His Last Fire (10 page)

A
N
E
XPERIMENT:
A
BOVE

S
he stood just inside the room, diminutive, her dress too big, drab against polished mahogany. Unaccustomed shoes. She was six; ten days ago he'd sent a ha'penny for her birthday. She replaced her brother in the weekly task, an older boy increasingly surly.

He beckoned her to where he sat, looking through the great south window: his young
magnolia virginiana
not yet flowering. Beyond the garden, fields, sheep-strewn hills.

‘You've come to collect the money, Mary. Do you prefer Polly? I've heard your mother call you that.'

‘Yes.'

‘Do you know my name? You should address me by my name.' His tone was kindly.

‘Mr. Powyss.'

‘Good. And do you know why I give you this money, Polly?'

‘So's we eat more. So's we eat more. Mr Powyss.'

Sudden sunlight lit her face. Round, placid, unresentful. Barely curious. He saw her mother in her; fled the thought.

He put the money in her drawstring purse, watched her unlatch the wicket, run, stop, dawdle on the path towards home.

He felt glad. Turned back to his room: books, engravings, precious Apulian vases. Set of globes. Newly-made cabinet with sloping top, thin wide drawers, for his plans. Necessities of intellect and wealth. He focused on the page before him; fought off a surge of dismay.

Moreham House, 14
th
June, 1797

Dear Philip,

Warlow's child Mary now comes to collect the money. She's a sweet girl of six and it cheers me to think I'm providing for her among the others. All the children look healthier than they did four years ago, even if they still resist shoes.

Sometimes when I write to you, my friend, I understand how it feels to be a papist making confession! You ask if I consider my action
purely
good.

He laid down his pen, put away the unfinished letter, rang for Stephens.

‘Dust is gathering on the shelves and objects, Stephens.'

‘Samuel doesn't like that end of the room, sir.'

‘Tell him he must see to it or be replaced.'

‘No replacements around here, Mr Powyss, sir.'

He went out to the hothouse. Built to his own design, nine foot wide, sixty foot long, heated by sea-coal boiler five months of the year. His senses rippled like cat's fur. Cucumbers doing well. Melons, new this year, still small but promising. Bunches of tiny grapes, acid-green.

Production was far in excess of need since he never entertained. He compelled the servants to eat pumpkins and rare vegetables. Production was not the point. What mattered was ascertaining the right conditions, recording: balance of soil, quantity of water, degrees of heat. Like the best gardeners he kept a calendar from year to year. Checked Miller's
Dictionary
.

After six weeks the child had lost her shyness.

‘Here you are again, Polly. Did they give you something in the kitchen?'

‘Yes. Tea. Piece of bacon.' She picked her teeth.

‘Did Catherine take tea leaves out of the pear-wood caddy? It looks like a big pear.'

‘Yes. Catherine said I'm a poor wee thing. It's not true because you gives us money. She says because of father.'

‘What do
you
say about your father, Polly?'

‘He's gone away. Is he dead?'

‘What do you think, Polly?'

‘Dead, I think.'

‘Don't trouble yourself with any more thinking. Take the money to your mother and be kind to her and all your brothers and sisters.'

‘Yes, Mr. Powyss.'

Again he watched her innocence. How she brushed the scented peas with her fingers on her way to the gate.

He took out the letter, dipped his pen. Once, half-seriously, his old friend had accused him of amorality. Plants were neither good nor bad, caused no dilemmas of conscience.

Perhaps there cannot be a human act of pure goodness. Such acts are for God alone. We do good as far as we are able. But remember, this is an experiment. I mean it to answer to both charity and science.

The child must remain in ignorance. He'd speak to the servants. Their restlessness was increasing. He would not be coerced into paying them more.

Worse, there'd been sounds. Distant but discernible. He'd keep talking when the child was there so she'd not hear.

Your final question is more difficult to answer. Of course ill could come out of a good act. But surely it would be inadvertent. No one can intend both good and ill. That defies logic.

