It seemed he was interested in almost everything, although he insisted he was an unimaginative man and constantly on the warpath, as he put it, to stamp out prejudices within himself. His mind was so crammed with learning, with scientific concepts and philosophical ideas, with facts and anecdotes, that an hour spent with him was enough to make Mr Bush giddy. He talked of politics, of butterflies, electrical currents, agriculture, the problem of setting words to music, the law. He often discussed crime and punishment, and while he conceded the latter was probably necessary on moral grounds, he believed there wasn’t a shred of evidence to prove it was a deterrent to the former. Besides, the law was an ass. Take the case, some years back, of the Reverend Samuel Smith, a Cambridge scholar who had made the lamentable discovery that his wife was having an affair with a porter called Leech. Having found her out he persuaded her to write to Leech and arrange an assignation in a secluded spot. This was done, and at the appointed time Smith jumped out and inflicted grievous injuries on the unsuspecting porter. Poor Smith was given five years penal servitude and his wife, the cause of all the trouble, a woman who had previously served behind the counter at Swan & Edgar’s, was let off scot-free. Homer, Mr Watson said, had made it clear that the avenging of crime on earth was an important matter, though the fall of Troy was obviously dictated by divine justice. It must never be forgotten that the Greek gods were essentially cruel and wayward – if a man could grasp the appalling reality of antiquity he would turn from it in horror. He did not pretend to have fully grasped it himself.
He was not a good speaker – often when he talked his hand hovered over his mouth – and many of his allusions to classical literature left Mr Bush in the dark, but his curiosity was infectious. He had the startling conviction that animals had the ability to reason. Dogs, of course, were particularly canny in this respect. A dog, Mr Watson claimed, could sometimes sense the premeditation of an act of violence. Various theories existed as to why this should be so, but Mr Watson thought it had much to do with a particular odour believed to be emitted by a person with criminal intentions. As to larger animals, he told a moral and gruesome tale of an elephant whose keeper was saddled with an unfaithful wife. One day the elephant secretly tracked the woman and, finding her lying beside a water hole in the arms of her lover, lowered its tusks and ran the guilty pair through.
Fred, to whom Mr Bush repeated this information, allowed that dogs might behave in the manner described, but discounted the last story out of hand on the grounds that no one, unless stone deaf, was likely to be secretly followed by an elephant.
Mr Watson maintained that it was much the same with birds. Mr Bush and he spent an entire morning watching gulls dropping mussel shells on to the rocks below the headland.
‘In New Holland,’ he said, ‘there is a species of buzzard, which, spotting the eggs of another bird, will carry a stone aloft in its talons and drop it from a height so as to smash the eggs beneath and suck out the contents. In the one case,’ he concluded, indicating with his stick the industrious seagulls wheeling about the headland, ‘the food is made to fall on the stone, in the other the stone is dropped on the food. In both the knowledge of cause and effect is much the same. Does this knowledge proceed from reason or instinct?’ Fortunately he answered the question himself.
It was true that he had a disconcerting habit of correcting Mr Bush’s choice of words, but it was a small price to pay for such stimulating chat. He noticed the shape of rocks, the gradations of colour where the sea met the sky, the form as opposed to the mass of the landscape. Mr Bush listened and nodded; not for one single instant did he feel either patronised or bored. Having begun by merely admiring the head master, he quickly grew fond of him, and in the process became protective towards him.
No sooner had this happened than it was apparent to him that Mrs Watson was neither as entertaining nor as equable as he had at first supposed. More than that, he believed she actually disliked her husband. It wasn’t so much what she said, though now and then a tone of bullying insistence crept into her voice, but rather the way she looked at him. A less observant man, Mr Kenny for one, or the Revd Mr Williams for that matter, might never have noticed the mild curl of her lip, or the almost imperceptible raising of her eyebrows whenever she spoke to him. Nobody, however, certainly not Mr Watson, for whom they were intended, could possibly ignore those occasional and searing glances of calculated insolence.
‘Whenever the poor man asks her opinion of anything,’ he told Fred, ‘she withers him with her eyes.’
