The Polyglots Read Online Free PDF Page A

attending to the engine. And when Connie shouted down the speaking tube to Lucy to back engines, Lucy of course could not hear a word, and Connie, who could not see a thing, landed us right into the middle of the Liteiny Bridge. How well I remember it! And then they shouted, shouted at each other, nearly bit each other’s heads off. It was awful. Your mother was on the launch’—she turned to me. ‘I think they were just engaged.’
    And as we plunged into reminiscence I took the opportunity of asking Aunt Teresa to enlighten me concerning my paternal ancestors. Whether what she said was fact or partly fiction I cannot truly vouch. I learnt, however, that originally, centuries ago, our fathers sprang from a Swedish knight who came to Finland to introduce Christianity and culture to the white-haired race; that subsequently he betrayed his stock and went over to the Finns and was disowned by his own clan without ever really being assimilated by the Finns, who, because of his forbidding looks, suspected him of being the devil’s envoy and called him old
Saatana Perkele
, which name—von Altteuffel—he adopted as he strayed into Esthonia and joined the missionary Teuton knights, I daresay in sinister extravagance, perhaps in evil irony, a dark romantic pride—who knows?—and chose two devils with twisted interlocking tails as his new coat-of-arms. His son, a Finn, but domiciled in northern Italy, had changed his name from Altteuffel to Diabolo.
His
son, an Italian born, but persecuted on account of his Protestant faith, had fled to Scotland, where
his
son, a Shetlander by birth, to make the name appear more Scottish, added a ‘gh’ ending to it, after the manner of MacDonogh—‘Diabologh’, to give it a more native air, but only succeeded in so estranging it from its original philology that it was neither fish nor flesh nor good red herring. So much so that when I, a distant offspring(born in far Japan), was joining up a Highland regiment to fight in the World War (for the freedom of small nationalities), the recruiting sergeant looked at it, and looking at it looked at it again, and as he looked at it he looked—well—puzzled. His face began to ripple, changed into a snigger, developed into a grin. He shook his head—‘
Gawddamn
,’ he said. Just that—and then no more. I took the oath and the King’s shilling—which then was eighteen-pence. My grandfather, who had been born in London and was of a restless disposition, after travelling in Spain, Holland, France, Denmark and Italy, settled in Siberia, where he had bought a large estate in the vicinity of Krasnoyarsk, where later he developed a successful business in exporting furs. In his diary there are curious references to the bull fights which he saw in Barcelona, where he also met his future wife, a Spanish lady who, after marriage, followed him to Manchester where, prior to settling on the Krasnoyarsk estate, she gave birth to my father, Aunt Teresa, Uncle Lucy, and half a dozen other offspring. My grandfather, who outlived his wife, provided in his will that the Krasnoyarsk estate (known by the Russian rendering of our surname ‘Diavolo’) should be equally divided among his many children. ‘But your father could not get on with your Uncle Lucy,’ Aunt Teresa told me, ‘and he withdrew his share of money and set up his cotton-spinning mills in Petersburg. And of course, he has also done very well.’ And as she spoke, I saw myself as a child back in the magnificent white house overlooking the Neva and contrasting strangely with the desolating quay on which it stood. Outside the snow was falling. The wind sweeping across the quay was hard, defiant. The ice-chained Neva looked cold and menacing. And looking at me, Aunt Teresa said, ‘You, George, are not a business man, you’re’—she made gestures with her blanched bejewelled hand towards the heavens—‘you’re a poet. Always in the clouds. But your father—ah, he was a business man!’ And