The Great Unknown

by Peg Kingman

  On another occasion, Nina reported to her sisters Mrs Crowe’s opinion: “Mrs Crowe says that humans are the sorting creatures, the distinguishing earthlings, Homo distinguit; that we divide everything into kinds. We distinguish between This and That. Between Us and Them.”

  “Do none of the beasts distinguish?” said Mary. “They must distinguish between male and female, at the very least; how continue their kind else?”

  “But there are a great many creatures not particularly male or female. Aye, it is so; I read it in a back number of Dad’s Journal. Not just animalcules, as are seen in their multitudes in a drop of pond water—but also snails and slugs, and earthworms, and some of the fishes.”

  “No one can distinguish cock pigeons from hen pigeons.”

  “Nay; only watch them together,” said Annie. “The cocks are the ones strutting and puffing—”

  “You fancy that you can distinguish, Annie,” Mary said, “but it may be that hens puff and strut, too!”

  “The pigeons distinguish well enough, if we cannot,” said Hopey. “Well enough to fill one nest after another with squabs, all the year round.”

  “The gardener told me that some very industrious pairs may even fill two nests at once,” said Annie.

  “How do they manage without help, I wonder?” said Hopey.

  “So handsome, still, this shot taffeta stuff!” said Mrs Chambers, holding up an old dress of hers in front of Nina’s shoulders in the drawing room one evening. For once, all the family was at home without any guests but Lady Janet at her cabinet in the corner, and Constantia. “These tints better suit your complexion, Nina, than mine; and you are nearly of an age now to wear so elegant a stuff. I could not quite bring myself to part with it—but nor could I wear it, for my waist never was the same again, hinney, after you were born. I daresay that Mrs Brown might be equal to the remaking of it. The bodice must be recut, to be sure; the neckline raised and the waist lowered—”

  “But Mamma, those sleeves!” cried Mary. “How mortifying for Nina to go about in such preposterous sleeves!”

  “Aye, they are something monstrous,” agreed her mother cheerfully. “Yet at the time, you know, we thought them the very summit of elegance. Still, mancherons and perhaps a pair of lace undersleeves would change everything; and there is plenty of stuff in them to be re-cut—”

  “I should say so!” said Nina, spreading out the enormous width of the bouffant upper sleeves which had been so killingly fashionable fifteen years before. “Why, there must be three yards to each one.”

  “I can scarcely believe my ears!” declared Lady Janet from her corner. “I should never have thought to hear such a spoilt and ungrateful reply from any well-brought-up girls, to a mother’s offer of a handsome present. It is demeaning to prostrate oneself to the fickle whim of fashion, and I assure you—though you will not believe me—that in fifteen years’ time the present fashions will appear equally ridiculous to you. This present mode of arranging the hair is the silliest thing I ever saw; even the queen goes about with her hair contrived in swags and draperies around her ears, for all the world like an upholsterer’s display. I am sadly disappointed in her. Worse still are those preposterous ringlets one sees everywhere, all a-dangle at either side of the face, like—like sausages hanging in the butcher’s shop!”

  This was more than usually tactless of Lady Janet, for all the girls—and their mother, too—arranged their hair each morning very much as the pretty young Queen Victoria did, with smooth glossy wings of hair looped around their ears. It cost them some time and trouble, and gave them great satisfaction, to contrive those very swags and ringlets so derided by Lady Janet.

  Lady Janet’s scanty white hair was scraped back into an old-fashioned cap; and her ears stood boldly forth ungraced by any swags, drapes, wings, ringlets—or indeed by any feminine softnesses or graces whatever. Although the girls could not admire Lady Janet’s toilette (and her whiskery lip and chin horrified them), they supposed that her advanced age put her hors de combat; and their courtesy was so far superior to hers that they could not have dreamed of dropping even a hint that her appearance might be improved in any particular.

  It was Constantia who broke the awkward silence which had fallen. “They are quite inexplicable, these revolutions of fashion,” she said. “Someone devises a new trimming, or new waist, or new sleeve—and at once the previous style, though it had been until that moment the smartest thing going, is utterly extinguished! As old-fashioned as—as—”

  “As a farthingale,” supplied Nina.

  “As a suit of armour,” said Mary.

