Gossip from the Forest (21 page)

But where is Paula? he thought. Who cooks my
spätzle?
Why have I cut Paula out of my happy dreams?

The First Sea Lord had never known his father, had lost him two weeks after being born. It had happened in as Gothic and ancestral a way as any fanciful child could have hoped for. On the north side of the Firth of Forth Wemyss Castle is found, a building as glowering as all the other Scottish castles travelers find ruined throughout Scotland. But by some special arrangement with the British Navy, Wemyss had survived the ruinous first half of the eighteenth century when warships used to sail up firths and lochs and bombard Jacobite structures.

One wing of the castle had been made comfortable and classic terraces ran away from it downhill toward the firth. In a twilight in the summer of 1864, Lady Wemyss went up to her room to rest because she was nearing term. Lord Wemyss and his sister sat at the top of the terraces watching the Firth change color as the light lasted and lasted from the west. Very remotely they could hear young men and women from the village of East Wemyss laughing too continuously in a pack on the road toward Kirkcaldy. In hope and terror of what the eventual darkness would do to them.

It should have made Lord Wemyss feel very seignioral on his terrace. In fact he had been melancholy throughout his wife's pregnancy. He had been invalided out of the Royal Navy for heart and respiratory weakness. The family ran to admirals—his father, grandfather, uncles, cousins. He had been raised to become one. Everyone said that's why he's so restless; he has lost his direction.

That still evening, on the lower terrace, without any encouragement from wind or rain or lightning, the paving split loudly as a cannon. Stone flags, gods and Roman senators, balustrades and urns slid away, grinding and breaking.

Lord Wemyss said, “That's it. I'm dead.”

His sister said, what nonsense. She pretended to be angry only with the Kirkcaldy landscaper who had done the work under contract. But that did not distract her brother.

Lord Wemyss said, “Whenever an Earl of Wemyss is about to die, his death is announced to him by the sound of falling masonry.”

When Rosslyn Wemyss grew to be a boy he could never forgive his father for responding so pat to the omen, like any of the nonpeople who inhabit ghost stories. Wemyss's outrage still expressed itself in his sleep.

Throughout the night of the falling terrace and the next day, the laird appeared resigned, not frightened. This seemed to the womenfolk to be the most dangerous state of mind. The family doctor could not talk him out of it. He suggested that since they intended to travel south to London for the birth, to their town house in Buckingham Gate, they should go as soon as possible.

When the child was born a boy and called Rosslyn, Lord Wemyss looked at its face and said, “This is the last child I shall beget.” Rosslyn Wemyss would develop the bitterness any child might feel who served his father only as a spur to that father's numinous self-pity.

After ten days, Lord Wemyss the father died in his sleep of heart failure.

Thirty years later Lady Wemyss reported the event to the Society of Psychical Research. They had broadly similar cases on record: people (generally aristocratic) who had died of omens; such as the sighting of certain untoward animals or combinations of animals, of certain stains or patterns.

When young Rosy Wemyss came home from prep school he heard his mother complain of servants. She said, they now think they're their own lords and ladies. Perhaps they had come the full way by 1914. It was then as if they all heard or saw some great communal omen, having become their own aristocrats, and went off and died resignedly, as his father had.
Noblesse oblige
. Women of Britain say Go!

The First Sea Lord dreamed of the fallen terrace, the jumbled stonework, and his father so unnecessarily reading death there. He took his father brutally by the elbow, saying it isn't the old days, you are no clan leader with a need to answer portents. Up and down the firth and all over the decaying myths of the clans, brewers and mercers and shipwrights are building and see no presages amongst their profit-and-loss columns, yet are more important to the working of the world than any laird. Though not to me they aren't. Not to me.

Wait, he always begged. I've never seen you. Though I've seen masonry fall. In Lemnos and the Dardanelles and when I relieved Feisal's Arabs in Akaba, I saw fallen masonry then. Did I lie down? So wait.

But every time Rosslyn bullied him, his young father seemed self-absorbed.

