Sir William

by David Stacton

  Emma’s voice triumphed over the clatter, for the plate had finally fallen to the floor. The others watched it settle.

  “Her voice loud, yet not disagreeable.”

  Nelson picked it up.

  “He is a little man, without any dignity.”

  Perceiving the evening to have turned squelchy, Sir William skated in graceful, distant, improvised curves around its incipient hole.

  “Though the words are by our Miss Knight, the music, as you may have recognized, is by the incomparable Haydn,” he said.

  Nelson shut his eyes. The warmth of the candles, no doubt, had rendered him faint. He could not, however, conceal a slight twitch of the nostrils.

  She puffs the incense in his face, but he receives it with pleasure and snuffs it up very cordially, concluded Mrs. St. George. It was good enough to copy into her journal.

  The party rose to retire.

  Miss Cornelia Knight, added Mrs. St. George, shaking her hand, seems the decided flatterer of the two, and never opens her mouth but to shew forth their praise; and Mrs. Cadogan, she added, with a frigid bow, Lady Hamilton’s mother, is what one might expect.

  Looking around to see if she had forgotten anybody, she saw that as usual she had not, and with quite a grateful smile went home to her writing desk and warmed to her task, though the night was chill, delighted to have a subject so worthy of her pen.

  *

  “She was framing phrases,” said Mrs. Elliot.

  “One begins to see how she does it,” said her husband. “Or, at any rate, when.”

  “It almost makes one wish one lived in another town,” said Mrs. Elliot wistfully. “To read them, you know.”

  “If they are quotable, they will be quoted. One has but to wait,” Mr. Elliot assured her, and went to bed. Mrs. St. George, though unavoidable, was frequently fatiguing. He had toyed once with the thought of applying for a transfer to Magdeburg, despite the lesser stipend, but had discovered that she had cousins there and sometimes visited. So it could not be helped.

  *

  On the 4th, they all went to the opera, where the cast sang very badly and Emma all too well. On the 5th, Mrs. St. George was invited to inspect Lord Nelson in Court costume. If he could not go there, he could at least dress as though he could. She found him stuck all over with everything, like a galantine—diamonds, stars, decorations and chelengkh awhirr. On the 6th, there was a concert (instrumental only), and on the 7th, the Attitudes were displayed.

  Emma showed signs of friendship at first sight. “Which I always think more extraordinary than love of the same kind,” said Mrs. St. George. “She does not gain upon me [few people ever did; Mrs. St. George was ever in the van]. I find her bold, daring, vain even to folly, and stamped with the manners of her first situation. She shows a great avidity for presents, and has actually obtained some at Dresden by the common artifice of admiring and longing.”

  And, with some irritation, Mrs. St. George paused to dip her pen in a plain glass cube which must serve until the large allegorical work depicting Mors and Thanatos bearing Eurydice back to the Cave of Night (the inkwell), which had stood there until recently, had been replaced.

  The Attitudes had been admirable, however. “Several Indian shawls, a chair, some antique vases, a wreath of roses, a tambourine and a few children are her whole apparatus. Each representation lasts about ten minutes. She represented in succession the best statues and paintings extant. The chief of her imitations are from the antique, but her waist is absolutely between her shoulders. It is remarkable that, though coarse and ungraceful in common life, she becomes highly graceful and even beautiful during this performance. But she acts her songs, and she is frequently out of tune.”

  It was vexing. There was actually something the woman did well.

  On the 8th, there was an argument.

  “I am sorry,” said Mr. Elliot. “The Electress will not receive Lady Hamilton because of her former dissolute life, her … ah, origins … so to speak. That is why there was no Court Sunday. And I understand there will be no Court while she stays.”

  Nelson, who since the news of the child had begun to regard Emma as his true wife, was stung to the quick. “Sir, if there is any difficulty of that sort, Lady Hamilton will knock the Elector down, and damn me, I’ll knock him down, too.”

  “Lord Nelson, you forget yourself. I should add that the Elector is a rather large man.”

  “Lady Hamilton is a rather great woman.”

  “The difficulty,” said Mr. Elliot despairingly, “is his wife.”

