A Maggot - John Fowles

by John Fowles

  A. 'Twill not fit thy alphabet, so be it. Yet so was it not to me. I knew such joy I must sleep on it; and did.

  Q. Must sleep? Who not doting idiot should sleep at such a juncture?

  A. I cannot tell, save I must close my eyes upon that tender face above, that our souls might join. 'Twas so a loving husband, that willed me with his love to rest.

  Q. Was it not more than your souls that joined?

  A. Shame on thee, to think it.

  Q. Did he not give thee some potion also?

  A. That of his eyes, no more.

  Q. Thy gossip Holy Mother Wisdom, did she riot appear?

  A. No, nor Dick neither. 'Twas he alone.

  Q. And where didst wake, in Heaven again?

  A. No Heaven, but a sore bed to lie upon, the cavern's ground where first we came, tho' l knew it not at the once, and would believe myself still where d had slumbered, and most sweet rested. Too soon it came upon me I had suffered some great loss, was cold and stiff beside, for all my May-queen clothes was gone, every stitch. Next I did mind me of Holy Mother Wisdom, at first so she had come in a dream, as thee'd believe; then knew it no dream, she was departed and I most sore bereft, of worse than my clothes, my soul cast naked back in this present world. Then in a rush, so a tumble of autumn leaves, came further memory, of those three figures in the meadow, which only now I saw what they had been, our Father and His Son, both the living and the dead, and 'he beside, and their haymakers saints and angels; nor did I forget he who had brought me to this holy knowledge. And misery, I smelled the sweet summer fragrance of June Eternal, that still lingered faint upon the damp cavern air, and knew certain I had not dreamed, but lived. My tears did flow, to think such had come and gone from me before I knew them truly. I tell thee I did feel it more cruel than all that other cruelty I had seen. Yea, I was vain still, still the harlot, I thought only of myself, one scorned and rejected, that had failed a great test upon me. Poor fool, I knelt there on the stone and prayed I might be taken back, where I had slept so sweet. No matter, my soul is wiser now.

  Q. Enough of thy soul- was there light to see within the cavern?

  A. Small. I might see.

  Q. The maggot was gone?

  A. Gone.

  Q. As I thought - thou wert practised upon. Such an engine could never pass within, nor out. None of this had substance outside thy woman's head; or what little it had thou hast

  maliciously nursed and let grow inside thee like that worm in thy womb.

  A. Thee may say. Deny what I am become, do what thee will, to me it matters not, nor to Christ's truth. 'Tis thy own soul shall rue the day.

  Q. Enough. Did you not search within the cavern? May his Lordship not have been asleep in some corner, as yourself? Was there no sign?

  A. There was sign. When I made at last to leave, my foot did stumble on his Lordship's sword, that lay still where he had thrown it.

  Q. Did you not pick it up?

  A. No.

  Q. And searched not to see if his Lordship might lie there?

  A. He was gone.

  Q. How gone?

  A. Within where I last saw him.

  Q. How know you this, were you not asleep?

  A. I was, and I know not how, save that I am.

  Q. Can you deny that he may have left some otherwise than in your engine?

  A. I cannot, in thy alphabet; in mine I can, and do.

  Q. You say, he was brought to your June Eternal?

  A. Not brought, he is returned.

  Q. What that these your holy visions had stripped you of your clothes, like common thieves?

  A. All Holy Mother Wisdom stole was my sinning past. That was no theft, she would send me back with new clothes for my soul, and did, for I wear them still, and ever shall,

  till I meet her again. I came out new-born from her spirit's womb.

  Q. And most egregiously lied, did you not, so soon as Jones came up with you?

  A. 'Twas not to spite him. Some are born broad and heavy, like ships, they may not be turned by their conscience alone, nor Christian light. He made it plain he would use me still, and I would not be used. I must make service of my wits, to escape his design.

