*
Mrs. Cadogan entered Emma’s dressing room without knocking. It was well past curtain time. She saw Emma and recoiled. Emma, who had been dressing for days, was pinning a small diamond, sapphire and ruby Union Jack to a kerchief tied around her neck in a naval manner. Where now was Attic simplicity? It had flown and left the gauds behind.
“Even for a snuffbox cover,” said Mrs. Cadogan, removing the brooch, “it would be excessive.”
Emma, who had managed the Lady superbly, had needlessly elaborated the simplicity of a Sailor’s Girl. On this subject Mrs. Cadogan felt herself competent to say little, while removing much.
“But now I look much as I looked before,” wailed Emma, whose enthusiasm had at last transgressed the boundaries of taste.
“Indeed, that is just what a sailor looks for,” said Mrs. Cadogan tactfully. “There must be no hint that anything has occurred in the interim.”
“Emma,” called Sir William from the hall below. He was resigned that ladies were dilatory to dress, but not when matters pressed.
However, Emma was at last ready, half Grecian urn, half Jolly Polly on a Toby jug, mature, wise, understanding, sympathetic, motherly—or anyhow sisterly—but with something perennially youthful about her too, and sincere, for sincerity was easiest of all; sincerity was but the work of a moment. Down to the harbor they went; the small boats parted from the prow of their barge, for England took precedence now, since she had won it back again, and therefore, so did they.
“How pretty are the boats,” said Emma, who had encouraged local industry. What with wreaths and garlands and freshly painted Madonnas and ex-votos without number, it looked more like Xochimilco at festival than their dear familiar Bay. “Will he be disfigured?”
“Dismembered,” said Sir William automatically, and leaned forward eagerly as they drew alongside the Vanguard, but sent Emma up the ladder ahead of him, as was only civil.
“Oh God. Is it Possible?” cried Emma, singling Nelson out. In the full-dress uniform of a Vice-Admiral, the effect of the pinned sleeve was not bad; she fell into his arms, or rather arm, and fainted away. Nelson staggered back. Arms lifted her. She was restored. As always happened when she was acting, her affectations fell away; she had no time for them—she was taken up by the thing itself. From being more dead than alive, she became on the instant more alive than dead. Pink-cheeked, rosy, nubile and none the worse for a little sun, she was a perfect Sailor’s Lass.
Sir William beamed approval. They made, he thought, a truly effective couple.
To get the King aboard was more difficult, for there was so very much more of him. It took an hour. But once aboard, he was his expansive, genial self. Out of several to choose from, that had seemed the most suitable. He could not have been more paternal, more benign.
“Nostro liberatore!” he boomed. Three cheers, hip and hooray.
“What, are there to be only three?” inquired the King, anxious that the thing be done properly, and then stooped, shattered by a grapeshot of applause. He received it, though it was not for him, with folded hands, before continuing.
“Oh had I been able to serve under you at the Battle of the Nile. But I, too, had my duty. I, too, stood at the helm of state.”
“What does he say?” asked Nelson, and looked nonplussed when he was told. Why, the great clumsy man would scarcely have been of service in the galley.
Since he could not refuse with grace, he consented without it, and was carted off to the city.
“Viva Nelson! Viva Hamilton!” the crowds shouted, pressing forward for a glimpse of him, and then, at the second carriage’s approach, in a less festive because more familiar tone, “Viva il Re!” For never before had so many lion tamers derived such heartfelt applause from the tousled appearance of one solitary, shabby lion.
“Sit down, Emma, pray do.”
“Rather stand up,” said Emma, “and be seen. For they demand it.”
Sir William would not. He was mistrustful of the plaudits of crowds, for they cannot last forever. A mere murmur of private admiration is far easier to sustain. He noticed a curious thing. Nelson, like Emma, never looked the same part twice. Like her, his only stable feature was his will. He could admirably reflect other men’s fires. In complexion, too, he was similar, white skinned, but with a variable pink flush—not strawberries and cream exactly, but the very best butter when he was feeling jaundiced.
