Mr Darwin's Shooter

by Roger McDonald

  Was MacCracken to lie on the chart table until kingdom come, with a hard pillow under his neck and a light cotton wrap thrown over him? It seemed he was—to stare at plaster rosettes in the ceiling, cultivate his aching jaw and think his own thoughts as Covington played with the soap and cleaned his ears and nasal passages. Water slapped the sides of the tub, and before MacCracken registered that Covington spoke, he was aware that the man had been speaking for a time.

  ‘… which is how it seems to me. Are you afraid of me, MacCracken?’

  No.

  ‘Respect me?’

  Yes.

  ‘Like me?’

  Not sure.

  Like? That was a flimsy emotion to have around such a monument.

  ‘I don’t give a damn if you like me, whatever your answer may be. But you have cause to be grateful to me. I fancy to think it is why you accepted my hospitality, for once without cavil,’ Covington chuckled, ‘even if I struck you.’

  The question Covington didn’t ask was whether MacCracken loved him—as he might love a father, say.

  Love you? How could I not?

  MacCracken had a sensation of warmth and affection riding above every other contradictory feeling and taking him over. Yes, he loved the man plain and simple—mere liking was below that peak like a flea on a plain. His own father, an insurance broker, was a sarcastic, disdainful man who undercut his son’s achievements lest they highlight the disappointments in his own. Nothing was ever good enough for that crabby Bostonian, Sandy MacCracken, and on the day of MacCracken’s graduation as a physician his Pa spent a good part of the celebration supper winkling from the assembled gowned professors the information that his son had scraped through his examinations on a wing and a prayer—and they had scant hope for him except as a provincial sawbones. So the hard-won scroll and mortar board that MacCracken had scored in the first place as much to please his old man as for any other reason, became just a fresh target of derision. Nothing was ever good enough for the man and so MacCracken gave up the bother.

  Covington’s bathwater slapped against the sides of the tub and MacCracken drowsed. The opiate suffused him with a kind of wisdom. Down the walls he watched the afternoon light turn pale as clouds raced over. Wind played around the cottage. He made Covington into the one who believed in him and bothered him for his own good, made him the one who passed back understanding of the world like a flaming torch, and placed it into his trembling hands.

  Lying on the chart table possessed by hallucination, MacCracken felt himself swallowed and heaved out again by a whale, and it was not an unpleasant experience. A Covington kind of a whale he believed it should be called, all crusted with molluscs and trailing weed, and splashing the sides of its bath. He heard an insistent tapping sound and believed it was the whale’s jaws clicking appreciatively and reminding him how lucky he was. There came that humming voice again, and low vowels of Spanish. MacCracken seemed to be swimming for an eternity in deep blue water made of billowing muslin curtains. Then he blinked and saw it was a set of trim fingernails making the tapping sound, and looking up into a pair of sleepy eyes, at lips that were half smiling, half downturned in seriousness, he hoped she was real. Those eyes at the edge of creation. That light drifting across them, a net of stars. Was she real? Theodora? MacCracken’s character declared itself and broke from its flimsy framework. He would be strong—just by sighting an aquiline nose, pale freckled cheeks and a floating, encouraging smile. Theodora. He fell in love with her then and forever, and in a surge of resolution decided she would be his wife.

  Covington spoke to her in Spanish, and then she was gone.

  When next MacCracken woke, a wild wind was blowing. It was the southerly buster that rarely touched them, but now moaned around chimney pots and rattled a lonely pane. It slipped under the door and rustled the sand that Covington had spilled on the bare boards. Mrs Covington came in and chased the sand with a broom. ‘What a mournful day we are having,’ she said, and backed out of the room having a little pile follow her.

  ‘What is it to be liked?’ Covington stirred himself in his bathwater.

  I am liked. It has its moments, attempted MacCracken.

  ‘It is a great thing to be liked, next down from love. Or up, depending on the outcome.’

  Was Covington asking about himself? About Theodora? If MacCracken fancied her one way or the other? So soon? He rubbed his sore eyes and pressed the tender upper part of his cheeks, where his sinuses were aching. He got the hint that matchmaking was in the air, yet thought it might be his own construction on the matter, or else it was of such a clumsy sort he could scarcely credit the process.

