by Leo Perutz
Salignac removed his cloak, bowed to the colonel and Monjita, and regretted that the importance of his guard duties had been such as to delay him. Then he sat down at table, and I saw for the first time that his tunic was adorned with the cross of the Légion d'Honneur.
"You won your cross at Eylau, I believe?" said the colonel. He signed to Monjita to serve him, and we all marvelled at her slender hands and graceful movements.
"Yes, at Eylau the Emperor himself pinned it to my chest," the captain replied, and the eyes beneath his bushy eyebrows shone. "I had returned from delivering a dispatch to find the Emperor at breakfast, hurriedly drinking his chocolate. 'Grognard,' he said to me, 'bravely ridden, my old grognard. How fares your horse?' I may be an old soldier, Colonel, but I swear my eyes grew moist at the thought that the Emperor could still find time, in the hurly-burly of battle, to inquire after my horse."
"All I fail to understand about your story," said Brockendorf, wiping his mouth, "is that the Emperor should have taken chocolate with his breakfast. Chocolate tastes of syrup and is sticky as pitch. It also leaves grounds between the teeth."
"I've spent two years in the field and taken part in seventeen battles and engagements, among them the assault on the Lines of Torres Vedras," Günther said resentfully, "but I've yet to be awarded the Légion d'Honneur because I wasn't serving in the Guards."
"Lieutenant Günther," Salignac replied with a frown, "you have been at war for two years and seen action seventeen times. Can you guess how many battlefields I have trodden — battlefields unknown to you even by name? Can you guess how many years before your birth I first wielded this sabre?"
"You heard that?" the alcalde whispered to the priest, and he drew the sign of the cross on his forehead with trembling fingers.
"Lord have mercy on the luckless man," said the priest, casting his eyes up to heaven.
"What foolishness to drink chocolate!" Brockendorf persisted. "A good beer soup, a brace of sausages well stewed in gravy, and a tankard of ale to go with them — that's my favourite breakfast."
"Have you often seen the Emperor at close quarters, Salignac?" asked the colonel.
"I have seen him at work in a hundred guises. I have seen him dictating letters to his secretaries while pacing his room. I have seen him studying maps and engaged in geographical computations. I have seen him dismount from his charger and lay a gun with his own hands. I have seen him listening to petitioners with knitted brow and galloping across the battlefield, head bowed and grim-visaged, but I was never so filled with a sense of his greatness as when I once entered his tent and saw him lying exhausted on his bearskin, stirring restlessly in his sleep as he dreamed with twitching lips of battles to come. He seemed to me then to resemble none of the generals or conquerors of our own day. I was reminded by his awesome appearance of that murderous old monarch —"
"Herod!" exclaimed the vicar. "Herod!" groaned the alcalde, and they both stared at Captain de Salignac with horror written on their distracted faces.
"Herod, yes," said Salignac, "or Caligula." And he poured himself some wine.
"The Emperor," Donop said slowly and thoughtfully, "is leading us along a road that traverses vales of misery and rivers of blood, but its destination is liberty and human happiness. We must follow him for want of any other road to take. Having been born into an ill-starred age and denied peace on earth, we can only hope for peace in heaven."
"There you go again, Donop," said Brockendorf, who was peeling himself an apple. "That's as pretty a speech as any uttered by a mendicant nun after Confession."
"What do I care for peace?" Salignac exclaimed with sudden vehemence. "War has been my lifelong element. Heaven and its perpetual peace are not for me."
"I know it," wailed the alcalde.
"We know it," groaned the vicar. "Deus in adjutorium meum intende!" he added in a low voice, folding his hands and composing his tremulous lips.
The colonel had meanwhile declared the meal at an end, so we all rose to our feet. Salignac threw on his cloak and strode downstairs with a jingling of spurs. The priest and the alcalde gazed fearfully after him until he was lost to view. Then the former tugged at my sleeve and drew me aside.
"That officer who took his leave a moment ago," he said, "— ask him if he was ever in La Bisbal before."
"In La Bisbal?" I replied. "When would that have been?"