Since this observation did not match the usual range of his experience, Sir William, with his customary horror of nonconformity, put it away.
*
“I do not care for the Neapolitans,” said Nelson. “It is a country of fiddlers and poets and scoundrels.”
“You have struck upon the very reasons we prefer them,” said Sir William delightedly. “Though from the other side. It is like two men digging one tunnel: one may blow cold and the other hot, but in the nature of the task, they are bound—if you view the thing in cross section—to meet. We may at any rate be the first to shake hands through the conjunctive hole.”
Nelson, who never felt the compulsion to hold his telescope the wrong way around, found this sort of chatter disconcerting. Still, for near seventy, Sir William was undoubtedly remarkable, a plain straightforward fellow after his own heart—as long as you attended only to every other word. Nelson felt at home here.
“I am sitting opposite Lady Hamilton as I write,” he informed his wife. As he was. She came in just as you began to miss her, and sometimes, frequently, before.
“Are you writing dispatches?” she asked.
“Only to my wife. It does not matter.”
“And what is she like, your wife?”
He could not immediately say. She was a little colorless; she resembled no one. He could not hit upon a comparison. “Oh, she is a young lady much like yourself, much concerned with country affairs, gossip and peach bottling in the proper season.”
“I do not gossip,” said Emma, “though I have, it is true, occasioned much, and besides, you are wrong—I have never bottled a peach, in or out of season. Though spiced, with meat, they are often served here.”
“I am devoted to my wife,” said Nelson, whom young ladies made nervous, particularly the older ones. “Indeed, if I had more time …”
“You would be about your devotions,” said Emma.
Nelson blushed. When he thought of Fanny, it was to see her always fully clothed and far away. She was a distant woman.
As for Emma, had she been a lady, he would not have thought her one, but as she was not, he did. His view of the aristocracy was highly colored. So was she, and Fanny’s views of eminence were so discreetly washed out as to seem unreal and colorless. He must say he liked the upper classes better colored in. King Parrot has more to say than King Sparrow, a wider range of vocables, says please and thank you, and is less monotonous. He does not peep.
Fanny peeped. So did her letters. Mr. Ramsey was ill. Mr. Squire was ill of a thorough scouring, after a stoppage of two days and a night. Mr. Bolton had sent fine lobsters and a hare, but the fish and poultry were deplorable. The other four pages were about the advancement of her son Josiah. She did not seem to realize he had stepped into a larger room. It was all most muddling.
Emma bent over him, uncorseted, solicitous, high-bosomed and warm.
“It is evening,” she said. “I thought perhaps you would care to admire the lights.”
“What lights?”
“Why, the lights of the evening,” she said, and led him to the balcony, which overlooked the main façade of the Palazzo Sesso. Three thousand self-feeding lamps spelled out his name across the front of the building. Sometimes their flames blew all one way, sometimes another, according as the breeze blew. They were like stars put in their proper order. It was the fame for which he had burned, and now it burned for him. He was moved.
She had been watching his face with the wary amusement of a good cook watching a guest test a pie. She is so sure of the outcome that she does not require to be tha
nked.
In the city, a rocket arched, broke, and descended into nothingness. It was followed by another, even more abundant; its color jostled in the air, like dew on an invisible leaf, and then bounced off into darkness. Squibs went off like cannon, the rockets in volleys.
Turning to look over the bay, he saw his name there, reflected backward from a set piece—anchors, wreaths and stars, in white, red, green, and yellow—writ in water, twenty feet across, and there was no tide. He shivered, gooseflesh all over, and backed away.
“There will be more,” she said as the rockets faded, thinking him disappointed. “Nelson’s name is now eternal.”
The sky, empty for the moment, reminded him of the lull in any night battle, with the sea full of jetsam and burning, and here and there a scream, a curse, a burst of light.
