This Thing Of Darkness (107 page)

Another cheer rocked the hall. Wilberforce gestured for calm, his upper body slowly rotating until his stare focused, as if through a magnifying glass, upon a point in the exact centre of Huxley’s forehead. He was full of confidence now, perhaps too much so. Huxley glared back balefully, his deep, dark eyes swimming in his bulldog face.
You are nothing
, Wilberforce’s look seemed to say.
You are other ranks
,
and no more. Know your place.

‘It appears that I must give way to Mr Huxley,’ said the bishop, his tones smooth and serpentine, ‘but before I do so, I should like to ask him one question. If you are willing, Mr Huxley, to trace your descent from an ape on your grandfather’s side, are you similarly willing to trace that descent on your grandmother’s side?’

There was uproar in the hall. Some of the students, and some of the more gin-soaked journalists, burst out laughing. There was genuine shock in many quarters: a commotion rippled out from the place under one of the windows where Lady Brewster had fainted. FitzRoy was appalled. The bishop had gone too far. In bringing Huxley’s grand-mother into the equation, he had insulted a lady. He had entirely handed the moral advantage to the opposition, with one carelessly offensive remark.
He has forgotten to behave like a gentleman.

Up on the dais, Huxley’s pasty face, set in a furious pout, disentangled itself from the large black beard that nested beneath his chin. He had been patronized all his life, and this was just one more example. Why was it so much worse to be descended from a monkey than to have been fashioned from dust? He wanted to see the foot of science pressed firmly on the neck of religion, and he saw his chance. He turned to Hooker. ‘The Lord hath delivered him into mine hands,’ he said, with mock-Biblical satisfaction; whereupon he rose, and made his way to the podium.

Anyone paying attention would have seen a stocky young man step forward, dressed in a plain, cheap waistcoat and a tailcoat that barely fitted him, both permanently crumpled from lives spent inside a suitcase. He was wedged uncomfortably into a high-collared shirt, his jet-black hair trimly parted and plastered down with macassar-oil, a pair of lorgnettes his only ‘learned’ affectation. But nobody was paying attention. Wilberforce’s
faux pas
had thrown the audience into confusion. Huxley was speaking now, but he was accustomed in the main to gatherings of twenty or thirty bemused colliers. His voice was too quiet to carry above the commotion, his phrasing too inexact, too mumbled.

‘Mr Darwin abhors speculation as nature abhors a vacuum. All the principles he lays down have been brought to the test of observation and experiment. The path he bids us follow is no airy track, fabricated of cobwebs, but a solid and broad bridge of facts, which will carry us safely over many a chasm in our knowledge. The right reverend bishop and his type, by contrast, look at creation as a savage looks at a ship, as a bewildering thing so far beyond their comprehension that they do not dare attempt a rational explanation. My lord’s address was so full of old and disproved contentions that it lacked any scientific credibility whatsoever - each of which, I assure you, I intend to address individually. Let us begin with the fossil record, which my lord is so keen to utilize to his advantage. Those, like the bishop, who believe in the absolute truth of the Old Testament would have us believe that the earth was created in 4004 BC. Yet the soil is bursting with fossils that have been geologically proved to be many millions of years old! How can this be? Has God written on the rocks one enormous and superfluous lie for all mankind?’

Huxley tailed off. It was no use - he had lost his audience. The bishop’s ill-judged abdication of the most basic good manners had triggered an earthquake, and the aftershocks were still being felt. He had to get the crowd back. He raised his voice.

‘A man has no reason to be ashamed of having an ape for a grandfather!’

A hundred animated discussions whirling round the room skittered to a sudden stop. He had them now.

‘If the question were put to me: would I rather have a miserable ape for a grandfather, or a man highly endowed by nature, and possessed of great means of influence, and yet who employs those facilities and that influence for the mere purpose of introducing ridicule into a grave scientific discussion — then I unhesitatingly affirm my preference for the ape!’

A huge roar of approval, led by the boisterous knot of students at the back, shuddered through the room. Huxley was ahead now, without doubt.

‘Mr Darwin — ’ Huxley began, but his voice was drowned out, not by cries of antagonism but by cries of support.

