Napoleon Symphony: A Novel in Four Movements (49 page)

It wasn’t long before she addressed him in a voice friendly enough yet cool, of the coolness however of some friendly water, ever so promising of refreshment to the tired wanderer of a long summer day through Devon dene or Lancashire clough, rather than the conventional and indifferent coolness proper to the approach of a “correct” young woman to some male stranger’s unexpectedly appearing. And it was with a very palpable astonishment that our friend caught from her address, through the veneer of its casualness, a sense, though hard to define, of his somehow being expected, of the encounter’s not being entirely unpurposed, though, for his part, the purposing was nonexistent, however much, now that it was actually “under way,” he was able to reflect with the firm knowledge of retrospection that he would have been willing enough to purpose it. The fire that flashed from her, as she sauntered toward where he continently stood, was a billion times told lovelier, more dangerous.

“And so,” she said, “it is very much
all over
, O my chevalier.”

He wondered, smiling vaguely, at the plenitude of allusions which her words seemed to contain, and, for want of something more to the purpose, whatever this was, he replied to the effect that this appeared to be so, hoping from whatever she would come out with next to gain a degree or so of illumination.

“And what,” she now said, “if posterity requires anything at all, would posterity be perhaps conceived of as requiring in the way of a summary?”

He thought he now began to get her drift, so, nodding and smiling amiably though with, he couldn’t help thinking, some of that quite meaningless up-and-down agitation of the head which he had seen frequently in the old and now recognized, with some inner and motor sense, as emanating from the old man in himself, he ventured a reply that might, to such a one as she (he saw in the eyes, of a color not clearly definable, which would be the very deuce for a portrait painter to catch, an intelligent hardness which contrasted piquantly with the “willowiness,” the softness, of the rest of her) be possibly considered satisfactory.

“Oh, well,” he said, “there was a something to fulfill. I think one might say it was fulfilled—partially, I have to add, since what we term contemporary history has insisted on the truncation of that something. I mean, there was a thing I was told to do and I ventured to do it.” And he agitated the cane in his left hand in a vague gesture of actions set oscillating.

“Told?” she picked him up. “Who tells?”

“Not
who
precisely,” he replied, with an
oeillade
and a characteristic shrug. “Some force, some daemon, let us say, that impels to particular modes of action, for good or bad—the consideration doesn’t apply—and which it is probably useless, even if one wished to, to attempt to oppose. We all have this indubitable embedding of a something.” Shy or sly, he wasn’t sure which, was the query he then commenced putting to her: “If I may be so bold as to ask, who—”

“Not
who
, then,” she said, beginning, with a certain absence that could have been construed as unconscious cruelty, to depetal a particularly fine carnation that rested in her basket. “And so the moral consideration, the question of, to be blunt about it, the rights and the wrongs of the matter—” She did not continue. He waited, but it was evident that he was to take the ellipsis as the round.

“One cannot,” he said with a triteness that surprised him only when it was too late to retreat from the locution, “make an omelette without breaking eggs.” Then he added, with an unwonted flush, “I apologize.”

“Much depends,” she replied, with a coldness that could not be mistaken for her previous coolness: the palpable drop in temperature forbade it, “on whether one likes omelettes.” Her smile was restored when she put in, before he could devise a reply, a remark that bespoke her learning. “We’re concerned less with oology than herology, if there is such a term. And if there isn’t,” she said with a kind of young-miss bluntness, “there ought to be.”

“Ah,” and he felt he was on firmer ground now. As if to stake a claim to such ground, he planted his cane in a flower-border, put on his hat (he didn’t have to seek her permission: this was the open air; he was much, he thought, her senior; she herself was hatted, and very prettily), folded his arms behind his back, and began to pace a little between two rosebeds. “The nature of the hero has to be made manifest. And what is the hero, you ask? The being of exceptional qualities, the man above men in the intensity and scope of thought and ability. The fields of heroism are, I think, manifold; mine was that of a
head of arms
, head of an army, head of an armed state.”

