The Great Unknown Read online

  “Perhaps we might agree to refer to it as an assumed name; a pseudonym,” said Mrs Chambers, “which, I fancy, has a more respectable sound. She makes it no secret that MacAdam is a name assumed out of discretion, for her husband’s sake—a discretion which is required of her for reasons which she is not at liberty to divulge.”

  “A complete stranger, of whom nothing is known!”

  “But she is by no means a stranger, Lady Janet,” said Mrs MacDonald. “I have known her for years. She was Miss Constantia Babcock when I first met her four or five years ago, a her up in the Indies, after her parents both had died. A remarkable personage, and a sterner and more virtuous matron never lived.”

  “But to conceal her name!” said Lady Janet.

  “Although we are not at present to know her husband’s true name,” said Mrs MacDonald patiently, “there is not the slightest ground for suspecting folly or vice; I should never have dreamt of bringing her along to Mrs Chambers else.”

  “And folk may have perfectly innocent reasons for preserving a discreet anonymity,” added Mrs Chambers. “No one can charge her with guile or deceit; only with a quite determined reticence on this particular subject, for which she may—indeed, must—have excellent reasons of her own. Now, my dears, if you like my gingerbread at all, you had better have it at once, before the children come in. They will be famished, for they have been upon the sands all the afternoon, with only a very large picnic hamper bursting with refreshments to sustain them. I fancy I hear them now.”

  This was by no means one of those tranquil households where children are seen and not heard. The children came in hungry, windblown, and red-nosed, bearing trophies of shell, rock, and seaweed to add to the collections already decorating the chimneypiece and the window sills. While the presence of children at downstairs tea was another of those matters on which Lady Janet disagreed with her hostess (and often found it her duty to say so), her conscience permitted her on this occasion to keep her own counsel.

  Instantly the remaining gingerbread disappeared. The Chambers children were accompanied by friends, including one Emily DeQuincey, just Mary’s age, who lived nearby and had come for the day to play. Emily was the youngest daughter of the notorious English Opium Eater. She was a well-behaved and musical child who, brought up by her respectable elder sisters and not her disreputable and impecunious father, was thought to be a suitable companion for Mary; she and her sisters were often at Spring Gardens. Fortunately, Lady Janet had no more to say at present on the subject of laudanum.

  Nina, the eldest of the Chambers girls, came in at last. She had not been on the sands with the little children; instead she had remained upstairs by herself to draw and to read, in luxurious solitude and rare quiet. Even now she carried her book downstairs with her finger marking her place in it.

  “Is not Mrs MacAdam coming down for tea?” someone asked.

  “I keeked in, as I passed her door,” said Nina, “and she has just got both babies fed—and to sleep, for a miracle. She’ll be down in a moment.” Presently, Constantia did come in, thirsty and too warm. Mrs MacDonald rose to kiss her, and Mrs Chambers gave her tea. To make room for her on the sofa, Nina retired to a chair under the window, where she resumed reading while the others chatted happily.

  “What is your book, Miss Nina?” called Lady Janet, after some time.

  “Vestiges,” replied Nina reluctantly, looking up. “Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation.”

  “Good heaven!” said Lady Janet. “Something about that red binding aroused my suspicion. Does your mother know? Were you aware, Mrs Chambers, that Miss Nina has somehow got hold of that pernicious book, the Vestiges?”

  “Pernicious!” said Mrs Chambers. “No, whatever that book may be, Lady Janet, I’m sure it is not pernicious.”

  “Pernicious, and sensational, and wicked. And blasphemous,” said Lady Janet. “I am surprised—indeed, grieved—at your permitting the entry of such a book as that into this houseful of innocent children.”

  “Oh! I cannot tell what good mothers may permit, Lady Janet—but I for my part am confident that Nina may read it, if she likes, without coming to any positive harm.”

  “I beg your pardon,” said Lady Janet, offended; and then, “You will, I hope, excuse my leaving you and the children to yourselves for a time. Others do not suffer as I do from noise.” She gathered up her skirts and stalked out.

  An embarrassed silence ensued. Then Tuckie said, “Mamma, how long is she staying with us?”

