An Eric Ravilious print hangs on the wall of my study: Doctor Faustus Conjuring Mephostophilis. The scientist- sorcerer kneels at the centre of a pentacle clutching his heart; a naked Mephistopheles springs through a black doorway; the good angel and the evil angel duel in the shadows. Pausing from my work, I feel a strong, irrational impulse to move Bessie's diary out of view of this diabolic scene. She would find it offensive. I resist.
Bessie Fenton's little black book fits the palm of my hand. The spine is crumbling but the pages are sturdy and only a little yellowed. She wrote in flowing copperplate with scarcely a correction or crossing out. "Diary. China 1900," it begins. "June 23rd." Later that year the Missionary Herald noted Bessie's characteristic self-deprecation in offering her services. "I know God can and does use the weakest instruments for His work," she wrote. Then it described her martyrdom at the hands of the Boxers - the rebellious Fists of Righteous Harmony - who had their own mission, which was to eradicate foreign devils. Having fled to the hills around Hsui Chou, Bessie and her small band of foreign devils were discovered and briefly imprisoned before being dragged by their heels through the streets of the city, "after which the veins in their arms were slit and they were left to die." That was 9th August. She was 29 years old. I'm not sure how the diary survived, but it found its way to my wife's grandfather (Bessie's not yet born cousin) and now it rests on my desk, solemn as a tiny coffin. I am a little wary of Bessie's book. I sense her presence, and her disapproval. But I won't yield to superstition.
Still, I feel uneasy. The little black book has the aura of a sacred relic. I have a typed transcription, but it's not the same. The book is imbued with Bessie. The chemistry of her conscious brain was transduced to marks on the page by her own steady hand. Molecules of skin and sweat - her physical self - were impressed into the paper as she wrote. Her anxiety is there too, towards the end, in the more urgent slope of the script: urgent but, to the last, restrained. She never abandoned her religious formulations: "We take comfort from God's word and cast our care on Him who careth for us." Some caring, it seems to me. But that's the thing about religion - it's incorrigible.
So why do I feel uneasy? I don't hold supernatural beliefs. Angels and devils, as depicted in the engraving, are figments of the medieval imagination. A scientist and an atheist, I believe that nothing remains of Bessie beyond her tragic story. Immersion in the rationalism of clinical neuroscience for 20 years has left me with no reason to believe in immaterial souls. There is no ghost in the machine. Why, then, should I believe there is a ghost in the universe? When Pierre Simon Laplace published Celestial Mechanics, his five-volume thesis on the stability of the solar system, Napoleon wondered how God fitted into the scheme of things. "I have no need of that hypothesis," said Laplace. Nor do I.
What disturbs me, I think, is something more covert and seditious than rationality: the germ of religious impulse. It's not difficult to map the neurological substrates of religious belief and behaviour. They represent universals of human biology. The origins of myth, ritual and self-transcendence are embedded in the architecture of the limbic brain and neocortex. Certain brain pathologies induce states of hyper-religiosity. Temporal lobe epilepsy, for example, is sometimes associated with sensations of ecstasy and awe, oceanic feelings of connectedness with the cosmos, and a sense of being in the presence of God. Other conditions, affecting deep central structures of the brain, produce the more negative states of guilt and religious obsession characteristic of obsessive-compulsive disorder. The sufferer becomes, like John Bunyan, tormented by obsessions of blasphemy or trapped in endless ritual to ward off evil.
In personifying Bessie's book, my guard has dropped and left me vulnerable to an irksome obsessional thought, soaked in primitive magic, which would be neutralised by the compulsive act of putting the diary out of sight in a drawer. Again, I resist. Instead, I open the book. "July 21st - Suddenly 2.45 an attack. This was made from ground above, grit, stones and boulders being hurled at the mouth of the cave by about 50 or 60 men. The gentlemen went out and fired... Mr Parker shot at a man who persistently hurled at Mr McKellen." (Bessie and her fellows were charged with the same religious zeal: they spent weeks living together in caves, hiding in holes, half-starved, and yet do not appear to have been on first name terms). The Boxers scatter. Mr Parker examines the wounded man, a young captain, and takes from him his charms and native medicines. "We are going to wash his wounds," writes Bessie, "and if too weak to be sent off, drag him up so as to be able to keep the wolves off him." I wonder what became of the man. There is no further mention. Did he return with his band to drag the foreign devils to their deaths?
The book stays where it is. Bessie, I decide, can hold her own with Mephistopheles. What's wrong with a little magical thinking?
