by Grant Allen
And for the next three days nobody talked of anything at the tea-tables of Dimthorpe, except the cheek of the cobbler, and the way Dr. Hawkins had banged the breath out of his body. He hadn’t a leg to stand upon, the mild-eyed curate opined — not a leg to stand upon; he was simply extinguished.
But Job Whittingham went away, scratching what hair remained on his shock-headed poll, and feeling vaguely conscious that in spite of the doctor’s long words — his crushing allusions to the hippocampus major and the flexor pollicis longus — Darwin and Huxley were right after all, and Richard Hawkins was but a shallow middle-class sciolist. It was his ample shirt-front that had carried the day. “A working-man ain’t got no chance,” Job remarked to himself, with philosophic resignation, “agin the respectability and the social presteedge of the black-coated classes. That’s just where it is, don’t you see? He ain’t got no chance agin ’em.”
It was on Saturday of that week that Richard Hawkins, going his rounds on foot in the poor part of the town, saw one of Job Whittingham’s eight starveling youngsters sitting on the doorstep of the cobbler’s house; for though the radical philosopher was in theory a stalwart Malthusian, in practice his quiver was very full of them. The boy was sucking a bone, which immediately attracted the doctor’s trained attention. It wasn’t a fresh bone, and it had no trace of meat on it. But the thing that made Richard Hawkins give a start of surprise at sight of it was the fact that — not to mince matters too fine — the bone was human. His anatomical eye told him that in a moment. The second or middle joint of a human forefinger!
He drew back, astonished. Not that there was here any faint flavour of romantic cannibalism. The bone, though human, was old and long buried. His interest in it was antiquarian and scientific, not living and medical. No suspicion of murder about this strange relic; No case of infanticide and back-garden interment. With facts like those, Richard Hawkins was only too familiar. He knew the ways of the poor and the evils of illegitimacy. But this bone was dry, very antique, thoroughly mineralized. He took it from the boy sharply, and looked hard at it awhile with the naked eye. Ha! what was this? Why, traces of crag on the sides and knuckle! Now, crag is the loose red Pliocene deposit of the hill at Dimthorpe; and as every geologist or antiquary knows, it antedates by many, many thousands of years the supposed first appearance of man on our planet. If the bone really came from a layer of the crag — Richard Hawkins drew back in unspeakable horror. He didn’t even dare to formulate to himself his instinctive conclusions.
If the bone really came from the crag, then the age of man on the earth must be pushed back a couple of million years at least, to the Pliocene time — and Heaven only knows what might be the remote consequences to the cause of orthodoxy.
“Where did you get this finger, boy?” he asked the lad sharply.
And little Ted, looking up, made answer with a jerk of his thumb over his right side, “Down yon: by Wood’s crag-pit.”
“Dug it out?” the doctor asked in a very short voice.
And the boy nodded assent. “Dug it out there,” he answered.
The doctor put the bone in his pocket hurriedly, gave the boy a ha’penny — for he was a saving man — and walked away to the next patient’s house, much perturbed and preoccupied. He could hardly attend to the symptoms in the case — a mere ordinary development of acute brain-fever, in the stage of collapse — so interested and excited was he by that momentous question. What did it matter, in fact, whether one more poor old woman lived or died, when the whole fabric of theology, the whole future hopes of the human race, trembled tottering in the balance?
As soon as he decently could, he got away from his patients, home by himself, and, locking the door of the consulting-room, as often happened when people had to be examined, he took out his little platyscopic lens, and gazed long and anxiously at that tell-tale forefinger. Fragments of crag were embedded on it all round. It was to some extent mineralized by removal of bony particles and their replacement through filtration of iron compounds. Richard Hawkins peered at it in blank dismay. If this were indeed a bone of Pliocene date — then the whole fabric of his philosophy must topple over, helter-skelter, in one awful collapse, from base to copingstone.
But no! Impossible! Incredible! The thing couldn’t be. By sure and certain warranty of Holy Scripture, he knew it wasn’t so; he knew it; he knew it. Man was fashioned direct, in the shape that we see him, by the finger of the Creator (whatever that may mean), without any Missing Link or other intermediate developmental form between himself and the soulless anthropoids. The bone must have been buried by accident in the crag, or deliberately interred there in ancient British times, and must have got mineralized in a comparatively short period by the action of water. To-morrow morning he would go and examine the crag-pit. Till then, he’d put the bone back safe in his waistcoat pocket.