  “A pumpkin eater, eh?” roared Lord Nelson, and charged from the room.

  *

  By the 9th, the Elliots had rallied sufficiently to give a farewell dinner, a thought inspiriting in itself, though never before had they sat down to dine in a bear garden. Mrs. Elliot suggested exposing the other guests only to the Attitudes, thus to save the Hamiltons from further exposure and keep the bear garden for the bears. So this was done, except that Mrs. St. George, being a precursor of the press, could not be kept away; and unfortunately the bears got drunk.

  “I am passionately devoted to champagne,” said Emma, holding her second bottle by the neck. The velocity of her Attitudes had left her thirsty. “But where are the people? Sir William and I never seat less than sixty to dine.”

  “We thought,” said Mrs. Elliot, “that this would be more intimate, and since we are about to lose you …”

  “Lost,” said Emma, lifting her glass. “All lost. A toast to absent-minded friends.”

  “Emma,” cautioned Nelson. “Perhaps tonight we should not drink quite so much.”

  “Why not? We have a great many absent friends,” said Emma. “They went away half an hour ago, all sixty of them, home to their frugal suppers. They would be better nourished boiling a glass egg. It is like one of Greville’s imaginary meals.” And she surveyed the table with some bitterness, for in truth there was not much food to be seen. “The bottle’s empty.”

  “Indeed,” said Nelson, “it is an empty bottle.”

  “To think that she is a Chanoiness,” said Mrs. Elliot sotto voce. “It makes one doubt the probity of the Cloth. Though it was Lord Nelson, so I am told, who prevailed upon the Tsar to make her one.”

  “Tsar Paul,” said Mrs. St. George, “though a very religious man, is not always in his right mind.”

  Emma, having put down her bottle, was enacting Nina, with a tambourine, and doing it intolerably ill.

  “Mrs. Siddons need not worry,” said Mrs. St. George.

  “Mrs. Siddons be damned!” shouted Nelson, swept up into the meaning of the piece, though meaning it had none.

  It was quite probable; she was a Catholic, so rumor had it.

  “She will captivate the Prince of Wales,” said Mrs. St. George, following this line of thought to its inevitable terminus, “whose mind is as vulgar as her own, and play a great part in England.”

  “I do not see,” said Mrs. Elliot, “how the part she is now playing could possibly be enhanced.”

  Mr. Elliot was watching Nelson. “What is a pumpkin?” he asked.

  “An American vegetable,” said Mrs. St. George, who knew everything, “but the seeds are edible. It looks rather like a hassock, and is orange. There are some in the Botanical Garden here.”

  “Ah, that explains it,” said Mr. Elliot, “but how the devil did he know?”

  “I want to be presented at Court,” said Emma, beginning to dance a tarantella.

  “I assure you it would not amuse you. The Elector gives neither dinners nor suppers,” said Mrs. Elliot.

  “What!” shouted Emma, astonished. “No guttling?” To judge by the dinner they had just eaten, it seemed a poor shaky vegetable sort of place. There was a marmoreal crash. The goddess had fallen, and sat upon the floor, let the chips fall where they may. The tambourine sailed through the silence and landed, quivering, in Mrs. Elliot’s lap.

  “Good food constitutes the whole happiness of human nature,” said Emma.
“I have slipped upon the damned Jacobinical rug.” And she giggled. “If the Queen is hoity-toity and will not receive me either, I care little about it. I had much sooner she settle half Sir William’s pension on me.”

  And, astonishingly, she began to weep for her debts to society, though not quite for the same ones as her guests would have had her do. Her concept of society differed from theirs.

  “Oh dear,” said Mrs. Elliot, and drew her feet together, one neat-shod little ankle against the other, with her hands in her lap. “Oh dear.”

  Mrs. St. George herself had far outflown the raptures of mere composition. “When I called her colossal,” she said carefully, “I strove for the exact epithet. For she is not gross. She has swollen in proportion so that the effect is that of an heroic statue towering over the terrain. It is this which produces the toppled and horrendous effect, now that she has fallen down.”

  “The exact epithet,” said Mrs. Elliot, from behind closed eyes (her fan was pierced ivory, it concealed the spectator, but not the spectacle), “eludes me.”

