Napoleon Symphony: A Novel in Four Movements (42 page)

“I will tell it some other time,” he said with a kind of mock ferocity. “Now it is my own story I am trying to tell. My garden was, I suppose, a magic one, though magic in a way different from the wicked Armida’s. For, you see, I could turn it into home whenever I so wished. And I always so wished. Whenever any other boy tried to intrude into my little garden, I would at once chase him out. Like that,” he added, making with his hands the gesture that a henwife makes at her feathery charges.

“You were quite right to do so,” said little Betsy, but, forgetting for the moment, she spoke it in English. But she nodded with vigor at the same time and he understood well enough.

“Now on the feast of St. Louis,” he continued, “which we had as a holiday because it was the official birthday of the King—not real, but official, you understand—”

“Is it true,” said Betsy, in her impertinent child’s way, “that you saw the King’s head cut off?”

“No. And it is not to the present point,” said he. “Let me finish my story. Every cadet was allowed to make fireworks. He could buy some gunpowder and then pack it into cardboard tubes. Then he would attach a fuse and light it and make a great noise. To celebrate, you understand, the feast of St. Louis.”

“I should think that must have been very dangerous.”

“We were young soldiers, you must remember,” he said, “so we had to know a great deal about gunpowder. Well, you see, what happened was that some of the cadets had built a great pyramid—”

“Peer a mead,” she said. “What is that, uncle?”

“Pyramid, pyramid,” he repeated, and he began to build one in the air with his very fine hands. “You will see them if you ever go to Egypt.”

“Is it true,” she asked, ever ready to divert him from his story with the hope of a better one, “that you dug the Sphinx out of the sand?”

“I will tell you another time. There is plenty of time. All I have, my dear child, is time.” And his sad smile returned, one of the saddest and sweetest smiles, she thought in her young miss’s way, that she had ever seen. “There was, as I say,” he continued, “a great pyramid of fireworks. The cadets set fire to it, and there was so much light and smoke and noise, the sparks flying everywhere, that they grew frightened. So they came rushing away from it into my garden, trampling it all down.”

“What a shame,” she said, again relapsing into English, though her tone again spoke all her shock and sympathy.

“Fences, bushes, flowers, everything. So I picked up a
bêche
and with it I drove them out. I cared not at all whether I hurt or even killed them. When your garden is attacked, the thing that you have made with your own hands, remember, then you must be ready to do anything to protect it. I repeat: anything.”

But Betsy was looking for the word
bêche
in her little dictionary of the French and English languages. “I do not know the word,” she said. “What is a besh?”

“Why,” said he, “the implement with which you dig.” And with his white hands, that looked so softly gentle, he seemed to grasp an airy haft and to initiate the movement of digging. “
Bêche
.”

“Ah, it is a spade.” And she showed him the two words together. “See the word
spade
”

“
Spade
” he said in some surprise, giving the word two syllables. “Why, that is the Italian word for swords. Is not that interesting? So even the English see that a garden has something to do with fighting. Is not that a most interesting thing to find?”

“And in a game at cards,” she said, “we have spades. But I was told that that was once swords.”

“In cards we have swords still,” he said, and he looked at her.

Looking at her from the rocky promontory of what she, a mere innocent English miss, must surely regard as the decrepitude of advanced age, he was powerfully aware of what might be, did he not guard feelings all too vulnerable and inflammatory in his enforced celibate loneliness, an affection not without possible danger to them both. How old was she then? Some fifteen summers, no more. And if Europe did not recall him to a destiny not yet, for all his aborted achievements, to be considered snipped by the Parcan shears, if, say, England did not, in its next change of government, install an oligarchy of Whigs inclined to Bonapartist sympathies, if, moreover or alternately, the papal appeal for his release did not prevail (though he cherished a hope that it would, since the Concordat had, despite many vicissitudes, been universally regarded as a shrewd stroke of policy), he might be forced, the agony flowering in his all too virile blood all too efficaciously fenced about, to observe her growth to an achieved beauty that now merely promised. Did his jailors then take him for a eunuch? Would he, who had enjoyed the frankest and most tender embraces from queens and princesses, be reduced to stammer protestations of shocking affection to an
English miss
? It was all an irony that might be regarded as the ultimate, however little purposed, in Britannic humiliation of a foe still hated though rendered almost zoologically harmless. Smiling now he said:

“We must cultivate our garden. You know who said that, little one? The great Voltaire said that.”

