Mr Darwin's Shooter (22 page)

With that Covington made an inner decision, jumped from his chair and crossed to the shelf and grabbed the parcel in both hands. Without delay he tore the string, ripped the paper off, allowing it to clatter to the floor, and stood staring at a brown leather cover with a gold-embossed spine and various commonplace features: pages; edges; binding—a book was a book. But he did not open it and, as if it burned his fingers, took a long stride over to the chart table and planted the freshly-minted volume on MacCracken's chest.

 

MacCracken leafed through the pages.
On the Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life
. It took only moments to see what was promised—a veritable Genesis of life. Despite blurred vision, an aching head and confused emotions, MacCracken wanted nothing more than to settle down for a marathon of study.

A knife, a knife
, he mimed through his lips.

Covington cleared his throat.

‘A name may be written in there. Doubtless in small print but writ there all the same, an acknowledgement of my existence.'

MacCracken made a sympathetic noise.
Would that be so terrible?

‘See, in my pride I crave it. I am moulded by the devil.'

Covington fetched a knife for the uncut folios, and after an interval of slicing and page-turning MacCracken reached a Register of Writers Referred to in the Text, a
Glossary of Scientific Terms, and an Index without any
COV
nestling above
COWSLIP
, where it would naturally belong.

Your name is not there
. He gave his friend a beseeching, apologetic look.

‘Then damn me for an imbecile,' exploded Covington, and strode from the room. But before getting very far he spun about and returned, looking everywhere at once, then reluctantly met MacCracken's eye.

‘Look under birds.'

Birds?

‘Finches.'

MacCracken brought a fingertip to the point of his tongue, leafed through pages, and looked under
FI
. He saw
FEAR, FEET, FERTILITY, FIR-TREES
and
FISH
, but nothing else.

No finches.

‘No
Geospiza magnirostris
?'

I'm impressed
, mimed MacCracken.
But no
.

‘Are you certain, man?'

MacCracken made a grunt,
Look for yourself
, holding out the book as best he could under the circumstances.

Covington lurched towards the chart table seeming about to take up the offer. The most desired object in his eyes it seemed was the book, and also the most feared. He turned and left the room. The front door of the cottage banged fearsomely loud as he made his exit.

Silence. And then just the sound of the dying wind in the chimney space, and the voices of the women fussing at the other end of the house: ‘What's he aggravatin' about, for pity? Perish the man and his tempers.'

MacCracken hefted the book to his chest and continued reading:

MacCracken read on. His concentration was absolute. His eyes swam under the spell of discovery and excited imagination. The letters on the page seemed edged by rainbow lines. And here was a word of thanks:
I much regret that want of space prevents my having the satisfaction of acknowledging the generous assistance which I have received … So there it was. Didn't such thanks, naming no
names, embrace Covington chiselling away on his rocks at the edge of the ocean, collecting trinkets and putting them in tin-lined boxes for his benefactor? But no, on further reading, it was naturalists Darwin meant—a rarer breed than carthorses. Still, MacCracken did not have to read far to confirm that what he held in his hands was a distillation into sensible theory of the entire majesty of the world. Even reduced to theory the majesty remained inherent, the mystery still swirled. It appealed to MacCracken's temperament and excited him greatly.

His finger went to the tip of his tongue. Wetted, it returned to the corner of a page. Gripped the paper. Raised the page to a small curve. Rustle of the page turning, scraping over. A feeling of sinking through time as the next raft of words rose up. He felt part of time with a deep contentment and understanding—
all
times past and future as well as this very particular moment of his lying in this room, topped and tailed, waited upon, pampered, drugged and given the poetry of existence in such a form. It roused his
admiration as an essayist to stand before a pile of such rich gleanings, and see them prodigiously exploited.

‘And between the stumbling old carthorse and a light-headed fool as they circle each other closer,' thought MacCracken—beginning a pattern of replies and counter-explications that were to be his companions for a good time now, as he made Darwin's book into his own.
Artificial
selection;
natural
selection; the two phrases rocked back and forth in a symmetry of understanding.

The artificiality and contrivance of MacCracken's circumstances were not lost on him. Calculation and counter-calculation were involved in the whole long day and ran back through the two years of his friendship with Covington. They always had a plan for each other and reached towards it in their dealings. That was the artificial side. The natural element was in the instinct that kept them glued. Which led where?

Further and more rapid dimming of light … Sweet odour of oil … Lamplighting … Fuss … MacCracken was a willing partner in it whatever it was … The clatter of Mrs Covington and Nurse Parkington getting a bed ready in the next room … Conflicting moods cutting across: the thrill of the unknown in Theodora; the sour reality in his use of misunderstood Georgina … The dimpled pudding with raisins for eyes that was Mrs Covington:

‘Up you get. Lean on my arm …'

Nurse Parkington on the other side, leaking liniment
through her pores as if she drank the stuff … The limping of MacCracken through into the small room matching his own side room in ‘Villa Rosa' … The settling of him into his new bed, a made-up couch … His profuse thanks as he was fitted as comfortable as two stout, strong and wonderfully good housekeeping women could devise … His sheets a froth of Egyptian cotton—easy as a cloud to lie on … His twisted ankle kept free of the pressure of bedclothes by a wicker basket … A lamp moved closer to him … Objections made:

‘Do be sensible. You must not read now, doctor, you must rest.'

Just for a while.

‘He'll want to know,' nodded Mrs Covington.

‘Know what?' shafted the Nurse.

‘A distressing nonsense,' said Mrs Covington, twisting her hands in each other. ‘He relies on the doctor, see …'

‘Oh. Until
he
comes back, then,' relented Nurse, adjusting the lamp.

