The Great Unknown

by Peg Kingman

  “He has had grace enough at least to admit and recant, however,” said Mr Hector MacDonald, who was an engineer and had wide experience of trials, errors, and a few superb successes. “After all, as the author of Vestiges has it, ‘The human faculties lead unavoidably to occasional error.’ Aye, we have made quite a motto of it, at our house, have we not, my dear?” he added, to his wife. “It is a truth which is often—remarkably often!—recalled to my attention.”

  Miss Toulmin said, “I found the reviewer’s analysis of the author’s mind so very interesting, however—”

  “Never mind the author’s mind,” said Mr Chambers, as the soup was taken away and the fish brought in: a codling with horseradish, in egg sauce. “Dr Sedgwick goes much astray there; let him attend to the book itself.”

  “But are they not inseparable, an author and his works?” said Mrs MacDonald, who was not herself an author.

  “—or her works,” said Mrs Crowe. “No, indeed; at least, they ought not to be. I agree with Mr Chambers. Look, here is the book; study and judge the book itself; leave aside all your notions and your speculations as to who made it. Dr Sedgwick goes quite wrong when he joins in the game of guessing who the author might be.”

  “The Spectator,” said Dr Moir, “declared that readers of a book always want to know whether its writer be a dark man or a fair; mild or choleric in disposition; married or a bachelor—so as better to understand what is written.”

  “Yet the Spectator himself declined ever to assume any bodily shape whatsoever,” said Mr Chambers.

  “Yes, a great tease—and a clever feint, too, on the part of the authors,” said Miss Toulmin.

  “‘Author’—such an odd word,” said Mrs Chambers. “Though any word sounds odd, if repeated often enough. You are our Latin scholar, Dr Moir; what is its origin?”

  “I believe it is from Latin auctor—which means, originator; creator,” said Dr Moir.

  “How puffing-up, for us scribblers!” cried Mrs Crowe. “A faint perfume of divinity wafts over us; over even us, lowly ink-stained wretches that we are!”

  “‘Advanced thinkers’ will ever mock,” said Lady Janet, “but it is an established fact that all Creation, and every kind of creature, has come into existence in a perfect and permanent form, not as the result of any ‘laws of nature’ in operation during immense ages; no! but called into existence by a power above nature; by an act of the Creator—of a personal and superintending God, concentrating his will on every atom of the universe. No wonder, then, that the chastened author of Vestiges has fallen silent. No reply is possible.”

  “Oh, but his reply—”

  “Or hers—”

  “The reply may be on the press even now,” said Mrs Chambers. “One might suppose.”

  “Here is our roast chicken. Who will have a wing?” said Mr Chambers. “Mrs MacDonald?”

  “Look, and marvel: a wing!” cried Mrs Crowe. “Is it not a marvelous development, the wing?”

  “It is a marvelous creation,” said Lady Janet. She and Mrs Crowe would not look at each other, though they sat directly opposite across the table.

  “Less marvelous than bread sauce, in my opinion,” said Mr MacDonald, to end an awkward pause.

  “Dr Sedgwick concludes that the author may be a woman,” Miss Toulmin said, “on account of the foolishness of the reasoning. He cites in particular the hasty jumping to conclusions.”

  “He grossly insults the sex, then; and reveals his own ignorance. He cannot be a married man,” said Mrs Crowe, who had lived apart from her husband for over a decade.

  “Indeed he is a lifelong bachelor, I believe,” said Mrs Chambers. “To whom certain common instances of development must remain unfamiliar—to whom babes, for example, are theoretical only; a mere fancy.”

  “Just hear us, though!” said Mr Chambers. “We at this table have fallen into the same fault as Dr Sedgwick: for we have strayed off the high road of pure fact and impersonal argument—and into the bog of personal speculation. Aye, but we have; we have sunk to commenting upon the personality of the author of the review, not upon the review itself. It is all but irresistible, you see, whenever the author’s identity is known.”

  “And even when it is not,” said Mrs Chambers.

  “I happened to look into Pride and Prejudice again the other day,” said Mrs MacDonald, “from the pen, as we all know, of ‘A Lady’—and was much struck by the opening sentence: ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.’ Compare that to the first sentence of Vestiges: ‘It is familiar knowledge that the earth which we inhabit is a globe of somewhat less than 8000 miles in diameter.’”