  “She won’t be at our Day o’Treason, will she?” said Lizzy.

  “No, hinney, we shall have to manage without her that day,” said Mrs Chambers, “for she has told me that she is engaged elsewhere.”

  “Day o’Treason!” cried Mrs MacDonald, delighted. “Is that what you are calling your party?” Mrs Chambers had invited all her lively and clever friends to a gala day: the centennial of Bonnie Prince Charlie’s first and last great victory, the battle at Prestonpans of 1745. The actual anniversary was the 21st of September which, in this centennial year of 1845, fell unfortunately upon a Sunday. As it was impossible to celebrate such an event on the Sabbath, Mrs Chambers had determined instead upon Saturday the 20th as her day for celebration and memorial of that great Jacobite victory. The invitations had all been sent; and now the acceptances and regrets were flooding in, swelling each day’s mail.

  “I do so hope that the Princes are coming,” said Jenny fervently. She was often a beneficiary of the sweets brought by her father’s old friends, those handsome, clever, good-natured frauds, the Sobieski Stuarts—otherwise the Allen brothers—whenever they paid a visit. “Are they?”

  “Alas, they cannot, though,” said Mrs Chambers. “I had a note this morning from their ‘equerry’—posted from London, where there is some important business afoot, a very deep secret. It is a relief in some respects; a release from the grave responsibility of furnishing an adequate pomp for their Middling-Highnesses. But we shan’t have the benefit of their piper, more’s the pity. I shall have to hunt up another for the occasion—and time is getting short.”

  “Oh, but I can bring you a piper,” said Mrs MacDonald. “His name is Dr John Sing—but there! I am forgetting that Mrs MacAdam knows him very well—don’t you, my dear?”

  “From childhood we have been as—as cousins, I suppose, if not quite brother and sister,” said Constantia.

  “He has just taken his medical degree at Glasgow,” explained Mrs MacDonald to Mrs Chambers, “and is now preparing to return to the wilds of Assam, where he was born, to commence his practice among the people there. And, though you might not expect it to look at him—for he is quite as black as that celebrated Mr Frederick Douglass, from America—he is as accomplished a piper as he is anatomist; or so I am told by my husband, who is well qualified to pronounce. Pronounce as to his piping, I mean; not his anatomising.”

  “I shall be very happy,” said Mrs Chambers, “to receive an accomplished piper-anatomist at my gala day—of any colour whatever. How fortunate I am in my friends, whose circle of acquaintance always seems to include precisely those talents I want! First, milk; and now, pipe music!”

  What was that book in which Nina’s finger kept her place? That book in its modest red cloth binding; that Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation? Brought out by a London medical publisher the previous December, it had by now, nine months later, sold out four large editions: the publishing sensation of the decade. Though ignored by the scientific press, it had been reviewed by all of the popular periodicals at great length and in minute detail. It had been reviled from countless pulpits. It had been passed from hand to eager hand. Readers stayed up all night to devour it. Never had there been such a book as this. It placed before the common reader all the latest knowledge in the fields of astronomy, geology, archaeology, physiology, language, biology, and probability. It claimed to be, and was, “the first attempt to connect the natural sciences into a history of creation.” It asserted (perfunctory nod to a
Divine Creator notwithstanding) that everything—all “creation”—from immense universe to microscopic animalcule—had come into existence through the uninterrupted operation of natural law.

  It asserted, shockingly, that humankind was no exception.

  Furthermore, the identity of its author was a mystery; its title page bore no name. And that was the delectable, tail-swallowing part of the puzzle: Who created this? How had it come into existence?

  The honest town of Musselburgh on the east bank of the River Esk, not far from Spring Gardens, was a favourite afternoon destination of the Chambers family. Of the two bridges across the Esk, the children favoured the old Roman one. They delighted in treading the very stones trodden by Roman sandals; delighted in halting, as Romans surely had halted (Romans! think of it!) at the center to lean over the wide parapet, and peer down into the clear dark water passing below, very rapid and smooth now, only a few hundred yards from its destination: rushing to obliterate itself, exhaust itself, extinguish itself in the sea. They brought things (leaves; bark; feathers) to be dropped onto the water and watched out of sight.

