The Great Unknown

by Peg Kingman

  “I beg your pardon, my lady, it is not; certainly not as compared to Greek or Latin,” said Constantia. “It is rich in nuance; it is subtle; it is vigorous; it is expressive—but it is also refreshingly simple and logical in its grammar, and even its vocabulary has a surprisingly familiar feel to speakers of English. Yet Mr Macaulay—who fancies himself quite the linguist—oh yes, ma’am! has he not boasted of beguiling his leisure re-reading the Greeks: Euripides and Aeschylus, Hesiod and Pindar? and of learning German, on the voyage home? Has he not declared that he could learn any language in a matter of four months, if only he set his mind to it? But he did not set his mind to learning Sanskrit; he could not be troubled.”

  “Jenny, dear,” said Lady Janet (to Lizzy), “you are spoiling your tucker.”

  “Can you read Sanskrit, Mrs MacAdam?” asked Nina.

  “Yes, well enough,” said Constantia. “And write it, too. But if Mr Macaulay would not learn Sanskrit,” she continued, “did he make any attempt to read the classical works of Indian literature—in translation? Did he make himself acquainted, even in translation, with the Vedas? The Upanishads? Or, if those were too laborious, perhaps he read Mahabharata? Ramayana?—for these, you know, ma’am, are the great epics of India, her Iliad and her Odyssey. Did he read the Charyapada, or the works of Kalidasa, or any of the Sutras? Well, it may be as he claimed, that he glanced over a page or two, here and there, when he was not too much engrossed by Homer and Horace and Herodotus. But it is clear from his comments that he cannot have done so with any energy or attention. No, my lady; he only inquired of his sister’s fiancé—a man who had arrived in India some months before himself, and whom he took therefore for an expert—a man who was full of schemes for baptising all the Hindus and Mohammedans of India—whether any of it was worth reading; and upon being assured, by this pious and bigoted future brother-in-law, that it was not—that it was all a pack of unscientific lies and blasphemous superstitions—he concluded that he need not trouble to acquaint himself with any of it.”

  Mrs Chambers returned, in time to hear Mrs MacAdam’s indignation in full spate: “I daresay that the only natives he ever spoke to,” she was saying hotly, “were his servants! his khansaman, his syce, his bearers and sweepers. The only natives he encountered were those to whom he gave commands. Perhaps he never met a cultivated Hindu—but if he did, I daresay he had not sense enough to know it. Quite possibly he ordered a learned scholar and poet to—to prepare his hookah! to fetch his slippers!”

  “I doubt that Mr Macaulay ever degraded himself so far as to have anything to do with a hookah,” said Lady Janet. “I have met him in company on more than one occasion, and he is a thorough gentleman. Furthermore, I will venture to remind you that a decent respect is due the office, even from those who may presume to disapprove the man. He is, after all, our Member.”

  “Whose Member is he, ma’am? Who elected him?”

  “Why, the electors of Edinburgh, of course!”

  “And who are these electors? Who are these elect and justified few, anointed to elect the fewer still? The fewer still who, once set above us, then presume to make laws, meant to be binding upon us all—all!—under penalty of fine or punishment?”

  “Why, you sound nearly as bad as those Chartists!” said Lady Janet.

  “I hope so, ma’am,” said Constantia. “I am proud to declare myself a Chartist.”

  “I cannot believe it of you. I suppose you mean to provoke me.”

  “Not at all. I became a Chartist long before I ever had the honour of meeting your ladyship; and without the slightest intention of provoking you.”

  “Ah! And I had made such efforts to think charitably of you! But no reasonable person can possibly wish that traitors and criminals shall have the direction of our civic affairs! Are we to sink into anarchy, as in France? What can ensue but bloodshed and brutality, riots and strikes?”

  “Chartists are neither traitors nor criminals,” said Constantia. “As for the strikes, it must be clear to everyone that they worked quite against the operative classes. The stoppages instead favoured the mill owners, who rejoiced in the excuse to halt operations—to idle their mills while there was no market for their produce—and then, upon resuming, to reduce pay yet again—”

  “That is a perfect example, then,” interrupted Lady Janet. “Are ignorant labourers, unable to discern even that their actions are not in their own interests—are these people fit to fashion the laws of the land?”

