There is a strong conservative streak in Matthew’s nature — an instinct, for all his inquisitiveness, for not looking too far about him, or looking only at what he wishes to see; and a tendency, for all his self-reliance and capability, to take a good deal for granted. During his spell at Oxford, the Tractarian question has been raging; but there is no evidence that, young man of religious conviction, he interested himself in the turmoil of an old Church facing new times. Nor, while he was at Oxford, does he seem to have pursued, though the opportunity was there, those areas of scientific debate which in later life he would grapple with for himself, as if they were new.
He sees himself as setting out to take his place in an advancing (if essentially unalterable) world: it is really his father who will have put him there. He thinks he has decided, himself, on his future profession: it is really his father, with his own instinct for not setting his sights too high, who has chosen it for him. And though John Pearce is no gambler (one Methodist vow he has not abjured) and would frown at his son’s forsaking the noble duty of Work so far as, for example, to dabble in railway or mining shares, Matthew would be astonished that his father’s dreams for him, if only when under the influence of brandy, extend beyond his becoming merely an accomplished, successful surveyor for the rest of his life.
It might also be claimed that there is in Matthew’s nature a strong capacity for happiness. Contentment, at least. A man who likes to think — and who does not like to think. Who has time for ideas but is peculiarly at home in the world of things. Who has no sense of his own importance but no vague notions, either, of his own abilities. Who has no airs and graces but a natural social ease — he is at home with people too. Who has the knack of knowing and not knowing.
Look at him now as, his journey resumed, the coach bears him onwards. Look into this bluff, obliging, earnest, amiable, in no way special face, which combines, right now, the stolidity of a man twice his age and the innocent glee of a child released from school. He has — he doesn’t know it yet — depths.
10th June 1854:
We are all aware, though none of us announces the fact, that today would have been the second birthday of little Felix. One and a half months dead — as if such posthumous calendars were significant. We go to the graveside, though I truly believe poor Felix, if he could speak, would bid us not to mark the inaugural day of a life so wastefully short.
A blooming, midsummer’s day. Swallows swooping around the church tower. A day designed to banish dark thoughts. Yet the thought does not escape me that it is almost ten years ago to the day that I made my excursion to Lyme. How I knew nothing then of my darling Liz, of my John, Christopher, Lucy and poor Felix. And yet how neither the passage of ten years nor all the heaped contentments they have brought me can expunge from my memory that former incident. How different my present powers of patience, of humble submission to Providence, had I not taken that journey. God knows how much since then I have pretended. God knows! — but there, in a phrase, is the essence of my pretence.
How earnestly have I endeavoured to persuade myself that I was the victim of some circumstantial or atmospheric “effect.” Was not the tableau perfect? The darkening sky, the lightning flashes at sea, the flapping and straining of the tarpaulin pitched above the exposed skull. I recall every detail. The sudden cry of the young woman who had slipped on the wet surface further down the path, so that everyone rushed from the enclosure to attend the accident, leaving me alone with the creature.
Why did I not rush too? To assist the damsel in distress. A little common gallantry might have saved me.
Yet I know — ten years cannot undo the knowledge — that what followed was not a moment of unreasoned panic and confusion but a moment of acute perspicacity. Truly, I was to rush too, a little while after the others, from under the tarpaulin; to rush quite past the little group helping the young lady, who must have regarded me with astonishment. I recall a cluster of umbrellas bouncing in the wind; the pale face of the victim (victim!) supported by one of her party while she tried the strength of her ankle; mud on her garments. But of what little note to me was this touching scene of mere human misfortune.…
He saw an ichthyosaur. It is difficult to know how people will react when they see an ichthyosaur. I can understand it with Felix — though I have never had children. Yes, I can understand it with Felix (though, even then, such a man as Matthew, cognisant of the infant mortality rate of the times — they bred hard, these Victorians, and with reason — might have thought: not so terrible, one in four). But with an ichthyosaur? An ichthyosaur.
Quite probably, he had seen one before. (I too have seen ichthyosaurs, in museums, in books. I have made a point of it, in fairness to Matthew. I look at them and don’t feel that much at all.) If he had been to London, which he probably had, he would have seen in the British Museum the famous ichthyosaur, thirty feet long, discovered (first of its kind to be so unearthed) by Mary Anning of Lyme Regis — beside which awesome exhibit this half-buried specimen, perhaps some fifteen feet, was a mere baby.
Yet museums are safe, orderly, artificial places, and here, still trapped in the rock from which workers employed by the same Mary Anning were labouring to release it, within sight of the plump hills of Dorset and the ruffled waters of Lyme Bay, was the thing itself. Here, in the very spot where— Here. Now. Then. He stood face to face with the skull of a beast that must have lived, so certain theories would have held, unimaginably longer ago than even the most generous computations from the Scripture allowed for the beginning of the world (yet which must have been created, so something inside him would have insisted, by God); so long ago that the fact of its existence had been almost irretrievably swallowed up in the fact of its extinction and only now, in the pathetically locatable nineteenth century, had it come to be known that it had existed at all; and thought— And thought what?
“… The moment of my unbelief. The beginning of my make-belief.…”
You have to picture the scene. You have to imagine these scenes in which for most people nothing changes, nothing is essentially different — all this drama and fuss, a passing storm, a twisted ankle — but for some people the world falls apart. I think that’s perhaps what Ruth did — all this drama! To picture how the world might be — how it might fall apart or hold, incredibly, together — in the eyes of other people.
Such a simple, unconscionable thing: to be another person.
A flapping tarpaulin. Sticky gobs of rain, a bruised, galvanic sky. The long, toothed jaw; the massive eye that stares through millions of years. He is the creature; the creature is him. He feels something open up inside him, so that he is vaster and emptier than he ever imagined, and feels himself starting to fall, and fall, through himself. He lurches on to the path, as if outward movement will stop this inward falling. He passes a startled young woman, who has fallen also, but less than her own length and on to solid ground. He blunders down another path, not the path he came up by but a path which takes him to the beach — as if to stop himself falling he must get to sea level. The storm swipes in off the sea. His hat blows off; he is soaked. Everything is lost and confused — sea, rocks, cliffs, sand — in swamping greyness.