Napoleon Symphony

by Anthony Burgess

  “Ah, is there not?” exclaimed the prisoner. “And, for an apt beginning, I will pick you up on your mode of address. For I am not Sir General but Lord Emperor, and that address is the garment of a reality, and the reality’s self persists despite the outer conditions to which I am subjected. Your prisoner I may be, Sir Knight—who indeed can deny it?—but I am in no wise a common prisoner, and it is your persistent and insolent treatment of myself as such that I most bitterly resent.”

  “If you are Lord Emperor,” Sir Hud rejoined, not without the suggestion of a sneer, “then your documents and seals of abdication were but a dream that the whole world joins you in dreaming. Know too, and here I forbear to jest, that the greater part of mankind rejects even your retrospectual claim to the title. General you are, and General I must call you. For the condition of your servitude, it is approved by all the signatories of the Peace, and the insolence you prate of must be referred to higher authority than my own.”

  “Insolent I said,” cried the other, and he strode threateningly a pace or so nearer to his adversary as he spoke. “I say also tyrannical I further add vindictive. The defeats that I, or my marshals, inflicted upon you in the field rankle within and forbid the disposing of your mind to the forms of common justice. Yea, common justice I say, since you will have it that I am but a common prisoner.”

  Stung to the nerve, Sir Hud hissed: “Sir, I will not bandy words. But nor will I be impugned so, for it is my honor, as a soldier and as a knight, at which you hit. And so I challenge you to show in what manner I have assumed the posture of vindictive tyrant.”

  “Ah,” said Lion of the Valley, a smile playing on his lips, “so we have at least entered a region of converse. Well then, Sir Knight, I would ask you this one easy question: where is my prison?”

  “Your prison, as you know well, is this island,” said the other, and at once would fain have called back the words, for he perceived the trap into which he was like to fall. “Or,” he added in haste, “shall I say that it is the manor of Longwood on this island.”

  “Nay, I take your first answer,” smiled Lion of the Valley, “as true and sufficient, for the common prison of a common prisoner may be located indifferently in any place, since it is the walls that confine. But for this uncommon prisoner a most uncommon piece of topography has, I assume with care and reason, been selected. Are not the walls of my prison this entire Southern Ocean? Are they not? Answer me.”

  “In a manner that is true,” responded the other with caution.

  “Well, then,” his prisoner continued, “if it be true, another thing is true, and that is, since I am not in chains, I may justly claim the liberty of passage from wall to wall of my dungeon. That is, I may have freedom of the island from shore to shore, and likewise freedom of converse with the inhabitants thereof. Why then,” and he raised his powerful voice to a shout, “am I not granted such right? Why do I have your musketeers and your grenadiers peering in my very windows and even violating the sanctity of—I will not speak the word, in deference to your knightly delicacy. By what right and by what order?”

  “Raise not your voice so,” returned the other with an equal anger. “I am not one of your underlings to be railed at. To your uncivil rantings I will return a civil answer, and that is this: that once you are on the shore you may well be on the sea, and that we have ample precedent of that danger. In a manner,” he said, and the sneer was now patent, “it is to protect yourself from another such signal defeat as you suffered at Waterloo.”

  “Puppy dog,” raved Lion of the Valley, now near dancing in his rage, “how you dare taunt me thus I marvel at—”

  “That you will retract and at once. You will take back between your insolent teeth that unseemly—”

  “Aye,” returned the other, sneering in his turn. “I could indeed swallow such as you at a breakfast, puppy dog. So,” he continued, while Sir Hud chafed in the freshly self-imposed bonds of his habitual courtliness, “you fear, do you? You fear that the Ogre may scape your confines and, whatever the outcome in Europe, if outcome there might be, your head would roll on Tower Hill for negligence. And if I am not to wet my feet in your encompassing ocean, nor am I to set my feet at all beyond the limits of this pitiable manor, since feet once freed to walk may walk towards some phantom vessel of liberation. You are a fool, Sir Knight, and you are also a caitiff coward.”