“Why?” she asked. She possessed this quality of disconcertment, well able to brim it into that narrowest possible vessel of an
oh
or a
why
.

“Why? Why?” He gave back the word to her with something of his old vigor of the counter assault. “You mean to what end? That may be answered. To the end of disseminating the word of republican enlightenment. To the end of protecting
by arms
an already existing republic or, let me perhaps put it another way, of preserving the motherland, already, far ahead of the other nations of Europe (for we will leave, as we must, America out of it), blessed with the enlightenment of the republican principle, from the machinations—and in anticipation, if need be—of ancient, corrupt and jealously fearful monarchies. There,” and he smiled at her much in the manner he had, it came back to him, used (a somewhat bizarre
mélange
of the triumphant and the ingratiating) in his extreme youth in the schoolroom when catechized on matters of Christian doctrine by the visiting bishop, in his voice a graciousness of answer, in his face displayed the plenitude of his whole handsome heart.

“Oh, as for that—” Then fingers that had been absently depetalling made a handsome, a graceful dismissal of what, he realized with the belatedness that was becoming characteristic of all his realizations
vis à vis
his responses to her so light-toned, so of a feathery delicacy, questionings, had been a decidedly jejune and at the same time positively elephantine, certainly demagogic, summation of the whole, so to put it,
tissage
.

“I know,” and his eyes were examining the toes of his boots, where a certain minute quantity of summer dust had dulled the caps. “Kings and princes and dukes, even an emperor. But not, you understand, hereditary. Totally, but totally and in toto, earned. An aristocracy of sheer merit. Or,” he was constrained to add in honesty, since he was aware of the sardonic quizzing of those eyes of hers, though he did not for the moment care much to meet them, “occasionally not of merit, but of family. There are, let us admit it, claims on one, of blood, sentiment and
tout ça
. But for ever so much the most part it was of merit. The state much like the army, with merit rewarded, medals, pensions, duchies and principalities. Indeed, the state hardly to be distinguished from the army. Head. Arms. You will understand the whole of the, so to speak,
tremblement
.”

“Oh, yes,” and her response was swift, almost eager, and not at all unfriendly, as if she had at last decided to accept him on his merits, such as they were. “But none of that is quite what I meant.” He descried then the true burden of condescension which the tone of amicable eagerness, like the ooze of oil, filmed over. “What we both have to agree upon,” she continued, playing her little show of comradeliness to the limit, “is the essential
mestière
or
métier
, the
métier
dressed to a dexterous and starlight order. To what purpose its practice?—this ought not to be asked, not, anyway, in terms of the larger and, so to speak, metaphysical aim. The royal cobbler may be said to make shoes not that the emperor may walk to the ultimate congress of the world, but that a pair of royal or imperial feet may be dexterously dressed. Would you not say that it might at least be thought of as conceivably being, within the small realm of possibility we concede to ourselves, so?” she said, with no diminution of the comradely-seeming eagerness.

He was quite ready to respond then with a warm look and some cautious enough inclinations of the head but not, as yet anyway, to respond more or less vocally, since he felt he must, she being what she was (who she was, who the dickens she was, was a question he was not now prepared to repeat), proceed quiet-padded and with all jungle senses alert.

“The
métier
of hero,” she said in a now musing tone, “of the quite exceptionally endowed genius of action—how far it must be fulfilled in, and the term is
à propos
, action, is a question that may be put. The
métier
of Don Quixote or, indeed, of Don Juan—you will perhaps catch my more surface meaning.”

“Ah.” He smiled at the childishness of the collocation. With some confidence he said that the applicability wasn’t particularly apparent, since the one Don was mere legend and the other Don certainly the creation of another Don—he smiled more broadly—and so, the one fiction and the other very nearly so, if not wholly so, the analogues to himself weren’t all that aptly chosen.

