Ever After

15

What did it was the bees. The Rector’s innocent, Virgilian bees. It began with dinosaurs, but what brought things to the breaking point, to their final undoing, was the humble, humming bee.

You have to picture the scene. Matthew does not detail every moment of that June afternoon — though he makes it clear enough that this was the genuine, the irrevocable denouement. It seems that the Rector issued an ultimatum; and perhaps nothing less, in the end, would have satisfied Matthew. Perhaps the pitch of his conscience, so long attuned to its own dilemma, was such that it required and desired another’s pronouncement of judgement. Or, to put it another way, the Rector was part of Matthew by now: if he hadn’t existed, it would have been necessary for Matthew to invent him. You could say that when Matthew called at the Rectory that afternoon, he was only knocking at the door of his own soul. Except that that, of course, is the wrong way of putting it. Precisely the wrong way. What he was about to do was evict his soul from the premises, to send it packing. What he would have to say henceforth would be: My soul? My soul? I do not possess such a thing.

24th June 1860:

… and, amidst everything, I still ask myself, did I will it to have fallen out thus, or was the hand of chance still my final arbiter? If the latter, it would not be inappropriate; since I am committed now — oh, committed! — to a random universe, the seeming capacity of which to present to our eyes instances of omniscient purpose only deludes us. What I ask is: did I truly set out this afternoon — I cannot remember now my exact feelings, it seems such an age ago — prepared, by my own determination, to take upon myself the consequences which now, indeed, I must accept; or was this to have been, at worst, but another addition to our stretched chain of “disputations”? But then was not, increasingly, the very drift of those disputations towards precipitating, in the heat they generated, what I myself could not in cold blood initiate?

Cold blood! Is my blood cold? It rushes now round my veins with such animal tumult. Did I not, like some spiteful heretic, like some cowardly deserter to the devil’s side (such phrases!), repeatedly tempt the good man to deliver his thunderbolt? As if, so long as he failed to do so, I might draw the mean and furtive satisfaction that, as I was a doubter of my faith (doubter — I must say now “abjurer”!), so he lacked the courage of his calling.

Well, I cannot charge him with that now.

And if, indeed, my intention, all along, was so resolved and adamant, then circumstances could not have been better disposed to dissuade me, to mollify me. Did this seeming perversity only spur me on? The sweet midsummer weather. Sailing clouds and the scent of hay. Dog roses in bloom. And the good Rector so eager to be examining his hives that he quite neglected his normal air, on my calling, of testy forbearance, quite failed to prepare himself for weighty altercation. Thus was I like the bringer of bad news who comes upon a household in a state of happy levity and is compelled, in spite of himself, to reciprocate the good humour.

“Come, come, my dear Matthew, you must assist. Surely you have noticed — you with your eye for such things — there never was such a year for clover. The combs will be oozing.” And, so saying, in the full holiday mood of his enthusiasm, he bade me don a spare pair of his long-sleeved gauntlets and one of his long-veiled straw hats — oh there was comedy in the tragedy! And in this clownish costume I came to my final declaration and he to his final fulmination, not because such was at first the tenor of our discourse, but because he would not have it that a system so wondrously disciplined as the society of the honey-bee, or a structure so ingenious as the honeycomb, not to say a thing so delectable as honey itself — surely the veritable manna from heaven — could exhibit anything other than the work of a benign and intelligent Creator.

“I only urge you,” I insisted, “to read what Mr Darwin has written on the subject in his chapter on instincts. How even a skill as consummate as that of the hive bee in making cells may be arrived at by a gradual modification of instincts which other species also demonstrate, if less perfectly. How instincts, no less than organic structures, are the result of an adaptation of nature’s random variations. And the only principle behind this process is neither the will of God nor, indeed, as you will have it, the work of Darwin’s master, the devil, but, in Darwin’s phrase”—I confess I had begun to shout, the flapping veil before my eyes seeming to smother my words—“the continual and irrepressible struggle for existence!”

