But next morning he drafted an answer, pointing out that the action which his brother-in-law had seen fit to threaten him with was not only ‘peu fraternelle’, but, nay, also peculiarly ‘criminelle’, and he asked my Uncle Lucy to terminate the painful correspondence. Uncle Emmanuel requested me to take this message to the General Post Office and to transmit it with all priority by ‘direct wire’ to Uncle Lucy at Krasnoyarsk, for which special favour I had to obtain once more the permission of the Russian General in command. Armed with a note from the Commander-in-Chief, General Pshemòvich-Pshevìtski, I proceeded to the General Post Office where a telegraph operator, reading the Commanding General’s note, transmitted Uncle Emmanuel’s message in my presence with a superlative degree of priority, known as ‘Clear the Line’. Uncle Lucy having now arrived at the other end, six thousand versts away, the telegraph operator received Uncle Lucy’s answer, which, ignoring all Uncle Emmanuel’s elaborate arguments, ran as follows:
‘Pas criminelle, mais tout en ordre.’
And once again Uncle Lucy signed himself: ‘Ton frère qui t’aime.’
I folded the message and put it away in my pocket, while the telegraph operator asked if I could let him have a box of English cigarettes.
17
THEN, ONE DAY, CAME UNCLE LUCY’S LETTER, THIS time addressed to Aunt Teresa. The Bolsheviks had occupied Krasnoyarsk and seized his works and all his property. He wanted the £100. He had all his life been paying them more than he had any business to do, and had incurred thereby the grave displeasure of his family which — so they said — he had neglected for the sake of his beautiful three sisters. ‘Why don’t you,’ he wrote, ‘sell your useless jewels and cough up the money?’ Anyhow, the £100 not having come his way, he enclosed Is. (one shilling), the silver bob, at the present favourable exchange, being over and above Aunt Teresa’s capital in roubles in the Diabologh concern which hereby he considered liquidated for all time.
What a shock to Aunt Teresa! After her son’s death, it was probably the greatest shock of Aunt Teresa’s life. She suffered a complete relapse. She lay prostrate and speechless, and Berthe busied herself about her slender form with hot and cold compresses, with eau-de-Cologne and pyramidon.
‘How is she?’
‘Ah!’ said Berthe with a sarcastic mien. ‘There is nothing ever the matter with your aunt. She is a malade imaginaire!’
But even as she spoke Berthe would rush off back to Aunt Teresa and be very kind to her. She would enjoy a malicious laugh at the expense of my poor aunt, about whose ‘miserable health’ she had no illusions and indeed no tears to waste, and sneer behind her back; yet even as she sneered she would suddenly get interested in her again, with a warmth, a pity, an attachment which was as genuine as her cynicism was sincere. She would delight in sharing anyone’s illiberality upon the subject of my aunt; yet all the time she would be at the beck and call of her new friend who had contrived to make a servant of her. From Vladivostok I had written Aunt Teresa a sentimental letter full of ach’s and och’s, ‘poors’ and ‘alases’, a letter in which the sentiment, intended as it was for a notorious sentimentalist, was laid on with a trowel. I was therefore all the more astonished when Berthe now imparted to me that my aunt had been repelled by the odious sentimentality of my letter and looked upon me as a kind-hearted but withal a sentimental fool. ‘A nice boy, George, but too much in the skies, too sentimental, a little mawkish, too. A dreamer of dreams!’ she had said.
‘The difference between the dreamer and your practical man, as somebody has said, is that the dreamer sees the dawn before the other fellow.’
‘Why? Because he sits up all night?’
‘That is one of the reasons.’
‘But your aunt,’ she said. ‘Why, there’s really nothing the matter with her. Nothing at all. It is all put on. But she is jealous of me even when I say I have caught a chill. But I’ve no more time to waste,’ she hastened. ‘I must go and change her compresses and make her her tisane.’
‘This is remarkable!’ exclaimed my aunt as I went in to her. ‘Your Uncle Lucy evidently imagines that our money is his own and that he can do with it whatever he likes! He must have gone off his head! When our father died we each had 100,000 roubles. Two months later your Uncle Lucy, who continued at the head of affairs as managing director, informed us that we each possessed 400,000 roubles, and less than a year hence he wrote to tell us we possessed one million roubles. Fifteen years later he told us that we had just 30,000 each. We never knew what we had! And now he writes to tell me that I’ve nothing.’
To Uncle Lucy, I daresay, it must have seemed that all he had done was to present the case to them in a new and startling light, but to his sister he was now worse than a criminal. Uncle Emmanuel drafted a reply in French and stood over her as she translated it hurriedly and not very efficiently into English. From long disuse Aunt Teresa’s English had become very foreign; but assuredly Uncle Lucy’s was no better. Opening her red-leather buvard and placing the writing-pad upon it, she began, without deigning to address him:
I duly received your insultent [so she spelt it] wicked and unjust letter dated 17th inst. I cannot realize that you, a gentleman, could have written in that shameful way to your poor old sister you have known enough to state she was true, honest and straightforward! You seem to have forgotten that when our father died we all inherited the same sum which you begged of us to leave in the business which you undertook to manage! I perfectly admit you made it prosper the first years and paid us a very good dividend, of which you profited more than any of us, as you lived in a palace as you may say — in the greatest luxury — spending money wholesale — this was of course your business. We lived plainly and spent the money on our children’s education, added what Emmanuel earned, as he has never lived doing nothing as you seem to think!
My jewels are the only thing I will have to leave to my daughter after my death! Emmanuel is trying to sell my silver, as we are head over heels in debt to the Belgian lady and family who share our flat with us, but he must consider the future when no more able to work and a sick wife to support, and the comfort and care my poor miserable state of health requires. And still I cannot afford consulting a first-class specialist, nor having sufficient strengthening food in my sad exile! We live in no luxury and I have to struggle hard to make ends meet. I do all the correspondence and write to all our relations for Christmas and Easter and birthdays as I cannot on account of my poor miserable state of health do house work — you have been able to shake my poor health, which is still worse since my poor son’s death!