And what, in the end, would he have judged to have been worse? His son-in-law’s defection to the forces of godlessness? Or his daughter’s rush — with his blessing, oh yes, with his politic blessing at the time — into the arms of Mammon, that false god that it was his duty to denounce in his sermons?
And what comfort had it brought her?
This search for buried treasure. This fever of the mines. The hills and vales of the south-west are still, apparently, sprinkled with the forlorn chimneys, the ruined engine-houses and overgrown waste-heaps of old mines. With the wind sighing around them, they have acquired, no doubt, a soulful effect, like the rusting hulks of old locomotives.
This alchemical quest to turn base metals into pocketable gold. This search, if not for the real thing, then for the substitute thing, the thing that, perhaps, will do just as well. The money. The money. First copper, then tin. Then — O heir of the Ellisons! O fully lifelike model fresh from the factory of the dead! — plastic.
And Matthew? And Matthew — gone on his soulless way? Throughout these years — or for part of them — in which the market in ore peaked then fell, we must assume he was living in Launceston, where he ministered to the ailing John Pearce and weaned him off the bottle. A Christian enough picture for a man who had forsaken Christianity. Did he attempt to revive his father’s neglected clock-making business? Did he — could he? — practise still as a surveyor? Did he endure a barrage of gossip, both on his father’s account and on account of his former, dissolved marriage; and did his father, who at one time, in his cups, had rebuked his son for not having become a famous man, ever chuckle over the rueful joke that at least they were reunited, now, in mutual ignominy?
He never wrote another word in the Notebooks. Not one word. But he preserved them. Why? Did he ever show them to his father? No, I think not. Not to the man who had once kept him ruthlessly at his school books and who only in his last hours yielded up a supposedly lost Bible. They both had things, this father and son, they thought it best to keep from each other.
And when John Pearce, creator of the original, ticking wedding gift, breathed his last, Matthew kept the Bible, as well as the Notebooks. Both were with him when he wound up his affairs in Launceston and travelled to Plymouth, thence to voyage to the New World. Then on that last night, as the Atlantic drizzle drenched Plymouth, he sent the Notebooks to Elizabeth, but held on to the Bible.
Question: did she or didn’t she — with Neale, even before that afternoon of the bees? The birds and the bees. Question: did she stop loving him, as (so she believed, let’s suppose) he had stopped loving her? Or did she love him still, even as the price of copper plummeted, even as Matthew looked his last on England?
Forget the other stuff. Stick to the love-interest. The ever-popular love-interest. What the audience wants. When all is said and done and the meaning of the universe has been fully squeezed dry, Hamlet sees Laertes usurping Ophelia’s grave (these dramatic strokes), picks a fight with him, spikes himself on a rapier and so achieves in the heat of the hour what he might have achieved, with a bare bodkin, after much exhausting philosophical deliberation. Matthew quits Burlford, to return to his birthplace. And Elizabeth quits Burlford, to marry into copper. Years later, she receives a package.
She kept them. (What did she do — hide them from Neale?) She kept them, persuaded or not by Lucy. And kept the letter too. Would she have replied? But he left no forwarding address. He wished to disappear. And he did, he did. So would she have kept them anyway, or was it only that other news, that would have reached her not long afterwards — news not from but of her former husband — that decided her?
For the bare fact is — I have done my additional research: a simple matter of consulting shipping registers — her former husband never reached the New World. The Juno went down on 14th April 1869 in a storm some miles west of the Scillies (what final terror, or acceptance? what revelations, confirmations — wrenched-out prayers?); and among the list of those who perished was Matthew Pearce, surveyor, of Launceston.
But there he sits, for now, on terra firma, in terra cognita, pen in hand, in his lodgings in Plymouth. The rain, a gentle, enclosing rain with no hint of fury to come, patters at the window and induces in him seafaring, far-ranging, spacious thoughts. By the light of the oil-lamp, he fills the page, as once he filled so many pages in his study at Burlford. This need to write it down. To describe it, to know it: this strange land of the living. He describes the rain. He describes the gaggles of displaced miners who mill round Plymouth in the spring of 1869. He says he will go to take one last look at Brunel’s bridge. Memories, and memories of memories, flood in.
A New World. A new life — a new name. Forget it all. Start again. Is it possible? There will always be what remains. He loved her. He wrote it down: that flimsy, romantic thing, a love letter. And Elizabeth? She kept the letter, she kept the Notebooks. She loved him still.
19
I have dipped into Darwin. It’s heavy going. The prose thick, grey and formidable, like porridge. It is hard to see in this sober stodge the bombshell which tore apart Matthew’s life and horrified Victorian society. Perhaps this proves Darwin’s point. Species adapt. Yesterday’s cataclysm is today’s absorbed fact. Yet it is equally hard to see, behind these plodding, scrupulous, epoch-making words, the man who wrote them. To picture the young Charles Darwin who set sail one day from Plymouth just as Matthew did, though this would have been nearly forty years before, when Matthew was only a boy of twelve, trying to absorb the recent cataclysm of his mother’s death. And the voyage was somewhat longer.
New worlds. New life. Matthew perished barely a day from port. Darwin returned, safe and sound, after five years’ roving, with the inklings of a new picture of the universe.
So was he the adventurous sort? A budding Sir Walter? Hardly. Seasick, it seems, all the time. And comes back not exactly with a booty of rattling yarns. But not, at one time at least, such a dull swot either. A dab-hand with a shot-gun. Footloose, outdoor type. His father, alarmed at his son’s idle ways, steered him first, abortively, towards medicine, then, of all things, towards the Church.
Was there a compartment in Darwin’s later fully freighted mind — a subsection of his own Theory of Natural Selection — which gave due consideration to the question of how individuals who undertake momentous undertakings — are selected? Did he ever ask: but why me? Why me? The captain of the Beagle, an amateur phrenologist, nearly rejected Darwin as a suitable shipmate on account of the shape of his nose. And it is a well-recorded fact that the great Theory, some twenty years in the forming, was only rushed into publication because someone else — a fellow called Wallace — seemed to have got hold of the same idea. Were it not for the mutual reasonableness of the two parties (not typical, I can vouch, of your rival men of learning) and for the fact that Wallace was tied up at the time in the Celebes, we might have had Wallace’s Theory of Natural Selection — Wallacism, Wallacists and Neo-Wallacists.
But what’s in a name?
So what became of the feckless duck-shooter (and prospective priest)? He signs on, more by chance than design, as naturalist with the Beagle. Voyages for five years to the far corners of the earth. Then ends up a studious and sickly recluse, writing endless notes in a house in Kent. So, he had seen the world? The rest was contemplation? To challenge the universe from a house in Kent!