Sea of Glass (Valancourt 20th Century Classics) (4 page)

I missed the point because I knew nothing about the politics of Sinkiang. Whilst I was still wondering how to respond, the tubular gong in the hall began to warble, its notes mixing with the quarter-chimes of the innumerable clocks which simultaneously announced the hour of lunch.

The meal was not a very happy one, in spite of the excellence of the food. Considering the small degree of supervision which its mistress could exert, the household at Aynho Terrace ran with surprising smoothness. This was partly due to the unexhausted strength of tradition, and partly to the fact that, for all appearances to the contrary, Mrs. Ellison had collected round her an exceptionally honest and conscientious nucleus of upper servants.

The trouble was, quite simply, the presence at the same table of Varvara and Nurse Fillis. They obviously hated each other.

This intense hostility struck me as something actuated from beyond visible causes. Each had her social disabilities, but in neither did they seem to take a form which should be particularly liable to rile the other.

As at breakfast, Nurse Fillis got up and left the table whilst we were still eating. If I had had to guess about a move which interested me so little, I should have said that she did so either from an inflated idea of her duties, or else in recognition of the fact that the family and their guests might like a chance to talk in private. Varvara, however, had a more original theory. As soon as the door closed behind her enemy she gave a loud, gruff giggle.

‘Now she goes upstairs to wash her armpits.’

‘Why on earth do you imagine she’s doing that?’ I said when I had recovered a little.

‘From desire,’ replied Varvara in a sombre tone. ‘
Elle fait la cour au roi des hyènes
.’

I had not noticed that the butler was in the room during these exchanges. Otherwise—prig that I was—I should certainly not have abetted them. Now, however, it was too late. Turpin who was doing something mysterious in a corner with the remains of a bottle of white wine gave a loud liquid chortle followed by the almost anguished cry of ‘Box on!’ As he went out of the room, still choking with mirth, Varvara observed:

‘Turpin is a man of God.’

It had been made clear by Mrs. Ellison that I was expected to devote the afternoon to entertaining her granddaughter. Nor had I any intention of welshing. I merely hoped that Varvara, like myself, would prefer some sort of active amusement. Nevertheless for fear of seeming stingy, I felt bound to begin by suggesting a matinée or a visit to the cinema. To my delight she rejected both without hesitation.

‘I wish to walk in the town,’ she said.

I took her by a circuitous route to Kensington Gardens. At the bottom of Queen’s Road we saw a disaster. A middle-aged man lay, either dead or insensible, on the outer edge of the pavement. One constable was bending over him whilst another kept back the usual ring of spectators. Since no vehicle seemed to be near, there was more than the usual scope for speculation.

‘Poor chap,’ I said, ‘I wonder what’s happened to him!’

This presented no problem to Varvara.

‘He was robbing in the street,’ she said confidently, ‘when the guards of the magistrate came by and shot him.’

After a pause I said:

‘How long have you been in England?’

‘Now, three weeks and three days,’ she replied.

‘Well, if I were you I shouldn’t be in a hurry to jump to conclusions.’

If I had been brave enough and cruel enough I might have added: ‘On the other hand, if you like to learn up a few of the simpler conventions, you can’t be too quick for me.’ Like most very young men I was gravely embarrassed by any eccentricities of behaviour or appearance. I certainly did not dress well myself, I was not even neat, yet I was capable of suffering acutely in the company of someone who wore brown shoes with pinstriped trousers. Any breach of the rules by a woman was even more excruciating. Nineteen twenty-eight is not very long ago, but it is an effort to recall how much more conventional people were in those days. For instance, if a girl had walked about the London streets without stockings, the dirty thoughts would have been swarming up her legs like centipedes. Varvara did wear stockings, though without much attention to their grip or alignment. On the other hand she had no hat; her tawny mane seemed to have a peculiarly elastic quality which caused it to bounce and flare out round her head as though a galvanic current were running through it. The garment which I incorrectly thought of as a djibbah was not intrinsically daring, but a piquant effect could be obtained by leaving the buttons which ran down the front open as far as the waist.

