A Maggot - John Fowles (3 page)

The man in the scarlet coat rode on a pace or two in
silence, and threw an answer back over his shoulder.

'The fleas in thy poxy inn.'

'What business?'

Again the rider waited to answer, and this time did
not turn his head.

'None o' thine.'

The ox-cart now turned into a smith's yard, and the
cavalcade could go more quickly. In a hundred yards or so they came
to a more open square, paved with small dark setts sunk on edge.
Though the sun had set, the sky had now cleared extensively in the
west. Rose streaks of vapour floated in a honeycoloured light,
suffusing the canopy still above with pink and amethyst tints.
Somewhat finer and taller buildings surrounded this square and its
central building, an open-sided shed, or market, made of massive oak
timbers and with a steep-pitched and stone-tiled roof. There was a
clothier's shop, a saddler's, a grocer's, an apothecary and
barber-surgeon's, the latter being the nearest the place had to a
doctor; a cordwainer's. At the far end of the square beyond the
market house stood a knot of people, around a long wooden pole lying
on its side, the central totem for the next day's celebrations, in
process of being dressed with streamers.

Closer, beside the roof-supporting outer columns of
the market house, groups of children noisily played lamp-loo and
tutball, those primitive forms of tag and baseball. Modern lovers of
the second game would have been shocked to see that here it was
preponderantly played by the girls (and perhaps also to know that its
traditional prize, for the most skilled, was not the milliondollar
contract, but a mere tansy pudding). An older group of lads, some men
among them, stood all with short knob-ended sticks of heavy holly and
hawthorn in their hands, and took turns to throw at a bizarre and
ragged shape of stuffed red cloth, vaguely birdlike, set at the foot
of the market-house wall. To the travellers this last was a familiar
sight, no more than practice for the noble, ancient and universal
English sport to be played on the morrow: that of cocksquailing, or
slaughtering cocks by throwing the weighted squailers, or sticks, at
them. Its traditional main season was Shrovetide; but in Devon it was
so popular, as cockfighting was among the gentry, that it was
celebrated at other festivals. A very few hours would see a series of
terrified living birds tied in place of the stuffed red puppet, and
blood on the setts. Eighteenth-century man was truly Christian in his
cruelty to animals. Was it not a blasphemous cock that crowed thrice,
rejoicing each time the apostle Peter denied? What could be more
virtuous than bludgeoning its descendants to death?

The two gentlemen reined in, as if somewhat taken
aback by this unexpected open stage and animated crowd. The
cockthrowers had already turned away from their rehearsal; the
children as quickly dropped their games. The younger gentleman looked
back to the man in the scarlet coat, who pointed across to the
northern side of the square, at a ramshackle stone building with a
crudely painted black stag on a wall-board above its porch and an
archway to a stableyard beside it.

The clattering and clopping procession now headed up
across the slightly sloping square. The maypole was also forsaken for
this more interesting entertainment, which had already gathered a
small train on its way to the square. Some seventy or eighty faces
were waiting, when they approached the inn; but just before they came
to dismount, the younger gentleman politely gestured the elder
forward, as if he must take precedence. A florid-faced man with a
paunch came out under the porch, a serving-girl and a

potboy behind him; then a man with a bustling limp
from the yard, the ostler. He took the older gentleman's horse as he
slid stiffly to the ground; the potboy, the younger gentleman's
behind him. The landlord bowed.

'Welcome, sirs. Puddicombe, at your service. Us trust
you be came an easy journey.'

The elder gentleman answered. 'All is ready?'

'As your man bespoke, sir. To the letter.'

'Then show to our chambers. We are much fatigued.'

The landlord backed, and offered entrance. But the
younger gentleman waited a moment or two, watching the other three
horses and their riders into the yard, to which they had headed
direct. His senior eyed him, then the ring of onlookers, and spoke
with a firm, even faintly testy, authority.

'Come, nephew. Enough of being the cynosure of
nowhere.'

