The Polyglots Read Online Free

the skin of her teeth. But the dignity that she had missed she somehow managed to retain, and when Uncle Emmanuel met her in Brussels he addressed his letters to ‘Madame la Princesse’—although this had never been her rank. It was her beauty rather and her manner that suggested it, and all his people could not but think that Emmanuel, clever chap, had contrived to marry right into the Russian aristocracy. Her sisters, on the other hand, were not a little pained to learn that she—their pride and hope—had married an insignificant little Belgian officer, who, however satisfactory as a husband and a lover, was a poor fish (they said) as an officer and a money-maker. This was the more disappointing because all my aunts on my father’s side—all singularly fascinating women—of whom, however, Aunt Teresa was incomparably the queen—had married duds. Her father, a pioneer British merchant in Siberia, beholding his new son-in-law Emmanuel for the first time, thought that he was ‘no great shakes’. Beholding him the second and last time, he found no cause to alter his opinion.
    And now the train was racing towards Tokyo.

5
THE VANDERFLINTS AND THE VANDERPHANTS
    WE STEPPED OUT AT TOKYO AS THOUGH IT WERE Clapham Junction, and repaired to the Imperial Hotel. Tokyo, too, seemed a weird city. The houses were weird; men, women and children moved about on weird bits of wood like some mechanicaldolls. The sun was blazing hot as we stepped into our rickshaws and drove in search of my aunt’s house.
    As we drove up round the corner, I saw an apparition of short skirt, dark-brown curls and ruby lips, moving on seductive legs. There was a soft smiling look in her eyes which had a violet glint in the sun. Her head slightly bent, she flitted past us—with her brogues unlaced—and disappeared round the corner.
    I guessed that it was Sylvia—perhaps on an errand to a shop across the way. I had seen one or two not very good snaps of her, and there was something sweet about her mouth that made me recognize her in a flash. How she had grown! What a ‘find’, to be sure! You read of such in novels by Miss Dell, but you did not often come across them in real life. But what had always rather stirred my blood, long before I ever saw her picture, was that she bore this lovely name—Sylvia-Ninon.
    We were first received by a thin middle-aged woman, on the heels of whom followed a somewhat stouter edition of the first, who called out ‘Berthe!’—the thin one turning round at this word. As we were shown into the little sitting-room, in came a girl and curtsied in the Latin way, followed by number two (
révérence
), obviously of the same brood. Here, I could clearly see, was a family—mother, sister and daughters.
    ‘Your aunt will be down in a few moments,’ said the elder of the ladies, who was called Berthe. And while we conversed in French—‘
monsieur, madame
’, with the usual complimentary allusions—I heard a rustle, the door opened, and a tall, slim, grey-haired lady with a greyish moustache stooped into the room, and—‘Well, well, here you are, here you are at last, George!’ she said in a deep drawling baritone which reminded me of my father. I kissed and was kissed by her in turn, feeling how her moustache tickled my cheek.
    ‘My friend,’ I introduced, ‘Major Beastly.’
    ‘Major
who
?’ asked my aunt.
    ‘Beastly.’
    To suppress the impulse to laugh she looked round quickly.‘This is my nephew George,’ she said vaguely. ‘Mme Vanderphant and Mlle Berthe. Madeleine and Marie. We all came over from Dixmude together—what is it?—four years ago now.’
    ‘Yes, we Vanderphants and Vanderflints have been getting on very well together, as though indeed we were one and the same family—
n’est-ce pas, madame
?’ said Mme Vanderphant, smiling pleasantly.
    Aunt Teresa at once assumed a presidential attitude towards the people in the room. When she spoke I visualized my father, but in most other