The Meaning of Night

by Michael Cox

  Nearly a year passed before I began to set my sights homeward at last. Before departing, Mr Furnivall had requested, with some warmth, that I should come to see him at the Museum on my return, to discuss the possibility of my filling a vacancy in the Department that had recently arisen. As I had no other career in view, it began to seem an attractive prospect. I had been an exile from my native country for too long. It was time to make something of myself. And so, in February 1847, I quit St Petersburg, travelling leisurely westwards, occasionally deviating from my route as the fancy took me, and arriving at last in Portsmouth at the beginning of June.

  Billick brought the trap to meet me off the Portsmouth coach at Wareham. Having heartily slapped each other on the back for a second or two on first seeing each other, we travelled back for two hours and more in complete silence, save for the sound of my companion’s incessant chewing on an old piece of tobacco, to our mutual satisfaction, until we arrived at Sandchurch.

  ‘Drop me here, Billick,’ I said, as the trap passed the church.

  As he continued on his way up the hill, I knocked on the door of the little leaning cottage next to the church-yard.

  Tom opened the door, spectacles in hand, a book that he had been reading tucked under his arm.

  He smiled and held out his hand, letting the book fall to the ground.

  ‘The traveller returns,’ he said. ‘Come on in, old chap, and make yourself at home.’

  And a second home it had once been to me, this low, dusty room tumbled from floor to ceiling, and up the stairs from ground to roof, with books of every shape and size. Its dear familiarity – the three-legged dresser supported by a groaning stack of mouldering leather folios, the fishing rods crossed above the fireplace, the discoloured marble bust of Napoleon on a little shelf by the door – was both poignant and painful. Tom, too, his long lined face shining in the fire-glow, his great ears with grey tufts growing out of them, his lilting Norfolk accent, brought a sense of childhood rushing in on me.

  ‘Tom,’ I said, ‘I believe you’ve lost what little hair you had when I last saw you.’

  And we laughed, and there was an end of silence for the night.

  On we talked, hour after hour, about what I had done and seen during my time on the Continent, as well as reminiscing over old times, until at last, the clock striking midnight, Tom said that he would get the lantern and walk up the hill with me to see me safe home. He left me at the gate beneath the chestnut-tree, and I entered the silent house.

  After nearly nine years of wandering, I lay down that night in my own bed again, and closed my eyes once more to the sound of the eternal music of sea meeting shore.

  The summer passed quietly. I busied myself as best I could, reading a good deal, and attempting a little work about the house and garden. But as autumn came on, I began to feel restless and dissatisfied. Tom would come and sit with me most days, and I saw plainly that he was troubled by my indolence.

  ‘What will you do, Ned?’ he asked at last.

  ‘I suppose I shall have to earn a living,’ I sighed. ‘I have used up nearly all my capital, the house is in a very bad state of repair, and now Mr More has written to say that, before she died, my mother borrowed a hundred pounds from him of which he now has need.’

  ‘If you still have nothing definite in view,’ Tom said after a pause, ‘I might venture to suggest something.’

  Whilst travelling in the Levant, I had written to him of my new passion for the ancient civilizations of Asia Minor. Apprised of my imminent return to England, and unaware that I was considering the position at the British Museum, he had acted on my behalf to make some tentative enquiries concerning the possibility of my joining an expedition just then assembling to excavate the monuments at Nimrud.

  ‘It would be an experience, Ned, and a little money in your hands, and you could start to make a name for yourself in a growing field.’

  I said that it was a splendid idea, and thanked him heartily for putting me in the way of it, though in truth I had some reservations about the plan. The gentleman leading the expedition, known to Tom through a relation, lived in Oxford; it was soon agreed that Tom would write to him immediately, to suggest that he and I go up there at the Professor’s earliest convenience.

  It was several weeks before an answer came, but then, one bright and windy autumn morning, Tom called to say that he had received a reply from Professor S— in Oxford* who had expressed interest in receiving me in New College to talk over my candidature for the expedition.

  The Professor’s rooms were crammed full of casts and fragments of bas-relief, inscriptions covered in the mysterious cuneiform writing that I had read about in Rawlinson’s account of his travels in Susiana and Kurdistân,† and carvings of muscular winged bulls in glowering black basalt. Maps and plans lay all about the floor, or were draped over tables and the backs of chairs; and on an easel in the centre of the room stood what I at first took to be a monochrome painting of an immense crowned king, bearded and braided and omnipotent in attitude, beneath whose feet crouched a captive enemy or rebel, frozen in abject surrender to the might of the conqueror.

  On closer inspection, I saw that it was not a painting at all, but what the Professor, seeing my interest, described as a photogenic drawing – a technique invented by Mr Talbot,* a fellow student of the cuneiform texts. I stood amazed at the sight; for the image of the king – a gargantuan and looming stone presence standing in a waste of desert sand – had been made, not by some transient agent devised by man, but by eternal light itself. The light of the world; the sun that had once shone on ancient Babylon, and now struggled to light up the dreary October streets of Oxford in the nineteenth century, had been captured and held, like the slave beneath the king’s feet, and made permanent.

