The Short Reign of Pippin IV (19 page)

“Why, don't you see,” the old man explained patiently, “then they'd push the base in too. I don't know if I could manage to get them out then.”

The king asked gently, “Are you the owner here?”

“No, I'm not. I live hereabouts.”

“Then why do you pull them out?”

The old man looked puzzled—searched for an answer. “Why—I don't know. I guess there's people that pull things out—that's what they do. I guess I'm one of that kind.”

The king stared at the green, slimy Pan.

The old man said helplessly, “I guess there's people that do different things, and,” he added as though he had just discovered it, “I guess that's how things get done.”

“Good or bad?” the king asked.

“I don't understand,” said the old man helplessly. “There's just people—just what people do.”

The king often called on Sister Hyacinthe, sometimes to speak quietly of the day's happenings and at other times to sit silently. And she, who had had more—if different—experience than Marie, knew when to chatter and when to join him in a healing quietness.

Once she told him, “I wonder what the Superior would think if she knew that, with one exception, I am fulfilling the functions of the king's mistress. You really should see your mistress, Sire. She feels left out. She had to struggle with her soul to become your mistress, and now she finds the struggle in vain. You haven't even spoken to her, let alone seduced her.”

“Later,” said the king. “Perhaps later I'll ask her to tea—what is her name again?”

After returning from Gambais, the king went without announcement to call on Sister Hyacinthe, and he found her in the midst of her massage. All he could see of her were two pink feet and ankles protruding through the holes in the screen.

“He's almost finished, Sire,” her voice said from behind the partition.

The master bowed and went back to his work, making little mewing sounds of affection and respect over the pink toes, giving pats and squeezes of encouragement to her flattened arches.

“I see an improvement,” he said professionally. And to the king, “Regard, Sire—a month ago one could not slip a sheet of thinnest paper under the metatarsal, and now, Sire, even the unpracticed eye is aware of a concavity.”

Sister Hyacinthe boomed, “Don't dare to cure them to the point where I will be encouraged to use them.”

“She considers only her feet,” he said stiffly. “I have my profession and my reputation to think of.”

When he was gone and the screen folded and put away, she said, “You know, that pompous little stinker really is curing them, and I dread to think of it.”

“One may keep this a secret, Sister,” said the king.

“Your color is high, Sire. You have been taking the sun?”

“I've been riding my scooter through the countryside, Sister.”

She laughed. “I should like to see the Sun King doing it,” she said. “Times are changed, I guess—a motor scooter, and I imagine your ministers are quarreling over the horsepower of their limousines.”

“How did you know?” he asked.

“There are things one knows, Sire. For example, I know that you have a problem, that it is a grave problem, and that you have come to me for help in its solution.”

“You are very wise,” said the king.

“Not wise enough to get out of the chorus before my arches fell.”

“But once out, Sister, you took a very long step toward Heaven.”

“You are amiable, M'sieur. It may well be that my closeness to Heaven is a by-product. Stumble would be a better word than step. Are you ready to state your problem?”

“I have first to isolate it, Sister. In general it might be stated with the question, ‘What is a man to do?'”

“It is not precisely a new problem,” she said musingly. “And it usually resolves itself that one does what one is. The first move should be to determine what the man is; that being established, there is very little latitude in what he does.”

“One learns so much more easily about other people,” said Pippin.

Sister Hyacinthe said, “On leaving the excellent school where Madame was my friend and on taking my place in the Folies, I was troubled about—loss of innocence. Then I discovered that not its loss but the timing of its loss was the problem. My timing was ill-advised, with the result that I had to lose my innocence on several occasions, and after that it was of no importance. But then I was one of many naked girls on a stage—not a king.”

“At this moment I feel very naked,” said the king.

“Of course you do. It takes time and a certain blunting. But do you know, after a few years I felt much more naked in clothes than without them?”

Pippin said abruptly, “Sister, I am not allowed the time.”

“I know,” she said. “I'm sorry.”

“What shall I do?”

“I don't know what you should do, Sire, but I think I know what you will do.”

“You know my dilemma?”

“Only the self-blinded could fail to see it. You will do what you do.”

“That's what the old man said. But he was only pulling statues out of the mud. If I am in error, people will suffer—Marie, Clotilde, even France. What would you say, Sister, if a good deed set off an explosion?”

The nun said, “I should say that a good deed may be unwise, but it cannot be evil. It seems to me that the forward history of humans is based on good deeds that exploded—oh! and many were hurt or killed or impoverished, but some of the good remained. I wish—” She paused. “Why not say it? I wish that for the moment I did not wear this—habit.”

“Why, Sister?”

“So that I may give you one of the few solaces one human can offer another.”

“Thank you, Sister.”

“Thank Suzanne, not Hyacinthe. I will ask you to believe, Sire, that at one time Suzanne was not afraid either for her feet or for her soul. Suzanne would have had the courage—and the love.”

 

 

In the early morning Pippin rode his motor scooter toward Gambais. In his pocket he had a bottle of wine.

He parked his scooter near the road and strolled through the overgrown park, smelling the hint of frost, picking the orange pips from the winter-ready wild-rose vines. A gust of wind dropped curling, darkened leaves from the restless trees on his head and shoulders.