  “Ah better so,” said Mrs. St. George. “It is not your métier.”

  When Mrs. Elliot opened her eyes, it distinctly seemed to her that Sir William—his specific gravity shifted downward by desperation and postprandial port—was hopping around the room on his backbone, stars, ribbons, arms and legs all flying about in the air, while Emma, immense as Bona Dea, led him in that lascivious Viennese novelty, a peasant ländler.

  It could not be true, however, for when she looked again, he was lying on a sofa, quite exhausted.

  The floorboards sagged. The candles guttered. It was time to retire.

  “Oh, Horatio, Horatio,” sobbed Emma. “I am so frightened.” And turning to look over her shoulder, she said, “Sir William, pray attend me.”

  All three went down the darkened bedroom corridor, where Virtue called Oblivion to her aid.

  She could not live within her allowance, so no one wanted her. If there is not room for one, how can there be room for two?

  *

  On the 10th, they departed by barge for Hamburg, which they would reach by drifting down the Elbe. The fine arts, the attitudes, the acting, the dancing and the singing were over.

  “Where is Quasheebaw?” demanded Emma, missing her Negro maid, “I cannot possibly leave without her. She has a sentimental value. She was the first thing dear Lord Nelson ever gave me.”

  Quasheebaw was on the barge, knackering in French about a parcel forgot. Feeling the pangs of hunger, Emma yowled for an Irish stew, while Mrs. Cadogan sat on deck with a pail, to peel potatoes for it.

  To Mrs. St. George, it was exactly like that print by Hogarth, of “Actresses Dressing in a Barn.” They were on tour. They would guttle where they would.

  How do you form the second person indicative of to guttle? wondered Mrs. St. George irrationally, gave it up as a quaint provincial verb, and went back to congratulate the Elliots on their deliverance, of which she found them very sensible.

  *

  There was a brief halt at Magdeburg, a small unrewarding place, and then ten days to rest at Hamburg, where the poet Klopstock, author of an ode to lost youth, admired the Attitudes. From Hamburg, they sailed across the North, or German, Sea to Norfolk.

  Fanny had written to offer them a free bed.

  “She does not mean it,” said Emma. “No woman could.”

  “She meant to be civil, at any rate,” said Nelson, who had begun to see that, yes, there would be difficulties.

  “Have you told her yet?”

  “Told her what?”

  “Tales out of school,” said Emma sadly. She did not like the thought of them.

  The coast was looming up, if anything so flat as Norfolk can be said to loom. Sir William joined them at the rail.

  “Isn’t it exciting?” said Emma, sure it would be. The sea voyage had quite restored her, for she was always at her best in an emergency.

  “If you have lived to see it, yes,” said Sir William, who had been seasick again, and did not greatly care.

  X

  SIR WILLIAM HUDDLED into his lovat greatcoat, if anyone so tall, if slightly stooped, can be said to huddle, and stood on the balcony of the Wrestlers Arms at Yarmouth, behind Emma and Nelson. The weather was not good. At Palermo, the snow fell on oranges; here it fell on offal. Naples had left him with a distaste for balconies; he had always had a distaste for crowds. In his view, crowds come when they are bidden, as to the hustings. When they come unbidden, we may do well to feel that we have lost our grip. This enthusiasm for Nelson was no more than hysteria, and the balance of hysteria is uncertain: it is mounted on a swivel; it can turn either way. If we are to understand politics, we must regard the emotions of men as natural phenomena, like the weather. So at any rate Spinoza advises us, and we would do well to take his advice. A mob is like a natural catastrophe, a flood or a storm, the one a flood of water, the other, a brainstorm, though without a brain. Each blows over us, to do the same irrational damage, and can be predicted only after it has appeared, which is usually too late. These cheering people had a lazzaroni look. But no doubt Emma was pleased.

  *

  She was delighted. She need not have worried. They had done the right thing by traveling together, for whatever her reception might have been had they returned in a private station, Nelson was a public figure, so the return was a triumph. It was delightful to be the known inspiration of so great a man, share and share alike.