‘I have never heard him ask for anyone’s opinion,’ said Fred.
‘Surely you’ve noticed the way she stares at him,’ Mr Bush insisted.
‘She regarded me in much the same way last week,’ said Fred, ‘when she sent me packing with the lobster. I don’t take any notice.’
Mr Bush found it increasingly difficult to be in the same room with Mrs Watson, let alone give her a civil word. That frankness of speech which he had once admired, now seemed rude and overbearing. There was something offensive, indelicate almost, in the bold way she looked at people. He felt she was always demanding attention. There was a dreadful greediness of spirit inherent in the way she poured salt on to the meat on her plate, or held up her face to the sun, or childishly pleaded to be escorted home. ‘I’m tired,’ she would say. ‘Poor little me.’ As her face darkened – she hardly ever put her parasol to its proper use and merely twirled it in the air over her shoulder – Mr Bush fancied she was changing into one of those reasoning animals Mr Watson was always discussing. With her sharp muzzle and her cunning amber eyes, he began to think she resembled a fox. Fred, usually so snappy in observation, couldn’t see it. He said his father was obsessed.
Mr Bush took to pressing Mr and Mrs Kenny to join them on their walks about the district, and then he would seize Mr Watson by the elbow and either surge ahead, leaving the vixen to follow with the others, or else deliberately delay him on some pretext and so manage to trail with him in the rear.
Several times he tried to draw Mr Watson out on the subject of his wife. He would say, ‘Mrs Watson, I think, is of a nervous disposition,’ or, ‘Mrs Watson, being Irish, is possibly hasty’, but each time the head master cleverly substituted one word for another, such as ‘sensitive’ for ‘nervous’ and ‘impulsive’ for ‘hasty’, and cutting him short pointed out the lichen on a rock or the presence of a bee hovering above a gorse bush. Attempting a more general tack, Mr Bush wondered aloud at the different nature of man and woman. To which the head master replied that in his view they were similar, only a woman had more to put up with.
One morning, sitting in the garden waiting for Mrs Watson to come downstairs, Mr Watson drew from his pocket a bundle of newspaper cuttings. He looked at them gloomily, and said, ‘I have turned over half a library to make one book, and they have dismissed it in a few words.’ He quoted: ‘We cannot in all truth say anything which would imply that we could not have done very well without this book.’
‘Surely not,’ protested Mr Bush. He had no idea to which book Mr Watson was referring.
‘Here,’ said Watson, throwing the bundle carelessly on to the grass. ‘Browse through them. Read and digest.’
Mr Bush put on his spectacles. The cuttings all seemed to deal with the biography of Richard Porson, Greek scholar and author of the letters to Archdeacon Travis. To Mr Bush’s way of thinking, leafing through them, there appeared to be a great many words. Unfortunately the ones that hit the eye were generally uncomplimentary … We sincerely hope that it will not stand in the way of a better work on the subject … He is a very useful author who has the art of research. Mr Watson has not this gift … A good hand at gossip ought to be good at the point of a joke. Mr Watson is not. The old reports of a criminal case used to say that the prisoner had been examined before torture, during torture and after torture. Mr Watson produces Porson before drink, during drink, and after drink. There was much more, columns of it. Mr Bush seized on a last line and recited triumphant
ly, ‘He deserves a merciful sentence as a man, and a high pedestal among scholars.’
‘They are talking of Porson, not me,’ said Watson.
‘I’m not a drinking man myself,’ remarked Mr Bush, after an embarrassed silence.
‘Porson could drink six pots of porter for breakfast,’ said Watson. He sounded as if he admired the feat. ‘The wife of Dr Parr, in whose house Porson stayed so that he could use the library, had never known such quantities of brandy to be drunk. Porson drank like an Irishman, and brandy and Greek acquired such an association in Mrs Parr’s mind that afterwards, when any visitor was introduced to her as a Greek scholar she rushed to see if there was enough brandy in the house. She got rid of Porson by putting a close-stool at the table in place of his chair.’
