17th June 1854:
An impossibility, a contradiction: to pray for belief. He knows everything. He “unto whom all hearts be open.” He punishes me with Felix’s death, for perpetrating this impossibility. Or: for my false belief, the belief in my own pretence.
Or: Felix’s death: merely a proof.
18th June 1854:
No, I will not believe it. I will acknowledge the insoluble mathematics of nature, the wanton waste and the resourcefulness of her economy; that compared with the brief life of countless creatures, my Felix may be said to have lived an age; that everywhere, if seeds and eggs be counted, examples abound of gross destruction so that few may survive; that humankind, albeit leniently accommodated, is not excused from this scheme. But I cannot believe that in this prodigious arbitrariness there is any purpose that grants life to a child only to withdraw it after two years; that it is not the case, rather, that he might as well not have existed; that he holds, in truth, in the great course of things, no place, value or identity compatible with the vain fabric of loving recognition that I, that we all, have built around him.…
He walks and walks, to stop the falling, all the way back to Lyme. If Lyme is still there. It is — emerging from the curtains of rain. But how pathetic and pitiable it looks; the little huddle of habitation, the quaint tumble of roofs, the cluster of rocking boats cradled in the curving arm of the Cobb.
And it was meant to be a holiday. And now it has become an experience from which he must recover, slowly convalesce. Though no one can help or nurse him but himself. No one will even know how he is not himself, how far he has fallen through himself, except himself. And the only remedy he has is to pretend. To pretend so hard that one day, perhaps, he will forget he is pretending. He will do his best, and even achieve, quite soon, some outward approximation of recovery, so that, back in Launceston that same summer, even his own father will not guess the true extent of the damage. The lad is strangely out of sorts, to be sure. So much for the benefits of sea air. Some talk of an untimely ailment, a fever, a soaking in a summer storm. As like as not, some woman is at the bottom of it. At any rate, his son is oddly reluctant to discuss the whole Tavistock question. Well, well, let the cloud pass, give everything its time.
Matthew says nothing. And John Pearce treads carefully. But remarkable recoveries — or rescues — happen. And Matthew has a capacity for happiness. And John Pearce is doubly glad that Rector Hunt should call that afternoon about his clock, and that he should bring his daughter with him.
Or that is how I like to see it. That is how I wish it to have happened. I give to Matthew’s life that very quality of benign design that he had already glimpsed might be lacking from the universe. I choose to believe that Matthew first met Elizabeth in his father’s office in Launceston that same July. And I choose to believe that at the very first meeting Matthew would have had the overwhelming perception that here, when his thoughts had already shown him how terribly you could go adrift, was the true, sure ground of his life. That he would have felt himself falling, sinking, collapsing again, not with that fearful sense of falling into a void, but with a sense of miraculous, restoring gravitation.
The scene: John Pearce’s workshop in Bell Street, Launceston. July sunshine — let’s suppose there was sunshine — slanting through the workshop windows on to the scratched and worn surfaces of the workbenches and on to the little brass pieces — cogs, springs, levers — laid out like some miniature treasury on rectangles of black felt. Matthew would have been impressed by the improvements to the workshop. His father now employed two journeymen and one apprentice, but he still sat, himself, at his workbench, eye-glass crammed into one eye, conforming to the image Matthew still retained of him from childhood: a vaguely magician-like figure, hunched over his little clockwork world, unwittingly miming the classic analogy for the existence of a Creator, and seeming to be engaged not only in the making of clocks but in the manufacture of this vital stuff called Time, this stuff which Matthew still thought of as being essentially human in meaning, the companion and guardian of human affairs.
A clock ticks on the mantelpiece.…
A desultory conversation in progress: Launceston gossip. John notes yet again the want of his son’s usual buoyancy and curiosity. Then the little bell in the office tinkles and John says, “Ah,” and drops his eyeglass neatly into his right hand, removes his apron, rolls down his sleeves and reaches for his jacket. “That will be Rector Hunt.”
Or perhaps there was nothing so apparently casual about this encounter. Perhaps John had said to Matthew: “The Reverend Hunt, from Burlford, will be calling by about his clock. He would be pleased to meet you.” Which is why Matthew was there. Or perhaps John, on a previous occasion, had said to the Rector, a man who, living in a household of women, felt a want of educated male conversation and a vague sense of being out of touch with the world, “Matthew will be home in July, so please call by — and you can see how the clock comes along.” But whether John had anticipated the Rector’s being accompanied by his elder daughter is another matter. And whether Rector Hunt had said to Elizabeth, “I shall be paying a call on Pearce the clockmaker — I believe his son, a Brasenose man, may be there. Perhaps you’d care to join me?” is another matter still. But why should Elizabeth have decided to attend her father about so humdrum a matter as a clock, when she might have passed her time in Launceston much more pleasurably, at the dressmaker’s or milliner’s, say?
Matthew would have gone with his father into the office, ready to offer his hand to Rector Hunt, but his eyes would have been compelled to meet first — and have been met quickly, meekly — by the eyes (I see them as glossy brown) of his daughter. A just-detectable hiatus would have occurred in which a just-detectable mutual blush would have touched the faces of the two young people. Then, after exchanged pleasantries and at a polite inquiry from the Rector and some prompting from his father, Matthew would have found himself rehearsing what he would have already rehearsed to his father, namely his account of the opening of the Bristol and Exeter Railway and of the jubilant arrival, just two months ago now, at the Exeter terminus of the first train from Paddington. And Rector Hunt and his daughter (if with different motives) would have listened with genuine awe to his tale. Railways existed, had existed for some thirty years in Cornwall — little, narrow-gauge haulage lines serving the north coast ports. But the Rector and his daughter would never have seen a steam engine. And these hurtling contraptions, which could take a man from his breakfast in London and set him down for dinner in Devon, they would have regarded with amazement and not a little dread.
Matthew does not overdo his scene-painting, but his voice betrays a curious urgency, and he finds himself gratified, peculiarly enlightened, by the looks of astonishment and vague fear on his listeners’ faces. As the train of his description is greeted by the cheering crowds at Exeter, a train of thought passes through his mind that fills him — he cannot say how much it has to do with Miss Hunt’s look of appealing vulnerability — with a sudden gush of liberating relief. The fear of the new, he thinks, is as primitive, as superstitious, as the fear of the old. We fear what we do not know. To the vole, the hawk is a monster of tearing beak and talons; only a man sees its aerial grace and skill. How many things that are dreadful to man might not be, in the eyes of their Maker, comely and fitting?