‘Dar-
win
! Dar-
win
!’

The students were chanting Darwin’s name, as if to summon him up from behind his iron-age fortress of earthen banks. FitzRoy was surrounded by primitive, drunken braying, as ignorant as the yells of any crowd of natives on a Fuegian shore. His frustration boiled over. The rush of arguments in his head became a landslide, an avalanche, each irrefutable fact tumbling incoherently over the others. The inability of natural selection to account for the origin of life itself. The unsatisfactory reduction of the aesthetic, the emotional and the spiritual to mere epiphenomena. The falsity of Darwin’s fossil narrative, which had been constructed on foundations that were geologically poles apart. The failure of natural selection to explain the development of complex organs, such as the eye, and their co-ordination in bodily systems. The presence of advanced creatures in the earliest strata of fossils, and of the most primitive creatures alive today. He felt both excited and agitated, and aggrieved by this sudden inarticulacy. Before he knew what he was doing, he had grabbed a Bible from one of the priests in the audience, and was waving it above his head.

‘I implore you all to believe in God, rather than man!’ he heard a voice shouting, and realized that it was his own. A chorus of jeers drowned him out.

On the dais, Professor Henslow had recognized him, and was trying to accord his interruption some sort of official status.

‘Please! Ladies and gentlemen! Captain FitzRoy wishes to contribute to the debate! Pray silence for Captain FitzRoy!’

Nobody paid any heed.

FitzRoy tried to tell them that he had been there with Darwin, that he had observed the same things, that
The Origin of Species
was not a logical arrangement of the facts that he had witnessed, but his throat was constricting in the most alarming way, and he found that he could not speak. He could only wave the borrowed Bible above his head. Bizarrely, he became aware that he could distinguish each individual voice that made up the surrounding clamour, could follow each and every line separately, as if they were the instruments of an orchestra. He looked at Hooker seated on the platform, handsome and fine-boned, his wire-rimmed pebble spectacles perched elegantly on the bridge of his long nose, an amused smile on his face, and he realized that he could make out the waxy quality of the man’s skin as if it were but an inch away, could see each of its tiny, downy hairs. His sight had become as crystal clear as his other senses, each of them intensified to a strength that only God Himself could possibly know. He could even feel the warmth of the little gas-jets on the walls. Electrical sensations ran up and down his limbs, and played across the surface of his skin. So intense were all these feelings, so wonderful and terrifying, that he thought perhaps he should try to fend some of them off, to find order amid the chaos; but they would not be deflected. They just kept coming, kept overwhelming him. And all the while, this man, this Captain FitzRoy, who was him and yet who seemed to stand apart from him, stood paralysed and pedestrian, holding aloft a borrowed Bible, making incoherent noises.

Somewhere deep within himself, beneath the whirling, unpredictable hurricane of sensations, a tiny spark of self-preservation remained. It told him to get out, to leave now, before something unimaginably awful happened. Captain FitzRoy heard this inner voice, as if from a great distance, and, remarkably, he listened to it. He put his head down and bulldozed his way to the exit, shouts and laughter reverberating in his ears. Driving himself ever onward, he did not stop until he reached the station, where, he noticed, he was still tightly clutching the borrowed Bible.

‘Another slice of cake for the vice-admiral, if you please, Hetty.’

‘Yes, ma’am.’

‘No, really, Fan, I’ve had enough.’

‘Nonsense, Bob. You need feeding up.’

Hetty hovered uncertainly between FitzRoy and his sister, but Lady Dynevor, as she was now entitled to call herself, was insistent. Really, her brother did look painfully thin.

‘Is he not in need of feeding up, ladies?’

Fanny and Katherine FitzRoy, who had accompanied Lady Dynevor on this Sunday visit to their father’s house, delicately chorused their assent. Both had inherited a fair slice of their mother’s poise and beauty.

‘You need feeding up, Pappa!’ gurgled Laura FitzRoy, plain and round, his only daughter by his second marriage, who had recently celebrated her seventh birthday.

‘I do try to keep Mr FitzRoy healthy and well-fed, I really do,’ protested Maria FitzRoy, her fingers nervously intertwined. As always, she found the elegance and self-possession of her husband’s sister somewhat intimidating.