“Voltaire?” said she, flushing in shock at the mention of a horrid name, yet intrigued, in a young girl’s manner, at the
naughtiness
of it. “But Papa says he was a man without faith in the Supreme Being and was, moreover, the cause of all our troubles.”

“What troubles?” he smiled with a touch of wryness.

“Oh, you know,” she said, her eyes lowered in embarrassment. “The trouble in France and with France.” She too frequently forgot that her kindly plump uncle in the garden here, staying indeed at the Briars until Longwood should be ready to accommodate him, was one with Nero and King Henry the Eighth and other fascinating horrors out of schoolroom history books. It was comical, and yet it was not comical, rather it was unbelievable, as if a picture had animated itself and stepped down from the wall, and it seemed to her possible, since she was still little more than a child, that the learned men who wrote history books could be mistaken in their judgments and presentations of the evil great, being in their way ignorant, never having left Oxford or Cambridge and certainly never having, as she had, dwelt in an outlandish zone such as these South Seas. Might it not be that Richard Crookback and the Emperor Caligula and Alexander the Great himself had been, in truth, kind avuncular men like her Uncle Bonaparte, and that they had been presented as historical ogres by men jealous of their incapacity to become themselves great tyrants and conquerors? These thoughts certainly passed through her young mind as she observed one held to be the greatest tyrant and conqueror of them all, now sitting at his ease in a wicker chair in the garden at the Briars, sipping lemonade and hitting at a fly that persisted in buzzing about his well, it was the correct word, was it not?, however little
ladylike
—perspiring nose. He was the nicest and most interesting of men and was, moreover, eminently teasable. It would appear that tyrants were, and she used the French word to herself, recognizing that there was no English word so apt, more
sympathique
than schoolmasters and clergymen, at least, for she was aware of the limitations of her childish experience, those she herself had any acquaintance of. She now smiled at him a little wickedly and said:

“Have you yet seen the new toy that Jane got in Jamestown? And do you promise not to be offended?”

“Goodness, must I answer both questions at once? Very well then: no, I have not and yes, I do. There. And what toy is this?”

“Wait,” said she. She scampered up to the house, a pert English miss in white muslin over the lawn, wearing dancing slippers stained by the recently watered grass. She had come to see her Uncle Nap or Bony straight from practicing her waltz-steps. Tonight was her first ball.

The beautiful lady of seventeen, dressed for the midsummer Christmas ball, came out of the house and glided, her grotesquely elongated shadow truckling all the way as she went, a stately young queen, as fair as any he had known gracing the courts of Europe, towards her fat old uncle, who appeared to be not very well, since that stupid Sir Hudson had now forbidden him the healthful exercise of horse-riding, and she had neither a toy nor a word for him. He greeted her with courtly gravity.

“You are very beautiful, my dear,” he said, and she flushed somewhat at the compliment, though her mirror had told her it was not undeserved. “It is, I think, Monsieur Montez-chez-nous who is causing all the trouble.”

“What trouble? I know of no trouble.”

“Ah, how our French Commissioner loves gossip and intrigue. He is still a part of those old wigged and scented days when, in high places, there was little else to beguile the idle hours. Our poor Montchenu refuses to accept in his heart of hearts that King Louis the Seventeenth was in truth guillotined, he seems to believe he is back there on the throne of France, having had that venerable seat thoroughly disinfested. Corsican fleas, you know. My dear sweet little Betsy, do you not know that you are in all the journals of the world, even your own English
Morning
Chronicle
?”

Her flush now was deep and unhappy. “It is all a great stupidity,” she said with some heat. “They are all being most silly.”

