The Polyglots by William Gerhardie Read Free Book Online Page A

please,’ they entreated.
    I played the crest waves twenty times over, and then stopped.
    They sighed appreciation.
    ‘You have such feeling,’ my aunt said.
    Well, that’s true. But I am impatient of technicalities. Once while at Oxford I played the same passionate bit from
Tristan
, and a D.Mus. rushed up to me, horror-stricken. ‘Either,’ he cried, ‘I’ve lost my ear—or you are playing in the wrong key!’ I was playing in the wrong key, by ear at that (because I could not tackle it in the original). But they asked me to go on playing, and all through my playing I had a feeling of warmth, as though the sun was shining on the tissues of my skin. Sylvia’s warm eyes followed my every movement. And of this I was pleasurably aware.
    Uncle Emmanuel who, while I was playing, looked as if he had something more urgent up his sleeve, immediately I stopped, took the opportunity of saying: ‘Now that the war is over one must rejoice, one must amuse oneself a little.’ And Aunt Teresa, who looked unhappy and preoccupied while I played, replied:
    ‘The war is over, thank God. But I am anxious … about the last six weeks that I’ve been without news of him—I mean before the armistice was signed.’
    I thought: they talk in terms of blood and fire—and then hope for safety and peace.
    Nevertheless, to calm her for the sake of all of us, I said:
    ‘Most of the suffering and pain in the world is imaginary suffering and pain—which is not there. The next story I write will be a tragedy of people who imagine that certain things will happen: they imagine, and their drama is a drama of imagining. Actually nothing happens.’
    ‘It’s you—it’s you—you,’ she said heatedly, ‘who’ve upset me——’
    ‘But, really,
ma tante——
’
    ‘It’s you—I won’t sleep all night.’
    ‘But listen,
ma tante——
’
    ‘Oh, why get excited! Why get excited!’ Uncle Emmanuel hastened between us. ‘Peace! Peace in the household.’
    For a while she sat silent in her big soft chair, thoughtful, bent over her fancy needlework. As her
tisane
was brought in to her by Berthe, she looked at me tragically with her large, sad, St. Bernard eyes, and her lip quivered. ‘How I worry, George! Pity me. Pity me, George! George, understand, can’t you, how dreadfully I worry!’
    ‘That, believe me, is unnecessary. There’s nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so. Nearly all unhappiness in the world is caused by futile recriminations, anticipations, fears, forebodings, remembrances—that is, by the failure to control imagination.’
    She sighed; then bent forward and sipped her
tisane
.
    ‘What good is it your deliberately spoiling so many days and weeks of your short life by imagining the worst? And if the best occurs instead, you will have cheated yourself out of so many æons of your life, and the knowledge that this dim unhappiness of yours was but a phantom of your ill-controlled imagination will not retrieve a minute of your wasted life.’
    She said nothing, only sipped her
tisane
.
    ‘Then you will spend the rest of your time being miserable in retrospect for having wasted your days so unprofitably.’
    ‘They will seem sweet then by the very contrast,’ she said, with a sigh. And suddenly she expressed one of those strangely feminine views which always reassured me that Aunt Teresa was, insome ways, not as selfish as I thought, but, in the end, as egotistical as mortal man could be. ‘No,’ she said, ‘if the best happens, and he has come out of it alive, unscathed, I will, by my utmost anxiety now, have paid, and gladly paid, the heaviest dues that may be exacted. I will have squared fate, and I shall be proud and happy to remember that I have not been ungenerous and have secured his safety by my suffering. Therefore I must be worrying now, it is dangerous to be calm and happy. I must pay the dues in advance. I feel I must—I ought to be anxious—and I have been—I don’t know why—all