The Polyglots (11 page)
Uncle Emmanuel suggested her signing it at this point. But Aunt Teresa felt that this was not really enough.
‘May God forgive you!’ she added, and then signed it:
‘Teresa Vanderflint.’
Uncle Emmanuel, writing his letter in French, began thus:
To my brother-in-law Lucy Diabologh.
I have just read the abusive letter which you have had the audacity to write to your sister Teresa who had nothing but the tenderest feelings towards you. Allowing for your own feelings in the matter, I choose to tell you that you have surpassed the measure of decent behaviour and that your letter has completely wrecked the health of my poor wife whose precarious state impels constant care and attention, and for whom, I must warn you, such emotions may prove fatal. If my income was inferior to that derived by my wife from the money inherited from her father, it does not yet follow that I have lived on your money, as you imply. Nevertheless, your offer to settle your debt to us of 500,000 roubles by one shilling appears to me so indescribably odious that I decline to discuss the matter with you any further. I repeat that I have never had the privilege of living on you, as you imagine, but that my family benefited by an advantageous (?) investment in a Russian industry at a time of prosperity of a capital of
100,000 roubles which belonged to my wife and that you were in duty bound to do your best for all of us. The facts have proved, alas! that the too absolute confidence that we have reposed in the ability and judgment of our brother-in-law has resulted in a catastrophe which must have occurred even if the war and revolution had not intervened. It must not, therefore, be forgotten by you that
we
are your creditors and not you ours, as you erroneously suppose.
I regret that for the first time that I have to correspond with a brother-in-law whom I had never had the occasion to meet I must be called to give him a lesson in
savoir vivre
. I ask him to cease all malignant polemics in regard to his brother-in-law and to spare his sister emotions so painful as those caused by his last missive.
He signed with a flourish:
‘Emmanuel Vanderflint.’
Aunt Teresa’s and Uncle Emmanuel’s letters were so long and explicit that Uncle Lucy as he read them must have felt he wanted to dine in between.
THE DOVE
MEANWHILE, THE SITUATION AS REGARDS THE sheepskin coats was still uncertain. Vague and perplexing. Dubious and undetermined. Confused and unsettled. Oracular, ambiguous, equivocal. Bewildering, precarious, embarrassing and controvertible, mysterious and undefinable, inscrutable and unaccountable, impenetrable, hesitant—apparently insoluble. Incredible! Incomprehensible! My orders were to ascertain their whereabouts and to arrange for their dispatch by rail to—I didn’t quite remember where. This I tried to arrange. ‘But where are the
coats?’ the railway authorities questioned. Alas, this was more than I knew. For the sheepskin coats, as I said, could not be traced.
At last I telegraphed:
‘Sheepskin coats cannot be traced. Wire instructions.’ And tired out by this exertion of duty and feeling the need of wholesome recreation, I said to Sylvia:
‘Come out and dine with me.’
‘Oh! Oh! Really? Oh! Indeed! I see! Oh! Very nice!’ she said in tones of roguish whimsicality which that moment made her irresistible.
I added: ‘Without further cost to yourself, as they say in the business world.’
‘Without further cost to yourself, as they say in the business world.’ She learnt my expressions, I noticed, and repeated them. A very good sign.
I looked at her tenderly. ‘My Irish darling!
Mein irisch Kind
!’
‘Oh! Oh! Indeed,’ she said. She was brimming all over with life and wanted to be naughty like a child, but didn’t quite know how to set about it, and so only hopped about on tiptoe, while I wondered if I had sufficient money in my pocket-book, and if so, whether I could not spend it better than by dining out—buying a new pair of cavalry boots, for example. And my spirit clouded. Like my old grandfather on my mother’s side, I was not over-fond of spending money, and now at this extravagant resolution to distract myself with Sylvia by an expensive meal, my old grandfather called to me from the grave. His motto had been: ‘Bargain, bargain, bargain hard, and when you’ve done, beg a hank of thread.’ He was never tired of warning: ‘When poverty comes through the door, love flies out of the window.’ Or he would buy a pennyworth of paper clips and demand a guarantee. He had spent his whole nervous force in life in seeing that he always got full value for his money, and he died unconscious of the fact that he had not received the value for the life that he had spent. But in moments of wanton extravagance, my grandfather would be calling to me from the grave.
