Paces

I have come to the place, Sir, where I must tell Your Majesty about yourself, and I find that I would rather do almost anything else.

I have put it off. I have written six chapters of this account in order to arrive at it, and I have known all the way that I was arriving at it, and I have gone more slowly with every page. I do not know whether it is proper for a subject to describe his sovereign to his sovereign’s face. I have looked for a precedent and have not found one. I do not think anybody has ever needed to do it, because until now no sovereign has had to be told what he looked like to a captain of engineers from King George County, and I am not sure that Your Majesty needs to be told it now. But I said at the beginning that I would tell you what the places were like where your silence was felt, and the first of those places was the room at St James’s where you were silent to me, and I cannot leave it out. If the gentleman reading this to you would prefer to pass over the next few pages, I shall understand, and I ask Your Majesty’s pardon in advance for anything in them that is not as it should be.

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The Minister came for me at ten in his own carriage, which was hired, and looked at my coat, and said that it would do. I was in the full dress of the new Corps, which had been made for me in a fortnight by a tailor in Savile Row who had never made an American coat before and had studied the regulations with the air of a man deciphering a treaty; it was dark blue, with black velvet facings and a great deal of gold lace, and a sword I had never worn with it, and a hat with a plume that I carried under my arm and was told on no account to put on. The Minister was in plain black, with a small sword, as American ministers have always gone to the Court, and looked better than I did.

St James’s Street was full of carriages from top to bottom, all of them going the same way at the pace of a funeral, and on the pavements there were crowds of people who had come to look at the carriages, and some of them cheered the ones they liked and groaned at the ones they did not. Nobody groaned at us, because nobody knew who we were. At the bottom of the street the old brick gatehouse of the palace stood across the way, with its clock and its towers, very small and very red after the white stucco of the street; and the carriages went in under it one at a time and set down their gentlemen in a court beyond, and went away again, and the gentlemen went up a staircase. I had imagined something larger. I had imagined, I think, something like Parliament House on Charter Hill, with columns. St James’s is a collection of old brick courts joined together by passages, and it looks like what I believe it is, a house that has been lived in by a great many people over a great many years, each of whom has added a room. I liked it at once. I have liked it since, the few times I have passed it, more than any of the great buildings in London.

We went up the staircase with a great many other gentlemen, in a great many kinds of uniform and court dress, and through a guardroom full of tall men in red with halberds, and through a long room full of pictures and gentlemen waiting, and into another long room where the gentlemen were waiting more closely, and there the Minister found the official whose business it was and gave him the card on which my name was written, and the official read it and looked at me, once, from the top of my head to my boots, and put the card on a pile with the others. Then we waited.

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I should tell Your Majesty what I was thinking about while we waited, because it was not what I should have been thinking about.

I was thinking about Philip Lightfoot’s paper. I knew that it was somewhere in London, and that the gentlemen who were charged with it had friends near the Court, and I found myself looking at the faces of the men about me in that room and wondering which of them it might be. There were gentlemen of the Household moving among the crowd, in their uniforms and with their wands and keys, saying a word here and a word there and moving on, and I looked at each of them in turn and wondered whether he had the petition in his pocket, or knew where it was, or had been asked to carry it to the next room and the room after that. I knew that this was foolish. I knew that the paper would come, if it came at all, by some way that I could not see from where I stood, and that I should never know whose hand it had passed through. I knew also that it was not my business. But I could not stop looking at the faces, and I have thought since that this was the first time I understood what it meant that a paper might reach a King, or not reach him, by the judgement of men whom nobody would ever be able to name.

The Minister said, without turning his head, “Captain Ashton, you are staring at the Household.” I said that I was sorry. He said that it did not matter, since everybody stared at the Household, but that he would be obliged if I would stare at the ceiling instead, which was very fine and had been painted by somebody famous.

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Then the doors at the end of the room were opened, and the gentlemen before us began to go through them one at a time, and in a quarter of an hour it was my turn.

The room was long, and lit by tall windows on one side, and hung with red, and it was very quiet. That was the first thing I noticed, and it is the thing I remember best: the quiet. There were perhaps a hundred people in it, the great officers of the Household along the walls and the gentlemen who had been presented standing in a body at the far side, and the gentlemen waiting to be presented coming in at the door one by one; and in all that crowd nobody spoke, and nobody shuffled, and nobody coughed, and I could hear the sound of my own boots on the floor. I had been in quiet rooms before. I had stood in the yard at Harpers Ferry at dawn with two thousand people on the hillside holding their breath. I had never been in a room that was quiet in this way, as though everyone in it were listening for something, and the something were very small.

You were standing at the far end, Sir, on a low step, with the throne behind you, which you did not use. I am going to describe you now, as plainly as I can, and I ask you again to forgive me.

You were tall, taller than I had expected from the engravings, and very upright, and you stood perfectly still. You were in uniform, a scarlet coat with a great deal of gold, and the blue riband across it. Your hair was fair, going grey at the sides, and your face was long and pale and composed, and your eyes were open. I had known that Your Majesty was blind. Everybody knew it. I had not understood, until I saw you, that it would not show; that you would stand at the end of that room with your eyes open and your head a little raised, turned very slightly towards the door, and that a man coming in at the door would feel himself looked at. I felt myself looked at. I have asked other men who were presented to you whether they felt the same, and they all said that they did, and none of them could say why, and I think now that it was because you were listening to us come, and that a man who is being listened to that closely feels it in the same place where he would feel himself being seen.

