Valiant Gentlemen

by Sabina Murray

  This English self that buttons his shirt, this Irish self that puts on the coat, the hat, that picks up gloves and cane. And thus returned to the sidewalk, that self that should pick its steps back and back, walk in reverse—as time seems to wind backward to him—winding back to the time when none of it ever happened.

  IV

  Paris

  January 1894

  The Wards have been in Paris for two months and Sarita does not miss England. England is not a default country for her. She is not English and, although Spanish-speaking countries are all out of the question, primarily because they are inhabited by Spanish-speaking people, she has been longing for something a little more lively than the house in Harefield: Paris feels like a good compromise. She likes reducing her belongings to a couple of trunks. She likes the townhouse with its marble steps and sun-drenched back garden. She likes the gardener who listens to her stilted French with patience and humor and goes ahead and does whatever he wants to anyway.

  Herbert mostly keeps her away from the Académie Julian’s crowd, where he spends most of his time painting. He’d said, “Sarita, I don’t think they’re your sort of people.”

  “Why?” she asked. “Because of my fancy upbringing, my delicate manners?”

  She knows that Herbert doesn’t want her to ruin his image. He is playing the explorer and the less they see of the wife with her current fashion, well-tooled kidskin boots, and soft hands, the easier it is to keep it going. All the academies have to be a bit nutty, but this Académie Julian is the one that accepts women painters, who introduce a whole new set of scruples or lack thereof. These women arrive with their brushes and smocks and canvases, and God only knows what they leave with. They’re in and out of bed with everyone. Even if Herbert returns every evening to their little apartment with its English habits and narrow views, in the morning when he leaves he arrives to a different set of values. Sarita can see the appeal of such adventure. One of Herbert’s classmates, an Irish girl, is having an affair with a married Polish count—a Count Marciewicz. Or so he’s heard. To Sarita, it sounds made up.

  Sarita has managed to make friends and find things to do. Father has connections everywhere. One of his associates is a very wealthy banker who lives bordering the park on rue de Monceau and that connection had gotten her into a very fancy tea, where she’d spent a fascinating afternoon chatting with an elderly lady who spoke a sort of Shakespearean Spanish and had spent her whole life, to that point, in Istanbul. Money is not always dull.

  Sarita has decided to drop by Herbert’s studio and see how his work is progressing. She doesn’t have a good reason to be in Montmartre, but perhaps a stroll to see the progress of Sacré-Coeur is reason enough. Cricket and baby Dimples are safe with Marte, who is—no doubt—making sure that they are kept as spotless and scentless as is possible for living things. Sarita sets out with Ticker the dog, a puppy of three or four months, who is fine but demands an anxiety-provoking level of exercise. She’ll walk the few miles to Sacré-Coeur, have tea at one of the cafés, and then drop in on Herbert. It’s a clear day, not too cold, not windy, with a vibrant sunshine. If she had a better sense of what she is trying to accomplish, it would be a good plan.

  Ticker helps. He gives her the appearance of a sense of purpose. Together they wander up the twisting streets to Sacré-Coeur. They reach the church at noon. Paris spreads beneath them like a blanket. Ticker, unimpressed, blesses the church’s bleached foundation with a raised leg. Sacré-Coeur, although started years earlier, is far from finished. From what Sarita can see, it will be, upon its completion, garish. The white stone is strangely luminescent—magical, but in a sugar-topped fairy-cake way. She prefers the airy darkness and attractive gloom of Notre Dame, with its pained children singing heavenly songs that are supposed to remind one of salvation but rather make you almost wistful for the comforting stillness of death. Sacré-Coeur is quite another thing, set up by the church to annoy the locals—artists and radicals—to cast its pure, white, sin-cleansing shadow over the windmills and brothels and absinthe cafés and studios of Montmartre.

  Progress of Sacré-Coeur now observed, Sarita moves on to the second stage of the plan: sitting at a café.

