Michael Cox - The Meaning of Night

My mother’s death provided a reason for my returning home from school that no one questioned; and the same excuse was conveyed by letter to Le Grice and my other friends at Eton. Only Tom knew the truth, and to him I now turned.

Mr Byam More, my sole surviving relative, offered to become my guardian; but, as I was firmly disinclined to remove to Somerset, it was agreed that Tom would temporarily stand in loco parentis , and that I would be placed under his educational care once again, whilst remaining – alone but for Beth and old Billick – in the house at Sandchurch, which had been left to me by my mother. The fifty sovereigns that I had insisted that she should keep as her own had been laid out on a number of unavoidable expenses; and so it became necessary to apply to Mr More, as my trustee, to release some of my remaining capital in order to maintain the household oeconomy.

In the meantime, I sought to accustom myself to the unexpected sensation of being master in my own house, at the age of sixteen. To be there alone, without my mother, gave me the most curious sensation at first, as if I half expected to meet her on the stairs, or see her walking down the garden path when I looked out from my bedroom window. Sometimes, at night, I became certain that I could hear her moving around in the parlour. I would hold my breath, heart beating fast, straining to make out what I had heard – whether it was, indeed, the sound of her poor ghost, unable to find rest from pressing pen to paper, pulling up her chair to the great work-table to take up some eternally unfinished work, or simply the timbers of the old house, creaking and straining as the wind howled in from the sea.

I lived at Sandchurch, tutored by Tom, and under his informal guardianship, until the autumn of 1838. My former school-fellows, including Phoebus Daunt, were preparing to leave Eton for the Varsity, and I too wished to continue my studies at some suitable seat of learning. Thus it was that, at Tom’s suggestion, I went to Heidelberg, where I enrolled at the University to take a number of classes, and indulged myself to the full in the pursuit of my many interests. My intellectual ambitions had been frustrated by having had to leave school prematurely, thus forfeiting the chance of proceeding to Cambridge and a Fellowship there; and so, though I did not intend to take a degree, I determined to use the time as well as I could.

I attended lectures and read like a perfect fiend, by day and by night: philosophy, ethics, jurisprudence, rhetoric, logic, cosmology – I fairly guzzled them down, like a man dying of thirst. Then I would run furiously back to the favourite subjects of my early youth – the old alchemical texts, the Rosicrucian teachings, and the ancient Greek Mysteries – and, through one of the Professors at the University, I imbibed a new passion for the archaeology of the ancient seats of civilization, Assyria, Babylonia, and Chaldea. Then I would be eager to search out paintings by the old German Masters in lonely forest-wrapped castles, or would travel on a whim all over the region to hear some local virtuoso play Buxtehude on an early eighteenth-century organ, or a village choir singing old German hymns in a white-painted country church. I would haunt the bookshops of the old German towns, unearthing glowing rarities – prayer-books, missals, illuminated manuscripts from the court of Burgundy, and other bibliographical treasures of which I had knowledge but, until now, had never seen. For I was mad to see, to hear, to know!

That was my golden time (Phoebus Daunt is welcome to his): in particular, the bliss of tracing the track of the Philosophenweg *with an armful of books on a bright summer’s morning; to find my private spot high above the Neckar, from where I could gaze down on the Heiliggeist Church and the Old Bridge through the clear new air; and then to lie back on soft grass, the sun seeping through the branches, with my books and my dreams, with swallows wheeling against clouds that might have been painted by Poussin, an infinity of blue above me.

*[‘Dust and shadow’. Ed. ]

†[Edward Craven Hawtrey (1789–1862), who had succeeded the infamous flogger Dr Keate as Head Master only two years earlier. He was, as Glyver notes, a great bibliophile himself and was a member of the premier association for bibliographical scholars, the Roxburghe Club. Ed. ]

*[The Roxburghe Club. Ed. ]

*[Meaning one huge event piled on another, alluding to the giants, the Aloadae, in Greek mythology who attempted to reach the abode of the gods by placing Mount Pelion upon Mount Ossa, two peaks in Thessaly (Odyssey , XI, 315). The narrator is doubtless alluding to Laertes’ words on the death of Ophelia: ‘Now pile your dust upon the quick and the dead / Till of this flat a mountain you have made / To o’ertop old Pelion’ (Hamlet, V.i.247). Ed. ]

*[The famous ‘Philosopher’s Path’ that leads up to the northern bank of the Neckar. Ed. ]

13

Omnia mutantur *

A man of knowledge increaseth strength, says the proverb; †and this saying I proved to be true, as I daily enlarged my store of understanding in the subjects to which I applied myself. I experienced a dizzying feeling of expanding power in my mental and physical capabilities, until I could conceive of no subject too abstruse for my apprehension to grasp, and no task too great for my ability to accomplish.

And yet I suffered continually from bouts of gnawing rage, which often threatened to undermine this swelling self-confidence. A fearful black humour would descend upon me without warning, even on the brightest of days, when the world about me was alive with life and hope. And then I would shut out the light, and pace about my room like a caged beast, for hours on end, eaten up by only one thought.

How would I be revenged? I turned the question over and over in my mind, imagining the ways in which Phoebus Daunt might be made to feel what I had felt, and envisioning the means by which his hopes could be destroyed. He was at Cambridge now, as I knew from Le Grice, both having taken their places at King’s College. Daunt, as expected, had secured the Newcastle, and was received at King’s with that expectation that naturally surrounds the holder of such a prize. Certainly he continued to display real ability in his studies, but again with that tendency to indiscipline that would have aroused the severe displeasure of his meticulous father. The Rector’s old friend, Dr Passingham of Trinity, did his best to maintain a paternalistic eye on the young man’s doings and would, from time to time, communicate discreet pastoral reports on his progress back to Northamptonshire. It was not long before such reports became troublesome to Dr Daunt.

From Le Grice, I received accounts of a number of incidents witnessed by him that testified to a distinct shabbiness of character, and which luridly corroborated the more sober notes of concern that flowed, with increasing frequency, between the Master’s Lodge at Trinity and Evenwood Rectory.

The first might, perhaps, be seen as an undergraduate prank (though it was not so construed by his father when it was reported to him). On being good-humouredly reprimanded by the Dean of the College for some trivial misdemeanour, young Daunt placed a game hamper before that gentleman’s door, directed to him ‘With Mr Daunt’s compliments’. When opened, the hamper was found to contain a dead cat, with an escort of five skinned rats. On being arraigned and questioned, Daunt coolly maintained his innocence, arguing that he would hardly have affixed his own name to the hamper had he been the culprit. And so he was released with due apology.

The second incident is more substantial, with respect to Daunt’s developing character.