But Napoleon was not to be deferred so easily for a second day. As though he felt he had paid sufficient lip service to his courting, the next morning he grew swiftly more insistent, and Alexander’s patience was by no means equal to fending off his approaches. They had not yet made noon when Napoleon cut short the diplomatic dance, thrusting aside with a sweep of his arm the carefully wrought speech which Kapodistrias and several of Alexander’s other diplomats had engineered, outlining without commitment the nearly innumerable small points of conflict and how these might perhaps be resolved—a catalogue which, if permitted to continue, might have consumed another day all on their own.
But Napoleon interrupted with a brusque, “Enough; enough of this,” and leaning forward to Alexander said bluntly, “Come, Your Majesty: these matters are for other men. Oudinot governs in St. Petersburg, and we speak here less than one hundred miles from the great city of the Moskova. Must the very throne of your ancestors fall into the hands of my army before you will cease to listen to warmongers? Shall we not again be friends? Give me only your oath that you will uphold again the Continental System, that you will recognize the Kingdom of Poland, and we will proclaim peace to these brave assembled soldiers. Then let the diplomats argue what they will!”
“In the sight of the Holy Mother,” Alexander said, springing from his chair, “I will chop the throne into kindling with my own hands before you sit upon it, and for the rest, you may take what you can. But before I give you peace while you stand with an army on my soil, I will grow my beard to my belt and go and eat potatoes with my serfs!”
The conference was shattered. The diplomats on both parts made small abortive attempts to bring their monarchs back to the table, for their several causes; but Alexander could scarcely make apology now without becoming a liar, and Napoleon, at first only surprised, grew swiftly choleric when he understood Alexander’s intransigence had not been a mere flourishing of temper but an expression of true feeling, and an outright rejection of the most central terms which should have formed naturally the core of any serious negotiation.
Napoleon’s face colored; he looked as though he would have liked to upbraid the Tsar like a junior officer, and nearly took a step towards him; Berthier put a hand upon his arm, prudently. Still hot with anger and breathing quickly, Napoleon said to Alexander’s back, “When you have thought better of your choice, I will not let this harden my heart against you,” and turning stormed from the pavilion.
The Russian courier-riders outside the pavilion had of course heard all the proceedings; Laurence saw one young enthusiast, as angry as Alexander himself at the indignity offered the Tsar, jerk deliberately upon the chain of his dragon’s bridle, and jab it with a spur, so the dragon snarling lashed its head forward to pull the rein loose, placing its jaws directly in Napoleon’s path scarce half-afoot from his head. Napoleon jerked back from the gnashing teeth, many of them jagged and broken and stained; two of his aides caught him, else he would have fallen, and the French couriers opposite their Russian counterparts all rose snarling on their haunches.
For a moment, the battle might have been joined directly, on the field before the pavilion; Laurence put his own hand on his pistol, and saw many another officer do the same. Then Napoleon said, “No,” sharply, and waved his own couriers down; he gave one look to the brazen young officer, who defiantly raised his chin and made no apology, though he had better have hung his head at so nearly breaking the state of truce; and then another harder to the dragon, who had pulled its head in towards its chest, and was mouthing the bit with sullen irritation and a cold look for its own handler. “No,” he said again, more thoughtfully, and turning went to mount up on his own courier, and departed for his lines.
“More than the heart could bear, Sire,” Kutuzov said to Alexander, out of the silence; they were all of them aware that the hammer of the French Army stood ready to fall upon them. “But the point has not been lost. We have been falling back all this day; they will not catch us to-night or tomorrow. Bagration’s men have been making fortifications at Borodino. We can hold him there—until the dragons arrive.”
He glanced at Laurence as he spoke, a narrow gleam in his one good eye, which Laurence did not wholly know how to interpret. But he and Temeraire carried the report back to Chu, with a borrowed map to show him the location of the little village: scarcely a pinprick on the outskirts of Klin, a little way off the road to Moscow.
“Well, it will have to be good enough,” Chu said philosophically, when he was given the news, and dictated new orders to one of the Jade Dragons, instructing half of the first jalan to concentrate and approach at a quicker pace. “I would rather have the entire force at the outset, and in the meantime a frightful number of these men will die, I imagine, but ah well! There are a great many of them, and we can manage for a day,” he added, a little callously.