The San Sebastian Chronicles, Part XVI
A bit about Gus.
The next morning I headed to a crossroads just outside the front chosen by Desotto with Johnny and Gus in tow, Johnny in his ersatz uniform and His Lordship in another of his English hunting suits.
“Lord Hinchingbrooke,” I asked.
“Please, call me Gus.”
“Lord Gus, should you not be leading hordes of the English lemmings into No Man’s Land on the Western Front?” I asked as we walked down the gravel road, passed from time to time by supply wagons, marching platoons, and mongrel dogs.
Continued from…
“Truth is, I have. Nasty business that.”
I waited for him to continue, but he kept walking.
“So, why are you here? I am sorry if it is rude to inquire, but should you not be fighting for your own country?”
Johnny seemed not to have thought of this before. “Yeah, Gus? Oughn’t you be fighting for the Queen insomedragoonsorfusiliersorwhathaveyou?”
Gus stiffened a bit. “A fair inquiry. Good on you both.”
“Yes,” I said, “so what is it? I think as your bondsman and commander pro tempore I have the right to know your allegiances.”
“Yes, of course. Well, truth be told…”
“Please.”
“Truth be told, you see, my father — ”
“The Seventh Marquess of Plopshire?” I said, trying to make him feel a bit more at ease. He didn’t seem to appreciate the joke.
“Sixth Earl of Shaftesbury, to be correct. Well, you see, he married a Viscontessa. One Katerina Elizibetta Sabina Lippa Solms-Baruth von Höhenröwe-Kirchberg.”
Johnny’s usual expression, which would never be confused with curiosity, went a bit slacker.
“This is your mother?” Johnny said.
“Well, she is my step-mother,” said Gus.
“A divorce?!” I said with hopefully not too much delight in the scandal.
“No, my mother, my father’s first wife, she was from West Yorkshire, but her family moved to Brighton. Her mother did at any rate. And she grew up in Brighton. Her name was Calliope.”
“That is a most winsome name, Calliope.”
“Calliope Longbottom was her name. She was an actress and singer. At the pleasure grounds on the boardwalk in Brighton. Quite the scandal in those days, as it turns out. At any rate, she died, under circumstances that shall remain private, thank you.”
“Something to do with her privates!” Johnny gasped.
“Yes,” Gus said. Then, “No! No, nothing to do with… Something that shall remain private! Thank you. Nothing to do with… Just, just listen,” he sputtered.
“Sorry,” said Johnny with more than a little chagrin.
I tried to salvage the situation, “Lord Gus, that’s just a damnable shame. I am quite sorry for you. Truly. One’s mother. A shame.”
“Yeah, you got my condolences too, Gus,” Johnny peeped.
“You’re quite welcome,” said Gus, clearing his throat and straightening his tie. “Anyway, you see my father, perhaps seeing a chance to regain his standing in polite society, or perhaps recognizing the error of his youthful impetuousness, or perhaps thinking of his legacy… whatever the reason, shortly after mother’s death, he married Katerina Elizi — ”
“Lady Katherine,” I said.”
“Yes, lady Katherine. Well, you see, she hails from some county palatinate or another in the Rhineland, near Swabia perhaps, or Nahegau. I’m not entirely sure. The essence of it is she is a daughter of the House of Erbach-Oettingen, which is a Teutonic princely family of quite ancient provenance and status before the fin de siècle, as it were. This was only a few years before the outbreak of the present hostilities.”
I could begin to see where the tale was heading. You, dear reader, may be as well.
Gus took a deep breath and, impossibly, straightened his posture a bit, no doubt to help soften the coming dénouement. He skipped a step suddenly, to avoid a pile of horse shit.
“So, to avoid, boring you both to death, I will summarize things thusly.” He paused again before blurting it all out, “When the war broke out, father and Lady Katherine decamped to ein Schloss in the forested innards of some mediatised Saxon duchy in the heart of the Fatherland. As a result, I could keep my English title only if I would resign my officer’s commission.”
“Shit,” said Johnny.
“I assure you will not bore me, and, again, I do not wish to pry, but I do not understand. And, I echo Johnny’s sentiments as well, literal and figurative.”
We were all walking in zig-zaggy paths on the road now, avoiding the great multitudes of manure piles strewn about us.
“Where are la Merdakumpeln?” I wondered aloud as I tried to keep my boots clean. Those were little vagrant urchins of various non-Sebastiano nationalities who were always to be seen scurrying around the roads of San Sebastiano to gather horse and cow manure to sell to farmers and gardeners for use as fertilizer for their little plotzches. This industrious if smelly activity had the dual benefit of helping to forestall roadside begging and to maintain San Sebastian’s reputation for exceedingly clean roads. (Apparently, our horses and cattle were famously well-fed.) I had heard recently, though, of advances in the production of artificial manures, in response to the Great Global Guano Crisis, that may have been depressing shit prices. Perhaps they’d reached such a low level that it was no longer economical to pick up crap. What was the world coming to?
