The Polyglots Read Online Free Page B

on a Chinese houseboat, or better still, fly away with her to some enchanted island and drink of her, to satiation. What I would ultimately do on such a desert island did not, of course, occur to me.
    Aunt Teresa had just got up out of bed on purpose for me, as she explained. Great exertion! And Uncle Emmanuel enquired at intervals if it was not too much for her, if the talk was not tiring her. No, she would stay with us a little longer. In fact, we would sit out on the terrace.
    It was too hot to move; so we sat still all day until evening, staring before us with a kind of semi-intelligent look, as we sat in big soft leather chairs on the open veranda, impotent after a heavy lunch, unfit for anything in the heat but day-dreaming.
    And so we sat and looked into the garden, and beyond the garden into the street, and all around us seemed weird and unreal. Weirdness, an unearthly charm, cast a spell over the place. And as I dreamt I fancied that these moving statuettes and the weird-coloured landscape were merely a scene from some ballet or a Japanese screen: so unreal they seemed. Even the trees and flowers seemed artificial trees and flowers. Some strange birds or insects made a weird continuous sound. But there was not a breeze, and even the leaves on the trees were motionless, listless with enchantment, lost in unreality.
    ‘To-day the air is soft and tender as in spring, and haunts one as in spring; but the cherry blossoms are over.’ Aunt Teresa as she spoke looked at me with a long, sad, silent gaze. Let me say at once that I’m good-looking. Sleek black hair brushed back from the forehead, lips—and something about the mouth, about the eyes, something—an indefinable something—that appeals to women. You think I’m conceited? I think not.
    ‘You’re very much like Anatole,’ said Aunt Teresa. ‘Neither of you is good-looking, but both have pleasant faces.’
    At that I am frankly astonished. I must take an early opportunity to re-examine my face in the looking-glass.
    ‘And you’re the same age. I remember so well when Anatole was born and we were thinking of a name for him, your mother writing to me and telling me they had decided to christen you Hamlet.’
    ‘But he’s called George!’ said Sylvia.
    ‘Georges Hamlet Alexander—those are my names. A certain sense of delicacy, I suppose, prevented my people from actually calling me Hamlet. Instead they call me Georges.’
    ‘But why Georges and not George?’ asked Sylvia.
    ‘I really can’t tell,’ I confessed. ‘Not after Georges Carpentier, I hazard, for he could not have been many years old when I was born.’
    ‘In Tokyo!’ Aunt Teresa gaily exclaimed, looking round at the Vanderphants. ‘
Mais voilà un Japonais
!’
    ‘
Tiens
!’ said Mme Vanderphant.
    ‘At the Imperial Hotel. An unlooked-for diversion during my parents’ pleasure trip in the Far East, I fancy.’
    ‘But you’re British-born, so you’ve nothing to complain of,’ said my aunt.
    ‘I suppose I am lucky.’
    ‘Yes, names are a great trouble,’ said my aunt, looking round again at the Vanderphants. ‘My daughter was christened Sylvia because when she was born she was perfectly fair and looked like a fairy. Eventually her hair has turned darker and darker, and is now, as you see, almost black—with gold-brown lights in it.’
    ‘And light brown after it has been washed,’ Sylvia said.
    ‘Is it really?’ I asked with genuine interest.
    ‘Or take the names of my brothers,’ said Aunt Teresa, turning to Mme Vanderphant. ‘Our mother wanted girls at the time, but the first two born happened to be boys: so she christened one of them Connie, and the other Lucy.’
    ‘
Tiens
!’ said Mme Vanderphant.
    ‘Connie—his father’—she pointed to me—‘was near-sighted, and Lucy very deaf. And how well I remember it when they took us for a trip on the Neva in a steam launch. Connie, as blind as an owl, was at the steering-wheel, and Lucy, stone-deaf, down below