"Fifty years ago in my grandfather's time, when the great plague was raging," the alcalde interposed, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
I burst out laughing at this nonsense, at a loss to know how to answer. The alcalde raised his arms in entreaty and the priest, with a terrified gesture, urged me to be silent.
Donop, who was conversing with Günther, never took his eyes off Monjita.
"Never have I seen such a resemblance. Her figure, her hair, those movements ..."
"The resemblance will not be perfect," Günther interrupted him in his arrogant way, "until I've taught her to whisper 'Till tonight, my dearest' when she bids me adieu."
"Günther!" the colonel called suddenly from the other end of the room.
"Here, sir," Günther called back, going over to him. "What may I do for you?"
I saw the two of them exchange a few words. A moment later Günther returned, his lips set in a stubborn line and his face as white as the wall.
"I am to hand over my command to you," he hissed at me, "and ride this very day to Terra Molina with letters from the colonel to General d'Hilliers. So that is Eglofstein's ace of trumps!"
"You may be sure the letters are extremely urgent," I said, glad that the colonel's choice had not fallen on me. "I'll lend you my Polish galloper. You'll be back within five days."
"And tomorrow you'll call on Monjita in my place, eh? You're in league with Eglofstein, just as I suspected. You and Eglofstein: rancid butter on mouldy bread!"
I did not answer, but Brockendorf stepped in.
"I have your measure, Günther," he sneered. "You're afraid - you can already hear musket balls whistling past your ears."
"Afraid? I would charge a battery of howitzers head-on, and you know it."
"The colonel respects your fine horsemanship," said Donop.
"Enough of your parrot's chatter!" Günther burst out. "Do you imagine I didn't see Eglofstein at table with the colonel, whispering in that furtive way? He wants me a hundred miles from here on Monjita's account, and I won't forget it — be damned if I will! Eglofstein is for ever spying. If two people stand talking together, he sidles up behind them like a customs inspector."
"What else can you do?" said Donop. "You have your orders from the colonel, and no amount of cursing and swearing will change them."
"Well, I won't go, not in a month of Sundays! A thunderbolt can bury me ten thousand fathoms deep before I quit the field in favour of the rest of you!"
I nudged him in the ribs, for Monjita, accompanied at the pianoforte by Eglofstein, had just begun to sing.
The very first notes transfixed me with melancholy, for I had often heard Françoise-Marie sing the same aria. Like Monjita, she would stand there with her dainty head bowed and a wealth of red-gold hair cascading over her rounded, girlish shoulders, surreptitiously smiling across at me, and I would thrill to the blissful recollection that it was only yesterday I held that trembling body in my exultant hands, and only yesterday that I had rapturously smothered that melodious mouth with kisses. And a sudden thought entered my head and filled it to the exclusion of all else. No, I told myself, it cannot be otherwise: when I take my leave of Monjita, bending low over her hand, she will secretly whisper to me, as Françoise-Marie was wont to do, "Till tonight, beloved!"
All at once Monjita broke off in the middle of a phrase and gave the colonel an imploring glance. He went over to her and tenderly stroked her russet hair.
"This is the first time she has sung it for company," he told us, "and only the beginning has lodged in that little head of hers."
"Monjita has
a fine voice," the priest said, venturing out of his corner. "She has sung in our church on feast days, together with a licentiate whom the Señor Marques de Bolibar employed for a while in his library. He now holds a good curate's post in Madrid."
"That name again!" exclaimed the colonel. "One hears no other in your town all day long. Where is this Marquis of Bolibar? Where is he skulking? Why cannot I see him face to face? I have good reason to seek his acquaintance."
It would have been wiser to remain silent, but my secret was giving me no peace.
"Colonel," I said, "the Marquis of Bolibar is dead."
Eglofstein frowned and got up from the pianoforte.
"Jochberg," he said in an irritable tone, "do you truly mean to weary us yet again with your foolish fairy-tale?"
"It is as I say: on Christmas Eve, when I was commanding the gate guard, I had the Marquis of Bolibar shot by my men."