  Constantia paused to lean over the parapet when returning from Musselburgh one afternoon with the children and their mother. Downstream of the piers there always swirled little eddies and whirlpools, ever-changing, yet ever the same. Or no; only approximately the same. Ever similar.

  “Aren’t they marvelous?” said Mrs Chambers at her shoulder. “Those dimples; those whirlpools? I could watch them for hours.” To the children, she said: “Do you know what we are seeing, my darlings? Do you? It is only the nebular hypothesis in action! Here, Professor Nichol would tell us—here, where opposite gentle currents of water meet and intermingle, we see in operation the same natural law by which the universe’s vast currents of gaseous matter begin to rotate as they coalesce.” She rotated her hands around each other, the better to demonstrate. “In the enormous dark expanses of the universe—just as in this homely familiar river—the whirlpool is to be expected where currents meet; and this, my bairns, my darlings, my natural-philosophers-in-embryo, is the genesis of all rotatory movement in all the galaxies, in the nebulae, in the planetary systems of our universe. Of all creation. Is it not marvelous, and wonderful? Mrs MacAdam is properly brimming over with awe, I see—but Annie thinks only of getting home to tea. Aye, so you are, hinney; I can hear you thinking it. And Lizzy is hoping that Cook has made diet-loaf. Well, I daresay that she has. Come on, then; last one home is a pointed egg—a guillemot’s egg!”

  Mr Robert Chambers was an affectionate father who thoroughly enjoyed the society of his children, the youngest as much as the eldest. Each morning he went by horse-drawn railway up to Edinburgh, where he and his brother William published every Saturday the wildly popular family newspaper Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal. Upon his return each evening, as soon as he had taken off his boots and put on his slippers, he came upstairs to visit his children. An old armchair in the day nursery was particularly his. He would take as many of the little ones onto his lap as would fit; and ask the elder ones how they had profited from the day just spent. He sometimes read articles to them from Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal or other popular papers, and made them tell him what they thought. He told them jokes; posed them riddles; and laughed uproariously at the jokes they themselves thought up to pose to him. And sometimes—generally on Saturday evenings, Constantia noticed—he would roll onto the floor with his arms full of children; would wrestle with them, and tickle them until they shrieked with laughter and finally “melted down,” as his wife called it: in their excitement, the smaller children were apt to wet themselves, and dissolve into tears. Then Mrs Chambers would send her husband limping down the stairs in his slippers, while she and Hopey remained behind to restore sober order and make all the children go to bed, and stay in bed.

  Poor man! His feet hurt him.

  And Constantia had also noticed that he bore a small puckered scar on the outside edge of each hand.

  Mr and Mrs Chambers generally dined at six, very late. Constantia had heard Mrs Chambers say that this was because her husband was a member not of the Leisure Classes, who could dine whenever they liked; but rather of the Industrious Classes—who did not take their daily bread until they had earned it. That daily bread was often shared with friends old and new, all welcome to fit themselves unceremoniously around the long table anyhow, with scant regard for precedence, place, or elbow room.

  When the babies were unusually slumbrous one evening, Constantia was able to sit down with the dinner-party of ten or a dozen. Among the guests were Mrs MacDonald with her husband Mr Hector MacDonald, of Edinburgh; Dr Moir and his wife, who had only to cross the bridge from Musselburgh; a prodigiously bewhiskered Mr Anstruther, a loud new acquaintance of Mr Chambers’s; and a couple of bluestockings, Mrs Crowe and Miss Toulmin, who both wrote frequently for Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal. Even before the mussel stew was finished, the conversation turned to literary matters, and inevitably to the sensational book of the year. “Oh, but who has not read Vestiges?” young Miss Toulmin was saying. “Every Hottentot in Africa must have read it, by now.”

  “I have not read it; nor shall I,” said Lady Janet impressively.

  Constantia had not read it either. Indeed, she had not opened a book since the birth of her babies, on the 25th of July; but she resolved now to read it just as soon as she might.

  Lady Janet went on, “Incalculable harm may be wrought by such a book. I have just been reading the Edinburgh Review’s article about it, and found my apprehensions fully justified.”

