Allan Mallinson - A Call to Arms

Shelley greeted him with an eager smile and an extravagant handshake. ‘I was afeard you would come very precisely on your hour as a military man and find me ill-prepared, for I could not lay hands on my notebook. But now I have it and we may leave at once. What do you intend with those ribbons?’

Hervey explained their provenance. ‘I thought I might take them for my sister. She was complaining of a want of colour in her wardrobe.’

‘How Italians do love ribbons!’ declared Shelley, taking a broad yellow and white one and draping it across his chest to resemble some papal order. ‘More so even than the French. I heard tell that Napoleon was a little too Italian in his love of them.’

‘Bonaparte?’ The imperial name was still unutterable to Hervey. ‘Perhaps; I could not safely say.’

‘I should not imagine you to be so easily seduced.’

Hervey frowned.

‘You were very dull last night. Not a word of Waterloo did you utter within my hearing. Shall you be dull again today?’

Hervey could not find it in him to bridle against the remark. ‘It is not my intention.’

‘Good. Then let us be away.’

‘Perhaps I may leave some of these for your wife?’ said Hervey, taking another handful of ribbons from a pocket.

Shelley seemed dismissive. ‘You may, but it will be some days before she is in humour to be gay.’

Hervey laid them on a table, without remark. He had not been so self-absorbed at the signora’s not to have heard the speculation there. The Shelleys had had a turbulent time in Naples, it seemed, and the precise status of their travelling companion was evidently of some moment. ‘Where do we go?’

‘To the Baths of Caracalla. I’ll warrant you never saw such a place in your life.’

The wager just permitted for Hervey to have seen them already, but in truth he had not yet explored them, seeing them only distantly and very indistinctly from the Palatine. It had been his intention to engage a guide and go there with Elizabeth in a day or so. He would not spoil Shelley’s enthusiasm in the sharing of a secret, however, and he therefore made no reply.

Indeed, Hervey said little throughout their approach march, but it was not dullness that made him silent, only that the poet was a most zealous guide, and there was little to say beyond an appreciative word here or an interrogatory one there. They tramped the Forum, skirted the Colosseum, briefly traced the line of the ruined walls of Romulus, explored the Circus Maximus for a while, where Shelley was keen to hear Hervey’s opinion of the turning circles and speeds of the chariots that had once raced there, and then followed the stream called Acqua Crabra for half a mile until they reached the object of their excursion. They came on it curiously abruptly, though the baths were as massive as any structure in the city.

‘ Now , Hervey, what think you? Tell me your thoughts ere I tell you mine!’

Hervey’s immediate thoughts were of India. The jungled ruins of the great Terme of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus — known as Caracalla, for he favoured that Gaulish mantle above the Roman toga — looked for all the world like the palace at Chintalpore overrun by the forest. He could therefore picture what must have been in this place, rather than seeing merely crumbling brick and tangled bines. ‘Nature is remorseless, I should say.’

It was a prosaic response perhaps, but Shelley was heartened by it and expressed his approval freely. ‘Nature is the ultimate barbarian, Hervey. The Goths cut the aqueducts which gave the baths their spirit, and others stripped the place of its marble, but it is Nature that overwhelms it in the end — crushes and devours it like an enormous serpent. Never was any desolation more sublime and lovely, though.’

Hervey nodded slowly.

‘It thrills me more than I can say. Indeed, it is a scene which overpowers expression.’

But Hervey was not so transported that he did not see the paradox. ‘If it overpowers expression, why does a poet seek inspiration here? Is there not other seclusion where you might summon the muse?’

Shelley smiled. ‘Captain Hervey, you would have me believe your heart is of stone, or lead — no, not lead, for that is the soldier’s precious metal! Come; there’s a winding staircase here like a mountain path. We can reach the summit of these towers. And so wonderfully overgrown with myrtle is it that you will have no thoughts but of the wilderness.’ He rushed ahead.

Hervey followed as if it were indeed a mountain path, having a care to place a hand at all times on something which might save him were the stones beneath his feet to expire after their sixteen long centuries of trampling. Shelley climbed carelessly, however, like a boy who knows the boughs of a great oak well and wishes to display that knowledge to another; except that Hervey was certain there was no such intention in his guide, for a man less affected in his fervour he could scarcely imagine.

All about them was Nature reclaiming — a thick entanglement of myrtle and bay and white-flowering laurustinus, of wild fig and countless nameless plants which the four winds had sown. High above circled buzzards, as if patrolling the Via Appia, sentinels to the two friends’ solitude. And below them flapped hooded crows, which brought to Hervey’s mind a happy boyhood at Horningsham, its jackdaws and their prankish flight. There were indeed special places, and this he would readily concede was one.

Shelley sat in an arch, a hundred feet and more above the ground, and took a black leather notebook from his pocket.

‘Shall you write?’ asked Hervey, wondering whether he should explore elsewhere in the ruins to give the poet his peace. ‘I mean, shall you compose something as we sit?’

‘No, not at once,’ replied Shelley, removing the seal from an ink bottle. ‘I shall sketch a little first. I like to compose the place when later I contemplate the lines.’

Hervey settled on the other side of the arch and took out his own leather-bound volume, much smaller.

Now Shelley was curious. ‘What is that?’

‘My prayer book.’

‘And what will you find there?’

‘I had it with me throughout the war.’

‘So you find consolation?’

‘I generally try to read the offices of a morning and evening.’

‘Do you, indeed? Are you bent on ordination?’

Hervey simply smiled. ‘It has been a habit for so long …’

Shelley made careful pen strokes, looking up occasionally at the arch. ‘Tell me something of yourself, Hervey. Who are your people?’

Hervey placed the marker at the open page, though he did not close the book. ‘My father is Archdeacon of Sarum.’

‘Archdeacon of Sarum ,’ said Shelley, not looking up this time. ‘That is a preferment which speaks volumes.’

‘Ordinarily, perhaps, but in my father’s case it does not. He is only very recently translated thus from an exceedingly poor country living. I beg you do not think us fattened by tithes and extensive glebe.’

Shelley chuckled, still intent only upon the arch and his sketchbook. ‘I am glad he was not so poor that you could not come to Rome.’

‘That expense was my own,’ said Hervey, mildly insistent.

‘The spoils of war?’

‘Only in a manner of speaking.’

‘ Everything is but the manner of its speaking, Hervey.’

‘I was lately in India and was rewarded for service to one of its princes.’

‘India? A vast plundering-house for the Honourable Company!’

Hervey would not be drawn.

‘And we know there is a sister of spirit and education,’ said Shelley, sketching still. ‘Who else?’

‘I had an older brother in holy orders. He died five years ago.’