A Maggot - John Fowles (49 page)

Q. As I thought - thou wert practised upon. Such an
engine could never pass within, nor out. None of this had substance
outside thy woman's head; or what little it had thou hast

maliciously nursed and let grow inside thee like that
worm in thy womb.

A. Thee may say. Deny what I am become, do what thee
will, to me it matters not, nor to Christ's truth. 'Tis thy own soul
shall rue the day.

Q. Enough. Did you not search within the cavern? May
his Lordship not have been asleep in some corner, as yourself? Was
there no sign?

A. There was sign. When I made at last to leave, my
foot did stumble on his Lordship's sword, that lay still where he had
thrown it.

Q. Did you not pick it up?

A. No.

Q. And searched not to see if his Lordship might lie
there?

A. He was gone.

Q. How gone?

A. Within where I last saw him.

Q. How know you this, were you not asleep?

A. I was, and I know not how, save that I am.

Q. Can you deny that he may have left some otherwise
than in your engine?

A. I cannot, in thy alphabet; in mine I can, and do.

Q. You say, he was brought to your June Eternal?

A. Not brought, he is returned.

Q. What that these your holy visions had stripped you
of your clothes, like common thieves?

A. All Holy Mother Wisdom stole was my sinning past.
That was no theft, she would send me back with new clothes for my
soul, and did, for I wear them still, and ever shall,

till I meet her again. I came out new-born from her
spirit's womb.

Q. And most egregiously lied, did you not, so soon as
Jones came up with you?

A. 'Twas not to spite him. Some are born broad and
heavy, like ships, they may not be turned by their conscience alone,
nor Christian light. He made it plain he would use me still, and I
would not be used. I must make service of my wits, to escape his
design.

Q. As thou dost now, to escape mine.

A. I tell thee truth, which thee won't have. In this
thee's great proof theeself I must lie to be believed.

Q. Downright lies or unchaste parables, it is all
one. Now, mistress, it is grown late, but I am not done with you, nor
will I have you this night conspiring with your man to make more
parables still. You shall sleep beneath this roof, in the chamber
where you dined, it is clear? And shall speak to no man unless my
clerk, who will watch you close as any turnkey.

A. Thee's no right, and least in God's eyes. '

Q. I might have thee flung into the town gaol,
mistress, where thou'dst sup on a crust and water, and sleep on lousy
straw. Argue more, thou shalt see.

A. 'Tis to my father and my husband thee must tell
that. I know they wait.

Q. Cease thy impudence. Be
gone with thee, and thank Heaven for my mercy. Thou dost not merit
it.

* * *

TEN MINUTES later three men stand stiffly across the
room from Mr Ayscough, close by the door through which they have
entered, as if to venture further might risk infection of some kind.
It is clear they are a deputation of protest, and as clear that the
lawyer has changed his mind as to Rebecca's impudence. When she had
left with her turnkey he had, as earlier that day, walked to the
window. The sun had only just set, and dusk had hardly begun, but the
square was far less busy than it had been that morning. One thing in
it had not diminished, however. Below the window, on the facing
street-corner, still stood those same three male figures, as sombre
as the Erinnyes, and as implacable; but now behind and beside them
stood ten others, of whom six were women, three elderly, three
younger, and all dressed as Rebecca had been. One might have assumed
it a group chancegathered, were it not for this quasi-uniform, and
even more in the way that all thirteen pairs of eyes seemed fixed on
one point only: the window where Ayscough had appeared.

He was made out; and in a ragged but rapid sequence,
thirteen pairs of hands rose in prayer to their breasts. The prayer
was not offered. It was a statement, not a solicitation; an obscure
challenge, despite the lack of cries, of hostile or threatening
gestures. The group showed nothing but solemn, intent faces. Ayscough
had stared down at these pillars of righteousness for a few moments;
then withdrawn in both senses of the word, to face his returned
clerk, who silently showed a large key in his hand, that with which
he had locked Rebecca in. He went to his desk and started to sort his
sheets of scrawled, indecipherable paper together, preparatory to a
start upon its laborious transcription. Suddenly Ayscough had spoken,
it seemed crossly and curtly.

