The Skull and the Nightingale
Page 40
I can think of several other perceptions of this circumstance which might render it more tolerable to you. After all you were willing, you were eager, to be my lover although I was married to Mr. Ogden. The birth of this baby could be seen as no more than a restatement of that acknowledged fact. By the time it is socially acceptable for us to marry, I shall have recovered, I hope, all my looks, and the baby will be a small child. Both still young, we can start afresh. For myself I feel a special tenderness toward an infant entering the world in such inauspicious circumstances. To be fair to my late husband I cannot think that a child of his will lack character or intelligence. This oddly compounded little being should make an interesting companion for the children that you and I will have.
I could moralize, and suggest that as it was the arrangement between us that led Mr. Ogden to return to London and so to meet his death, we owe it to him to take responsibility for his child. But I do not think I need to do so. I know you to have a kind disposition. As a boy you were always good-natured. I cannot believe that you will be found lacking in charity where an obligation seems to be owed, and where our own love is in the case.
That last consideration is to me the greatest. I have always loved you. It was possible for me to marry another only because you had disappeared from my life. If I now rejoice to be wealthy, it is solely because at last I have something to give to you—a person who, to my eyes, has been so animated, so sparkling.
It pleases me to think that you and I, as a pair, may be out of the common run, capable not only of strong passion but of large views and generous imaginings. If you can find it in your heart to accept this unlooked-for situation, it will be one more guarantee that our future together will be happy.
I await your answer with trepidation—but with confidence.
I remain, &c.
* * *
My dear Godfather,
I mentally rehearsed what I wished to say to you, but could not bring myself to write this difficult letter until I was under the influence of wine. In consequence I feel distanced from my task, and now find it indistinct, even unreal. I watch my hand as it moves the quill. It is directed by my mind. The mind is swayed by animal tides within. These in turn may be influenced by the wine I have drunk or the weather beyond my window. (It is raining.) We do well to communicate at all.
I have lost my thread already. Perhaps if I set down some paragraphs as they come to me, you will discern the sequence that I have forgotten.
I had not expected to write to you again, and do so only because you have written to me. I was offended that you had spied upon me and that our comradeship was proved false. But there is more to the matter. I am no longer swayed by your arguments: I reject the cynicism that I have affected to share. Of course we are inescapably physical beings. Repeatedly I have acknowledged the fact. But the argument cannot end there. If we are mere animals, what is it within us that deplores the fact? And why does it do so?
Man must endlessly struggle to reconcile those three irreconcilables, body, mind, and spirit, as they vie for control. Mr. Swift needed no great penetration to mock our inability to achieve the impossible. His position is a shallow one—and literally a barren one: he has left no descendants.
Can we not laugh without bitterness at our equivocations? They need not be ascribed to hypocrisy or self-deception: there is an instinctive wisdom in our willingness to compromise, to recoil from certain apparently logical conclusions. It enables us to live in affection and companionship. Gulliver’s claimed wisdom leaves him banished to a stable.
I am glad to learn that you are recovered. We have seen much physical misadventure this past six months: Yardley’s injury, the loss of Quentin, your own indisposition, Hurlock attacked by a dog, the accidental death of Mr. Ogden—for a kind of accident it surely was.
Perhaps such loss or damage should be set against the potential advance to be glimpsed in hopeful alliances. My friend Nick Horn marries Kitty Brindley, Crocker sets up house with Jane Page, and Mr. Thorpe, I hear, plans to take a wife. Through some disinclination you have never made such a move and nor, as yet, have I. Perhaps we have both been more interested in using people than in relating to them. Neither of us belongs to a family—ours has been an alliance of the solitary.
As you all but admit, we are invalids of a sort, affecting detached curiosity to hide fear of engagement. It is safer to be a historian of war than a soldier. In your letters to me you have more than once implied the contradiction in your philosophy: it is as though an ant should withdraw from the marching line, forgoing his identity in order to reflect upon it.
In performing on your behalf over the past six months, I have, like you, learned a great deal about myself. It has been dismaying to me to see how readily I have made excuses for behaving badly. When I at last learned how my friend Matt Cullen had deceived me, I perversely felt some slight relief at finding a foothold: here at last was an action I could never have been guilty of. I could not betray a true friend. Perhaps from this recognition I may begin to improvise a morality of some sort.
I cannot but be grateful for the opportunities you have given me. I have lived very comfortably, and it is too late now for me to find work as a shepherd, a bricklayer, or a coachman. You seem to propose a continuance of that previous arrangement. Your letter arrives, however, at the very time when I have an opportunity of a different kind—one that would sever my links with you and set me free. In short it is suddenly open to me to marry an amiable, beautiful, and wealthy lady.
There is no uncertainty in this fresh prospect—no coercion or obliquity. There is but one small stumbling block, which demands from me no more than a certain generosity of imagination and conduct, of a kind that should be readily afforded and which the lady in question effortlessly displays. But—
. . . But I have had to confess to myself that I am no longer sure that I can muster that generosity, even if I could once have done so. Perhaps I am not made for domestic dependability: my energies are fed by the excitements of the town. Perhaps I always was, or have now become, irredeemably self-concerned, incapable of selfless love. Perhaps, after all, you and I are two of a kind.
Such admissions take me as far as I can go as a moralist. I will never attain dignity, but I can try to be honest. The excellent lady concerned will be grieved by my decision, but she deserves far more than I can give, and will not lack for suitors.
I will accept your offer and take my chance.
I have read your letter narrowly. It seems that I must be wary. So, believe me, must you. To an extent you have put yourself in my hands. The past few months have hardened me. You will be at risk equally with myself.
In making my choice, I feel I am under compulsion from within: I am obliged to be the man it seems that I have become, even at the price of loneliness. In this perhaps I am at one with the times. Despite some ignominious misadventures Gulliver accepted that he was inescapably condemned to “an active and restless life.” After twenty-six years on his lonely island, Crusoe rested at home but briefly before once more setting out to sea.
Acknowledgments
I owe too much to too many secondary sources to be able to offer a bibliography, but I would like to express my particular indebtedness to Jenny Uglow for Hogarth: A Life and a World; to Liza Picard for Dr. Johnson’s London; to G.E. Mingay for Georgian London; and to Jeremy Barlow for his recorded reconstruction of the complete Beggar’s Opera.
About the Author
MICHAEL IRWIN is an emeritus professor of English literature at the University of Kent in Canterbury, where he specialized in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature. His published work includes a full-length study of Fielding and essays on Defoe, Richardson, Sterne, Smollett, Johnson, and Pope. He lives in Kent, England.
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Credits
Cover photographs:
nightingale © by Genevieve Vallee/Alamy; woman © by Derek Hart/Millennium Images, UK
Map of West London © by The British Library Board (Maps. Crace. IV).
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
THE SKULL AND THE NIGHTINGALE. Copyright © 2013 by Michael Irwin. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
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