"Restoration" - читать интересную книгу автора (Tremain Rose)

Chapter Twenty. John's Ladle Almost Taken from Him

This night began what I now call my Time of Madness at Whittlesea.

There had been a Time Before. In the Time Before, as I have shown you, I believed that all my dealings with the Keepers and with the inmates were true and honest. I did not dissemble. I took out my lost skills from the darkness to which I had consigned them and laid them at the service of the community. I had been renamed and I strove to become worthy of that name. And if the old Merivel sometimes reappeared, sighing over his lost past, he also tried to make himself useful, as on the afternoon of the tarantella. As Pearce said of my oboe playing, it was evident to all that I was "making progress."

That "progress" could not continue after I entered the operating room of Margaret Fell with Katharine, for from that moment I became addicted to my own foulness so entirely that my mind, instead of contemplating the work of each day, was filled up with it and I entered willingly on the most terrible deceptions just to come to it again.

When I woke, on the morning after that first night, and remembered what I had done, I felt mortally afraid. I knelt down by my bed and confessed to God: "I have suffered a contamination of madness and now I am unclean and full of the Devil, but I will not do those things again, if you will help to drive the Devil from me!"

When I went down to breakfast in the kitchen, Hannah remarked that I looked pale, and I admitted to the Friends that I did not feel well that morning, it proving very difficult for me to swallow the porridge set before me, or even to hold my spoon because of a trembling in my hands.

I did not shun the work of the day, however, which included an airing for the inhabitants of William Harvey – always a most difficult and lengthy task, for before they can be brought out into the air all of them must be washed, some of their own excrement. And as the day progressed, the fear and shame by which I had been overcome upon waking gradually went from me and were replaced by a most acute longing to go into Margaret Fell and seize Katharine roughly by the hand and push her before me into the dark room and begin again on the shameless acts I had promised that morning to renounce.

And so began the pattern of each day during the Time of Madness: each morning, I vowed I would never, as long as I lived, touch Katharine again nor let her hand seek me out; each night, I lay and waited without sleeping for the moment when I could slip out into the darkness and go to find her.

It was soon known by the other inhabitants of Margaret Fell what kind of acts we performed in the operating room and the women would sometimes cluster by the door, listening, and when we came out some of them would claw at me, at my mouth and at my sex, and beg me to take them also. And this longing that they had and their knowledge of what I was doing made me feel very sick and afraid, for I knew that sooner or later some behaviour or word of theirs would betray me to the Keepers and I would be sent away. I was deceiving Pearce (perhaps for the first time in my life, for I had never before pretended to him that I was leading an honest life when I was not) and I was deceiving Ambrose and the others, who had taken me in and tried to make me one of them. But more terrible, perhaps, than either of these deceptions was my deceiving of Katharine who, finding herself in love with me, asked me to swear that I was in love with her and that, if the day came for me to leave Whittlesea, I would take her with me. And so I swore. But the truth was that I did not love her at all. Pity had drawn me to her, and my own lust, suddenly a most overpowering and demented thing, kept me there with her in the darkness. And when I asked myself whether, in time, I would grow to love her, I knew the answer: the possibility of my growing to love Katharine was as remote as the possibility of Celia growing to love me.

I had gone on, undiscovered in the Time of Madness, for about five weeks when, returning one night to my room near one o'clock, I heard a voice call out, "Merivel!"

I stood on the landing, shivering a little, certain that Robert had been found out at last and was being summoned as Merivel to be given his punishment. I waited and the voice called again, "Merivel!" And then I recognised it as Pearce's voice and I moved slowly towards his room.

I opened the door. He had lit a rushlight by his bed and was lying on his side with his face very near the taper and he held one of his thin hands out towards me, palm upwards, in the gesture of a beggar.

"John," I said, "what do you want?"

"Merivel…" he said again, and his voice sounded thick with his old catarrh, "I was waiting for you…"

"Waiting for me?"

"To come in. I heard you go out and I waited for you to return, so that I could call you and not wake the others."

