The Polyglots (29 page)

There was no other sound than the chirruping of birds; the sun beating upon us, on the sprouting young green beneath the thawing snow, spoke of the passing of winter, of the awakening of life into spring, then into summer. The eternal cycle. And suddenly—for no reason—the thought of the gold bridge in Uncle Lucy’s mouth swam into my mind. It would outlast the ages! In these decades his teeth, his mouth, his body would be gradually decaying in the swilling grave, but the solid gold would be immune from change, and then, one day, there would be a moment when nothing whatsoever remained of his once active body, and the solid golden bridge would fall upon dry dust. The sky was kindly, the morning friendly and tranquil. I thought of this terrible death penalty that hangs over us all—when we shall fall asleep and not waken. No: waken, but far beyond this. In my soul I keep captive the soul of the world as hostage for my immortality. I have released it now: and we are one: and I am dead. To die could not be stranger than to come to life. He died—and was disillusioned in death. ‘Where was death?’ And there was no death. And perhaps he longed to explain, to tell us that there was no death, that death once dead, there was no dying then. Passion, in the nature of the satisfaction it seeks, is not a craving for acquisition, but rather for the release of the forces oppressing us. In the same way, death may be the release of those forces that had ‘licked us into shape’, and kept us in the mould of our particular individuality too long—a satisfaction akin to the physical, but lasting longer,
perhaps very long, perhaps into eternity. Death, I thought, is the merging of a particular vision in the sea of bleak generalities, the ending of all limiting and exclusive perspectives, the grandest of all disillusionments.

And then, as one felt that all was over and it was time for us to go, Aunt Molly who had so far made heroic efforts to contain herself, suddenly trembled, her face changed, quivered, and she began to sob at first softly, quietly, then louder, in odd little jerks, nervous convulsions. For a moment we gazed helplessly, and I thought I could read what was in her mind. How she had worried the long years through over his diet and digestion, over his socks when they were damp, seen to it that his bed was aired for fear he might catch cold; and now she was to abandon him to this swilling grave. How strange! The ancients had a fitting sense of delicacy in these matters. They left food and clothes and all the necessaries with their dead before abandoning them to their long sleep. Aunt Molly, the tall, stout, milk-and-blood-complexioned woman, was now about to faint. And we, not failing in sympathy but shy of demonstrance, stood as in a trance, reluctant to give succour. All but Berthe, who, again, was first at her side. ‘
Pauvre amie
!’ she said in wailing doleful tones as she slipped her own sinewy arm round Aunt Molly’s big sobbing frame. ‘Come with me,
ma chérie
, come along, come with me.’

We made our way back past innumerable monuments and stopped before a mosaic erection of the Island of Death still as doom in the shadow of cypresses. We halted a moment, and then continued our retreat. Our eyes caught the inscription on a tomb:

We walked on and presently stopped again and read: ‘
I have held faith
.’ I walked in silence beside Uncle Emmanuel, Aunt Teresa
and Count Valentine on the grassy edge of the path, the wet grass tingeing my boots, inhaling the scent of fresh verdure, and again I felt that soon spring would be far advanced, then there would be summer. Somehow, as slowly we made our way back through the cemetery, where thousands of mortals, gone before us, lay peacefully in the glittering wood that was awakening in spring revivification, I forgot the coffin floating in the swilling grave; I thought only that he lay here for ever, sleeping through the onset of ages in eternal forgetfulness.

We walked on, thinking, until we passed out of the Great Silent Gate. Then, once again, we were in the world of the living.

Oh, no, Aunt Teresa did not begrudge Aunt Molly the place of principal mourner. Whether her memory went back to days of early childhood when she had played together with her little brother in dreary Manchester, I know not. But Aunt Molly had been his wife, had rendered him innumerable intimate offices—which, strangely, women as a rule are not averse from doing for those they love. She had known him in all his moods, she knew in detail all his plans, his worries, his complaints, had suffered from his temper—and infidelities. As they ensconced themselves in the carriage, it was as if Aunt Teresa, red-eyed but not weeping, had been relegated to the posture of a dowager-queen, and conscious for once that our compassion was focused not on her, ‘
Ma pauvre Molly
!’ she said: ‘We both have become orphans!’

‘Don’t cry, dear,’ said Berthe. ‘It won’t help. There … I’m crying myself.’

