The Polyglots (27 page)

We stopped peeping but began whispering to each other; for, indeed, Uncle Lucy was getting very strange. He did not come in to chocolate, but went up into the dark-room instead to develop some snaps. Of late, Uncle Lucy was always taking photographs and developing them in the dark-room upstairs. After chocolate, the children began playing together, at first somewhat gingerly, as if sounding one another; then more freely and boisterously. There was a boy with a withered arm, nevertheless very sturdy and strong and twice the size of Harry. Harry, in a wicked mood, came up to him suddenly, and—for no conceivable reason, but merely from an abounding sense of well-being—slapped him in the face. The boy’s impulse was to strike Harry back, but he must have remembered that he was a guest and restrained himself, with a mighty effort. For two minutes or so he brooded over the offence, as if considering whether he should be offended or no. He could not stomach the idea that a boy half his size should have dared to strike him in the face with impunity. At last, he came up to Harry and—mildly, because he was the guest, almost amicably, with a propitiatory, extenuating smile—slapped Harry in the face. Harry looked as if considering whether he should cry, but since the boy with the withered arm smiled, Harry decided to take no offence and smiled too—unconvincingly. Two little girls with a little boy came in—a curly-haired, black-eyed, clean-faced and thoroughly well-brought-up boy, who presently, quite by accident, got a black eye from the boy with the withered arm, and went off crying softly. At once his two little sisters put their arms round his neck, kissing and consoling him: ‘Oh, it
was
a knock. Oh, it
was
one!’—A microcosm of the adult world.

They bandaged the little boy’s head up, and they all went on playing again. In the end, hardly one of them escaped uninjured.

‘And now Nora will recite to us,’ said Aunt Teresa, ‘Little fly on the wall.’

‘No, “Wee Willie”,’ she said.

‘All right, “Wee Willie”, then.’ And placed on a chair, Nora said:

All clapped; and, for an encore, she told us about Bunny who was white and
such
a size, who had long silky floppy ears and funny
wee
pink eyes.

Long after chocolate, Uncle Lucy came down into the drawing-room, where already a number of guests—my friends: local intellectuals—were gathered, and sat facing us, looking on sarcastically, never saying a word. He was pale, but his nose was redder than ever. ‘What is consciousness?’ I was saying. ‘At the point where
all
the rays meet, there is a spark: that spark is . But the same rays meet in infinity again and again an infinite number of times (all straight lines being crooked in the infinite), and so all these other sparks are all these other
I
’s. But since we are, each one of us, the sum of the same rays, all
I
’s have their immortal being in the source of the One, eternally replenished by the fount of the Many: the finest distillation of this comprehension being the spirit we call God.’

Uncle Lucy as he sat there, listening, looked so wise, so derisively contemptuous in his silence; had such a seer’s look in his eyes (as if indeed he were seeing through our intellectual foibles far into the future) that it silenced even the intellectuals. They felt
as if Uncle Lucy had a secret message for ever hidden from their minds. They looked respectfully expectant. Even Dr. Murgatroyd stopped talking. Uncle Lucy’s true secret, however—they did not know—was that he had quietly gone off his chump, indeed was already as mad as a hatter. Yesterday he had taken Aunt Teresa out for a drive and kept calling at shops without number, purchasing things—mostly cumbersome, useless things—without end, so that Aunt Teresa, sitting there beside him in the vehicle, thought that her poor brother had definitely turned the corner, and that his old vein of prodigious generosity was returning to him. But the extraordinary thing about it all was that the things he bought were conspicuously useless and unwieldy things—electric stoves, two ladders, a canary cage—depositing his purchases, as they drove on, at the railway station in charge of porters, at the theatre cloakroom, and suchlike places, which even to Aunt Teresa’s unsuspecting soul appeared a trifle singular. Next day he came into the drawing-room, with that sulky Charlie Chaplin look we grew to know so well, and manifesting the wish to tune up the piano, took it all to pieces, to the minutest particles, so that afterwards he was unable to put it together again. He went out, and Aunt Teresa, frightened of meeting him alone, locked the drawing-room door. He returned, and finding the door locked, smashed the window.

Now he pulled out his watch and, declaring that it was half-past twelve o’clock, said that he had some snaps to develop in the dark-room.

‘But, Uncle Lucy, it isn’t six! What is the matter with your watch?’

