Free The Polyglots by William Gerhardie

went back into his study and shut the door behind him.
    Some time afterwards he came out and knocked at Aunt Teresa’s door.
    ‘
Entrez
!’ came her voice. And he went in. Berthe and I stood outside, listening, and I thought that her feeling at hearing his words must be that he and other sympathetic souls were souls assisting at a tragedy not wholly understood; that listening to warm condolences her only thought was that the son whom she had borne she would not see again. And—strange—my aunt, that woman who revelled in self-pity, now controlled herself and did not cry. There was something quiet and austere about her—like sombre music, like deep red wine. The storm had rolled over, but the rain fell quietly, steadily. And as I entered the bedroom I saw the two of them together. He was sitting on her bed, saying, ‘My son! My son!’ He had upset a jug of water which stood on the floor, but it took him some time to realize what he had done. The despair that had come on them with the first news had worn off a little; they were sobbing softly, quietly, timidly. ‘I knew, I knew all the time,’ she said, crying. ‘You had better go and leave us, George; thank you, you can do nothing.’
    Too late, I thought, you can’t repair it now, there is no help! I went out quietly, quietly shutting the door. For a while I stood on the terrace, my thoughts circling round and round unprogressively. I noticed now that it was raining heavily.

13
    ON THE 23RD OF JULY, BEASTLY AND I AND PICKUP, my servant, left Tokyo and crossed from Tsuruga to Vladivostok on the s.s.
Penza
of the Russian Volunteer Fleet, whose Captain, as he sat among us at the head of the table, had a meek, resigned look in his eyes, as if he didn’t quite know what he was going to do next, while the ship’s officers, professing disgust for the tedium of their prosaic occupations, speculated with enthusiasm on highpolitics, religion, literature, and metaphysics, upon which plane of thought navigation and such-like matters appeared proportionately negligible things. Meanwhile the ship somehow went on, thud after thud—and even reached its destination.
    Vladivostok, as we surveyed it from the boat, struck me as a city of disgruntled individuals. Dock-labourers sat inertly on the quay, as if disgusted with Red Guards and White Guards and Green Guards alike, and the people, as they moved to and fro in the drizzle, looked tired of their work, of themselves, and of existence as a whole.
    Our ‘Organization’, let me say at once, was something without precedent—one of the really comic sideshows of after-armistice confabulation. It was the poor old sentimental military mind, confronted with the task of saving civilization, forced to draw upon the intellect, and finding that in truth it had no such reserves to draw upon, plunging gallantly into a Russian sea of incoherence. And puzzled—daily more puzzled; coming out of it at last, with its tail between its legs, considerably bedraggled. There was really nothing to it but to enjoy the spectacle. The spectacle consisted of a number of departments whose heads amused themselves by passing buff slips one to another, the point of which lay in the art of relegating the solution of the question specified to the resources of another department. It was a kind of game of chess in which ability and wit counted for quite a great deal. The department which could not pass on the buff slip to another and in the last resort was forced to take action itself was deemed to have lost the game. From time to time new officers would be called for: specialists in embarkation, secret service, and so forth, and usually six months or more would elapse before their arrival from England, by which time the need for them would generally have passed. Unwilling to go home, they would prowl about the premises, coveting their neighbours’ jobs, and usually end by establishing a new department of their own, with themselves as heads. A fat, flabby