Complete Short Stories (21 page)

It all seemed so wrong and so out of key with tradition that I heard myself hollering madly at him: ‘Hi there, Colonel, you turned hoss-thief? That’s my beast! Where’s your own?’ And as true as I’m standing here, he hollers back: ‘It’s the Commander-in-Chief,
Doc! He’s grabbed mine and told me to shift for myself.’

Another mounted figure moved into the light of the french window, and you will excuse me for not describing him, for though I have seen Death often in the course of my professional activities, and wearing many disguises, that is not a subject on which I care to dwell in company. I’ll say no more than this: he was riding the Colonel’s white
horse.

‘Call yourself a Flack?’ I hollered again. ‘So you’re a coward after all, is
that it? Forgotten the family motto, eh? You, who never before let yourself be pushed around by the Top Brass?
Nec Flacci Mortem
indeed! My word, I’m downright ashamed of you, Randy Flack! And no Doc Halloran ever said that before to a man of your name.’

It worked. I saved the mother and I saved the boy. Then,
when I could look up again, I watched the Colonel trotting away out of sight, mounted on his own horse; and the duelling pistol smoked in his hand.

P
ETRONIUS DID HIS
best. He wasn’t a bad fellow at heart, though he had the foulest mind in Rome and drank like a camel. And he was such an expert in the art of modern living that the Emperor never dared buy a vase or a statue, or even sample an unfamiliar vintage, without his advice.

One evening Petronius dropped in to dinner at the Palace and was handed a really repulsive-looking
sauce, of which herb-benjamin and garlic seemed to be the chief ingredients. Since the waiter actually expected him to pour it over a beautifully grilled sole, Petronius made Nero blush to the roots of his hair by asking in his silkiest tones: ‘My dear Caesar, can this be
exactly
what you meant?’ Nero’s eager, anxious glances, you see, made it quite obvious that he had invented the sauce himself;
and if Petronius had been weak enough to approve, every noble table in Rome would soon have stunk with the stuff. Our hearts went out to him in gratitude.

My brother-in-law Lucan notoriously lacked Petronius’s poise, and yet was far too pleased with himself. I had always regretted my sister’s marriage: Lucan, the son of rich Spanish provincials, never ceased to be an outsider, although his uncle
Seneca, Nero’s tutor, had now risen to the rank of Consul and become the leading writer and dramatist of his day. Seneca doted on young Lucan, an infant prodigy who could talk Greek fluently at the age of four, knew the
Iliad
by heart at eight; and before he turned eleven had written an historical commentary on Xenophon’s
Anabasis
and translated Ibycus into Ovidian elegiacs.

He was now twenty-five,
two years older than Nero, who had taken him as his literary model. Lucan repaid this kindness with a wonderful speech of flattery at the
Neronia
festival. But when that same night Petronius visited our house – Lucan was staying with us at the time – on the pretext of congratulating him, I guessed that there was something else in the wind. So I dismissed the slaves, and out it came.

‘Yes, Lucan,
a most polished speech; and I am too discreet to inquire how sincerely you meant it. But… well… a rumour is about that you’re working on an important historical poem.’

‘Correct, friend Petronius,’ Lucan answered complacently.

‘For the love of Bacchus, you aren’t after all writing your
Conquests of Alexander
, are you?’

‘No, I scrapped that, except for a few fine passages.’

‘Wise man. You might
have inspired our Imperial patron to emulate the Macedonian by marching into Parthia. Despite his innate military genius, and so on, and so forth, I cannot be sure that the army would have proved quite equal to the task. Those Parthian archers, you know…’ He let his voice trail off.

‘No, since you ask, the subject is the Civil Wars.’

Petronius threw up his hands. ‘That’s what I heard, and it
alarmed me more than I can say, my dear boy! It’s a desperately tricky subject, even after a hundred years. At least two-thirds of the surviving aristocratic families fought on the losing side. You may please the Emperor – I repeat
may
and underline it – but you’ll be sure to tread on a multitude of corns. How long is the poem?’

‘An epic in twelve books. Nine are already written…’

‘An
epic,
my very good sir?’

‘An epic.’

‘But epics are ridiculously out of fashion!’

‘Mine won’t be. I make my warriors use modem weapons; I rule out any absurd personal intervention of the gods; and I enliven the narrative with gruesome anecdotes, breath-taking metaphors, and every rhetorical trope in the bag. Like me to read a few lines?’

‘If you insist.’

