The Difference Engine (6 page)

“I saw no contradiction in the lives of Homer’s heroes and those of my beloved Cherokees,” Houston persisted. Behind him, the Greek’s javelin sprouted the dangling feathers of a hunting-spear, and war-paint daubed his face.

Houston peered at his notes. “Together we hunted bear and deer and boar, fished the limpid stream and raised the yellow corn. Around the campfire, under open skies, I told my savage brothers of the moral lessons that my youthful heart had gleaned from Homer’s words. Because of this, they gave me the red-man’s name of Raven, after the feathered spirit that they deem the wisest of birds.”

The Greek dissolved, giving way to a grander raven, its wings spread stiffly across the screen, its chest covered by a striped shield. Sybil recognized it. It was the American eagle, symbol of the sundered Union, but the white-headed Yankee bird had become Houston’s black crow. It was clever, she decided, perhaps more clever than it was worth, for two of the kinotrope bits in the screen’s upper-left-corner had jammed on their spindles, showing dots of left-over blue; a tiny fault but annoying all out of proportion, like a bit of dust in one’s eye. Mick’s fancy clacking was working the Garrick’s kino very hard.

Distracted, Sybil had lost the thread of Houston’s speech. ” . . . the brazen cry of the battle-trumpet, in the camp of the Tennessee volunteers.” Another kino-portrait appeared: a man who looked rather like Houston, but with a tall shock of hair in front, and hollow cheeks, identified by caption as
GEN
.
ANDREW
JACKSON
.

There was a hiss of breath here and there, led by the soldiers perhaps, and the crowd stirred. Some Britons still remembered “Hickory” Jackson, without fondness. To hear Houston tell it, Jackson had also bravely fought against Indians, and even been President of America for a time; but all that meant little here. Houston praised Jackson as his patron and mentor, “an honest soldier of the people, who valued a man’s true inner worth above the tinsel of wealth or show,” but the applause for this sentiment was grudging at best.

Now another scene appeared, some kind of rude frontier fort. Houston narrated a tale of siege, from his early military career, when he’d fought a campaign under Jackson against the Indians called Creek. But he seemed to have lost his natural audience, the soldiers, for the three Crimea veterans in Sybil’s row were still muttering angrily about Hickory Jackson. “The damned war was over before New Orleans . . . ”

Suddenly the limelight flashed blood-red. Mick was busy beneath the stage: a tinted glass filter, the sudden booming of a kettle-drum, as little kino cannons cracked gunpowder-white around the fort, and single-bit flickers of red cannon-shell arched rapidly across the screen. “Night after night we heard the Creek fanatics howling their eerie death-songs,” Houston shouted, a pillar of glare beneath the screen. “The situation demanded a direct assault, with cold steel! It was said to be certain death to charge that gate . . . But I was not a Tennessee Volunteer for nothing . . . ”

A tiny figure dashed toward the fort, no more than a few black squares, a wriggling block of bits, and the entire stage went black. There was surprised applause in the sudden darkness. The penny-boys up in the Garrick’s gallery whistled shrilly. Then limelight framed Houston again. He began to boast about his wounds; two bullets in the arm, a knife-stab in the leg, an arrow into his belly — Houston didn’t say the vulgar word, but he did rub that area lingeringly, as if he were dyspeptic. He’d lain all night on the battlefield, he claimed, and then been hauled for days through wilderness, on a supply cart, bleeding, raving, sick with swamp-fever . . .

The clerky cove next to Sybil took another lemon-drop, and looked at his pocket-watch. Now a five-pointed star appeared slowly amidst the funereal black of the screen, as Houston narrated his lingering escape from the grave. One of the jammed kino-bits had popped loose again, but another had jammed in the meantime, on the lower right. Sybil stifled a yawn.

The star brightened slowly as Houston spoke about his entry into American politics, presenting as his motive the desire to help his persecuted pet Cherokees. This was exotic enough, Sybil thought, but at its heart lay the same snicky humbugging politicians always talked, and the audience was growing restive. They would have liked more fighting, or perhaps more poetic talk about life with the Cherokees. Instead, Houston had settled into a litany of his election to some rude equivalent of Parliament, various obscure posts in provincial government, and all the while the star grew slowly, its edges branching elaborately, becoming the emblem of the government of Tennessee.

Sybil’s eyelids grew heavy, fluttered, while the General blustered on.

Quite suddenly, Houston’s tone changed, becoming lingering, sentimental, a honeyed lilt creeping into his drawl. He was talking about a woman.

