This Thing Of Darkness (34 page)

‘Now you are interesting me, Mr McCormick. We must discuss this with Mr Darwin, the - ah - my companion.’

‘Your what, sir?’

‘I have engaged a gentleman companion for the voyage, a Mr Charles Darwin. He too is interested in natural philosophy, and intends to make a collection.’

‘Well, as long as it doesn’t interfere with my official work as surgeon and naturalist.’

‘I gather that he, too, studied under Jameson at Edinburgh.’

‘Did he? Splendid.’

‘He is presently in the Atheneum Gardens assisting Stokes, my assistant surveyor. He is to mark the time and take observations on the dipping needle, while Stokes calibrates the chronometers for their initial readings. We have selected the Atheneum as the starting point for a chain of chronometric measurements around the globe.’

‘Is that usual, sir, for a civilian to assist with naval surveying matters?’ McCormick looked decidedly piqued to hear of Darwin’s involvement in the scientific life of the ship.

‘It may not be usual, Mr McCormick, but the arrangement is most satisfactory to all concerned.’

‘Of course, sir.’ McCormick took the hint. ‘I say, you there.’ The surgeon indicated Stebbing. ‘I’m absolutely gasping for a drink. Fetch me a glass of wine, will you, well qualified with brandy and spice.’

Stebbing looked bewildered.

‘There is no alcohol on the
Beagle
, Mr McCormick,’ cut in FitzRoy. ‘This is to be an alcohol-free voyage. Shall I show you to your cabin?’

‘No alcohol! Good Lord. Belay that. And I felt just like swallowing off a glass.’ McCormick wore a bleak expression. ‘It’s going to be a deuced long two years, sir.’

The officers’ cabins were forward of FitzRoy’s own cabin on the lower deck, leading off the old messroom, which had been converted into a well-appointed gunroom. McCormick flung open his cabin door: a cot, a washstand and a cramped chest of drawers consumed almost all the meagre space available.

‘The cabins in these coffin brigs are so damned poky,’ he complained. ‘Are they all painted white?’

‘It affords some reflected light, given the paucity of natural light below decks.’

‘I’m not sure I wouldn’t prefer French grey. It’s more restful. On second thoughts, it is a French colour. Hmm. I shall give the matter due consideration.’

Shall you indeed? thought FitzRoy, who was beginning to wonder how he would last two hours in McCormick’s company, let alone two years. McCormick, he realized, had now fallen silent, for the first time that afternoon. The surgeon had pulled open the cabin drawers one by one, and stood open-mouthed before them.

‘Excuse me, sir,’ he said finally.

‘Yes, Mr McCormick?’

‘My cabin appears to be full of French lace, sir.’

 

FitzRoy marched up George Street in a disturbed frame of mind, a silent Darwin trailing a yard behind. The impossibility of completing his commission in the time available bore down heavily upon him; the callow inexperience of Matthews, and the imposition of McCormick upon what had been a close-knit group of colleagues only made matters worse. He felt a vague sense of urgency as a physical need, an itch he could not scratch, a strange discomfort for which there was no relief. Anxiety had made him tired through lack of sleep; a sense of the pointlessness of all his meticulous preparations was creeping over him, even though his mind was too filled with thoughts to be still. The wider panorama of problems that assailed him was for the most part impossible to address; but on a more intimate scale he could, at least, remedy the ludicrous surfeit of crockery aboard the
Beagle
. So it was that he marched through the doorway of Addison’s china shop in combative mood, Darwin - bringing up the rear - wondering all the time what had happened to his
beau ideal
of a sea-captain.

‘Commander FitzRoy, is it not? May I be of assistance, sir?’ The proprietor - presumably Addison himself - glided from behind the counter to greet his distinguished visitor.

‘You may indeed. I have recently had occasion to purchase several complete sets of crockery from this very shop.’

‘I remember the occasion well, sir.’

‘It seems I have over-ordered. I will have to return them.’

‘The items in question have provided every satisfaction, I trust?’

‘I told you, I have over-ordered.’

‘Then forgive me, Commander’ — here Addison indicated a sign — ‘but goods may not be returned unless they are found to be faulty.’