The clerk had looked surprised at what was commanded,
but said nothing; then bowed and left the room again.

The middle of the three men is the tailor James
Wardley, who is the shortest, yet has visibly the most authority. His
hair is grey and, as is his two companions', long and straight; his
face worn and lined, that of a man older than his fifty years. He
looks a humourless plain-dealer; or would have done so, did he not
wear steel-framed spectacles. They bear peculiar pieces of dark glass
on their arms, to shut out all side-light, and this apparatus gives
an abiding impression of myopic but intent malevolence, for the eyes
behind the very small lenses do not shift their gaze from the
lawyer's. Neither he nor the other two have removed their Quaker
hats, and unconsciously show that feature common to all members of
extremist sects, whether political or religious, forced to consort
with more normal human beings: an awareness, both defiant and
embarrassed, of how locked away they are from conventional society.

Rebecca's husband stands gaunt as ever and visibly
ill at ease. He seems, despite his prophetic enthusiasm, distinctly
awed by this formal present - far less a potential rebel than a
mournful outsider involved by chance. Unlike Wardley he stares at the
floor between the little lawyer and himself. One might almost believe
he had not wished to be present. But Rebecca's father is another
matter. He wears a dark brown coat and breeches, and seems of
Wardley's age: a strong, square-set man, who means not to give an
inch, and is as determined in face as his son-in-law seems at a loss.
If Wardley's stare is steady, his is bold, even aggressive; and his
hands by his side are clenched, as if for a fight.

Wardley is what he is by cantankerousness and love of
argument; not that he lacks faith in his beliefs and visions, but
above all he enjoys that part of their exposition and defence which
allows him to mock his enemies' illogic (not least their smug
contentment in a grossly unjust world) and also - how sweet is bile -
then to dispatch them to future damnation. In him the spirit of Tom
Paine - as of countless seventeenth-century quarrellers, in the past
- is alive; he is not a true French Prophet only in as much as his
eternal nature, non-conforming and uncomfortable, has found very
different outlets in the course of history.

Rebecca's melancholy husband is in truth no more than
an ignorant mystic, who has picked up the language of prophetic
visions and yet is sure his utterances come by divine inspiration:
that is, he is self-gulled, or innocently self-believing. To speak so
is anachronistic. Like so many of his class at this time, he still
lacks what even the least intelligent human today, far stupider even
than he, would recognize - an unmistakable sense of personal identity
set in a world to some degree, however small, manipulable or
controllable by that identity. John Lee would not have understood
Cogito, ergo sum; and far less its even terser modern equivalent-,1
am. The contemporary I does not need to think, to know it exists. To
be sure the intelligentsia of John Lee's time had a clear, almost but
not quite modem, sense of self; but the retrospective habit we have
of remembering and assessing a past age by its popes, its Addisons
and Steeles, its Johnsons, conveniently forgets how completely
untypical artistic genius is of most human beings of any age, however
much we force it to be the reverse.

John Lee is, of course; but as a tool or a beast is,
in a world so entirely pre-ordained it might be written, like this
book. He laboriously reads the Bible, and so does he hear of and
comprehend the living outside world around him - not as something to
be approved of or disapproved, to be acted for or against; but as it
simply is, which is as it always would or must be, an inalienably
fixed narrative. He has none of Wardley's comparatively emancipated,
active and quasi-political mind, his belief that a man's actions may
change the world. His prophecies may predict such a change, but even
in this he is to himself but a tool, a ridden beast. Like all mystics
(and many novelists, not least the present one) he is baffled, a
child, before the real now; far happier out of it, in a narrative
past or a prophetic future, locked inside that weird tense grammar
does not allow, the imaginary present.