  She and Ticker take turns dragging each other down the hill until she finds a place that doesn’t look too crowded. She decides on a seat inside. At a corner table, a woman sits with her Irish setter—a beautiful dog with a great, elegant head and impressive bearing. That dog, which, no doubt, has some noble name, sits still and upright, gently nodding to people as they pass, inspiring all sorts of admiration from the waiters, from young men, from the woman herself, who wears a crushed velvet jacket of the same rich burgundy as the dog’s coat. Sarita orders her sandwich and tea. She watches the waiter appraise Ticker, who is either an overblown spaniel or an unsatisfactory setter. The whole time Sarita is eating her sandwich and gulping her tea, Ticker seems determined to garrote himself in some complex cat’s cradle about the legs of the table.

  “Well, Ticker,” she said, “it wasn’t a complete disaster. After all, you didn’t bite anyone.” But she’s never bringing him to a café again. What was she thinking? Sarita had intended to stay longer, but now, walking past the Moulin de la Galette, she’s set to arrive at the studio smack in the middle of the lunch hour.

  The studio is in a shabby building on a side street and is painted cheerful shades—bright yellows and greens, although with no apparent yearning towards any aesthetic. She knocks on the door, then knocks again. There are weary footsteps. The door creeks open and an unshaven man—although it’s not exactly a beard, more facial hirsuteness, like a monkey—presents himself.

  “I’m looking for Herbert Ward,” she says in French. “I’m his wife.”

  The man says nothing but, after a moment’s assessment, tries to block her view with his shoulder. Sarita can still see the bare model, including his hairy buttocks, who is standing on a platform bathed in sunlight and underlit with shadow.

  “Ehrbert Ward is not ehre, Madame,” the man says, volunteering En­glish. “Eh is taking a sandwich.”

  “Well, where’s he taking it?”

  “Madame?”

  Another man appears at the door, relieving the first, and speaking French. “You must be Sarita.”

  “Yes,” she says, surprised at the familiar tone. “And this is Ticker.”

  Across the street, barrels of something, probably beer, are being unloaded from the back of the cart.

  “I am Jacques Petrie. I am a friend of your husband.”

  “Pleasure to meet you, Mister Petrie.” This Mr. Petrie is a very handsome man and for a minute she can’t remember why she’s there. “I was taking a look at Sacré-Coeur,” she gestures vaguely in its direction, “and walking the dog,” she raises the leash for confirmation, “and thought I might drop in and say hello to my husband.” She is waiting to see whether or not Mr. Petrie will accept this, because he’s taking a moment, and his features are either droll, disbelieving, or just maintaining a practiced and unreadable expression, when there’s a crash across the street. One of the barrels has slipped and landed on a workman’s foot, and he’s shouting, and the horses take off. Sarita feels the leash pull out of her hand. Ticker has bolted and is galloping down the street.

  Sarita breaks into a run, aware that long after Ticker’s fear has dissipated, he’ll keep going. She watches him tear down the sidewalk of rue Fontaine and round the corner. And there is the gate to the cemetery. She’s out of breath as she reaches it. Where is Ticker? She glimpses a few inches of feathered tail—going, gone—behind a marker. Sarita is out of breath, cursing her corset, and cursing Herbert—which may not be reasonable but certainly feels justified. She stands at the cemetery entrance, looking at forking paths and shadowed walkways, the spectral monuments and Catholic hush. She is cursing everything, herself included, in an audible, satisfying, unladylike Spanish.

  “Madame Ward,”
comes a voice. It is Mr. Petrie, who has followed her.

  “I’ve no hope of catching him,” she says, her breath still rough, “he’s possessed. But if we don’t get him back, Herbert and the children will never forgive me.”

  She sees Ticker step out from behind an enormous mausoleum an improbable distance from where he’d initially disappeared. He seems nervous to return, fearing her anger, probably wondering if he’s ready to relinquish his freedom. In Ticker’s place, Sarita would feel much the same.