‘I beg your pardon?’ said FitzRoy, taking a step forward with sufficient intent that the proprietor was forced to take a step back.

‘G-goods may not be returned, Commander, unless they are found to be faulty.’

‘Do you see this, sir? And this, and this?’ FitzRoy indicated the most expensive items on display. ‘I would have purchased these - all of these — had you not been so disobliging. You are a blackguard, sir!’

‘Really, Commander, I must — ’

‘I said, you are a blackguard, sir!’ FitzRoy seized the principal teapot from the nearest crockery display, and dashed it to the floor. Darwin stood, stunned. Addison, unable to believe his eyes, remained rooted to the spot, shaking and confused. FitzRoy swept out of the shop.

With only a brief, panic-stricken glance of sympathy at the proprietor, Darwin followed him into the street. ‘My dear FitzRoy, what the deuce — ’

‘You do not believe me? You do not believe that I would have purchased those items?’ His nostrils flared; his features were contorted with rage.

It was, thought Darwin, as if a complete personality change had suddenly overwhelmed the captain. ‘But the Beagle already has a surfeit of crockery,’ he pointed out.

‘I tell you sir, I - I - I ...’ FitzRoy tailed off, and stood there on the cobbles, outwardly silent; but Darwin could see that a superhuman struggle was taking place inside his friend’s mind.

FitzRoy could see Darwin now, a ghostly grey shape embodying calm and reason, superimposed against that other Darwin who had inexplicably driven him to anger just a moment before. It was as if another, different reality was showing through, a palimpsest behind the reality that currently intensified each and every one of his senses, that stretched his every nerve-ending like india-rubber. A surge of panic threatened to overwhelm him, as he felt himself on the edge of an abyss, a terrifying black hole of enveloping hopelessness and despair. But he was also conscious of the fact that, for the first time, an alternative course presented itself, if he could only find the strength to reach for it.

‘FitzRoy?’

‘Darwin, I - I ... I’m sorry, but I ...’

He wanted to complete the sentence, but he realized that he could not recall the start of it. Big tears, huge dollops of salt water, began to roll helplessly down his face.
I’m all right, he realized. I’m all right. Whatever it was, it went away.

He had come back from the brink. But was his sudden salvation anything to do with his friend’s presence? Had the very fact of Darwin’s companionship driven the demons of loneliness away? Or was his recovery mere coincidence, another unpredictable fluctuation in the electric current that seemed to course unchecked and undirected through his mind?

‘FitzRoy? Are you all right?’

‘Yes... yes, I’m fine. I am most terribly sorry... Please, let us leave now.

And he led his friend back down George Street towards Devonport.

‘Deep in wide caverns and their shadowy aisles

Daughter of Earth, the chaste Truffelia smiles;

On silvery beds of soft asbestos wove,

Meets her gnome-husband, and avows her love.‘’

 

Darwin giggled when he reached the end of the verse, and shot FitzRoy an I-told-you-so look.

‘And you are seriously informing me,’ repeated FitzRoy, ‘that these lines were written about two truffles mating underground?’

‘I do not jest.’

‘Extraordinary.’

‘It is not the finest verse ever composed.’

‘It is certainly the best entertainment I have had this last month.’

The
Beagle
had received Admiralty permission to leave in late November, and had moved to the holding area at Barnet Pool beneath Mount Edgcumbe, ready for departure. No sooner had she done so than a persistent gale had set in, flinging squall after squall up the Channel from the west; there had been no break in the weather for nigh on a month. Bucking and dipping and bouncing where she stood, the little brig strained continually at anchor like an impatient dog trying to break free of its lead. Attempting to tack a square-rigger into such a head-on gale, as FitzRoy explained to Darwin, would be a waste of all their efforts; a point made emphatically on 17 December, when the
Persephone,
a brig that had set out for the Bay of Biscay two days before the storm broke, was driven unceremoniously back into Devonport.

