths wherein our steps and even whisper resounded magnified a hundredfold. The night was black, and Aden a dark pit. The car put on speed. We were back at the coast — back on the boat.

In the midst of the Red Sea, Sylvia dreamt of how nice it would be to go on a beautiful voyage together.

‘Darling, even in dreams one should observe a certain measure of reality. What is the use of dreaming of future voyages now? We’re in the midst of one and — and it isn’t that we like it awfully.’

‘You’re only making a convenience of me.’

‘An inconvenience.’

‘Kiss me; you never kiss me now.’

‘A kiss today, a kiss tomorrow. How it doesn’t tire you!’

‘You have got up with the wrong leg this morning, darling.’

‘Very likely. Very likely. Captain Negodyaev has borrowed £7 from me this morning.’ I looked into my pocket-book to see what was still there, and suddenly I came across a card with—

Some day our eyes shall see

The face we love so well ,

Some day our hands shall clasp ,

And never say ‘Farewell .’

‘What is it, darling, let me see?’

‘Ah, that was a beautiful evening.’

‘It was. Better than any we have had since.’

‘It was.’

‘But, darling, what will happen to us next when we get back to Europe? Have you thought of it?’

I sighed. ‘There are in life such concatenations of circumstances when you neither know nor care what happens next or next after.’

‘But I want to know.’

‘Exactly. I notice, with regret, the same morbid and unhealthy appetite in the readers of novels. How do I know? There is no end to life except death — and so when this boat of ours reaches the shores of England it will merely mark the end of a particular group phase in our individual existence.’

‘You speak to me like a teacher,’ she complained.

‘I favour a mild measure of uncertainty as regards the future.’

‘Gustave,’ she said — and was silent.

‘The extradition of Gustave may prove to be a costly business.’

‘No. When I get to London I shall go to see my solicitor,’ she said, ‘to arrange a divorce immediately.’

‘On what grounds?’

She thought a while. ‘Desertion.’

‘Oh!’

‘Restitution of conjugal rights,’ she said knowingly.