  “Ah! So you, too, suppose that the writer of Vestiges was ‘A Lady’?” said Mr Anstruther.

  “No, indeed,” said Dr Moir. “Who can it be but Sir Richard Vyvyan?”

  “He has denied it, unequivocally,” said Mr Anstruther.

  Said Mrs MacDonald playfully, “Perhaps it is the work of Mr Balderstone.” The domestic doings of “Mr and Mrs Balderstone” were frequently reported in Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal; the Balderstones were fictive versions of the Chambers family, written up by Mr Chambers himself whenever something charming, comfortable, and amusing was needed to fill out the sixteen weekly pages of that newspaper.

  Mrs Crowe said, “A London correspondent of mine assures me that a bosom friend of hers has uncovered evidence—quite conclusive—that the author is Ada, Countess Lovelace.”

  “All that business about Mr Babbage’s Analytical Engine would suggest so,” said Miss Toulmin. “But on balance, I think it is far more likely to have been Mr Gilaroo.”

  “Or Mr Stukely,” said Mrs MacDonald. “He seems more the type than Gilaroo, don’t you agree?” Mr Stukely and Mr Gilaroo were also figments of Mr Chambers’s fruitful imagination, another pair of imaginary characters whose fireside chit-chat on timely subjects often appeared in Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal.

  Mrs Crowe said, “It has actually been reported to me—never mind by whom—that I have been credited with the authorship of Vestiges! Which I consider a great compliment. If it were mine, I should be proud to own it, Dr Sedgwick and all his sarcasms notwithstanding.”

  “The author will soon come forward, I daresay,” said Dr Moir. “Someone will claim it. The author will be unable to bear watching all that acclaim, all that éclat, going to waste; gang agley. Authors always do acknowledge their creations, eventually.”

  “Not always,” said Mr Chambers. “Who knows who was ‘Junius’?”

  “Who was Junius?” Constantia whispered to Miss Toulmin.

  “But that’s just it; no one knows,” Miss Toulmin whispered back. “It is a nom de plume.”

  “No; I mean, what did this unknown Mr Junius write?”

  “Oh! furious political polemic, I think it was; back in the seventies, or so.”

  “It must become known, sooner or later,” Dr Moir was saying. “Books do not spring, Athena-like, full-grown from the brows of their authors. There are typesetters, and press-men, and proof-readers, and so forth. Someone knows; and someone will tell. The publisher must know, certainly.”

  “He declares that he does not,” said Mr Anstruther loudly. “He claims that all was done through an intermediary.”

  “If we ask everyone, we must hit upon the right person,” said Mrs Moir. “Someone must own it eventually.”

  “Perhaps not,” said Mr Chambers. “Even when the King asked him—and very rude it was, too, of His Majesty—Sir Walter Scott did not admit that he was the celebrated Author of Waverley.”

  “No? what did Sir Walter say, then?”

  “He simply denied it,” said Mr Chambers.

  “Lied to his king! Shocking!” said Lady Janet.

  “He said to me, years later, that not even his king had a right to expect an answer to such a question.”

  “But everyone knew that he was the Great Unknown—the Author of Waverley, and of a
ll the rest, too,” said Mrs MacDonald. “It was the worst-kept secret of the world,”

  The fowl had been cleared away, and a joint of lamb set before Mr Chambers. “It is no secret now,” said he as he rose, the better to operate upon it. “But it was a close secret for quite a long time, until Sir Walter’s financial dealings became a matter of public record. Even then, it wasn’t talked about; who would be so ill-bred as to press a man as to the offspring he does not choose to acknowledge?”

  “Do you know, Chambers, some people say you wrote that book, the Vestiges,” said Mr Anstruther abruptly.

  Mr Chambers—in the act of separating shoulder from ribs of the joint of lamb—said, without looking up, “I wonder how people can suppose I ever had time to write such a book.” He applied a quick twist of the wrist, and the joint gave way under the knife. “What will you have, Lady Janet: fat or lean?”

  “Horrid!” cried Lady Janet. “I shall instantly denounce any such rumour as a falsehood, and a slander, if ever I hear it repeated in my presence! Oh—I beg your pardon; lean, if you please. I shall not shrink for a moment, in any company, from delivering my testimony—for I know Mr Chambers to be incapable of writing so horrid, so atheistical, a book! No decent father of a family could bring himself to write anything of the kind.”