  “You quite mistake my point, my lady; do you not see that the strikes—and the riots too—were instigated by spies and infiltrators, in the hire of the mill owners for their own pecuniary interests; or else of the government, to bring disgrace upon the movement?”

  “Spies! What nonsense! Name me one.”

  “I shall name you six: Hartley. Harrison. Goulding. Frowen. Griffin. Cartledge. That is only six among untold scores; only six whose infamous names happen to lie at the tip of my tongue.”

  “Stuff!” scoffed Lady Janet.

  “And the mails opened—” said Constantia.

  “Stuff!” said Lady Janet again.

  “Indeed they are! It is a fact that Patterson and Cooke were convicted at Manchester upon the evidence of intercepted letters—and letters not from them, but to them.”

  “Blether, I say! Our mails are inviolate, and the best in the world.”

  Here Mrs Chambers entered the fray, saying, “I fear there is very good reason to suspect, Lady Janet, that the mails are watched, and sometimes intercepted.”

  “Anyone who is no criminal has nothing to hide,” said Lady Janet.

  “I am no criminal,” said Mrs Chambers, “but I may nevertheless have secrets which I had rather not share with—everyone. With the world at large.”

  “Mamma, may we be excused, please, all of us?” put in Mary hastily; and permission granted, she and her sisters and dog all escaped to the garden.

  More calmly, Constantia said, “Even the operative classes are required to pay taxes. Even the operative classes are required to turn out for militia duty. Why, then, may they have no voice in shaping the laws of the land? Why, then, are their opinions branded as ‘sedition’—and their persons liable to arrest, imprisonment, and transportation—merely for voicing those opinions?”

  “Well; there was a Chartist candidate, as I recall, who made a great noise and a fuss, about standing against Mr Macaulay in the last election,” said Lady Janet. “A stone-mason, or a miner, I believe; some such fellow—”

  “I suppose you mean Mr Stevenson. A quarrymaster,” said Constantia.

  “Quite possibly that was the man’s name,” said Lady Janet. “But if memory serves, he failed even to make an appearance at the hustings. No doubt he was too frightened to ascend the platform, when the time came.”

  “Not at all, my lady. The truth is that he was prevented from going to the hustings because a false writ for debt had been sworn out against him—”

  “Oh, a debtor! A bankrupt! I might have known. Well, if the Chartists can do no better than that—”

  “A false writ, I said; a perjured writ, sworn out expressly to prevent his appearance at the hustings! A low, cunning stratagem, a conspiracy among the supporters of Mr Macaulay—for they were fearful of the humiliation that should have attached to their candidate, when it became clear in the show of hands there, that he was by no means the choice of the majority!”

  “We cannot be ruled by mobs, Mrs MacAdam; nor by bullying majorities. I do think it is a pity that we in Scotland have no property qualification for Members, as they have in England. We would be spared these agitations, these undignified displays—these circuses; and crowds of mountebanks and vagrants at the hustings. There is a great deal too much lawlessness, upon these unfortunate occasions—”

  “Ah; there is a point on which your ladyship and I can agree. If poverty is deemed a crime, there is a great deal too much of that crime about!”

  “Of course that is not at all what I mean.
And you ought to know that these people are not nearly so poor as they pretend to be, or they would not be so very ready to down tools and go out, upon any pretext, or none at all. It is only an excuse to become drunk and riotous. Or how do they afford such quantities of intoxicating liquors, do you suppose?”

  “I assure you, ma’am, they are desperately poor—and so ill-paid for their labour that, whether in work or out of it, they face starvation just the same. It is desperation that drives men to desperate measures.”

  “Desperately ignorant, to be sure. Surely you cannot deny that the gross ignorance of the entire class disqualifies them to function as electors!”

  “I do deny it, though, my lady. But even if it were so—which I deny—why then does the present government strive so mightily to keep the laboring classes in deepest ignorance?”

  “How absurd. There is not a shred of truth in so ridiculous an assertion.”