  Q. As thou dost now, to escape mine.

  A. I tell thee truth, which thee won't have. In this thee's great proof theeself I must lie to be believed.

  Q. Downright lies or unchaste parables, it is all one. Now, mistress, it is grown late, but I am not done with you, nor will I have you this night conspiring with your man to make more parables still. You shall sleep beneath this roof, in the chamber where you dined, it is clear? And shall speak to no man unless my clerk, who will watch you close as any turnkey.

  A. Thee's no right, and least in God's eyes. '

  Q. I might have thee flung into the town gaol, mistress, where thou'dst sup on a crust and water, and sleep on lousy straw. Argue more, thou shalt see.

  A. 'Tis to my father and my husband thee must tell that. I know they wait.

  Q. Cease thy impudence. Be gone with thee, and thank Heaven for my mercy. Thou dost not merit it.

  * * *

  TEN MINUTES later three men stand stiffly across the room from Mr Ayscough, close by the door through which they have entered, as if to venture further might risk infection of some kind. It is clear they are a deputation of protest, and as clear that the lawyer has changed his mind as to Rebecca's impudence. When she had left with her turnkey he had, as earlier that day, walked to the window. The sun had only just set, and dusk had hardly begun, but the square was far less busy than it had been that morning. One thing in it had not diminished, however. Below the window, on the facing street-corner, still stood those same three male figures, as sombre as the Erinnyes, and as implacable; but now behind and beside them stood ten others, of whom six were women, three elderly, three younger, and all dressed as Rebecca had been. One might have assumed it a group chancegathered, were it not for this quasi-uniform, and even more in the way that all thirteen pairs of eyes seemed fixed on one point only: the window where Ayscough had appeared.

  He was made out; and in a ragged but rapid sequence, thirteen pairs of hands rose in prayer to their breasts. The prayer was not offered. It was a statement, not a solicitation; an obscure challenge, despite the lack of cries, of hostile or threatening gestures. The group showed nothing but solemn, intent faces. Ayscough had stared down at these pillars of righteousness for a few moments; then withdrawn in both senses of the word, to face his returned clerk, who silently showed a large key in his hand, that with which he had locked Rebecca in. He went to his desk and started to sort his sheets of scrawled, indecipherable paper together, preparatory to a start upon its laborious transcription. Suddenly Ayscough had spoken, it seemed crossly and curtly.

  The clerk had looked surprised at what was commanded, but said nothing; then bowed and left the room again.

  The middle of the three men is the tailor James Wardley, who is the shortest, yet has visibly the most authority. His hair is grey and, as is his two companions', long and straight; his face worn and lined, that of a man older than his fifty years. He looks a humourless plain-dealer; or would have done so, did he not wear steel-framed spectacles. They bear peculiar pieces of dark glass on their arms, to shut out all side-light, and this apparatus gives an abiding impression of myopic but intent malevolence, for the eyes behind the very small lenses do not shift their gaze from the lawyer's. Neither he nor the other two have removed their Quaker hats, and unconsciously show that feature common to all members of extremist sects, whether political or religious, forced to consort with more normal human beings: an awareness, both defiant and embarrassed, of how locked away they are from conventional society.

  Rebecca's husband stands gaunt as ever and visibly ill at ease. He seems, despite his prophetic enthusiasm, distinctly awed by this formal present - far less a potential rebel than a mournful outsider involved by chance. Unlike Wardley he stares at the floor between the little lawyer and himself. One might almost
believe he had not wished to be present. But Rebecca's father is another matter. He wears a dark brown coat and breeches, and seems of Wardley's age: a strong, square-set man, who means not to give an inch, and is as determined in face as his son-in-law seems at a loss. If Wardley's stare is steady, his is bold, even aggressive; and his hands by his side are clenched, as if for a fight.

  Wardley is what he is by cantankerousness and love of argument; not that he lacks faith in his beliefs and visions, but above all he enjoys that part of their exposition and defence which allows him to mock his enemies' illogic (not least their smug contentment in a grossly unjust world) and also - how sweet is bile - then to dispatch them to future damnation. In him the spirit of Tom Paine - as of countless seventeenth-century quarrellers, in the past - is alive; he is not a true French Prophet only in as much as his eternal nature, non-conforming and uncomfortable, has found very different outlets in the course of history.

