The Polyglots Read Online Free Page A

particulars she differed from her brother. Aunt Teresa’s eyes were large, luminous, sad, faithful, like a St. Bernard dog’s. Thick on her heels was a very small gentleman in a brown suit, with a waxed moustache—plainly Uncle Emmanuel. He came up to me, somewhat shyly, and fingering the three ‘pips’ on my shoulder, slapped me approvingly on the back. ‘Already a captain!
Ah, mon brave
!’
    ‘I owe my recent promotion,’ I said, ‘to having, at a psychological moment, slapped a certain War Office Colonel on the shoulder: just as his ego had touched the height of elation. Had I slapped him a second too early or a second too late, my military career would have taken a different course altogether. I am sure of it.’
    Uncle Emmanuel did not take in what I said, but generalizing the topic into a human attitude, murmured: ‘
Que voulez-vous
?’
    ‘Yes, I wouldn’t be here but for that.’
    ‘After a big war there are always little wars—to clear up,’ said Uncle Emmanuel, shrugging his shoulders.
    ‘We sailed three days before the armistice.’
    ‘We were in mid-Atlantic,’ said Beastly, ‘when the armistice broke out. We did have a binge!’
    ‘
À Berlin! à Berlin!
’ said my uncle.
    A novel is a cumbersome medium for depicting real people. Now if you were here—or we could meet—I would convey to you the nature of Major Beastly’s personality in the twinkling of an eye—by visual representation. Alas, this is not possible. At myuncle’s remark, as indeed at all remarks, Beastly screwed up his eye and gave a few slow heavy nods and guffaws, as though the thing—the Germans, the Allies, my Uncle Emmanuel, nay, life itself—confirmed his worst suspicions.
    Then the door opened, and Sylvia sidled towards us, with her eyes on the floor. I looked at her closely and noticed that in truth she had lips kissable to the point of delectation, asking for nothing better. She had the same St. Bernard eyes as her mother, only perhaps of a younger St. Bernard in the act of wagging his tail.
    Having greeted me, she went over to the sofa and began playing dolls by herself—a little insincerely, I thought, perhaps out of shyness. Then: ‘Oh, where’s my
Daily Mail
?’ She got up to get it, spread it out on the sofa, and began to read.
    Uncle Emmanuel stood pensive as though meditating before giving utterance to his thoughts.
    ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘yes.’
    ‘To-day, after the Big War, the world is in as childish a state of mind as before,’ I pursued. ‘I do not even vouch for myself. If tomorrow these silly bugles went off again, calling the manhood of Britain to arms, inviting us to march against some imaginable enemy, and tender girls said “We don’t want to lose you, but we feel you ought to go”, and loved us and kissed us and white-feathered us, I should find it hard to overcome the fascination of donning my Sam Browne belt. I am like that. A born hero.’
    Irony was not a strong point with them, I noticed. Uncle Emmanuel again did not take it all in, but, with a gesture indicating ‘
Que voulez-vous
?’ he murmured these words.
    While I spoke I was conscious all the time of Sylvia—short-skirted and long-legged, in white silk stockings—playing dolls on the sofa. For my own part I know of nothing so secretly exhilarating as the first meeting with a good-looking cousin of the opposite sex. The rapture of identifying our common relatives, of tracing the lifeblood bondship between us. When I looked at her I felt it was enchanting, amazing that this stripling girl of sixteen summers with the wide-awake lustrous hazel eyes, though with aslightly frightened look, should be my cousin, that she should call me by the second pronoun singular, be intimate with the details of my childhood. I felt that I should like to dance with her in a crowded ballroom which would throw into relief the intimacy of our movements, gestures, murmurs, looks; that I should like to float away with her down the sleepy river