A gentleman stood at your left hand, a little behind you, in the uniform of the Household, quite still. I learned afterwards that he was the one who would murmur to you anything you needed to know that the Lord Chamberlain did not say aloud; I did not see him do it, and I watched for it. Whatever passed between you passed without any movement I could see. I have read since that Your Majesty learned every room you used before you entered it, and knew the number of steps in it, and knew the men you received by their voices and their footfall and the way they paused before they spoke, and that your attendants were made a part of the ceremony so that their help should not look like help. I did not know any of that then. I only knew that I had never seen a man so entirely in command of a room in which he could not see anything, and that he commanded it by standing still.

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The Lord Chamberlain read my name. He read it from the card, in a clear voice that carried to the end of the room: Captain Henry Ashton, of the Corps of Engineers of the Royal American Army, presented by the American Minister. And I began to walk.

Now I must tell Your Majesty something about myself that I have never told anybody, because it is a habit and not a thing a man thinks of telling. I pace rooms. I have done it since I was a cadet, when the professor of engineering at the Point taught us to know our own pace as a surveyor knows his chain, so that we could measure ground without a tape; mine is thirty inches, very nearly exact, and I have walked it so long that I cannot cross a room without counting it, any more than I can look at a wall without seeing where the courses run. I counted that room. I did not mean to. I was frightened, and when I am frightened I do what I was trained to do, and what I was trained to do was to know the ground. I walked from the door towards you at my ordinary pace, which is very even, with my hat under my arm and my eyes on the step where you stood, and I counted, one, two, three, all the way, in my head, as I had counted the yard at Harpers Ferry and the bastions at Fort Warren and every room I had ever been in. At the twenty-second pace I was at the step, and I stopped, and bowed.

You turned your head towards me, a very little.

And you said, not loudly, in a voice that I do not think carried beyond the step, “Twenty-two paces from the door, Captain Ashton; you counted them too.”

Then you inclined your head, and the Lord Chamberlain read the next name, and I walked backwards out of the room as the Minister’s secretary had taught me, without falling over, and I do not remember doing it.

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That is the sentence, Sir. It was the only thing Your Majesty ever said to me, and the only thing, so far as I know, that you said to any American that summer that anybody has repeated. I have given it as you said it. I wrote it down in the carriage, on the back of the Minister’s card, in pencil, with my hand shaking so much that I can barely read it now; but I did not need to write it down, and I have never needed to look at the card.

I have thought about it a great deal, as I said at the beginning I had. I want to tell Your Majesty what I have thought, not because I suppose it will interest you, but because I said I would tell you what your silence was like in the places it was felt, and the sentence is part of the silence. It is the part of it that I was given.

The first thing I thought, in the carriage, was that you had heard me counting. I thought that you must have known the room, as I have since read that you knew all your rooms, by the number of paces in it; that you had known that it was twenty-two paces from the door to the step for a man of my height; and that you had heard that my step was even, and had come to the step at the twenty-second and stopped dead, as a surveyor stops at the end of his chain, and not at the twenty-first or the twenty-third, as a courtier would, a little short or a little shuffling. I thought you had heard a man doing what you did. I thought, and I still think, that it was a kind of greeting, from one man who knew the ground by counting it to another, and that it was the only greeting you could have given me that was not about the thing everybody in that room was thinking about and nobody was saying.

The Minister asked me in the carriage what you had said. I told him. He was quiet for a long time, looking out of the window at the crowds in St James’s Street, and then he said, “Then he said nothing to you about America.” I said that he had not. The Minister said, “Good,” and then, after a moment, “Remarkable. Quite remarkable,” and he did not say what was remarkable, and I did not ask.

It was some weeks before I understood what he had meant, and I am not sure that I have understood it even now. I think he meant that a King who was being watched that summer by every government in Europe and every agent of the rebellion in London, to see whether he would say one word about America, had been presented with a Union officer from a Province in rebellion, a man from the very half of Virginia that had gone over, wearing the Crown’s coat, and had said to him, in the hearing of the Lord Chamberlain and the gentleman at his elbow, a sentence about the floor. Anything else would have been reported. Any word of welcome would have been read in Charles Town as a slight and in New Westminster as an encouragement, and anything that sounded like a question would have been read everywhere as an opinion. Your Majesty gave me nothing that could be read at all, except by me. I did not see that then. I saw it later, when the paper came back.

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There is one more thing, and then I will leave the room at St James’s, as I have been trying to leave it for five years.

Philip Lightfoot had said to me on my own staircase, “Tell him we are loyal, Harry. He will believe it from a man in a Union coat.” I did not tell you. I did not say anything to Your Majesty at all, because nobody says anything at a levee; one bows and is spoken to or is not, and goes. But I have thought since that if I had been able to say one sentence back, there in front of the step, I do not know what it would have been. I do not think it would have been Philip’s. I do not think it would have been mine either, the one about my oath that I said to him in Richmond over his wine, because it seemed to me in that room that Your Majesty did not need to be told about my oath, since you were standing at the end of it. I think it might have been something about Daniel. I do not know what. I have tried for five years to think what a man in my position could have said to his King, in one sentence, at the end of twenty-two paces, about the man he owned, and I have not found it, and I have come to believe that there is no such sentence, and that this is why nobody in America said it for eighty years.

I walked backwards out of the room. In the long room outside, the gentlemen who had been presented were standing about in their uniforms in the light from the windows, talking now, all at once, as men talk who have been quiet too long, and the Minister found me and took my arm, and we went down the staircase and out through the courts into the sun.

I saw Your Majesty twice more that summer, once at St James’s and once in the Park, and you did not speak to me either time, and I did not expect you to. I shall come to both in their place. And at the end of the summer I saw your silence come back to Philip Lightfoot in his own hands, in my lodging off the Strand, in the form of a packet with its seals unbroken. But I will go on in order, as I said I would, because that is the only way I know of telling a thing so that it can be checked.