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Check to Your King

Chapter Three — Conversation Piece

Chapter Three
Conversation Piece

The white-starred négligé of the jasmine sprawling over the dank little summer-house was cautiously parted by an arrow's point. A peculiarly complacent-looking cat, very spruce in black doublet and spotless white hose, sat sunning itself on the brick wall against which an elderly apricot had brought forth golden abundance. The arrow whizzed, pinking a splendid apricot, clean missing the cat, which, heedless of this boon, called upon its gods and launched itself into space.

“Charlie, Charlie,” drawled a voice as lazy as the windless pause of the trees, “did I give ye that bow to keep your eye trained proper at the targets, or were't to go shooting cats and vermin?”

“'Twas no vermin,” answered the boy, with a flat disregard of the laws of evidence which seemed to amuse the tall, limping, club-haired old gentleman, whose eyes were no less twinkling blue than his periwinkle satin coat. “'Twas a heathen cannibal.”

Green turf, smooth as though abigail had pressed it with flatirons, invited them. The gentleman squatted down beside Nimrod, who, after a moment, forgot his wounded dignity, and flung himself full-length at his tall companion's side.

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“If it were a cannibal,” said the elder, seriously, “you'd have more sense, Charlie, on coming to my age, or even years enough for a saucy little Jack midshipmite, than to go fighting the wind with a great cumbersome weapon like that. What use would your bow be across a dirty little grey creek with the trees twisting all around, like as old Mother Cranston down the way had put the twitching palsy on 'em, and a stink of musk coming out of the swamp, where ye'd see a big, ugly snout hitching itself under the nose of your canoe? If it came to fight, there'd be neither sight nor sound of the enemy, but you'd see the man in front put up his hand to brush a gnat from his cheek; and 'twouldn't be no gnat at all, but a little bit of a sticky dart, come from one of the savage blow-pipes. A moment later, ye'd see that man pitch forward, Charlie…”

“Poisoned?”

“Poisoned,” nodded the lame gentleman, sombre satisfaction in every crinkle of his mahogany face.

“Captain Pete, next time you're at sea, couldn't you bring me back the littlest scrap of that poison? I wouldn't use it, not even on the cat. Just to keep it, Captain Pete. Who knows the savages won't be coming to England one day in their canoes?”

“I'll be going no more to sea, Charlie. They don't want lame old sea-dogs for a man's work, you know. Besides, there's no Captain Cook for me to sail with now, as in my boyhood. There was a man, Charlie. The southern seas will never see a better. And he was too fine an Englishman to go poisoning savages, as I fear many will do in times to come. Where he found them to be men, ay, and gentlemen, he could treat 'em as such. Maybe the ideas he put into me in boyhood have stuck with me yet. But if you want a gentleman's weapon for fighting the savages, Charlie, don't go using long-bows, nor yet poisoned darts.

“Put that club of greenstone I brought you from New Zealand against your cheek, and ask it to sing you its battle-song, as the natives swear it will. If it would do that, you'd hear a long story and a fine one, Charlie. Generation to generation, those clubs are handed down among the Maoris, the tallest and bravest race of fighters the world can show a sailor. They're poets, too, in the savage fashion. That stone your club's make from, they call it ‘robe of the sky’. Do christen their clubs like babies, and give 'em titles of honour after a battle, as the old kings would knight a man.” He shaded his eyes, watching a tiny fountain bubble in a white jet of laughter between the hands of a leaden naiad.

“Before Cook was slain, Charlie, I used to dream that a man page 19 might do better than go to those southern seas to fight with the people. It's a fair world, and deserves more than greed and bloodshed, if so be it we can't let it alone. And the people…”

“They're good people, Captain Pete?”

“Last time I sailed with Cook, and not much older than you are today, I lay sick ashore on the north island of that New Zealand. Friendly enough, the people were. Do live in huts like bee-skeps, and wear great cloaks made of feathers, or the leaves of a strong plant, dyed black, vermeil, and white. They've ovens with red-hot stones in them, under the earth, and water-springs that come singing like the steam from a kettle out of the ground itself, though that you won't believe. I've seen trees burning fiery red with flowers there, and in the morning, the most beguiling sweet bird with surplice of white on his breast, like Robin Hood's parson, wakes the heart up with his song. Cook, the scoundrel, had some caught and baked in a pie. Marvellous sweet eating he said they were, but I couldn't bring my stomach to it, after that morning song. Sweeter on the bough, say I. A lovely place, Charlie.”

“I'll go, Captain Pete, and I'll wear a cloak of feathers and carry my green club and be their king, as our Louis was in France till they cut his head off. I'll be a good king.”

