An Instance of the Fingerpost (11 page)

‘That is very simple,’ Grove said. ‘He is of a violent and unstable disposition; perhaps it is a case of the sins of the fathers being handed down. He became an unruly, ungovernable child and took to bad ways with a vengeance once he was free of family control. He assaulted and nearly murdered the guardian who has looked after him with kindness since his father’s disgrace, and there is also a complaint from an uncle
that he ransacked that man’s money chest on a recent visit. It happens: we hanged an undergraduate for highway robbery last year, Prestcott this year and, I’m afraid, these will not be the last. “The land is full of bloody crimes, and the city is full of violence.”’ He paused for me to recognise the quotation, but I shrugged helplessly.

‘Ezekiel 7:23,’ he said reprovingly. ‘It is a consequence of the turmoil we have been through. Now, sir. I feel unable to insult you by offering you money for your kindness, but perhaps a meal in college would be an adequate recompense? We do fine food, better wine and I can promise excellent company.’

I smiled wanly, and said I would be delighted.

‘Splendid,’ he said. ‘I am so glad. Five o’clock?’

This was agreed, and I made my farewells to him with as many thanks as I could muster.

The way he waved it aside suggested that he believed I was singularly honoured by the invitation. ‘Tell me, before you leave,’ he said as I opened the door, ‘how is the girl’s mother?’

I stopped in surprise at the way he brought the matter up. ‘She is not well,’ I replied. ‘In fact, I believe she will die.’

He nodded grimly in a fashion I could not decipher. ‘I see,’ he said. ‘God’s will be done.’

And then I was dismissed. I went back to inform Mrs Bulstrode I would not be dining, then fulfilled my last obligation and took the gallon of wine to Prestcott in his gaol cell.

DINNER AT NEW
College came as a shock. As my hosts were all gentlemen of education, and many of them in holy orders, I imagined that I would be passing a pleasant time in agreeable surroundings. Instead, the meal was served in a vast and draughty hall, through which the wind swept as though we were at sea in mid-gale; Grove was well wrapped up for the occasion and went into considerable detail to inform me of the layers of undergarments he was wont to don before venturing forth. Had he forewarned me, I would have done likewise. Even so, I would have been cold. While the English are used to icy conditions, I am used to the soft air and balmy weather of the Mediterranean. None the less, even the lowliest tavern did not possess a bitterness like that hall. The chill ate through your clothes and flesh and made your very bones ache with the pain of it.

Even that would have been endurable had food, wine or company been a compensation. These colleges have the monastic custom of eating in common, with the exception of the wealthier members who pay to have food sent up to their chambers. On a raised platform sit the senior Fellows, and in the rest of the hall are the others. As the food is scarcely fit for animals, I suppose it is not surprising that they behave like beasts. They eat off wooden platters, and in the middle of the tables are vast wooden bowls into which they toss the bones, when they do not throw them at one another. I ended up with food splattered over me from Fellows talking with their mouths full, spraying each other with bits of gristle and half-masticated bread.

The wine was scarcely palatable, so I could not even drink myself into oblivion. Instead, I had to listen to the conversation, which was not at all about matters of scholarly interest. I began to realise that, having initially fallen in with Mr Boyle and Dr Lower, I had gained
an unduly favourable impression, both of Oxford and the English. Far from being concerned about the latest advances of knowledge, the assembly was instead entirely taken up with who was going to gain which preferment, and what the dean of this had said to the rector of that. There was one other guest apart from myself, evidently a gentleman of some standing, and the obsequiousness of their behaviour to him was such that I assumed he was a patron of the college in some form. He, however, said little, and I was placed too far away to draw him into conversation.

For my part, I excited little interest and I confess my pride was wounded by it. I had anticipated that someone like myself, fresh from Leiden and Padua, would have rapidly become the centre of attention. Far from it. Saying that I did not live in the town and had no position in the Church was like confessing to the pox. When it became clear I was a Catholic two members left the hall, and at least one other declined to sit near me. I hated to admit it, since I had become partial to the English by then, but in nearly all respects they were no better than their fellows in Padua or Venice and, apart from the differences in religion and language, could have been exchanged for any group of gossiping Italian priests without anyone really noticing.