But he felt uneasy about it, all the same, for the rest of the day; that uncanny fragment! how annoying of it to come in with its disturbing implications, to upset the snug edifice of his cut-and-dried system! Bones shouldn’t be allowed to get craggy like that! They should be kept in their place; they should be retained on the surface; they should be confined entirely to their proper strata. As the vicar with Job Whittingham, so the doctor with that digital.
That evening the vicar called round for an amiable chat with Dr. Hawkins in his private study. The twins never came there, and he could see his friend quietly. They had a cigar together, and discussed the last lecture. The doctor was more positive that night than ever. He gazed at the illustrative casts of mammalian skulls in the cabinet opposite — man’s, the gorilla’s, the chimpanzee’s, the gibbon’s — and remarked complacently that for his part he pinned his faith on Specific Distinctions. If ever the affiliation of Man on the Anthropoid Apes became a Proved Fact, then he didn’t see how they could any longer resist the plain conclusion: on the special creation of man rested the Immortal Soul; and with the Immortal Soul went the whole complex system of orthodox theology.
The vicar, on the other hand, holding his coffee half sipped, was far more cautious and far less dogmatic. It didn’t do, the vicar thought, for Christian men to base their faith too much upon any particular scientific or mere human opinion. Facts might be too strong for them in the end, any day, and they might have to reconsider their ideas and eat their own words, if they spoke too positively. “Remember how we stuck at first to the six literal days of creation,” the vicar said softly, twirling two fat thumbs upon his ample knee. “And we had to give them up after all. We had to go back upon it. Geology taught us they were only six epochs. For my part, Hawkins, if I were you, I wouldn’t lay so much stress upon any one mode of interpreting scripture — especially Genesis. Genesis is a vary hard nut to crack. While insisting strongly on the general close correspondence between the book of God and the book of nature, I wouldn’t tie myself down to any special theory as to the mode of the coincidence between them — wouldn’t nail a particular little flag to my mast, and pledge myself before the world to stand or fall by it.” For the parson was one of those prudent men who believe in the saving grace of hedging. The vicarage of Bray would exactly have suited him. He took his stand, of course, on the Impregnable Rock of Holy Scripture: but he insisted that no one individual fragment of it had any necessary connection with the stability of the entire structure.
Richard Hawkins, however, with his scientific ideas, and his logical intellect, would hear of no such paltering with eternal and immutable Truth. More orthodox than the parson, he hated these latitudinarian views. “No, no,” he said with warmth, fingering the bone in his pocket uneasily as he spoke: “I can’t admit that. I won’t play fast and loose with the plain words of the Book. If God made man in His own image, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life on the Sixth Day of Creation, then I can understand all the rest: the Immortal Soul; Free Will; the Plan of Salvation; the difference that marks us off from the lower animals; the existence within us of a divinely-sent conscience. But if e
ver it can be shown conclusively, shown beyond the shadow of a doubt, we’re descended from an ape, then I give up all. We can be nothing more than the beasts that perish. For at what point in the series of evolving monkeys can the Immortal Soul first come in? How can we ever say where the ape leaves off, and the man begins? Once admit the existence of a continuous chain of life, and you abandon the citadel. Either man is created in the image of God, or else he is a direct descendant of the monkey, the lizard, the ascidian, the jelly-fish. What is true of them is true also of him. The soul, the conscience, eternal life, depend entirely on direct creation.”
The vicar knocked off his ash pensively, and perused his boots. Logically, he had nothing to answer to the doctor’s argument; but practically, he knew in his own soul that if evolutionism were to prove man’s animal origin beyond the shadow of a doubt to-morrow morning, he’d stick to the vicarage of Dimthorpe still, and debate as hotly as ever at the diocesan synod over apostolic succession and the eastward position. So he held his peace, like a wise man, and stared hard at the fireplace.
All that night long, Richard Hawkins hardly slept a wink. The bone was indeed a bone of contention to him. Early in the morning, he rose up betimes, and betook himself in the grey dawn to the crag-pit by the river. Mrs. Hawkins, the mother of many twins, was little surprised at his eccentric movements. A doctor’s wife is accustomed to night alarms. She took it for granted he was called up to attend some patient.