NECESSARY LOVE-MAKING IN 2417D

In the morning Hope came in and told him, in an oddly disarmed sort of way for a man who did not like fornication, that the French had found a woman's handkerchief in 2417D and a sergeant had been arrested.

Wemyss too smiled and hoped nothing too bad would happen to the sergeant.

Wemyss:
I thought I saw a woman amongst the elms. Night before last.

He was happier about 2417D. The woman and the sergeant had humanized it for him and it wasn't too much to say that he felt grateful.

He would never discover what happened to the sergeant or if a woman was apprehended. But in Compiègne and amongst old soldiers the event took on the marks of a fable. People would tell you this: that a French sergeant in the infantry regiment camped in the forest felt impelled to bring a Compiègne woman, appropriately a young war widow gone reckless with loss, through the perimeter running west, south, and east around the sidings of Rethondes.

The widowed girl had to bike it four or more kilometers from her house in town to the ruin of a stone cottage along the Compiègne-Soissons road. Here a dry corner would have suited her and the sergeant. Except they were impelled toward 2417D and no other surfaces would do them.

If they met any sentries the sergeant told them he was taking the girl to one of the delegates. The officers were all in camp beds and tented against the rain squalls. The sergeant and the widow came to the blind side of 2417D and found it quite unlocked.

He had thought she might be awed in a sight-seeing way but Compiègnoises are not easily impressed that way—Louis XIV, XV, XVI had lived more or less amongst them, at the Palais de Compiègne on the edge of the town. Napoleon Bonaparte, Napoleon III. For two hundred years they had worked in royal households or supplied them with candles or coal, soap or pheasants. The girl's uncle had owned a patisserie whose hand-made chocolates had ravished the Empress Eugénie. Even lately the Palais had been HQ for renowned soldiers: Nivelle, who had killed her husband, Pétain … She simply put her hand on the neatly laid out blotters.
So!
was all she said.

She wasn't there for the sights.

He began to caress her. Her skirts were wet to the knees. He moved one of the acanthus-leaf lampshades to a safe place down the table, also an ashtray and cut-glass inkstand. Then he pitched her backward so that she lay between the note pads of Vanselow and Erzberger on one side, and Weygand and the Marshal on the other. The leather tabletop was at first very cold through her dress.

Even if they had not already had their minds on it, they would have found coitus the obvious recourse. Simply because it was insufferable to think that in such a little space, round a table no bigger than a family dinner table, with note paper and pencils, it was possible for eight men to weave a scab over that pit of corpses four years deep.

It was clear that the note pads flanking her reminded her of vacant memorial stones, set either side for soldiers still to die. For they found in the morning that she had written
R.I.P
. and
Pour la patrie
on them.

Dressing, they could hear noises in the next carriage, where the duty wireless operator and the night telephonist talked and yawned. It occurred to them how dangerous their little rite had been.

She shook her skirts together quickly, mute but not regretting. The seed now traveling in her was necessary seed.

The sergeant replaced the inkpot, the lamp (using his handkerchief to polish its brass shaft), the ashtray, but missed the pencilled-on pads.

He helped her back to the Soissons road.

Rumor of them dies there. No child is said to have come from the penetration of 2417D—no drunkard or poet, deaf-mute, whore, violinist, or other symbolic offspring.

Simply that in the coming world people would now and then nominate the sergeant and the widow as the wiser visitors to 2417D.

OFF TO SEE THE FROCKS

At the breakfast table, Wemyss heard that overnight there had been utter silence from Spa and Berlin. He was not enlivened by the coffee he drank opposite pert Marshal Foch.

The Marshal:
The Kaiser might abdicate? Yes. But that is not a revolution. That is the triumph of the healthy cells.

Like Erzberger, even Wemyss considered for a moment that he might be—for puckish or other motives—denied the truth. He turned to Weygand; sphinx-in-chief, he thought.

Wemyss:
No message at all?

Weygand:
None.

Wemyss:
Could it be the weather? Transmission problems?

He thought less of himself for grabbing at comfort in front of these two.

