by Peg Kingman
Constantia smiled, but said nothing. Side by side, the two of them surveyed the orderly green expanses and tidy hedged compartments of the Jardin. A breeze ruffled the treetops below, and flights of pigeons wheeled and turned against pale blue sky.
If Mrs Chambers was not the author of Vestiges and Explanations, who was?
Presently a quantity of small figures spilled out of the distant Muséum’s monumental doorway onto the sun-warmed stone pavement in front of it. The last session of the conference concluded, the savants were emerging into the open spring afternoon. They looked like insects hatching out of some vast classical egg-case.
“There’s Daddy!” cried Tuckie. “I see him! And there’s Mr Stevenson, too!” Even at this distance, Constantia recognised Mr Chambers’s characteristic gait—for his feet always hurt. Beside him, Hugh’s stone-mason shoulders and arms were equally unmistakable.
“Dad! Daddy!” cried Tucky, waving madly, to no avail; her tiny piping voice floated up and away in the rising spring air, like that soaring balloon-boat in Lucknow, so long ago.
Constantia turned to Mrs Chambers and, saying nothing, only looked her question: He?
Saying nothing, Mrs Chambers only smiled her answer: a tiny smile; meaning, aye. Aye, my dear friend; just so!
Mr Gunn lay on his back, on the dirt floor of the doocot. He had crawled there upon regaining consciousness, to be out of the wind. Outside, that April wind blowing off the Forth battered at the eaves of the doocot. Inside, all was still but for the taffeta rustlings, the honey murmurings of the pigeons. Their bright round eyes peered down at him from their perches and nests which lined the rising circular walls, all above, all around. He was inside the Tower of Babel, looking up from the very bottom; and try as he might, he could not understand their murmurings. In through the pigeon-portals just under the roof there streamed tangible rays of sunshine. These rays illuminated a dung-spattered nest, empty; a lost feather, moving faintly as though it breathed; a bird’s vivid pink foot, clutching; and, most fascinating of all, gorgeous glimmers of dust which circulated in the rise and the fall of the air.
That air. He could still breathe it. He breathed the superb odour of pigeon dung.
All of it—all—was so heartbreakingly beautiful. Therefore was his heart now breaking; and he could feel it happening. The crushing pain of it was beneath his notice.
Beauty, beauty. But why?
Am I not a Man? Have I not, therefore—in service to Beauty—laboured in this Garden all my life? And why? Did this distinguishing Sense render me better suited to circumstance? Did Beauty arm me for my strict ordeal?
Other words came, on familiar melody: Necessary to suppose; a part of a whole; a state in a Great Progress.
He could not suppose that. Of Redress there is none. Nothing lies in reserve.
Am I not a Man? Did I not, therefore, originate both Beauty and Justice? Worthy errors, both!
Outside the stone tower the wind suddenly rose, a magnificent blast like the beating of colossal wings; inside the stone tower the pigeons all at once opened their wings and took flight.
Amid this great rustling of wings, Gunn’s mortal heart broke, all the way through.
The strict ordeal is finished.
Gravity relented, and off the Earth he fell; upward.
Afterword
IT IS ALMOST IMPOSSIBLE now to conceive how the world—the cosmos—felt in 1845, when the anonymous Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation burst upon the reading public. Patrick Matthew’s On Naval Timber and Arboriculture of 1831, with its brilliant little appendix, had escaped everyone’s notice. Charles Darwin’s magisterial On the Origin of Species did not yet exist. It was a time previous to knowing.
Try to remember being unable to read; that time just before you got the knack of it. Here is the book, open on your knees. Here are pictures, which are your friends, because they are quite intelligible. And here too are mysterious designs and signs called “letters,” arranged according to some elusive protocol. Not random: they have meaning; but how is that meaning to be unraveled? The world was awash in magic, then; indeed, magic drenched everything, explained everything. Then suddenly you learned to read, and the tide of magic began its ebb; it has been subsiding ever since.
Try to remember when you apprehended for the first time that the dirt beneath your feet is—contrary to all appearances—a spherical planet called Earth. What did you make of that? What cosmos did you construct in your mind? (Told that the Earth was round, like a ball, I supposed it hollow, and concluded that we inhabit its safe and enclosed interior surface; the luminous dome of sky overhead was evidently the far side. I remember still the wrenching difficulty of revising my cosmic views, at the age of four or five, when assured that we inhabit instead its exposed and vulnerable exterior surface. Could this be true? Such an inferior arrangement!)
Once a thing is known, there is no going back; no un-knowing it again.
In 1845, when he read Vestiges, Mr Darwin was unimpressed. But eventually he acknowledged its usefulness in preparing the public mind for the 1859 publication of his own great book. “In my opinion,” he wrote, “it has done excellent service in this country in calling attention to the subject, in removing prejudice, and in thus preparing the ground for the reception of analogous views.”
Mr Matthew’s peculiar mongrel of a book On Naval Timber and Arboriculture escaped Mr Darwin’s notice until 1860, when Mr Matthew drew it to his attention. Mr Darwin then inserted in the third and all subsequent editions of On the Origin of Species this statement: “I freely acknowledge that Mr Matthew has anticipated by many years the explanation which I have offered of the origin of species, under the name of natural selection.”
Mr Matthew later wrote, “To me the conception of this law of Nature came intuitively as a self-evident fact, almost without an effort of concentrated thought. Mr Darwin here seems to have more merit in the discovery than I have had; to me it did not appear a discovery. He seems to have worked it out by inductive reason, slowly and with due caution to have made his way synthetically from fact to fact onwards; while with me it was by a general glance at the scheme of Nature that I estimated this select production of species as an a priori recognisable fact—an axiom requiring only to be pointed out to be admitted by unprejudiced minds of sufficient grasp.”
Mr Robert Chambers’s authorship of the sensational best-selling Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation and its sequel, Explanations, remained secret until after his death in 1871.
ALSO BY PEG KINGMAN
Not Yet Drown’d
Original Sins
Copyright © 2020 by Peg Kingman
All rights reserved
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The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Names: Kingman, Peg, author.
Title: The great unknown / Peg Kingman.
Description: First edition. | New York : W. W. Norton & Company, [2020]
Identifiers: LCCN 2019027189 | ISBN 9781324003366 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781324003373 (epub)
Classification: LCC PS3611.I62 G74 2020 | DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019027189
ISBN 978-1-324-00337-3 (e-book)
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Peg Kingman, The Great Unknown
