Napoleon Symphony: A Novel in Four Movements (51 page)

“Treachery treachery treach—”

“I think,” smiled Dr. Arnott, “that the Governor, that Sir Hudson Lowe, on behalf, remember, of Lord Bathurst back in London, would agree that there is no enlargement of the liver. Three to two, gentlemen.”

“I’m surprised,” sniffed Dr. Mitchell, “that you, Shortt, should be willing to go along with—Well, after all, certain loyalties, the claims of undoubted decencies. Damn it, man, whose side are you on?”

“He is on,” cried Dr. Antommarchi, “the side of truth, the side of our great and good dead king and master.”

“I wouldn’t agree with that last bit,” scowled Dr. Shortt. “Truth, if you like, but not the rest of the rigamarole. And if having truth means having to have all that, then I’m not too sure how I stand. Look,” he said to his fellow-perfidalbionites, “I’m not too sure either that I give a damn about Sir Hudson Lowe and that fool Bathurst back in London. No one’s going to send me to the guillotine for having the courage of the conviction of my own eyesight. I say it’s enlarged—”

“Abnormally, you said.” Dr. Arnott smiled at him.

“Whatever that means—”

“Whatever
enlarged
means,” twitched Dr. Mitchell. “Look, Shortt, do you know what the average size of a liver is?”

“I’ve seen enough livers in my time to know that this one is damnably enlarged. Sorry, don’t want any trouble, as you know, but there it is, damn it.”

“I heard that,” cried Dr. Antommarchi, “about the guillotine. Have courage, man. His lovers and worshippers will be praying for you if that day should come.”

“We don’t have the guillotine in England,” smiled Dr. Arnott. “We’re civilized there. It was just a figure of speech. Nobody’s going to send anyone to the guillotine. Except,” he said, but his smile showed that this was no time for threats and insults and so on to this Dr. Auntie Margery here. “Now then,” brisk, smiling, gesturing, “a cancerous condition of the stomach. Right, Shortt? Accept that as the cause of his taking off?”

“That liver’s damnably enlarged. Funny thing I didn’t notice it before. Very well, death through cancerous ulcer, I’ll sign that, but I want that put in about the enlarged liver.”

“Oh, I don’t think we’re going to have that,” smiled Dr. Arnott. “We’ll leave out the liver. An irrelevance, really.”

“I’m having the liver in,” snorted Shortt. “And I want it noted that Sir Hudson Lowe has suppressed the enlargement bit. And I don’t care a damn.”

“Friend to the truth and the cause,” cried Dr. Antommarchi. “For my part, I will be no party. I will sign nothing.”

“Couldn’t be better,” smiled Dr. Arnott. “Damned if I know really how you got into all this. It was his mother sent you, wasn’t it? Along with those two damned snuffling priests. Madam Mayor or Mare or whatever they call her.”

“Look,” sourly said Dr. Shortt. “I don’t want you breathing garlic and
ami de la verité
all over me. It’ll sound as if I’m in on some damned foreign conspiracy. I go my own way, follow my own ocular testimony, so keep your garlicky breath out of it, do you understand?”

“I stand alone,” cried Dr. Antommarchi. “Treachery, always treach.”

“Oh, do shut up,” smiled Dr. Arnott. “Can’t you let the poor devil lie in peace?” And he gestured to the corpse, hacked open like a haggis. “Sew him up and have him made to look pretty. He won’t keep long.”

“It’s a good face, you have to admit,” admitted Dr. Shortt. “It’s what I’d call a noble face. Compare it with Lowe’s face, for instance. No damned comparison.”

“Friend,” cried Dr. Antommarchi. “The magic is working even from the shades of death.” But Dr. Shortt looked at him in proper Britannic disgust, stupid hysterical foreigner.

