A Maggot - John Fowles (36 page)

At Bideford the Collector, Mr Leverstock, was able to
confirm me from his register that on the and of May last the vessel
Elizabeth Ann, master Thomas Templeford, sailed for Bristol and on
the next day the coal-ship Henrietta, master James Parry, bound for
Swansea, as your deponent told.

Likewise the same told truth as to the Barbadoes inn,
where I inquired, and found he and his companion was recollected,
tho' little noticed, for their story was credited. He boasted to one
after she was left that she was gone to ask leave of her parents in
Bristol to marry him; naught else of import.

Now, sir, I must inform you also that the horse that
was left there is sold, and the landlord would claim it within his
right, for he kept it the one month paid and a month besides, or so
he says, and could keep it no more; nor would part with what he sold
it for, tho' I threatened it should come to law and he be hanged for
a horse-stealer; as I wish he were, he is an impudent, arrogant
fellow, and Mr Leverstock tells me, a great friend to the smugglers.
You may wish not, for so small a sum, and so 'tis left in abeyance.

Sir, I await your further instructions in re and
meanwhile respectfully attach an accompt of my fees and disbursements
to date, in the trust that you will ever count me your most devoted
and obedient servant,

Rich'd Pygge, attorney at
law

* * *

London, the 1st October

Your Grace,

I write in great haste. She we seek is found, though
she knows it not yet. My man is sure; for he took Jones to view her
secretly, which he hath done, and now affirms most positively, it is
she. She is late married to one John Lee, blacksmith, of Toad Lane in
the town of Manchester; and is several months gone with child, it
cannot be by him. Lee is said, Quaker, like her. They live in
poverty, in little better than a cellar, my man avers; for Lee has no
regular work, but is called preacher by his neighbours. She now plays
the housewife and very soul of piety. Her parents and sisters are
likewise in the town as Mr Pygge wrote. I trust I need not assure Yr
Grace that I proceed there at once - and humbly pray he will pardon
this present brevity, in the knowledge of its cause, and that I am
ever the most forward in his service,

H.A.

I inclose with this copy
of a letter received this day from Dr Hales, that is best known
(these few years past) for his worthy anathemata upon the evils of
spirituous liquors; yet I am told also of excellent report as a
natural philosopher, though more such as botanist than chymist. He is
friend to Mr Pope, that is one of his parishioners.

 
* * *

The First of October,

Corpus Christi College.

Sir,

I am pleased to assist any friend of the learned Mr
Saunderson. I have examined the piece of baked earth, upon which you
request an opinion, and regret I may come to no certain conclusion as
to its nature. 'Tis clear that it hath been subject to great heat,
and I doubt not great alteration of the original composition, that
alas doth make the chymical analysis thereof (in even the
best-furnished elaboratory) most difficult; for we may say in such

matters that fire is as an anacoluthia in grammar.
All natural logick of expression in the elements is made thereby
interrupted and most obscure, howe'er so skilled and moliminous the
adeptist. I may believe that before the incalescence the earth was
admixed or drenched with some element of character bituminous, yet
none has outlived the fire in sufficient size (nor upon colation) to
allow of a closer determination. The Royal Society (of which I have
the honour to be socius) doth hold in the collection of minerals and
stones bequeathed it by the great chymist and philosopher the Hon.
Robert Boyle some fragments from the banks of the Asphaltick Lake of
the Holy Land (that is, the Dead Sea) that do bear some resemblance,
if memory serves; and likewise have I, seen pieces not dissimilar
brought from the Asphaltum, or Lake of Pitch, that is found upon the
Spanish isle of Trinidadoe in the Indies; indeed somewhat the same
have I remarked where pitch is boiled and some portion has spilled
upon the ground beneath the vats or coppers. But yet unless I mistake
I detect a smell in these baked ashes that is neither of pitch
mineral (as these examples that I have cited) nor of pitch of pine,
or vegetable. Sir, if you can provide me of this soil a fresh portion
that is not burnt (that may doubtless be found adjoining), I should
be exceeding grateful, and may thereby the better enlighten you. Such
soil is not hitherto reported to be found in these isles, and may be
most apt to commerce, and of great enhancement to your client's
(whose name Mr Saunderson did not vouchsafe) estates.

