Free The Bride of Texas by Josef Škvorecký

over to my creditors. In time I paid the rest off in cash.”
    “And what did they do with the patent?” I asked.
    “Well,” said the general, stroking his magnificent side-whiskers, “well, Mrs. Tracy —”
    “Lorraine.”
    “Lorraine.” He said it almost as melodiously as he had years before in Liberty, and a delicious shiver went up my back. “When the war broke out, the army had a serious shortage of weapons. Smith and Wesson signed a contract for two thousand units a month —”
    “Without a bribe?”
    “I don’t know for sure, but I’d say yes, without a bribe. After Lincoln’s appeal there were suddenly seventy-five thousand volunteers who had to train with sticks instead of rifles. The army was buying up everything it could lay hands on. I suspect that was the end of bribes for a while.”
    “So two thousand of your rifles a month —”
    “At the beginning. The demand was far greater; the manufacturers started producing more and pretty soon they were delivering five thousand a month. At Bull Run about a third of the infantry regiments had my breech-loaders.”
    “So you indirectly saved a lot of lives, and your honour too.”
    “Well,” said the general, again fingering the fringe around his face, “the casualties at Bull Run were still too high. I managed an orderly retreat.” There was a slight trace of pride in his voice … poor Ambrose. Bull Run was one of his very fewmilitary successes, and at that it was only partial. He kept his regiment from panicking while others — they were all volunteers — fled in disarray. Unlike most commanders, he emerged from the defeat with his professional reputation more or less intact. “But otherwise,” I heard him say, “some units got mixed up — there was great confusion —”
    “You saved your honour, and on top of it the soldiers got your splendid rifle. Did you get anything out of it yourself? I mean in dollars and cents?”
    He shook his head. He was perplexed, I thought. “I told you, the patent wasn’t mine any more,” he said. “I’d given it to my creditors as partial payment of my debts.”
    So there you have Ambrose. He knew how to make a better gun. But he could never quite fathom matters of honour and bribery, and the life and death of soldiers.
    So how could he have fathomed the problems awaiting him in Cincinnati?
6
    But back then, on the way to the Connersville railway station in the uncomfortable saddle, I gave no thought to this side of Ambrose’s personality. What was going through my mind was how the horror of the second week of our courtship had given way to the horror of what I had done to him.
    The nightmare of that second week had urged me to break off this engagement while there was still time, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Once, I interrupted one of those abominable poetry recitations in the middle of a would-be sonnet. “May I recite a poem for you, lieutenant?” I said and, without waiting for a reply, I began. I hadn’t consciously memorized it, either, I’d simply fallen under Poe’s spell:
    It was many and many a year ago

In a kingdom by the sea

That a maid there lived whom you may know

By the name of Annabel Lee.…
    When I finished, he just stared at me in silence with his beautiful, guileless eyes.
    That was Wednesday. After that he stopped reciting poems to me, and he pruned back his odes to the glory of nature, too. So now it was I who babbled, about everything except what I wanted to say, what I should have said. I’d look at those devoted and suddenly desperate eyes of his — and I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. Once, when I was ten, some boys were jumping off a cliff that must have been twenty feet high, showing off and daring me to do the same, and teasing me for being just a girl, and they made me so mad that I climbed the cliff, but once I got to the top I looked down and I was terrified. The boys were like the seven dwarfs at the bottom of a chasm, egging me on. I