  I tell you all this because the moment was a significant one in my life, as shall appear. Up until then, I had followed the familiar paths of knowledge that wound out from the safe harbour of the Liberal Arts. Now I saw that science, somewhat neglected in my education, held open possibilities of which I had not dreamed.

  The Professor smelled a little overripe in the close confinement of his attic rooms, and seemed to think that standing very close to someone and talking loudly into their faces was the most convenient way of conducting an interview. He questioned me closely on my knowledge of Mesopotamia and the Babylonian kings, and on a variety of congeneric questions, whilst Tom hovered some distance off with a hopeful smile on his face.

  It may well be that I passed muster. Indeed, I know it to be the case, for a few days after our return to Sandchurch, the Professor wrote to communicate his desire that I should return to Oxford as soon as it could be so arranged, in order to make the acquaintance of the other members of the proposed expedition.

  But by then my heart had found a new desire. That glorious imprisonment of light and shadow, which I had observed in the photogenic image of the great stone king, began to consume me, and all thought of digging with my finger-nails in the heat and dust of the Mesopotamian desert was driven out. And besides, I had had enough of travelling. I wished to settle, find some congenial employment, and master the photographic art, which perhaps might one day furnish a means of earning my living.

  To Tom I said nothing, but I skilfully contrived excuses for not returning to New College, as requested by the Professor, and, by feigning a slight but temporarily debilitating sickness, managed to keep myself close in the house for several days.

  On the first day of my pretended illness, the rain came down hard from the south, and remained beating in from the Channel until darkness edged across the cliff-top and enveloped the house. In the morning, I had settled down with Buckingham’s Travels in Assyria,* lying back in the parlour window-seat that looked out to sea, in a vain attempt to assuage my conscience at deceiving Tom; but by the time Beth came with my luncheon, I had grown weary of Buckingham, and turned instead to my dear old copy of Donne’s sermons, in which I lost myself for the rest of the afternoon.
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br />   After supper, I began to think about practicalities. There was much that I needed to do in order to establish myself in a firm and permanent way of success, lacking, as I did, a University degree. Until Tom’s intervention on my behalf, I had determined to sell the house and move to London, to see what I could try there in the way of some work that would draw on my capacity for intellectual application. I had planned, first of all, to take up the invitation of Mr Bryce Furnivall to put myself forward for the vacancy in the Department of Printed Books at the British Museum. It remained a congenial prospect; the bibliographical fire burned strong within me, and I knew that a whole life of useful work could be found in this – for me – absorbing study.

  Whichever way I went – to Mesopotamia or Great Russell-street – I should need ready money to support myself in the beginning. A start would also have to be made on reviewing and arranging my mother’s papers, for I had been lax in this regard, and they had lain for the past eleven years, undisturbed and reproachful, in bound heaps on her work-table. That task, at least, could now be commenced. I therefore proposed to myself that I would begin looking over them first thing in the morning, lit up a cigar (a bad habit that I had acquired in Germany), pulled my chair close to the fire, and prepared to take my evening’s ease with a neat little edition of Lord Rochester’s poems.

  But as the flames flickered, and the rain continued to hammer against the window, I put the book down and began to stare at the yellowed and curling piles of paper on the work-table.

  On the wall flanking the table was the set of shelves, made by Billick, housing my mother’s published works, in two and three volumes, dark-green or blue cloth, their spines and blocked titles gleaming in the firelight, assembled in strict order of publication, from Edith to Petrus; or, The Noble Slave, her somewhat half-hearted attempt at the historical mode, published in the year of her death. Below this library was the arena of her labours itself – the great square work-table, fully eight feet across, that would later stand in my rooms in Temple-street.

  It was a landscape of paper, with little peaks and shadowed troughs, tottering sheer-sided gorges, and here and there the aftermaths of little earthquakes, where a crust of curling sheets had slid across the face of its fellows beneath, and now leaned crazily against them. The mass of paper that lay before me contained, I knew, working drafts and fragments of novels, as well as accounts and other items relating to the running of the household. My mother’s curious system had been to parcel up little battalions of sheets and other pieces relating to a particular category, before binding them together with string or ribbon or thin strips of taffeta. Then she would stack them up, unlabelled, roughly in the order in which they had been created, one on top of the other. The effect, where it remained intact, was rather like a model of the battlefield of Pharsalus* that I had once seen, with massed and opposing squares and echelons. Nestling in the midst, surrounded on three sides by the encroaching walls of paper, was the space, no wider than a piece of foolscap, in which she had worked.

  There were, too, a number of small, perfectly square note-books with hard, shiny black covers, each closed up by delicate silk ribbons of the same hue, which used to draw my fascinated eye as a child because of their resemblance to slabs of the darkest chocolate. In these my mother would commit her thoughts by bending even closer to the page than she was wont to do when engaged on her literary work, for the leaves were small – no more than three or four inches square, requiring her to adopt a minuscule hand for the purpose. Why she had chosen willingly to put herself to so much trouble – the note-books were made especially for her by a stationer in Weymouth, which seemed a most uncharacteristic luxury – I never knew. A dozen or more of these miniature volumes now stood, line astern, on one side of the working space, held in formation at the edge of the table by the rosewood box that had once contained my two hundred sovereigns.

