Napoleon Symphony: A Novel in Four Movements (46 page)

“Far behind us, far far far.”

He thought, but not for long, of a cuckolded prince. He had no pity for cuckolds, he, the most cuckolded man alive. But all in the past, true, and he was sure there was a faithful Empress in Mainz, anxious to join him in Warsaw, perhaps already having heard something, women were quick to scent other women, but he had written. “Your grief at our separation crucifies me with pain, but circumstances compel us both to a continuing agony of privation. Mainz is too far from Warsaw, the roads are wretched, the snow lies deep and blizzards howl, Paris calls you, Paris needs you, the Empress, you have duties to your people, Our Lady of Victories. Oh, how I chafe at our continued separation, oh, how I long to fold you in my arms, to warm and be warmed, giving and taking love, in these endless winter nights that endlessly continue, spring so far, your springlike beauty lost to me, Persephone Persephone.” A good, he considered, and persuasive letter.

“Heart of my heart of my heart of my.” He panted, riding hard, the goal in sight. Marie and he writhed naked in a tumble of bear-rugs before the great pine-fire of the lodge. “My kleba, my vota.” And that was right: it was pure and honest water, which a man could drink without fear, in which a man could be cleansed, that mattered more than the wine. Deceitful wine that turned to vinegar. It was vinegar on a sponge they had handed up to him when it was the final kiss of his own element he had, in his final agony, begged. But not the sea, never that. All about their sanctuary of fire, where they rode in the act of life, the snow lay,
vota
turned to manna, a universal fall of white bread.

“Love of my.”

Riding, riding. And at last the goal reached, the horses reined, the miracle of the gush that he knew, in the very revelation of the instant, not the imposed fancy of the later knowledge, to be ready to be transubstantiated to the bread of life. They slept, and he awoke to her kisses, her yellow hair all about him, as though it were he who was Danae. He smiled, blinked, saw through the casement no snow, only sun-roasted earth and the sea beyond. This was Elba, and she had come to him in Elba, the bread and water of life, and their son was playing outside, calling in Italian: “
Cattivo cattivo
.”

“What is that word he calls?” she said.

“It is the first word often a child will use when he comes to a place that speaks Italian. The Italian children say it to him and he learns to say it to them.
Cattivo
. It means
bad
.” He sighed. “But its older meaning is
prisoner
. Captive. He who is in chains and has lost everything—such a one is bad, bad. It is a very cruel kind of morality. I, my love, am
bad
.”

“Well then,” she smiled, and kissed him swiftly on his left eyebrow, “it is time for you to be good again. You are not in chains and you have not lost everything.”

“I have lost everything except you. That means there is a little good left in me.” He smiled, then his eyes grew sternly soft in passion, and the kiss he gave her was neither light nor swift. They writhed, their bodies dewed by the heat of the Elban afternoon, and then the child’s voice from outside called:

“
Buono buono buono
.”

They desisted, laughing. She knew what that word meant.

“
Bon, bon, bon
.” They were in a horse-sleigh again, furred and rugged, riding embraced, the reins and whip this time in the hands of a Walewska coachman, snow in uncountable hectares all about, and the two of them were harrying Russia together.

“The Hospodars,” she was saying.

“Yes yes, the Hospodars. I will write to the Sultan Selim and bid him drive out the Hospodars from Wallachia. And what sort of Russians are the Hospodars?”

“Just holy Russians living in Wallachia,” she smiled.

“
Bon
. Being holy Russians, O Father of the Faithful, they will destroy your mosques in the name of their spurious Christianity, to them the very name of Mussulman is an abomination. Strike now, spit on the treacherous Serbians, march upon Choczim, butcher the—”

“Hospodars.”

“
Bon, bon
. In the name of Allah, who is the Lord of all, I write to you as your dear and faithful and loving friend. Set the Balkans ablaze with the vengeful sword of Islam. There,” he smiled. “I do this for Poland.” And he kissed her heartily. “Then,” he said, and his great eyes burned a huge map on the snow, “Persia. What shall we say to the Shah?”

“To the Shah say—let me see. Something about Allah again.” It was mad, it was glorious. Love and snow and Poland and Islam. It was poetry.

“Ah, I will write this. The Russian infidel reels under the blows of your faithful friends of Frankistan, and the Ottoman Porte hacks him with the vengeful sword of Islam—”

“You have already used that phrase.”

“Yes, but to the Sublime Porte, not to the Divine Shah. Perhaps the vengeful scimitar might be better.”