At the big shop in the Kitaiskaya—I have forgotten the name—I bought Sylvia a bottle of scent. In another shop she bought a piece of elastic; sat down and examined the articles with a proud, competent air and sent the girl about her business. And again I noticed her astoundingly charming profile. As the elastic was being wrapped up for her she took hold of her little vanity-bag, a little insincerely, perhaps, while I was looking dreamily away; then I bestirred myself and anticipated her action with a wholly admirable gallantry. And possibly because the amount was something like tuppence, for once my grandfather did not stir.
As we entered the restaurant ‘
Moderne
’ we were confronted by an enormous savage-looking head waiter—the sort of man of whom you tell yourself at once, ‘That man’s an ass.’ And subsequent events confirmed our worst suspicions. The waiter looked at us with that savage dubious look, as though he were not quite certain whether Sylvia and I were human beings or some other animals. He displayed the greatest inefficiency in the seemingly simple task of finding us an empty table, of which the number, in proportion to the tables occupied, was vast. Around us stood the waiters—internationals all: a race unto themselves—with that look of theirs betraying that their minds were only set upon a share of what I had in my breast-pocket. And because I was palpably allergic to such menials as porters, waiters and the like, I talked in a loud unconcerned voice, calculated also to reassure myself, and generally assumed the attitude of a gastronomic connoisseur and a man of the world—as though I were Arnold Bennett. Sylvia was studying the menu, and the enormous head waiter bent over her chair. And I looked at him with dark hatred. Among other things, Sylvia wanted chicken. There were two kinds of chicken. A whole chicken cost 500 roubles. A wing, 100 roubles. The rate of exchange, be it remembered, at that time was only 200 roubles to £1 sterling. The enormous head waiter strongly recommended the whole chicken. ‘Straight from Paris in an aeroplane,’ he said. I felt cold in the feet.
Sylvia hesitated dangerously. ‘I don’t think I want as much as
a whole chicken. I’ll have a wing,’ she uttered at last. I breathed freely.
‘But the wing is larger than the chicken, madam,’ said the fiend. I longed to ask him to explain that curious mathematical perversion, but a latent sense of gallantry deterred me. I felt like clubbing him. But civilization suffered me to go on suffering in silence. ‘
Go away
,’ I whispered inwardly. ‘
Oh, go away
!’ But I sat still, resigned. Only my left eyelid began to twitch a little nervously.
‘All right,’ she said. ‘I’ll have the whole chicken, then.’
Five hundred roubles! £2 10s. for a solitary chicken! My dead grandfather raised his bushy eyebrows. And I already pictured to myself how under the removed restraints of matrimony, probably in my braces and shirt-sleeves, I would exhort my wife to cut down her criminal expenditure.
There was a variety of ice-creams at ‘popular prices’, but Sylvia ordered a silly dish called ‘Pêche Melba’—and proportionately more expensive.
‘What wine, darling?’
‘French,’ she said.
‘But what kind?’
‘White, darling.’
The waiter bent over the wine list and pointed to the figures which were double those he did not point to. ‘But what kind?’
‘Sweet. The sweetest.’
And, according to the waiter, the sweetest wine concorded with the highest figure on the list.
How I hate extravagant drinks! How I hate extravagant food! What I really wanted now, if I could have my way, was eggs and bacon and hot milk.
‘Yes, that will do,’ she said.
The waiter, bowing, whipped his napkin under the arm and retired with the air of one who has his work cut out. The band struck up a gay waltz, but in my soul was darkness.
‘Whatever is the matter, darling?’ she enquired.
‘This soup,’ I said. ‘It’s damned hot. And why should I eat soup?’
‘You eat soup at home.’
‘At home I eat it—whether it’s there or not—I mean I eat it—I don’t care—because it’s there. Automatically.’
‘Well, eat it here as you would at home,’ she said. ‘Automatically.’
‘But here—oh, well, never mind.’
Spreading the table-napkin on her knees, quickly she brought her fingers together and bending a little and closing her eyes, hurriedly mumbled grace to herself. Then she began to eat the soup, dreamily rolling her eyes.
Meanwhile, the waiter had returned. ‘I regret, madam, but no more whole chickens left. Only the wing.’ And that moment the music seemed exhilarating.
‘Cheer up,’ I said.
‘In that case,’ said she, slowly recovering from the blow, ‘I’ll have something else.’
In front of us were two women of twenty. ‘Look at those two grannies there,’ Sylvia called out aloud.