Gus went on, sidestepping crap piles along the way, “Yes, well, to be more particular then. You see, I had joined the army even before the war broke out and was leading cavalry charges in Alsace when I got the news that father had sailed his yacht to Hanover in the night. I was informed by my Colonel who had gotten the news directly from Whitehall. I would eventually find a letter from father to me at his study at Windmouth, but you can imagine my embarrassment at hearing of the news second hand. I bucked up and kept at things. Stiff labrum superius and all that.
“A few months and much fighting later, I received reports of some letters patent, exequaturs, and other archaic proceedings and proclamations issuing from Buckingham Palace, the result of which was that my father and step-mother were no longer considered… English. I was then summoned to Westminster and informed by some funnily-dressed chamberlain or majordomo or another of two types of news, one bad and one as to which opinions might vary.
“As to the latter, I was told that, my father’s decrepit and erstwhile earldom, Shaftesbury, would be held in trust by some uncle or another, ex officio, until my father’s demise, and that my title and contingent peerage would remain intact under some provision of the Magna Charta and a law passed by the Long Parliament. As to the former, I was informed that, given my father’s expatriation, my bachelorhood and lack of children, and my mother’s low station and current state of demise, my temporal loyalties to the Crown were under some suspicion; accordingly, it was proposed with some insistence that I should resign my commission in the army, which resignation would be accepted with no mention of the affair.”
“What a pile of shit,” said Johnny. We stopped and looked at him, then I looked at Gus. He seemed to blush. Johnny went on, pointing ahead, “I’m sorry, it’s just that look at that pile of horse shit there.”
And behold, there was an enormous pile of dung before us. Truly monumental.
“I can’t believe this shit,” I said. We’d stopped, agog. “I have never seen anything like it. What are we feeding these animals?”
“I have only seen something like it once. It had issued from a rhinoceros,” said Gus.
“Is there gonna be some kind of wagon or dozer or something to push it away or pull it off the road?” Johnny wondered aloud.
“Let’s just get going,” I said, looking at the position of the sun in the sky.
Quite a traffic jam had formed as the wagons and formations of men struggled to get around the mountain of excrement in the middle of the narrowing road. One private fell into the ditch trying to avoid it. Some stood around it with hankerchiefs over their faces, poking it with sticks for signs of life. Some men were piling logs on the side of the road in an effort to create a new path around the gob. We wound our way through the crowd and emerged up ahead. We continued to jog until we caught up with a wagon ahead of us. One of the horses in the rear seemed somewhat embarrassed. I elected not to mention anything to the teamster, who seemed like he was trying to flee the scene. It wasn’t our problem any more.
The three of us finally reassembled and resumed our more relaxed pace.
“That is quite a story, Lord Gus,” I said.
“Yeah, that’s quite a disappearin’ act by your pop. Leavin’ you in the lurch. I don’t know what I’d do insuchacircumstancemyself. My pops, he’s just at home, whittling on the porch most likely. Maybe I’ll write him.”
“Yes, well I am sorry for burdening you with my story, gentlemen, and a bit embarrassed, I must say. Disclosing such private affairs. Can we let that be the end of it?”
“Yeah, sure.”
“Yes, of course, Lord Gus.”
Englishmen. So reserved. It would drive them all to early graves. Any good San Sebastiano man has a good, drunken cry-and-kiss with various family members at least three times a year, preferably after a good fight with many curses exchanged.
Gus continued, “Suffice it to say, since my discharge I have been a bit at loose ends, looking for adventure here and there. Stamping up the passport, you might say. Only a few weeks ago I was at a cafe in, em, Tunis, I believe it was, reading the Paris newspapers. It so happened that in one edition a correspondent was going on about the perils of tiny little alpine San Sebastian, bravely facing the Hunno-Gothic menace, her very existence in the balance, and it struck a chord. I thought I might be of some help, and the mountains always beckon. So I boarded a ship for Venice a few days later. And that is how I found myself here.”
“Well, I will say, we are glad to have you,” I pronounced.
“I’ll say. Wait ’til after this war, Gus. When you come to Ohio, you’ll see all the land there is for development, like you were saying. Heck, I got neighbors with farms bigger’n this whole country! Fortunes to be made. For sure.”
“I should think so, Johnny. I should think so.”
We walked on for another three or four decaminutes. In silence, enjoying the sunshine and balmy May weather. Dragonflies seemed to follow us. The traffic began to die away as we went onward, up a slight grade that made our calves burn only a bit. The exercise was much appreciated.
Continued…