You would never have got the tailor to admit that the
tenets of the French Prophets were simply convenient to his real
nature and its enjoyment; and even less to consider whether, had some
miracle brought him national power instead of the mere leadership of
an obscure and provincial sect, he would not have been quite as grim
a tyrant as the man his sinister spectacles vaguely foreshadowed,
Robespierre. These various defects in his partners made Rebecca's
father, the carpenter Hocknell, the most straightforward and in many
ways the most typical of the three.

Both his religion and his politics were ruled by one
thing, the ;kill in his hands. He was a much more practical man than
either Wardley or John Lee; a good carpenter. Of ideas in themselves
he took little account, and regarded most as he regarded ornament in
his sister trades of joinery and cabinet-making - superfluous, and
transparently sinful in God's eyes. This marked tendency in Dissent
towards severity of ornament, this stress on structural solidity,
good workmanship, sobriety of taste (at the expense :)f fancy,
elaboration, useless luxury and all the rest), came in the beginning,
of course, from Puritan doctrine. The aesthetic of a society of
God-fearing Sobersides had by the 1730s (or ever since 1660) largely
been brought into contempt and discredit by the rich and educated;
but not among those like Hocknell.

Plain carpentry had become a religious template with
him; and so did he judge much else besides the working of wood. What
mattered to him was that a thing, an opinion, an idea, a man's way of
life, should be plain, exact to its purpose; well built, well pinned
and morticed, well fitted to its function; and above all, not hidden
by vain ornament from what it truly was. What did not fit these
homely precepts taken from his trade was evil or ungodly. Aesthetic
justness had become moral justice; simple was not only beautiful, it
was virtuous; and the most satanically unvirtuous piece of work of
all, grossly obvious beneath its unseemly and excessive ornament, was
English society itself.

Hocknell was not such a bigot he refused to fit
ornamental wall-cases, over-carved mantels, whatever it might be, on
demand; but counted it all devil's work. For fine houses, fine
clothes, fine carriages and a thousand other things that hid or
travestied or ignored the fundamental truths and elementary
injustices of existence he had no time at all. His principal truth
was the truth of Christ, which the carpenter saw rather as
substantial and precious pieces of seasoned timber left abandoned in
a yard than as a fixed structure or house. They were there to be
properly used and built by such as him. The metaphors he used in his
own prophecies tended very much to this kind of imagery; the present
house was rotten and must fall, while far better materials lay to
hand. His prophecies were plain beside those of his son-in-law, who
seemingly had a close speaking and seeing acquaintance with the
Apostles and various Old Testament figures. The carpenter hoped
rather than firmly believed Christ's second coming was near; or
believed, like so many Christians before and after him, that it must
be true because it ought to be true.

It ought to be true, of course, because the Gospel
may very easily be read as a political document; not for nothing did
the medieval church fight so long to keep it out of the vulgar
tongues of Europe. If all are equal in Christ's sight, and as regards
entry qualifications for Heaven, why are they not in human sight? No
degree of theological obfuscation or selective quotation justifying
the Caesars of this world can answer that. Nor did the carpenter
forget the trade Christ's worldly father followed; and indeed drew a
fierce pride from the parallel, perilously close to the sin of
vanity.

In ordinary terms he was a touchy, short-tempered man
in many things, and adamant for his rights, or as he saw them. They
had included the patriarchal right to command his daughters' lives
and expel the one who had lapsed so flagrantly. Rebecca had feared
his reaction most when she returned. She had had the sense to seek
her mother's forgiveness first, and gained it - or rather, gained it
if her father would allow. She was then brought straight into his
presence by her mother's hand. He was at work in a new-built house,
hanging a door; on his knees, about a hinge, and unaware of them,
until Rebecca spoke the one word, Father. He had turned, and given
her the most terrible stare, as if she were the Devil incarnate. She
had fallen to her knees and bowed her head. Most strangely his face
began to work beneath its terrible stare; he had lost control of it,
and was in agony. The next moment she was snatched into his burly
arms; and into a tide of mutual sobs stemming from a much older human
tradition than that of Dissent.