Sybil sat up straighter, listening.

Houston had been elected Governor, it seemed, and had gotten himself some tin, and been cheery about it. And he’d found himself a sweetheart, some Tennessee gentry-girl, and married her.

But on the kino’s screen, fingers of darkness crept in snake-like from the edges. They menaced the State Seal.

Governor and Mrs. Houston had scarcely settled in when wifey kicked over the traces, and fled back to her family. She’d left him a letter, Houston said, a letter that contained an awful secret. A secret he had never revealed, and had sworn to carry to his grave. “A private matter, of which a gentleman of honor cannot and should not speak. Black disaster struck me . . . ” The newspapers — apparently they did have newspapers, in Tennessee — had attacked him. “The tattling mouths of libel poured their venom on me,” Houston lamented, as the Greek shield with the raven appeared, and black kino-blobs — mud, Sybil supposed — began to spatter it.

Houston’s revelations grew shocking. He’d actually gone through with it, had divorced his wife, of all the unlikely, awful things. Of course he’d lost his position in Government; outraged society had bounded him from office, and Sybil wondered why Houston had dared to mention such an ugly scandal. It was as if he expected his London audience to morally approve of a divorced man. Still, she noticed, the ladies seemed intrigued, and not entirely without sympathy perhaps. Even the fat mama fluttered at her double-chins with a fan.

General Houston was a foreigner, after all, half a savage by his own account; but when he spoke of his wife it was tenderly, as of a true love, a love slain by some cruel mysterious truth. His bellowing voice broke with unashamed emotion; he mopped at his forehead a bit, with a fancy handkerchief from his leopard-skin vest.

In truth, he wasn’t a bad-looking cove, over sixty but that sort could be kinder to a girl. His confession seemed bold and manly, for he himself had brought the matter up: the divorce scandal and the secret letter from Mrs. Houston. He wouldn’t stop talking about it, but neither would he tell them the secret; he’d pricked the curiosity of his audience — and Sybil herself was simply dying to know.

She chided herself, for being so cakey, for it was likely something stupid and simple, not half so deep and mysterious as he feigned. Likely his gentry-girl wasn’t half so angelic as she’d looked. Likely she’d had her maiden virtue stolen from her by some good-looking Tennessee beau-trap, long before Raven Houston came along. Men had hard rules for their brides, if never for themselves.

Likely Houston had brought it all on himself. Perhaps he had beastly vile ideas about married life, come from living with savages. Or perhaps he’d milled his wife about with his fists — for Sybil fancied he’d be a right bully-rock, in his cups.

The kino came alive with harpies, meant to symbolize Houston’s slanderers, those who’d smeared his precious honor with the ink of a gutter press. Nasty crooky-back things, crowding the screen in devilish black and red. As the screen whirred steadily, they twitched their cloven hooves. Never had she seen the like, some Manchester punch-card artist having gotten the gin-horrors sure . . . Now Houston was ranting about challenges and honor, by which he meant dueling, Americans being most famous duelists, who loved guns and shot each other at the drop of a hat . . . He’d have killed some of those newspaper rascals, Houston insisted loudly, if he hadn’t been Governor, and on his dignity. So instead he’d thrown in his cards, and gone back to live with his precious Cherokees . . . He had a real head of steam up, now; he’d stoked himself so, it was almost frightening to watch. The audience was entertained, their reserve broken by his bulging eyes and veiny Texian neck, but none too far from disgust.

Maybe it had been something really dreadful that he’d done, Sybil thought, rubbing her hands together inside her rabbit-skin muff. Maybe it was lady’s-fever, that he’d given his own wife a case of the glue. Some types of glue were horrible, and could make you mad, or blind, or crippled. Maybe that was the secret. Mick might know. Very likely Mick knew all about it.

Houston explained that he had left the United States in disgust, and gone to Texas, and at the word a map appeared, a sprawl of land in the middle of the continent. Houston claimed he’d gone there seeking land for his poor suffering Cherokee Indians, but it was all a bit confusing.

Sybil asked the clerky fellow next to her for the time. Only an hour had passed. The speech was a third gone. Her moment was coming.

