At home I found a telegram for me: ‘Regret misunderstanding. No coats ordered. 50,000 fur caps instead. Arrange transportation and return forthwith with caps. Urgent.’
19
THERE ARE TIMES WHEN, AFTER FEEDING MY MIND and soul upon ideas of our most hopeful evolutionists, I suddenly experience a spiritual relapse and think that after all, perhaps, human beings are a race of biped rats — that human destiny on earth doesn’t greatly matter. I meditated thus as I recalled the 50,000 caps intended for 50,000 soldiers intended to restore by their commanders some of that ‘law and order’ in the land and so preserve the continuity of our glorious humanity. This nonsense was hatched by strong silent men, men ‘with no nonsense about them’. Rats, I thought, 50,000 rats in fur caps, sacks of flesh and disease, bundles of incoherent urgings, rapacious beasts. The rats had crept out of their holes and went for each other. All out of silliness. Rats, I thought, rats.
In the drawing-room as I entered stood a Russian officer whom I had seen before, so far as I could remember, at the local censorship department. And indeed the officer looked like a rat on its hind legs — a rat in khaki. At my approach he clicked his heels, introducing himself: ‘Captain Negodyaev.’ What a passport for a man! The name translated into English would read Captain Scoundrelton or Blackguardson — ominous enough. Yet Captain Negodyaev was meek and servile, humble and very timid, but was said to bully his wife. He had a long narrow head with a scanty growth of yellowish hair and a small scraggy moustache with wrinkles round his mouth, and eyes as if he had stolen somebody’s cuff-links and feared to be found out. His chin was shaven — I mean on days when it was shaven; on other days one could surmise that this at all events was roughly what he aimed at. He had a wooden leg which he liked to pass off as an honourable war wound. But everybody knew that he had fallen off a tram at Vladivostok while the ground was slippery and broken his left leg which later, owing to blood-poisoning that had set in, had been amputated for him. He was always spurting scent on his handkerchief, and every time he opened it to blow his nose there was an all-pervading odour in the atmosphere.
‘I have two daughters,’ he was telling Aunt Teresa. ‘Màsha and Natàsha. Màsha is grown up and married and lives with her husband Ippolit Sergèiech Blagovèschenski. And Natàsha is only seven and lives with her mother also in Novorossiisk. I should like them to come over to Harbin. But there is a great shortage of accommodation in the town. I myself live in a railway carriage. Luckily enough it does not stand out very far from where I work — in the censorship department, you may know.’
‘Look here,’ said Aunt Teresa, ‘when our friends the Vanderphants go back to Belgium in May, why not come here? We’ll have lots of room to spare.’
Captain Negodyaev opened his handkerchief. And, automatically, I whisked out mine and applied it to my nostrils — in order not to suffocate. ‘I would be very glad indeed,’ he said, bowing awkwardly.
But my time came to an end. One morning as I came down, I found the entrance hall cluttered up to the ceiling with fur caps, so that Berthe grumbled and cursed at me, because she could not get to and fro.
‘Ah, que voulez-vous?’ Uncle Emmanuel calmed her. ‘C’est la guerre!’
‘How am I to get them to the station? Damn these caps,’ I said.
‘Don’t you bother,’ said Captain Negodyaev who had come to see my aunt relative to his forthcoming installation in our flat. ‘My man is here. He will take them to the station for you … Vladislav!’ he called out. ‘This is Vladislav. He will take them and dispatch them for you and do all that’s necessary.’
I had a talk with Vladislav and found him on the face of it a very capable, smart fellow who inspired confidence. Vladislav had once upon a time been batman to a Russian Colonel who took him with him on a trip to Paris; and his attitude ever since to things Russian was that nothing at home would astonish him. ‘What civilization!’ he was telling me. ‘What education! politeness! A plain cabman, a common izvozchik you might say, and even he, if you please, jabbers in French! Monsieur — madame — s’il vous plaît — comprenez-vous—and all that sort of thing. As for Russia—’ He only waved his hand — an abject gesture. ‘No civilization at all! You live here like a brute — just the same as if in Australia or somewhere.’
At the hotel where I had called on business, the porter — a good soul with a kind smile — came up to me. Because he was a good soul with a kind smile he fared well at the hands of the generous who took a liking to him and his soul, and he fared badly at the hands of the unscrupulous who took advantage of his smiling good soul; and so, on the whole, he fared no better than others. ‘You have a separate coupé, sir?’ he said. (Harbin is a terrible place.)
‘Yes. Why?’
‘There’s a lady here who can’t get a berth in the train. Perhaps—’ He paused.
‘Good-looking?’
‘Awful good-looking!’
I scrutinized him suspiciously.
‘Has travelled with a gentleman before,’ he hastened to assure me eagerly. ‘Gentleman very satisfied.’
Harbin is a terrible place. Human nature is frail. Men are born in sin — and I suppose I am no exception. But I digress.
The train was due out at midnight. I paced the platform and surveyed the crowded third-class waiting-room where bundles of unwashed humanity — bearded men, young girls and women with sucking babies — slept on the naked floor in heaps, among their chattels. So insistent was the demand for space in the train that I had ordered Pickup to stand on guard outside my coupé, with fixed bayonet. The prudence of my action was vindicated a few moments later when a strange Polish doctor came up and addressed me in Polish.
‘I don’t speak Polish,’ I said.
‘Will you send for your Polish interpreter?’
‘I haven’t got one. Besides, I observe that you can speak Russian.’
‘Oh, yes,’ said the Polish doctor.
‘May I ask why in that case you cannot speak to me in Russian?’
‘Because I am a Pole,’ he replied, and beat himself on the chest.
‘What can I do for you?’
‘I am a Polish doctor,’ said the doctor, ‘and I desire to be admitted to your coupé.’
‘We haven’t got any room, I fear.’
‘But you must have room for a Polish doctor. You are Allies.’
The reiterated pertinacity of this man annoyed me. It annoyed me in particular that he should intrude on my privacy and space at a time when I expected … never mind what I expected. In short, it annoyed me. ‘My dear sir,’ I replied, quietly but with a subtle side-smile, conscious of a short and easy road to victory, ‘it is not a question of your being a doctor, a Pole, or a Polish doctor, but a matter of there being no room for a man, woman or child of whatever profession or nationality or combination of both. Good evening to you.’ It seemed to me that I had settled both the Polish nationality and the medical profession.
Tired of pacing the platform, I got into my coupé, took out a book and scanned the pages. I am a serious young man — an intellectual. I was plunged in thought, when Pickup interrupted me.
‘Who? What?… Ah, yes.’
Then the train drew out.
20
‘HAVE YOU, OR HAVE YOU NOT, AN INTELLIGIBLE account of the present situation?’ Sir Hugo asked when I reported two days later.