While Lucan is away fetching the scroll,
Petronius plucks me by the sleeve. ‘Argentarius, you must stop this nonsense somehow – anyhow! The Emperor has just coyly asked me: “What about those
Battle of Actium
verses I showed you the other night? Were you too drunk to take them in?” “No, Caesar,” I assured him, “your remarkable hexameters sobered me up in a flash.” “So you agree that I’m a better poet than Lucan?” To which I replied: “Heavens
above, there’s no comparison!” He must have taken this all right, because his next remark was: “Good, because those lines form part of my great modern epic.”’

Re-enter Lucan. Petronius breaks off the sentence dramatically and reaches for the scroll. Lucan watches him read. After an uncomfortable quarter of an hour Petronius lays the scroll down and pronounces: ‘This will take a lot of polishing,
Lucan. I don’t say it’s not good, but it must be far, far better before it can go to the copyists. Put it away in a drawer for another few years. In my opinion (which you cannot afford to despise) the modern epic is a form that only retired statesmen or young Emperors should attempt.’

Lucan turns white. ‘What do you mean?’ he asks.

‘I have nothing to add to my statement,’ replies Petronius,
and waves his hand in farewell. Petronius was so drunk, by the way, that he almost
seemed sober.

Lucan tried to cut Petronius in the Sacred Way early next morning; but found himself forcibly steered into the back-room of a wine shop. ‘Listen, imbecile,’ Petronius said, ‘nobody denies that you’re the greatest poet in the world,
with one exception;
but that exception has got wind of your project,
and he’ll be very cross indeed if you presume to compete with him. For the love of Vulcan, light the furnace with that damned papyrus! Write a rhymed cookery-book instead – I’ll be delighted to help you – or some more of your amatory epigrams about negresses with lascivious limbs and hair like the fleece of Zeus’s black Laphystian ram; or what about a Pindaresque eulogy of the Emperor’s skill as
a charioteer? Anything in the world – but
not
an epic about the Civil Wars!’

‘Nobody has a right to curb my Pegasus.’

‘Those were Bellerophon’s famous last words,’ Petronius reminded him. ‘The Thunderer then sent a gadfly which stung Pegasus under the tail, and Bellerophon fell a long way, and very hard.’

Lucan flared up. ‘Who are you to talk about caution? You satirize Nero as Trimalchio in
your satiric novel, don’t you? Nobody could mistake the portrait: his flat jokes, his rambling nonsensical talk, his grossly vulgar taste, his heart-breaking self-pity. Oh, that squint-eyed, lecherous, illiterate, muddle-pated, megalomaniac, morbid, top-heavy mountain of flesh!’

Petronius rose. ‘Really, Spaniard, I think this must be good-bye! There are certain things that cannot be decently
said in
any
company.’

‘But which I have nevertheless said, and will say again!’

It proved to be their last meeting. A month later Lucan invited a few friends to a private banquet where, after dessert, he declaimed the first two or three hundred lines of his epic. It started by describing the Civil Wars as the greatest disgrace Rome ever suffered, but none the less amply worth while, since they
guaranteed Nero’s eventual succession. Then it promised Nero that on his demise he’d go straight up to the stars, like the divine Augustus, and become even more of a god than he already was – with the choice, though, of deciding whether to become Jove and wield the Olympian sceptre, or Apollo and try out the celestial Sun-chariot.

This was all very well so far; but then came the pay-off. You
must understand that Petronius had got away with the Trimalchio satire because he was an artist: careful not to pick on any actual blunder or vulgarity of Nero’s that had gone the rounds, but burlesquing the sort of behaviour which (under our breaths of course) we called a Neronianism. Nero would never have recognized the
nouveau-riche
Trimalchio as himself; and, obviously, nobody would have dared
enlighten him. But Lucan wasn’t an artist. He soon let his mock-heroic eulogy degenerate into ham-handed caricature: he begged Nero when deified not to deprive Rome of his full radiance by planting himself in the Arctic regions of
Heaven or in the tropical South, whence his fortunate beams would reach us only
squintingly
; and he was, please, not to lean too
heavily
on any particular part of the
aether for fear his
divine weight
would tilt the heavenly axis off centre and throw the whole universe out of gear. And the idiot emphasized each point with a ghastly grimace – which caused such general embarrassment that the banquet broke up in confusion.

Nero, as it happened, heard only a vague rumour about the affair, but enough to make him ask Petronius whether Lucan had been warned not to
trespass on the Imperial preserve. Petronius answered without hesitation: ‘Yes, Caesar. I explained that it would be ridiculous for him to compete with his master in literature.’ So Nero sent a couple of Guards officers to Lucan’s house with the curt message: ‘You will write no more poetry until further notice!’