  “I will no more of this,” said the British knight with the calm of an inner strength to which the barbarian adventurer could not, either through training or through racial endowment, himself even remotely pretend. And he picked up his helmet from the table whereon he had put it, and prepared to take his leave. But the prisoner was swift to place himself between his jailor and the door.

  “Not so swift, Sir Knight.” And now the voice of Stentor was but a serpentine whisper in the leaves. “I know it is your will that I should die, and I guess that in your sleep your hands twitch on the coverlet in a mime of strangling, but your commission forbids, on pain of your disgrace and mayhap worse, the overt or even covert doing of the deed. But you have softer and slower and more insidious means of encompassing my dispatch than the knife in the dark or the poison in the cup. There is, for one ensample, the device of starvation.”

  “You do not,” returned the good knight with a restored humor in his countenance, “seem to me to be dying of that malady. Your bones are as well hid under your flesh as the stumps of felled oaks under January snows.”

  “Aye, you say so? Well, and if I say that what your mean benison permits myself and my entourage is of a gross insufficiency and that I am forced, this very day, to send ancestral gold and silver to be sold in the markets of the island’s capital—What say you then, O Knight of the Doubtful Countenance?”

  “I say that it is but an act of gratuitous malice, to bring myself low in the world’s eyes. You have no need to sell plate that you may eat, and well you know it.” Sir Hud’s eyes, which Lion of the Valley closely observed, betrayed unease and resentment of an injustice he could not scotch, since the members of his prisoner’s household were not themselves prisoners and hence could not be barred from free access to the marts of the town. There would be talk and there would be calumny, and the malice, transformed to a mendacious image of his tyranny, would fly with the trade winds to the known corners of the earth. “This is,” he said, “a traitorous and unworthy act.”

  “It is,” rejoined the other, now disporting his small but ample body in the postures of a known triumph, “a fair return for your own cruelty, aye, unworthy and unknightly cruelty. For in confining me as you do to the wretched periphery of this estate, you deprive me of all exercise. Was I not at one time free to ride a-horseback over the island ridge? And now I, whose life was lived in the field, must nurse a liver swollen and a belly over-rounded with the neglect of bodily action. Is not this cruelty, is not this a manner of slow and contrived murder?”

  “Ride the ridge and you will ride to the shore. I cannot allow of such dangerous liberty and well you know it.” But the eyes of Sir Hud had still to recover the calm and light of one content in his judgment. Of the cunning of his adversary he had long known; he had not however conceived that such cunning might contrive a manner of victory through self-elected martyrdom.

  “Oh aye,” jeered his prisoner, “and your soldiers will shoot me if I ride too far afield. Or perchance they may not. In spite of the hatred of myself that the governors of your realm hug to their bosoms, it may well be that the governed are of a different heart. May it not then be,” and his voice was low and musical, “that you nurse some inner fear of my cause being not yet lost, of your own men responding to my trumpet, of mutiny in the name of liberty, the jack hauled down and the tricolor raised? Is it not so, O Knight in whose knightly countenance glooms a whole night of doubt?”

  “This alone is so,” responded Sir Hud, and his look and his voice alike had recovered authority, “that your confinement to the boundaries of this estate of Longwood shall be reinforced with the
greatest rigor, and that orders will be given in my name and thereby in the name of His Majesty of England that, should you essay trespass beyond them, then you will be shot at sight.”

  “Ah,” returned Lion of the Valley all smiling and in a voice of honey, “this likes me well. Your enmity is declared and, believe me, Sir Knight, Knight of Blackness, it shall be chronicled forever in the annals of infamy. For when I am dead, and this cannot in the nature of things be long delayed, it will be known to all the world who was my murderer. I foresee a time,” said he, and the light of the visionary shone in his countenance, “when the agonies of the Emperor shall be enacted upon the common stage, and the pusillanimity and rancor of his jailor, the unchivalric chevalier, shall call forth cries of outrage from them that see the foulness of it all, and, yea, the very comedians who enact your part shall fear for their lives. Was it such fame as this that your parents foresaw for their offspring in the unlucky hour of your begetting?”