He wouldn't tell Philip about Hannah. Warlow's wife. He'd certainly not intended what came about. Yet he could not call it ill. It was she who'd come for the money at first, her baby left with the oldest child – there were eight of them. She'd been shy, but accepted the money without question. As with Polly, no resentment. She was grateful, then awed and, he realised, relieved. He perceived something of what she had endured. Warlow was a big man, wilful, barely articulate, his movements propelled by bulk. Kindness not a quality he understood, so that she turned to it like light. Thin, tendril arms winding, fingers reaching up for life.

Only he and she knew; he believed the servants didn't. Caution made him ask her to send a child for the money instead, to keep encounters rare. His upbringing told him what they did was wrong. His reason, that tenderness was a virtue.

For years he'd cared only for plants. In the garden hollyhocks were shooting up ready to flower, purple
verbena bonanensis
and
sweet mauve heliotrope already out – well-established purchases
from Chelsea. Cat's Head apples flourishing.

Polly became conversational. She was learning her alphabet at school; he encouraged her, wrote words, drew pictures. H was for holly or Herbert, his name, Hannah, her mother's; I for ivy, J for Jack, her brother, K for king.

‘Jack says damn to the king.'

‘How old is Jack?'

‘Fourteen. He says father said it and father is right.'

‘Jack will get into trouble if he says such things. Don't tell anyone else, Polly. It'll do no harm to tell me.'

‘Mother says you're good. Jack says damn to Mr Powyss, too.'

‘Who is right, do you think?'

‘Mother of course! Jack is bad. He hits me.'

‘Enough now. On your way.'

It was not extraordinary that a fourteen-year-old boy of almost no education should spout against the monarchy. Liberty was in the air, wherever you looked. Found inscribed on the Market Cross together with ‘equality'. Only weeks ago magistrates dispersed a Disputing Club in an ale-house a mile away.

Philip had sent a sixpenny
Rights of Man
, determined to shake him up. He'd not cut the pages. Not that he countenanced hostility. He'd never pay men ten shillings and sixpence to carry Tom Paine's effigy about and shoot at it. He preferred to avoid disruption in his life. Yet already he realised that his best new plants came from America, that radical land: delicate
dodecathon meadia
,
ceanothus americanus
. The proud juniper that withstood last winter's intense freeze.

He thought he heard movement. The child had gone. He locked the door, knelt on an Ottoman prayer rug at the end of the room near piles of papers. Lifted a sheaf from the floor. Put his ear to the hole.

Thud of clogs on flags. Monotonous, obsessive mumbling passed beneath, moved away out of hearing.

Samuel had drilled two-inch holes in the floorboard and the cellar ceiling. The house was older than it looked from its light-loving façade. Powyss had imposed reason on it years before, upon inheritance. Behind were thick stone walls and foundations out of which cellars had been gouged. Samuel needed help to drill the hollow through which a copper tube would conduct sound from below to the hole under the paper. The hole in the cellar ceiling was unnoticeable: a knot-hole.

That was four years ago, when the advertisement was published, the offer made; made, he'd assured Philip, with the best of intentions. Something he'd read made him ponder for days about the nature of human endurance. About solitariness free from the burden of punishment. Hermits chose to live for years alone, after all. He determined to carry out an experiment, write a full account, publish it.

Was it
so
unreasonable? To see if a man could exist without the comfort of others? Others often provided no comfort. His own life was unsociable, his principal friendship conducted on paper. Weeks passed when he spoke to no one except Stephens, then barely. Felt closer to his new, blue-flowered
lupinus nootkatensis
, whose growth he recorded in a vigorous hand. With books, music, resources of the mind, one surely could exist alone.

A reward of fifty pounds a year for life, the advertisement read, was offered for any man who would undertake to live for seven years underground without seeing a human face, without speaking to a soul.