  ‘That boy was liked, but he drowned. He drowned because he loved our liking.’

  At the thought of Charley Pickastick, MacCracken felt his chest thicken. What an easygoing keen-eyed humorous young chipper he was. Involuntarily a sob made its way towards MacCracken’s throat and he choked it back, fearing the pain to his jaw and regretting throwing his skinny watcher a silver coin the first time he ever did, thus starting the urchin’s passion for diving from the wharf.

  ‘If you’re thinking he drowned happy you’re a fool. It was a life ended, all its days stolen.’

  ‘I’m a fool,’ thought MacCracken sourly. ‘Will I never get it right, even when my thoughts are being read, old bully-boy?’

  ‘What is it like to have love taken from you? Given so freely, and then taken?’ Covington raised himself from the tub, cascading water, and reached for a cloth to dry himself. All his sinews were taut and he twisted himself around as if ready for another dive into the deeps. ‘Do you know that, MacCracken? Can you tell me?’ Covington advanced on the temporary bed with the cloth around him like a Roman toga. ‘These questions gnaw. Why do we begin asking them, and when we do, why is it God hides his face?’

  Don’t stand so close to me dripping grey water, your breath smelling of green waterweed belches, old timer.

  ‘We are better off as dogs. They live on liking, loyalty, and a few odd bones. They have no knowledge of death, but only their eyes grow sleepy, and they dream.’

  Covington eyed the crumpled letter that had fallen to the floor.

  ‘What is this?’

  My dignity, if you please, objected MacCracken, his voice box making only a muffled squeak.

  ‘How does it start?’ grunted Covington, echoing himself and smoothing out the crumpled pages and eyeing the words greedily.

  Don’t know. And if you are alluding to Miss Georgina Ferris and her disappointments of me I would ask you to mind your manners, sir.

  ‘This letter …’

  Yesss?

  ‘It is most satisfactory …’

  You think so?

  ‘Except it shows you in a flimsy light.’

  Indeed.

  ‘You shall improve on yourself, MacCracken.’

  I had the same thought.

  ‘Otherwise there’s no hope for us.’

  Us?

  Darwin’s new book, that was of such importance to the man, and by connection of almost unbearable curiosity to MacCracken, sat on the shelf untouched, wrapped in Evans’s waxy brown paper. Covington knew it was there and MacCracken knew that its presence ruled him. Shedding his toga, Covington’s eyes swivelled into every corner of the room except the bookshelf. He pulled on trousers, shirt and smoking jacket. ‘Where is my damned cravat?’ he bellowed. Mrs Covington scuttled in with a hank of spotted silk steaming from the smoothing iron. Covington allowed her to fuss, to stand on her toes and work at his collar with a stickpin the size of a skewer.

  ‘There was never such a strong handsome chump as this one,’ she opined over her shoulder, making sure her husband couldn’t read her lips, ‘so cheerful and bright when I first knew him. Courageous, with the world at his feet. He needs you, doctor, don’t let him down.’

  Cheerful and bright were words MacCracken had never considered for Covington. They served the way lush and verdant did for a desert.

  When t
he good wife was gone Covington stood rather pompously dandified with his back to the package while he filled his pipe and set up a blaze of tobacco smoke. His eyes looked puffy and tired. The exertions of the morning had done him no good, this man who had gone without sleep more nights than one.

  ‘There is something I cannot do alone,’ Covington declared.

  I already had that hint.

  ‘It concerns the matter of non-creation.’

  MacCracken frowned to convey ignorance.

  ‘If it is a fact,’ Covington continued.

  MacCracken still didn’t understand. A tighter frown gathered between his eyes, which he shot at Covington like a bullet. What in the name of blazes’ brightness are you talking about?

  ‘Non-creation,’ said Covington, ‘is the idea that the Garden of Eden and the Flood of Noah are merely stories men tell each other. That when God said, “Let there be light,” there was no great flash. There never was. Non-creation is the notion that there’s been more time on earth than any mortal is able to calculate, and that those who love the Bible are fools. One such a fool stands before you, MacCracken.’