“
Bon, bon
.”

“Ah, listen to this. Fortuné has removed the bandage from her own eyes and placed them about the eyes of our common enemy. There is a power—God or Allah, but there is no God but Allah—who hovers over me, bidding me conquer in the name of Truth and Goodness, who sees the time as propitious for the new promotion of Persian Glory, and who smiles on the Empire of the Ottoman Porte. Three empires, dedicated to the spread of the Divine Word—let us go forward together.”

“You go too far, I think.”

“Forward together!”

“Too far!”

They tore at each other’s furs, laughing, then tumbled out of the horse-sleigh, over and over in the gorgeous snow. The coachman drove on impassive, cracking his whip, not looking back, and disappeared over the ridge where bare blackthorns stood under the scimitar moon. Where they made love—

“Forward together!”

“Too fast!”

– naked, the snow melted and steamed. They lay side by side naked under the velvet heavens, and he said:

“What is that constellation?”

“Cassiopeia. My family initial.”

“Not only yours.” He grew gloomy and began to sweat. They were indoors, lying in a hot snow-tumble of sheets and blankets. Roustam came in and salaamed grinning at their nudity, then recharged the vast fire with fresh pine logs. “Too hot,” his master complained, but Roustam turned and said: “
Cadeaux islamiques
.”

“God,” he said, ignoring that, “how I hate the English.”

“That’s not very complimentary,” pouted naked Betsy. He turned in shock to see that it was indeed she he had been riding, no more than a child, and said:

“You shouldn’t be here, who let you in, who allowed me to—”

“Like all men, take what you want, and then say you hate me.”

“But I don’t hate, I love, I love—”

“Sweetheart,” she said, bringing her thin whiteness closer to his fat, “remember what you said about gardens, hm? Well, we’re a garden, you know, and we have our spades ready to stick into intruders.”

“Quite right, quite right.” He sighed heavily and looked down at his heaviness (that belly, the size of it). “But you should have left my garden alone.”

“You should have left other people’s gardens alone.”

“But they weren’t real gardens, they were more like wildernesses, a duty to reclaim, you know, and if they were gardens they were very badly kept gardens. God, it’s so hot in here. God, I’m so thirsty.”

“Oh, don’t be so selfish all the time. Come on, do it again, I want it, you dig so vigorously,
komm’ Süsser, wieder wieder
.”

“Now you’re being like
her
. God, the thirst.”

Roustam, who had silently and invisibly gone out, came in again by a different door. He was dressed as an English gentleman, a sort of pump-room beau, and he raised a disdainful quizzing-glass. “The friendship,” he said haughtily, “subsisting between the Islamic peoples and the British is not to be broken by the clumsy machinations of a mere Corsican adventurer. You spoke of thirst. You require water? Note, in my language, the Cassiopeian initial. Water you shall have.” He clapped his hands, as if about to announce a quadrille, and yet another door opened. Through it, whooping and whooshing and growling but undeniably very wet water, came the sea. “Drink that,” said Beau Roustam. But the man who had called himself his master, by a supreme effort of the will of a sick man, manfully recollected his manly duty to resist, so, turning the water into Cassiopeia, he split it at its superior angle, so that the W fell apart into two V’s, and a V thrust on either side of him as he lay otherwise helpless on his bed, piercing the wall behind in two separate places but entirely failing to transfix himself. That was the secret then, so simple once one had learned it. One V, of course, was quite enough. He smiled, but he was still thirsty. Roustam exploded with Britannico-Islamic rage.

“
L
et him drink that,” said Dr. Arnott. “It is cow’s milk. Highly nutritious, also refreshing.” And he indicated smiling the crock to his medical colleague Antommarchi. But the latter did not smile; rather his face was full of thunder. He said:

“I must oppose most resolutely the proposal that he imbibe a beverage so heavy and indigestible. He requires a very much lighter diet. Even when he was in reasonably tolerable health he was unable to digest with any ease any species of milk—cow’s, goat’s, sheep’s. Now to offer him milk would infallibly excite grave stomachic distress.”

“But you do not quite understand,” smiled Dr. Arnott. “It was Sir Hudson Lowe himself who suggested that he be given cow’s milk. Sir Hudson ordered milk to be obtained and recommended its immediate ingestion.”

