Angels and Insects (27 page)

The sofa on which Emily Jesse sat with Mrs Hearnshaw was high-backed and ample, covered with a printed linen designed by William Morris, which showed a trellis of dark boughs, at once randomly crossing and geometrically repeating, on a mysterious deep green ground, the colour, Emily thought, with the inveterate romanticism of her family, of deep forests, of holly thickets, of evergreen glades. The boughs were studded with little star-like white flowers, and between them loomed pomegranates, crimson and gold, and small crested birds in blue and rose, with creamy speckled breasts and crossed bills, a kind of impossible hybrid of exotic Amazonian parrakeets and the English mistle thrush. Emily was not houseproud—she believed there were higher things in life than crockery and Sunday roasts—but she took pleasure in the sofa, in Mr Morris’s weaving of a kind of formal, solid series of magical objects which recalled to her childhood days in the white Rectory in Somersby, when the eleven of them had played at the Arabian Nights and the Court of Camelot, when her tall brothers had fenced on the lawn with foils and masks crying, ‘Have at thee, toad-spotted traitor!’ or defended the little bridge over the subsequently immortalised brook with staves against the village boys, like Robin Hood. Everything was double there, then—it was real and loved, here and now, it was glittering with magic and breathing out a faint cold perfume of a lost world, a king’s orchard, the garden of Haroun al-Raschid. The windows of the Gothic dining-room which their furiously energetic father, the Rector, had built with his own hands and the help of his coachman Horlins, could be seen doubly by the active imagination, embrasures to frame ladies in the latest modes, ready to slip away to trysts, or magic casements behind which Guenevere and the Lily Maid waited with beating hearts for their lovers. Mr Morris’s sofa
acknowledged both worlds; it could be sat on, it hinted at Paradise. Emily liked that.

There had been a yellow sofa in the Somersby sitting-room where Mrs Tennyson sat with her mending and the little ones tumbled like a basket of puppies or waves on a choppy sea, surging round her. Here Emily had sat alone with Arthur, that one Christmas visit, beautiful Arthur with his carved features and his air of knowing about the vagaries and coquetries of the female sex. He had put his arm round her shoulder, her accepted lover, and his fastidious mouth had brushed her cheek, her ear, her dark brow, her lips. She could remember to this day how he had trembled, ever so slightly, as though his knees were not quite controlled, and she herself had been stricken by fear—of what, she could not quite remember now, of being overwhelmed, of responding inappropriately or inadequately, of losing herself? His lips were dry and warm. He had written often about the yellow sofa, after that, it had loomed in his letters, a mysterious solid object of oblique import, mixed with Chaucerian sighs out of some ideal Romance.

He had missed both beginning and end of this lamenting cry:

which she said to herself still, from time to time. ‘ “Allas, myn hertes quene, allas, myn wyf,” ’ which she had never become. Poor Arthur. Poor vanished Emily with her long dark ringlets and her white rose. After this delicate embrace she had been so agitated in
body and mind that she had kept her bed for two days though his scanted visit was a bare two weeks. She had written him from her seclusion little notes in charmingly inept Italian (or so he pronounced it) which he corrected for her, patiently, and returned, with the page marked where he had kissed it. Poverina, stai male. Assicurati ch’io competisco da cuore al soffrir tuo. A verray parfit gentil knight, Arthur.

Mrs Hearnshaw was not noticing the sofa. She was speaking her grief to Emily, to Sophy Sheekhy, who had settled on a footstool near them.

‘She seemed so
strong
, you know, Mrs Jesse, she waved her arms so lustily and kicked with her little legs and thighs, and her eyes saw me so quietly, all swimming with life. My husband says I must learn not to attach myself so to these tiny creatures who are destined to stay with us so briefly in time—but how can I not, it is natural, I think? They have grown under my heart, my dear, I have felt them stir there, with fear and trembling.’

‘We must believe they are angels, Mrs Hearnshaw.’

‘Sometimes I am able to do so. Sometimes I imagine horrors.’

Emily Jesse said, ‘Speak what is in your mind, it will do you good. Those of us who are
wounded to the quick
, you know, we suffer for all the others, we are appointed in some way to bear their grief too. We cry out
for them
. It is no shame.’

‘I give birth to death,’ said Mrs Hearnshaw, speaking the thought she walked about with, constantly. She could have added, ‘I am an object of horror to myself,’ but forbore. The mental image of the mottled limbs, after convulsion, of the rough, musty clay bed, was always with her.

Sophy Sheekhy said, ‘It is all one. Alive and dead. Like walnuts.’

She saw very clearly all the little forms, curled in little boxes, like the brown-skinned white lobes of dead nuts, and a blind point like a wormhead pushing into light and airy leafage. She often ‘saw’ messages. She did not know whose thoughts they were, hers or
another’s, or whether they came from Outside, or whether everyone saw similar messages of their own.

They were joined by Captain Jesse and Mr Hawke.

‘Walnuts?’ said Captain Jesse. ‘I have a great partiality for walnuts. With port wine, after dinner, they can be most tasty. I also like green, milky ones. They are said to resemble the human brain. My grandmother told how they were used in certain country remedies which might be closer to magic than to medicine. Would that be a correspondence that might interest Emanuel Swedenborg, Mr Hawke? The encephaloform walnut?’