I banged the door from without, and Berthe, who was sitting on the small seat, turned the white bone handle from within, and the carriage moved and drove off. Sylvia, Gustave, Philip Brown, and Beastly got into the second carriage; Count Valentine, the General, his A.D.C., and Mme Negodyaev into the third; and Captain Negodyaev, Uncle Emmanuel, Natàsha and myself into the fourth, and followed. We drove in silence. Uncle Emmanuel’s behaviour throughout had been that of a correct disinterested
spectator. Only now and then, as we drove home, my uncle would say something essentially trivial—‘There seem a lot of houses,’ or ‘That man seems to be talking to himself.’ About half-way home we saw the virgin drive past with an officer. My uncle leaned out of the window and waved his hand to her, and was about to shout something, but ‘
Mon oncle
!’ I restrained him, just in the nick of time. I was very hungry and enjoyed the quick drive. I sat and thought: they have put you into a dark wet hole and covered you with earth: while I am driving home to have my lunch! Yet on one of the seven days of the week I am bound to follow you, and there is no escape. If I do not die on a Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday, the chances of my doing so on a Thursday, Friday or Saturday will be increasingly more probable. And should, by a miracle, my death not come off on any of these days, it will be imminent on a Sunday. The certainty of it is appalling. A friend of mine—a profound reader of character—characterized me, with astounding penetration, as the Strong Silent Man of the Kitchener type. He was quite right. At the funeral of Uncle Lucy I did not weep—nor did I want to. I thought of my own death, and thus side-tracked my emotion and spent it on myself. But now I thought: who is the next on the list? Aunt Teresa, by the looks of her, could have spared herself the journey back. But then it was not always the old and delicate who went first. She had taunted Uncle Lucy with her death, and he died before her, and she might go on living till she was a hundred, while some young slip of a thing, a newly-fledged spring chicken, departed without warning.

When we got home, the children were playing ball in the yard. They had been told that daddy had gone—gone away. And they did not worry overmuch, as they thought that when he had done his job he would in his own good time come back. Only Bubby was heard to say: ‘I want my daddy.’

‘S—s—sh!’

‘But I
want
him.’

But her daddy, as the Russian saying is, ‘had bid them a long life’. She had been his favourite.

In the house it was like a removal day. All doors were open and a draught promenaded the length and breadth of the flat; a strange dog was being chased out of the hall. Aunt Molly seemed as though in a trance and never opened her mouth. But when she returned to the great emptiness of the room that was once his abode, she collapsed in a chair and wept—wept fully, unstintingly, and the tears like a flood streamed from her stricken eyes. While in the drawing-room Aunt Teresa was receiving the condolences of the ‘diplomatic corps’. Lunch was not ready. The table wasn’t set. Nothing was ready. Uncle Lucy with his funeral had upset everybody. In the corridor somebody was looking for Uncle Emmanuel. He went out. It seemed the undertaker had come for payment; the cabs too had to be paid.

Returning, he took me amicably by the waist. ‘
Mon ami
,’ he said tenderly, ‘go and settle it with these people.’

NOW THAT I LOOK BACK ON IT FROM THE VANTAGE point of many months it is clear to me that Uncle Lucy’s life was a crescendo towards madness, culminating, as you will have seen, in this extraordinary suicide in Aunt Teresa’s knickers, camisole and boudoir cap. Why did he do it? Well may you ask. Yet the explanation is, perhaps, more simple than we think. It may have been because he knew that he was going mad that Uncle Lucy hanged himself, and hanged himself the way he did in order to do justice to his madness. What was the reason? I wondered whether it was monetary worry, or disillusionment in life; or whether, again, it was to indicate that it was the element of woman, ‘
das Ewig-Wcibliche
’, and more particularly woman’s love of plumage, which had caused him to set out to meet his Maker in his sister’s mauve silk stockings and the boudoir cap. I cannot say, I do not know, I can do nothing but record the sad and somewhat singular fact.