It is a curious thing, which I have confirmed more than once, that a woman who comes from a country where there are strict rules of female modesty from which she is exempt will not unconsciously approximate to those standards; much more probably she will go round in a way which would cause comment in a licensed quarter.

But at least I had a companion who never allowed any one embarrassment to chafe monotonously. Brisk as raindrops came half a dozen more, making their impact in as many different quarters.

‘We should be friends,’ announced Varvara, as though she were triumphantly refuting some furious argument to the contrary. ‘We have the same misfortune.’

Oh no, we haven’t, I thought. My shirt is done up in front.

‘You also are an orphan—yes?’

‘Yes.’

‘We fight alone.’

‘I didn’t know your mother was dead too,’ I said, for something to say.

Varvara rolled up her magnificent eyes until practically only the whites were visible.

‘God rest her, my beloved Serafina Filipovna. She had a terrible death. I shall tell you about it and see if you weep.’

‘Let’s take a chair,’ I said, feeling that it might be easier to force a few tears from a sitting position.

We arranged ourselves to look over the Round Pond, above which a faint water-vapour was shimmering in the brilliant heat.

Varvara began: ‘In the summer at Doljuk it is so hot that nobody can sleep in the houses. At night they go into the cellars which are dug deep beneath the yards. But before you lie down you must be very careful. You must search the
Kang
and search the ceiling and you must burn along the cracks of the wall. Otherwise the pests will come out and empoison you in your sleep.’

‘Bugs?’ I queried.

‘Pests,’ said Varvara firmly. ‘Scorpions, many bad flies, and also
nobbol
.’

‘What’s
nobbol
?’

It was more easily asked than answered. There was a gap in Varvara’s English about
nobbol
and not one which could be easily filled by circumlocution or gesture. After several feverish minutes I had accumulated a number of disconnected items about them; for instance that they were about half the size of her palm, they had hair, appeared to be generally unloved and—to make it more difficult—they uttered a noise which she rendered as a sort of bark. But none of this added up to any coherent picture. And since
nobbol
were clearly essential to the story, it looked as if I might miss the horrible end of Serafina Filipovna.

Presently, however, a little dejected by her failure to explain, Varvara allowed her eyes to wander. Of a sudden she stiffened and pointed with a cry at the ground beside her chair. I looked down and saw a tiny spider clambering round a piece of stick.

‘
Nobbol
,’ she said triumphantly.

‘But they don’t bark.’

‘In Doljuk,’ she insisted.

‘Well, it’s your story!’

Here I will admit that subsequent research shows that Varvara was speaking the literal truth. In parts of Sinkiang is found a species of very large spider covered with reddish fur. It is capable of making a noise which natural history books usually compare to the snapping together of two boards. It bites fiercely and injects some sort of venom whose effects are highly unpredictable. Some people suffer very little, but in others the stuff produces intense lassitude followed by swelling and coagulation of the blood round the wound.

Apparently Varvara’s mother was sleeping alone in the cellar, because her husband and daughter were away on one of the former’s business expeditions. I suspect that Serafina Filipovna may have prepared herself for a lonely night with several hearty drinks. At any rate she fell asleep without making the usual precautionary search. By bad luck not merely one but two
nobbol
dropped on her and bit her simultaneously on the breast and the side of the neck. She had never been attacked before and neither she nor anybody else knew that she was violently allergic to the poison. Before she could seek aid she fell into a stupor, during which great buboes of stagnant blood came up at the points of injury. Presently fragments broke away from the main clots and were washed round in her circulation till they reached her heart and brain. So I suppose she died from a kind of multiple thrombosis.

The tale was my first introduction to life in Doljuk, and it indicated the general flavour not badly—the savagery, the inconsequence, and an element of absurdity which prevented the most frightful blows from acquiring any spiritual significance. It is an awful thing to be bitten to death by barking spiders, but it is not tragedy.

I should have liked to ask Varvara how her father had perished. But I thought it might seem a morbid insistence on the details of her orphanship. Besides I was conscious how very little I had to offer in return: merely one pneumonia and one motor accident.