  “As a mammoth,” said Annie.

  “But how do fashions change?” said Mary. “How can enormous puffed sleeves ever have been smart?”

  “One might as well ask why mammoths are extinct,” said Annie. “How did mammoths fall out of fashion?”

  “Perhaps, having no warm clothes to put on when the east wind blew, they froze to death, each and every one,” said Jenny, who had been complaining all day of the cold.

  “Oh, silly,” said Lizzy.

  “Perhaps not so very silly,” said Mrs Chambers thoughtfully. “Is it not curious that none of the animal tribes wear clothes? Only humankind does so. Humans are the earthlings who clothe themselves. Do you hear that, my dear?” said she, turning to her husband who, engrossed in his book, had succeeded at hearing none of this frivolous chatter. “It may be our universal appetite for attiring ourselves which distinguishes humankind from the beasts: Homo vestitum! What do you think of that?”

  “Jemmie and Willie are not human, then,” said he, not looking up from the page, “for they are determined to escape their clothes.”

  “A trifling objection,” said Mrs Chambers. “Over time they will develop into humans. It is a matter of development.”

  “No, it still will not answer,” said Mr Chambers, laying aside his book. “I have been reading the account of a voyage recently published by an eminent naturalist—the highly intelligent and observing geologist Mr Darwin—who reports that even the full-grown men and women of Tierra del Fuego often go entirely naked.”

  “But surely this Fuego must enjoy a tropical climate? Where clothing is only a discomfort and a hindrance?”

  “Not at all. Fuego lies in nearly the same relation to the South Pole as our Shetland Islands do to the North, and with a comparable climate. Yet the author reports the sleet falling and thawing upon the naked bosom of the naked mother, while she suckles her equally naked new-born infant.”

  “They can hardly be human, then.”

  “They are undoubtedly human.”

  “How very disagreeable it is to hear such matters spoken of,” said Lady Janet from her corner. “In the drawing room, too.”

  Upon seeing her father wind the hall clock on a Saturday morning, as was his custom, Tuckie—who had only recently learned to interpret its round face, its unequal hands—said, “It is only humans who can tell time. Isn’t that so, Daddy?”

  “An intriguing notion,” said Mr Chambers, stepping down from the ladder. “But how are we to account for the dog who knows when to expect his master’s return, and goes to await him in the high road at the end of the day’s work? How to account for the birds who know when it is time to fly south?”

  “Oh,” said Tuckie, crestfallen.

  “It is a valuable thought, whatever,” said her father. “We are perhaps the only creatures to have devised ways of measuring time—indeed, of measuring anything. We ought perhaps to be called Homo mensor—the measuring earthling.”

  “Homo mathematicus,” proposed Mary to her father, one evening when he had come upstairs with slippers, notebook, and dull pencil. “None but humans are able to perform mathematical operations.” For Mary had been instructed by her mother that very afternoon in the useful Rule of Three.

  “Mm,” said her father. “But a ewe, having borne twins, is not content if only one of them is by her; she knows that the other is missing, and goes seeking it. And
if she has borne triplets, and only two of them are by her, she knows that the third is missing, and goes seeking it.”

  Said Annie, “If that is true—”

  “Mr Hogg, who ought to know, has assured me that it is. A great and amazing fact.”

  “—then ewes—even silly ewes!—can do maths; can count to three, at least.”

  “Which is more than Jemmie can do!” crowed Lizzy.

  “One, two, three!” retorted Jemmie. “Six, seven, eight!”

  “You forgot four and five!”

  Mrs MacDonald, who was accustomed to children and quite liked them, would often pay them the compliment of engaging them in conversation, and even in argument, as though they were her equals. One afternoon when she had come down from town, the three older girls were admitted to downstairs tea. In the rambling and wide-ranging course of their table-talk, Annie, somewhat exhilarated by two cups of strong tea, ventured to declare that it was only humans who made use of symbols.

  Said Mrs MacDonald, “I beg your pardon, Miss Anne—but consider, pray, that so too do dogs.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Dogs use their excrement as symbols, to intimidate their rivals. Why else are dogs so determined to leave their droppings in the high road which everyone uses?”