S
ir Hud abated none of the fierce sternness of his inveterate antagonism in the face he raised to the heavens. “He was my foe,” he declared in an heroic voice, “and the foe of all mankind. He was the eternal enemy, but now he has passed away from the eyes of men. The forces of good have prevailed, and though no true heart may prate of forgiveness, yet what heart is this day so obdurate that it will not soften, yea, and liquefy to a brief dew-dropping of generous tears? Damned he is, damned he must be, the endless flames of perdition enfold him, but at the same time he reposes in the bosom of a just God, who knoweth better than any of us how the souls of the wicked shall justly be disposed. He is dead, which none may deny; he is buried, which none may deny either; he is gone from us, which the most skeptical must be ready to admit. Nevertheless, we must show true British generosity. His tombstone shall not bear the legend of imperial pretension, but nor neither shall it be inscribed with true and veracious, though in the circumstances ungenerous, accounts of his evil villainy and damnable dastardliness. Nay, blank it shall be; blank shall it rest; and the sun and the wind and the generous rain shall attest to the end of time to its blankness. So let us dry our eyes and pronounce Amen to that.” And he spurred his charger and rode off, whither no man was much inclined to inquire.

“W
ell, miss, as habit himpels me still to go on calling you of,” said Sergeant Trouncer, as good a soldier of King George (though the Fourth now, not the Third, it making little odds however) as King George, if King George were disposed to look, could be expected to find, “them was his last words, as I have hevidence hof, and they is hinscribed ear hon this ear bit of paper, not to give it too rumbustious and overfacing hof a description.” He sucked his ample mustache, which had been, together with the spacious orifice to which it was a curtain, amply laved with beer freely donated by the Bascombes. He sat with Betsy in their garden in London, listening to birdsong very straightforwardly British and no nonsense, none of your tropical ornithological melodic extravagances. In six more months they would all be celebrating a British Christmas (not these same birds, of course; they, having little of true Christmas or indeed of British feeling, would have winged their way to other climes), but now it was British summer and no whit the worse for that, God bless it.

Betsy read the scrap of paper, which bore evidence of long and arduous travel in the somewhat cramped diligence of Sergeant Trouncer’s back trousers pocket, and wept a little as she read. “France. Army. Head of the Army. Josephine.” She sniffed back a tear. “How very sad,” she said in a muffled voice.

“Ha,” said Sergeant Trouncer weightily. “So that’s what it means, eh? I was never much of a one for the Frenchies and their lingo, miss, aving ad orrible hexperiences as I bitterly recall at Toulong.” To her blankness he elucidated: “Toulong being by way of a seaside place, miss, in France, and terrible rumbustious goings hon there was—I takes my hoath hon it, hif you will forgive the circumloquaciousness, so to speak, miss.”

“So he thought of her,” sniffed Betsy, “at the very last. How sad, how really sad. And they all left him, Sergeant Trouncer, every one.”

“I stayed,” Sergeant Trouncer observed, teasing out like carded wool the left wing of his damp mustache. “But then, I ad to, in a manner of talking, me being in His Majesty’s Forces, God bless im and them. Nor,” he added sagaciously, “was I by way of being a Woman, miss, that being in your mind without a Doubt. But,” he said mysteriously, “Eaven transposes all things in the long run, and whether we abide it or do not abide it makes but little difference to the houtcome of the ole boiling, miss, if you’ll a pardon of the hobservance.”

“And I left him too,” Betsy said in a low and tremulous voice. “I deserted him with the others. How can I ever forgive myself?”

“The call of dooty, miss,” pronounced Sergeant Trouncer, “and there is no going beyond of that, as is well detested by Them As Knows.” And, as though this last word asked for it, he placed a great index finger against the side of his meaty nasal organ.

“I loved him, you see,” murmured Betsy.

“Ah, love,” said Sergeant Trouncer frowning, as though it were some military innovation of which he did not approve, “love we all as eard of, heven when we ave not been much deposed to it. So there it is, miss, so to speak.”

“And now it’s all over.”

“Well,” deliberated Sergeant Trouncer, “I wouldn’t be too certain of that, miss. Them is very final words—Hall Hover. No, miss, I would think twice before deliverance of that there hutterance.” Our military friend, though lacking in what the narrower world calls learning and refinement, was not devoid of a certain natural wisdom, and it was out of the depths of this that he repeated the words: “Hall Hover? No, miss, not in the least Hall Hover.” And then he gladly accepted another glass of the Bascombes’ good British ale.