  Miss Toulmin, seated at Constantia’s left, leaned over and murmured in her ear, “The ‘Embryo Review’ I always think of it—I cannot help myself—and now, I daresay, I shall have made you think the same!”

  “Nothing could be more dangerous,” Lady Janet was saying, “than that unknown author’s theory of transmutation and development. Nevertheless, he gives himself—as the reviewer so elegantly puts it—gives himself the airs of a legislator over the material world. The entire book, it seems, is riddled with error, both moral and material. The unknown author knows only enough to feel shame, or he would not conceal his name.”

  “Oh, ma’am! In present company!” cried Mrs Crowe, whom nothing and no one could abash. “Half of us at this very table often lay our words before the public—our pearls before the swine—without signing our names; and it is not for shame, I assure you. Who wrote the Edinburgh Review’s article, do you know?”

  Embryo Review, thought Constantia, without meaning to.

  “I did not notice,” said Lady Janet.

  “It was unsigned,” said Mrs Crowe. “The Edinburgh’s always are; it is a matter of editorial policy, not of shame. But Dr Sedgwick has made no secret about his authorship of that review. Oh yes, it is quite generally known, ma’am, I assure you; the Edinburgh’s review of Vestiges is from the pen of Dr Adam Sedgwick, who is the—the . . . well, what is he, exactly, that voice from on high?”

  “He is the Woodwardian Professor of Geology at Cambridge,” said Mr Chambers, “and has been for lo, these long ages; for fully the quarter of a century.”

  “A vast period in the history of geology,” said Mrs Chambers. “Perhaps this will be called by geologists of the future ‘the Sedgwickian Era.’”

  “I found that review distasteful,” said Dr Moir. He was, besides family friend and physician, also a regular contributor, Constantia had been told, to the immensely popular Blackwood’s Magazine under the pen-name “Delta.” “One is entitled to expect a soundly-constructed and well-reasoned argument,” he declared. “Temperate, careful, modest; and abstaining from personalities. But that review was none of those. No; its tone was waspish, sarcastic, contemptuous—self-righteous—sanctimonious! If the Vestiges author gave himself the airs of a legislator, the Edinburgh reviewer took upon himself the airs of—of a Pharisee. Furthermore, he seems to have misunderstood—misconstrued—and misrepresented the arguments set forth in Vestiges at every possible
opportunity. As I cannot suppose Dr Sedgwick stupid, I can only conclude that his misrepresentations must be deliberate. And perhaps even malicious.”

  “Oh; malicious?” said Mrs Chambers. “But he is a theologian, too, you know. A canon at Norwich Cathedral; a man who stands as high in the moral realm as in the material.”

  “I am not in the least surprised,” said Lady Janet. “His is the reverent attitude of one who well knows his proper relation to the Most High; one who has habitually trodden sacred precincts. But reading the Vestiges, he says, is like being conducted through the glory, the magnificence of a cathedral—by a stone-mason! A guide who can speak only of ladders and scaffolds, of hammers and chisels, of stones and mortar-hods!”

  This was more provocation than Constantia could bear, and she said, “I beg your pardon, my lady—but who could be better qualified than a stone-mason? Surely no one imagines that cathedrals build themselves! If one is so fortunate as to be guided through a cathedral by the stone-mason who built it, one is led, after all, by its maker! Do we not agree that the maker of any glorious creation, no matter how humble his livelihood, no matter how modest his tools, cannot be contemptible?”

  “Was not our Saviour trained up as a carpenter?” murmured Mrs Moir.

  “Quite right; cathedrals do not build themselves; men build them,” chimed in Mrs Crowe. “Whereas all creation—if the author of Vestiges is right—did indeed build itself! Did spin itself up out of the fire-mist, over untold millennia, in accordance with natural law—”

  “—itself a creation of the Divine Will; how could it be otherwise?” said Mrs Moir.

  Said Dr Moir, “Even if we revert to earthly matters—I refer, now, to geology—Dr Sedgwick is no Pope; he is by no means infallible. No, I remember when he had to recant quite publicly—before the entire Geological Society—upon quitting the camp of the diluvialists and going over to the fluvialists instead.”