The Polyglots by William Gerhardie Read Free Book Online Page B

this last month.’
    She rose wearily from her arm-chair and stooped up to bed on the gallant arm of her husband. Aunt Teresa, I learnt, had an attack of nerves after that, ‘une
crise
’, as Berthe called it, and could not sleep all night.
    I looked at Sylvia. ‘When I saw you in the street to-day I knew at once it was you.’
    ‘Oh—with my shoes unlaced,’ she laughed. ‘I ran out just to buy some sweets.’
    And later, when Sylvia and I played dominoes, I was so fascinated by her presence that I didn’t care a rap about the dominoes, and Sylvia corrected practically my every move, as much as if playing by herself, while I only gazed at her in rapture. In another week her holidays would be over and she would return to Kobe to a boarding-school run by Irish nuns—the ‘Convent of the Sacred Heart’.
    ‘You are a wonderful, unique, great writer, George,’ she said, and then added, in her serious way, with a perfect absence of guile: ‘I must read one of your books some day.’
    Then she too went to bed.
    ‘Ah! the night life of Brussels! Ah!…’ said Uncle Emmanuel over the drinks. ‘It wants some beating!’
    A moment later he came up to me. ‘
Mon ami
,’ said my uncle, taking hold of me with both hands by the waist and looking up at me frankly, ‘you must see Japan—life—it’s amusing! The night aspect especially.’

9
    UNCLE EMMANUEL HAD WHISPERED THINGS INTO my ear, and I had nodded, and now we were on our way. Our two rickshaw coolies ran smartly side by side in the abated heat of the evening. The lighted lanterns at the shaft and the side bobbed gaily through the gathering dusk. We went past endless bazaars, through endless lanes lined with shops. Uncle Emmanuel lit a cigar. He wore a brown bowler hat, yellow gloves that had been washed so often that they looked perfectly white, and with his stiff waxed moustache and his gilt-knobbed cane he looked quite a dog as he sat there, contented at last, in the feather-spring vehicle. The interminable progress through the city. Tokyo indeed was like an endless succession of villages. Night fell. The two men ran as smartly as ever. I, with my thoughts full of Sylvia, listened to those queer plaintive chants—A-a-a—y-a-a—yaw—y-o-o—that emanated from every nook and lane; shrinking aback at the touch, disinclined.
    At last we drove up before a queer-looking wooden structure on long legs, and at once the hostess and attendants came down the crude wooden staircase to meet us. Our boots were removed at the foot of the stairs, and we were ushered upstairs into a low-ceilinged drawing-room, where I could not even stand up without bumping my head (though Uncle Emmanuel could do so with ease), and I had a feeling as if I had left the company of human beings and had joined that of birds or some undefined species of animals. While we were thus seated on the matted floor, fruit was served round; then a side-door opened, and a small procession of blanch-faced, short-legged women filed before us.
    I was repelled by their flat blank Asiatic faces, and by the thick paint thereon. But Uncle Emmanuel smiled as he looked at them.
    ‘
Elles sont gentilles, eh
?’ he turned to me.
    ‘M …’ I demurred.
    ‘Ah!’ he retorted, provoked by my critical attitude, ‘
Ce n’est pas Paris, enfin
!’
    He said that, say what I might, they were ‘
mignonnes
’. I maintained that their legs were much too short for my liking—a defect that, to me, stripped them of all feminine attraction. ‘
Que voulez-vous
?’ he said philosophically. And we mildly fell out. The women stood before us, awaiting our choice. From outside came the din of the streets, and the plaintive whining chant of Mongol music, and the listlessness of the city stealing on us at the dead of night. I sat listless, too, on the matted floor in the low-ceilinged room, and I felt as if I had been locked up in the upper drawer of a cupboard—locked up and abandoned, in an age and place that were not