  “Is it not to infuriate all those who are sure to step in it?” said Mrs Chambers.

  “As I did, on my way here?” said Mrs MacDonald. “No. It is meant as a public notice to other dogs: a warning to would-be interlopers that a well-fed and valiant dog is already here, in this district, and they had best go along, somewhere else.”

  “Horses make a tremendous monument, too, of their dung, and for the same reason,” observed Nina, “though geldings and mares do nothing of the sort.”

  “This is no fit subject for respectable company,” said Lady Janet.

  “In Daddy’s Journal, dung is called ‘effete particles,’” reported Annie. “Aye, it is; and some naturalists have made great studies about it, haven’t they, Mamma?”

  “Quite true,” said Mrs Chambers. “Both Dr Buckland and Dr Mantell have established some very interesting and valuable facts deriving from their studies of fossil, ah, ‘coprolites.’”

  “Oh, ‘coprolites,’ is it? What a splendid word!” said Mrs MacDonald. “Where is Dr Moir when we need him?”

  “Not at all nice,” said Lady Janet.

  Jenny, playing on the lawn with the puppy Bunty, said to her twin, “Lizzy, if we are the crown of all creation, why cannot we hear and smell as keenly as a dog?”

  Lady Janet, passing within earshot on her way into the conservatory, seized upon this opportunity to instruct. “Let it be a lesson to you, miss,” she called out. “It is a sign that we are not to be at the mercy of our senses—for we, God’s creatures which He has made in His own image, are endowed with something immeasurably higher, and better. You know what that is, I hope?”

  “Mm; reason?” hazarded Jenny, without much confidence.

  “No, certainly not Reason! Reason may lead us dangerously astray—indeed, Reason is no more reliable a guide than is Sensation. I refer, of course, to our immortal souls. And you ought certainly to know that, at your age. Have you children had no religious training at all? You are as ignorant as infidels.” She passed into the house through the conservatory.

  Jenny flopped down on her back in the grass, thus inviting delirious Bunty to tumble all over her face and neck, licking her eyes, nose, and ears. She shrieked with laughter until, when the licking and tickling became unbearable, she had to push him away and sit up again. Wiping her sleeve across her face, she said, “Lizzy, do dogs suppose that they are the ones made in God’s own image?”

  “Aye, they must,” said Lizzy. “Just fancy: God with four legs and fur, and a long pink tongue, and a tail to wag when He is glad.”

  ONE DAY, as she was passing by the open nursery door, Constantia was arrested by Annie’s voice saying, “Nay, Lizzy, you blockhead. Mammifers are the creatures which nurse their young. That is why they are called mammifers. That is what ‘mammifer’ means.”

  Constantia stopped to listen.

  “Oh! Like ‘Mamma’ then,” suggested Lizzy.

  “But that cannot be so,” objected Tuckie, “because Mamma does not nurse Charlie. She has Mrs MacAdam to do it for her.”

  “She might, though, if she wished.”

  “Nay, but she cannot,” said Tuckie. “She did try, mind you, after the wicked nurse went away—and she could not, for she had no milk.”

  “And Daddy, never,” said Jenny. “Does that mean that men are not mammifers?”

  “No, the males of the mammifer tribes do not themselves nurse their young, but they are mammifers nonetheless . . . because they were nursed by their mammas,” insisted Annie.

  “But we were not nursed by Mamma,” said Jenny. “It was Hopey who nursed us.”

  “Oh! You are too stupid to talk to! A scanty and defective development of life! Of course you must know what I mean!”

  “Mrs MacDonald says it is only humans who laugh; that we are the laughing earthling.”

  “But Lady Janet never laughs. Have you ever seen her laugh?”

  “Nay, nor even smile.”

  “Miss Toulmin says that we are the only creature that weeps.”

  “Daddy never weeps—but Tuckie does, nearly every day. A cry-baby.”