‘Dear me,’ cried Mr Bush.
‘I don’t have an inflated opinion of my abilities’, said Watson, ‘but I know it is a good book. But then my critics belong to the Cambridge faction – and Porson was a Cambridge man. No doubt they feel such a biography should have been left to one of their own men. They think I’m an upstart or an outsider – although I was ordained by the Bishop of Ely, and taught at Charles Parr Burney’s School at Greenwich before I went up to Trinity: those were the happiest days of my life. Burney is now Archdeacon of Colchester. He took the school over from his father, who had been one of Porson’s intimate friends, and he supplied me with a great number of letters and anecdotes from his father’s papers relating to Porson. That’s what those Cambridge people don’t like! By the way, there was no whipping at Burney’s establishment. Dr Johnson used to say of the school, in the elder Burney’s time, criticising the lack of discipline, that what the boys gained at one end they lost at the other. But we continued the tradition – and I have continued it at Stockwell. What a contrast to the Public Schools! Have you heard of Flogging Keate? He was only five feet tall – “Pocket Hercules” they used to call him – and he tanned eighty boys at Eton in a single day. The whole school cheered him when he had finished.’
‘A standing ovation, I suppose,’ said Mr Bush nervously.
‘They say he had no favourites and flogged the son of a duke and the son of a grocer with equal impartiality.’
‘At Stockwell, I imagine, all your pupils are the sons of grocers,’ said Mr Bush.
Watson knew it was a weakness in him that let him confide in such an uneducated man as Bush, but he couldn’t help himself. He said: ‘Mrs Parr was a woman of violent and overbearing temper – she hanged her husband’s cat in his library. No man can know, who hasn’t experienced it, the mischief such a woman can cause between a man and his friends.’
Mr Bush fidgeted on his wicker chair. He felt enormously dejected on Mr Watson’s behalf.
Watson stared at the parched grass. He said quietly, ‘Porson wrote to Dr Parr and said how difficult it was for a man to renovate his spirit once it had been broken.’
At that moment Mrs Watson was heard talking to someone on the terrace. Watson abruptly snatched the cuttings from Mr Bush’s knee and stuffed them back into his pocket.
As Mr Bush later told Fred, it was obvious he didn’t want Mrs Watson to be reminded of the reviews. She probably never lost an opportunity of throwing them in his face.
‘He is protecting her,’ said Fred, absurdly. ‘They must have hurt her as much as they hurt him’
At the close of the third and last week of the Watsons’ visit to Hastings, Mrs Kenny suggested that it would be nice if they all spent an afternoon on the beach. The sun was now less fierce, and they could take a picnic.
They were sitting on the shore on canvas chairs under two umbrellas, when Mr Kenny politely asked Mr Watson what he was working on at the present time. ‘I suppose,’ he said, ‘that a man of your talents must always be searching for the next subject.’
Mr Watson looked at him as if measuring him for some dark corner. He was dressed, as usual, in black, but he sported a straw hat which was unravelling at the brim. ‘I am engaged on a biography of Warburton,’ he said. ‘He had the most extraordinary ideas on the influence exerted by men on women, and regarded woman, in her natural state, as similar to one of those pictures that were once used for experiments in optics.’
‘What pictures?’ asked Mr Kenny.
Watson explained that a number of colours, thrown together at random on a board, could, by the use of a cylindrical mirror, instantly reflect a pattern of order and design. ‘Warburton was under the misguided impression,’ he said, ‘that a husband could perform the function of a cylinder.’
Mr Kenny nodded wisely. Mr Bush could tell that the exchange had gone over his head; he was all at sea in more ways than one.
‘One day,’ said Watson. ‘I hope to write an essay explaining why there has to be an Established Church. Warburton’s best book was his Alliance Between Church and State, in which he steered a middle course between the Puritans – like Fox, the Quaker – who claimed that the law had no concern with religion, and political philosophers like Hooker and Hobbes who said that the State had a natural supremacy over the Church. Warburton’s theory was that Church and State were mutually dependent, and that the Anglicans had a right to be established because there were more of them than there were Papists or Dissenters. The book got him a bishopric. Things have changed now in this age of progress and unbelief, and something new is needed to justify the union in modern terms. I am of humble origins like Fox – and Porson – but I speak for the Established Church.’