“You must forgive me,” he said, startled not to anger but to sadness. He felt as a man feels who has gotten with difficulty to the head of the stairs only to discover there is yet another flight to the attic above. “I have not been famous long. I must get used to it.”
“You will,” she said, with a confidence which startled him even more. No patient is soothed by being told he has a common ailment. He looked down. The street was full of people, waiting down there in the earthy obscurity, like bulbs. When he smiled, they burst noisily into bloom. They applauded.
“Emma,” Sir William had said once, “you must never look down on royalty. They are not meant to be seen from above.” But she had forgotten it. She bowed. Nelson bowed. What else was he to do? To retreat, rigid, would have been discourteous. And having bowed once, he must do so again. So he did so again.
Emma was delighted. To play Britannia suited her so well that you could almost hear the ophidian slither of her corselet when she did not so much move as shift her trident for a little while and gather in her shield.
*
“Poor man, he looks undernourished. He wants a fortifying jelly,” said Mrs. Cadogan.
“Bring one and I will take it to him.” Emma was trembling.
“That I can do myself. He’s scarcely fit to be seen.”
“What is all the noise downstairs?”
“That Miss Knight,” said Mrs. Cadogan, without pleasure. “Not only has she moved in kit and caboodle, but now it seems she has written an ode. She is reciting it.”
Emma had isolated her astonishment. “You know, I do not mind the stump one bit.”
“Ah well, he’s famous now. It’s not his fault, poor lamb,” said Mrs. Cadogan, and since she loved a hero even more than a gentleman, went off happily to the kitchens to supervise the exact perfections of a mutton broth and skim the scum.
*
“The British Nelson rivals Caesar’s fame,” declaimed Miss Knight, in her best leno, looking somber, as a sibyl should.
“Like him he came, he saw, he overcame.
In conquest modest, as in action brave,
To God the glory pious Nelson gave.
From Gallia, Bonaparte sailed,
Nelson from Albion’s sea.
Chains were our lot if one prevail,
The other [and here she paused] sets us free.”
If no good at Attitudes, she could at least make the proper gestures, and did. There was applause, and even Sir William favored her with a smile. She was content. She had done well. She was a poetess and an admiral’s daughter. For the rest, she could do no more than Pope and lisp in numbers till the numbers came.
*
“Lady Hamilton has been an angel,” said Nelson.
“She has her moods,” said Sir William easily, and because his leg was tapping, crossed it the other way.
“A ministering angel.”
“The mother has much to do with it. She is an excellent plain cook,” said Sir William, echoing, without knowing it, the Greville of fifteen years before. He liked the boy exceedingly.
“She is really delightful.”
Not wishing to see too much, Sir William looked away, and sure enough, when he looked back again the expression had gone. Sensing itself to be unwelcome, it had vanished utterly. It would have been foolish to notice it when the boy, he was sure, was unaware of it himself. So many things vanish if we do not notice them. However, here and there Sir William had managed to save a few, for he saved appearances from habit, like bits of old string. You never knew when they might come in handy.
*
The 29th was Nelson’s birthday. Emma, in a mood of austerity suitable to war, had formerly restricted herself to small intimate dinners for eighty, but this time decided to do the thing properly. She enjoyed to play hostess and did it well, and would have asked the world to dine had she been able to procure so large a table, or borrow enough plates. While she arranged the guest lists, Nelson, propped up in bed, was posing for his portrait, which had been commissioned by the Queen. The artist was one of a corps which did the royal children in relays, a man called Guzzardi.
“It is not necessary to rise,” said Guzzardi. “The body, I can make up from stock.”
Nelson felt irritably the absence of an arm. The best that could be said for the fellow was that he worked rapidly. The result was a flounder in uniform.
Sir William was displeased. “It will do very well, but it should not be given the currency of an engraving.”
“My wife has had my portrait of Lemuel Abbott,” said Nelson. “I own it is a better likeness.” Abbott had shown him—if not as a member of the aristocracy, as an aristocrat—a most clubbable portrait, when the fleet engaged in battle at the rear.
