‘Time, sir!’
I opened my eyes. The steward had come to put out the lights in the writing-room. ‘Of course. Of course.’ I rubbed my eyes. From outside came the melancholy chant of the surges, and the uneven beat — as though of a contrite heart — of the piston rod. Here they still push and shuffle, I thought, and get into one another’s way in the corridors, or some try to run up the stairs, press forward, fall off — irreligious dullards! — when all they need do is to get on and keep still. To escape from this sheer restlessness, to get an abiding place in the eternal newness of the world!
As the saloon doors leading out on deck were always shut before this hour I was surprised to see them open. But when I spied my aunt crouching in a deck-chair I was not astonished. For one who had carried clean off her officer-husband in the midst of a great war; who had induced her daughter to break with her lover and marry clean against her will; who on the bridal night had sent the bridegroom home to his solitary bed, and sailed away with his young wife: for a woman who had done these things without forfeiting the least good will, to break the routine regulations of a ship was, I suppose, little more than a routine. I looked at her sitting there, all shrivelled up, crouching, gasping for air. But I was not a little frightened lest she be sick, and the pretty sight of it provoke my own sensitive entrails; so I had no sympathy to waste on her condition.
She looked at me darkly. ‘Where is Berthe? Here am I, ill and faint and quite alone! Oh, my God! where is she?’
‘She’s with Percy. He is indisposed. It’s the sea.’
‘Ah! but this is extraordinary! He is a man! and I am a woman, a poor invalid! and I have no one to attend on me!’
With expiatory gestures I mimicked back at her thus: ‘!!! Que voulez-vous?’
The ocean still rolled its angry surges. As far as the eye could see it was black night. I paced up and down like a captain on the bridge, on guard — against what? These lines from Goethe:
Was, von Menschen nicht gewusst
Oder nicht bedacht,
Durch das Labyrinth der Brust
Wandelt in der Nacht
came into my mind.
I do not want to sadden you with pessimism; nevertheless it looks — it very much looks, Uncle Emmanuel’s salary as Member of the Dixmude Municipal Films Censorship Committee being a paltry one — as though my royalties on this forthcoming book would be the sole support of Aunt Teresa and her retinue. A sad look-out for an intellectual! Before I left Harbin in the sunshine, my pocket-book was bulging with bank-notes of a high denomination; now after being fleeced and drained by my relations I am again as poor as a curate. I have an insane desire to sneak down the gangway as the boat touches the quay of Southampton, and only let them see my heels.
Reason for yourself. Yesterday again Captain Negodyaev borrowed money. As usual we spoke of religion and the hereafter; he listened amiably, only to ask me at the end of it to lend him £7. Of course he assured me that he would pay me back the money. The sincerity of his intention, in the face of the clean impossibility of his ever doing so, is formidable indeed, and does him credit. But Russians never pay their debts; they don’t consider it good fellowship. Aunt Molly had drawn to date the sum of £14 12s. Uncle Emmanuel this morning asked me for £2. Captain Negodyaev’s debt was £19. Berthe had had £4. Sylvia £30. A total of £69 12s.
Grand Totaclass="underline" Seventy-nine pounds eleven shillings and a penny.
‘Hell! Hell! Perfect hell!’
‘What is it, darling?’
‘Oh, not you.’
‘Alexander — please give me £15. Do you mind?’
‘I don’t mind. But where am I to take it? Honestly and truly—where? Unless I really go and borrow some!’
‘Yes, borrow some.’ My grandfather rose in the grave.
So far Aunt Teresa had not drawn on me. But I knew she had almost exhausted the advance from Gustave’s bank.
‘What shall we do,’ she asked, ‘when we have no more money?’
‘Of course, there is the International Red Cross.’
She meditated. ‘I hardly think—’ she said. There was a pause.
‘Can’t you, George, do something?’
‘I can.’
‘What?’
‘I have begun a novel. I have already written the title-page.’
My aunt looked at me with that strange look an English public school boy may cast upon a boy he secretly respects for being ‘clever’ but nevertheless regards as ‘queer’, and is a little sorry for him, for all that.
‘Is it going to sell well?’ she asked.
The exorbitant demands of my aristocratic aunt would tax the circulation of a best-seller. You will see the force of this my writing.
‘I hope you’ll make money,’ she said.
I was silent.
‘Anatole would have helped me if he were alive, I know. He was so generous.’ I was silent.
‘Is there a lot of action in it? People nowadays want something with lots of action and suspense.’
‘Oh, lots and lots!’ I answered savagely. ‘Gun play in every chapter. Fireworks! People chasing each other round and round and round till they drop from exhaustion.’
Aunt Teresa looked at me uncertainly, not knowing whether I was serious or laughing, and if laughing whether I was laughing at herself. ‘I wonder,’ she said, ‘whom you could write about?’
‘Well, ma tante, you seem to me a fruitful subject.’
‘H’m. C’est curieux. But you don’t know me. You don’t know human nature. What could you write about me?’
‘A comedy.’
‘Under what title?’
‘Well, perhaps—À tout venant je crache!’
‘You want to laugh at me then?’
‘No, that is not humour. Humour is when I laugh at you and laugh at myself in the doing (for laughing at you), and laugh at myself for laughing at myself, and thus to the tenth degree. It’s unbiased, free like a bird. The inestimable advantage of comedy over any other literary method of depicting life is that here you rise superior, unobtrusively, to every notion, attitude, and situation so depicted. We laugh — we laugh because we cannot be destroyed, because we do not recognize our destiny in any one achievement, because we are immortal, because there is not this or that world; but endless worlds: eternally we pass from one into another. In this lies the hilarity, futility, the insurmountable greatness of all life.’ I felt jolly, having gained my balance with one coup. And suddenly I thought of Uncle Lucy’s death; and I realized it was in line with the general hilarity of things!
‘I suppose,’ she said, ‘we shall have to put up at an hotel in London.’
I sighed.
‘To live at a London hotel is like living in a taxicab with the taximeter leaping all the time—2s. 6d. — 3s. 3d. — 4s. 9d. — while you breathe. It’s awful.’
There was a pause.
‘The book,’ said my aunt.