  Mr. Petrie begins whistling in a soft, birdlike way. Ticker cocks his head and raises his ears, watching. Mr. Petrie steps closer, but not too close, and then, flat on the ground, lays himself out as if volunteering for a crucifixion. The dry leaves scutter past, the cawing crows give voice to the dead, and Ticker sits deliberating. The dog cannot resist. He trots tentatively towards Mr. Petrie, and then, as Ticker peers into the man’s face, Petrie’s arm shoots out and grabs the leash. Petrie gets up from the ground. He presents himself and Ticker, handing the leash to Sarita.

  “Thank God,” she says. “I honestly don’t know what I would have done without you.”

  “It would have taken longer,” says Petrie.

  “Well, I hope there’s some way I can return the favor.” She resists brushing the leaves from his hair, which he seemed unwilling to do.

  “Of course, there is not a need.”

  “No, of course . . .” Does he think she means to pay him?

  “But maybe . . .” He was looking at the ground intently. Ticker follows his gaze downward. “You must say no.”

  “Must I? What is it?”

  Petrie performs an elaborate series of shrugs and then, with an aura of complete resignation, says, “I need a woman’s foot.”

  “How very interesting.”

  “You see, we have a model for this week, and she is beautiful in some ways, and sometimes the ugly ladies are better to paint—I mean it, more beautiful the ugly ones. But this woman . . . What has feet like this woman? They are grotesque.”

  “You can’t make them better?”

  “Feet are my weakness,” he says. “I am no good at feet.”

  “Oh,” she says, “I understand. You need a woman’s foot. And I have two.”

  Petrie nods, thinking. “It is still no good. No women are allowed in the men’s studio.”

  “Oh, well, is there somewhere else?”

  “Only my room, which is not far.”

  Sarita knows she should never have entered into this conversation. She should never have tried to repay a favor. Ladies don’t. Now she is stuck with either making Mr. Petrie out to be a rake, which he might be, or joining in with something highly irregular. Ticker looks from Petrie to her to Petrie. “I suppose if we don’t take long,” she hears herself say, “because I do want to see my husband.” Her cheeks are burning. She wonders if Petrie knows what she’s agreed to, because she isn’t sure.

  His room is on the second floor of an old house on rue Lepic. The light is good, but the floorboards gap, and the old couple arguing below might as well be in the same room. She’s managed to get her shoe off—buttons, not laces—and, hidden behind a screen (what is it there for?) her stocking. “Do you need both feet, or just one?”

  “Both, please.”

  Mr. Petrie has lost some of his friendliness, which is a relief. This is work for artists—women bared. She grapples off her other boot, rolls the hose down and hangs it beside its mate on the screen. She steps across the broad, gapping floorboards. What if her feet are grotesque? To Sarita, they seem completely acceptable, but what of Mr. Petrie’s opinion? Clearly he is particular. He looks them over, his expression inscrutable.

  “Can you stand like this,” he mimes for her to bunch her skirt in her left hand, “and then like this,” he slides a bucket over to her, gesturing for her to put her right foot onto it. The metal of the bucket is very cold against her bare foot.

  He’s been sketching for close to an hour, during which time Sarita has oscillated between boredom and anxiety. She wonders if that other man has told Herbert that she’d dropped by. She wonders if he’s connected Mr. Petrie’s disappearance with her exit. And then she wonders when Petrie will be done with his sketches so she can release her skirt and put her boots back on. Ticker has fallen asleep in the sunlight thrown by a curtainless window and she envies him. She is also hungry.

  She imagines Herbert looking at Jacques Petrie’s painting, at those familiar feet, stitched by the ankles to another woman.

  When they return to Julian’s, Herbert is still not there.

  “This is not uncommon,” says Petrie. “So many artists live here. If you are having a slow day, you can go visit the studio of another artist.”