“It would,” cried the other, “be altogether characteristic of Sir Lowe to wish to cause the hero whom he hates and who now seems to lie totally at his mercy maximal pain and suffering. That is, naturally, presuming that Sir Lowe has sufficient medical knowledge to be aware of the ghastly consequences of lactary imbibition in the state to which the patient has, partially through Sir Lowe’s own malice, been brought. It would, of course, be more charitable to see in this proposal, however misguided, a change of heart, a relenting, the blooming of an unwonted and uncharacteristic compassion. But his gift must be rejected. The patient may be given when he wakes a little orange-flower water mixed with ordinary water and sugar.”

“You still do not seem to understand,” still, though somewhat uneasily now, smiled Dr. Arnott. “It is Sir Hudson Lowe himself, the Governor of St. Helena, who makes both the recommendation and the offering. You see it here.” And he once more indicated the crock. “Milk. The milk of a cow. Pure. Good. Nourishing. The milk of Sir Hudson Lowe.”

“It would seem to me, sir,” frowned Dr. Antommarchi, “that your clinical knowledge as well as your normal endowment of human compassion are alike being clouded by sycophancy. If Sir Lowe recommended and offered rosbif you would doubtless wish to force it down the throat of the sufferer. In order, if you understand me, that you reinforce Sir Lowe’s good opinion of himself, both as a man of knowledge and a creature of compassion, and through that good opinion of yourself, his good opinion of you, who, against your better medical judgment, are totally prepared to corroborate that good opinion.”

“Which good opinion?” smiled Dr. Arnott more uneasily still. “Of himself or of myself?”

“They are hardly extricable one from the other,” cried Dr. Antommarchi. “It is all a matter of good opinions and not at all of what is clinically fitting.”

“I do not think you have understood at all what I have been saying,” said Dr. Arnott, with an easier smile. “Nor do you seem to appreciate the significance of this er present proffer. Here” he smiled, indicating the crock and its snowy content, “is cow’s milk. Milk, a lactic or lactal substance obtained from the mammary glands of er vaccine quadrupeds. Forgive me if my technical terms are inept or inaccurate. I have been in this medical business a very long time and hence am become possibly somewhat ignorant. This is milk from Sir Hudson himself. It is for our patient. It is nourishing and highly digestible. Also refreshing.” And he indicated once more the snowily brimming crock. “Let him therefore drink it.”

“Must I reiterate yet again,” cried Dr. Antommarchi, “my abhorrence of what is either calculated Britannic villainy or else uncalculated Britannic stupidity but, whatever its quiddity, most certainly reflects adversely to a degree hardly computable on the ethics and even professional qualifications of one whom I had deemed, perhaps, as I begin to see now, misguidedly, at least a disinterested colleague, but of whom I now, I must confess, entertain very considerable doubts.”

“Ah,” smiled Dr. Arnott, “that seems a little more reasonable. So I suggest we pour some into a glass or a cup, I leave the choice of the vessel of er imbibition entirely to you, and then wake the patient or prisoner or both, prisoner-patient really I suppose, make him imbibe the er beverage, sit back while he does so, and watch its immediate er beneficial er effects.” He indicated the snow-white contents of the crock.

“No, sir,” thundered Dr. Antommarchi, “we will do nothing of the kind, since as I have already said with, I should have presumed, sufficient clarity, that substance, however fit it may be for the digestive systems of British infants, is totally unsuitable for our patient in his present state. It is heavy and indigestible and will cause grave enteric distress.”

“But,” smiled Dr. Arnott, somewhat uneasily now, “this is proffered on the recommendation of Sir Hudson Lowe. Doubtless, though a foreigner here, you will have some notion of who Sir Hudson Lowe is. He is Governor of this island where our prisoner is a patient or, if you prefer, patient a prisoner. Now milk, as Sir Hudson considers, is an admirable and totally un-solid food, easily imbibed, supremely nourishing, bland to the inner organs and refreshing to the taste, also altogether digestible. And so he may, of his goodness and condescension, be regarded as the fount and original of this present er proffer.” And he indicated with a smile the crock snowily brimming.

“It seems to me,” cried the other, “that I must repeatedly raise my voice in opposition to a proposal that is redolent of most unprofessional malice or else nescience or even conceivably, since the British temperament is illogical enough to embrace totally incompatible elements, a combination of both. This
lac
vaccae
is totally unsuitable for the patient in his present enfeebled state, and, even were he less enfeebled, were he, indeed, in normal health, it would be a totally inappropriate nutritive. More, it seems to me, I can hardly say.”