"Yes," I said. "I go and walk in the air sometimes at night, if I cannot sleep…"

"I heard you."

I went nearer to Pearce. I know him so well that I can discern anger on his lips before he has uttered a word and I looked hard at him to see if it was there or not. It was not there, and the relief I felt was very great. What I could see, however, as I approached his bed, was that his face was running with sweat and that his cheeks (usually of such translucent whiteness it is difficult to believe that Pearce spends any of his time in the open air, let alone a great part of his day hoeing and pruning in his vegetable garden) had a hectic bright redness to them, the two things announcing to me at once that he had a high fever.

I went to him and laid my hand on his forehead. My hand burned.

"John…" I began.

"Yes. Very well. There is some fever. I was about to tell you that. I did not call you to repeat to me something I already know."

"Why did you call me, then?"

"I called you because…"

"What?"

"I cannot find my ladle. I think it has fallen and rolled under the bed."

I knelt down and felt about in the dust under his wooden bed, but could not discover it. I moved round and round the bed, searching under it as far as my arm would reach, but the thing was not there.

"I cannot see it, John."

"Please find it, Merivel."

"Why do you call me 'Merivel'?"

"Did I call you that?"

"Yes."

"When in truth you are… who? I cannot for just this one moment remember your other name."

"Robert."

"Robert?"

"Yes."

"And yet tonight, since this fever began… that name Robert seems to have slipped away from my mind and what I remember is Merivel and how we once together witnessed a very miraculous thing and that was a visible beating heart. Do you recall that?"

"Yes, I do, John."

"And you, because I could not, put your hand in and touched it."

"Yes."

"Yet the man felt nothing."

"He felt nothing."

"So pray for me, that I might become that person."

"Why?"

"To feel no pain in my heart or anywhere."

"Are you in pain?"

"Have you found the ladle?"

"No. It does not seem to be under the bed."

"Please try to find it."

"I do not know where else to look. Where shall I look?"

"Ssh. Don't raise your voice. You will wake the others."

"I shall wake the others unless you tell me about the pain. Is it the pain you had before, in the lung?"

"Could anyone have stolen my ladle?"

"No. And I will find it for you. Where is the pain, John? Show me or tell me. Where is it?"

Pearce looked up at me. His faded blue eyes, in this dim rushlight, looked a darker colour than they were. He withdrew his hand and placed it, in a hesitant way, against his chest.

I stood up. I told him I refused to continue my search for the ladle until I had listened to his breathing. Then I gently helped him to turn onto his back and folded back the bedclothes and laid my head (which a mere half hour ago Katharine had taken in her hands and forced to suckle her breast like a baby) first on his sternum and then lower on his diaphragm.

I found Pearce's ladle under his pillows and handed it to him. I told him I was going to boil water for a balsam inhalation, then I left him for a while and went to my room and washed myself, for the smell of Katharine seemed to cling to every part of me. I put on a clean nightshirt and combed my hair. Only then did I go down to the kitchen and begin to prepare the only remedies I and all the world of medical science could offer for my friend's condition, knowing as I worked that this time they would not be strong enough to make him well.

What I began that night and what we, the Keepers of Whittlesea, continued between us for ten days and nights was a constant vigil at Pearce's bedside.

On the fifth or sixth day, the pain of his breathing became so great for him that he whispered to me: "I would not have imagined longing, as ardently as I do, for my last breath."