It was Christmas Eve. FitzRoy and Darwin had taken refuge in the library; the other occupants of the cabin, King and Stokes, were part of the last dog-watch from six to eight, and so were hunched in their thick woollen surtouts outside, the elements at their backs. Sleeting winds and rain swept mercilessly across the decks, and inside the library, beat their muffled tattoo against the skylight. The oil lamp swung from side to side in its gimbal, bathing the cabin in its warm yellow glow, and tossing out little parabolas of smoke with every rise and fall of the ship. As the lamp swung back and forth, the two men’s shadows alternately grew and shrank against the cabin walls, like pugilists advancing and retreating.

Darwin, who had been feeling queasy for a whole month, was endeavouring to distract himself and entertain FitzRoy by reading aloud from a book of his grandfather Erasmus’s scientific verse.

‘I say, listen to this. It’s about the reproductive process of the
Gloriosa
flower:

‘By the deuce, that’s racy stuff!’

‘My grandfather did sire a prodigious number of children.’

As their conversation dissolved into laughter the cabin door banged open, and the outside world roared in. The lantern flame guttered, sending their shadows boxing each other crazily across the walls. Pages of poetry flickered past at high speed, as a gust of wind raced dismissively through their contents. McCormick ducked into the cabin, shook himself like a wet spaniel, and shut the door. ‘Deuced filthy night, sir,’ he observed.

‘Good evening, Mr McCormick,’ said FitzRoy, finding manners, as so often, a useful cloak for his feelings.

‘Poetry,’ remarked McCormick suspiciously, picking up the volume on the chart table and leafing through it.

‘ “Organic life beneath the shoreless waves

Was born and nurs’d in Ocean’s pearly caves

First forms minute, unseen by spheric glass,

Move on the mud, or pierce the watery mass;

These as successive generations bloom,

New powers acquire, and larger limbs assume.“”

 

‘I say, who wrote this bosh?’

‘My grandfather did.’

‘Sorry,’ grunted McCormick, in a tone more or less devoid of apology.

‘It is his volume of “scientific” verse.’

‘Forgive me, Darwin, but I don’t see that the mystery of creation is within the range of legitimate scientific territory.’

‘Do you believe so?’ asked FitzRoy. ‘Surely the purpose of philosophic enquiry is to illuminate all God’s works, and to understand the laws by which He has created the universe?’

‘Yes, sir, but to suggest that man is just another creature crawling out of the slime, well, it’s a beastly and damnable creed that has no place for honour, or generosity, or beauty of the spirit, or any of the qualities given by God to man alone.’

‘I’m inclined to agree with you, Mr McCormick. But, if Darwin will forgive me — ’

‘Please carry on.’

‘ — my principal objection to the theories of Erasmus Darwin, and Lamarck, and their fellow transmutationists, would be a scientific one. Their contention that living beings can develop useful characteristics and somehow pass them on to the next generation allows no mechanism for doing so. A farm labourer may develop muscles, but he cannot pass them on to his son through inheritance. How can mere matter generate its own variations? It is a question that they cannot answer. I’m afraid, my dear Darwin, that your grandfather undermines the distinction between mind and matter by endowing matter with inherent vitality.’

‘Yes, absolutely, of course, that too, sir,’ agreed McCormick, his brows knitted. ‘But hang it, sir, life comes from God, not from the mind or from matter, for that matter. That is, I didn’t mean...’ McCormick became momentarily confused. ‘I mean, all this nonsense about new species developing. It’s been scientifically established that God created every single species of plant and land animal on the same day - Saturday, the thirtieth of October 4004 BC.’

FitzRoy allowed McCormick the debatable contention that Bishop Ussher’s dating had been ‘scientific’.

‘The French Philosophical Anatomists would disagree with you.’

‘With all due respect, sir, they
are
French.’

‘Not all of them,’ said Darwin. ‘Professor Grant at Edinburgh was as Scottish as oatcakes.’

‘With all due respect, Darwin, Professor Grant is a damned scoundrel.’

‘When I was at Cambridge,’ persevered Darwin, ‘Professor Henslow made a very good case for incorporating philosophical anatomy into the theory of natural theology. He believed that God’s laws of creation did allow for new species to occur.’