‘If he comes back at all, Nurse Parkington,' said Mrs Covington, going to the window and peering out into the dusk.

‘You mustn't fret.'

‘How can I not?'

More mutterings made about the thoughtlessness, the outrageousness of Covington. More defence of him by his long-suffering wife … Laudanum drops administered … A bedpan proffered. Then MacCracken left alone again and the book taken up again.
The mutual relation of beings … The wide range of some beings, the narrow range of others
…
Domestication. Artificial selection … Variation under domestication …

 

MacCracken began injecting Covington's voice into some of the propositions before him:

Crossing in the wild gives only limited variety.

That spoke of humility. The fierce little tribe of Covingtons clinging to steep ridges and guarding their cattle among the dingo dogs.

Huge variety possible under domestication.

That spoke of ambition—and a very present one too for a man of property and clumsy pretensions. Why else did the Covingtons of this world take their wild-bred daughters to Government House balls, and try getting them joined with officers who were, back through the Home Counties and spa towns of England, in turn bred for such conjunctions, being adapted to getting rich colonial wives?

There was a trace of perfume in the room where MacCracken lay. Memory of a smile hovered at the edge of his understanding. Had the fleeting Theodora rested there, changed her clothes, sprawled on the imperial couch fanning her pale forehead while MacCracken hallucinated? By any reasonable standard of feeling he should be free of desire in his sickbed. But selection came in three forms, he read by now: artificial, natural, and then there was sexual, and the last-named was stronger than death.

MacCracken skimmed. Leafed back. Darwin's story was set far below man in the order of things, in the vegetable garden, the worm patch, the bird's nest, the frog pond. South American landscape and buried, ancient bones played an important part. Yet although there were no men, as such, treated in these pages, hints of them were everywhere—in every potent old sire of various broods, in males' dedication of life to the continuation of the line—in the draught stallion, the bull elephant, the oxen and the rhinoceros with its lowered horns and armour-plating. MacCracken lifted the sheets, peered down his trunk, and studied himself in the raw. He'd never quite thought of the penis ennobled as such, but there it was, ever-hopeful, the flagpole of life's claim on itself.

So what
about
MacCracken and his common urges
under the sheets? When it came to the attributes of sexual selection, which was he—the peacock with the showiest feathers, the gamecock with the sharpest spur, the lion with the boldest mane? None of it fitted. He had only his impertinence, his rather lazy-faced intelligent features, to recommend him. That and a fullness of desire making him ardent to his sweethearts, the several women whose hearts he'd crossed in life.

MacCracken understood what was being said against the comforting and the familiar in Darwin's pages—about the seething profligacy of creation and its object to breed at any cost. Because only custom created nature in the sense of what was proper. Otherwise wildness was all.

MacCracken allowed himself a whim of rapaciousness. Chasing Theodora through a grassy shade he caught her and had her on a muddy bank. The illusion was decently succeeded by a picture of them on the chair-deck of a steamer on the Italian lakes, smoking cigarillos and planning the architecture of a nursery wing.

He dreamed a while longer, then put his aching head into the book again. It was a great challenge to understanding.

Nature, wrote the hero of the
Beagle Journal
—now raised to greater heights—must have its universal laws and they were surely as obvious in the wild as they were in the stars. Because if in one place, why not in another? Laws were accepted in physics and astronomy, otherwise the arrangement of the heavens would collapse. An apple would never fall into your hands from a tree, nor a wave advance along a shore. The work of the wave and the seeding of the apple were well known to common sense. Lineal descent, likewise, was accepted in the farmyard and understood by the simplest of observers. Darwin wrote that he consulted farmers and breeders and they gave their thoughts. So domestication in Darwin's thinking was a demonstration of longer-term processes in the wild. Selective breeders summoned into life whatever forms and
moulds they pleased. They imagined a spotted dog or a heavy-haunched draughthorse and within a few animal generations brought them into being. When Darwin looked farther afield—into the shipload of specimens the
Beagle
brought back—he saw that naturalists needed to learn the same lesson. He ventured confidently to look back thousands upon
thousands
of generations. Therefore all naturalists should understand how species in a state of nature were descendants of other species—though few did, it seemed, and stayed rooted to the idea Darwin shared before he began his study, which was that God made each being fit for its station in the world, and allowed it to vary only in small ways, as the diet and climate of its station dictated. How magnificent though was Darwin's idea of the wild, thought MacCracken, where forms were chalked out upon a wall of stupendous extent, not by men, but as it were by a greater force, most powerful, and utterly invisible except in effect.

In such a way MacCracken sketched out his thoughts of Theodora.

Now MacCracken was weary and let the volume slide from his fingers. His mind went to those green eyes again. Rested in them. Dreamed of attachment. How many shutter-exposures had his eidetic memory made as he lay stirring hazily, and Theodora took him in charge, leaning over him, expertly twitching him in the region of the zygomatic fossa, and so putting his jaw in place? A picture he retained was of her face turned half-away, chin slightly lifted, fiery hair freed and cascading, eyebrows memorably arched and somewhat thick, as if they underlined a style of thought. A sadness in her downturned mouth caused his heart to yield its independence absolutely. He believed it was for the simple reason that she was absent in that look, and he would never be able to reach her where she was, that his longing was found measureless in the very moment it began. Then he remembered. She had been carrying a
lamp, holding it high to check the room on leaving. There she was, all of her—a small woman, well proportioned, intense in her fine-boned perfection, and youthful in looks although perhaps edging towards thirty years of age. Whatever, his heart went still.