“The point I am trying to make,” she said with a coldness positively of a near-glacial order, “is that the hero doesn’t have to have existed. To nourish the imagination with the heroic image—this can be as well done through some superior (and hence perhaps heroic) imagination. Oh, we don’t have to call on the ultimate imaginer, if he may be called that, since all that he can add to the image is the corporeal and the spatial element and the time thing and so on, all of them limitations.”

Her extreme coldness stung him, like a well-aimed snowball, into a more intelligent reply than perhaps, all things considered, he might be thought of as being in a position to give. “But without me,” he cried, and he doffed his hat as though to wave huzzahs in his own honor, “this particular image couldn’t have been. Modesty forbids the uttering of the name or the epithet available from it, but the imaginations of the yet unborn will, to use your own phrase, be nourished by it. So I had to, and how absurd this sounds, exist, quite apart from the tabled and achieved enactments which will change, which have changed, which are changing, the order of things.” And he breathed somewhat stertorously, as with the labor of intellection required for the earnest, earthless, equal, attunable, vaulty, voluminous … stupendous utterance.

“Oh, as for that—” It was one of her phrases, the exordial something that preceded the larger dismissal, the more explicit pushing-by. “A man, a German he was,
ein
or
einer Mann
, I find the accidence of the language excessively, supererogatorily endowed with endings, says something somewhere about the German need to
oppose
, to struggle against that particular imposition, in the name of forests and sunsets and the like, which turned their romantic spirit political. No very creditable achievement, if I may say so.” And in a strangely, he could only think of it as
sibylline
, tone she said, “
Our
evening is over us,
our
night whelms, whelms and will end us.” And she shuddered in the large summer heat, as though foreseeing its premature and summary dismissal by some active force of cold, perhaps the cold that once blanketed the whole world come again. “And as for the other thing—” He could not for the moment recall what “the other thing” was, but he allowed her to proceed, hoping that words which he still expected uncomfortably to be sibylline would somehow jog his recollection of it. “You created, in your own Promethean manner, and I employ the term altogether without the disparagements of—”

“Yes, yes.” For some reason he did not wish to hear the word upon her lips. “
Sarcasm
.”

“Very well.” The day was indeed advancing, and the lovely behavior of the silk-sack clouds was being transformed into a cortège of unseemly haste with the rising of the wind (black, he was thinking involuntarily, ever so black on it, the night on its way). “You created your men out of clay, though to create women you had no power. You never had, and I must say everything now, if I can, without excessive circumlocution, much power over women. Bread and water.” The sibylline pose was back. “Taken with the sword still in the scabbard.
Vota
.
Vuota
.” He flushed a deep crimson, the words being not all that sybilline. “But they had the clay about them even when they were made, since the creator must always maintain the sway of control and not brook the danger of the creation rising up and—”

“They were
made
” he interposed somewhat testily. “Who else could have made them?”

“The question rather is,” she responded: “Who could have made” (the flowers in their straw basket had the look of flowers that were somehow aware, and the fancy has to be admitted, of an impending rapid shriveling) “
you
?” She twirled a blown Dieudonné by its stalk and watched with no observable emotion the loosening petals detach themselves centrifugally. “You could have been made, and made rather well, by some master of that kind of artifaction—in words, you know. Then there would not have to have been all that cauchemar of flesh and blood spilled about, and that notable cruelty to horses. I have always been particularly fond of horses.” A fantasy of particular coarseness struck in on him, but he was quick to banish it. Besides, the properties of aristocratic Englishry represented only one of a positive zootrope of appearances under that shady hat; there were other masks capable of being rapidly imposed and then “whisked away” on and from the quintessential
herself
, and most of them he recognized with varying degrees of certainty; the voice too was a spectrum of voices, a basal auditory light, so to speak, capable of (in the same manner as the masks) the ever so rapid variant staining with colors which, despite his known daltonian affliction in this sphere of recognition, he was able to name with considerable exactitude. “The essence of the heroic,” she went on, “herology, herography, heropoetics, with no one compelled to rise in the cold morning to go out and die. Or in music.”