The Polyglots (45 page)

The sun had set, and at once the ocean looked dark, the sky was unfriendly: God had gone back to His bunk. Then, strolling about, I came across Captain Negodyaev. He sat very still on a bench at the stern, gazing at the dark trail running away from us, as if asking a meaning from it of a death that had no meaning. In the day-time, half dazed by the sun and the heat, he had braved it somehow, pacing about, avoiding condolences, unable to find a place for himself. But now with the twilight, his grief, like a vulture, descended upon him, and cringing in the corner of the bench he began to cry. I touched him on the shoulder: his face convulsed, he covered it with his hands.

‘Trust your feeling. Remember Turgenev: “Can it be that their prayers, their tears are fruitless? Can it be that love, holy, devoted love, is not all-potent? O no! However passionate, sinful, rebellious, may be the heart that has taken refuge in the grave, the flowers which grow upon it gaze tranquilly at us with their innocent eyes: not alone of eternal repose do they speak to us, of that mighty repose of ‘indifferent’ nature; they speak also of eternal reconciliation and of life everlasting.” ’

‘Flowers,’ he said, after a moment’s pensive silence, and looked at the dark burrows that eluded our steady course into the loneliness of the ocean, unafraid. ‘Innocent eyes …’ He choked.

‘It didn’t need the war. It didn’t need the revolution.’

He rose and stalked away. He went back to his wife, who
henceforth lay in her cabin, a wounded thing, and was never seen to emerge. Whether he was kind to her, we did not know. I passed the half-open door of Aunt Teresa’s cabin. Aunt Teresa’s going to bed was always rather an event. She took pyramidon for her head, and aspirin for her cold, and pills to counteract the effect of pyramidon on her stomach, and a remedy to counteract the effect of aspirin on her heart, besides which she used lotions: a tooth lotion, a gum lotion, a jaw lotion (to prevent dislocation), and sunflower seed oil as a general lubricant, and of late a lotion to rub into the roots of her hair. She was sitting now in her chemise upon the bunk in an attitude of great distress and, with the help of Berthe, was rubbing coconut oil into the nape of her neck. In the last few days she had suddenly begun to lose her hair at a terrific rate; there was a bare space on the nape as large as the size of an average saucer. ‘
C’est terrible
,’ she was saying to Berthe, ‘there will be nothing left.’

I went out on deck. The nocturnal sky, vigilant, soared above me. The stars looked at me kindly, good-humouredly. The ship’s lights twinkled demurely in the dark. I stood very still, following the dark phosphorescent trail that now and then gave a glint of light in the moon. When I was alone I whispered: ‘Can you hear me——?’ But only the wind that ruffled the topmost flag on the mast answered me. The wind and the lazy splash of the waves.

THE DAY WE CAME TO PERIM I WAS ORDERLY OFFICER, and had to take a party of soldiers, bluejackets and marines to bathe off the island. Aunt Teresa, Sylvia, Uncle Emmanuel, and Berthe (very meagre in her bathing-dress) also came on our launch. There were naked black men and women on the beach, and Aunt Teresa and Berthe cleverly pretended that they did not
see them. They did not look aside; they looked at them as though they were so much air. And a black beauty had taken Uncle Emmanuel’s fancy. We were back on the launch, and nearly alongside the boat, but he was still standing inert, his binocular gaze fixed on the shore, till Aunt Teresa saw fit to interrupt him: ‘
Emmanuel! Eh alors!
’

‘
Ah, c’est curieux
!’ he said genially, looking round at us, as though inviting assent. ‘There are no trees, not a single one! Extraordinary country!’

‘Mind the steps, dear,’ I said tenderly, as we were alongside and climbing the slippery ladder to the quarter-deck.

I know I felt that there was something ineffably pathetic about our anchoring in the fading sunlight of a scorching afternoon—gliding noiselessly into the silent harbour, still as doom. What spots there were in the world. What places! Aden, the back-stairs of the globe. Sylvia leaned on the rail and looked, and I beside her. It made her want to weep softly and woefully, she could not say why. And when the boat, gliding noiselessly, halted still in this uncanny stillness of moist air and yellow water, she looked at me as though expecting that I too must be aware of her emotion. Beastly looked too. He shook his head slowly. ‘What a black hole to live in!’

