This Thing Of Darkness (93 page)

Annie went ahead, pirouetting in front of her father. ‘Look at me, Pappy!’

‘A most beautiful dance, my dear.’

‘Huh!’ snorted George, derisively. ‘Look at
me,
Pappy!’ So saying, he dived head first into a gap in the shrubbery, quickly burrowing out of sight.

‘Well hidden, Georgie! Most impressive.’

That is behaviourally analogous to young pigs biding themselves
, thought Darwin, and made a mental note to investigate the subject further. It
surely represents the hereditary remains of our savage state.

The children charged this way and that, running ahead and doubling back, collecting ‘specimens’ for him from his own garden, which he had to pretend to find deeply impressive. Physically, he struggled to keep up. His forty-second birthday was not long past, but it might as well have been his seventieth, for all the strength he could bring to bear on a simple walk. He hobbled painfully through the greenhouses, leaning heavily on his walking-stick with every step.

‘Pappy, Annie’s brought you a present!’ confessed Etty, no longer able to bear the burden of confidentiality.

‘That was supposed to be a secret!’ said Annie, indignantly. ‘You’ve
spoiled
it now.’

‘Well, I have no idea what the present is,’ soothed Darwin, ‘so I don’t think the secret is spoiled at all. Am I allowed to know it?’

‘I brought you out some snuff,’ confessed Annie. ‘From the silver box in the hall.’

Darwin was slightly taken aback.

‘I know you like to sniff it every five minutes. But you can’t have any when you’re out walking, so I brought some with me.’ She carefully unwrapped a little paper package.

‘Every five minutes? Surely not!’ he protested, embarrassed for himself if no one else.

‘I listen out for you when we are in the nursery,’ his daughter confided. ‘I can hear the clink of the lid, so I always know when you are there.’

‘Well, that is extremely kind and considerate of you, my dear,’ he said, taking an extravagant sniff for her benefit.

There was a loud yell, indicating that George had accidentally run over little Frank. Miss Thorley, blunt-faced and carrying an air of worry like an old suitcase, scurried to console the child.

‘
I
’ve brought you a present too,’ said George defiantly, holding up the mangled remains of a small beetle.

Annie held her father’s hand all the way round the sand walk.

 

The gong in the hall summoned Darwin and his wife to the dining room at one o’clock. They took dinner so late now - at six, according to the current fashion - that it was necessary for them to take luncheon in the middle of the day to avoid going hungry. Two liveried manservants served their food, the whole operation masterminded by Parslow, the butler.

‘I see the kids has been gettin’ theyselves dirty again, sir,’ grumbled Parslow. ‘Twenty pairs of little shoes there were to clean yesterday.’

‘I’m sure you’ll manage,’ said Darwin absently. He regarded Parslow as even more hopeless than Covington, who had emigrated to Australia with Harriet the tortoise some years back; but the butler was at least prepared to lose to his master at billiards, on those rare occasions when the billiard-table was not covered in bird and rabbit skulls.

‘Did you have a good morning’s work, Mr Darwin?’ enquired his wife, politely.

She was a good-natured soul to take an interest, he thought; the gold-rimmed spectacles perched on the end of her nose even imparted an academic air, although he knew he would have to keep his remarks general, were she to have any hope of understanding them.

‘Yes, thank you, Mrs Darwin. I have been revising the chapter on semi-hermaphroditic barnacles. They are the most remarkable creatures. There is a tiny male inside the same shell as the female; a clue, perhaps, to the origin of the separate sexes.’

‘I hope, Mr Darwin, that your scientific habit of believing nothing until it is proved shall not influence your mind to distrust those things which
cannot
be proved, and are above our comprehension.’

He smiled. ‘I do believe, my dear, that you are accusing me of casting off God’s gifts!’

‘Of course not, my dear. But I am aware that you have honest and conscientious doubts, which cannot in themselves be a sin. Yet I cannot help thinking that if you were only to stop questioning, you might find yourself able to believe.’

‘It is only through questioning that I know what to believe and what not to believe.’