  Sir Hud now trembled with emotions he could not, in the moment of their arousal, well define. “This is unjust,” said he in a choked voice, stressing the word with a trembling fist, “and before the Supreme Judge of all of us you know it. I do no more than my duty, and my duty is to oversee the security of your confinement, as is delegated to me by my masters. If you consider that you and your household are in want of the necessities of sheer life, that what is allowed for your and their provisioning is inadequate, then I will, as is my duty, convey your complaint to them best able to judge of whether it be well-founded. For the rest, I must set severe limits on the bounds of your freedom of movement, and before God I see not how I can do otherwise.”

  “And so,” said Lion of the Valley, and he purred in rather a tigrine than a leonine manner, “I am to have armed men still patrolling about my walls and peering in at my casements. Well, this I promise, as the Almighty is my witness, that should any come too close I shall conceive of it as unlawful trespass and act accordingly. Aye, Sir Knight, I will fire a ball into the breast of the intruder.”

  “This is contrary to all the laws that govern the covenant,” began the knight, still trembling, but the other at once struck in with:

  “Covenant, say you? There is no covenant between enemies. You and I, Sir Lowe, are at war.”

  “This is the very cream of madness,” said the knight, with a partial recovery of his equanimity. “By rights you should be unarmed.”

  “And if I were to say aye to that,” responded Lion of the Valley, “there would still be the matter of my royal entourage, which is a body of free men bearing all the privileges of free men, though they have of their grace and loyalty joined me in my incarcerated state. And to be armed is their right, and it would be their bounden duty to use arms in the defense of their prince. So I say again: beware. And if you yourself, Sir Knight, seek entrance here as out of what you conceive to be your gubernatorial privilege, then you too will receive, before you thrust foot beyond the threshold, a ball in your breast. Are my words clear? Do you apprehend them?”

  “I must seek instruction from my masters,” said Sir Hud. “For the moment I will say that my men will, and this I grant of my grace, keep discreet distance, neither peering in nor unlawfully entering. Their limits shall be the borders of your gardens.”

  “Ah, you say so?” responded his prisoner in glee. “I have won so much. And is there some law that forbids my tending and working in my gardens?”

  “There is no such law,” said the knight, though unhappily, “and it may be regarded as the healthful exercise you seek, but I know well what you have in mind.”

  “Aye, you will have read of me. Aye, you will have been apprised of the time of my cadetship. For a garden is what a man must win from the wilderness, it is the order he seeks, with nature’s own compliance, to impose upon the aimless growth of nature’s germinating forces. And my gardens shall spread, sir, and my trees and bushes push back the bounds of your watchfulness. Once I sought to turn all Europe into a garden, nor, despite all, will the wilderness altogether reclaim it. And so it must suffice now, that in a smaller or microcosmic figure, I must resume the labors to which God called me. I will construct, while you will but constrict. Is that not the truest and briefest summation of our respective aims?” The knight said nothing, having nothing further to say. “So now,” spoke the Emperor of Longwood as to an underling, “you may leave my presence and plan new stratagems. But I shall win, make no mistake of that.”

  The day was hot beneath that southern sun,

  The time conspired to rest, though Nature’s self,

  Knowing no rest, was busily at work,

  The bees about their task, the butterflies

  Gilding the blue they sailed and skimmed along,

  And all the hidden forces underground,

  Inaudible to most but to the ear

  Attuned to Nature’s music live and loud.

  Thus as I strolled, wiping with movement slow

  The copious dew the sun called forth to film

  My heated brow with the coarse handkerchief,

  A sister’s gift, that I had hither brought

  Out of my gentler dales, I chanced upon

  A sweating gardener, singing at his task,

  Digging and hoeing, and with cheerful tones

  Bidding his helpers, men less apt than he

  And with no cheerful song upon their lips,

  To work apace for soon the westering sun

  Would sink apace, the southern stars rush out,

  And in one stride the mantling dark descend.