  For nursery meals, the two little boys were belted into high chairs drawn up to the table, but all the girls were tall enough and mannerly enough to sit upon back stools or chairs. Even at nursery meals, where Hopey presided, dining-room manners were to be practised. It was impermissible to leave the table until excused under any circumstance but one: suddenly seized by a musical idea, any of the girls might leap up at once and run to her instrument. It was understood by all that musical ideas were so fragile, so evanescent, and so precious that they were to be snatched from the thin air upon the very moment of their wafting into existence; they might otherwise evaporate as quickly as they had precipitated, never again to be recovered. No chances could be taken with them; it was a duty to bring them into the world. Constantia became accustomed to seeing an inward distracted stillness fall over the face of the girls; any of them might, even in the midst of nursery-supper noise, fall silent for a moment; then spring from her chair, to run to the pianoforte—the harp—the violin.

  One night in the dark small hours when Constantia was sitting up with Charlie at her breast, she heard the harp in the drawing room downstairs. Someone picked out a long cascading scale—and then a developing series of melodic phrases, deliberately and meticulously elaborated, elucidated. This nocturne lasted some twenty or thirty minutes.

  In the morning, Mrs Chambers apologised for the disturbance, saying that a most exquisite melody had come to her in a dream—a melody so ravishing that it had wakened her from a sound sleep; that she had been compelled to rise and fly to her harp to capture and transcribe it before it went the way of all dreams. “There is no need to apologise,” said Constantia. “It was the loveliest thing I ever heard, of a night.”

  Mrs Chambers cherished a tea-set of Staffordshire manufacture, white with dainty handpainted gold decorations; her own, not the landlord’s. One saucer in particular was kept aside for her exclusive use because of its pitch: it chimed a perfect A, whenever a spoon rang against it, or a cup was set down upon it. Each of the saucers had its own pitch, each slightly but discernibly different, and all pleasant to the ear. But only one of them rang a perfect A; and that was the one which Mrs Chambers invariably preferred. Her daughters had once, for fun, replaced it with another saucer, identical in appearance; but their mother, setting down her cup with ink-stained fingers, immediately knew the difference. The cups and cake plates and slop bowl rang too, a little, but the saucers had the purest tone. The girls had, on another occasion, ranged the saucers in order of their pitch, from lowest to highest. All fell within a whole note (they had checked, against the pianoforte)—but each was slight
ly different from the next. Alone, each note was lovely, and sufficient; Constantia—and indeed all of the girls except Tuckie—could reconcile herself to that tone; that tone could be taken for the tonic, and any scale built from it. But Mrs Chambers and Tuckie each had somewhere within herself some absolute reference pitch, which she could consult with complete confidence; and compare. To them, the saucer which rang A was preferable by far to all others.

  One evening, two of the Misses DeQuincey performed a violin duet. Constantia admired the grace of the girls as they plied their bows across the strings, and fingered the fretless necks—though the elder had a distracting way of sniffing, a noisy intake of breath at the end of each bowed phrase; probably she was quite unaware of doing it. Constantia had been told that the DeQuincey girls lived with their grown-up sisters at a place upstream called Lasswade. She imagined a shallow ford, a clear burn where the DeQuincey lasses and their friends, the Chambers girls, might tuck up their skirts on a warm summer’s day—the single warm summer’s day—and . . . wade. How picturesque.

  Constantia could sing in tune, and was a useful participant in a round, able to keep up her own part, in her proper time; but she knew herself to be not finely attuned to music, not as real musicians are. She was hearing just now a pretty melody and its harmony; and, if she concentrated, she was able to compile some sense of direction and of pattern; a sense of where the music was going, where it repeated itself; its passage from one point to another. But as she listened now beside Mrs Chambers, Constantia was distracted by curiosity: What was Mrs Chambers hearing? Her experience of this music must be far richer and more complex than Constantia’s own. Where Constantia knew herself to be hearing only melody, harmony and, if she attended closely, progress, was Mrs Chambers hearing intervals, meanings, relationships and ancestries, resemblances and reminders, all plaited together, complex as a tartan?

  And to Mrs Chambers’s knowing ears, was the experience perhaps less pleasant than to Constantia’s unsophisticated ones? Were the instruments ill-tuned? Were the players clumsy? Did Mrs Chambers’s finer sensibilities increase her pleasure—or diminish it? Perhaps the defects of the performance (if defects there were) even caused her some discomfort. The players concluded—and Mrs MacAdam thought that as Mrs Chambers clapped her hands in appreciation, she also exhaled a long sigh; it might be of relief.