‘Sylvia!’
She smiled a beautiful bashful smile: her mouth was closed, only the lips withdrew and revealed a portion of her teeth. A delicious smile.
She rolled her eyes and talked a lot to herself, cooing like a dove. I felt she wanted that I should propose marriage to her, but she was shy to ask. ‘Major Beastly,’ she said, and blushed, ‘thought that—that—that we were—you were—my, as it were, in a word, my fiancé.’ And she blushed crimson.
‘He’s a good man, Beastly,’ I said. And she blushed again. Sylvia had brought with her to dinner a letter from a man who had proposed to her once in Japan. ‘Read this,’ she said. The letter, which struck a devil-me-care tone, ended with the words: ‘If the price of rubber goes down by one jot, I’m a ruined man.’
‘He is in the rubber trade now,’ she explained, ‘somewhere in Canada, some place called Congo or something——’
‘You mean in Africa.’
‘Yes, yes.’
‘What is he? English? American?’
‘A Canadian.’
‘Where did you meet him?’
‘At the dance in Tokyo.’
‘And——?’
‘He wanted to marry me.’ She lowered her lashes. ‘He loved me.’
‘And you——?’
She did not answer at once. ‘He was rather like you.’
‘No excuse.’
‘Only worse.’
‘Still less.’
‘I wanted somebody to love me. And you were away.’
‘And you let him?’
‘Only one kiss—one evening.’
‘I am not listening! Not listening!’ I cried, covering my face with the table-napkin.
‘Darling, listen——’
‘No!’
‘You’re not listening,’ she laughed. Her laughter was a lovely thing.
‘I am not.’
There was silence except for the sound I made in eating the soup. She beamed at me with her lustrous eyes. ‘Tell me something.’
‘You’re Cressid—I mean Chaucer’s, not Shakespeare’s, of course.’
Like Cressida, she knew neither Chaucer nor Shakespeare.
‘When did you see him last?’
‘As we left Tokyo. He caught me while
maman
had turned away. We stood on the platform. He went in—and gave me a cocktail.’
‘Did you like it?’
‘Yes. He drank and looked at me. “Marry me, Sylvia,” he said. “I will go away, make a lot of money on rubber, and then come back for you.”
‘ “I can’t,” I said. “I love another.” ’
‘Whom? Whom?’ I asked in alarm.
‘You. Or I liked to think so.’
‘And what did he say?’
‘ “The blackguard!” he said.’
‘Oh!’
‘I said to him that you used to kiss me without being engaged to me. “The cad!” he said. “I’ll punch his head for him.” I said you wrote very short letters. “The rotter!” he said, “taking a mean advantage of you. The scoundrel!” ’
‘That will do,’ I said. ‘I’ll punch his own silly head for him. Who is he, anyhow?’
‘ “I’ll break him in two,” he said. “The scoundrel! The blackguard! The cad!” ’
‘Now, that will do, that will do. What did
you
say?’
‘ “I love another,” I said. Then I held out my hand to him, like this: “Good-bye, Harry; you will probably never see me again.” And there were tears in his eyes as he turned and walked away quickly.’
‘Never mind. Eat your soup, darling.’
She did not eat but stared in front of her.
‘You’re not thinking of him?’ I asked, with suspicion.
‘No.’
‘H’m!… Who’re you thinking of?’
‘You.’
‘Only me?’
‘Yes.’
She took a few spoonfuls and then asked, ‘Have you by any chance seen in the
Daily Mail
what the price of rubber——’
‘Look here,’ I said, with some ill-controlled impatience, ‘never you mind about the price of rubber. Eat your soup.’
‘Oh, when you were away I came across an ideal menu in the
Daily Mail
. It was supposed to be the ideal dinner for young people just engaged. And I thought then: if Alexander comes back and takes me out to dinner I must have this menu.’
‘What was it, darling?’
She looked unhappy as she strained her memory. ‘I can’t remember,’ she said.
‘Well, but some of the dishes surely?’
She strained her memory and again looked as unhappy as she could be. ‘I can’t remember.’
‘Well, then, one single dish out of the blooming lot,’ I cajoled. I waited. ‘Out with it!’
She strained her face again. ‘No, I can’t remember.’
‘But this is remarkable,’ I said, laying down my spoon in astonishment.
‘Eat your soup, darling, or it will be cold,’ she said.
I ate, and she ate, and we looked at each other as we ate.