"How closely the Evil One can imitate the workings of the Spirit"

Arthur Conan Doyle, Micah Clarke: Reading Notes, Part Four

Micah, Reuben, and Decimus encounter the bibilous roue Sir Gervas Jerome who, speaking of his thirst, claims to be "as dry as a concordance" and states he would welcome arrest as a dissenter and even imprisonment as a welcome change of pace.

Micah thinks Sir Gervas is jesting when he offers his services as a valet; he is so slow to realize that the aristocrat is ruined that Sir Gervas addresses him as "oh most astute and yet most slow-witted master."

Speaking of the Jewish moneylenders who have a hold on his Estate, Sir Gervas moans "the ten tribes have been upon me and I have been harried and wasted, bound, ravished, and despoiled . . . They have hewed into pieces mine estate rather than myself."

Sir Gervas on the dispersal of his retinue in the wake of his bankruptcy: "when the honey-pot is broken it is farewell to the flies."

With Sir Gervas now in their company, Micah's party falls in with a group of puritans heading for rendevous with Monmouth. Decimus adjusts his behavior to match them, singing hymns and expounding faith in the almighty.

Soon, the puritan band is confronted by horse troopers. Decimus, in command, slays an officer (a cornet) under a white flag when he haughtily tries to incite desertion among the dissenters (interestingly similar to action of Balfour of Burley in "Old Mortality"; the same section makes reference to Wappinenschaws and popinjays as in opening chapters of that Scott novel).

After the puritan victory, the minister, Pettigrue, bridles at Decimus' comparison of the bravery of the dissenters to that of Turks he has seen in battle.

"'I trust sir,' said the minister gravely, 'that you do not intend . . . to infer that there is any similarity between the devil-inspired fury of the infidel Saracens and the Christian fortitude of the struggling faithful!'"

"'By no means,' Saxon answered, grinning at me over the minister's head. 'I was but showing how closely the Evil One can imitate the workings of the Spirit.'"

Micah reacts as Decimus, now a hero to the puritans, continues to play the role of the extreme sectary: "I could not but marvel at the depths and completeness of the hypocrisy which had cast so complete a cloak over his rapacious self."

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Plunder and Alchemy

Arthur Conan Doyle, Micah Clarke: Reading Notes, Part Three

Traveling cross-country to Monmouth's camp, Decimus immediately commences looking for opportunities for plunder: "What would war be without plunder! A bottle without wine -- a shell without the oyster."

Of Micah's increasingly strong and angry moral remonstrances, he jests: "Od's mercy! I see you will start carving me anon and take me to Monmouth's camp in sections."

In one village, Micah and Decimus encounter two Royal officers strangely conversant in the latest theories of chemistry.

Later (they have now been joined by Micah's loyal friend Reuben) the adventurers arrive at the secluded cabin of a dispossessed noble, Sir Jacob Clancing of Snellaby, who has turned to alchemy.

In service to Charles I, Sir Jacob had experienced a different kind of transmutation as he converted his wealth and property into military resources for the doomed King: "My silver chargers and candlesticks were thrown into the melting-pot . . . they went in metal and came out as troopers and pikemen."

With Cromwell's success, Sir Jacob's estate goes to a baser kind of alchemist: a soapmaker.

Upon the Stuart Restoration, Sir Jacob seeks restitution from Charles II, but is offered instead a commission as a "lottery cavalier," a licensed keeper of a gambling house "allowed to have a den in the piazza of Covent Garden, and there to decoy the young sparks of the town and fleece them at ombre."

Incensed to see the dissolute Stuarts waste on their revels money they deny to those nobles seeking restitution, Sir Jacob retires from court in order to painstakingly rebuild his fortune through his alchemical knowledge.

The doubtful and greedy Decimus: "Perhaps you have found out how to convert pots and pans into gold in the way you have spoken of. But that cannot be, for I see iron and brass in this room which would hardly remain there could you convert it to gold."