  “I beg your pardon; it is quite true. Or why is it that only poor men’s newspapers are taxed? Only those newspapers costing less than sixpence are subject to the Stamp Act, you know—while rich men’s newspapers are exempt! Do you know that it is illegal to lend a newspaper? And as it is illegal for the workers to combine, how, then, can the Corn Laws—which protect the combined interests of the great landowners, at the expense of everyone else who must subsist upon a mouthful of bread—how can the Corn Laws have become the law of the land? And how can there be justice in a Master and Servant Act which provides that a worker’s transgression makes him subject to criminal arrest—while employers, under the same Act, are liable only for civil penalties?”

  “Why, what in the world is the use of lodging a civil action against a labourer—who hasn’t got a shilling to pay the fine with?”

  “Precisely, Lady Janet, just so! And having robbed their workers, penny by penny, of every shilling due them in justice for their labour, the masters now resolve to rob them of the sole possession still remaining to them: their very bodily liberty! Having deprived them already of their ancient right—their right, ma’am!—to participate in electing the lawmakers whose laws will be binding upon us all—having subverted and degraded that lawmaking body to its present shameless condition, where it legislates solely in its own class interest, and against all others—”

  “This is a very dangerous style of talking, Mrs MacAdam, and I advise you, for your own good—”

  “Excuse me, Mrs Chambers, and my lady,” interrupted Hopey, poking her head in, “but you are wanted in the nursery, Mrs MacAdam, hinney. Most urgently wanted, I am afraid! Quite in a swither! Upstairs, I mean. As for bread and corn, who can say?—but milk is the thing for bairns, now; milk—”

  “—of human kindness,” said Mrs Chambers, quietly, as Constantia went out.

  Then, another point occurring to Lady Janet, she went out after her, and called up the stairs: “We are obliged, each and all of us, to submit to laws not of our own making, Mrs MacAdam; and those are the laws of nature: God’s laws!”

  When Lady Janet returned to the drawing room, she found Mrs Chambers sitting quietly, apparently absorbed in her book of household accounts. Lady Janet took a few turns up and down the room; and presently, having composed herself and marshalled her resolve, she said, “Dear Mrs Chambers, nothing but a deep sense of obligation and friendship toward you and Mr Chambers could induce me—nay, compel me!—to presume to say something, on a subject which is properly no concern of mine; but I cannot feel easy that the sweet children should be exposed—should live on so intimate a footing with such a person as this sly ‘Mrs MacAdam’ reveals herself to be. Her views are dangerously republican, and she seems a great deal too familiar with the doings of those Chartists.”

  “I do agree, Lady Janet, that the Chartists have been most unlucky in their leaders,” said Mrs Chambers, setting aside her household book. “Certain of them do their cause more harm than good. Nor can I approve their more extreme tactics and rhetoric. But I think it is a pity they have not found better men to lead them, for—as regards their principles, at least—I am a bit of a Chartist myself, you know! Aye, but I am, my lady; for the Charter itself is only plain justice and good sense. I am quite in earnest, I assure you. Those Six Points of theirs must become the law of the land, sooner or later; and Britain will be all the better for it, whenever it shall come to pass.”

  “How can you . . .? Every man, to have a vote? Every pauper, every vagrant? Every drunken brute? Every atheist? What will become of us all?”

  “Not just every man, Lady Janet; but every woman, too.”

  “Oh! And every dog, and cart-horse, I suppose!”

  “I should like to cast a vote. And if I am to cast a vote, Lady Janet, I daresay that you should like to have a vote as well—with which to nullify mine, if nothing else. And if we are to eliminate the property test for voters, it must also be eliminated for Members—not only in Scotland, but throughout the kingdom. And Members ought to be paid a moderate salary for their work, so that any worthy men—even those not born to independent fortunes—may take their seats in Parliament without dooming their families to starvation; any Member who feels himself demeaned by his salary may turn it back to the Exchequer, if he likes. And as I ought not to be subjected to intimidation or retaliation from others for casting my vote according to my own conscience, the ballot ought to be secret. There is no shame in that; it ought to be as private as the post, at least—not that our mails are so very private, I fear. Of course the constituencies ought to be as nearly as possible of equal size—in numbers of electors, I mean, so that every vote carries approximately equal weight. And Parliament must know that its deeds and acts are under the close superintendence of the electors, who may promptly recall them if they are displeased; hence Parliaments ought to be brief—perhaps not so brief as one year, as some argue—but certainly no longer than three years. There! Those are the Six Points, Lady Janet; and I do subscribe to them, shocking though it may seem.”