  “I am obliged to you, Lady Janet, for your good opinion. With caper sauce? Aye,” said Mr Chambers, and passed her a slice of the lean, with sauce. “As it happens, I was just entering Baird’s bookshop the other day when I heard a fellow there loudly declare to Mr Baird that ‘Mr Robert Chambers was certainly incapable of writing the Vestiges’—but for quite another reason; which was, that, ‘Mr Chambers was very much over-rated!’ ‘Good day to you, Mr Chambers!’ sang out Mr Baird, upon catching sight of me as I crossed the threshhold; and the aforesaid fellow of remarkably poor judgment clapped his hat onto his head and slunk out without meeting my fiery eye. I did not quite know whether to be amused, angered, or humbled. Fat or lean, Mrs MacDonald?”

  “Just a little of each, pray; with sauce. Now, I have been puzzling over the meaning of ‘upper’ and ‘lower,’” said Mrs MacDonald. “As in ‘the upper Silurian,’ for instance, or ‘the lower Devonian.’ Is it a term of—of altitude? Of latitude? Or what is it?”

  “No, no,” said Mrs Crowe, “‘upper’ and ‘lower’ refer simply to the physical arrangement of the rock strata. They indicate recency, you see; and sequence. What is oldest, having been laid down earliest, lies lowest, and is overlain by what is more recent; the most recent of all lies uppermost; that is to say, highest.”

  “Certain exceptions have been found,” added Dr Moir. “There are places where the strata have buckled and folded, sometimes having toppled over completely, so as to reverse their proper sequence. Nevertheless, as a general rule, it can be said that ‘upper’ and ‘lower’ refer to time; and sequence.”

  “Oh . . . I see,” said Mrs MacDonald; but then, after thinking for a moment, she said, “There is no question, then, of—of superiority? Not of any physical or moral superiority?”

  “Oh, but it is that too, in a certain sense,” said Miss Toulmin, “for those organic things which are more recent—higher—are also more fully developed; and advancing therefore nearer to perfection—”

  “Now there is a leap of logic which would excite Dr Sedgwick to paroxysms of misogyny!” brayed Mr Anstruther.

  “‘Perfection,’ is it? We have among us a believer in Progress—in perfectibility!” said Mrs Crowe.

  “As to progress—” Constantia began to say, but broke off in confusion.

  “Why, then, do we call ourselves the ‘descendants’ of our ancestors?” Mrs MacDonald said, cutting through them all. “Ought we not properly to say that we are ‘ascended’ from them, rather than ‘descended’ from them?”

  “Indeed, I do not know, Mrs MacDonald,” said Dr Moir courteously. “Unless it may be a habitual and respectful deference to our forbears, no matter how undeserving they—mine, at least—may have been.”

  “Well, I am still perplexed, but I daresay it is my own fault,” said Mrs MacDonald. “Pray allow me another foolish question: Is it birds before frogs? Frogs before birds? Am I the only one who struggles to remember the order of appearance of the animated tribes in the strata?”

  “Oh, but it’s just the order of our dinner, isn’t it?” said Miss Toulmin. “Out of the fire-mist there condenses first of all a primordial soup, in which there develops, during untold ages, a profusion of calcium-bodied creatures whose remains compose all the limestone and chalk, and culminating in such choice morsels as mussels—as in the musselkalk, don’t you know—and mussel stew; developing next into fishes and frogs and such swimming delicious creatures as codlings; thence ascending still, to the flying creatures, represented at this table by the poulet; and now, now, the mammiferous climax: our shoulder of lamb!”

  “Oh! And for pudding, Mrs Chambers, are we to regale ourselves upon a trifle of—of angel’s wings, perhaps; or some such celestial thing?” asked Mrs Crowe.

  “Alas, no angel’s wings were to be had at Musselburgh today,” said Mrs Chambers. “I fear we shall have to content ourselves with a charlotte.”

  “But a charlotte is just the thing! Named for a princess, is it not? And made with lady-fingers?”

  “Aye, so it is, come to think of it . . . and flavoured with candied angelica, too!”