  Their reception was a parade, but where does a parade go once it has passed the reviewing stand? It breaks up in the back streets, and she had not returned to England in order to return to its back streets. Therefore the parade must continue.

  *

  In London, Fanny was perhaps at last aware of the ultimate inconveniences of a marriage of convenience, and prepared to despond. If Nelson did not write, and he did not, the newspapers did. An unintelligent woman whose attention wandered easily, she had always read between the lines by preference, but she preferred those spaces blank. They were not blank now. They caught the highlights of innuendo. They shimmered nastily.

  Nelson informed the Admiralty that his health was now reestablished and that he wished to serve immediately. It was true. Flattery had put new roses in his cheeks.

  “Oh dear,” said Lord Spencer to Lord Grenville, “it is that woman.” Captain Hardy threatened to go fetch Nelson at once.

  “It is evident,” said Lord St. Vincent, “from Lord Nelson’s letter to you, that he is doubtful of the propriety of his conduct. I have no doubt he is pledged to getting Lady Hamilton received at St. James’ and everywhere, and that he will get into much brouillerie about it.”

  He had no doubts about his conduct. He was sensible always of an inner rectitude. Therefore whatever he did, he could not be wrong, so what others said of his conduct must be. That would have to be set right. He saw no reason why Fanny should not present Emma at Court, though the devil he knew how to ask her to do so. Fanny was sometimes difficult of approach. Her graciousness was circumscribed, it embraced only the sick, and seldom other women, of whom she was habitually shy. However, Emma had the art to put a dromedary at its ease, let alone a drudge.

  It was ridiculous to take this low moral view; the freedom of cities is not presented to the criminous, and this they had received not only at Yarmouth, but at every hamlet along the way, for everyone was out to see the man who had bottled up Old Boney, and who, though he had also let him escape, would assuredly soon have him corked again, for there was no one else to do it, which was both his own opinion (based upon experience) and theirs (soundly grounded upon terror). He foresaw no difficulty.

  At Ipswich (flags, bunting, contentious yeomen, the apple-cheeked poor, the mayor, the syndics of the city, a rostral column, and dear Emma; also, Yorkshire pudding, elastic as a Rhodian sponge, soaked in bitumen gravy and surrounded by beef half raw and turnip mash half cooked; they were home; in what other country but one’s own would a badly boiled onion be con
sidered a personal attention from the host? It is not true to say the English eat only to survive; on the contrary, they survive what they eat, an altogether different thing, which builds character. Only the Prince of Wales, ulcerous and greedy, had added to his boyish vices the essentially adult peccadillo of a French chef, as Sir William pointed out), Nelson could stand the strain no more. Round Hill was not far away, and forgetting—he had sent so many and those so contradictory—his instructions, but remembering that Fanny had offered them all a bed, if not the same one, he decided with exasperation to put his head upon the block, confront the two women with each other, and get it over with.

  Besides, since he had none, he wanted to show the Hamiltons that he, too, had a home.

  But Round Hill was closed. The servants had to let them in. The rooms were bare, the ceilings too low, and everything was tricked out with that total absence of the esthetic which is what the genteel mean by taste: the furniture respectable, the wallpaper discreet, the rugs reserved, and nothing vivid anywhere except perhaps in the pantry—the vibrant colors of possets and jellies put up to be carried to the sick. The rooms were chilly. His stump hurt. The £2,000 the estate had cost would not have sufficed to furnish Sir William one room, and Norfolk has no Herculaneum, merely barrows.

  The house reeked of rain water in a stone crock, a patchouli jar of moldy rose petals, rubbed gillyflowers, lavender in sachets, the odor of benzoin against the cough, and the burnt stench of mutual misunderstanding. For Fanny was willing always to be understanding, given only she never be put to the effort of actually having to understand. In short, the world had shrunk. Round Hill was too small for him. He did not belong here.

  Sir William, who had no objection to small rooms if there was anyone in them he wished to see, was politely admirative. But Emma looked affronted that the parlor ceiling was so low (it was twelve feet), hesitated, and then made her way to the small desk in the window, the sort of useless escritoire at which a woman perches when she wishes to scramble her domestic accounts.