‘I’ve got to go by my watch—such as it is,’ he replied very gravely and earnestly, and went off to the dark-room.

I went back to my office, and Uncle Emmanuel, who had lit a cigar, said that in spite of the rain he would come out with me. The pavement was a glittering sheet, like a wet waterproof, but the evening was misty and dark and the rain that wetted my face was completely invisible, and only as you came up to a lamp-post could you see how, in the radius of yellow light, the silver rain fell
steadily from the sky. We took refuge in the barred doorway of a hosiery shop, whose windows were shuttered. A young woman was standing there, and my uncle took the opportunity of ogling at her through his pince-nez. And when I returned, after having vainly looked for a cab, Uncle Emmanuel was already speaking to her in his own tongue, while she only giggled and simpered. Presently we all moved along, Uncle Emmanuel holding his new friend by the arm. I parted with them at the back stairs of a shabby building, which they slowly ascended, but the rain having now become a torrent, I returned and stood under the porch, waiting for it to subside. Then, as I stood there, I heard strange menacing sounds from the back of the stairs up which my uncle had vanished. After a while, fearing that he might be in danger, I followed the sound of the menacing voice and gingerly knocked at a door on the second landing. There was no answer, but the thick drunken voice still boomed out menacing words, punctuated, as I now distinctly discerned, by Uncle Emmanuel’s, as it seemed to me, feeble exhortations which sounded rather like ‘Allies! Allies!’ With an inward thrill of trepidation, I pushed open the door and, entering, perceived a huge fierce drunken Cossack ‘carrying on’ in the face of my uncle’s clearly unwarranted presence, while the woman was doing her best to restrain him.

‘This is my husband,’ she turned to me. ‘Returned unexpectedly.’

But here, again, I am in difficulties. My uncle was, as you may guess, the hero of an unseemly situation. I warn the reader to put down the book, for I refuse to hold myself responsible for the doings of my uncle. I am a serious young man, an intellectual. I blush all over, my very paper blushes as I think of him standing there—I can’t. You must not press me to go any further. For there, if you please, stood my uncle—No; the less said of it the better. A veil over my uncle’s private life. A veil! A veil!

‘Cut you to pieces! Mince you up!’ shouted the Cossack, his hand on his sword-hilt, while Uncle Emmanuel meekly repeated: ‘Allies! We’re Allies!
Vive la Russie
! Allies!’

‘Allies!’ shouted the Cossack, coming close up to him with savage glee. ‘Allies! I’ll show you some allies!’

‘He’ll kill him,’ whispered the lady. ‘He’ll kill him, sure. Better give him something—some money quick! He’ll kill him!’

‘Give him some money,’ I cried in French. ‘For God’s sake give him some money, quick!’

Uncle Emmanuel fiddled with his pocket-book for a moment, and then producing a 500,000 rouble note (at that time worth about 80 centimes) gave it to the Cossack, who grabbed it with his huge sabre-scarred fist, his body swaying uncertainly as he did so. ‘Allies!’ he snorted. ‘H’m!’

He calmed down. ‘Call yourself Allies!’ he said, in a grumbling tone, no longer dangerous, and turning to go. ‘Allies! H’m! That’s right. Allies—in name.’ He paused. ‘I’ll go and have a drink,’ he said. And he went out, slamming the door after him.

My uncle looked at me, with confusion. ‘
Que voulez-vous!
’ he said. ‘
C’est la vie
.’

But a veil over my uncle’s doings. I went out at last, leaving him there. A nice lesson for a purist and no mistake!

I was sitting in my office, working on my book,
A Record of the Stages in the Evolution of an Attitude
, when the telephone rang shrilly at my side. I took up the receiver. It was Berthe.

‘Georges, come home at once.’

She did not say why, but I sensed a tone of calamity in her voice. Before I could make myself ask she had hung up the receiver.

The rain had stopped and the big orange moon hung in the sky. The funny old man in the moon, as I drove home, looked sly in the extreme, and the road was all orange and unreal, and our whole life that moment seemed a series of ludicrous antics which we took so seriously to heart because—because we could not see, because we did not know. And then I thought that if when I got home I found Berthe standing on her head or Uncle Lucy standing on one leg and crowing, ‘Cock-cock-cock-cock-orikoo!’ I would not turn a hair, finding it in strict
accordance with this orange light, this orange night, this orange moon.