  But Sarita isn’t sure. She says goodbye to Mr. Petrie, whose frank demeanor she has found refreshingly unmannered—she would be happy as a woman artist, one of these painting comrades, if she could paint. But she is also happy as a mother and, most of the time, happy as wife to Herbert. And this is what she is thinking when, as she leaves, she raises her eyes to the second floor of the house on the opposite side of the street. A shutter has just been thrown open and a woman is standing in the window. She has a man’s shirt thrown over her shoulders and her breasts, the type of soft rich flesh that Renoir paints so well, are exposed to the street. This woman is looking at Sarita—although why?—and smirking. Maybe she is the lover of Mr. Petrie, or some other artist, but Sarita does not care to find out. It doesn’t matter. She’s been envying Herbert’s freedom and, one foot on the cold bucket, one on the dusty floorboard, skirt hiked in her cramping left hand, she has learned that she is free—not imprisoned in marriage: If marriage has bars and a lock, she holds the key.

  V

  Niger Protectorate

  June 1894

  Casement has signed on for some surveying work in the Niger Protectorate employed by Commissioner Claude MacDonald, and therefore England, and therefore not for Leopold, which is—therefore—not so bad. The stakes aren’t as high for palm oil as they are for ivory. Palm oil doesn’t involve killing anything and has replaced slavery in the region as a way of turning a profit. In West Africa, the small nuts are ground and distilled into a fat for cooking, but in England—all of Europe now—the grease lubricates the pistons and joints of Industry. Although here, marching along a native track with the chatter of porters, muted clank of equipment in baskets, and occasional bird screech as the only music, it’s difficult to think that one is a part of the chugging, smoke-belching engine that is Europe.

  Casement is moving through dangerous territory, that of the Anang, and wondering about the wisdom of traveling without weapons. He sips the last of the coffee and swirls the grounds in the bottom of the tin cup: Perhaps the future can be read there. Ofime, his linguister, had asked him several times if he was absolutely sure that he hadn’t brought a gun, and this had made Casement snap—he hadn’t appreciated being asked more than once and all that inquiry had made him nervous. Ofime did not feel responsible for Casement’s outburst, nor was he insulted by all his shouting. Ofime has told Casement that his name means, “Don’t be angry, wait all the time,” which Casement has translated to, “It is good to be patient.” Ofime is patient and Casement is patient, but on occasion it would also be good to have things where they’re supposed to be, people behaving in a way that does not require patience.

  Soon his stint with the Niger Protectorate will be over. He’s looking forward to home leave. Hopefully brother Tom, currently bankrupted in Australia, will soon have his sea legs—or his bush legs—or whatever other legs one must have in order to stay beyond the range of creditors and Casement will be able to save some money, take a real holiday. He could even relocate to Liverpool, although it’s hard to think of how he’d make a living. He could balance ledgers, like his uncle. Or he could write to his relatives in Ballycastle and see if they know of any openings, b
ut all those people have been asking him about the consular service, as there’s not much going for young men in the old country. He’s a bit out of touch with Ireland. Since the death of Parnell and the latest defeat of the Home Rule Bill, he does not follow the machinations of the House of Lords. Parnell failed—even with Gladstone as his ally—and more failure fails to entertain. He’s gotten into this with Ward, who has a hard time understanding how Casement can support the British in Africa and want an Irish Parliament—how these two things are not at odds with each other. Most ambitious Irishmen end up in England, or working with the English. It’s an economic necessity. At least in Africa, England and Ireland are allied forces, working for the good.

  Casement raises his umbrella against the sun, his only weapon and one, he fears, that is developing a tear. The porters are chattering anxiously. He sees Ofime patting the air as he moves past, as if he hopes to reassure them.

  “Ofime, are we set to leave?” asks Casement.

  “No. The Anang have refused permission.”

  “I already know that.” Casement recognizes the insubordination. It is good to be patient. “Surely some diplomacy—”

  “There is no diplomacy with the Anang without guns.”

  “Ofime . . .”

  “Master, why are you arguing with me? Have I ever misrepresented anything? You don’t want to kill us all. Not for your map. Put a big hole in this place. Or put a big gun so that the white man knows to bring one when he comes back here. If I tell the porters not to move forward, they will not move forward. But I want to tell them that it is because you have said that the Anang are too dangerous and that you want to take care of them. Why must you go here? Look. Over there. More Oil Rivers. And over there. More Oil Rivers. And in both directions, no Anang.”