Sir Jacob: "Gold has its uses and iron has its uses . . . It can indeed be done, but only slowly and in order, small pieces at a time, and with much expenditure of work and patience."

Observing a locked chest, Decimus determines to rob Sir Jacob of his gold. Answering Micah's objections: "he can make more as easily as your good mother maketh cranberry dumplings."

Micah stays awake to protect his host's possessions from his plundering companion.

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Decimus Saxon, the "strange fish"

Arthur Conan Doyle, Micah Clarke: Reading Notes, Part Two

Sailing in the harbor, Micah and his friend Reuben rescue a man who jumped in the sea to escape an altercation on board a Dutch ship.

The braggart and soldier of fortune Decimus Saxon, "tenth child of a worthy father," had been in a violent dispute with two of his brothers: Nonus and Quartus. Becomes apparent that all three brothers had been engaged in the slave trade.

Saxon has with him letters for several of the Independent sect, including Micah's father.

A change into dry clothing at Micah's home also seems to change Decimus' identity: "it seemed as if he had cast off his manner with his rainments," no more the flippant "bedraggled castaway who had crawled like a conger eel into our fishing-boat" but rather a demure and pious warrior for the faith.

Micah's father, utterly taken in by Decimus' manner -- "a man of parts and piety" -- outfits him as his son's companion in sending the youth off to war as part of Monmouth's forces.

As they prepare to travel across country to join Monmouth, Micah objects to the cover story Decimus proposes as dishonorable and a lie: "I should rather be hanged as a rebel than speak a falsehood."

Decimus counters that all warfare is a manner of lying: "For what are all strategems, ambuscades, and outfalls but lying on a large scale? What is an adroit commander but one who has a facility for disguising the truth?"

The freebooter casts off his piety once out of range of Micah's father: "Master Decimus Saxon had flung to the winds the precise demeanor which he had assumed in the presence of my father, and rattled away with many a jest and scrap of rhyme of song ad we galloped through the darkness."

"'Gadzooks!,' said he frankly, 'it is good to be able to speak freely without being expected to tag every sentence with a hallelujah or amen.'"

Further making his opportunism apparent, Decimus relates to the increasingly scandalized Micah the story of how, captured by the Turk, he escaped death and slavery by taking on the identity of a devout Muslim.

Micah: "'What,' I cried in horror, 'you did pretend to be a Musselman?'"

Decimus: "Nay, there was no pretence. I became a Musselman."



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"Micah Clarke": The Rising of the "Old Leaven"

Arthur Conan Doyle, Micah Clarke: Reading Notes, Part One

Set at time of Monmouth's Rebellion, the events in Arthur Conan Doyle's "Micah Clarke" occur just a few years before those in Scott's "Old Mortality."

Framed as story told by an old man -- Micah Clarke -- to his grandchildren, relating experience of his own youth.

He speaks as among the last survivors: "it is not likely that in the whole county of Hampshire, or even perhaps in all England, there is another left alive who is so well able to speak from his own knowledge of these events."

Micah's father a Dissenter and veteran of Cromwell's army; generally mild, but can be subject to fits of "the old leaven" what "his enemies would call fanaticism and his friends piety." Micah's mother is a churched Protestant -- a believer in the Church hierarchy -- and so his religious heritage is divided between extremes.

The adult friends of Micah's youth include a bookish carpenter, Zachary Palmer, who shares with the boy works of serious drama and poetry as well as Classics and treatises of contemporary political philosophy. His other "father" is Solomon Sprent, a retired seaman, tattooed with the Old and New Testaments (Creation upon his neck and the Ascension upon his left ankle) and full of romantic stories of faraway lands and adventure, his talk "a library in itself." Micah's intellectual heritage is thus also divided between extremes.

Rumors abound that there will be a rising of the "Independents" under the illegitimate Duke of Monmouth against the Catholic James II.

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