We gave him opiates and as these entered his blood (there to be circulated to every part of him, as proved by his beloved mentor, WH) he seemed to fall, not into a sleep, but into a kind of dream of the past, so that he babbled to us of his mother who had been a widow for twenty years and who said prayers every day of her life for the soul of her dead husband, a barber, who had left her nothing but the tools of his trade with which, as soon as her son had been accepted into Caius College, she cut her own throat. She was buried not in the churchyard beside her husband, but "at a crossroads, distant from the village; a place where people on foot or on horseback or in carriages went this way or that, but did not stop." He told us how, if we opened his Bible at Matthew, Chapter Ten, we would find "the imprint of a bird across the writing." He said he could not remember what species of bird it was, only that it was small and that he had found it "freshly dead when I was a child and my mother still living." He seemed very anxious that we should see this imprint, so I took up his Bible and searched for it and found eventually – not in Matthew, but across two pages of Mark – a brown greasy smudge, such as might have been made by the accidental placing on the Holy Book of a hot cinnamon pancake. I showed it to Pearce. "Is this it, John?" I asked. He stared at it, his dilated pupils having difficulty focusing upon it. "Yes," he said at last. "The viscera were removed, for I did not want to pollute the words of Jesus. And then I laid the bird in and opened out the wings and closed the book and put weights upon it and pressed it like a flower."

I looked up at Hannah, who sat on the other side of Pearce's bed, bathing his brow from time to time with lavender water. She shook her head, showing me that she did not think this story about the pressed bird could be true, both of us being obliged to imagine the stench of the dead creature as it decayed in its tomb of sacred words. Had Pearce been well, I would have made the observation that the scent of death in a vertebrate does not resemble at all the scent of death in a flower, but, very far from being well, Pearce was by this time so weak that he could barely raise his head from the pillow, onto which what remained of his thin hair was gradually falling out.

The knowledge that Pearce was going to die was, during those ten days, like something draped round me, something that I wore but refused to take into my mind. And I do not think that this refusal was based upon any false hope that Ambrose or I could save him. What I had understood, I believe, is that no amount of knowing in advance that I was going to lose my friend could adequately prepare me for the actual loss of him when it came.

On the seventh or eighth day of Pearce's sickness, both the pain in his lungs and his fever diminished for a while. He asked me to lift him up and prop him with cushions "but not any with tassels or jewels on them or any gaudy ones such as you had in your house." I smiled. I put my hands gently into his armpits (where there seems to be no flesh any more, only a webbing of skin) and pulled him towards me while Daniel set some pillows at his back. I asked him if he would try to eat a little broth. He said he would and Daniel went down to fetch it for him (there is broth always ready in this household, the boiling of bones with onions and greens being a very frequent sight in the kitchen), thus leaving me alone with Pearce.

I sat down beside him, just within reach of his breath, which smelled of sulphur. He began to talk, quite lucidly, just as he once did at Bidnold, about the theory of spontaneous generation, in which he has never truly believed but which seems proven by the appearance of the living maggot upon dead matter. "Is it possible, Merivel," he asked, "that the maggot is not spontaneously generated but – as has been hypothesised – emerges from an egg so small it cannot be seen by the human eye?"

"I think it is possible, John."

"And thus, it would follow, if the human eye cannot see these infinitely small things, there may be other pieces of matter of whose existence we have not yet the slightest perception, would it not?"

"It would."

He sighed. He was silent for a long while. Then he said:

"It troubles me to take with me to my grave so much that I do not know."

"I would rather you did not talk about the grave, John," I said.

"Of course you would," he said acidly. "There are many matters, ever since I met you, on which you would have preferred me to remain silent. But that has not been my way. And now, there is one uncertainty I do not wish to carry with me. And that is what is going to happen to my things."

"What things?"

"Those few that are precious to me. You once called them my 'burning coals' in order to mock me."

Daniel arrived at this moment, thus sparing me the humiliation of having to compose yet another apology to Pearce, the syllables of which I find so difficult to pronounce, when what I longed for was for Pearce to beg my forgiveness for the thoughtless act he was about to commit: the act of leaving me.

Daniel set down a tray, on which had been placed a bowl of broth and a spoon and by the side of this a greenish fruit that Pearce immediately recognised as one of his own pears. He picked it up and felt it in his hand, then held it to his sore nose and sniffed it. "The perfume of pears," he said in the rapturous voice that always brought back to my mind our river excursions and Pearce's excess of joy at the sight of a mayfly, "I have loved for years."