N
ot
in the least all over
. It was a gorgeous spring morning as N rode out to inspect the troops. The words of the memoranda he had just dictated rang like a jingle of little bell-tunes. It was really a most beautiful morning. “The Louvre was five minutes late in opening yesterday… That junior clerk in the Ministry of Works, Queval I seem to remember the name is, seems to me to be a sly tippler. How can he afford it on his salary? Irregularities there, and if in small, probably in high places too. Have it looked into… The Egyptian fountain is in a very dirty state, have it cleaned out… The rate of the bank loan must be raised one percent… The time has come for a new school edition of the life of Charlemagne… Corporal Masson has an inflamed eye, order him to report sick… Some day we will have those bastards incorporated into the Great European Family…”

With him rode his Chief of Staff, the Marshal of the Day, the Master of the Horse (sulking; some argument about shoeing techniques), two of his ADC’s, two orderly officers, an equerry, a telescope-carrying page, a groom, an interpreter, a soldier of the escort bearing a map-portfolio and a pair of dividers fixed at the daily rate of march, Roustam, dear old black bastard. Ahead, twelve cavalry and two more orderly officers. Behind, the main escort of four squadrons of the Guard Cavalry (chasseurs, lancers, mounted grenadiers, dragoons). It suddenly struck him, with amusement, that he had forgotten entirely what, where—

“Sire.” And he was told where they were, what the name of the coming victory was to be, who the enemy was. But, of course, there was really only one enemy.

“—Family sooner than they think, bastards.”

“Sire.”

The roar of loving greeting from the assembled troops scared the birds to mad uncoordinated circling. His birthday, the anniversary of a great victory, of his crowning? No, it was just him, he. He waved, tears of love in his eyes, marking at the same time the shocking turn-out of Sergeant Pécriaux, nearly on his knees and an upper button missing, must speak to the womanizing swine. Cheers of greeting and rejoicing. Everything and everybody joined in, far beyond this field. Animate and inanimate in general jubilation.

The muzzle-loading plugs, the last remaining stretch of the Zuyder Zee, the unleavened bread disk of the Eucharist, Wilhelm Richard and John Peter (Honus), the constellations Ursa Major and Auriga, the whole tribe of Motacilla, the widows and orphans, what was left of Solomon’s temple in Jerusalem, the tongues of the Nootka, Bridges Creek, the Vaudois, the entire cavalry, camptosorus rhizophyllus, leucoma and strabismus, the tough wood of the gunstocks, witches’ sabbaths, the brash and the buffalo, the salamanders, cowbane, plantain, purslane, diving beetles and wattlebirds, the snowberry, Mad Anthony, sea trout, meteors and meteorology, weave and lattice, gravitation, cisterns, canals, marine snails, Bengal, monsoons, the shark and the wheatear, the nematode worm, the knout and the vine-garroon, the gratuitously assumed mission of the Caucasoids, Pentecostal tongues, harlots and liars, islands and cutlets and physicists, the lily of the valley, the bellowing gnu, ships and clarinets and tempests, the Son of Sirach, hazel and witch moth, cuckolds and warlocks, sorrel and alexia, Sir Thomas and Breslau and all the flowing wine of the world rejoiced. Rejoice. And again I say rejoice. And I say aga INRI ng bells bells bells bells and rejoice. Rejoice.

I and III, Rome, 1972
II and IV, Rome, 1973

AN EPISTLE TO THE READER

Take then or leave this lump of minor art,

A novel on Napoleon Bonaparte

(In a Pickwickian sense, I ought to add).

Post-Tolstoy novelists are reckoned mad,

Presumptuous, temerarious, or all three,

To write about the Corsican, since he

Is brilliantly portrayed in
Voina i Mir
:

After that vodka, who wants British beer?

The two Leones met, the task was done;

Why seek the knout of vile comparison?

Our Thomas Hardy was aware of this

(Great in his way, though, as Count Leo is),

And so, when limning Bonaparte’s career,

Eschewed the epic shape of
Voina i Mir,

Choosing the Goethean super-closet-play

Instead or (daring prophecy, some say)

A filmscript with no dream of celluloid,

The firmament as screen, thus to avoid

Being, with those same knout-strokes, flogged and flayed.