No one felt qualified to respond to this disquisition, and Watson proceeded: ‘How indeed is it possible that a man of education who has read enough to understand the effects of human action on human society, should feel within himself other than Conservative tendencies? Fox of course was something of a genius, or madman. He was obsessed by light. Even the heathen, he thought, could be saved by the portion of light vouchsafed to him, if he did not resist it. His life is interesting as showing how much may be effected by the resolute perseverance of one man, notwithstanding opposition, insult, ridicule, and vexation of every kind. But he was bound to fail, for human nature remains always the same: the world was intended to be as it is, and whatever is opposed to the common sense of mankind must inevitably decay. Worldly radicals, on the other hand, are worse. Take Wilkes, with his notorious cry for “liberty”. The great characteristic of the demagogue, from the earliest times to the present, has always been the same: a desire to gain advantage for himself under pretence of benefiting a multitude too short-sighterd to discern his real aims, by opposition to authority that he stigmatises as oppressive. Cobbett was better, and his egotism is as often amusing as offensive. But though many of his attacks on men and things have been attributed to love of sport rather than love of mischief, the savage earnestness of his invective, especially after he became a thorough radical, shows that the love of mischief predominated. Wilkes and Cobbett would make a good pair for a joint biography.’
There was a pause, and he pressed on hurriedly: ‘Another good subject would be the Scotch rebel Sir William Wallace – whose first adventure was to kill the son of one of my ancestors: Selby, constable of Dundee. After hanging and beheading him, the English burnt his heart, liver, lungs and entrails, whence his wicked thoughts had come.’
A gust of warm air blew inland. It was sufficient to ruffle the fringes of the umbrellas, and to lift Mr Watson’s hat. He clamped it on more securely, but not before Bush had noticed a white scar high up on his temple. He asked what had caused it.
‘I was attacked,’ replied Watson.
Mrs Watson, who until then had appeared to be dozing, rose from her chair and walked down to the water. Earlier she had paddled in the sea and her feet were still bare. She stood with her back to Mr Watson, the hem of her damp skirt encrusted with sand. The sky was washed blue all over, without cloud.
‘On the other hand, whatever may be said against Cobbett,’ said Watson, ‘he was a true husband to a good wife.’
‘Who attacked you?’ asked Mr Kenny.<
br />
‘I was living in Eltham at the time,’ Watson told him, and then stopped. Mrs Watson had returned and was holding out a shell for Mrs Kenny to look at. It was quite a large shell and Mrs Kenny took it from her and held it to her ear.
‘I have a curious shell on the mantel-shelf at home,’ Mrs Watson said. ‘Lord Moran, a friend of my father’s, bought it at a sale of effects at Ballyraheen. It belonged to an old militia man who had defended the slopes of Vinegar Hill. Lord Moran gave it to me on my sixteenth birthday. I was his favourite god-child.’ As she spoke she looked steadily at Watson. Taking the shell from Mrs Kenny she sat down again and wriggled her toes in the warm sand.
‘The attack,’ repeated Mr Kenny. ‘Who attacked you?’
It seemed for a moment as though Watson hadn’t heard, but then he said, ‘Marines’, and began his history again. ‘I was living in Eltham, having graduated a year before from Trinity College. I had been teaching for two terms at a school in Woolwich. It was a summer’s night and I was returning home after coaching a university candidate. Coming down Well-hall Lane out of the Dover Road at about half past ten, I was overtaken by a man who was lame. There was a moon and I clearly saw that the man was walking in a lopsided manner. I was considerably in advance of the crippled man when two soldiers came towards me. As they separated on the path to allow me to pass, one of them said, “Goodnight.” It was at this point that I was struck on the head.’
‘How dreadful,’ murmured Mrs Kenny.
Watson’s Apology Page 11