I am, sir, your most obedient servant,

Stephen Hales D.D. R.S.S.

I am in Cambridge briefly,
and may be the better addressed at my living, that is at Teddington
in Middlesex.

* * *

THE TALL, gaunt man sits with an empty bowl of
pottage, wiped by bread as clean as if it had been well washed, on
the scrubbed wooden table before him, and stares at the woman
opposite. She is a less hungry, or more fastidious, eater, and does
it with cast-down eyes; so, it seems, to declare the very act of
eating vaguely immodest. The table stands before a huge grate and
large chimney, but no fire is lit and the pottage the woman still
eats is evidently cold. The fingers that hold the wooden spoon she
eats with look cold; and are cold. The fingers of her other hand lie
against the broken morning loaf, to gain some last warmth from its
baking. That, the two bowls, two battered pewter mugs and an
earthenware pitcher of water - only one thing else lies on the table,
a little to one side: a large octavo book. Its brown leather binding
is dog-eared, and it has lost its spine; and been repaired by a glued
patch of old canvas, so that one may only guess at its contents.

The room is a half-cellar, paved with flags, many of
which are cracked, with steps up to the street outside. The upper
shutter of the door there is thrown open and lets in a weak and
new-risen October sun; as do the two small windows beside it. The sun
is needed, for the scene is one of great penury. The cellar-room has
no carpet, not even a rush mat. The recently whitewashed walls are
similarly without adornment, except that of patches discoloured by
damp. There is no other furniture, beside the table and two chairs,
bar a wooden chest against the inner wall, that rests at either end
on rough-sawn baulks of timber, to keep its bottom off the
flagstones. Two iron pans and an ancient chafing-dish hang on nails
inside the chimney. There are the remains of a fire there, but it is
very small, confined by old bricks, a paltry thing beside the large
logs the seven-foot hearth must have been built to burn in its
beginnings.

Through an inner and doorless doorway beside the
chest can just be made out another and smaller room, and the end of a
bed.

That room has no light at all from outside. A shelf
fixed to the beam above the hearth has one or two other necessities;
an iron candlestick and two or three candle-ends, a square of
mirror-glass without a frame, a tinder-box and salt-box. And that is
all. A monastic cell could not have been more sparse.

Yet there are two strange things in this austere
scene. One is physical, for the floor above the room, though not
ceiled, is supported on two fine oak beams, almost black with age,
and each delicately fluted and chamfered downward to a narrow hanging
edge; as if a century or more before, in James I's or Elizabeth's
reign, the house had been a finer place, where even those who lived
or worked in the half-cellar were counted deserving of such elaborate
joinery. In truth it had served as shop to the merchant clothier who
then lived above. It was his customers who were granted such noble
beams.

The other strange thing is a virtue. Poverty is
associated today with loss of morale; and that with dirt and
disorder, both personal and domestic. This humble room is as clean as
a modern operating theatre: no dust, no dirt, not a single cobweb,
not a blemish on its strict tidiness. All is swept, washed, scrubbed,
more thoroughly shipshape than the most demanding bosun's mate could
want, as if its denizens have said to themselves: We have nothing,
and so may be godly. There was an equivalent saying of the time:
cruel to the flesh, kind to the soul. The virtue was not mere
cleanliness in adversity, but a kind of wakeful resilience; a latent
energy, a waiting will to change; a being set like a spring. We
accept this now, we will not accept this for ever. The cleanliness
was no more than a convenient and easily demonstrable symbol; a
physical emblem of a psychological cleanliness, spare and hard, a
dormant readiness for both martyrdom and militancy. That was why
comfortable established Christianity so mistrusted - as some of us
today mistrust conspicuous consumption, less for what it is than for
what it may bring - the outward signs of a strict, practical
Christianity in Dissent.