‘As long as you do not reject the prospect of salvation, for that might cause the most terrible consequences on the Day of Judgement. It is the day when I know I shall see my dear sister Fanny once more. I should be most unhappy if I thought that we should be parted on the same day. I so want us to belong to each other for ever.’

His wife’s earnest expression, full of concern, the long nut-brown hair looped around the perfect oval of her face, her quiet but steadfast devotion, all these put him comfortingly in mind of his three sisters. He attempted to share this feeling of reassurance with her. ‘My dearest, whatever it takes to spend eternity with you, be assured that I shall do it.’

‘I
am
glad. I would not want the Lord to leave behind a soul so full of virtues.’

‘The origin of life may be a mystery to me, my dear, but I know that it is one of the Lord’s mysteries. I seek no more than to interpret His wisdom.’

‘The origin of life is not
entirely
a mystery, Mr Darwin,’ she said flirtatiously, patting the lilac muslin that stretched over her bulging belly. She was pregnant again, and eight months gone.

‘More egg, sir?’ said Parslow, gloomily.

 

After luncheon Darwin retired to the dark womb of his study, to take a cup of tea from his little pewter teapot and resume his correspondence. There were only five daily postal deliveries in Downe - nothing like the twelve in central London - but they brought sufficient letters to keep him occupied for several hours a day. Each letter brought facts and observations from a variety of correspondents, each fact a grain of sand in the mighty edifice he was slowly constructing. Gradually, his theory of natural selection was taking shape.

As was usual, he could only work at his desk for the first twenty minutes or so after luncheon. Then, in keeping with his daily ritual, he hobbled over to the curtained-off privy that occupied one corner of the room, dropped his trousers and sat down. The terrible, odious flatulence that followed every meal invariably began to make itself known around this time, peaking in a cacophony of burps and rumbles after an hour or so. Then, as the stabbing pains built to a crescendo, he would sink to his knees and the vomiting would begin. Clutching the rim of his little hip-bath for support, he would void his stomach just as he had once done on the
Beagle
, the sickly acid taste that flooded his mouth seemingly more revolting by the day. He hoped and pretended that his family could not hear him, but he knew in his heart that they surely could.

When the relentless waves of attacks had finally receded, he made himself presentable and left the study. Annie was waiting for him in the corridor, concerned incomprehension in her big, confused eyes. She moved towards him, put her girlish arms about his waist and held him tight.

Somewhere down in Charles Darwin’s soul, a little voice offered a ludicrous but frightening suggestion: one that, for all the regularity with which he dismissed it, still persisted in returning.
Could this illness,
he wondered,
possibly -just possibly - be
a
punishment for my presumption from the Almighty?

 

Darwin was wakened at five in the morning by Parslow, already dressed in his livery, ready with the towels and the bucket of iced water. At first his brain was befuddled by the strange surroundings: this was not his bedroom. Then he remembered. He was not at Down House. He was at Malvern, with Parslow. He could be allowed no further time to grapple with the question of his whereabouts. Speed was of the essence. He climbed out of bed and stripped naked, his mottled white body shaking in the winter cold. Parslow set to work with what seemed like undue relish, flaying his master with the soaking towels until his flesh resembled a lobster’s. Then, when the servant had completed his assault, he lit the spirit lamp, and scorched his master’s skin until it streamed with perspiration. After Darwin had drunk the tumbler of iced water provided, the compress of soaked and freezing linen was placed in his underwear, his mackintosh was buttoned over the top, and he and Parslow set out for their pre-dawn route march. At least, he felt that he was the one doing the marching: Parslow seemed to trail lugubriously at his side without ever slipping behind, a suspiciously impassive expression masking the man’s feelings. Was that pleasure he saw lurking there for a moment?

Breakfast was the same every day: fresh meat on toast, with beef tea. No vegetables, bacon, butter, sugar, milk or spices of any kind were to soil the purity of his diet. Only meat could ensure the inner cleanliness that Dr Gully demanded of his patients. Gully it was who had invented the water cure, and a host of prestigious clients had testified to its effectiveness. The Carlyles had recommended it to Darwin personally; Tennyson, Dickens and Wilkie Collins were among those who had made the pilgrimage to Malvern.