We dined on board, and after dinner stepped into the launch and crossed the tepid shark-infested strip of water to the cheerless shore. Not a tree, not a patch of grass. The sun had sunk into the sea, but the baked desert earth still glowed with heat, and when, driving through the dark of night in a car dashing at full speed, I held out my hand, it was like putting it into an oven. The Sahara was breathing on us from behind. The moon in heaven seemed stifled by the night. The General with the mad eyes who was not allowed to come with us (lest he detract the Arabs from the line of duty to iniquity) asked me to buy a packet of tobacco for him. This done, we visited the famous cisterns deemed to have been built by King Solomon, passed down the many flights of stairs into the hollow depths wherein our steps and even whisper resounded
magnified a hundredfold. The night was black, and Aden a dark pit. The car put on speed. We were back at the coast—back on the boat.

In the midst of the Red Sea, Sylvia dreamt of how nice it would be to go on a beautiful voyage together.

‘Darling, even in dreams one should observe a certain measure of reality. What is the use of dreaming of future voyages now? We’re in the midst of one and—and it isn’t that we like it awfully.’

‘You’re only making a convenience of me.’

‘An inconvenience.’

‘Kiss me; you never kiss me now.’

‘A kiss today, a kiss tomorrow. How it doesn’t tire you!’

‘You have got up with the wrong leg this morning, darling.’

‘Very likely. Very likely. Captain Negodyaev has borrowed £7 from me this morning.’ I looked into my pocket-book to see what was still there, and suddenly I came across a card with—

‘What is it, darling, let me see?’

‘Ah, that was a beautiful evening.’

‘It was. Better than any we have had since.’

‘It was.’

‘But, darling, what will happen to us next when we get back to Europe? Have you thought of it?’

I sighed. ‘There are in life such concatenations of circumstances when you neither know nor care what happens next or next after.’

‘But I want to know.’

‘Exactly. I notice, with regret, the same morbid and unhealthy appetite in the readers of novels. How do
I
know? There is no end to life except death—and so when this boat of ours reaches
the shores of England it will merely mark the end of a particular group phase in our individual existence.’

‘You speak to me like a teacher,’ she complained.

‘I favour a mild measure of uncertainty as regards the future.’

‘Gustave,’ she said—and was silent.

‘The extradition of Gustave may prove to be a costly business.’

‘No. When I get to London I shall go to see my solicitor,’ she said, ‘to arrange a divorce immediately.’

‘On what grounds?’

She thought a while. ‘Desertion.’

‘Oh!’

‘Restitution of conjugal rights,’ she said knowingly.

‘Why divorce? He’s a good man.’

‘But I want to marry you.’

‘He might die,’ I said, ‘of hydrophobia. Wait and see.’

‘How long?’

‘Perhaps not very long. All is in the hands of God—and Aunt Teresa.’

She paused, thoughtful.

‘If you go on loving me, and I go on loving you—what else do we want?’

‘Oh, that’s all right, we shall go on and on and on!’

She cooed like a dove.

From Port Said, Sylvia, Uncle Emmanuel and I set out for Cairo. On the platform at the station I saw Wells’s
First and Last Things
and bought it.

‘Buy me a
Daily Mail
, darling,’ said Sylvia.

The hot, weary journey. Restaurant-car like anywhere else, but Arab waiters in red fezes. The head waiter, whose conception of the lunch seemed to be to get it over in order to begin the second lunch, and to get that over in order to get over the third lunch, exhorted us to take our places, and the waiters, urged on by the head waiter, rushed us through our meal. The man next to me winked one eye at me. ‘They don’t ’arf chuck it at yer!’ he remarked; thus, in a second, wafting us to the Thames-side from
where he sprang. But we looked out of the window at the whirling fields of Egypt: a white-robed Arab leading a donkey, a dusky young woman flashed by. On, on, and on.

Cairo at last. We stepped into the victoria and drove off, my knees touching Sylvia’s as I sat on the little seat, facing her. Why had she bought that hideous hat, which was like a helmet, covering wholly the upper portion of her face which was entirely lovely, and revealing but the lower part which was less lovely? And sitting there, I thought, as the carriage wafted us out of the station confines into the splendours of the city, that I shouldn’t have overtipped the Arab porter as I did. But then I could not very well have asked for change with Sylvia and Uncle waiting for me in the carriage. So there you are, and as we drove along I had to make the best of it. Still, why that hat?