But if few paid me much attention, only one was offensive and my reception was neglectful more than hurtful. It was a great shame, however, that the frostiness came from a gentleman whom I was ready to admire without reservation, for Dr John Wallis was someone I would dearly have liked to count in my society. I knew of him and admired him for his skill in mathematics, which placed him amongst the first rank in Europe, and I had imagined that a man who was the correspondent of Mersenne, who had crossed mathematical swords with Fermat and Pascal, would have been of the broadest civilisation. Alas, this was not the case. Dr Grove introduced us, and was shamed by the way that Wallis refused even normal civility to me. Rather, he stared at me with pale, cold eyes that reminded me of a reptile, declined to respond to my bow, then turned his back on me. Worse still, he later rudely spurned my every effort at acquaintanceship.

This was as we were sitting down to eat, and Grove became
excessively cheerful and pugnacious in his conversation to cover up the embarrassment his colleague had caused.

‘Now, sir,’ he said, ‘you must defend yourself. It is not often that we have an advocate of the new learning amongst us. If you are intimate with Lower, I suppose you must be so.’

I replied that I hardly saw myself as an advocate, and certainly not a worthy one.

‘It is true, though, that you seek to cast off the knowledge of the ancients, and replace it with your own?’

I said I respected all opinions of worth.

‘Aristotle?’ he said in a challenging way. ‘Hippocrates? Galen?’

I said that these were all great men, but could be proven to have been wrong in many particulars. He snorted at my reply.

‘What advances? All that you novelists have done is to find out new reasons for ancient practice, and show how a few trifles work in ways other than was supposed.’

‘Not so, sir. Not so,’ I said. ‘Think of the barometer, the telescope.’

He waved his hand in scorn. ‘And the people who use them all come to entirely different conclusions. What discoveries has the telescope made? Such toys will never be a substitute for reason, the play of the mind upon imponderables.’

‘But the advances of philosophy, I am convinced, will achieve wonders.’

‘I have yet to see a sign of it.’

‘You will,’ I replied warmly. ‘I doubt not that posterity will verify many things that are now only rumours. In some age it may be that a voyage to the moon will not be more strange than one to the Americas for us. To speak with someone in the Indies may be as usual as a literary correspondence is now. After all, to talk after death could only have been thought a fiction before the invention of letters, and to sail true by the guide of a mineral would have seemed absurd to the ancients, who knew nothing of the magnet.’

‘That is a most extraordinary flourish,’ Grove replied tartly. ‘Yet I find the rhetoric defective in the suiting of the antitheses and the antapodoses. For you are wrong, sir. The ancients discovered the magnet. Diodorus Siculus knew it plainly, as any gentleman should
be aware. All we have discovered is a new use for the stone. This is what I mean. All knowledge is to be found in ancient texts, if you know how to read them aright. And that is true in alchemy as in physick.’

‘I disagree,’ I said, thinking I was holding my own quite well. ‘For example, take cramps of the stomach. What is the usual remedy for those?’

‘Arsenic,’ said another further up the table who was listening, ‘a few grains in water as a vomit. I took it myself last September.’

‘Did it work?’

‘I know the pains grew worse first. I must say, I am inclined to believe that letting a little blood was more effective. But its qualities as a purgative are undoubted. I have never passed so many stools so quickly.’

‘My master in Padua did some experiments and concluded that the belief in arsenic was a foolish error. The idea came from a book of remedies translated from Arabic and then into Latin by Deusingius. However, the translator made a mistake; the book recommended what it called darsini for the pains, and this was translated as arsenic. But arsenic in Arabic is zarnich.’

‘So what should we be taking?’

‘Cinnamon, apparently. Now sir, do you defend a long tradition when it can be shown to rest merely on a translator’s error?’

Here this other threw his head back and laughed, sending a shower of half-chewed food in an elegant parabola across the table. ‘You have justified only the existence of a sound knowledge of classical languages, sir,’ he said. ‘No more. And use this as an excuse to cast away thousands of years of learning so you may replace them with your own feeble scrabblings.’