You will be wondering why I am writing of it at such length. It is because I am a novelist—and a novel, as no doubt you are aware, is not the same as a short story. Aunt Teresa, when I went to her, was sitting up in bed, propped up by many pillows, and a soft transparent shawl on her slim shoulders. On the wall I saw an old photo of Anatole, and next to it another—Harry holding Nora by the hand. The mingled scent of medicine and
Mon Boudoir
aroma attacked my nostrils, till, staying with her for some little time, I got used to both. When Anatole was killed Aunt Teresa was so grief-rooted that the thought of wearing mourning for her son had never crossed her mind. But now with Lucy’s death—who had frightened her with his moodiness and threats, and worried her with many an unpleasantness—she would not let the opportunity go by and sent at once for seven yards of crape, as well as black-edged writing-paper and envelopes to match in order that she might immediately attack a number of outstanding letters of condolence. ‘Berthe!’ she called out.

‘Yes?’

‘I must have black ink. I can’t write in violet ink!’

‘Why not?’

‘How insensitive!’

There were a great number, but she was warming to her task. To answer letters was her mission, joy, and gift in life. If you wrote to Aunt Teresa on any subject whatsoever you always had a letter by return of post. ‘
Mon pauvre frère
!’ she wrote, and stopped. She used a lot of exclamation marks. But even so, her task today was not easy. ‘He had complained of sleeplessness!’ she wrote. She stopped. The trouble was to say it all without making a farce of him and her. He had hanged himself, to Aunt Teresa’s lasting shock, in her clothes. She could not forget this. And she did not mourn him as she felt she should have done, because she secretly resented the highly unconventional manner of his end. It did not follow the canons of good taste. It was not pre-eminently a respectable death. It was so irregular. It was awkward to tell people how he died. What made it worse was that the crêpe-de-Chine
camisole and knickers—green, embroidered with flowers—were the General’s souvenir brought back from Japan. The most astonishing thing about it, the most distressing, too, was that it was—well, funny. It required feats of self-restraint to bear down an involuntary impulse to giggle as she wrote about his death: ‘… I do so miss my poor brother Lucy!’; or, when she told about it to a sympathetic listener, to suppress a sudden chuckle as she thought of her poor brother in her knickers and the boudoir cap; so hard to keep your face straight. It seemed so wanton, so extraordinarily unnecessary. The absence of any trace of logic in his choice of conduct baffled her. She wanted to feel sorry, she did feel sorry for him, but it was so—deuced funny, and she reproached herself for that. She did not know that one could laugh and be serious at the same time. Aunt Teresa was never violent, always spoke calmly, quietly. She said: ‘Other people get excited. Your Uncle Lucy, for example—he is dead, and I don’t want to say anything against my poor brother—but I—(she cried softly)—I am different. I have to keep it all here (she pressed her palm to the heart), all to myself!’ She had taunted him with her approaching death, and once he was affected and even cried—but he died before her. And I thought that Aunt Teresa could still be sighing and complaining when the youngest of us would be pushing up the daisies.

A decent (but not too long an) interval having elapsed after Uncle Lucy’s death, Aunt Teresa sent out cards, the first half of which read: ‘Commandant and Madame Vanderflint have the honour to inform you of the forthcoming marriage of Mademoiselle Sylvia Vanderflint, their daughter, with Monsieur Gustave Boulanger’, while on the second half of the parchment Mademoiselle Boulanger stated, in identical terms, that she had the honour to announce the forthcoming marriage of Monsieur Gustave Boulanger, her brother, with Mademoiselle Sylvia Vanderflint. These cards were placed in large parchment envelopes and dispatched to Count Valentine, Dr. Murgatroyd, Colonel Ishibaiashi, Philip Brown, Percy Beastly, General ‘Pshe-Pshe’
et fils
, Dr. Abelberg,
and others, even to the legendary General and Madame Pan-Ta-Loon.

And already ties were being artificially cemented. Aunt Teresa had paid a visit to Mlle Caroline Boulanger, an elderly spinster, heavily powdered, and the children had been asked to tea.

‘Uncle Gustave will take us to the Logical Gardens to see the lion this afternoon,’ Harry said, strutting about in his long trousers.

‘Are you afraid of the lion?’

‘Yes,’ he confessed.

‘And where have you been all this morning?’

‘To Sunday school,’ he said. ‘What have you been doing there?’

‘Singing,’ he answered. ‘Hymns?’

‘No.’ He wrinkled his nose. ‘Sumfink about Jesus.’

‘And what was the sermon about?’

‘Oh, all about hell.’ He reflected a moment. ‘Any ice-cream at hell? No? Only at heaven?’