Eglofstein shrugged. "A figment of his overheated imagination," he said, turning to the colonel. "The Marquis of Bolibar is alive and will, I fear, give us a deal of trouble yet."
"Well," said the colonel, "be he alive or dead, we know his plans and have taken all steps necessary to prevent them from being put into effect."
"And I tell you, and I stand by what I say," I cried, stung by Eglofstein's mocking and supercilious manner, "that the man is dead and buried. We're battling with a ghost, a bugaboo, a chimera."
Just then the door burst open and Salignac entered, his face even paler than the bandage around his head. He stood there sabre in hand, all breathless from running up the stairs, and his eyes sought the colonel's.
"Colonel," he panted, "was the signal given on your orders?"
"The signal?" exclaimed the colonel. "What do you mean, Salignac? I gave no order."
"Clouds of smoke are rising above this house! There's straw smouldering on the roof!"
Eglofstein squared his shoulders, white to the lips.
"This is his doing. We have the man at last."
"What man?" I exclaimed.
"The Marquis of Bolibar," he replied, leaden-tongued.
"The Marquis of Bolibar?" Salignac cried in an extremity of agitation. "Then he must be in the house. No one has left by the door!"
He rushed out, and we heard a slamming of doors and a thunder of footsteps as his dragoons charged wildly through the house, searching every room, passage and stairway.
Günther's voice broke the spell. "Colonel," he said, "is it not time you gave me those letters for General d'Hilliers?" He was lolling against the wall with his hands behind his back, smiling, and it occurred to me that I had not seen him in the room for some minutes.
"Too late," the colonel said darkly. "Another hour, and the town will be encircled by guerrillas. You would never get through their lines. The convoy is lost."
"So the child is still-born," drawled Günther, and his eyes shone with the malign exultation of a Judas Iscariot. "Many thanks for the offer of your Polish horse, Jochberg. I shall not be needing it now."
"And the worst of it is," Eglofstein said gloomily, "we have no more than ten rounds per man. Do you still maintain that the Marquis of Bolibar is dead, Jochberg?"
I alone heard the muttered response that came from where Günther was standing: "Trounced!"
WITH SAUL TO ENDOR
On Tuesday morning I left the town to take up my duties in the Sanroque outwork, for we had begun to strengthen the ramparts and entrenchments, and two semicircular outworks with counterscarps and wide ditches were already half completed. The lines were jointly manned that day by Brockendorf's company and a half-battalion of the Prince of Hesse's Own, which had been sent to reinforce us not long before. My dragoons, whose turn it was to do duty in the town itself, were patrolling the streets.
While passing the presbytery I came upon Thiele, my corporal, seated on the ground with a battered camp kettle between his knees, whistling "Our Cousin Mathies", a marching song, as he hammered out the dents with a mallet.
"Lieutenant," he hailed me from across the street, "hell has sprung a leak since yesterday, and demons by the bushel are roaming abroad."
It was the guerrillas of whom he spoke. Fearing to lose my way unaided in the maze of entrenchments that lay between the walls and the Sanroque outwork, I bade him accompany me. He shouldered his mallet and fell into step beside me, swinging the camp kettle.
The appearance of the town had altogether changed overnight. Despite the fine winter weather, the marketplace was deserted and the streets were devoid of the many water-carriers, fish- and vegetable-sellers, muleteers and beggars who ordinarily went about their clamorous business at this hour. Apart from a few old crones who flitted across the street from doorway to doorway, hurriedly and with anxious faces, the townsfolk were hidden away indoors.
Yet there was life and noise enough. Dispatch riders galloped unceasingly to and fro between the outworks and the colonel's headquarters, rumbling powder waggons overtook us, and mules laden with provisions and entrenching materials filed past. The Hessians' surgeon had installed himself in a hollow beyond the town gate and was leaning against an ambulance waggon, smoking his pipe and awaiting the first of the wounded.
"The night pickets have already had a brush with the enemy," Thiele told me as we went our way. "They sent back three prisoners with their report. All three looked as if they were newly landed from Noah's Ark. How comes it that all these guerrillas have the faces of monkeys, mules or goats?"