“Abbott?”
“Some English painter.”
“The only English painter was Reynolds, but he is dead and so beyond compare. Lawrence will do in a pinch. If you were County, it would be different. There a certain stiffness in the modeling does no harm.”
Nelson felt graveled. In this house, where everything was what it seemed to be, except the people, he began to perceive that appearances were not only everything, but had nothing in common with Fanny’s perpetual keeping up of them. To reach fame we must move rapidly and travel light. We grow oppressed by boiled pudding and turnip tops, for they retard us. There can be no butterfly without a metamorphosis, and the butterfly is the emblem of the soul. We must pupate into immortality, rest, exchrysalate, move on, and all on a diet of mulberry leaves and water, and leave each dish untasted, merely to touch them all.
“I like Sir William much,” he wrote his wife. It was what a schoolboy would have said of a master who did not whip him, explained the logarithmic tables of society, and told one frankly why one was not popular; it was because one was unique. One could move easily and be welcome, therefore, only among one’s peers, of which there are not many, and those not always Peers.
“When people say they want something new, what they mean is that they want the same old thing, only different. To something new, they are inevitably hostile until it has had the edge taken off it by being imitated at least twice. This is why we admire equally the old genius and the young fop, and prefer, naturally enough, the latter,” said Sir William. “So Sir Thomas Lawrence, I think, would do very well.” And he looked around proudly at his vases, which had been imitated at least twice by Mr. Wedgwood at Etruria, so their value had soared enormously. The best place to achieve novelty is to rummage in an old closet or down a stopped-up well.
“We must be going,” he added, for they were to visit the Royal Porcelain factory that afternoon.
“The King might better,” said Nelson, who found all this dilatory when there was fighting to be done, “visit the armory.”
“Ah well,” said Sir William. “Did you know that one of the designers has had made a porcelain cannon, provided with a caoutchouc breech, which shoots hard candy a distance of six feet? For a while he diverted himself with that. He is concerned with ends, not means. He is ugly and likes to be flattered. Talk up victory to him until he can see it as a self-portrait, all apotheosis and very little blood, and he will soon enough gallop of
f to pose, once he has chosen the right uniform.”
“Battles are not conducted that way.”
“No, but they may be composed so, after the event.”
“He likes to hunt, so I hear. Why can he not like to hunt the enemy?”
“You have not attended a royal hunt,” explained Sir William. “It is not here a tallyho over hedges after hounds. He is a large man, difficult to move. It is three hundred years since anyone in Italy has had the skill to run with the fox and hunt with the hounds. Now they sit motionless in a tent, the game is paraded before them, and then they fire. They like to be sure of their trophies, you see. I assure you, for I have often tried, it is no easy thing to flush a King. They may seem mad, but now and again they lapse into sanity. Besides, he has a most extensive warren.”
“Warren is the word for it.”
“Nelson,” said Sir William, “you have seen too much water. You are indifferent to wool. I have been here thirty years, and have yet to tire of it.”
The boy had his limitations, he feared: he had ability. That blinkered him.
*
At the China manufactory, where Nelson wished to buy the similicra of the King and Queen, hard-glazed, as a gesture, the King prevented it. His own image was within his gift. He might bestow it where he would.
“Let him bestow it upon Rome,” said Nelson as they came away, his eye caught by the rustle of the trees which met above their heads, a species he had never seen before. “What trees are these?”
“Mulberry,” said Sir William. “There is a manufactory for silk, too. We are fair to rival China, though not in bulk.”
*
“Nelson,” said Emma, titivating, “is curiously attractive.”
“Oh, Em,” said Mrs. Cadogan—who had eyes in her head, though it is difficult to be Argus with but two, and those drowsy—“can you never leave well enough alone?”
“I only meant a title will suit him. Why does it not come?”
“A picture must dry before it is varnished,” said Mrs. Cadogan. “Such things take always a year. Besides, he has a wife.”
Sir William Page 17
