Sir William (12 page)

“Tell milady I am only sorry I cannot speak English,” he said.

“Indeed,” said Emma, “it is a blessing he cannot.”

“Lovely like marble, but like marble, a cold race,” said the King, who was merely habitually acquisitive and had meant no harm.

*

“I have not wrote this ten days as we have been on a visit to the Countess Mahoney at Ische 9 days and are just returned from their,” Emma informed Greville. They had gone in a hired galley, in stable weather, with a harpsichord on deck, a semicircle of musicians, and the Countess down to the shore to meet them. “Though I was in undress, onely having on a muslin chemise very thin, yet the admiration I met with was surprising.”

Like many almost sexless creatures, Emma was attractive to women of a certain taste. It made her life much smoother, since they never told her why. Ischia was a volcano once, too.

“When we came awhay the Countess cried & I am setting for a picture for her in a turkish dress, very pretty.” She enjoyed writing to Greville these days. It is not given to every woman to love two generations of the same man, and, to tell the truth, she now preferred him in the older version. In London, she had been locked away in a box; here she sat in one.

“There has been a Prince paying us a visit. He is sixty years of age, one of the first families here, and as allways lived at Naples & when I told him I had been to Caprea he asked me if I went their by land; onely think what ignorance. I staired at him and asked who was his tutor.”

*

At Caserta, the English garden was not going well.

“The Queen has dropped it,” said Graffer, “and what is worse, His Majesty has taken it up. He wants a maze. I am a gardener, not an antiquarian. There has been no maze in England since Fair Rosamund’s bow-er.”

“You could make a little one of box,” said Sir William.

“Box grows slowly. By the time the box is up, we’ll be down to his grandson, at the earliest. He wants it now. It’s one of his pranks; to confuse the courtiers, he says. I’ll not please his pranks, for he’s no king to me.”

Sir William had one of his happier solutions.

“Lay it out as a knot garden, tell him it will grow, and once he’s forgotten it, you can dig it up again and turf it over,” he said.

*

Notions are one thing. Any woman can have notions, but it is harder to be visited by an idea. Nonetheless, Emma had just received one.

She was sitting in Sir William’s gallery of statues, surrounded by Castor, Pollux, a dubious Vespasian, a Mourning Woman, a Crouching Venus (it was a pair), a Hellenistic Prince in gilt bronze, and two Senators, one of them lacking a head. She felt rebellious. What did he see in them anyway? And he moved her about as though she were an art object. Very well then. She would be an art object.

Getting up, she rang for a shawl and a full-length mirror. Then she arranged herself, a Crouching Venus first, then the Mourning Woman. She was reminded of George. What with George and the Opera and a dash of mythology besides, she found that Grief, Joy, Surprise, Awakened Conscience, Noble Resignation, An Orphan’s Curse, Herself Surprised, they came quite easily; they were easy to do, so long as you watched the mirror. A portrait was all very well, but a mirror was better.

For Cornelia, however, she would need two children. It was Sir William’s birthday. This was to be her surprise.

*

Sir William galloped home from Caserta, past the poorhouse. It was a very long poorhouse, for Naples was a very large town, and though the King was generous, he could not be generous every day, so the rest of the time
there was precious little to do but spend money and corrupt the taxgatherer.

As sometimes happened in the evening, Sir William did not feel so immortal as was his wont. No doubt on their birthdays the Gods occasionally feel the same way, conscious perhaps of Christianity in the future, waiting patiently, with an undertaker’s air.

A great many things could be counted in Sir William’s head at any given moment, for though he was not restless, his thoughts were often so. Ideas to him were like fruit: one does not grow them oneself; one merely touches them to see if they are ripe, before plucking them. Did a horse ever take all of its feet off the ground at one time? Would there be a war, and if so, with whom? At any rate it would not affect them: they were too far south. What about the English garden? It would have to be finished; it was a matter of national prestige. If Oliver Cromwell could have his portrait behind a door in the Pitti Palace, surely His Britannic Majesty might be allowed to plant a garden here. What was to be done about Greville? It seemed he could succeed at nothing unless it hung on Sir William’s affairs. At what age did a healthy man have his first heart attack? No doubt she was sometimes shrill, but she was a grateful creature, and at least she was always there when one came back. Since she never asked for anything, it was a pleasure to give her gifts. She had natural breeding and referred to him by his first name only when taken unaware.