After a while we strolled on, going down to the Serpentine and then along its banks as far as Lancaster Gate. From there we cut up into Hyde Park. We were not very far on the way to Marble Arch, and the heat was already making me think of a return by bus, when a few yards ahead of us I recognized a familiar figure.

Andrew Callingham had rooms on the same College staircase as myself. He was a year older than I by birth, and at least a decade by experience. His father was a financier, who received a good deal of mention in the newspapers. I suppose he was what they call cosmopolitan and had brought up his son likewise. At any rate by the age of twenty-one Andrew was at home in London or New York or Paris. Brighton suited him equally well—though this did not dawn on people till later.

I don’t know why he bothered with me, except perhaps that I was useful whenever he wanted to get rid of a surplus of worldly wisdom. His visits to my rooms were usually paid late at night after his return from some gambling party in Trinity, or, more often, a gallant visit to Town.

‘Don’t get caught up in it, David,’ he would say. ‘I dropped eighty tonight,’ or, ‘I thought I should never get rid of the little bitch’—depending on the way he had spent the evening.

‘Don’t let yourself be drawn into it,’ he would repeat.

Simple though I was, I realized at an early stage that if by some chance I disregarded his advice and began to rush round gambling and fornicating, Andrew would be very, very angry. I should have destroyed a delicate but essential constituent in our relationship.

If I had been in control of our progress, I would have dawdled so that we never caught him up. Unfortunately Varvara set the pace, and it was a brisk one. There was nothing for it but to swallow my mean fear of being laughed at for going about with a wild woman. Andrew did a good deal of quiet sniggering at the comic lack of sophistication around him.

‘Hallo,’ I said, as we came level.

He stopped and raised his pearl-coloured trilby.

‘David, my dear chap! And accompanied!’ He smiled at Varvara. ‘David always pretends to be such a woman-hater.’

‘This is Miss Ellison,’ I said. ‘From Chinese Turkestan.’

‘No!’ said Andrew. ‘Or is that an example of your famous poker-faced humour?’

‘He speaks the truth,’ said Varvara. ‘Why should you doubt him?’

‘I don’t really,’ said Andrew. ‘It is just that I’ve never met anyone from those parts before. In fact I can’t miss the chance of making good the gap in my education. Why don’t we all go and have tea at Tytlers.’

Tytlers lay just behind Park Lane. It was one of the most fashionable teashops in London. There, sitting on small gold chairs with bars like harp-strings across the backs, one could eat the nicest ice-creams and cakes which I have ever tasted. Two things only I hoped: first that Andrew would pay, for I had very little money on me; and secondly that Varvara’s dress would not attract stares—though on this point I was somewhat reassured by Andrew’s calm acceptance.

Accidentally or by design they put us at a secluded table. As usual the place was pretty full and it was not numbers that Andrew was thinking of when he said:

‘I don’t know what’s happening to this place. You practically never see anyone here nowadays.’

‘To me there seem many,’ said Varvara.

‘He means people of importance,’ I said.

I don’t know why, but I thought this explanation might make her annoyed or contemptuous. Those seemed to be the proper reactions of a Noble Savage. But on the contrary a look of interest animated her face and her fierce blue gaze swept round the room like an arc-lamp.

‘They are peasants?’ she said.

Andrew began to laugh.

‘Oh dear!’ he said. ‘That’s very nice. Yes, I see several who could be described as honorary peasants.’

‘At first I must say strange and foolish things,’ said Varvara with dignity and also with an unsuspected humility. ‘But in the end I shall come to speak as a true-born residing native.’

‘God forbid!’ said Andrew. ‘It would be a descent from champagne to soda-water.’

Here I will anticipate a little. From her father she inherited great linguistic gifts which were developed by the hotch-potch of races amidst which she had lived. As well as English, she spoke fluent Russian, French, Chinese, and Turki—the last being a language of quite fantastic difficulty. But like most polyglots she was prevented by the range of her accomplishments from becoming absolutely at home in any of them. Nobody who talked to her for five minutes would have believed that she was English. And yet her actual solecisms were few and her mispronunciations still rarer. It was the odd turn of phrase—the dignified word when one expected a colloquialism—which gave her conversation its foreign ring.