Sunday morning though it was — no fit day for fossilizing — Richard Hawkins began to peer about in the pit, to see if he could find any trace of the owner of the forefinger. He wasn’t long in discovering it. It was easy enough to find. His heart stood still within him as he gazed at the spot. A hand half protruded from the face of the cutting, where the workmen had left it exposed without ever discovering it. Or perhaps Ted Whittingham had grubbed it out after they went away from their work for the evening. The doctor’s practised eye took in the facts at once. A significant glance at the lie of the strata told him this was indeed no ancient British interment. All the beds were undisturbed. The skeleton, if there was one, lay there in situ.
A few minutes’ work succeeded in convincing him there was a skeleton. Egging away with his knife at the soft stone, he gradually unearthed a palm and fore-arm. He started afresh at the sight. Human, no doubt; yes, distinctly human! But how curiously proportioned, too! How unusually shaped! How strangely ape-like!
As he looked, a vague horror came over him suddenly. Why, this was an accursed thing, a work of the devil! He saw what it all meant already, and shrank from it with a deadly shrinking, an unspeakable repugnance. His first impulse, indeed, was to cover it all up, and rush away from the spot, and let the unclean thing remain buried for ever. But what use would that be? In a day or two’s time, the workmen would reach it as they dug, and all England would ring with the hateful discovery. Second thoughts told him better. This was the Lord’s doing. How lucky it was Sunday! Thank Heaven, in England, we remember the sabbath day to keep it holy still! The workmen wouldn’t come to dig it out to-day. And how lucky it was a Christian who had first discovered it! In an agony of haste, he wrenched the fore-arm and wrist from the crag with a jerk, and wrapped them up with care in his white silk pocket-handkerchief. Then he turned and fled from that unhallowed pit. All the devils in hell hooted after him in derision.
That morning, Richard Hawkins didn’t go to church. He was in no humour for prayer. He locked himself up in his own study, and sat examining those hateful bones with minute anatomical care. The more he looked at them, the less he liked them. Gratiolet’s plates lay open by his side. He compared the things with the normal skeleton in his cabinet — much to their disadvantage. Human; yes, human; undoubtedly human; but oh, how ape-like in effect, how intermediate in character! They were ghastly in their reminiscence of the great anthropoids. No Hottentot or Bushman was one twentieth so simian.
How he got through the day, he hardly knew. Dinner time came, and he ate his food mechanically. But horrible thoughts surged and seethed in his soul. The universe was tottering to its centre that day. The cosmos stood tremulous on the brink of an abyss. God himself was being weighed in the balance, and perhaps found wanting The existence of order, creation, a deity, depended upon the undisclosed remainder of that hateful skeleton. If the rest was as monkey-like as the fragment he had unearthed, then the Bible was a lie; the Creator was a dream; religion was a figment; the universe rolled black down the ages to hell: there never was, there never had been, a God its ruler.
So Richard Hawkins thought. Perhaps he thought right. Perhaps he thought wrong. But at any rate, he thought so. Too logical to palter with petty reconciliations, he stood by his guns manfully in this last extremity. He had erected for himself early in life a well-rounded philosophy, a system of things; and on that system he had based himself through all the years of his manhood. On the Impregnable Rock of Holy Scripture he had taken his stand. Now a moral earthquake shook and assailed that Rock. It trembled before his very eyes. If it staggered and fell, the solid ground would have failed beneath him. He had no place left in which to lay his head. Hell yawned open beside him. He must plunge into it and be satisfied.
Yet, born man of science that he was for all that, he could never be untrue to the Facts, could never ignore Evidence. Though that skeleton were to overthrow his God and his philosophy at once, he must unearth it still: he must find out the Truth: let it cost what it might, he must stand even with Realities. At nine o’clock he rose, and took out his lantern. His wife looked astonished. “Where are you going, Richard?” she asked. And for the first time in his life, that perturbed and troubled soul told her guiltily a deliberate lie. “A midwifery case,” he answered, shuffling. “Poor woman out Ness way. I mayn’t be back till morning.”
And he went out by himself towards the crag-pit by the river.