  With this, Covington gave MacCracken such a hang-dog pathetic look that MacCracken made a gesture of offering his hand, which Covington, to his astonishment, came and took and squeezed.

  You a fool? MacCracken answered somehow. But you move me, my friend, almost to tears. No fool could ever do that.

  ‘There is something you don’t know about me,’ said Covington querulously. ‘I have been shy to show it to you, lest I seem a relic like a mammoth or the sabre-toothed tiger. I am a natural religious man. I have my Pilgrim’s Progress by rote, my Genesis, my Psalms, and my Gospels all in order.’

  Covington mopped his eyes and blew his nose. He found a chair and took up a position at the edge of the table, where his eyes met MacCracken’s at an equal level.

  ‘You see, I once had a great text that comforted me, and I still have the same text, but it brings me only fear.’

  It goes?

  ‘“The things that are seen are temporal, but the things that are not seen are eternal.”’

  Covington let the text hang in the air, then added: ‘I was put to work digging out the unseen, I played my part, and believe me, MacCracken, I was a great worker in the enterprise. Most willing, you might say.’

  With that Covington made an inner decision, jumped from his chair and crossed to the shelf and grabbed the parcel in both hands. Without delay he tore the string, ripped the paper off, allowing it to clatter to the floor, and stood staring at a brown leather cover with a gold-embossed spine and various commonplace features: pages; edges; binding—a book was a book. But he did not open it and, as if it burned his fingers, took a long stride over to the chart table and planted the freshly-minted volume on MacCracken’s chest.

  MacCracken leafed through the pages. On the Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. It took only moments to see what was promised—a veritable Genesis of life. Despite blurred vision, an aching head and confused emotions, MacCracken wanted nothing more than to settle down for a marathon of study.

  A knife, a knife, he mimed through his lips.

  Covington cleared his throat.

  ‘A name may be written in there. Doubtless in small print but writ there all the same, an acknowledgement of my existence.’

  MacCracken made a sympathetic noise. Would that be so terrible?

  ‘See, in my pride I crave it. I am moulded by the devil.’

  Covington fetched a knife for the uncut folios, and after an interval of slicing and page-turning MacCracken reached a Register of Writers Referred to in the Text, a Glossary of Scientific Terms, and an Index without any COV nestling above COWSLIP, where it would naturally belong.

  Your name is not there. He gave his friend a beseeching, apologetic look.

  ‘Then damn me for an imbecile,’ exploded Covington, and strode from the room. But before getting very far he spun about and returned, looking everywhere at once, then reluctantly met MacCracken’s eye.

  ‘Look under birds.’

  Birds?

  ‘Finches.’

  MacCracken brought a fingertip to the point of his tongue, leafed through pages, and looked under FI. He saw FEAR, FEET, FERTILITY, FIR-TREES and FISH, but nothing else.

  No finches.

  ‘No Geospiza magnirostris?’

  I’m impressed, mimed MacCracken. But no.

  ‘Are you certain, man?’

  MacCracken made a grunt, Look for yourself, holding out the book as best he could under the circumstances.

  Covington lurched towards the chart table seeming about to take up the offer. The most desired object in his eyes it seemed was the book, and also the most feared. He turned and left the room. The front door of the cottage banged fearsomely loud as he made his exit.

  Silence. And then just the sound of the dying wind in the chimney space, and the voices of the women fussing at the other end of the house: ‘What’s he aggravatin’ about, for pity? Perish the man and his tempers.’