The man, although only in his mid-thirties, is
already going grey. He wears breeches and a loose white blouse, and
an armless jerkin, scarred, like his forearms and hands, by countless
smithy sparks. For this is john Lee, the blacksmith of Toad Lane;
though he has no forge, and is far more given now to hammering
something harder and more obdurate than iron, the souls of other men
and women. A tall, gaunt man, with an abstracted face and seemingly
far-seeing eyes. Something in them suggests he thinks too slowly ever
to smile; must endlessly digest before he might laugh, or offer an
opinion. He certainly does not look as if he has yet digested this
other being and wife, Rebecca opposite, in her coarse grey dress and
pure white cap; this latter an object as sober and sparse as the room
itself, without lace or frill, close over her ears. Only her hair and
her face have not changed; the grey dress and white cap cannot quite
hide why she was what she was. Those gentle brown eyes, that opaque
innocence in spite of all, that patience ... yet she has changed
elsewhere. There is now something also steadfast, almost learnt, in
her meekness; perhaps learnt from the man opposite; a new self,
defiant, determined by new circumstance and new conviction.

She pushes her bowl across the table to the man.

'Eat, thee. I have no stomach for it. And must to the
neasery.'

'It ails thee?'

'All shall be well, praise Jesus.'

'Thy father and I shall stand witness outside, and
pray for thee. If they'd stone thee for thy bygone sins, thee must
bear it, and remember thee art the Lord's new-born.'

'Yea, husband.'

'They too shall be judged when He comes.'

'Yea, yea. I know it.'

He looks at the offered bowl, but clearly has more on
his mind.

'There is a thing I would tell. I was given in the
night, but feared to wake thee while thee rested.'

"Twas well?'

'One came all in white upon a road, as I walked. And
he held a staff in the one hand, the Book in the other, and greeted
me. He said naught, beyond these words. Be patient, thee, for thy
time is nigh. Yea, thus he stood and spake, most clear, as clear as I
see thee now.'

'And who should he be?'

'Why, John the Prophet, praise the Lord. And more, he
smiled upon me, as his friend and good servant.'

She stares gravely at him a moment. 'The time is
nigh?'

"Tis as Brother Wardley says. Be resolute in
faith, and thee shalt be given signs.'

She looks down, towards where her stomach swells a
little, then up, and smiles faintly. Then she stands and goes to the
inner room, to re-appear with an iron bucket, which she bears across
the room and up the steps; unlatches the half-door, and disappears.
Only then does he draw her half-finished bowl closer, and begins to
eat what she has left. He tastes nothing, still thinking of his
dream. It is thin gruel, watery oatmeal mixed with one or two specks
of salt bacon and a few dark green leaves of fat-hen; the left-over
of the previous evening.

As soon as it is finished, he pulls the book close
and opens it; and it opens, as if by nature, at an inner title page,
that of the New Testament. It is an old Bible, of 16t9, and turned,
by its most frequent usage, into a Tetrevangelium. The content words
of the page are in a heart-shaped frame, heavily underlined in red
ink for lack of proper rubrication. They are surrounded by tiny
woodcuts of sacred emblems like the Paschal Lamb, the tented arms of
the Prophets, portraits of the Apostles, and most closely by those of
the four Witnesses. The man stares for a moment or two at the cut of
St John, a distinctly Jacobean and moustached gentleman who sits
writing at a table with a tame dodo - no, an eagle - sitting beside
him. But John Lee does not smile. He turns on to the saint's gospel,
and finds its fifteenth chapter: 'I am the true Vine, and my Father
is the husbandman'.

He stoops a little to read. It is clear, without any
ease, for his finger slowly traces what he reads, and his lips can be
seen silently moving, as if these words cannot be understood unless
they are also spoken in mind, not merely absorbed by it.

'Abide in mee, and I in you: As the branch cannot
beare fruit of