Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth [72]
Barton’s pipe was finished. With a gesture curiously dandified he took a silver thimble from his waistcoat pocket, fitted it on his little finger and pressed out the last spark in the bowl. The tone of these last words had been hostile – perhaps through disappointment at his failure to draw Paris out; but he now raised his face again in the peering way characteristic of him, almost benevolent-seeming. Moonlight caught the thimble in a running gleam as he returned it to his pocket. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘you will know which side you are on, whatever you meant in there. You will live in fear like the rest.’ He nodded, still smiling, and turned to go below. ‘It smells of hexcrement,’ he said. ‘You will get to know the smell, because them two hundred or so blacks will be shittin’ in fear too.’
Paris stayed alone on deck some minutes longer, then returned to his cabin. He was too disturbed in mind to think immediately of sleeping. It seemed to him that he had grown more impressionable in these last weeks, more easily affected by what he felt emanating from others. He looked more closely and saw more – not by conscious intention but somehow helplessly. Increasingly of late he had felt drawn into conflict with Thurso, a struggle too mortal for their short acquaintance: it was as if they had recognized each other as heirs to some ancient feud. Just now, on deck, Barton’s rhetoric had oppressed him, and the moral vacancy he felt behind it. The mate had a sort of degraded subtlety about him, a scavenger’s instinct for scents of weakness. And Paris felt himself that it was a weakness, this vulnerability to impression, this too-strong sense of other human beings – almost like a failure of manhood. He blamed it on his isolation. In the removal of all that was customary in his life, some customary skin of protection also had gone, it seemed.
He found solace for the spirit now in De Motu Cordis. The Latin text acted on him these days with the power of incantation. He had earlier been labouring to do justice to Harvey’s paean to the heart’s pre-eminence towards the end of chapter eight: Just as the sun deserves to be called the heart of the world, so is the heart the sun of the microcosm and the first principle of life, whose virtue quickens the blood and keeps it free from all taint of corruption …
It was not, he reflected, that the analogy was original; the notion of the heart as the sun of man’s being was an ancient one, deriving from Aristotle; but if you are about to demonstrate, for the first time, the difference between veins and arteries and explain how the blood is transferred from the vena cava to all parts of the body, you may be allowed to borrow your comparisons at least. There were other great men, of course, who didn’t. Paris thought while preparing for bed of Newton and that confession of ignorance in which he compares himself to a small boy playing with pebbles by the shore of a great unknown sea.
This led him, by a leap he did not pause to examine, to thoughts of his cousin Erasmus and that lonely struggle of the eight-year-old boy to make the elements conform to his will. Memory of it came first in a wide perspective – the empty beach, the grey sea, the small, intent figure. Then, in one of those swooping approaches sometimes experienced in dreams, he drew near, saw the white face, the bloodied fingers … There was nothing in common here with Newton’s image of human limitation. Erasmus had wanted to subdue the world. Paris recalled what Barton had said of Thurso a short while ago: he takes it all personal. But that staring child had no world to command, no ship, no community of men to wrench to the shape of his obsession.
Perhaps because of his quickened thoughts, sleep did not come to him, despite the cradling motion of the vessel. He lay staring up through a darkness so profound that it cancelled all sense of confine; the deck above him was no nearer than the spaces of the sky beyond and the planets in their obedient courses.