  Rebecca's melancholy husband is in truth no more than an ignorant mystic, who has picked up the language of prophetic visions and yet is sure his utterances come by divine inspiration: that is, he is self-gulled, or innocently self-believing. To speak so is anachronistic. Like so many of his class at this time, he still lacks what even the least intelligent human today, far stupider even than he, would recognize - an unmistakable sense of personal identity set in a world to some degree, however small, manipulable or controllable by that identity. John Lee would not have understood Cogito, ergo sum; and far less its even terser modern equivalent-,1 am. The contemporary I does not need to think, to know it exists. To be sure the intelligentsia of John Lee's time had a clear, almost but not quite modem, sense of self; but the retrospective habit we have of remembering and assessing a past age by its popes, its Addisons and Steeles, its Johnsons, conveniently forgets how completely untypical artistic genius is of most human beings of any age, however much we force it to be the reverse.

  John Lee is, of course; but as a tool or a beast is, in a world so entirely pre-ordained it might be written, like this book. He laboriously reads the Bible, and so does he hear of and comprehend the living outside world around him - not as something to be approved of or disapproved, to be acted for or against; but as it simply is, which is as it always would or must be, an inalienably fixed narrative. He has none of Wardley's comparatively emancipated, active and quasi-political mind, his belief that a man's actions may change the world. His prophecies may predict such a change, but even in this he is to himself but a tool, a ridden beast. Like all mystics (and many novelists, not least the present one) he is baffled, a child, before the real now; far happier out of it, in a narrative past or a prophetic future, locked inside that weird tense grammar does not allow, the imaginary present.

  You would never have got the tailor to admit that the tenets of the French Prophets were simply convenient to his real nature and its enjoyment; and even less to consider whether, had some miracle brought him national power instead of the mere leadership of an obscure and provincial sect, he would not have been quite as grim a tyrant as the man his sinister spectacles vaguely foreshadowed, Robespierre. These various defects in his partners made Rebecca's father, the carpenter Hocknell, the most straightforward and in many ways the most typical of the three.

  Both his religion and his politics were ruled by one thing, the ;kill in his hands. He was a much more practical man than either Wardley or John Lee; a good carpenter. Of ideas in themselves he took little account, and regarded most as he regarded ornament in his sister trades of joinery and cabinet-making - superfluous, and transparently sinful in God's eyes. This marked tendency in Dissent towards severity of ornament, this stress on structural solidity, good workmanship, sobriety of taste (at the expense :)f fancy, elaboration, useless luxury and all the rest), came in the beginning, of course, from Puritan doctrine. The aesthetic of a society of God-fearing Sobersides had by the 1730s (or ever since 1660) largely been brought into contempt and discredit by the rich and educated; but not among those like Hocknell.

  Plain carpentry had become a religious template with him; and so did he judge much else besides the working of wood. What mattered to him was that a thing, an opinion, an idea, a man's way of life, should be plain, exact to its purpose; well built, well pinned and morticed, well fitted to its function; and above all, not hidden by vain ornament from what it truly was. What did not fit these homely precepts taken from his trade was evil or ungodly. Aesthetic justness had become moral justice; simple was not only beautiful, it was virtuous; and the most satanically unvirtuous piece of work of all, grossly obvious beneath its unseemly and excessive ornament, was English society itself.

  Hocknell was not such a bigot he refused to fit ornamental wall-cases, over-carved mantels, whatever it might be, on demand; but counted it all devil's work. For fine houses, fine clothes, fine carriages and a thousand other things that hid or travestied or ignored the fundamental truths and elementary injustices of existence he had no time at all. His principal truth was the truth of Christ, which the carpenter saw rather as substantial and precious pieces of seasoned timber left abandoned in a yard than as a fixed structure or house. They were there to be properly used and built by such as him. The metaphors he used in his own prophecies tended very much to this kind of imagery; the present house was rotten and must fall, while far better materials lay to hand. His prophecies were plain beside those of his son-in-law, who seemingly had a close speaking and seeing acquaintance with the Apostles and various Old Testament figures. The carpenter hoped rather than firmly believed Christ's second coming was near; or believed, like so many Christians before and after him, that it must be true because it ought to be true.

