‘To keep?’ asked Harry, incredulous, accepting the gift, with the old man’s smile coming over his tear-stained face.
Natàsha cried softly.
‘I will get you another one, Natàsha, a better one,’ drawled Aunt Teresa. And Aunt Molly gave Natàsha a copy of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, intended for Harry, to placate her for the temporary parting with the cupboard. Natàsha smiled through her tears at the book. ‘No give back?’ she asked.
‘No.’
And she smiled away the rest of her tears.
Meanwhile the candles were flickering, rapidly burning down … Melancholy life. How it passes! even while it seems to hang so heavily on your hands. A little more, and we shall join the throngs who went before us. Then why don’t we make haste and live? But how? How make the most of life? If you grip it, it runs through your fingers. While music played hilariously, life seemed to have stopped. Ah, if it were never to move on again I’d bear it: but it’s stopped — and then, next moment, it will slip away — into the dustbin … What the deuce was the matter with life? I liked, for instance, spending Christmas in other people’s homes because then I liked to think of my own home; but I never liked being at home. The children, who were between the ages of ten and fifteen, were all shy and reluctant, and I think looked on this Christmas tree as a nuisance. ‘What extraordinary, unnatural children!’ demurred Aunt Teresa. ‘You should enjoy yourselves like everybody else!’ Alas! You either do — or else you don’t — enjoy yourself. There is no ‘should’ about enjoyment. Uncle Lucy was shy, too. Aunt Molly alone was sending forth sounds of ‘Green grow the leaves’ at the top of her not very agreeable voice, to her own not very efficient accompaniment on the piano, and urging us to join in. But no one did — at least not for some time. We stood around the wall sulkily and shifted awkwardly from one foot to the other, and perhaps regretted that Jesus Christ was born at all. Besides ourselves there were Stepan’s little nephews and nieces — evil smelling things with hair greased with butter — who also stood at the wall and shuffled their feet. At last, with some difficulty, and thanks to Berthe’s initiative, the mechanism was set in motion: we began to go round, gingerly at first and feeling somewhat foolish, but gradually gaining confidence. Tall Uncle Lucy, small Uncle Emmanuel, Captain Negodyaev with the wooden leg — all but Aunt Teresa — went round the tree merrily. I thought: a few more æons, and we shall have joined the vast battalions which lie in wait for us and possibly begrudge us our temporary advantage. Why then is life so peculiarly unsatisfying? Why is there a streak of sadness, a deep strata of melancholy beneath all joy? ‘Green grow the leaves of the old oak tree. Green grow the leaves on the old oak tree. They waggled and they jaggled and they never could agree: till the tenor of the song goes merrily.
‘Merrily-y — merrily-y — till the tenor of the song goes merrily.’
‘Gleen glow the leaves on the ole, ole tree,’ sang the small children, while Nora lagged behind—
‘navver could aglee—’
‘They razzled and they jazzled,’ came from Bubby, Harry, and Natàsha, and Nora sang—
‘and the tanner of the song—’
‘Mère Lee—! Mère Lee—!’ came Berthe’s piercing soprano, a rendering which was an outrage on the national atmosphere of the song. ‘They razzled and they jazzled,’ Nora sang in her own time and tune, while—
‘Gleen glow the leaves’ came from the other three, when Nora, making up by a bounce, would cry—
‘could aglee—!’
And Berthe shrieked like an engine whistle—‘Mère Leeeee—!’
From the many lighted candles the room had become very hot. Beyond the drawn curtains, Harbin was eclipsing into twilight, amid cries of Mongol drivers and the sound of cracking whips, the sense of two rival civilizations bordering on each other, the piercing wind sweeping the barren, naked streets, raising clouds of cold dust, and the town mercilessly cold but snowless, miserable, like a sleepless sufferer or a tearless heart. The wax candles burnt down sadly. The smell of burning pine. Music, laughter — and I wanted to weep for all living things. Oh, why must we live? Half realized revelry! Whom were we pleasing? A mere interlude — and then back. Back at the heart of the universe, listening to the beat and the waves universal rising and falling and breaking in and about us, dreaming of all things and none, sleeping — what deep, wholesome sleep — for ever and ever and ever.
The three little chairs of the three little bears were put in a row. Berthe, who had a ‘working knowledge’ of music, sat down to the piano, and Aunt Teresa, as a special dispensation on account of the high festival, joined her, brushing aside her long, black silk skirt as she sat down on the plush stool beside Berthe (who had moved on to a plain chair), and the two women struck together the opening bars of Liszt’s Rhapsody No. 2, the children the while playing musical chairs. Harry moved very close to the chairs, ready to drop into each and even sitting down for a space and refusing to move on, and having fallen out of the game, joined again imperceptibly and strove irregularly to compete for a chair as before. Aunt Teresa and Berthe were belabouring the rhapsody, my aunt swinging her body a little to the always accelerating galloping rhythm, as though she were an expert musician, or else an expert horsewoman — or both. And possibly because the passage they were interpreting was one of chaos, they never noticed a discrepancy till Berthe turned the page. ‘Voyons donc, Berthe! I’m not yet half through the page!’—‘Enfin, Thérèse!’ Nor had we noticed anything, for chaos it should have been: and chaos it certainly was. The music having abruptly ceased, the children made for the chairs, and Nora fell out.
After supper Dr. Murgatroyd was talking of the psychology of the Koreans in the light of the teaching of Confucius, when he suddenly discovered that, leaning back against a table with a lighted candle on it, he had burnt a hole in the seat of his trousers. From the adjoining room came Beastly’s resonant voice: ‘No, my dear sir, you can’t get out of that — ha, ha! Sit down, here you are, here’s the pen and here’s the ink, and get about it — ha, ha, ha!’ he guffawed loudly.
‘See here, man, you sit down right here, and write to your Marshal,’ spoke Philip Brown’s stern voice.
‘But ze maréchal he be astonished,’ protested Uncle Emmanuel excitedly.
‘Never you mind, old chap. You write him a letter and ask him for the autograph, quick.’
‘Allons donc! le maréchal he askèd for ze French Red Cross, and ze French Red Cross zey getted nothing. You send it all to American Red Cross.’ Flushed in the face, Uncle Emmanuel expostulated: ‘Excuse to me, ’ow can I ask? He askèd where is ze money. I say, Zey send it all to Amérique! Nom de Dieu, enfin!’ protested Uncle Emmanuel, all his muscles agog with excitement.
‘They’re Allies — ain’t they?’ Beastly interjected.
‘Sure we are!’ said Philip Brown.