“Maybe, Charlie. Heigho, it's the sunshine and old age make me prosy, dreaming of the green isles where I can voyage no more. And fine I'll be scolded by Mistress Caroline, who sent me out with news of a bowl of strawberries that seems to be waiting about in the larder for you….”

A moment, just one, before scrambling to his feet. Sometimes, when you're unspeakably happy, or the reverse, the touch of some insignificant thing will fix the memory for ever. In the New Road, on the last night before Papa forsook his lodging-house, a hand outspread, cautiously, like some queer white creeper on the stone wall, seemed to take and hold everything that was London. The misery, the running children, the old, slow lichens, trying to be golden-green, succeeding only in being sooty. Men speaking in voices as despairingly brutish as those of Circe's enchanted tigers and swine. The red horses. The sparrows, soul of London, hopping cheerfully over the manure. A solemn moon, quite beautiful, like a princess astray in New Road.

Now, under one's fingers, the sunburnt feel of smooth turf. We are rich, quite safe, or, one knows instinctively, we would not possess such smooth turf…. Take and hold the moment while you can, outspread fingers of little Charles de Thierry.

* * * *

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Four steps, whistle your tune over again. (Somerset is the lovely cool green, Hesperidean colour of dusk tangling in the apple trees.) In between whistling, rehearse what must be said, as befits a man of affairs.

He is, in fact, almost a great man now. Twenty, the head of his house, the Baron de Thierry; and successfully through no less a mill than the Congress of Vienna, which from 1814 until this year of 1816 has drawn half Europe to their city on the sentimental blue Danube.

The Corsican's done for, the scare of the Hundred Days was no more than a sky-rocket, flaring and falling against that horizon where the Bourbon monarchy's star has risen again over France. Be grateful, France! Napoleon is strait-jacketed on St. Helena. The English will keep him tight there; don't disturb yourself. They have no manners, no sense of mélange, but in their rough way they are efficient. Louis XVIII occupies the throne of France… and how fully! The old man didn't get slim in exile. The émigrés are not forgotten. In the pocket of Baron Charles de Thierry, personal secretary to the Marquis of Marialva at the Congress of Vienna, now crackles a bit of parchment — no less than the letter which appoints him attaché to the French Legation at London, and assures him of Monsieur's “very perfect consideration”.

Click the gate. Underfoot are the same round white pebbles that Captain Pete and a ghostly little Charles used for playing knuckle-bones, years ago. The house, with its benevolent, shaggy eaves, hives a multitude to welcome him. Not alone Caroline, Francis, Frederick, Louis…. But there is the ghost of his mother, her hands white on her spinet. The rinds of cucumber and lemon that she used, poor Maman, to scrub off the feel of the cooking-pots! And the memory of his father, who used to sit in the sunshine, solemnly nodding assurance that again a king would sit on the French throne, and the lost diamond of émigré valour glitter from the dust. There was a time, mind you, when the scoundrels said we were only French paste.

Moreover, every moment when Charles put doubt from his mind, and assured various stars and apple trees that the way to Fame was open, will now have crowded into the house to welcome him. You will perceive that while French royalty and the émigrés lay tumbled in limbo, this house, its occupants and its hours, did not live at all. They were suspended in a dream; and at times, as into the mind of the dreamer glides the shadow of a haunting fear, so they were pestered by the idea, “Will we ever be able to wake up?” Now, all over the houses, the little clocks page 21 of Victory are striking, slow, solemn, and clear. They are very ornate clocks, some enamelled with painted shepherdesses, others adorned with the gilt figures of Noble Qualities. You would not, I am sure, permit them in your drawing-room today…. Our Charles, however, has come home to set them ticking. “There is a king again; and, I can assure you, I am quite a success for one so young.”

The Abbot Vaggioli, author of La Storia della Nuova Zelandia, comes to light with a reference to the Baron de Thierry of this date, mentioning him as attached to the Portuguese delegation at the conference of Vienna, “where his musical talent attracted much notice”. I like better a passage underlined in a newspaper description of a Court masquerade in Vienna, which the Baron himself evidently retained among his treasures for sixty years.

“At the masquerade, the Baron de Thierry played a harp solo, and an Imperial lady fell in love with him.” Who was she, the unknown whose eye brightened as the little émigré wandered through his golden forest of harp-strings? One thing is certain: if she were really an Imperial lady, Charles would have been beside himself with delight at her attentions, even though she had a face like a gardening-trowel.