Whereupon the Rector cried, with a force that seemed to take even him by surprise, “Damn your Darwin! Damn your detestable Darwin, sir!” There was a moment when I thought he might add, “And damn you, sir!” But he did not do this. He strode up the row of hives, striking with his gauntleted fist the trunk of one of the apple trees, then strode back to deliver upon me his verdict, his anathema. Was there ever such a strange priestly garb for the purpose? Though who knows if it were not those outlandish masks — neither of us could clearly see the other’s face — that made such terrible words possible?

And, truly, even as I received my sentence, part of me still saw with the old man’s believing — credulous, I should say — eyes. Had I not once, too, drawn short at the great mystery of the instincts? Had I not, like the Rector, taken the industry of the honey-bee as one of the sublimest testimonies to the hand of Providence, demonstrating, moreover, like the milk of cattle (oh milk and honey!), that the chief care of Providence was the good of mankind? And if this were illusion, was it not a sweet and benign illusion? And was not exposing it but an act of wanton destructiveness — as if, there and then, I had lifted up the wooden roof of one of the hives and, upon a mindless whim, dashed to pieces the little insect Jerusalem within? See, it is as nothing!

(And yet — invincible instinct! — they would have repaired it at once.)

And even as the Rector spoke, I could not help thinking of the many pounds of the Rector’s honey we have consumed at Leigh House, and how, in the days when I was still her mentor in such things, I instructed Lucy in the “miracle” of its manufacture, holding it up to her as something to wonder at and reverence: “So, my dear Lucy, the honey we eat is made from flowers — does it not taste as sweet as a flower looks? — and the magician who performs this trick is the bee.”

She is asleep now, or so I hope. So I hope are they all. I am alone in the house with my children. Asleep or awake, they are frightened, and must all face the morrow. They are none of them so young as not to ask, in their own way: What will become of us?

And my dear Liz has departed for the Rectory. I do not know — there have been so many alternations of anger and tears — whether to remonstrate with him or to take his side (his “side”!). I do not know when, or if, she will return. Yet her children are here, she did not think to bundle them with her — I cannot therefore be such an ogre. For them, at least, she must return.

“How could you do this? How could you do this?!”—I will always hear her repeated cry. As if all this too were only a perverse, destructive whim. The little honey-hive of our home. The nectar of our happiness. Fifteen years!

I said nothing of Neale. It seemed to me that to make such a reference was inadmissible, though more than once I thought her look challenged me, even desired me to do so. To make this domestic drama no more than one of those familiar, sordid upheavals by which households fall apart. When she had stopped raging, I put myself, as resolutely as I could, at her mercy: “If I am no longer to make my home here in your father’s parish, then I ask you to choose between your father and me. If the former, do not suppose I shall cease to provide for you.” “Oh,” she said, eyeing me fiercely and tossing her head, as if she would turn this into some common jilting, “do not suppose I shall not be taken care of!”

She is gone. The night is still and starry. And the chimes from the church tower — one, two o’clock — seem to tell me she has made her choice.

I cannot sleep. I cannot move. I keep company with this notebook. This book! This book! What have I become, that I have parted from my wife, but I still keep company with this book?

Do we have souls? Do bees? Did Matthew have a soul? If not, why should he have written, over a period of six years, those pages in which it is no misapplication of a well-worked phrase to say he “laid bare his soul”?

But then the Notebooks ceased on that June day in 1860—or rather, a little later, when he had left wife, children and home. And they were, by his own description, the record of his life as a fiction: “the beginning of my make-belief.” From now on, he would be “real”—he would live according to the way things truly were. But if the soul is a fiction, why should a book — a few ideas set down on the page — make so much difference to the world? Did people have souls until 1859, when Darwin published his momentous work, then suddenly cease to have them?

And if the soul is a fiction, and it is all just a struggle for existence, why do we ever reach beyond ourselves to the existence of others, not to say beyond existence itself? Why do we think of the dead? And why, and for whom, did Matthew write the Notebooks at all? For some all-viewing, all-reading witness (like God in the sky)? For some “kindred soul” in the audience of the future (oh yes — an avid theatre-goer) who unexpectedly “identifies,” as the saying goes, with the plight of this “character” up there on the stage of the past?