When I arrived, I saw Harry, very tiny, very serious, below, proudly watering the flowers in the kitchen-yard out of a crooked tin; and two street urchins hanging on to the fence and gazing down at him with envy. The sight of him reassured me, but the absence of his little sister Nora made me feel uneasy.

‘Harry!’ I shouted down to him as I paid the cabman. But deep in his preoccupation with the ‘water-can’ he barely deigned to look up at me.

‘Harry!’ I said again. ‘Where is Nora?’

He mumbled something, looking at the boys the while.

‘Harry!’ I repeated. ‘Can’t you speak up? Where is Nora?’

‘In the w,’ he said in tones of provocation, gazing at the urchins in confusion.

Relieved, I made my way into the house. Berthe met me in the hall. She looked at me with that intimate sad smile I knew so well, but there was in it, this time, no trace of reminiscence, rather of a tragic resignation, and the red stripe on the tip of her nose—the result of the dog bite—gave her gravity a very funny expression. It was that look which in effect implies, ‘We live in a mad world: what can you expect?’ And I answered it with a series of quick becoming nods of gravity.

‘Your uncle,’ she said, ‘is dead.’

‘Which one?’

‘Uncle Lucy.’

‘Oh damn!’

I could find no more. Bang! that is fate flying in at your door. I was amazed more than really shocked. It was so unlike Uncle Lucy. He was not at all the kind of man to do a thing like that.—So his life was finished, wiped off the slate.

She led me silently ahead and up the stairs. Before the dark-room where Uncle Lucy used to develop his snaps, she paused and turned to me. ‘It’s a dreadful day today,’ she said. ‘He has hanged himself.’

I opened the door and went in.

Ever since I had been born, some five-and-twenty years ago, I have been more and more astonished at the spectacle of life as lived on our planet. Others had struggled with the hangman on the scaffold: what has induced this man to do the ghastly job himself? In the name of what logic, in the name of what God was he cutting this capering figure? It was a suicide, you might say, with extraordinary features. Uncle Lucy was clothed in Aunt Teresa’s camisole, knickers, silk stockings, garters, and a silk boudoir cap.

‘What I want to know,’ she said, ‘is
how
he got into her cupboard.’ And I had a vision of Uncle Lucy stealing into Aunt Teresa’s wardrobe—and stealing out again on tiptoe, with the camisole and knickers and the boudoir cap.

‘What
I
want to know is
why
he did it.’ I could not think why, unless, perhaps, to vindicate his girlish name.

His ordinary clothes were behind the door. The face was livid; only his nose, for once, was pale, and the body was still warm but lifeless. He was hanging on the rope when he was seen through the window by a neighbour, who at first, owing to the extraordinary attire, took him to be a dummy. He was now lying on the floor, a wretched sight to behold.

‘My God what had we better do? Send for the doctor?’ she asked.

I looked at my wrist-watch: two adjacent holes on the strap had joined and the strap was loose, the watch hung under my wrist. ‘A doctor! The matter is past a doctor. Though perhaps Abelberg had better come and look at him. I’m not exactly familiar with such feats. Poor man.’ But in my heart I could find nothing but annoyance.

‘Somebody must wash him,’ she said with grave concern, and shuddered at the prospect of doing it herself.

‘Doesn’t need washing now. Clean enough for the worms.’

‘Georges!’ she cried. ‘It’s—it’s blasphemy.’

These people are absurd.

‘Do you know what the good Jesus said about the dead?’

‘No; what?’

‘That the dead had better bury their dead.’

‘George!’ she said, still uncertain if my words were in accordance with propriety. ‘
Quelle tragédie
!’

I have no tears to waste over this sort of thing. ‘It’s not a tragedy, Berthe: it’s tragedy-bouffe.’

To hang yourself in a pair of Aunt Teresa’s knickers—it’s not the kind of thing you might expect to happen every day: it wanted some little getting used to. Suddenly, Berthe began to laugh (she couldn’t help it). Indeed, though dead, he looked very funny. Her laugh gave me the shudders. And as she began laughing, she laughed louder and louder; she laughed at the idea that she should be laughing; it struck her as being increasingly funny. She tried to suppress it. She could not. She ran out of the room.