Separate & Sulky
Tuesday, May 06, 2014
It is Tuesday, 13 January, 1829 and Lieutenant Colonel Matthew Hervey of the 6th Light Dragoons has returned to London from a campaign in South Africa with his friend Edward Fairbrother. They are in their “club” the United Services Club. It took me a while, enjoying author Allan Mallinson’s odd style (perhaps replicating the writing of the time) that it was about my old friend (I have read Mallinson’s 10 previous installments in the career of Mathew Hervey) having a bath and experiencing new-fangled running water with faucets!
Brigadier Allan Mallinson is a former infantry and cavalry officer, with thirty-five years’ service in the British Army. All the history and the traditions of the British Army during the era of Napoleon (Mallinson’s first Matthew Hervey novel begins with Waterloo in The Close Run Thing) somehow evoke the land side of things most nicely with the counterpart of the same at sea by Patrick O’Brian. Unfortunately with Patrick O’Brian dead I will not be able to read more of his Captain Aubrey/Dr. Maturin nautical novels set in the Napoleonic Wars. Fortunately Allan Mallinson seems to be happily at it providing the many that must be fans with new situations in which Matthew Hervey quotes in Latin, Greek and of writers of his age. Below is the beginning of Allan Mallinson's 11th novel On His Majesty's Service.
Hervey had rarely seen water come with such
force. It was that of the falls in Canada,
near Fort York (if an infinitesimal fraction of
the volume), which a decade past he had observed for himself in their icy
midwinter trickle. And the enveloping steam was like the mist that had shrouded
him in safety on the heights of Esi-Klebeni as the warriors who had
assassinated the Zulu king pursued him with like intent.
‘Remarkable,’ he said, shaking his head.’
His friend Edward Fairbrother took the
cheroot from his mouth and frowned at its dampened glow. ‘I confess I am
astonished that you wonder at such a thing after all you have seen,’ he
replied, blowing the end of the remaining three inches of the best Indian leaf.
‘We have come here twice by steamship, have we not? And I fancy the Romans
bathed with scarcely less luxury hereabout in centuries past.’
Fairbrother’s practiced insouciance almost
invariably amused. Indeed Hervey thought of his friend increasingly in terms of
indispensability – not as jester but (since it was he that had spoken of the
ancients) more as the crouching cautioner in the triumphant procession: Respica
te, hominem te memento – ‘Look behind thee, and remember thou art but a man.’
Not that Hervey saw himself as the man
honoured in triumph, for although he had saved what remained of his troop in
the desperate fight in the kraal, he had not been able to save the Zulu king’s
favourite, Pampata (his ward in their flight thither); but he returned now to
London with commendations for resource and bravery, and in the prospect of
command at last of his regiment. This latter, whatever his regrets – above all
the slaughter of men under his authority – was ample cause for satisfaction.
But first, before any triumphs, or anything remotely resembling it – before,
that awaited him – he was determined to bathe.
‘And by this ’andle ’ere, sir, the water is
regulated,’ said the valet, first slowing and then stopping altogether the
surge. ‘And then you can ’ave it as ’ot or as cold as you will by this other
’andle ’ere, sir which regulates the cold water in like manner.’
On His Majesty's Service - Allan Mallinson
Mallinson has a way of inserting relevant
information, little at a time. As if this information were the first chip in a
tall round box of Pringles.
On His Majesty's Service - Allan Mallinson
Fairbrother had already declared his intention to do nothing but sit in the shade of the seraglio’s courtyard, uncomprehending all the language spoken about him and therefore able with perfect concentration to finish reading – strange as it seemed to Hervey – Guy Mannering, which had lodged several days unopened in his small pack, with a mark at the beginning of the second part.
‘What moved you to choose it?’ asked Hervey
when they were alone, more disposed to humour him of late.
‘It was in the bundle I bought as a single
lot at your bookseller’s. I wanted the Hazlitt, principally, and the others
looked engaging.’
At this point I must clarify that I had no
idea of who was Guy Mannering nor the importance of Hazlitt. I let the info
pass me by.
‘I confess I’ve not read it.’
‘You ought to. Mannering’s a colonel.’
‘I imagine it is Scotch?’
‘There, and Holland,
and India.’
Hervey was taking his ease over yet more
coffee. ‘You know, I read Waverly, for he’d caught the rebellion very well,
said those who knew about it, but I confess I was not greatly drawn to Scotland.
I can’t think but that its wildness is mean, or melancholy – though I wouldn’t
mind seeing Culloden.’
And of course this ignoramus still did not
get the drift. By the almost end of On His Majesty’s Service I finally did get
it.
He took a few more thoughtful paces, and
closed the book. ‘And how was your novel? Did you finish it?’
‘I did, indeed. And it’s given me an idea.
Let me read something to you.’ Fairbrother opened the Scott [yes!] at the last
page. ‘Guy Mannering’s returned from India a colonel and he’s resolved
to give up his house and build anew: “See here’s the plan of my bungalow, with
the all convenience for being separate and sulky when I please.’
‘It does not have the ring of great
literature, so I imagine you have another purpose for reading it.’
Fairbrother smiled, grateful that his
design was half explained. ‘Well I am minded to give up my house at the Cape
and build the same, a bungalow, close to your quarters at Hounslow – close
enough to stroll by of an evening, yet far enough to be “separate and sulky”
when I please. What say you?’
And of course after looking it all up I
found out that Sir Walter Scott (1771 – 1832) was a lawyer/poet during an age
when writing a novel was simply not done by a man of good upbringing. He did
not want his father to know about his penchant for wanting to write a novel. So
Scott published his first, Waverly in 1814 it was done so anonymously. When his
other novels became (runaway in the parlance of our era) successes they were
published as “by the author of Waverly” so these subsequent novels were called
Waverly novels. It makes all the sense that Mallinson has his protagonists read
books of their time and to quote in the various languages learned at school.
There is a poignant attraction to become the friend of a protagonist you read about in a progression as is the case of Mathew Hervey's rise in the British Army. This was the attraction of that series by Alexandre Dumas, his Musketeer series. It was best put by Robert Louis Stevenson
who read the Vicomte de Bragellone at
least five times. Of his second reading he wrote, “I would sit down with the
Vicomte for a long, silent, solitary lamp-light evening by the fire. And yet I
know not why I call it silent, when it was enlivened with such clatter of
horse-shoes, and such a rattle of musketry, and such a stir of talk; or why I
call these evenings silent in which I gained so many friends. I would rise from
my book and pull the blind aside, and see the snow and the glittering hollies
checker a Scotch garden, and the winter moonlight brighten the white hills.
Thence I would turn again to the crowded and sunny field of life in which is
was so easy to forget myself, my cares and my surroundings: a place as busy as
a city, bright as a theatre, thronged with memorable faces, and sounding with
delightful speech. I carried the thread of that epic into my slumbers, I woke
with it unbroken, I rejoiced to lunge into the book again at breakfast, it was
with a pang that I must lay it down and turn to my own labours; for no part of
the world has ever seemed to me so charming as these pages, and not even my
friends are quite as real, perhaps quite so dear, as d’Artagnan.”
I feel the same about Matthew Paulinus Hervey.
Romance in the Napoleonic Wars
I feel the same about Matthew Paulinus Hervey.
Romance in the Napoleonic Wars