  His language was not mine, but I had once,

  In those good days when Freedom was the cry,

  And France was teaching Brotherhood, been fired

  To speak it much and dwell some little time

  Where it was spoke, and so I used it now

  In cheerful greeting. “Good it is to see,”

  Said I, “such happy industry, my friend,

  And such fair promise of a myriad blooms

  And saplings that, when you and I are dust,

  Our souls recalled to Nature’s bosom, may

  Yield grateful shade which sunburned travelers,

  Such as myself, will bless, as also bless

  The good man who once placed them in the earth”

  He smiled at me; he was of middle years

  And corpulent, and something in his mien

  Shone that was hardly of the common sort

  As though, but reason thrust the fancy back,

  He had been ruler of some little world,

  A squire, or officer of revenues.

  Smiling he said: “I do, sir, what I may

  To enlarge my little kingdom, as of yore

  I made a greater kingdom greater still”

  And, saying thus, he plied his clodded spade,

  Calling out “Spade, spade,” in a jest

  I could not comprehend, as though he thought

  Our English “spade” was an Italian word.

  This, and his earlier words, made dawn in me

  A sense that he was what a happy trope

  Terms one of Nature’s naturals. So with a smile

  But neither look nor word of unbelief,

  I let him speak on gaily as he worked.

  “Aye, sir,” said he, “for all that wilderness

  Which men call Europe, wherein noisome weeds

  Did choke the flowers, and greedy hornets bred,

  And fruit did rot upon the vine, I took

  Once as my garden-plot, and with the help

  Of Nature and my fortitude inborn

  And the long gift of patience did I make

  The greatest garden man has ever known,

  With tended plots and avenues built fair,

  And cool gazebos, glassed herbaria

  And everything to glad the heart of men.

  Now, as you see, I work a humbler plot,

  But still my kingdom.” Then his manner changed.

  It seemed he
had but now discerned the tones

  Wherein I spoke his language, for he said:

  “Are you of Albion’s shore? Are you sent here

  To spy and probe? Whether so sent or no,

  You trespass on my kingdom—get you gone”

  And then he offered with his spade to strike:

  “I have no spada but by heaven this spade

  Shall serve me,” and I understood the word.

  And so I got me gone, though smiling still,

  For Nature is as various in the men

  She breeds as in her fruits and flowers, I mused.

  And to this day, when idle hours invite

  The drawing from my memory’s varied store

  Of images extravagant, extreme,

  Or pale and simple as the woodland blooms

  Wherein I lie at summer ease, I see

  That man again, of swollen dropsied frame,

  Of swollen fancy too, and hear his voice

  Speak of his garden-kingdom, and I smile,

  But deg the smile withal with generous tears.

  Sergeant Trouncer, of His Britannic Majesty’s infantry, and as good and faithful a servant of His Britannic Majesty as His Britannic Majesty could hope to find, if His Britannic Majesty were disposed to look, lay at his ease, or at such ease as the broiling heat would permit, on the plain pallet of the guardroom, and removed his boots. Each fell to the stone floor in its turn with as much noise, within the limits of its booty capacity, as it could muster, as though aware of a kind of military responsibility to be noisy, and, for good measure, the hobnails of the soles flashed sparks against the stone, as though concerned to impress the crawling foreign blackbeetles with a sort of British firework display. Sergeant Trouncer observed his junior colleague, Private Slodge, admire the steam that arose from within the discarded leather, as though each boot were a fairy Vesuvius, or rather, since he was a young man of no large imagination, the boots were twin bakeries released from their task of roasting Sergeant Trouncer’s feet for some supper of delicate-stomached cannibals who must arrive soon if they were not to eat their pedal victuals lukewarm.