He did it because of me. Because of me. Because there I was; and I wasn’t— I was the last straw. He did this thing: I know it can be done. He wanted — I see it now — to be something other than he was. He wanted all the deathly, death-defying magic of recognition, renown. This road to fame; these valleys of death. But he couldn’t pretend, he couldn’t turn the blind eye. It makes a difference. Oh it makes a difference! If I had known.
Look. The age of steam trains is already over — devoured by the ruthless age of ballerinas. I sit in the little école, mouthing some rigmarole from La Fontaine, with the April sun dancing at the window, and only streets away — if I had known — he is coming to his decision. This cancelling of the self by the self. To be or— Pull the trigger, then it won’t matter any more. April in Paris: surely this isn’t the end of the world? The patter of typewriters, the smell of coffee. But he really does it, he isn’t pretending or playing Hamlet. Little pieces of his hot, bright skull scattered across the floor. My father! My father!
18
He left Burlford in 1860. He never wrote another word in the Notebooks. But he didn’t throw them away, didn’t destroy them. Why? What were they for? Who was supposed to read them?
These notebook-keepers. This jotting urge. This need to set it down.
Is it possible that in the midst of his torment of soul (his what?) one tiny corner of Matthew’s eye was aimed at posterity? Some reader hereafter. Some unknown accreditor. “… and I am quite forgotten …” A small plea, after all, for non-extinction. A life, after all, beyond life.
Is it possible, in other words, that he was thinking of me?
And what did he suppose that I should think of him? Did he consider, being a one-time fossil-collector, that he might turn into just another fossil himself? That his spiritual torment might become just another thing of the past, and future generations would shrug at the meaninglessness that once so appalled him?
(Shrug! All the pills in the bottle.)
And Elizabeth? And Elizabeth. It must have seemed to her such a simple and terrible thing. It must have seemed to her that nothing, least of all the mere thoughts in a man’s head — albeit her own husband’s head — could counterweigh that undeniable, years-old possession of love, that palpable access to happiness. And did he suppose that the death of Felix was something she hadn’t felt too? That she didn’t nurse too that aching, child-sized absence, which only made more precious, nonetheless, the treasure they kept? What did it matter what he had or hadn’t faith in (though she wouldn’t have put it this way to her father), so long as he had such still-remaining happiness (was the whole stock ruined?) before him? And if it mattered so much that he rejected it, then it must mean that he’d never truly valued it. That he was pretending. That he didn’t really love her.
That’s what it must have felt like when she woke at night to an empty space beside her and knew that he was still down there at his desk: that he was deserting her. She must have thought of ways to get him back.
Who is Elizabeth? What is she? I see her as a warmhearted, trusting, perhaps rather brittle girl, emerging suddenly from the chrysalis of life at the Rectory into the full bloom of womanhood. Any man, perhaps, might have been the touchstone; it happened to be Matthew. It was her fortune, and her misfortune, to marry Matthew. And strange that this robust and outgoing man, to whom she had looked to lead her, some way at least, out of the sheltered existence that she could admit now had been hers, should himself slip so easily into domesticity and family-hood, should choose to settle, after all, right here in Burlford, under the eye, as it were, of the Rector and her mother, should even seem now and then to need a sort of shelter himself. It must mean he was happy; that she made him happy.
She has soft brown eyes and the smile of newly awakened, newly indulged instincts; the clear conscience and undissipated emotions of a clergyman’s daughter. What did she think of her husband’s “interests”—the specimen-collecting, the reading-up in learned tomes and journals? Perhaps they seemed, at first, endearingly, if vexingly, like her father’s interminable devotion to Virgil. Men seemed to need these “enthusiasms,” which rapidly became so all-consuming. She had thought, perhaps, that her own sex, with its needlework, sketching and piano-playing, was lacking in this respect. But now, watching little Christopher at play, watching the earnestness with which he went about it — a furrow in his brow just like one in Matthew’s — she would have felt more of concern than envy for these curious menfolk. But she would no more have dared knock on Matthew’s study door and urge him, for his own sake, to stop, than she would have dared ask her father (though perhaps she had the subversive thought) why he, a minister of the Christian church, should spend so much time in the company of a pagan poet.
She has deep-brown hair and a soft, ripe bosom. And she is perfectly capable, now that she has discovered her instincts, now that she knows, beyond all girlish dreams, the full extent of her power to give and receive love, of concurring absolutely with that motto (what if they were the words of a pagan poet?) which Matthew’s father had had inscribed for them. Yes. Amor vincit.
2nd March 1860:
Neale here again for Sunday dinner. And playing very merrily afterwards with John and Christopher and offering them fine exhortations as to how they are almost grown men now, with “places to take in the world.” Cannot help supposing that these visits are encouraged by Elizabeth in collusion with her father, so as to preserve our Sundays from the animosity that now so often springs up between myself and the Rector following our church-going. Suspect also that the Rector has had private words with Elizabeth about the parlous state of my father’s affairs — how, in plain terms, if I do not have a care and desist from lending my father money, the taint will spread to my own reputation.
Neither of these suspicions becomes me. Yet suspect also that Elizabeth wishes, out of an understandable and not uncharitable motive, to put Neale before me as an example of what I should be, and, indeed, once was before my falling off of these last months. That is: sanguine, cheerful, dependable, steady in my responsibilities and successful in my affairs. Yet cannot, for the life of me, see myself in Neale (or him in me) at all. Distrust my former liking of him. Despise my own distrust and upbraid my own seeming want of character. Should perhaps be simply jealous and act the plain part of jealousy. Nothing, in fact, might better restore me in my Lizzie’s eyes — proving I was a creature still of direct and vivid emotions, and not the remote occupant of my own incapacitating thoughts.
Yet I disdain to be — even as I become the very thing — the pallid husband resenting the vigorous interloper. And I disdain (pride! Oh, pride!) to engage in matrimonial histrionics, when it is indeed my “thoughts” which are the nub of the matter.
Neale asks, in seeming candour or in seeming tact, after my father. Wheal Talbot fares well. Neale, in truth, is a rich man, an eligible match, slow to take his pick, and the story goes that he pays court to the fair daughter of one of our reduced gentry — or, rather, that she pays court to him. He observes that Benson (do I remember our “scourge of the boll weevil”?) does well enough out of his arsenic licence, and wittily remarks that while he extracts the “cordial” of the mine, Benson extracts the poison. Adds that Benson may be obliged shortly to interrupt his war against the weevil, if the States, as seems almost certain, go to war themselves. Might advise him that at such time it would be opportune to buy back the arsenic rights and thus secure, against future vicissitudes, another basket for his eggs. Might remind him also that Wheal Talbot does not command the richest section of the lode, and he would do well to sink exploratory shafts for tin while there is time and capital. But this perhaps would be only my “circumspection” speaking — who now sees any perils in the copper market? — and I do not wish Liz to suppose that I resent Neale’s success.