‘Must you all speak about me as if I were not present, ladies?’ said FitzRoy, raising his hands in mock protest.

The FitzRoy family were seated in the first-floor drawing room of the house in Church Road, which was a riot of chenille tablecloths, wax fruit under glass domes, crocheted chair-coverings, brass chimney-guards, potted plants and cheap bentwood furniture. If his wife preferred to compensate for their straitened circumstances with an ostentatious display, so be it. The fault was his, for failing to provide for her properly. He would have preferred a plainer style of decoration, in keeping with the ships’ cabins of his youth, but he had no right to cavil. If his daughters and his sister had any objections, they did not show it.

‘And what is this you are reading?’

Fanny picked up the portentous volume in its stout gilt binding that lay on the teapoy by FitzRoy’s chair:
The Pentateuch and Book ofJoshua Critically Examined, volume 4
by Bishop John Colenso.

‘Shall you ever give your mind a rest, Bob?’

‘Is that not an appropriate volume for the Sabbath?’

‘No, it is not. Your head is filled with wind speeds and barometric pressures from Monday to Saturday. The last thing it needs on a Sunday is weighty theological debate.’

‘I would rather wear out than rust out, Fan. Besides, it is an important book. Colenso is the first bishop of the Anglican Church to come out openly against the flood.’ There was a sad tinge to FitzRoy’s voice.

And — may I guess - you are all too busily laying the blame at your own door?’

‘If I had not selected Mr Darwin as a travelling companion — ’

‘I think you do not give the Almighty enough credit, Bob,’ his sister told him affectionately. ‘These challenges would have arisen without your assistance. You cannot fight every battle. If you had not selected Mr Darwin as a travelling companion, then somebody else would have.’

‘It does seem an uncommonly complex book for the day of rest, dearest,’ fretted his wife, glad to be able to shelter her own anxieties behind the imperturbable vanguard of her sister-in-law’s concern.

‘As usual, I am outnumbered five to one,’ grumbled FitzRoy.

Of course, it was only when he was outnumbered five to one and ordered to stop working that he got any rest. During the week, he often survived on as little as five hours’ sleep a night, so he appreciated the luxury of being allowed to down tools with a clear conscience. Nonetheless, his grown-up daughters usually chose to ask him polite questions about weather forecasting, knowing that it would put him at his ease and assuage his restless guilt.

‘Pappa,’ said Katherine, ‘if you do not issue weather forecasts on the Lord’s day, what if a storm were to strike a fishing fleet upon that very day?’

‘One would hope that all good Christian men would refrain from putting to sea on the Sabbath, of course,’replied FitzRoy, whose features then softened into a smile. ‘And, of course, the storm warnings to shipping are two-day warnings, so the Saturday warning covers the period ’til Monday morning. It would not do in these Godless times to depend upon the piety of our fellow citizens.’

‘But, Pappa, how do you
know
what the weather shall be in two days’ time?’

‘There are advance warning stations in Bermuda, in Halifax in Nova Scotia, in Lisbon, Bayonne and Brest... Wherever our weather comes from, we are connected to the local observing-post by electric telegraph. My job is to determine when the weather shall arrive, and its exact strength and direction, and to compose that information into a forecast. Then I issue it to the newspapers, to the Admiralty, the Horse Guards, Lloyds, the Board of Trade and the Humane Society. Except on a Sunday, of course, when anyone impious enough to put to sea must rely on Saturday’s information!’

‘Forgive me, but it is the doorbell, dear,’ interrupted his wife.

‘Is it?’ As he approached his sixtieth birthday, FitzRoy was going deaf. ‘Who on earth can that be? Are we expecting anyone on the Sabbath?’

Hetty was already on her way out into the hallway to answer the door, followed by the excitedly bobbing figure of Laura. The maid returned a moment later, looking flustered and discomposed. ‘Excuse me, sir, but I think you had best come. There is a gentleman — ’

FitzRoy raised himself from his chair and stepped into the hall, to find a messenger in old-fashioned livery standing nervously inside the open front door. Down the steps, in the street beyond the front garden, stood a brougham bearing the royal coat of arms, its sleek horses steaming.