  On a whim, I thought I would just look into one of these diminutive black books before retiring. I had never before known what they contained, and a rather anxious curiosity – I cannot account for the slight tingle of nervous anticipation that I felt as I walked over to the table – began to rouse me from the drowsiness that had begun to come over me as I had sat by the dying fire, reading Lord Rochester’s eloquent bawdy.

  I took the first of the note-books from its place and undid its silk ribbon. Placing it beneath the candle’s light, I opened the hard black cover, and began to read the tiny characters that had been pressed onto the page from top to bottom with so much care and deliberation. They told of my mother’s last weeks at Church Langton before she and the Captain moved to Sandchurch. Intrigued, I read on for a few more pages, then closed the volume and picked up another. I continued thus, looking into one of the tiny books, and then moving on to its fellows, for near an hour. It was approaching eleven o’clock when I thought that I would put my nose into just one more volume before I went to bed.

  The first two pale-yellow leaves contained little of particular interest, consisting mainly of brief and inconsequential résumés of daily activities. I was on the point of closing the volume and picking up the next when, flicking forward, my eye lighted on the following passage:That this is folly, sheer fatal folly, I know only too well. All my feelings revolt against it, everything that I hold sacred is appalled by the prospect. And yet – it is asked of me, & I cannot dash the cup from my lips. My nature is not my own, it seems, but must be press’d into shape by another’s hand – not God’s! We spoke at length yesterday. L was tearful at times, at others angry and threatening of worse than even what is proposed. Can there be worse? Yes! And she is capable of it. He wd not be home that night & this wd give us more time. After dinner L came to my room again and we cried together. But then her resolve return’d & she was all steel & fire once more, cursing him with a vehemence that was horrible to behold. She did not depart until first light, leaving me exhausted by her rage so that I did not return from E— to here until pm today. The Captain not in evidence and so made no mention of my lateness.

  The passage bore a date: ‘25.vi.19’.

  To gaze so fixedly upon my mother’s private journal seemed a gross intrusion; but I found I could not bring myself to secure the silk ribbon again and confine the contents to obscurity. For, being a journal or personal chronicle of some kind, then it must contain something of truth about her, something hidden but authentic about the little hunched and distracted figure, constantly writing, of my childhood memory. I felt impelled to uncover what lay behind the words that I had just read, even if it led to the postponement of my own plans to begin making my way in the world.

  But what truth informed this enigmatic passage eluded me completely. For this was not simply a record of events, as earlier entries had been, but of some impending crisis, speaking of deep inward searching, the roots of which, it seemed, were as yet impossible to conjecture. A subsequent passage, dated a few days later, whilst clearer in its detail, appeared equally impenetrable to immediate interpretation:L’s appearance today, so wild & unexpected, at the door, was a great disturbance, made worse by Beth coming down the stairs just as she arrived, to hear her knocking furiously like the Devil himself. Beth asked if the lady was ill but I sent her off to fetch a drink as soon as I got L into the parlour & when she return’d L was as composed & gracious as you like. He had come back but had refus’d her again —& this time something more and terrible had happened that she wd not say but which had open’d up a new chasm between them. I saw the rage begin again and urged her with much tender anxiety to quieten herself – which she did in a little while. She had come all this way to tell me – trusting nothing but her own whispered words as she always does – that Mme de Q was to be in town next Mon. & Tues. & that I shd expect to hear something more quite soon thereafter.

  Who was ‘L’? Who was the man so clearly referred to: the Captain, or someone else? And what of ‘Mme de Q’? I was now wide awake, held in an iron grip by what I had read. I tried to connect the memory of my mother’s
quiet and industrious life to these clear intimations of some looming climacteric, in which she had become involved; but I quickly gave up, and began to read on, urgently scanning the tiny yellow pages, to see whether some light could be shed on this mystery.

  And so it began. I opened another little black book, then another, in a kind of dazed concentration, alive to the strangeness of what I was reading but transfixed, until my eyes were wearied. At last, looking up as the second or third candle I had lit began to gutter, I saw that a pink arc of light was creeping above the line of horizon beyond the parlour window. A new day had broken, for the world beyond, and for me.

  *[‘Revelation’. Ed.]

  †[In the Rue de Richelieu. Ed.]

  ‡[In the Rue Vivienne: ‘a great resource to the Englishman in Paris’, according to Murray’s Hand-Book for Travellers in France (new edition, 1844). Ed.]

  *[A Hand-book for Travellers in the Ionian Islands, Greece, Turkey, Asia Minor and Constantinople (John Murray, 1840). Ed.]

  *[Vasily Stepanovich Sopikov, book dealer and author of a standard essay on Russian bibliography. Ed.]

  *[I have not been able to identify ‘Professor S—’ and am unable to say why the author chose to respect his anonymity. He seems to have been involved in some rival enterprise to the expeditions to Nimrud of Austin Henry Layard (1817–94) that did not materialize. Ed.]