  After the charlotte, the entire company repaired at once to the Nearby stood Mrs Chambers’s harp, a new Erard fully fitted out with everything desirable by way of pedals and fourchettes. From the piano, Mrs Chambers started everyone off in a rousing rehearsal for her rapidly approaching Day o’Treason: three hearty verses of “Johnny Cope”—finishing with a flourish of chords. “Anyone who wants tea,” she said, “must give us a Something. A song, or a poem, or something amusing, in that line. You have had your dinner without singing for it—but as for tea—well, that is another matter altogether! Come, Dr Moir, I know you want your tea directly, if not sooner; I daresay you are willing to lead off?”

  He was. He had come prepared, with the words of his song in his coat pocket to save himself the trouble of remembering them. Accompanied by Mrs Chambers at the piano, he rendered the company a creditable version of “The Pope He Leads a Happy Life.”

  Mrs Crowe and Miss Toulmin were ready, too, with a duet which, they declared, was all the rage in America: “Excelsior.”

  Constantia knew herself utterly incapable of singing aloud before them all. Did those babies not require her yet? Hopey would come fetch her when she was needed—but now she was thinking of just slipping away; of running upstairs to check on them.

  “Now, Mr Balderstone,” Mrs Chambers was saying to her husband, “what novelty have you brought from town for us?”

  “I will claim my usual exemption, for the usual forfeit,” said he. “No song, no tea. The hoodie-crow must not croak, in a houseful of canaries.”

  “Hm! We have not yet heard from you, Mrs MacAdam . . . will you favour us?”

  “Oh, the same as Mr Chambers, if you please, ma’am,” said Constantia, vastly relieved at being shown this way out of the ordeal. “I want no tea, so pray excuse me; in any case, I could not produce anything like a song.”

  “As you like. Lady Janet, what will you give us, this evening?”

  Lady Janet read them a brief devotional verse, which was met with respectful and appreciative murmurs.

  “Come now, Mrs Chambers, it is your turn at last,” said Mrs Moir, after the MacDonalds had been heard, and Mr Anstruther forfeited. “Do let us hear your beautiful new harp.”

  “You must give us your own song, ‘The Geologist’s Wife,’” said Mrs MacDonald. “Indeed you must; I have told all my Edinburgh acquaintance about it. Oh, do! And pray explain, Mrs Chambers, the occasion for your song.”

  “Oh—here, among friends,” said Mrs Chambers, flushing, “I may as well confess! I cannot tell what good wives may do, when their husbands set off for walking tou
rs in the Highlands—I am given to understand that commonly they attend to shirts and bootlaces and the like—but I, for my part, composed for my husband this little song to carry with him.” Moving to her harp, she leaned it tenderly against her right shoulder, and shut her eyes. Her inky fingertips skimmed the familiar landscape of its strings, awakening a whisper of chords, harmonics, arpeggios. Quickly she tuned, the improvements discernible to no one but herself; and then, having flashed a smile toward her husband, she sang:

  Adieu then, my dear, to the Highlands you go,

  Geology calls you; you must not say no;

  Alone in your absence I cannot but mourn,

  And yet it were selfish to wish you return.

  No, come not until you search through the gneiss,

  And mark all the smoothings produced by the ice;

  O’er granite-filled chinks felt Huttonian joy;

  And measured the parallel roads of Glenroy.

  Yet still, as from mountain to mountain you stride,

  In visions I’ll walk like a shade by your side.

  Your bag and your hammer I’ll carry with glee,

  And climb the raised beaches, my own love, with thee.

  Let everything mind you of tender relations;

  See, even the hard rocks have their “inclinations”!

  Oh let me believe that wherever you roam,

  The axis of yours can be nowhere but home.

  And if in your wanderings you chance to be led

  to Ross-shire or Moray to see the Old Red,

  There still, as its mail-covered fishes you view,

  Forget not the colour is “love’s proper hue.”

  Such being your feelings, I’ll care not although

  You’re gone from my side for a fortnight or so . . .

  But know if much longer you leave me alone

  You may find, coming back—a wife turned to stone!

  Everyone laughed and applauded. Hopey appeared at the door, and Constantia had to go upstairs, to the warm hungry babies.

  After the dinner guests had gone, Mr Chambers disappeared into the library to attend to some business—for no longer, he promised, than a quarter of an hour. He returned half an hour later to his wife’s bedroom, which, as the house was so full, the two of them were obliged to share. Although they did not regard this sharing as a hardship, the continuing presence of Lady Janet, which occasioned it, decidedly was.