Uncle Emmanuel fiddled with his pocket-book for a moment, and then producing a 500,000 rouble note (at that time worth about 80 centimes) gave it to the Cossack, who grabbed it with his huge sabre-scarred fist, his body swaying uncertainly as he did so. ‘Allies!’ he snorted. ‘H’m!’
He calmed down. ‘Call yourself Allies!’ he said, in a grumbling tone, no longer dangerous, and turning to go. ‘Allies! H’m! That’s right. Allies — in name.’ He paused. ‘I’ll go and have a drink,’ he said. And he went out, slamming the door after him.
My uncle looked at me, with confusion. ‘Que voulez-vous!’ he said. ‘C’est la vie.’
But a veil over my uncle’s doings. I went out at last, leaving him there. A nice lesson for a purist and no mistake!
I was sitting in my office, working on my book, A Record of the Stages in the Evolution of an Attitude, when the telephone rang shrilly at my side. I took up the receiver. It was Berthe.
‘Georges, come home at once.’
She did not say why, but I sensed a tone of calamity in her voice. Before I could make myself ask she had hung up the receiver.
The rain had stopped and the big orange moon hung in the sky. The funny old man in the moon, as I drove home, looked sly in the extreme, and the road was all orange and unreal, and our whole life that moment seemed a series of ludicrous antics which we took so seriously to heart because — because we could not see, because we did not know. And then I thought that if when I got home I found Berthe standing on her head or Uncle Lucy standing on one leg and crowing, ‘Cock-cock-cock-cock-orikoo!’ I would not turn a hair, finding it in strict accordance with this orange light, this orange night, this orange moon.
When I arrived, I saw Harry, very tiny, very serious, below, proudly watering the flowers in the kitchen-yard out of a crooked tin; and two street urchins hanging on to the fence and gazing down at him with envy. The sight of him reassured me, but the absence of his little sister Nora made me feel uneasy.
‘Harry!’ I shouted down to him as I paid the cabman. But deep in his preoccupation with the ‘water-can’ he barely deigned to look up at me.
‘Harry!’ I said again. ‘Where is Nora?’
He mumbled something, looking at the boys the while.
‘Harry!’ I repeated. ‘Can’t you speak up? Where is Nora?’
‘In the w,’ he said in tones of provocation, gazing at the urchins in confusion.
Relieved, I made my way into the house. Berthe met me in the hall. She looked at me with that intimate sad smile I knew so well, but there was in it, this time, no trace of reminiscence, rather of a tragic resignation, and the red stripe on the tip of her nose — the result of the dog bite — gave her gravity a very funny expression. It was that look which in effect implies, ‘We live in a mad world: what can you expect?’ And I answered it with a series of quick becoming nods of gravity.
‘Your uncle,’ she said, ‘is dead.’
‘Which one?’
‘Uncle Lucy.’
‘Oh damn!’
I could find no more. Bang! that is fate flying in at your door. I was amazed more than really shocked. It was so unlike Uncle Lucy. He was not at all the kind of man to do a thing like that. — So his life was finished, wiped off the slate.
She led me silently ahead and up the stairs. Before the dark-room where Uncle Lucy used to develop his snaps, she paused and turned to me. ‘It’s a dreadful day today,’ she said. ‘He has hanged himself.’
I opened the door and went in.
Ever since I had been born, some five-and-twenty years ago, I have been more and more astonished at the spectacle of life as lived on our planet. Others had struggled with the hangman on the scaffold: what has induced this man to do the ghastly job himself? In the name of what logic, in the name of what God was he cutting this capering figure? It was a suicide, you might say, with extraordinary features. Uncle Lucy was clothed in Aunt Teresa’s camisole, knickers, silk stockings, garters, and a silk boudoir cap.
‘What I want to know,’ she said, ‘is how he got into her cupboard.’ And I had a vision of Uncle Lucy stealing into Aunt Teresa’s wardrobe — and stealing out again on tiptoe, with the camisole and knickers and the boudoir cap.
‘What I want to know is why he did it.’ I could not think why, unless, perhaps, to vindicate his girlish name.
His ordinary clothes were behind the door. The face was livid; only his nose, for once, was pale, and the body was still warm but lifeless. He was hanging on the rope when he was seen through the window by a neighbour, who at first, owing to the extraordinary attire, took him to be a dummy. He was now lying on the floor, a wretched sight to behold.
‘My God what had we better do? Send for the doctor?’ she asked.
I looked at my wrist-watch: two adjacent holes on the strap had joined and the strap was loose, the watch hung under my wrist. ‘A doctor! The matter is past a doctor. Though perhaps Abelberg had better come and look at him. I’m not exactly familiar with such feats. Poor man.’ But in my heart I could find nothing but annoyance.
‘Somebody must wash him,’ she said with grave concern, and shuddered at the prospect of doing it herself.
‘Doesn’t need washing now. Clean enough for the worms.’
‘Georges!’ she cried. ‘It’s — it’s blasphemy.’
These people are absurd.
‘Do you know what the good Jesus said about the dead?’
‘No; what?’
‘That the dead had better bury their dead.’
‘George!’ she said, still uncertain if my words were in accordance with propriety. ‘Quelle tragédie!’
I have no tears to waste over this sort of thing. ‘It’s not a tragedy, Berthe: it’s tragedy-bouffe.’
To hang yourself in a pair of Aunt Teresa’s knickers — it’s not the kind of thing you might expect to happen every day: it wanted some little getting used to. Suddenly, Berthe began to laugh (she couldn’t help it). Indeed, though dead, he looked very funny. Her laugh gave me the shudders. And as she began laughing, she laughed louder and louder; she laughed at the idea that she should be laughing; it struck her as being increasingly funny. She tried to suppress it. She could not. She ran out of the room.
To die, I thought, must be like violent stomach-ache, when you exclaim, ‘Oh my!’ and are released, contented, with a blissful smile, into another world. Into the reasons necessitating this strange attire, into the tragedy of it I am unable to follow. Of course, he had worried over the loss of his Siberian property a good deal. And let us be just: he had also purchased a large quantity of roubles, which would justify any man laying hands on himself on that score alone. But I am inclined to think that the ordinary normal spectacle of life as it is lived on our planet had unhinged his mind: had proved too much for him. I pondered on the logic of the insane: perhaps they have a logic of their own. Or perhaps madness is the very antithesis of logic.
I found Berthe in the children’s bedroom. ‘I believe you and I, Berthe, are the only two sane beings on this earth. In fact, I am not even so sure about you. Why don’t you spring at me and bite me in the shoulder?’
The children were awake. I went in and saw Nora, her small rosy head on the enormous pillow, like a pale cherry. She was crying.
‘What’s the matter, Nora?’
‘Earache.’
‘You’ve been in a draught?’
‘I ’hink so,’ she said, and cried.
It transpired that during the day she had drunk water out of the drain-pipe in the yard, and suddenly in the night fear seized her, and she cried: ‘Don’t want to die.’ In the rough-and-tumble she had scratched her leg, and the little boy with the withered arm had evidently preyed on her mind, and through her choking sobs ‘Don’t want to die,’ she interjected, ‘withered leg … oh, I don’t want to die.’