Weygand:
That isn't possible, Lord Admiral.

The Marshal:
Well then, I'm off to see the frocks.

It was his term of contempt for statesmen.

A staff limousine heaved down the forest track to collect him. As it made for Senlis the mist grew streaky and fell away and a high wind broke the cloud apart. Smartly it traveled eastward. The sodden poilus at the front would be pleased to see it shredded like this.

On his arrival, his staff stood to attention in the hall of the château. He saw tall Major Ferrason, who was about to take to the academic life.

The Marshal:
Did the Kaiser give up while I was on the road?

Ferrason:
His five sons have all taken a vow not to succeed him as regents. That's all we've heard.

The Marshal:
And the Salonika front?

Ferrason:
The Bulgarian surrender terms are being enforced. The typhoid epidemic has worsened amongst our soldiers.

The Marshal:
Cold, isn't it?

Ferrason:
The fire is lit in your office, my Marshal.

At his desk, he heard the honor guard clash to the salute for the arriving Premier.

The Marshal:
Ferrason, I want you to stay and take notes.

To enter the château, the old Prime Minister held a thorn stick well down its length, implying he might dare beat the Marshal or perhaps lesser soldiers should they mislead him. As well he wore gaiters as if on a trip to the front. His lean secretary from the War Office, General Mordacq, an army man who had backslid amongst the frocks, kept watch at his side.

Clemenceau:
A fire, my Marshal? Let's all sit around it. I said to my PT instructor that after twenty-five years of daily calisthenics I've found there's nothing tones a man up like a blaze.

His eyes avoided the Marshal's and his lips were well hidden behind the strands of his Confucian mustache. So he didn't seem to wish that his intuition about toning men up would benefit anyone in particular.

Clemenceau:
What's this officer doing here?

The Marshal:
He will take minutes.

In fact Ferrason was shifting chairs at that moment into the fire's ambience.

Clemenceau:
My God, we're not going to take things down in evidence, are we? Aren't we friends?

The Marshal:
Of course.

Clemenceau:
I don't want him making notes. He can stay. But I don't want notes.

The Marshal:
As you wish.

The Premier took his seat slowly and the Mongolian eyes now settled on the Marshal. Mordacq sat by his master. Mordacq and the Marshal were, of course, well-established enemies. Mordacq, the freemason, the agnostic, pretentious about strategy, pretentious about politics. A keeper of secret files on enemies actual or possible, on people who could be used for advantage. Very much in the old man's image.

The Marshal knew what the old man would talk about and was not surprised.

Clemenceau:
I'm very concerned, my Marshal. The men you have in that train in Compiègne are imperial plenipotentiaries. If the German Emperor abdicates today, if there's a republic proclaimed, they won't have any power to negotiate.…

General Mordacq spoke exactly to the middle air.

Mordacq:
The written authorities on the basis of which those Germans in Compiègne are working have a very exact diplomatic meaning.

That's meant to be information for the crude soldier, the Marshal thought. He grew pugnacious.

The Marshal:
They're waiting simply on word from Spa. I refuse to believe that so close to signing they'll be emptied of their authority.

Mordacq:
Not everything is a matter of believing or refusing to believe. Faith isn't the rails diplomacy runs on.

The Marshal put his large hand over his yawn. He decided to speak exclusively to the old man.

The Marshal:
You might remember there was some fear—the British Prime Minister, that Colonel House—that we were asking too much. What happened in the train is an answer. They will give up armies, navies, territories. They argue in small ways but you can see in their eyes they've already given them away. They turn pale only when we mention rolling stock, machine guns.

The Premier's large-boned paws caressed his thorn; there seemed to be terror of loss in his large fingers.

Clemenceau:
That's not what we're talking about. All they're willing to give … it might have no meaning by evening.

The hands went on smoothing down the blackthorn. Hands that had operated on Miss Plummer, New York seminarian, and imposed three children on her before she fled to American lawyers for a divorce. Hands that had known the pelt of the highest-grade tarts. Now they were uncertain as they never were with the horseflesh of the capital.