William Gerhardie - The Polyglots

Henceforth the General could not make up his mind whether he should go on to Sicily, France, Czecho-Slovakia, Germany, or England. With Gibraltar — across was scorching Africa — the Mediterranean blue was left behind, and the tropical green of the Indian Ocean with Natàsha in it was long out of sight, out of call. No sooner had we turned the ‘corner’ and plunged into the Bay of Biscay than we began to feel the difference. Suddenly it had become cold. We paced the deck in our overcoats. There was the drizzling rain. Then Percy Beastly, as though nothing was the matter with him, walked quickly to his bunk.

‘Sylvia wants to have the fancy-dress ball tonight,’ Aunt Teresa observed to me. ‘But I hear the Captain is against it — it being Sunday.’

‘That is no reason.

‘Of course, it’s too rough.’

‘That too is no reason.’ Had they forgotten, so soon forgotten, my little friend?

‘The Chaplain is also against having it on a Sunday.’

‘If there is a reasonable God in heaven’—and I already felt her shrinking from what she felt to be a coming piece of blasphemy—‘if there is a reasonable God in heaven, He won’t care tuppence if you dance on Sunday or if you don’t.’

‘That is so,’ she agreed; and suddenly a cynical look came into her eyes. ‘But if He is unreasonable?’ Her face twitched, her charming powdered nose wrinkled with a touch of devilry; she seemed both frightened lest she should be blaspheming and proud of her original cynicism, as if to say, ‘I can do as well as any, if I want to.’ But the next moment the fear of blaspheming outweighed the other impulse. ‘We ought not to say these things’; adding, after a pause of reflection, ‘And particularly now we’re at sea.’

Instinctively we both looked at the gathering clouds. The sun had sunk; the waves were getting very black. Twilight at sea! What sadness. I remembered that these things come like bolts from the sky. You come home and find your uncle hanging in the dark-room. Or you wake up to find a child had died at sea. ‘We ought to be at the service, instead of talking like that.’ Away in the saloon, they paid homage and thanks to their Lord. The evening service was nearing to its end, and the hymn resounded, dim and melancholy, through closed doors.

Abide with me; fast falls the eventide;

The darkness deepens; Lord, with me abide .

It was dusk. The sea raged without abating. What was intolerable was that it would evidently go on raging as long as it pleased. It showed no sign of abating with the second, the third, or tenth surge. The waves began, not at the shore, but somewhere in the middle of the Bay, gathering momentum, till they rose in mountains and broke over us, leaving deep yawning gaps that threatened to swallow us. This fury of inanimate nature let loose is awful because it behaves with an unmeaning mercilessness just as if we were not there — as it did before man had stepped out of the slime to try and bridle it. So the waves must have raged when this earth was one ocean. Why this wrath? The inanimate taking on the mood of an animate being; the ocean crouching at you like a tiger. What did it want from us? ‘Ah, he is terrible , the ocean!’ Uncle Emmanuel said, as, after dinner, in the falling dusk, we stood in our overcoats, clenching at the rail and watching the approach of the surges. The waves, like fierce white-maned horses, galloping from afar, crashed down upon us and rushed past without cease, and their flying manes sent a chill through our hearts as, tearing, swelling with rage, they came on.

I turned in. Aunt Molly sick, Sylvia sick, Berthe sick, Harry sick, Nora sick. Nor was my commission, be it remembered, a naval one. The dark turbulent mass will not rest in the night; the spray splashed at the glass, as I sat on the rocking seat at the rocking desk in the writing-room and coped with my diary.

I wrote:

Her prime young loveliness, swift grace, her springtide brightness — it was not for long. — No matter. Her true being was not in that but in her shining star, a light for ever, now dipped into new worlds.

My thoughts drifted. In years to come she would have been an exquisite young girl. The answer, it may be, to my yearning being. Perhaps — I saw it half-foreshadowed across the cheated years — my one true love. Dreams! Life itself has died with her, and beauty with it, and all the promise of all beings yet to be born.

The sea swept on heedless of everything. I wrote — I dozed off. I dreamt that I was at Liverpool Street Station, just stepping on the moving stairs and going up to the street level — the way out. The stairs of transcendence; the unchanging spirit of movement and change: if we can get a foot on to this moving staircase, we go towards new wonders without end. And suddenly I saw Natàsha sitting on the step holding fast with both hands, wonder and delight writ in her shining eyes. And a few steps behind sat Anatole, in Belgian uniform, with boots soiled by the mud of Flanders, happy, debonair, waving the national colours, and shouting: ‘ Vive la Belgique !’ And then behind him, at a little distance, Uncle Lucy, taciturn and unresponding, in the knickers and the boudoir cap. All racing up — up — up to heaven. Past and past they went, past the street level, past the ‘way out’. For there is no way out as there is no way in: for all is life and there is nothing to get out into.

‘Time, sir!’

I opened my eyes. The steward had come to put out the lights in the writing-room. ‘Of course. Of course.’ I rubbed my eyes. From outside came the melancholy chant of the surges, and the uneven beat — as though of a contrite heart — of the piston rod. Here they still push and shuffle, I thought, and get into one another’s way in the corridors, or some try to run up the stairs, press forward, fall off — irreligious dullards! — when all they need do is to get on and keep still. To escape from this sheer restlessness, to get an abiding place in the eternal newness of the world!

As the saloon doors leading out on deck were always shut before this hour I was surprised to see them open. But when I spied my aunt crouching in a deck-chair I was not astonished. For one who had carried clean off her officer-husband in the midst of a great war; who had induced her daughter to break with her lover and marry clean against her will; who on the bridal night had sent the bridegroom home to his solitary bed, and sailed away with his young wife: for a woman who had done these things without forfeiting the least good will, to break the routine regulations of a ship was, I suppose, little more than a routine. I looked at her sitting there, all shrivelled up, crouching, gasping for air. But I was not a little frightened lest she be sick, and the pretty sight of it provoke my own sensitive entrails; so I had no sympathy to waste on her condition.

She looked at me darkly. ‘Where is Berthe? Here am I, ill and faint and quite alone! Oh, my God! where is she?’

‘She’s with Percy. He is indisposed. It’s the sea.’

‘Ah! but this is extraordinary! He is a man! and I am a woman, a poor invalid! and I have no one to attend on me!’

With expiatory gestures I mimicked back at her thus: ‘ !!! Que voulez-vous ?’

The ocean still rolled its angry surges. As far as the eye could see it was black night. I paced up and down like a captain on the bridge, on guard — against what? These lines from Goethe:

Was, von Menschen nicht gewusst

Oder nicht bedacht ,

Durch das Labyrinth der Brust

Wandelt in der Nacht

came into my mind.

I do not want to sadden you with pessimism; nevertheless it looks — it very much looks, Uncle Emmanuel’s salary as Member of the Dixmude Municipal Films Censorship Committee being a paltry one — as though my royalties on this forthcoming book would be the sole support of Aunt Teresa and her retinue. A sad look-out for an intellectual! Before I left Harbin in the sunshine, my pocket-book was bulging with bank-notes of a high denomination; now after being fleeced and drained by my relations I am again as poor as a curate. I have an insane desire to sneak down the gangway as the boat touches the quay of Southampton, and only let them see my heels.