Dr Gully, who rose considerably later than his patients, came to see Darwin after breakfast, just as his charge was undergoing the agonizing ritual of having his feet immersed in a tub of iced water seasoned with a little mustard powder. The doctor cut a mightily impressive figure, bespectacled, portly and confident, with a lion’s mane of bronzed hair poised rigid but windswept above the upper slopes of his huge brow. He made Darwin, who was a big man, feel rather small.

‘And how are we today?’ enquired Gully, grandly.

‘Improving, I feel,’ ventured Darwin. ‘Certainly the piles and skin eruptions have lessened, although I still have occasional tremblings and feelings of faintness. But my stomach actually seems to have improved since I stopped taking the blue pills.’

‘That is hardly surprising. One can have too much mercurous oxide.’

‘Dr Holland said I should take a purgative every day. He said that my stomach was being affected by toxicity of the blood - a kind of suppressed gout.’

‘Far be it from me to question the expertise of your Dr Holland,’ tutted Gully with a smile of pity, ‘but here at Malvern we follow the most advanced regimens known to medical science. What you are suffering from, my dear fellow, is nervous dyspepsia, caused by badly balanced digestive organs irritating the brain and spinal cord. The effect upon the stomach is purely secondary, the result of a congestion of blood in the ganglionic nerves which surround it. My water cure will provide a counteraction - an external friction to counter the internal friction, thereby balancing the inner and outer pressures upon your body. We shall have you cured in no time.’

In the years since returning to England Darwin had tried arsenic, amyl nitrite, bismuth, electric chains, spinal anaesthesis, morphia pills, quinine and tartar emetic ointment in an effort to cure his persistent ailments. Dr Gully’s water cure was just the latest in a long list but, somehow, he had a feeling in his gut that the swaggering doctor might finally be the man to crack the mystery.

‘Time for the ice-water douche,’ boomed Gully, and even as the words issued from his lips, Parslow was half-way up the waiting stepladder, eagerly clutching the bucket of iced water that he would soon upend over his master’s cranium.

 

Annie had been sitting by the fireside, threading ribbons and sewing clothes for her dolls - her ‘treasures’, as she liked to call them - when she had quite suddenly keeled over. At first her parents had thought her to be play-acting, but there was no mistaking the clammy sheen of sweat upon their daughter’s brow. She had been put to bed, and Dr Holland had been called. He had diagnosed bilious fever, of a typhoid character, and had prescribed an ordinary physic of camphor and ammonia. But Darwin no longer trusted Dr Holland: before the night was out, he and his wife had decided that, whatever the risks of the journey, Annie must be fetched to Malvern, and given over to the care of Dr Gully.

The following morning Darwin had set out at dawn, together with Brodie (the children’s nurse), Miss Thorley the governess, Annie all wrapped in blankets, and little Etty, to keep her sister company. They took the Great Western Coach, for there was no train to Malvern, an exhausting, clattering journey through rolling meadows. Spring budded the fields, which would have made them feel optimistic, had not Annie cried all the way. Upon arrival, they installed themselves in lodgings at Montreal House, and Dr Gully was duly summoned. His diagnosis was simple but reassuring: just like her father, Annie’s blood had become congested. Only a water cure would show improvement.

So began the familiar, alternating routine of icy beatings and showerings, followed by scorchings from the spirit lamp, the exhausted and bewildered child made to stand naked and shivering while an equally bewildered Brodie tipped buckets of near-freezing water over her head. What use was it, Darwin asked himself, trying to explain the workings of science to a servant or a little child? Annie’s diet was to be even more restricted than his own: only brandy and gruel were to pass her lips. Somehow, though, the treatment that had so heartened her father, the treatment he was very nearly absolutely sure had produced an improvement, lost its bracing allure when visited upon the defenceless child he so adored. He winced every time she winced, and shuddered every time she shuddered. What was worse, the treatment seemed to be having no beneficial effect - indeed, Annie seemed to be getting mysteriously weaker. Her temperature continued to rise; she regularly vomited up the brandy-and-gruel mixture; and, when that had been comprehensively regurgitated, she brought up the bright green contents of her gall bladder, in a series of shuddering spasms.