“Ah,” he said, shaking his great round head in humorous sadness. “They are talking of the fat dirty old Corsican adventurer. What they are saying is that he always had an eye for a pretty girl. That, dear Betsy, is your reward for being kind to the terrible tyrant Bonaparte. Keep away from tyrants, my dear, since good rarely comes from them.”

“Papa,” she said stoutly, “has said to take no notice. It is all French
bétises
, he says. He says it is a stupid game, with all their talk of
l’amour
.”

He knew the English word, though he could not well pronounce it. The word
love
seemed to him to be a strange and cool word, much different in tone and meaning from the French, signifying also in tennis a score of nothing as well as a kind of game of euchre. No, it appeared that love and
l’amour
were far from being the same thing, a whole insulating channel flowing between them.

He smiled and said: “Cut off Monsieur Montez-chez-nous’s pigtail. That will teach him a lesson.” He made a snipping motion with his fingers, though at true tail-level, knowing that she was ever ready to pardon in him small coarsenesses of behavior, which she regarded as the harmless marks of foreigners who knew no better. And now she said:

“He will have to find someone else for his gossip. We are going back to England.”

The pain he felt at that moment within him stabbed with a surprise for which he was not fully prepared, yet he knew well enough that such an event must sometime come and that it would entail an attendant emotion of loss; it was his prescience of the severity of the emotion that occasioned the surprise. Nor was there any real need for him to ask the question
why
?

“Papa received a letter from East India House in London. They require him to be back there. Nobody stays here forever.”

“Except,” he sighed, “your lonely old ogre.”

“Oh,” she said, “you will not stay here forever, for that would be too cruel.” Somewhat heartless was the casualness of the tone in which she added: “Anyway, I shall think of you. And when anybody in England says that you are a cruel tyrant and a terrible ogre, then I shall shout at them and pinch them and perhaps even kick them.”

“That would be not very ladylike behavior. But I thank you for being my only lady defender.”

“Well,” said she, and something of the old roguishness of the pert miss of fifteen appeared in her smile, “you have a Polish lady, do you not? She has great cause to be your defender, or so they say.”

“Yes, yes, there is indeed she, and a very beautiful lady, though perhaps not so beautiful as my English lady dressed for the ball. You are my only friend among the enemy,” he said, “and that is something to rejoice in and to wonder at.”

“Oh, enemy, enemy,” she cried. “It is all nonsense. Everybody is really your friend and loves you. It is only the stupid people who do not. Such as silly Sir Hudson and the men of politics and the rich people whom you have made a little poorer, which serves them right.” And then she disclosed something she had hidden in her hand in the folds of her silk foulard. “See,” she said, “I have this for you.” And into his hand she placed a little snuffbox, a thing of cheap metal in blue and yellow, doubtless bought in Jamestown out of her scant spending money.

He took it with a grave bow and said: “Thank you. I will start to take snuff again, if Sir Hudson will allow me the indulgence.”

“No, no, silly, you are to open it. I should really give it to you later, but I fear I may lose it first.”

He opened it and found therein a lock of her hair. He was greatly touched and said, over and over: “Thank you, I thank you, I most sincerely thank you. Yes yes, we must exchange
boucles
. Alas, I have little enough to cut now, so I must cut it for you quickly. And then sometime you will find it and think of me. You will find it and think of me, if you do not lose it or give it away.”

She stamped with her satin slipper on the lawn, but the soft sward yielded no noise. “Oh, fiddle on your stupidity,” she cried. “I shall never forget you.”

The tone was of a schoolmistress’s firmness, and the promise seemed to hold the strength of a threat.

“I shall never forget you,” she said again.

In his hand he held, not yet, a lock of her hair and a snuffbox.

In his hand he held the toy she had come running out with, the pert miss of fifteen years only. It was not, he considered, smiling and yet sighing over it, a toy in the best of taste: the toymakers, then, had reduced him to a monster merely meet for the play of infantile derision. For it consisted in a gross carven caricature of himself with characterizing military hat but the form else, and even the tail, of a monkey, clinging to a pole which the pulling of a string enabled his simian mock-majesty to climb to the top, whence he tumbled to a flat green-painted bed inscribed with the name
St. Helena
.