Matthew Paris’s last night on shore was spent at an inn in Water Street, not far from the docks. He had called earlier at Red Cross Street to make his farewells, declining all hospitable urgings, deeming it easier for himself as for his patron if he did not impose himself for such a short stay. His wish was for solitude; more of his uncle’s ardent prophesying he did not feel able to endure and he might have been constrained to show it.
He was ready for the voyage, as far as concerned physical readiness; he had the bare wardrobe he thought would suffice, together with his medicine chest, instruments, bandages and dressings and a large store of medicaments and drugs: not knowing what to expect, he had brought everything he could think of, from mustard to eucalyptus oil. In the lacquered box his aunt had given him he had his writing materials and in a larger one of tin plate lined with wood his books, which for reasons of space were few and carefully chosen: Pope, Maupertuis, Hume, Voltaire. These four he had rescued from the bailiffs, who had taken almost everything else. On the fifth, Astley’s New Collection of Voyages & Travels, he had spent some of his uncle’s money, having been assured that it was a mine of information for anyone wishing to learn about Africa. Alongside these, in that same stout box, was the unfinished translation of Harvey’s Treatise on the Movement of the Heart & Blood, which he had begun in prison, when with his uncle’s help he had been able to afford a private room.
Books were a habit and so a need. But whether or not to include Harvey was something he had hesitated long over, caught in a contradiction he could not resolve. Stepping on to a slaveship, sailing with her, was as near to cancelling his former life as he felt he could come. And that was what, when he interrogated himself, he believed he most wanted – he wanted to cauterize the nerves that held him to the past. And yet he had not felt able to leave Harvey behind. Ambition, the wish for some lustre to fall on him from this great and revolutionary work? But how could that live in one breast with a desire to kill the self, to smother it in darkness, a desire so urgent at times that it came to him like an impulse of violence? And why, in spite of this, did the past lie in ambush for him at every unguarded turning of his thought? His desolation bristled with such questions, like blades.
There were reasons more immediate, and these also he gave weight to. The voyage was likely to take eight months at least and he did not expect to be occupied with medical duties for the whole of the time; there would be vacant hours to contend with. Eight months, he thought, sitting at the window of his upstairs room, looking out at the light rain which had just begun to dampen the cobbles. Perhaps longer, perhaps a year – all according, as Thurso no doubt would say. Perhaps in that time, among those new scenes, he would become somehow different. But it did not seem likely. He felt fixed for ever in his shape, impervious to change, whatever lay before him. It seemed to him that he had reached this final shape quite quickly: a few random blows had been enough. All the years before, his studies, his practice, the happy years of his marriage, he had remained unformed, impressionable, he had thought of himself as flowing towards something in a kind of pursuit. Quite suddenly this had been reversed, he had become an object of persecution. Was this the rescue, this shape of stone he was now? Those in pursuit did not turn to stone, only the pursued were wrought into shapes beyond change …
In the late afternoon he had writing materials brought up to him and sat down to write a letter to a friend and colleague in Norwich, to whom he had entrusted his collection of fossils, all he had, really, to leave or care about. He hesitated for a little while, looking from his blank page to the thin slant of rain outside. He had said goodbye before he left – this was a mere indulgence of his solitude. Almost he decided not to write at all. Then, with an impulse of impatience, he dipped pen in ink and began:
My Dear Friend,
I write on the eve of departure, to say my farewells over again and to thank you once more for all your acts of kindness towards my Ruth and myself.
A blurring of his page obliged Paris to pause here, though having only just begun; gratitude to his friend released tears in a way that thoughts of his wife could not – her name in his mind was all desolation. Clear-eyed again now but with throat painfully tightened, he resumed:
I do not in the least know what awaits me on this voyage and – though this need not at all distress you, my dear friend, and I am not seeking to make a parade of it – I am quite indifferent to what becomes of me, at least so I think at present, though if it came to a danger to my person, I dare say I should scramble with the rest, that being our nature.
If I should not return, please keep for your own use the collections you have been kind enough to house for me all this while. They are all I possess of any value. I mean to say by this that you should keep them whatever happens and regard them as yours; since even in the unlikely event of my ever returning to Norwich, I shall not want to set eyes on them again – they would recall the past too painfully. I hope the specimens will be of use in your own investigations, and in particular those preserved parts of sea animals, by which we learn of the changes of place in the waters which otherwise could not have been supposed.
I am giving up the work, because it belongs to a part of my life that is over now for ever, but I have not changed in my convictions. I can only recognize one vital principle throughout animate nature: by natural gradation of species we must always be led to an original species, and this must be the same for man. Though life may appear very compounded in its effects in a complicated animal like man, in my view it is as simple in him as in the most simple animal. I think we have reason to suppose that there was a period in time in which every species of natural production was the same, and this could square with the account of creation given to us in the Old Testament. But over great spans of time and with the earth and water changing situations, there have been many sorts of transmutation. It is not true, as they said, that I denied God’s creation and promulgated atheistical notions. But I cannot agree, my reason will not allow me, with those who would have us believe in a fixed immutable species or in successive acts of creation and extinction …
Self-contempt had been growing steadily in him and he ended abruptly, with good wishes and renewed thanks. As he chalked the page dry he was swept by a despairing sense of his incorrigible vanity and folly. Even now he could boast of his constancy, could stand up on the ruins of his life and crow with his doctrines like some vainglorious cockerel on a dung heap. He had maintained an abstract truth and published it abroad at the expense of all that was dear to him – and he sought still to make it a cause of pride. It was appropriate that dry bones and dead beetles should be his only legacy. The rabble set on by the Church Party had smashed his press and thrown his furniture out into the street; but by an unerring instinct of contempt they had ignored the cases of fossils in his study …
If I could have the choice again, he thought, if I could keep my Ruth and the child inside her, I would make any grovelling recantation, on my knees I would confess to all error since time began … But this was another proclamation from the dung heap. If he could not claim all truth, he would embrace all error. Never the common mixture of mortality …
In shame he would have torn the letter across but checked himself; it was well that Charles should know the specimens were for his unrestricted use. He would be more cautious in that use since such was his nature; he would continue to collect evidence, make his observations, write notes; but nothing would be published until he was safely dead. Some day these obscure researches that men all over Europe were making would find a synthesis in one brain and then the age of the earth would be stated boldly and it would be shown how the creatures had changed …
A little later, when it was getting dark, he went out and walked towards the Pier Head. The rain was still falling. He saw a woman lying sodden against a wall in a fume of gin. One or two taphouses showed gleams of light and he saw a farrier hunched at work still inside his shop. But the streets near the waterfront were for the most part deserted.
Paris stood in the rain looking towards the open sea. Lanterns of ships out in the road winked through the moist air. The Liverpool Merchant was there with the others, riding on the dark water. For some moments, as he stood there, the night was hushed around him, there were only the winking lights across the water and the silent rain. Then he heard the running of the tide, the scream of a late sea-bird, voices raised and lowered again from a tavern further along the quay.
He tried to think of Africa, tried to imagine the lives of Africans, lives that would be changed, more even than his own, by the ship. But it was too far away. There was only the rain on his face, the sense of solitude. The door of the tavern opened, two men came out and stood talking there. In the yellow light from the open door the rain had become suddenly visible. Paris saw the glint and swarm of it and without warning was transported to summers of his childhood, insects round lamps at night in the garden or over river water in dying sunlight, rising and falling as regular as breathing in the last warmth of the day.
The door closed, the bright swarm was extinguished. But the vision of those lost summers remained with him, like the sum of all loss. Standing there, looking across to the lights of the ships, one of which was to take him to a future of sorts, Paris could think only of the past.