The sequel is well known. Lucan persuaded a few other hot-heads to join his plot
for assassinating the Emperor in the name of artistic freedom. It miscarried. His friends were arrested; and Lucan had his veins opened by a surgeon in the usual warm bath, where he declaimed a tragic fragment from his
Conquests of Alexander
: about a Macedonian soldier dying for loss of blood.

Lucan’s father naturally had to follow his dreary example, and so did old Seneca. (Rather hard on my
poor sister, that!) Moreover Lucan had left a rude letter behind for the Emperor, if rude be a strong enough word, incidentally calling Petronius a coward for pulling his punches in the Trimalchio portrait. So Petronius was in for it too!

But I had run straight from the banquet down to Ostia – a good twelve miles – with all the gold I could cram into a satchel, and taken ship to Ephesus; where
I dyed my hair, changed my name, and lay low for three or four years until Vespasian had been securely invested with the purple. Thank goodness I was stupid at school, and never felt any literary ambitions whatsoever! But nobody in Rome could touch me as a long-distance man…

Y
ES, YES AND
yes! Don’t get me wrong, for goodness’ sake. I am heart and soul with you. I agree that Man is wickedly defrauding the Earth-Mother of her ancient dues by not putting back into the soil as much nourishment as he takes out. And that modern plumbing is, if you like, a running sore in the body politic. And that municipal incinerators are genocidal rather than germicidal…
And that cremation should be made a capital crime. And that dust bowls created by the greedy plough…… Yes, yes and yes again.
But
!

Elsie and Roland Hedge – she a book-illustrator, he an architect with suspect lungs – had been warned against Dr Eugen Steinpilz. ‘He’ll bring you no luck,’ I told them. ‘My little finger says so decisively.’

‘You too?’ asked Elsie indignantly. (This was at Brixham,
South Devon, in March 1940.) ‘I suppose you think that because of his foreign accent and his beard he must be a spy?’

‘No,’ I said coldly, ‘that point hadn’t occurred to me. But I won’t contradict you.’

The very next day Elsie deliberately picked a friendship – I don’t like the phrase, but that’s what she did – with the Doctor, an Alsatian with an American passport, who described himself as a
Naturphilosoph;
and both she and Roland were soon immersed in Steinpilzerei up to the nostrils. It began when he invited them to lunch and gave them cold meat and two rival sets of vegetable dishes – potatoes (baked), carrots (creamed), bought from the local fruiterer; and potatoes (baked) and carrots (creamed), grown on compost in his own garden.

The superiority of the latter over the former
in appearance, size and especially flavour came as an eye-opener to Elsie and Roland. Yes, and yes, I know just how they felt. Why shouldn’t I? When I visit the market here in Palma, I always refuse La Torre potatoes, because they are raised for the early English market and therefore reek of imported chemical fertilizer. Instead I buy Son Sardina potatoes, which taste as good as the ones we used to
get in England fifty years ago. The reason is that the Son Sardina farmers manure their fields with Palma kitchen-refuse, still available
by the cartload – this being too backward a city to afford effective modern methods of destroying it.

Thus Dr Steinpilz converted the childless and devoted couple to the Steinpilz method of composting. It did not, as a matter of fact, vary greatly from the
methods you read about in the
Gardening Notes
of your favourite national newspaper, except that it was far more violent. Dr Steinpilz had invented a formula for producing extremely fierce bacteria, capable (Roland claimed) of breaking down an old boot or the family Bible or a torn woollen vest into beautiful black humus almost as you watched. The formula could not be bought, however, and might
be communicated under oath of secrecy only to members of the Eugen Steinpilz Fellowship – which I refused to join. I won’t pretend therefore to know the formula myself, but one night I overheard Elsie and Roland arguing in their garden as to whether the planetary influences were favourable; and they also mentioned a ram’s horn in which, it seems, a complicated mixture of triturated animal and vegetable
products – technically called ‘the Mother’ – was to be cooked up. I gather also that a bull’s foot and a goat’s pancreas were part of the works, because Mr Pook the butcher afterwards told me that he had been puzzled by Roland’s request for these unusual cuts. Milkwort and pennyroyal and bee-orchid and vetch certainly figured among the Mother’s herbal ingredients; I recognized these one day
in a gardening basket Elsie had left at the post office.