It rained hard that night, but for hours he stood there in the cold and wet, digging away with all his might, digging feverishly, madly. At all hazards, he must dig out that accursed thing. Never should it affront an innocent world with its godless face. Never should it laugh its mute laugh at purity and goodness. No workman should unearth it, and exhibit it in a glass case at the British Museum. If it was all that he feared, no human eye but his own should ever behold the atheistical grin on its mocking skull. He alone should pass through that fiery furnace. He alone should know by positive proof his Bible a lie and his God a delusion.
Two million years ago, some black and hairy creature, shambling along half erect on crouching knees through the woodland, had been suddenly carried away by a wild rush of water from a bursting tree-dam, and, after one hideous yell of rage and despair, had been drowned and buried in sand on the spot that is now the Hill at Dimthorpe. Alone among his kind, his skeleton was thus preserved, by the pure accident of geology, for our age to look upon. Richard Hawkins had discovered the one surviving specimen of the ancestor of man, as he roamed the dense woods of a Pliocene Britain.
Bit by bit he uncovered the thing — head, foot, trunk, shoulders. In the dark and under the rain, by the dim light of his lantern, he could hardly form any just anatomical opinion upon its form and affinities. But he saw quite enough even so to know his worst fears were hideously confirmed. With the energy of despair — the energy of a man who works body and soul against fearful odds to save the community from some unknown cataclysm, Richard Hawkins dug on, all heedless of rain and cold and darkness. His one terror was now lest any man should come up before dawn and interrupt him. That he should have learned that ghastly secret of the rocks was bad enough in all conscience: but that all the world should know it, and sink into the hopeless slough of infidelity and vice, — that was more than Richard Hawkins could bear to contemplate.
At last he finished his task. Every bone of the entire skeleton was there, unbroken. He thrust the precious fossils carefully into his sack, extinguished his lantern, and trudged wearily home through the rain, a disillusioned unbeliever.
Any other discoverer with half Richard Hawkins’s scientific knowledge would have gone home rejoicing that he had found the most wonderful geological relic ever unearthed on the surface of our planet. But to Richard Hawkins, the whole episode envisaged itself quite otherwise. The iron of the Young Men’s Christian Association had entered into his soul. For years he had preached, with all the solid, stolid, square-headed logic of his British middle-class mind, that morality, decency, the well-being of our race depended absolutely upon the religious life, and that the religious life depended absolutely upon implicit acceptance of the Bible story as he himself interpreted it: — and was he going now to turn back upon the creed of a lifetime, merely because he found the facts of the world had gone against him? Never, never, never! Nobly consistent in his way, Richard Hawkins admitted himself fairly beaten. The book of nature and the book of God, contrary to all belief, were plainly at variance. There was no God; there was no Immortal Soul: infidelity and vice had things all their own way: one moral shone clear from that evening’s bad work — Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die! Let us wallow, if we would be logical, in the foul sty of licentiousness!
He had preached it so long, he had reiterated it so often, that he firmly believed it himself. If only the world knew what he carried in his bag, the world would in twenty-four hours from that time be a seething mass of sin like Sodom and Gomorrah.
With such thoughts surging fiercely in his feverish brain, he reached his home at last, let himself in with his latch-key, and deposited the sack in his own study. It was three in the morning, and he was wet to the skin. But the internal heat of a great disillusion kept him fiery hot in spite of it. Most men would have grown cold with it: Richard Hawkins went feverish. He took out the bones and examined them one by one. That skull — oh, how horrible! how loathsome! how disgusting! Human, human; vaguely, prophetically human: room for large hemispheres in it, a thinking brain; but what a low-browed scowl, what huge bony ridges over the deep-set eyes, what a massive lower jaw, what savage and snarling canines! The creature that owned that head-piece was a man in intelligence — of the lowest and most degraded Digger Indian type — but a brute in moral sense, in fiendish cruelty, in fierce fighting instincts, in ungovernable passions. Richard Hawkins reconstructed the fellow mentally for himself at a single glance — a peering, scowling, hairy-browed, heavy-jawed, shambling, scurrying, long-limbed savage — a bully all fists and tusks and brutal battles with his kind — a transmitter of the ape into the veins of what we had fondly hoped was rather the archangel ruined.