‘I am all too well aware of the feebleness of my scrabblings,’ I replied, still the most civil person there. ‘But I do not substitute; merely examine before I accept an hypothesis. Did not Aristotle himself say that our ideas must conform to our experience of things as they are?’

I fear I was becoming reddened with anger by this stage, as I was conscious that he was little interested in a discussion in which reason
played a part; while Grove was amiable in his argument, this one was unpleasant in tone and in manner.

‘And then?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘And after you have put Aristotle to your proof? And, no doubt found him wanting. Then what? Will you submit the monarchy to your investigations? The Church, perhaps? Will you presume to put Our Saviour Himself to your proofs? There lies the danger, sir. Your quest leads to atheism, as it must unless science is held firmly in the hands of those who wish to strengthen the word of God, rather than challenge it.’

He stopped here and looked around to gather support from his colleagues. I was pleased to see that they did not look on with complete enthusiasm, although many were nodding with agreement.

‘“Shall the clay say to him that fashioneth it, What makest thou?”’ Grove murmured mildly, half to himself.

But his half-spoken quotation roused the young man who had shown me the way to Grove’s room that morning. ‘Isaiah 45:9,’ he said. ‘“The price of wisdom is above rubies,’” he added quietly, being obviously too young and junior to enter into the contest, but reluctant to let the older man speak unchecked. I had noticed that he had tried to take part in the conversation on several occasions, but each time he opened his mouth, Grove had interrupted and carried on as if he wasn’t there.

‘Job 28:18,’ Grove snapped back, irritated by the presumption. ‘“He that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.”’

‘Ecclesiastes 1:18,’ Thomas Ken countered, also showing signs of becoming heated. I discerned that there was some private squabble here, which had nothing to do with me or experiment. ‘“Scorners delight in their scorning, and fools hate knowledge.”’

‘Proverbs 1:22. “Thy wisdom and thy knowledge, it hath perverted thee.”’

The final sally defeated poor Ken, who knew that he could not remember the source of the quotation, and his face grew red under the public humiliation as he desperately tried to think of a response.

‘Isaiah 47:10,’ Grove said in triumph when Ken’s failure was obvious to all.

Ken threw down his knife with a clatter and, hands shaking, stood up to leave the table. I feared that they might come to blows but, in fact, it was all theatre. ‘Romans 8:13,’ he said. With icy slowness, he withdrew from the table and marched out of the hall, his footsteps echoing as he went. I believe I was the only person who heard this last comment, and to me it meant nothing. I always found the tendency of Protestants to bandy quotations from the Bible a trifle ridiculous, even blasphemous. Anyway, Grove certainly did not hear, but instead looked pleased with himself for having carried the field.

As nobody else wanted to break the silence, I decided (as a foreigner, and knowing little of what was going on) to try to cover over the affair. ‘I am not a theologian or a priest,’ I said, trying to return the argument to rational grounds, ‘but I have studied the medical arts in my way. And I know that in many cases physick is as likely to kill as to cure. I think it is my duty to find out as much as I can and help my patients the better. It is not impious, I hope, so to do.’

‘Why would I take your word when it differs from the great masters of the past? What is your authority compared to theirs?’

‘Small indeed, and I reverence them as do you. Did not Dante call Aristotle
il maestro di color qui sanno
? But that is not what I am asking. I ask you to decide on the result of experiment.’

‘Ah, experiment,’ Grove said with glee. ‘Do you hold with the Copernican notion that the earth goes round the sun?’

‘I do, of course.’

‘And you have performed those experiments yourself? You have made the observations, repeated the calculations, and established by your own labours that it is so?’

‘No; I know little of mathematics, alas.’

‘So you
believe
it is true, but you do not know? You take Copernicus’s word for it?’

‘Yes. And that of those experts who accept his conclusions.’

‘Pardon me for saying so, but it appears to me that you are just as bound to authority and tradition as a man who subscribes to Aristotle or Ptolemy. After all your protestations, your science is also
a matter of faith, in no way distinguishable from the old learning you so despise.’