*

At dinner she seemed nervous. Afterward she excused herself. He kept his birthday privately, but even so, that was unlike her. He took coffee in the large salon, where the sculpture was. It was bitter coffee. He let it stand. When he heard a rustle, he paid no mind to it, for it was only the evening shadows closing in.

“Who’s there?” he asked, catching another sound. It was a footman, squeaking across the parquet with a candelabrum, to open the gold-and-white doors leading to a farther room.

In the darkness beyond the doors the candelabrum
caught a weaving figure in long Roman garments, gathering flowers in a meadow. The walls were blue. Space was blue. In the Elysian Fields one sees a good deal of blue. The flowers were yellow. So was the dress. The figure looked this way and that, now stooping, now plucking, and in the candlelight, space seemed infinite. It was like that scene in Swift, at Glubbdubdrib, where the past is shown, too real to be touched.

“William, is it not that fresco we saw underground at Herculaneum, to the life?”

Sir William dropped his coffee cup. He had been dreaming.

“Don’t be cross. Perhaps I have not got it quite right yet, but there are more.”

There were more. It was the beginning of what were to be called her Attitudes. He was entranced. It was not so much that she moved, as that she was so moving. She could make the past move.

“No, not quite that way,” he said, dismissing the footman, and from then on it was he who held the candelabrum up.

*

“My dear, Herr Goethe is coming. He is a great man. And though I know that concept to be repugnant to the female temperament, yet to men such do exist, so entertain him. We will do the Attitudes.”

The Attitudes had become famous.

*

He was a great man. He was almost as good as Kotzebue, and had written a novel sufficiently illusory to make women cry. There was the added advantage that when he traveled he left his native language, that is most of it, at home, and spoke French. He was not alone. Some people, in moments of self-doubt, produce a mirror; Goethe produced Tischbein, a young artist brought along to sketch the Master when told to. Goethe, so they said, had a universal mind, and if he found that restricting, did not show it. He was no more frightening than any other young man of good family.

Though without affectation, he was not without mannerisms
and had a tendency to sit about in rooms as modestly as a public statue patiently waiting to be unveiled, and when he spoke, spoke as a priest does through the mouth of the oracle. Sir William could not help but notice that his chair was an exact two inches in front of Tischbein’s chair, no matter where they might find themselves.

Sir William was amused. Like all well-bred people, he demanded of others only that they play their role. If they asked you backstage, he did not like it. He clouded up at once. But since Goethe could be seen only from out front, he found him, though German and hence irrelevant, congenial.

Emma was up to her star turn.

So this is hate, she realized, with some surprise (it was a Medea). It is certainly a most sustaining emotion, I had forgotten it; but, afraid to linger, hurried on to a Psyche Abandoned (after Thorwaldsen). It was marvelous really. The emotions could be not only shown but felt, merely with the aid of two shawls, a chair, a candle and an urn. It was possible to express them all; Sir William had shown her how. For Joy, however, one needed a tambourine (with fitments from Pompeii. Joy was authentic, though the wood hoop itself was new).

“
Schöne
,” said Goethe.

“
Schöne
,” said Tischbein, though he did not altogether approve, for in Winckelmann he had read that Expression is an unfortunate necessity which arises from the fact that human beings are always in some emotional state, and Tischbein, who was a learned painter, had found this to be true from his own experience, and not only true, but deplorable.

“W
under
schöne
,”
said Goethe sharply.

“W
under
schöne
,
”
repeated Tischbein.

As the two men said it, they seemed to bend over invisible oars, while behind them the minor members of the Neapolitan German colony followed them (the oars were locked) in expressing admiration with the same most audible hiss, in unison.
Vogue
la
galère.