  Upstairs, Constantia sat by her open window nursing both babies at once, and a grudge against Lady Janet; but eventually she fell into contemplation.

  Who has made the laws which govern men and women? Who must obey those laws? Is this state of affairs just?

  Who has made the laws which govern the universe? Who must obey those laws? Is this state of affairs just?

  Why would anyone suppose that justice has anything at all to do with anything? Justice!

  The human faculties lead unavoidably to occasional error.

  Soon after this, Constantia contradicted Lady Janet again, quite inadvertently. “How I wish I could fly!” Tuckie had said, to her sisters.

  Lady Janet, from her seat at her penwork cabinet across the drawing room, lifted up her voice to admonish her, saying, “If God in his infinite wisdom and goodness had meant us, his creatures, to fly, he would have endowed us with wings.”

  “But we can fly,” Constantia declared impulsively. “By our ingenuity, we do fly, despite our sad lack of wings—such an unaccountable oversight, that! Oh yes, but we do, Lady Janet, using hot air balloons. I saw such an ascent myself, when I was a child, in India.”

  (For suddenly—this instant—she had remembered herself, a little girl on a palace terrace, in dazzling early morning sunshine; and remembered the little wicker boat suspended under an immense balloon sweeping upward, plummeting upward! falling upward! The handsome Englishman in it—such a splendid moustache—had bowed in passing to Constantia’s supremely beautiful mother, whose hand Constantia gripped.)

  “That is not flying,” said Lady Janet. “Flying is what birds do, upon their own God-given wings.”

  “And angels,” said Jenny.

  “Bats, too,” added Lizzy, “though they are so prodigious ugly. It does not seem right, does it, that they can fly?”

  “But if you had to choose between having wings, and having arms with hands at the ends, which would you choose?” said Mary.

  “Oh! Wings instead of arms! Nay, I could not possibly manage withou
t arms, and hands.”

  “You would have to peck at your food with your face, like a bird.”

  “Willie does. Look at him, with grease on his nose: ‘A scanty and most defective development of life.’”

  “Jenny, that is very rude,” said Lady Janet.

  “But Mamma says it; I have heard her.”

  “She does not say it of her children.”

  “I should like to have wings and arms.”

  “And legs, too?”

  “Certainly legs!”

  “You would have six limbs, then; you would be an insect!”

  “No; but plenty of insects have six legs—and a pair of wings.”

  “Angels have arms and wings. And legs. Haven’t they, Lady Janet?”

  Lady Janet took this opportunity to declare that there was no scriptural warrant for attributing wings to angels. The children, unlike Mrs MacAdam, were polite enough not to contradict Lady Janet to her face, but later, when she had gone out, they agreed that she was quite mistaken. It is familiar knowledge that angels have wings.

  That night, in quiet darkness with Livia at her breast, Constantia examined this newly-emerged memory. As though with sable brushes and burin and sandpaper, as though freeing a new-found fossil from its stony matrix, she brought it forth.

  Dil Kusha—Heart’s Desire.

  “You are my Dil Kusha,” Constantia’s mother had whispered to her, on the verandah of the Dil Kusha palace in Lucknow, amidst a great crush of people, both Indians and Englishmen. “My fair flower! my Dil Kusha.”

  And the handsome English balloonist coolly doffed his hat to Constantia’s mother and bowed, as he was borne swiftly upward. Her mother released Constantia’s hand for a moment; then sought it again and squeezed—as man, boat, and enormous sausage-shaped balloon were borne aloft. Up, up they swept, past the Nawab and his nobles and notables, all assembled upon the big verandah of the Dil Kusha palace. How strange, how like a vision in a dream, to see the little wooden boat sailing—in midair! The enormously swollen balloon from which it was suspended seemed its big-bellied sail. For a moment Constantia felt herself underwater, looking upward at the keeled boat sailing through the brilliant blue above. The marvelous machine shrank rapidly, diminishing each minute against the blazing March sky until it appeared no larger than a water-jug; then a lofty air current seized it, and bore it off to eastward. A regiment of horse galloped out of the Dil Kusha park, to follow it. Constantia was six and a half years old.