After thinking awhile, he himself supplied an explanation for this singular phenomenon.
"Most likely," he said, "it comes of their partiality for eating corn cobs and acorn mash, victuals such as we feed to our beasts at home. They're quiet now, but an hour ago you could have heard them wailing piteously. They stood in a circle round their officers and chanted their morning prayer. It sounded like a hymn to Behemoth, the demonic patron of blasphemy and cattle fodder."
He spat contemptuously on the ground. By now we had reached the Mon Cœur lunette, which was enclosed by a palisade. The Hessian grenadiers lay stretched out in the trench on their kitbags and knapsacks. The officers on duty, Captain Count Schenk zu Castel-Borckenstein and Lieutenant von Dubitsch, two figures in pale blue tunics with tiger-skin revers, were conversing at the mouth of the lunette. The hauteur with which they returned my formal salute stemmed from the longstanding enmity between their regiment and ours, its origin being a parade in Valladolid at which the Emperor had omitted to bestow so much as a glance on the Prince of Hesse's Own.
We traversed the redoubt and, by way of the Estrella curtain, reached the first outwork, where I sent Corporal Thiele back. I found Brockendorf's men hard at it, for this part of the fortifications was barely half finished. Some of the men were revetting the walls with gabions and fascines, others improving the embrasures in the parapet, and others at work on the penthouse roof. Donop, spade in hand, was supervising the laying of a mine to be set off in the event that the colonel should order this part of the defences to be demolished. His breakfast of bread and a bottle of wine lay beside him on the ground, together with a treatise by Polybius on the art of warfare in the ancient world.
"Jochberg," he called, resting his spade against the wall, "you can go home again. Günther has taken over your duties today."
"Günther on duty in my place?" I said, surprised. "That's the first I've heard of it."
"He volunteered," said Donop. "What's more, you owe your day of leisure to Monjita."
Laughingly and a trifle maliciously, he recounted the lamentable outcome of Günther's visit to Monjita. It seemed that he had called on our colonel's lovely mistress punctually after Mass the previous day. He apologized for bringing her no flowers. Had it not been winter, he said, he would have presented her with a bouquet made up of roses for ardent love, of blue forget-me-nots for true remembrance, of delphiniums, the flowers of St George, and of tulips and violets, whose romantic significance I forget.
He had then declared his love and assured her
how heartfelt it was, and Monjita sent for iced water and chocolate and heard him out with a smile, for Günther's polished phrases seemed to please her. She asked him if he had ever been to Madrid and if what her father said was true, namely, that all the people one saw in that city's streets were either English cobblers or French barbers.
Rather than pursue the subject of Madrid, Günther began to speak of the colonel, whose dearest wish, he said, was to father a son and heir. If he got one, he would assuredly make Monjita his wife.
Monjita's eyes lit up at these words. She proceeded to question Günther about the colonel's late wife and asked if he had known her. He must tell her all about the dead woman, she insisted, for she wished to become like her in every respect but had much to learn.
"One learns so little from our Spanish books," she said with a sigh. "When a king was born and when he was baptized, which princess he married and who arranged the match - things of that sort, nothing more ..."
Günther reverted to the colonel's desire for a son. Then, his conversation with Monjita having already taken so intimate a turn, he went a step further. If only she would avail herself of his services, he said, he himself could readily assist her in this matter.
Monjita looked puzzled, for his meaning had at first escaped her, so Günther repeated his proposal in plain language.
At this she rose without a word, turned her back on him, and went to the window. Günther, who assumed her to be thinking the matter over, waited patiently for a while. At length, however, he rose and, hoping to further his cause, kissed the nape of her neck.
She swung round and glared at him with flashing eyes. Then she swept past him and out of the door.
Günther, all the more piqued and disappointed for having felt so confident of success, lingered alone in the room for an hour or thereabouts. At last, when the hour was up, Monjita reappeared.
"What, still here?" she said, her anger unabated.
"I was waiting for you."
"I have no wish to see you any more. Go!"
