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.