  MacCracken hefted the book to his chest and continued reading:

  When on board HMS Beagle, as a naturalist, I was much struck with certain facts in the distribution of the inhabitants of South America, and in the geological relations of the present to the past inhabitants of that continent. The facts seemed to me to throw some light on the origin of species—that mystery of mysteries, as it has been called by one of our greatest philosophers. On my return home, it occurred to me, in 1837, that something might perhaps be made out on this question by patiently accumulating and reflecting on all sorts of facts which could possibly have any bearing on it …

  MacCracken read on. His concentration was absolute. His eyes swam under the spell of discovery and excited imagination. The letters on the page seemed edged by rainbow lines. And here was a word of thanks: I much regret that want of space prevents my having the satisfaction of acknowledging the generous assistance which I have received … So there it was. Didn’t such thanks, naming no names, embrace Covington chiselling away on his rocks at the edge of the ocean, collecting trinkets and putting them in tin-lined boxes for his benefactor? But no, on further reading, it was naturalists Darwin meant—a rarer breed than carthorses. Still, MacCracken did not have to read far to confirm that what he held in his hands was a distillation into sensible theory of the entire majesty of the world. Even reduced to theory the majesty remained inherent, the mystery still swirled. It appealed to MacCracken’s temperament and excited him greatly.

  His finger went to the tip of his tongue. Wetted, it returned to the corner of a page. Gripped the paper. Raised the page to a small curve. Rustle of the page turning, scraping over. A feeling of sinking through time as the next raft of words rose up. He felt part of time with a deep contentment and understanding—all times past and future as well as this very particular moment of his lying in this room, topped and tailed, waited upon, pampered, drugged and given the poetry of existence in such a form. It roused his admiration as an essayist to stand before a pile of such rich gleanings, and see them prodigiously exploited.

  We see beautiful co-adaptations everywhere and in every part of the organic world … between the woodpecker and mistletoe … in the humblest parasite which clings to the hairs of a quadruped or feathers of a bird … in the structure of the beetle which dives through the water … in the plumed seed which is wafted by the gentlest breeze …

  ‘And between the stumbling old carthorse and a light-headed fool as they circle each other closer,’ thought MacCracken—beginning a pattern of replies and counter-explications that were to be his companions for a good time now, as he made Darwin’s book into his own. Artificial selection; natural selection; the two phrases rocked back and forth in a symmetry of understanding.

  The artificiality and contrivance of MacCracken’s circumstances were not lost on him. Calculation and counter-calculation were involved in the who
le long day and ran back through the two years of his friendship with Covington. They always had a plan for each other and reached towards it in their dealings. That was the artificial side. The natural element was in the instinct that kept them glued. Which led where?

  Further and more rapid dimming of light … Sweet odour of oil … Lamplighting … Fuss … MacCracken was a willing partner in it whatever it was … The clatter of Mrs Covington and Nurse Parkington getting a bed ready in the next room … Conflicting moods cutting across: the thrill of the unknown in Theodora; the sour reality in his use of misunderstood Georgina … The dimpled pudding with raisins for eyes that was Mrs Covington:

  ‘Up you get. Lean on my arm …’

  Nurse Parkington on the other side, leaking liniment through her pores as if she drank the stuff … The limping of MacCracken through into the small room matching his own side room in ‘Villa Rosa’ … The settling of him into his new bed, a made-up couch … His profuse thanks as he was fitted as comfortable as two stout, strong and wonderfully good housekeeping women could devise … His sheets a froth of Egyptian cotton—easy as a cloud to lie on … His twisted ankle kept free of the pressure of bedclothes by a wicker basket … A lamp moved closer to him … Objections made:

  ‘Do be sensible. You must not read now, doctor, you must rest.’

  Just for a while.

  ‘He’ll want to know,’ nodded Mrs Covington.

  ‘Know what?’ shafted the Nurse.

  ‘A distressing nonsense,’ said Mrs Covington, twisting her hands in each other. ‘He relies on the doctor, see …’

  ‘Oh. Until he comes back, then,’ relented Nurse, adjusting the lamp.

  ‘If he comes back at all, Nurse Parkington,’ said Mrs Covington, going to the window and peering out into the dusk.

  ‘You mustn’t fret.’

  ‘How can I not?’

  More mutterings made about the thoughtlessness, the outrageousness of Covington. More defence of him by his long-suffering wife … Laudanum drops administered … A bedpan proffered. Then MacCracken left alone again and the book taken up again. The mutual relation of beings … The wide range of some beings, the narrow range of others … Domestication. Artificial selection … Variation under domestication …