‘Darling, why that hat?’

‘Eighty-seven rupees,’ she said. ‘Besides, it protects against sunstroke.’

There was a pause. The still angel winged by.

‘Poor Natàsha.’

‘Yes.’

‘Why didn’t I bring my uniform? We ought to have called on Lord Allenby,’ observed Uncle Emmanuel.

Sun-scorched houses, shuttered windows, elegant victorias, red-fezed coachmen. But, withal, distrust verging on hostility. And when we set out, on camels and dromedaries, to see the Sphinx and the pyramids, the look upon my driver’s face was a dark leer, foreboding the rebellion of the Moslem world, and Uncle Emmanuel, balancing himself upon the dromedary’s hump, looked small and frightened, while the white-robed Arabs all the way along kept yelling for ‘Backshish! Backshish!’ or selling us, at intervals, Egyptian coins dating back to 2,000 years B.C. (actually manufactured by an enterprising firm in Sheffield for the benefit of unsuspecting tourists).

But the failure to fall in with the driver’s offer to backshish him or to buy his coins always meant his giving the dromedary a
vicious whack with his big stick which sent the animal a-cantering in a most unpleasant fashion, so that Uncle Emmanuel from the uneasy vantage of the hump, exclaimed: ‘
Cessez! Ah! Voyons donc!
’ in anguished protest.

‘Backshish!’ cried the Arab.

‘No!’

And he whacked the animal again, so that my uncle found it difficult to keep his balance on the hump, which pitched and tossed like the mast of a small schooner in a heavy sea. Arrived at the foot of the pyramids, two Arabs climbed to the top in less than three minutes, and then demanded a backshish. Backshished, they offered to repeat the feat provided we backshished them all over again.

The Sphinx—what did he think of it all? For, contrary to tradition, the Sphinx, I insist, is male. He was right: life
was
terrible.
He
knew that talking, writing, even at its best, was prating. To make a statement, unless it be safeguarded by a thousand definitions (when it were better it had not been made at all), is to prate. To state is to ignore. To maintain a position is to maintain a false position. To maintain no position is to negate existence. To assert is to give oneself the lie. To cease asserting is to give the lie to other men’s assertions—the sanction to that lie. To know, to know all, would mean to be silent; indeed, what is there in the world to do for such as he? Will you have him explain that things are and are not; that we have a will and have not; that we change and change not? There are moments when one feels uncertain about everything, even the essential, fundamental things of life; when one gropes in the darkness waiting for the light to return; when all is transient, vague, unfounded, casual, one’s soul not worth expressing; when every phrase seems arbitrary, every page a string of sentences beginning with ‘perhaps’. It is as if one trod upon an empty world, an atmosphere of void, a universe of nothing. Hush! if the whole world be unreal, by what standard, what undying reality is it so? If we are to be dead for all time, by what living truth is it to be?

Arrived back from where we had started, the Arab drivers demanded more backshish. We refused—and they cursed our children and our children’s children into the seventh generation.

Next day we went by motor to the splendid Cairo suburb Heliopolis—the Monte Carlo of the East. How luxurious and for the most part how vain. A faint melancholy summer day was nearing to its close, and there was that other feeling that … a little more, and it would all be over. In the evening we sat in the park, along with others, round in a circle. The flower beds are so symmetrical, so neatly laid out. We watch the flower beds, we watch our sticks and parasols. How dull and how senseless. Among other things, the mosquitoes are biting through the socks atrociously. I think: as days gone by have crumbled into dust beneath my feet, so my future days will crumble—give them time; and the unmeaning present, poising, pale, in the abyss, shall fall—and be no more. I felt sorry for Sylvia and for myself, and for the Arabs, over whom we had come—God knows why—to exercise a perennial fatherly control, and even for the simple-minded, cheerful, military brass-hats who were making asses of themselves. Their band played absurd music in the hot, stifling, melancholy air. One sat and drank against the all-invading heat. And life passed, and one hardly minded its passing.

At night, when we walked down the dormant Cairo streets, harlots called after us from the balconies, enticing us to come up, and Uncle Emmanuel waved his hand to them. Sylvia in bed, my uncle insisted on my seeing the
kan-kan
, the
danse du ventre
, the big black man, and the rest of it. Perhaps I am too much of a puritan, but the sight of the nude Arab woman kan-kaning was enough for me.