Michael Cox - The Meaning of Night

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.

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.