With that he passed into
the inn, leaving his nephew to follow.

* * *

In the best upstairs chamber, the uncle and nephew
have just finished their supper. Candles have been lit on a
wall-sconce by the door, three more in a pewter branch on the table.
An ash-log fire burns in a wide open hearth not far away, and the
faintly acrid smell of its smoke pervades the trembling shadows in
the large old room. A four-poster bed, its curtains drawn, stands
with its head against a side wall opposite the fire, with a ewer and
bowl on a stand beside it. There is another table and chair by the
window. Two ancient and worm-eaten wooden-armed chairs with
leather-padded seats face each other on either side of the hearth; a
long seventeenth-century benchstool guards the foot of the bed. There
is no other furniture. The windows are hidden by folding shutters,
now latched across; there are no hangings, drawings or pictures,
except for a framed engraving, on the wall above the fire, of the
last but one monarch, Queen Anne, and a small tarnished mirror by the
wall-sconce.

Ranged by the door lie the leather trunk, lid flung
open on clothes, and the brassbound wooden chest. The fire and its
shifting lights and shadows somewhat hide the room's bareness, and at
least the old half-panelling and uncarpeted yet polished broadplanks
are warm.

The nephew fills his glass from a blue-and-white
china decanter of madeira, then rises and goes to the fire. He stares
down at it for a few moments in silence. He has unbuckled his
neck-stock and put on a damask night-gown (at that period a loose
informal coat, not what it means today) over his long waistcoat and
breeches. He has also taken his wig off, revealing that he is
shaven-headed to the apparent point, in the poor light, of baldness;
and indeed looks like nothing so much as a modem skinhead, did not
his clothes deny it. His riding-coat and long suit-coat, and the
fashionably brief campaign wig, hang from hooks by the door, the
top-boots and sword stand below. His uncle has remained more formally
dressed, and still wears his hat and much fuller wig, whose knot-ends
lie against his coat. The two men bear little physical resemblance.
The nephew is slightly built, and his face shows, as he stares at the
fire, a blend of fastidiousness and intransigence. It is, with its
aquiline nose and fine mouth, not an unhandsome face; but something
broods in it. It certainly does not suggest any lack of breeding or
urbanity, indeed he looks like a man confident, even certain, of his
position in life, and of his general philosophy, despite his
comparative youth. But unmistakably it suggests will, and an
indifference to all that is not that will.

Its present meditative expression is in marked
contrast to that of the corpulent uncle, at first sight a man of more
imposing mien:: jowly, doctorial, heavy-browed, incipiently choleric.
Yet for all that he seems distinctly less at ease than his companion,
whose stance in front of the fire, the downbent face, he now
contemplates. His look reveals a certain wryness, not untinged with
impatience. But he ends by looking down at his plate. His quick
glance up, when suddenly the younger man speaks, although it is
seemingly to the fire, suggests that the meal, like the journey, has
lacked conversation.

'I thank you for bearing with me, Lacy. And my
vacua.'

'I had fair warning, sir. And fair fee.'

'Even so. For one to whom speech must be the bread of
life ... I fear I have been poor company.'

They do not speak like nephew and uncle. The older
man produces a snuffbox; and slides a sly look under his eyebrows at
his interlocutor.

'Speech has brought me rotten cabbages before now.
And far worse rewards than yours.' He takes snuff. 'No more than the
cabbages themselves, on occasion.'

The man by the fire looks back then, with a faint
smile. 'I'll wager never such a part as this.'

'I can't deny you there, sir. Most assuredly no such
part as this.'

'I am grateful. You have played it well.'

The older man bows, though with a perceptibly mock
exaggeration.

'I might have played it better still had I...' but he
breaks off, and opens his hands.

'Had you had more confidence in the author?'

'In his final design, Mr Bartholomew. With respect.'

The younger man stares back at the fire.

'We might all say that, might we not? In comoedia
vitae.'