Why do bees make honey? They say it will last, uncorrupted, for a thousand years. People have eaten honey from the tombs of the pharaohs. They say it is as good as gold.

I see the two men in the little apiary at the far corner of the garden. I see Ruth pacing beside the tumbledown fence, learning her parts. They stoop over the first hive. They have an observer (as well as God in the sky): the Rector’s wife — let’s suppose she was watching, watching quite intently, from a rear window of the Rectory. She knows that something is in the offing. She knows that the two men do not see eye to eye. It is some while since she has indulged the fond notion that Matthew is like a son to her husband (there have been regrettable developments by this time, with Matthew’s own father). And her former motherly soft spot for her son-in-law (who, after all, scarcely had a mother of his own) has hardened of late. It is high time the Rector took things firmly in hand. And now here is Matthew again, showing up with his face like the calm before a storm. And here is her husband employing his usual blustering, stalling, side-tracking tactics.

The sky is heaven-blue. The hives hum like little generators. Dressed in their grotesque costume, as if for some strange form of martial art, the two men bend over their peaceable task. The Rector has lit his curious, home-made smoking-device. They proceed to the second hive. The Rector removes its roof. They seem to confer. Then there is a distinct pause. The two men pull themselves upright. An evident disagreement. Some difference of opinion on the finer points of apiarian practice? Hardly. The exchange is more fraught, more passionate, than that. There is a pacing to and fro and flinging of arms — the older man waves his smoking-device like some useless gun. The inspection of the other hives is forgotten. More gesticulation. Then the gentle Rector seems suddenly to wax apoplectic. He throws aside his smoker: the smoke indeed might be issuing from his head. He shouts something at his companion, marches off to the very edge of the garden, delivers a blow to one of the apple trees, stands stiff and intent for an instant, like a man taking a final look at a cherished view, then turns.

You have to picture the scene. You have to reconstruct the moment, as patient palaeontologists reconstruct the anatomies of extinct beasts. If it were not for Matthew’s Notebook, nobody might have known it had happened at all, it might have been as though it never was. So what, on the part of this unforeseen testifier, is a little bit of creative licence? A little bit of fiction? The place: a rectory garden in Devon (it is like the setting for some vapid period piece — of course, Potter’s TV “realisation”). The time: a June afternoon in 1860. The persons: Gilbert Hunt (the Rector); Matthew Pearce, his son-in-law; (off-stage, Emily, the Rector’s wife). I don’t know what they really said, but all around them, like some counterpoint — it’s the same sound now as it would have been then — was the undesisting drone of bees.

… RECTOR: But look, look again at the contents of this hive! Look at the combs! You are aware that they are constructed upon a principle that is geometrically perfect. Geometrically perfect! Is it not astonishing? And you are to tell me that this is some freak, some stroke of chance? Have you no spirit of wonder? You may as well say that a rose is an ugly thing that stinks!

MATTHEW: I do not question the wondrousness of things — only that God made them so.

RECTOR: So, so. Then how comes your very wonderment? How comes your capacity to behold, marvel and inquire? How comes, Matthew, the marvel of your marvelling brain?

MATTHEW: In just such a way — I cannot tell exactly — as comes the marvel of the bee and the honeycomb.

RECTOR: Indeed! And you may as well have a honeycomb for a brain! Do you hold yourself as no more favoured than a bee?!

MATTHEW: That is no simple question. A bee, had he my faculty of speech, might profess that I lacked his faculty of flight, and his unrivalled ability to build in wax.

RECTOR: Do not joke with me, Matthew.

MATTHEW: I don’t joke. I say only that creation — I use your word — favours no species save as it adapts successfully to its means of existence. A million fossils tell us that nature discards as well as promotes. The bee and mankind are just two of her ventures.

RECTOR: I see, sir, I see. So we may as well shut the book of nature, and give thanks to no one when next we spread a little honey on our bread? And what of Holy Writ? We must have it out now, sir, it has come to this! What of the words of the prophets and evangelists? Come, speak your blasphemies!