There are geese in the Forum, thought Sir William.
They will rouse the guard. And so Rome cannot be taken, after all; the relevant anecdote may be found, with some labor, in Livy.

Emma was up to Lucretia now, in the opulent manner of Giulio Romano, also to be found in Livy, with a bare bodkin. Goethe admired, though what he remembered was a large portfolio he had seen recently in which the physiognomy of the horse, by means of the eyes mostly, was utilized to show the entire range of the emotions, from Startled Joy to Woe. Ox-eyed Juno is one thing, but the English are noted for their addiction to and emulation of the horse.

“Tischbein, is it not so?”

“
Ja
,” said Tischbein, without listening. He was a paid companion. It was always so, though later he hoped to have disciples of his own.

Emma was beginning to tire, but Vivacity came next, so she was not worried. She was enjoying herself. There was so much to feel—whole continents of emotion of whose existence she had been ignorant. She beckoned to the footman. It was time to bring the children in, for she planned to conclude with a Cornelia and Her Jewels, to be followed by a Hope, a 19th century emotion perhaps, but then, artists are always a generation ahead of their time.

“Standing, kneeling, seated, reclining, grave, sad, sportive, teasing, abandoned, penitent, alluring, threatening, agonized … one manifestation follows another, and indeed grows out of it,” said Goethe. For that is the way life is: one thing leads to another. We need merely follow, being careful only that of any two roads, we take the right one, lest we be left. “Her elderly knight holds the torch for her performance and is absorbed in his mind’s desire,” he added.

Perhaps he was, at that. For Sir William had never been given to the passions; he was cerebral. At any rate, he would not have mentioned them, for English is the language of the affections, not of the passions. Anything else fortunately remains a lexicographical impossibility.

Nonetheless, it was true; it was his mind’s desire.

After the performance, he took Goethe down to the cellars. The lantern made little holes of light in the surrounding darkness. Bronzes,
bustos,
and sarcophagi cast muddled silhouettes against the ceiling and the walls. Standing in the middle of the floor was a chest with a gold rim, upended.

“She stood there once,” said Sir William, “in a Pompeiian dress. The effect was striking.”

Goethe stared at the chest. It looked very like Pandora’s box, without the lid. Hope, no doubt, was fluttering about upstairs, or else waiting quietly in her bed, her wings invisible, a hope realized.

Had Sir William been a fellow German, Goethe would have said, “You are to be congratulated, sir.”

Had he been English, and therefore truly clubbable, Sir William might perhaps have permitted him to say so.

As it was, with a last look at the chest, which was a shrine of some kind, the two men went back upstairs, sobered by the thought that under different circumstances they might each have found somebody they could talk to, at last.

*

Emma’s letters were too long, so Greville did not read them. In order to have our letters read, we must insert in them something the lector wishes to know, and there was no longer anything about Emma that Greville wished to know. But he answered them because in that way he could bring things to Sir William’s attention indirectly. She should be a go-between. He had found her proper use.

He was concerned with the improvement of Milford Haven. Instead of taking money out, Sir William should put money in.

The man is ungrateful. I am only acting in his best interest, thought Greville, had the Act of Parliament passed anyway (it would allow him to pour money into Milford Haven Harbor), and drew a draft upon his uncle’s bankers, which he cashed with some pleasure.

*

At an official reception to which all the world and his wife came, Emma could not appear. Like a child, she was to be allowed downstairs only in the presence of the more indulgent members of the family. And since she was a child, she did not relish that.

The King and Queen were to make a call, much as they would have gone to the bank, for such was the political situation that England seemed their one security.

Since formal calls can scarcely be made impromptu, Emma had already seen the carpet rolled out to the street, and was well aware of an anticipatory bustle among the chambermaids and footmen. So when, at her singing lesson (she had put back the regular hour), she heard coach horns in the street and the clatter of a stage carriage, a natural curiosity impelled her—forgetful that she was not to be seen—to the landing at the top of the main hall, to see who it could be. The clustered columns of the landing made her indiscretion discreet without in any way concealing her.