Michael Cox - The Meaning of Night

My hands were shaking as I completed the exposure, but at last it was done. I was about to begin preparations to expose the last negative, but his Lordship informed me that he did not wish to detain me any longer. In a moment he had thanked me brusquely for my time, and was gone.

Mr Tredgold and I passed the night in Peterborough, returning to London the next morning. We left Evenwood without catching further sight of Phoebus Daunt; but I could not rid myself of the fixed image that I now had of him: standing in the sun, laughing, gay and self-assured, without a care in the world.

We had both been too tired the previous evening to discuss the events of the day, and during the homeward journey, on the following morning, my employer seemed no more inclined to talk. He had settled himself into his seat immediately on boarding the train, and had taken out the latest number of David Copperfield , *with the deliberate air of someone who does not wish to be disturbed. But as we were approaching the London terminus, he looked up from his reading and regarded me inquisitively.

‘Did you form a favourable impression of Evenwood,

Edward?’

‘Yes, extremely favourable. It is, as you said, a most ravishing place.’

‘Ravishing. Yes. It is the word I always use to describe it. It transports one, does it not, almost forcibly, carrying one rapturously away, to another and better world. What it would be to live there! One would never wish to leave.’

‘I suppose you have been there frequently,’ I said, ‘in the course of business.’

‘Yes, on many occasions, though not so often now as formerly, when the first Lady Tansor was alive.’

‘You knew Lady Tansor?’ I heard myself asking the question somewhat eagerly.

‘Oh yes,’ said Mr Tredgold, looking out of the carriage window as we entered under the canopy of the terminus. ‘I knew her well. And now, here we are. Home again.’

*[Opticians, ‘chemical and philosophical instrument makers’, and also a leading supplier of photographic equipment, at 121 and 123 Newgate Street. Ed. ]

*[The famous stone roofing slates of northern Northamptonshire. Ed. ]

†[Conrad Verekker (1770–1836). The first edition of his guide was published in 1809. Ed. ]

*[In ‘Recollections of the Arabian Nights’, first published in Poems, Chiefly Lyrical (1830). Ed. ]

*[Louis Désiré Blanquart-Evrard (1802–72), a cloth-maker from Lille. He developed an improved version of the calotype process that allowed paper negatives to be prepared in advance and developed hours or even days after exposure. The negatives also had greater sensitivity to light, and thus had shorter exposure times. In 1850 Blanquart-Evrard introduced the albumen paper print process, which became the primary print medium until gelatine paper became available in the 1890s. Ed. ]

*[Dickens’s novel was published in monthly parts from May 1849 to November 1850, and in book form in November 1850. Mr Tredgold would therefore have taken out the second number, for June. Ed. ]

IV

The Pursuit of Truth

I did not see Mr Tredgold again for several weeks. He left London the next day to visit his brother in Canterbury, and I was just then embarked on investigating a case of fraud, which obliged me to be out of the office a good deal. It was not until a month after we returned from Evenwood that I received an invitation to spend a Sunday with the Senior Partner.

We quickly resumed our old bibliological ways; but it appeared to me that there was not that unalloyed surrender by my employer to our shared enthusiasm for book-lore as before. He beamed; he polished his eye-glass; he brushed his feathery hair away from his face; and his hospitality was as warm as ever. But there was a change in him, detectable and troubling.

The negatives exposed at Evenwood had been developed, fixed, and printed, and all the views, with the exception of the portrait of Lord Tansor, had been mounted, at my own expense, in an elegant album, embossed with the Duport arms. The portrait, which I had mounted separately in a morocco case, would have been a fine piece of work, had it not been spoiled by the face of an inquisitive servant, whom I had failed to notice, peeping through the glazed door just behind where Lord Tansor had been standing. But Mr Tredgold complimented me on the work, and said that he would arrange for the album and the portrait to be sent to Evenwood.

‘His Lordship will be happy to remunerate you,’ he said, ‘if you would care to let him have a note of your charges.’

‘No, no,’ I replied, ‘I shall not hear of it. If his Lordship is satisfied with the results, then I am well rewarded.’

‘You have a generous nature, Edward,’ said Mr Tredgold, closing the album. ‘To have worked so hard, and then to refuse reward.’

‘I did not expect to be rewarded.’

‘No, I’m sure you did not. It is my belief, however, that good deeds will always be rewarded, in this life or the next. This accords with another belief of mine, that what has been taken from us will one day be restored by a loving providence.’

‘Those are comforting convictions.’

‘I find them so. To believe otherwise, that goodness will receive no recompense in some better place, and that loss – real loss – is irreversible, would be the death of all hope for me.’

I had never before heard Mr Tredgold speak in so serious and reflective a manner. Nothing more was said for a moment or two, as he sat contemplating the portrait of Lord Tansor.

‘You know, Edward,’ he said at last, ‘it seems to me that there is a kind of correspondence between these convictions of mine and the photographic process. Here you have captured and fixed a living person, permanently imprisoning light and form, and all the outward individualities of that person. Perhaps the lineaments of our souls, and of our moral characters, are similarly imprinted on the mind of God, for His eternal contemplation.’

‘Then woe to all sinners,’ I said, smiling.

‘But none of us is wholly bad, Edward.’

‘Nor wholly good, either.’

‘No,’ he said slowly, still looking down at Lord Tansor’s portrait, ‘nor wholly good.’ Then, more brightly: ‘But what an age we live in – to have the power to seize the evanescent moment, and fix it on paper for all to see! It is quite extraordinary. Where will it all lead? And yet how one wishes that some earlier age had made these wonderful discoveries. Imagine looking upon the face of Cleopatra, or gazing into the eyes – the very eyes – of Shakespeare! To see things as they were, long ago, which we can now only dream of – that would be wonderful indeed, would it not? And not only to look upon the dead of ages past, but also upon those we have recently lost, whom we yearn to see in their living forms again, as those who come after us will now be able to see Lord Tansor when he is no more. Our friends who died before this great miracle was discovered can never now be rendered permanently visible to our eyes, in the full flower of their lives, as his Lordship has been rendered, here in this photographic portrait. They must live only in our imperfect and inconstant memories. Do you not find that affecting?’

He looked at me and, for a moment, I thought his eyes were moist with tears. But then he jumped up, and went over to his cabinet to retrieve some item that he wished to show me. We talked for another half-hour, when Mr Tredgold said that he had a slight headache, and begged me to excuse him.

As I was leaving, he asked me whether I had many friends in London.

‘I can claim one good friend,’ I replied, ‘which I find sufficient for my needs. And then of course I have you, Mr Tredgold.’