Graham Swift - Ever After

Question rather is: Why should the Almighty have been so slow ? If He ordained for us a privileged position between the brutes and the angels, why did He place us there so late ? Anticipate the Rector’s answer: God not to be reckoned by temporal gauges; all is one sub specie aeternitatis; “a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday,” etc., etc.

6th November 1856:

Dined in Tavistock with Neale, who will be chief venturer in Wheal Talbot, and Mr Benson, a visiting acquaintance of his, a Manchester man and something in cotton. Neale a sound enough fellow. Mean to invite him some day to Burlford. Benson harder to fathom. Proposes: (1) to acquire of Neale, and similarly of others, the exclusive right to refine the arsenopyrite waste from Wheal Talbot, which can hardly be objected to by Neale, who would otherwise have the task of its disposal; (2) to export said arsenic to the American plantations to curb the American boll weevil, thus benefiting—“a pretty chain of consequences”—not only the planters but the economies of Devonshire and Lancashire.

Asks (Neale having told him, doubtless, of my “bug-hunting”) whether I am acquainted with the boll weevil—“a prodigious devourer of cotton.” Answer: “No, I am not familiar with that species, but is there not a blight upon the cotton trade more detrimental than the boll weevil? I mean the blight of slavery.” Answers: “Indeed, sir, there is much sentiment aired nowadays on the subject of slavery, much of it, I observe, by those who do not object to wear cotton on their backs or who fondly suppose that slavery is an evil unmet with in our own happy land. You do not know our Lancashire factory hands. You would find them also an interesting species. I assure you that were you to view the conditions under which the mass of them exist, you would consider the miners here in Devon to be blessed in comparison. It would be an interesting experiment, would it not, to remove one of your negroes from his shackles in the Carolinas and set him down, a free man, in the din of one of our Manchester mills? Would he thank us, I wonder, for our Christian mercy?”

9th November 1856:

Estimation: from one mature oak tree, in a seed-bearing year, some 20,000, or, say, two bushels, of acorns. (This from calculations upon my own observation of the oaks in Loxley Wood.) Of which but some hundreds will root as seedlings (failure in germination; eaten by birds and animals). Of which again barely some ten per cent (nibbling by animals; want of light — your bracken is your enemy of your oakwood) will remain after the first three years.

Estimation: A hen salmon of ten pounds from our Tamar will deposit, say, 10,000 eggs, of which perhaps only a quarter are made fertile and of these the vast bulk will be destroyed as eggs, in the larval stage or as parr. For this (being itself one of the lucky survivors) it performs, unstintingly, its gruelling and eventually fatal yearly journeys from the sea.

Estimation: The pheasant (this from Wilson, the gamekeeper) will lay, say, twelve eggs in a year. Of which (assuming no vigilant and protective Wilson) some three or four will be lost as eggs to weasels and other nest-robbers — not counting the frequent destruction of whole clutches — and of the surviving nestlings some three or four again will fall to predators or, as young birds, to the trial of their first winter.

The same pattern, if the margin of waste narrows, among the higher animals. If we suppose the human species to be above the harsh husbandry of nature, then we need but look to our own systems of economy (N.B., Benson’s factory hands). Two minutes in the company of our copper miners will prove that they are Toms, Dicks and Harrys; but are they not perceived as so many man-units, quantifiable (and expendable) at cheap rate?

Conclusions . ( a ) Bad: That nature is a pitiless arithmetician and gross cozener, hiding behind her bountiful appearance the truth that the greater portion of Creation exists only as a tribute to Destruction.

( b ) Good (but conditionally): That nature is indomitable in her promulgation of life. What expense will she not spare to maintain her own? But this the tenacity of the blind. If disposed by the Almighty and All-seeing, why not with more thrift?

10th November 1856:

“And herb for the service of man”? If the cotton plant were created so we might not lack for clothing, why the boll weevil? And all the nations of pests .

15th November 1856:

The Rector has returned my Lyell. Confesses he has progressed so far but found it bewildering ground. It is the ground under our feet ! Concedes he will not judge what he cannot pretend to have studied. A humble way of wishing the subject closed. But I perceive a kind of challenge in this embargo on further parley. I have spoken; he has heard me. This is the gist of it. He has allowed me, for so long, to be the advocatus diaboli in his study; he has answered me with patience, with sympathy, even with pleasure in the envigoration of the exercise — but now, if I truly mean to persist in all this, would I consider very carefully the consequences?

Meanwhile, under this enforced truce, he does not shrink from outfacing me indirectly. He pre-empts me from the vantage of his pulpit and counters me in his choice of text — I am sure these things are intended especially for me. This Sunday’s sermon: “Therefore will we not fear, though the earth be removed; and though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea.”

And still I go and sit in our pew and listen while he thus dares me before the unwitting congregation. And still I kneel and pray, and my heart is uplifted by the words of the Bible, which I cannot believe, no, no, are mere fancy, mere poetry, like the Rector’s Virgil. Dear God, I do not want to hurt the dear old man. And only when I put on again my Sunday hat, do my “thoughts” return. Only at the church gate does my conscience meet me once more and charge me with desertion.

I trust — I know — he will not speak to Elizabeth. Is not that the true measure of my hypocrisy? That I keep from my own wife what I impart to her father, wishing to spare her, being her father’s daughter, the full pain of disclosure, when I daily injure and perplex her with my furtive preoccupation; and she, dear Liz, patiently supposes that periodically I must wrap myself in weighty but necessary “studies.” Surely she suspects. But surely if I were to tell her all, she would only commend me to her father’s counsel. Surely, one day, taking the matter into her own hands, she will speak to her father. And there will be the poor Rector in a fine state of contortion.

6th July 1857:

My dear little Lucy! Such a sweet mixture of trustingness and forwardness. I confess she has become my favourite. I endeavour to instill in her what, increasingly, is absent in me and to teach her to see what I discern less and less: an immanent Divinity in all things. As this morning, when we passed a memorable hour in the sunshine, observing the butterflies on our buddleia bush. I had thought she had no mind for her lost little brother, but today, when I explain how short is the life of the butterfly, she pierces my heart by remarking: “Poor things, like Felix.”

“This is the Large White,” I say, “and this is the Tortoiseshell — you see, each wears its own apparel — and this the Red Admiral, who is called admiral not because he is a naval gentleman but because he is to be admired: do you not agree?” She asks: “But why should each kind be dressed the same?” A big question. I answer. “Why, so we can recognise them and tell one kind from the other and know their names.” Answers: “But that is silly, Papa, they cannot all have the same name. I would rather they had names of their own, like you and me.”