'True, sir.' He takes a lace handkerchief out and
dabs at his nose. 'But our craft conforms us. We like to have our
morrows fixed. Therein cloth lie our art. Without we are disarmed of
half our powers, sir.'

'I have not remarked it.'

The actor smiles down, and closes his snuffbox. The
younger man walks slowly to the window and idly unlatches the
shutters, and folds a creaking half-panel back. He looks out, almost
as if he expects to see someone waiting below in the market-place.
But it is empty now and dark. In one or two of the surrounding houses
windows shine faintly with candlelight. There is still a very barely
perceptible luminescence, a last breath of the gone day, in the
western sky; and stars, some nearly overhead, announce that the sky
continues to clear eastwards. He recloses the shutter and turns to
face the man at the table.

'We may ride the same road for an hour tomorrow. Then
we must part.'

The older man looks down with a slight rise of his
eyebrows and a tilted nod of reluctant acquiescence, like a
chess-player forced to acknowledge he has met his master.

'I trust I may at least hope to meet you in more
auspicious circumstances.'

'If fortune wishes it.'

The actor gives him a prolonged look.

'Come, sir. At this happy juncture -did you yourself
not mock at superstition but a day or two ago? You speak as if
fortune is your foe.'

'Hazard is no superstition, Lacy.'

'One throw of the dice, perhaps. But you may throw
again.'

'May one cross the Rubicon twice?'

'But the young lady -'

'This time ... or never more.'

Lacy is silent a moment.

'My dear sir, with all respect, you take too tragical
a view of matters. You are no Romeo in a history, bound upon
destiny's wheel. Such notions are but a poet's contrivance, to
achieve his effect.' He pauses, but gets no answer. 'Very well, you
may fail this time in your venture, as you tell me you failed before.
But may you not try again - as true lovers must? The old adage warns
us so.'

The young man goes back to his chair and sits, and
once more stares at the fire a long moment.

'Say it were a history that has neither Romeo nor
Juliet. But another end, as dark as the darkest night.' He looks up.
There is a sudden force, a directness in his look. 'What then, Lacy?'

'The comparison is better made between ourselves.
When you speak thus, it is I who am thrown into darkest night.'

Again the younger man is slow to reply.

'Allow me to put a strange fancy to you. You spake
just now of fixed morrows. Suppose one came to you, to you alone, and
said that he had pierced the secrets of the world to come - I mean
not those of Heaven, but of this world we live in. Who could persuade
you he was no fairbooth charlatan, but had truly discovered what he
pretended by some secret study, mathematick science, astrology, what
you will. Then told you of the world to come, what shall happen
tomorrow, shall happen this day month, next year, a hundred, a
thousand years from now. All, as in a history. Now - would you run
crying it in the streets or keep silent?'

'I should first doubt my own mind.'

'But if that doubt were removed by some irrefutable
proof?

'Then I should warn my fellow-men. So that they might
consider to avoid what might harm them.'

'Very well. But now further suppose that this prophet
reveals that the predestinate future of this world is full of fire
and plague, of civil commotion, of endless calamity. What then? Is
the case the same?'

'I cannot conceive your case, sir. How it should be
proven.'

'Bear with me. It is but conjecture. Let us grant he
shall find proof to convince you.'

'You are too deep for me, Mr Bartholomew. If it be in
the stars that my house shall be struck by a thunderbolt tomorrow, I
grant you I may not avert that. Yet if it be also in the stars that I
may be told as much, I can surely remove from my house in the
expectation.'

'But suppose the bolt will strike you, wheresoe'er
you flee or shelter? You are none the better off. You should as well
have stayed at home. Besides, he might not know how you in person
should die, or when such and such an evil fall on any one of mankind,
no more than that one day it must fall on most. I would ask this,
Lacy. Would you not, if such a man, before coming to you, advised you
of his purpose in coming, so that you had time to reflect and conquer
natural curiosity - would you not most wisely refuse to hear a single
word from him??