The only man to respond was Warlow. In a burst of lucidity he said he cared not for human faces, would be glad to be shut of them. For seven years? Yes. Nor was he troubled by the other conditions: to let toe and fingernails grow during the whole of his confinement, together with his beard.

By now he would be shaggy, clawed. But requests were allowed. He had only to ring a bell and barely literate notes were hauled up on the dumb-waiter. Daily ringing signalled removal of his night soil. His clothes were washed on occasion, new ones provided. He'd asked for larger clogs.

Powyss had carefully prepared the underground ‘apartments' before he knew who their occupant would be. Under the ballroom – shuttered, untouched – several unused cellars extended to just below the far end of his library. He'd equipped them with good furniture, matting, rugs, oil lamps, books.
Candide
,
Robinson Crusoe
, Defoe's
Journal of a Plague Year
,
The Tempest
, Ferguson's
Astronomy Explained upon Sir Isaac Newton's Principles and made easy to those who have not studied Mathematics
. A cold bath, a chamber organ. Provisions served from his own table sent down three times a day.

For Warlow, a labourer with eight children, here was space unknown, the calm of responsibilities removed, luxury. Time's oppression, invasions of vermin. The company of insects.

At first Powyss had noted down each demand, what was eaten, what left. Warlow wouldn't touch venison, sauces or pickles. Ice-cream returned uneaten, a pool of scummy cream in a dish. He'd listened for every sound. There was little. One day a few notes from the organ. Warlow couldn't play. Whistling that suddenly ceased. Smell of oil smoke from the lamps came up through the hole; the tobacco he'd asked for. Powyss recorded. Sent periodic accounts to Philip.

At some point Warlow began to talk to himself. For months there was intermittent muttering. Then outbursts. Shouts. Thumps. Wild yells. Great shatter of sound as he smashed the organ's keyboard with his fists, arms or what? Powyss imagined the man, huge, bear-headed, howling amid heaps of books he couldn't read. Weeks of silence.

Moreham House, 20
th
August, 1797

Dear Philip,

Don't imagine I haven't thought about Warlow, even though it's hard to enter the mind of a man with no learning. I do sometimes hear complaining sounds from below, let me tell you, my friend, and these disturb me deeply. But, he agreed to it. Nor has he ever asked to be brought out. And his wife and children are now well fed and clothed (as is he).

Unkindly, you suggest I'm like the man who found a gold ring in a turnip in Northallerton. It is surely Warlow who has found the ring.

These days he rarely completed a letter to Philip. He hated the sight of his complacency spreading like grey mould across the page. He took up the newspaper, read of sea battles with the French and Spaniards; the Thunder bomb, mutiny, violent riot at Tranent.

Escaped to the long south-facing wall where espaliered Ribston pippins began to glow. He pocketed some blemished fruit with which to reprimand Price. Flowerheads heaved with bees and hoverflies.

Polly had begun to read. Powyss was pleased with her. He realised she was never fearful, hadn't learned anxiety. He'd lectured the servants, insisted they give her no hint. They complied but grew sour. Warlow's proximity – one staircase and a nailed-up door were all that separated him from kitchen, pantries, sculleries – made it hard for them to ignore his presence.

Powyss looked forward to Fridays, ink and paper ready. He rewarded each advance by showing her a curio, allowing her to handle it, telling her its story. He watched her when she came and when she left, how she'd find some gaudy flower, touch it, set off its scent. Saw her in his window-framed landscape of garden, fields, hills.

Today, a perfect ammonite lay on his desk.

She broke out as soon as he greeted her.

‘My father's in this house! In prison!'

‘Who says so, Polly?'

‘Catherine.'

‘What else does Catherine say?'

‘She says he's mad. What
is
“mad”? She says you give money so mother be's quiet. She says it's not fair we have clothes and food and others have none.'

Her look was frank. She expected the truth from him, was amazed he'd been deceptive. He felt a sensation not experienced since childhood. Blushed with shame.