Daniel grinned at me, then sat down beside him to help him sip the broth. Somewhat to my surprise, Pearce asked him gently to leave so that he could talk to me alone. The boy got up at once, passing me the spoon, and went out.

The broth was hot. I did not want Pearce to burn his mouth on it, so I took up a spoonful and blew upon it before guiding it to his lips. Silence descended upon us for a few moments as we both concentrated on the task of the spoon-feeding. But the effort of taking in sustenance seemed to weary Pearce very quickly and he told me to take the tray away and fetch pen and ink and paper instead.

What I wrote – although I do not have the paper before me, having been instructed to give it to Ambrose – I can remember very exactly, for it was perhaps one of the shortest wills ever made, Pearce's burning coals having diminished, as it were, to a mere few cinders. He bequeathed all his books, including his Bible, to Whittlesea House. His clothes – those threadbare garments that he wore without the least tremor of embarrassment or shame – he offered "to the inmates of our Hospital, so that they may put on the garments of a true Quaker and be tender towards each other", and the ladle he left to me, "this fragile thing perchance being of comfort to him sometimes." And this was all. The last line I was ordered to write stated that "John Joseph Pearce, Quaker, possesses of his own no other thing or things upon earth."

When I had written down everything (in the careful script I am capable of if I take extreme care with the position of the quill in my hand) I gave the paper to Pearce and helped him to sign his name. I made no comment upon his gift to me of the ladle, being so saddened and troubled by it that for a short while I could not speak. When I found my voice again, it was to offer Pearce a taste of the green pear, which he declined fearing, he said, that it would give him a pain in his teeth.

Since the night when Pearce had called out to me on my return from Margaret Fell, I had not visited Katharine. I had made a bargain with God: I would not touch her nor let her come near me again if He would give me Pearce's life.

I knew it to be a futile thing. I knew that Pearce was dying. Yet I kept to it. And Katharine, finding herself abandoned by me, came up to the house from the Airing Court and beat on the door with her hands and screamed out for all the world to hear that I was her lover. And that night, the ninth night of Pearce's illness, I and the Keepers sat quietly at supper, they looking at me sadly but saying nothing until the end of the meal when Ambrose spoke. "When the time is right for Robert to speak to us," he said, "then he will speak to us."

And I nodded. And we all rose and began to clear away the plates and dishes.

They knew that I could not leave Whittlesea until Pearce was gone.

He died in the quiet time between the Night Keeping and the dawn of the eleventh day.

I was with him, alone.

I closed his mouth. I took up his thin, white hands and folded them across his chest. And into his hands I put the ladle.

"Look," I whispered to him, "the ladle will not be taken from you."

Then I closed his eyes. And I sat down. And it was then that I was aware of the silence, and I knew it would be there for ever, and that whenever I thought of my friend or spoke to him in my mind, I would hear it again, and where before there had been answering words or messages of guidance or sniffs of disapproval, there would henceforward be only this: the Silence of Pearce.

I sat on the hard chair, leaning forward with my elbows on my knees, and cried. I did not try to stem my tears nor mop them up with any handkerchief or striped dinner napkin, but let them fall onto the floor and onto my thighs and run down my legs.

When I looked up again, there was a milky light at the window and Ambrose and Edmund and Hannah and Eleanor and Daniel were there with me in the room, standing by the bed with their palms pressed together in prayer.

A coffin was made for Pearce that day by two men from George Fox. It was too large for him, but we put him in it and packed his body round with branches of pear.

We held a wake in the parlour and this wake took the form of an all-night Meeting, during which, as and when we were moved to do so, we spoke of him or said prayers for his soul.

I tried, without saying any words, to gather into me what I could remember of his wisdom and what came to my mind was his despair at the greed and selfishness of our age which he believed was like a disease or plague, to which hardly any were immune, not even the poets or the playwrights, "because, Robert, even the creative spirit is whoring, and Piety, the mother, has given birth to Luxury, the wanton Daughter…" And these thoughts comforted me a little because through them it came to me that the things which Pearce had loved about the world had been so few – the tenderness of Quakers, the wisdom of William Harvey, the memory of his mother, the growing of trees en espalier, the light on a trout stream -that, though he declared himself to be afraid of death, he must also very often have longed for it.