MATTHEW: Poetry! Poetry! Like your precious Virgil, who so extolled the genius of the bees. Admirable, inspired and inspiring, and composed by those, I do not doubt, who believed what they set down. But poetry — fiction!

RECTOR: And your Darwin — who has had the bene fit of the world’s judgement for a little less time than the Bible — he only lacks the poetical inspiration to found a new creed?! By God, sir, by God, I charge you now to repeat your creed, here, before me, a minister of the church. And if you cannot — if you cannot, Matthew, if you will not — then, by God—

But I do not know, I cannot even invent, what the Rector said. I falter in my script-writing, just as the Rector himself, perhaps, faltered on the verge of his imprecation. Did he say, wavering desperately at the last moment, “But can you not pretend?” Did he utter, thinking of the scandal about to unleash itself on the quiet backwater of Burlford, only what an inner voice had uttered to Matthew for six years? “I give you one last chance. I bid you go back now to your home. I bid you say nothing of this to Elizabeth, nor to anyone. I bid you go through the motions — yes, if it must be so for you — of a God-fearing man, of the husband of your wife and the father of your children. And if you cannot do this, then never darken my church door again, nor this rectory, nor, with my blessing, the home of my daughter! Go sir! Choose your way!”

Did he compromise his own faith sufficient to beg another man to play false with his? Or did he, indeed (Matthew failing to recite his creed), draw himself up — in his bee-keeper’s hat — to his full anathematical height and thunder: “Then never henceforth, etc., etc.…”?

The June afternoon still blooms. The bees still go about their summery business. The Rector stands alone among his little congregation of hives. Beyond the garden is the green flurry of the beech copse. Beyond that, the hedged languor of fields; warm, unavailing hills.

And if we do not have souls, why should we have these — feelings? These moments that rack and enrapture us and take us by storm. Why should things matter?

He stares, in his quixotic outfit, at the little gate, set in the hedge, leading to the churchyard, through which Matthew has departed. He has shouted, twice: “Matthew!” For a moment, the sweetness of the afternoon turns to sheer nightmare around him. He sees himself in some medieval vision full of demons and terror. He is before the walls of some beleaguered city in which the pious cower for safety and he, their champion, is beating back, with the intrepid zeal which once he hoped to bring to the darkest corners of the earth, the ravening beast, Darwin. Then the vision melts into the mocking familiarity of Burlford church and its quiet churchyard, its trusting retinue of gravestones, and the immemorial murmur of bees.

At genus immortale manet, multosque per annos Stat fortuna domus …

Poetry! Fiction!

How long does he stand there? The Rector’s wife watches him. She knows that something extraordinary has happened. She has seen Matthew leave abruptly, not by the way he came but by the garden gate, and has watched the Rector watch him walk — retreat (so she pictures it) — across the churchyard and so out by the lych-gate to the street.

Well, and about time too. A few sharp words. For his own good. She feels a moment’s bristling solidarity with her husband, a moment’s pang for a stronger man she once knew.

But the Rector does not move. He stands there stock-still. At last he turns and walks slowly towards the house. He has quite forgotten to replace the roof on the second hive and quite omitted to inspect the remaining hives. And, as the Rector’s wife well knows, if you do not attend to the combs when the bees are in full production, then you will have trouble, you will have swarms. Not to mention the need to extract the honey — the golden honey which, for years now, it has been her proud custom, with a little sweet glance to her husband, to press upon guests for tea at the Rectory: “Now, you are not to go without tasting some of Gilbert’s celebrated honey.…”

The Rector walks towards the house, though not to speak to his wife. There is a French window in his study which opens directly on to the garden, and he makes straight for it. He does not remove his bizarre accoutrements — the gauntlets and hat. It seems that whatever it is that has happened out there has made him more than usually forgetful. Then the Rector’s wife sees that the wide-brimmed hat with its attached gauze curtain is still performing a useful function — the same function that her veiled black bonnet, and Elizabeth’s too, performed at little Felix’s funeral. Her husband is shaking with tears.