There was a picturesque world for a young man to choose from, since Metternich, the great chancellor of Austria, had brought to Vienna half the damsels and courtiers of a continent, possibly so that the clack of their tongues would either lull or deafen the foreign diplomats. From Paris came those hussies whose petticoats were cut like mares' tails; whose shoulders, what with puffs, ruffs, and frills, stood up higher than their ears. One is puzzled. How was so much of immorality possible, against the voluminous shapes of the prevailing fashions? Ladies, you remind me, do not invariably retain their petticoats. Naked they came into the world, naked they… But it must still have taken such a time to disrobe. Yet their charm laughed over the taffeta barricades. Tiny spring-song bracelets, white lilac and rosebuds, caught their sleeves again and again to their arms. There were soft bare shoulders; the hair of the older dames was delicately rimed with powder, as in the days before France put her eggs into the revolutionary basket….

Yet with all the world sending embassies to Vienna, secretaries must have been as plentiful as blackberries.

“Who is the young man in green broadcloth, the one with the air of an infant Byron, and a slightly long nose?”

“That is the Baron de Thierry, a son of émigrés.”

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“Psst!… Vienna is full of émigrés, half of them sons of the Bourbons, bastard and otherwise, and all borrowing.”

“He is personal secretary to the Marquis of Marialva, of the Portuguese delegation.”

“A secretary… we waste our time.”

“Yes, but he has an uncommon musical talent. He plays the harp, the grand piano, the penny whistle also, for anything I can tell you to the contrary.”

“A musician… something for our women to listen to… now that's a profession of discretion. We shall ask the young man to dinner.”

Harp solos. A little tempest of hand-claps in the porcelain tea-cup and Our Charles harping and blushing furiously. Marialva, it would seem, comports himself pleasantly with his secretary: for years later, Charles, trying to refute one of the many libels bruited about among the unimpressionable English, refers haughtily to “the Marquis of Marialva, to whom I was as a son”.

As attaché to a legation, one acquires a passport here and there. From twenty gloriously stamped and sealed documents, still preserved, emerges a Charles de Thierry with a long nose, a nose rather thick at the end, a sideways-inclined nose. One official gives him grey eyes, another insists on brown, a third offers orbs of viridian green; summed up, it comes to hazel. They describe him as sun-tanned, pale, and of swart complexion. (Perhaps he had been seasick after one Channel crossing, scorched during another.) Of two things alone they cannot rob him. He remains a slender young man of middle height, and with chestnut side-whiskers. An Imperial lady fell in love with this….

Suppose, now it's all over, that some affable Djinn, astray from the Arabian Nights, were to stand whispering in his ear, as he walks up the pebbled drive of the house in Somerset?

“Well, my little Baron, let's have it. You have seen the lot of them; a poor crowd compared with the old hands, but the best we can get, now that history no longer does itself in style. For yourself, my boy, what shall it be? An emperor, perhaps?”

“Emphatically not an emperor. To be an emperor is both too much and too little. There is something of unreality in the office. One would suspect always the presence of the little toy nightingale, the dolorous bird, flying about the palace and singing, ‘We are all alone, Emperor, you and I and Death.’ There was a brace of emperors at this congress. But look at them… Alexander of Russia, weak, melancholy, swayed always by his desire to sway other people. And the Emperor of Austria, what page 23 was he, poor devil, but an opportunity for this Metternich to show how sharp he was? Both of them had no companion but the nightingale.”

“A duke, then, all done up in strawberry-leaves? Come, don't be modest!”

“Mmm. The devil of it is, these dukes, these lords, these earls… they're all so busy running after the king.”

“What is it, then, that you would ask?”

“I would like to be a great leader of men.”

“I am surprised, my little one, that you shouldn't have selected a profession with more cachet. But no matter: it would please you, then, to be a demagogue?”

“Monsieur, you wish to insult me. I am a baron, the son of noble parents, godson to Monsieur the Comte d'Artois, who is brother of King Louis XVIII. You would compare me to a politician. I would lead the people, as it has always been the duty and privilege of the noble to lead the people.”

“Then, since you won't be a politician or a duke, you insist on being the man apart? That is to say, the king?”

“There are possibilities in such a position. I often wonder they don't see it.”

“Kings are a lousy lot.”

“Perhaps. But I would do things differently. I would civilise my subjects.”

“You will, in this kingdom, personally wipe all unseemly noses, chastise all unrepentant behinds, and reward the virtuous? Aussitôt dit que fait, my little one. Long live King Charles!”

The Djinn disappears. All the bells of Vienna echo softly in the air, drowning the dull rasping of Ethics, Moralising, and Philosophy. Charles, putting aside the question of a kingdom, stands on the thresholds of a diplomatic career and a kindly old house in Somerset. He is already attaché to the French Legation at London; Monsieur assures him of Monsieur's consideration toute parfaite…. Things could be worse.