I was trying very hard to imagine him in Paradise (I have frequently tried to envisage my parents here, but all my mind is able to conjure up is the Vauxhall Woods and I am inclined to doubt whether, if Paradise exists, it would resemble a place where Londoners go to have picnics), when Daniel suddenly said: "It has come to me from the Lord that John Pearce taught me many things by the example of his life and the greatest thing that he taught me was never to be blinded by affection, because it was his way to judge most harshly those he loved most, and so his loving of them never hurt them but only helped to strengthen them." I looked up and saw that Daniel was looking at me, and Ambrose, too, glanced at me, as if the two of them were waiting for me to speak.

I felt very hot, just as I had at the Meeting where I had suggested the story-telling and the dancing, and so I suspected that some words were going to come out of me, but did not know that when I spoke them they would reveal to me something that I had not, until I uttered it, understood. I wanted to stand up, but my legs felt very weak, so I continued sitting down and then I said: "In the silence which has fallen since John died this morning, I have listened and waited. It is as if I have been waiting for some word, not from John, nor from God, but from myself to myself and now it has come…"

Still, I did not know precisely what the supposed "word" was or what I was going to say next. I paused and took out a handkerchief and mopped my brow, and then I said: "In this quiet, I have understood one thing. And it is this: that all my love for women which, before I came here, was a very trumpeted and tempestuous thing, and even all the love I thought I had for my wife, Celia… all these loves were mere deceptions and not love at all, but only vanity and lust, for which I am ashamed. And in all my life I have truly loved only two people on earth, and these two are John Pearce and the King."

At the shock of hearing the King's name put beside Pearce's, all the Friends raised their eyes and cast upon me their sternest looks. I opened my hands in a gesture of helplessness, "You will straightway say," I continued, "that my love for John Pearce is worthy and my love for the King unworthy and that I should, as indeed John often told me, cast it out from me. But it seems that I cannot. For whatever I do and however far I travel from my former life, I still find it there. But it is no longer a greedy love. It asks nothing. It is like the love for a dead man; it is like my love for John. For I will see neither man ever again. I will never be with them. All I understand tonight is that these two people I have truly loved – wisely in one particular, unwisely in the other – and that no one else on earth has ever counted as these two have counted with me. And for this knowledge, which may have come to me from the Lord or from some other place, I feel grateful."

The flush that had come into my face and body subsided after some minutes, despite my awareness that the eyes of all the Friends were still upon me. The air was very close with their displeasure and I expected them to start speaking out against me. But they did not. And I imagined each one of them wrestling with his or her anger and conquering it for the sake of quietness and for the sake of John.

And so the night went on and became morning and at six o'clock, we drank some chocolate and ate some biscuits which seemed to me to taste most strangely of charcoal.

Towards midday of the tenth of September, Pearce was put into his grave and the yellow clay of Whittlesea packed tightly around and above him. I had made certain that the ladle was put into the coffin with him before the lid was nailed down.

But at the graveside I found myself remembering how, at Cambridge, some cunning thieves calling themselves "Anglers" had tried to steal it and all Pearce's possessions from him. They worked with a long pole, on the end of which was a hook made of wire, and such a pole had been thrust through Pearce's open window one night while he slept. He had woken up to see a chair moving in a glimmer of moonlight three feet off the floor and floating out through the window. "It was only," he told me, "when the pole came back into the room and I saw it move towards my ladle that I understood there were villains at work and not ghosts. And so I cried out angrily, and my shouting frightened them and they ran away." He laughed when he had told me this story and then he said: "Perhaps it is always easier to frighten away the living than it is to frighten away the dead? What do you think, Merivel?" But I cannot remember what I answered.