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.
16
Qui quaerit, invenit. I wonder.
I received a letter from a Major Pilkington, whose exact function and status remain far from clear to me, but who appears to be the final clearing-house for any awkward but unignorable inquiry from the general public. I have tried to picture Major Pilkington, this man who (in a manner and language so different from Sam’s) has been the bearer of such significant if belated news. The name suggests some buffer of the old school. I see him therefore as a grey-moustached, reddish-cheeked, chubby-jowled figure, long since past his military zenith and thus edged into this dead-end, dead-letter job, which a sort of tendency to fat in his character enables him to perform with the appropriate cushioning tact. He looks (I imagine) more like a headmaster of the patient, understanding sort, or an inured but genial family doctor, than a major. “Now, what seems to be the trouble …?”