‘I do not remember having seen any animadversion on walnuts in his writings, Captain Jesse, though they are so voluminous, some reference may indeed be hidden away there. The thought of walnuts always makes me think of the English mystic, Dame Julian of Norwich, who was shewn in a vision
all that is
like a nut in her own hand, and told by God Himself, “All shall be well, and thou shalt see thy self that all manner of thing shall be well.” I think what she may have seen may have been the thought of some Angel, as it appeared in the world of Spirits or in the world of men. She may have been in a sense a precursor of our spiritual Columbus. He relates, you know, how he himself saw a beautiful bird in the hand of Sir Hans Sloane, in the Spirit World, differing in no least detail from a similar bird on earth, and yet being—it was revealed to him—none other than the affection of a certain Angel, and vanishing with the surcease of the operation of that affection. Now, it appears that the Angel, being in Heaven, would not be aware of this
indirect
forthgoing in the world of Spirits, for the angels see all in its highest Form, the Divine Human. The highest angels, we are told, are seen as human infants by those approaching them from below—though this is not how they appear to themselves—because their affections are born of the union of the love of
good
—from an angel-father—and of
truth
—from an angel-mother—in conjugial love.

‘And Swedenborg himself saw birds during his sojourns in the Spirit World and it was revealed to him that—in the Grand Man—rational concepts are seen as birds. Because the head corresponds to the heavens and the air. He
actually experienced in his body
the fall of certain angels who had formed wrong opinions in their community about thoughts and influx—he felt a terrible tremor in his sinews and bones—and saw one dark and ugly bird and two fine and beautiful. And these solid birds were the
thoughts
of the angels, as he saw them in the world of his senses, beautiful reasonings and ugly falses. For at every level everything corresponds, from the most purely material to the most purely divine in the Divine Human.’

‘Very strange, very strange,’ said Captain Jesse, somewhat impatiently. Himself a great talker he could not listen passively whilst Mr Hawke unravelled for the assembled company all the threads of connection between the Divine Human and local lumps of clay. Once started, Mr Hawke was driven to go on, expounding the Arcana, and the Principia, the
Clavis Hieroglyphica Arcanorum Naturalium et Spiritualium
, the mysteries of Influx and Vastation, Conjugial Love and Life After Death, for it was only in the act of exposition that Mr Hawke could hold all the balls of his system, so to speak, up in the air at once, an arc of theological tumbling and juggling, which Sophy Sheekhy saw briefly, during his excursus on birds, as a flurry of pouter pigeons and collared doves.

‘In that world, in the spiritual world,’ said Mr Hawke, ‘they have their light from the spiritual sun, and cannot see our corresponding material sun, from our dead world. It appears to them as thick darkness. There are also some quite ordinary spirits who cannot bear material things, for instance, those from the planet Mercury, who correspond in the Grand Man to the memory of things, abstracted from material things. Swedenborg visited them and was allowed to show them meadows, fallowlands, gardens, woods and streams. But they hated that, they hated their
solidity
, they like
abstract knowledge, so they meticulously filled the meadows with snakes and darkened them, and turned the streams black. He had more success with showing them a pleasant garden full of lamps and lights, because those appealed to their understanding, as lights represent truths. Also lambs, which they accepted, as lambs represent innocence.’

‘Not unlike some preachers,’ said Mrs Jesse. ‘The spirits of the planet Mercury. Only able to think in abstractions related to abstractions.’

‘Not unlike some savages,’ said her husband. ‘Those who sailed with Captain Cook used to tell how the savages in New Zealand seemed unable to see the ship anchored in the harbour. They went about their business as though it wasn’t there, as though everything was the same as ever, fishing and swimming, you know, making their fires to roast their catch and all that, whatever they get up to. But the moment boats were lowered and put off from the ship the men became as it were
visible
, and caused great agitation, great lining-up on the beach and waving, great shrieking and dancing. But the ship they just couldn’t
seem to see
. You’d think analogy might have operated, they might have thought it was some great white winged thing, some spirit power or what not, if they couldn’t see it as a ship, but no, they couldn’t see it all, it appears, not at all. Now this tends, to my mind, to support the theory that the spirit world may be juxtaposed with this, may riddle it through and through like weevils in bread, and we might just
not see it
because we haven’t developed a way of thinking that allows us to see it, d’you see, like your Mercurials or Mercurians, who didn’t want to know about fields and things, or like the proper Angels, who can only see the sun as thick darkness, poor things.’

Aaron the raven, perched on the arm of the sofa, chose this moment to raise both his black wings in the air, almost clapping them, and then to settle again, with a rattling of his quills and various stabbing motions of his head. He took two or three sideways
steps towards Mr Hawke, who retreated nervously. Like many creatures who cause fear, Aaron seemed to be animated by signs of anxiety. He opened his thick blue beak and cawed, putting his head on one side to observe the effect of this. The lids of his eyes were also bluish and reptilian. Mrs Jesse gave an admonitory tug on his leash. Mr Hawke had once asked the origin of his name, supposing it to have something to do with Moses’ brother, the High Priest who wore the god-designed bells and pomegranates. But Mrs Jesse replied that he was named for the Moor in
Titus Andronicus
, a play of which Mr Hawke had no knowledge, not having the Tennysons’ erudition. ‘A sable creature, rejoicing in his blackness, Mr Hawke,’ she had said, shortly. Mr Hawke had said that ravens were generally birds of ill omen, he believed. Noah’s raven, in Swedenborg’s interpretation of the Word, had represented the wayward mind wandering over an ocean of falses. ‘Gross and impenetrable falsities,’ he said, looking at Aaron, ‘are described in the Word by owls and ravens. By owls because they live in the darkness of the night, by ravens because they are black, as in Isaiah 34, 11, “the owl also and the raven shall dwell in it”.’