The Peppered Moth Read Online Free PDF

buried and preserved at Spitsbergen in the permafrost of the Norwegian Arctic Circle.
    Was the Spanish flu a judgement? Was it a purge? Was it a sign of the wrath of God? Various little Spanish sufferers endured affliction so patiently that they became candidates for sainthood, so they did well out of their early deaths.
    Let us return to Bessie Bawtry, who survived the first four crucial days, but remained ill for twenty days and twenty nights. She was, during this period, promoted to the bed in her parents’ bedroom, though she was never to be sure why: was it for convenience, was it through a superstitious respect? There she lay, as empires crumbled, as fateful peace treaties were negotiated, listening to the echoes of their death throes and to the rapid beatings of her little childish heart. There she felt both safe and happy. Her mind wandered, and she babbled of Dickens’s
Pickwick Papers
and Charles Reade’s
The Cloister and the Hearth,
both novels that she had devoured that September: the characters of Sam Weller and the abandoned Margaret seemed to stand in person by her bedside. She knew them: they were her friends: they spoke to her. Occasionally she would lapse back into her earlier biblical phase, for the language of the Bible had long outlived its content in her imagination, but fortunately no Mrs Sherwood was waiting by her sickbed to pounce like a vulture of salvation upon these signs of weakness and of grace. The Bawtrys, chapel-goers though they were, were not a religious family.
    The Bawtry bed was the best piece of furniture in the house, and it offered Bessie its own interior world, a haven such as once, aeons ago, the cave beneath the parlour table had provided. Her father said he had bought it secondhand from Arthur Cook’s in Leeds, along with all his household furniture. He liked to boast, with an uncharacteristically romantic flourish, that he had paid for the lot with ‘a handful of golden sovereigns’—the drawing-room suite, the grandfather clock, the bentwood chairs and rocker, the walnut bedroom suite, the mahogany sideboard, the oak table with castors, the hair mattress, and the
pièce de resistance
, the mahogany ‘Tudor’ bedstead itself. Many of the neighbours had cheap new furniture—chip oak, veneer—although several also possessed the silent, never-to-be-played status symbol of a piano. Bert Bawtry alone had ventured far into the past, and he had chosen well, for the bed was an object of virtue. (It is a pity Bert did not live to see
The Antiques Roadshow.
He would have enjoyed it. He was a man of curious interests.)
    The bed was a four-poster, far too large for the room, but never mind that: it was a room of its own. Its hangings (original, and antique) were of a pale fawn green with a woven design of dark blue flowers and yellow stars, and pinned into the back curtains were watch pockets of a rubbed and faded crimson velvet embroidered with birds of pearl beading. These watch pockets filled Bessie with inexpressible delight. They were aristocratic, they were poetic, they were historic, they spoke of Sir Walter Scott, whose novels Bessie much admired. (Walter Scott had once, astonishingly, visited their neighbourhood, and had exclaimed upon its great natural beauty—‘there are few more beautiful and striking scenes in England ... the soft and gentle river Hammer sweeps through an amphitheatre in which cultivation is richly blended with woodland’—so had the great Wizard of the North bizarrely described their paltry spoil tips.)
    Above Bessie’s fevered head was a half-tester, also of green and blue: she gazed up into this heavenly canopy, and muttered cajolingly to herself that Assyria would fall, yea, that Damascus and Babylon and the whole of the Austro-Hungarian Empire would be given over to the thorn and the wilderness, and that the vine and all its silverlings would perish. (Bessie did not know what silverlings were. But that made them all the more attractive to