Then he heard a weak shouting ahead of him near the moat and hurried forward until he cleared the edge of the forest and saw three burly youths laughing and wrestling playfully with the ancient. They had the bust of Pan in their arms and they moved toward the moat while the old man tugged helplessly at their jackets and shouted curses at them.

Pippin broke into a run, and then he was in the midst of it. The strong young men turned on the furious king, and then they were rolling and fighting and scratching on the ground, and then the squirming clot went over the edge and down into the dark water of the moat. And still the fight continued until the young men held the bleeding king underwater. He ceased to struggle. Then in fear they clambered, dripping, up the slippery bank and ran, ran in panic and disappeared into the autumn forest.

Pippin gradually came back to consciousness. The ancient had pulled his head and chest out of the water.

“I'm all right, I guess,” said the king.

“Don't look it! Them young thugs. I know 'em. I'll go to their people. I'll bring a charge.”

“As long as I'm wet already, I might as well dig around in the water for the vase and the Leda and the baby with a shell.”

“You'll do no such thing. I got the vase yesterday. You'll come to my place and get dry and warmed up. I got a half-bottle of cognac.”

Pippin crawled up the slippery bank. He was covered with green scum like the bust of Pan, one eye was black, and a line of blood ran from his split lip.

In a little shack hidden within the fringe of the forest his friend built up the fire and helped him to remove his clothes and bathed him with a sponge and a bucket of warm water, and dried him with frayed clean rags.

“You look like you been in a cat fight,” he said. “Here, take a nip of this. Put this blanket around you. I'll hang your clothes over the stove.”

Pippin dug in the pocket of his spongy corduroy jacket for the bottle of wine.

“I brought you this as a present,” he said.

The old man held the bottle away from him as far as his arms would reach and squinted at the label.

“Why this—this is—is christening wine—this is wine for a wedding. I don't know if I'll ever have a day again would justify pulling this cork.”

“Nonsense,” said Pippin. “Open it. I'll help you drink it.”

“It not yet the hour of nine?”

“Open it,” said the king, and he gathered the blanket about his shoulders.

The ancient drew the cork tenderly. “Now why would you think to bring a wine like this to me?”

“Maybe in celebration of the ones who pull things out.”

“Oh! You mean like the statues—”

“Or like me. Drink up! Drink up!”

The old man tasted and smacked his lips. “A wine like this—” he said helplessly. He wiped his lips with his sleeve for fear some extraneous flavor might creep in.

Pippin said, “Last night I thought of something I wanted to ask you. What do you think of the king?”

“Which king?”

“The king—Pippin the Fourth, by the Grace of God Monarch of France.”

“Oh! him.” And then suspiciously: “What you getting at? I don't want trouble, wine or no wine. Why'd you come to think of it at night?”

“I just wondered. It's only a question—no trouble. Who could give you trouble?”

“You never can tell,” the old man said.

“Fill up your glass and tell me. What do you think of him?”

“I've got no politics outside of right here in Gambais. What do I know about the king? He's just the king, I guess. There's kings and then there's not kings, only—”

“Only what?”

“Well, there isn't rightly any kings anymore. Kings? They're like those blasted big lizards, big as a house. They run out. They disappeared, they're ex—ex—”

“Extinct?”

“That's it, extinct. Seems like there wasn't room for them.”

“But there is a King of France.”

“He's like a play game for children,” the old man said. “He's like Father Christmas. He's there, but when you get old enough you don't believe in him anymore. He—well—he's just a dream, like.”

“Do you think there will ever be any kings anymore?”

“How should I know? What do you keep picking at me for? You'd think you was related to him.” He surveyed the clothes hanging over the stove. “But you ain't.”

“Would you know if there was a real king, not just a dream?”

“I guess so.”

“How would you know?”

“Well, he'd come riding down the crops on his horses—or there'd be trouble and he'd hang a lot of folks—or he'd say, maybe, ‘There's a raft of bad things going on and I'm going to fix them—'” His voice dwindled away. “No, I guess none of them would answer. I know plenty of rich men that do like that, but they ain't kings. I guess there's only one way you'd know for sure.”

“What?”

“Well—if they'd take him out and guillotine him I guess you'd be pretty sure he was a king. I guess you would.”

Pippin got up and went to the stove and lifted down his damp and steaming clothes from the drying cords.

“They're not dry yet.”

“I know—but I must go.”

“You going to report me to somebody for something?”

“No,” said the king. “You've answered my question. And—by God, I'll do it! A man can't stand being extinct. Perhaps I'll do it badly, but I'll do it.”

“What are you talking about? You haven't had that much wine.”

Pippin pulled on his clammy clothes. “I'll send you some wine,” he said. “I owe it to you.”

“For what?”

“You have told me. To be guillotined a man must have done something to make him worthy of the guillotine. The guillotine or—or the Cross requires either a thief or—Thank you, my puller-out-of-things.”

The king strode out of the shack and walked rapidly through the forest to the thicket by the roadside where his scooter was hidden.

 

 

In the royal apartment the queen rubbed lemon oil on a polished tabletop.

“How many times must I say that a glass should not be set down without something under it?”

The king put his arms around her and drew her close.

“What are you doing? Pippin, you're wet! Pippin, look at your face—your eye! What have you done?”

“Tripped over the coping and fell in the carp pond.”

“You'll never learn to look where you're going. Pippin! Someone might come in—M'sieur—they don't knock.”