  It ought to be true, of course, because the Gospel may very easily be read as a political document; not for nothing did the medieval church fight so long to keep it out of the vulgar tongues of Europe. If all are equal in Christ's sight, and as regards entry qualifications for Heaven, why are they not in human sight? No degree of theological obfuscation or selective quotation justifying the Caesars of this world can answer that. Nor did the carpenter forget the trade Christ's worldly father followed; and indeed drew a fierce pride from the parallel, perilously close to the sin of vanity.

  In ordinary terms he was a touchy, short-tempered man in many things, and adamant for his rights, or as he saw them. They had included the patriarchal right to command his daughters' lives and expel the one who had lapsed so flagrantly. Rebecca had feared his reaction most when she returned. She had had the sense to seek her mother's forgiveness first, and gained it - or rather, gained it if her father would allow. She was then brought straight into his presence by her mother's hand. He was at work in a new-built house, hanging a door; on his knees, about a hinge, and unaware of them, until Rebecca spoke the one word, Father. He had turned, and given her the most terrible stare, as if she were the Devil incarnate. She had fallen to her knees and bowed her head. Most strangely his face began to work beneath its terrible stare; he had lost control of it, and was in agony. The next moment she was snatched into his burly arms; and into a tide of mutual sobs stemming from a much older human tradition than that of Dissent.

  Yet surrender to attacks of intense emotion was an essential part of both its being and its practice, perhaps not least because it stood so deeply against the aristocratic, then the aping middleclass, and now the universal English tradition in such matters; which dreads natural feeling (what other language speaks of attacks of emotion?) and has made such an art of sangfroid, meiosis, cynicism and the stiff upper lip to keep it at bay. We may talk coolly now in psychiatric terms of the hysterical enthusiasm, the sobbing, the distorted speech in the gift of tongues, all the other wild phenomena found in so much early Dissenting worship. We should do better to imagine a world where, once again, a sense of self barely exists; or most often where it does, is repressed; where most are still like John Lee, more characters written by someone else than free individuals in our comprehension of the adjective and the noun.


  * * *

  Mr Ayscough walks from his table and sweeps past the three by the door - or more exactly, tries to sweep, since he is shorter even than Wardley, and can no more truly sweep than a bantamcockerel could pretend to be the old English gamecock of the inn backyard. At any rate he does not look at the three faces of Dissent, and manages to suggest by his expression that he is being very improperly put upon. The clerk gestures the trio to follow s master's back, and they do so, with the sardonic scribe behind them.

  The five men file into the room over the inn yard, Mr Ayscough leading. He goes to the window, but does not turn. He oins his hands beneath his open coat at the back, and stares out at the now dusk-filled yard. Rebecca stands by the bed, as if hastily risen from it, and evidently surprised by this solemn delegation. She does not move to greet them, nor they she, and there is a moment or two of that awkward suspension characteristic of such meetings .

  'Sister, this person would have thee rest here this night, against thy will.'

  'It is not against my will, brother Wardley.'

  'He hath no right in law. Thee be not charged.'

  'I am obliged in conscience.'

  'Hast thee asked counsel of Jesus Christ?'

  'He says, I am obliged.'

  'Hast thee not been ill treated in respect of thy state, both of soul and of body?'

  'No. I have not.'

  'Hath this man not wickedly tried to break thee of thy faith?'

  'No.'

  'Thee art sure?'

  'Yes, I am sure.'

  'Hath he not told thee thee must say these things, or thee shall suffer after?'

  'No.'

  'Be not afraid if he would taunt or corrupt or howsoever force thee from the light, sister. Speak truth entire, and nothing but Christ's truth.'

  'I have, and shall.'

  Wardley is clearly set back by this calmness. Mr Ayscough still stares down into the yard; one may suspect it is now partly to hide his face.

  'Thee's sure that what thee dost is best in Christ?'

  'Most sure, brother.'