“You must envision a nation many times the size of your home islands,” said Houston, “with no roads greater than the grassy tracks of Indians. Without, at that time, a single mile of British railroad, and lacking the telegraph, or, indeed, Engine resources of any kind. As commander-in-chief of the Texian national forces, my orders had no courier more swift or more reliable than the mounted scout, his way menaced by the Comanche and Karankawa, by Mexican raiding-parties, and by the thousand nameless hazards of the wilderness. Small wonder then that Colonel Travis should receive my orders too late; and place his confidence, tragically, in the reinforcing-party led by Colonel Fannin. Surrounded by an enemy force fifty times his own. Colonel Travis declared his objective to be Victory or Death — knowing full well that the latter was a surely fated outcome. The defenders of the Alamo perished to a man. The noble Travis, the fearless Colonel Bowie, and David Crockett, a very legend among frontiersmen” — Messrs. Travis, Bowie, and Crockett each had a third of the kino screen, their faces gone strangely square with the cramped scale of their depletion — “bought precious time for my Fabian strategy.”

More soldier talk. Now he stepped back from the podium and pointed up at the kino with his heavy polished cane. “The forces of Lopez de Santa Anna were arrayed as you see them here, with the woods upon his left flank and the San Jacinto river-marshes at his back. His siege engineers had dug in around the baggage-train, with emplacements of sharpened timber, represented thusly. By a forced march through Burnham’s Ford, however, my army of six hundred had seized the wooded banks of Buffalo Bayou, unbeknown to enemy intelligence. The assault began with a brisk cannon-fire from the Texian center . . . Now we can witness the movement of the Texian light-cavalry . . . The shock of the foot-charge sent the enemy reeling in confusion, throwing his artillery, which was not yet limbered, into utter disarray.” The kinotrope’s blue squares and lozenges slowly chased the buckling red Mexican regiments through the checkered greens and whites of woods and swamps. Sybil shifted in her seat, trying to ease the chafing of her hoop-skirt. Houston’s bloodthirsty boasting was finally reaching a climax.

“The final count of the fallen numbered two Texian dead, six hundred and thirty of the invader. The massacres of Alamo and Goliad were avenged in Santanista blood! Two Mexican armies utterly defeated, with the capture of fourteen officers and twenty cannon.”

Fourteen officers, twenty cannon — yes, that was her cue. Her moment had come. “Avenge us. General Houston!” Sybil shrieked, her throat constricted with stage-fright. She tried again, pulling herself to her feet, waving one arm, “Avenge us, General Houston!”

Houston halted, taken aback. Sybil shouted at him, shrilly. “Avenge our honor, sir! Avenge Britain’s honor!” A babble of alarm rose — Sybil felt the eyes of the theatre crowd in upon her, shocked looks that people might give a lunatic. “My brother,” she shouted, but fear had seized her, bad nerves. She hadn’t expected it to be so frightening. This was worse than singing on stage, far worse.

Houston lifted both his arms, the striped blanket spreading behind him like a cloak. Somehow he calmed the crowd by the gesture, asserted command. Above his head, the kinotrope wound slowly down, its flickering domino-tricks whirring to a stop, leaving San Jacinto frozen in mid-victory. Houston fixed Sybil with a look of mingled sternness and resignation. “What is it, my dear young lady? What troubles you? Tell me.”

Sybil gripped the back of the seat before her, closed her eyes tight, and sang it out. “Sir, my brother is in a Texian prison! We are British, but the Texians imprisoned him, sir! They seized his farm, and his cattle! They even stole the very railroad that he worked on, a British railroad, built for Texas . . . ” Her voice was faltering, despite herself. Mick wouldn’t like that, he would scold her performance . . . The thought put a jolt of vitality into her. She opened her eyes. “That regime, sir, the thieving Texian regime, they stole that British railroad! They robbed the workers in Texas, and the stockholders here in Britain, and paid us not a penny!”

With the loss of the kinotrope’s bright play of images, the theatre’s atmosphere had changed. Everything was quite different suddenly, oddly intimate and strange. It was as if she and the General were somehow framed together, two figures on a silvered daguerreotype. A young London woman, in her bonnet and elegant shawl, reaches up with eloquent distress to the old foreign hero; both part-players now, with the surprised eyes of the public silently fixed on them.

“You suffered because of the junta?” Houston said.

“Yes, sir!” Sybil cried, a practiced quaver stealing into her voice. Don’t frighten them, Mick had said, but make them pity you. “Yes, the junta did it. They have flung my brother into their vile prison, for no crime, sir, but simply because my dear brother is a Houston man! He voted for you when you became President of Texas, sir! And he would vote for you today, although I fear very much they will kill him!” “What is your brother’s name, my dear lady?” Houston asked.