Mr Darwin's Gardener (4 page)

Stuart Wilkes crouched behind the chicken shed. His knees clicked. A dry, sharp sound, like a branch breaking. Sounds echoed in the silence of the evening twilight. The whole business was dubious. Too late for regrets. I did agree. Blood brotherhood obliged. What brotherhood might that be, then? These were men from the village and acquaintances. But there would have been talk if I had stayed at home.

Stink of nettles. And urine. I heard the chickens
breathing
. So it seemed. Fortunately they did not take me for a fox and start clucking. The chickens were not to know that a man is worse than a fox. The pollen in the air tickled my nose.

Take a stick, Harry reminded me. A cudgel. I listened to make sure Lucy was asleep, I got up, I went to the landing to get dressed. I heard Charles murmuring in his sleep. I crept along the creaking stairs and squeaking floors. I took an umbrella from the hall stand. I opened the back door and came to the chicken shed. The watch was in my coat pocket. James had named the hour. Harry repeated it many times and looked all of us in the eye. We had a duty in the name of God.

The chickens rustled on their perch, perhaps they turned. I clutched the umbrella handle. A strange job for a man
to get into, practically in the middle of the night. For the sake of God. The middle finger of my right hand ached. Arthritis. Nothing to be done about it. I pricked up my ears and listened to the darkness.

I heard nothing but the fluttering of the chickens and their breathing and my breathing.

When the wind got up, the clouds shifted. Strange that clouds should seem pale even at night, although the sky is black. Stars twinkled. Harry had determined each man's hiding place. Until the right moment. My neck tingled. Harry, James, Robert, Henry and the others were lurking in the dark. All the men who wanted to prove their
manliness
. When the moment strikes, Daniel Lewis, blasphemer, thief and whoremonger, will be walking along the road. What for? James spun the plot. Lewis will be taught what it means to betray a woman, the church and God.

Henry asked if the vicar himself was not required for an ecclesiastical task like this.

Harry said the congregation represented God. No other intermediaries were needed.

I felt cold, crouching motionless, though it was only August.

The grass swished when I moved my feet. Nettles burned my left wrist. I felt like sneezing. My ears grew large from listening to the silence. The crunch of steps on the road, getting louder. Brisk, noisy steps.

There he was. Anger mounted. He walked with a swagger, contented, without a care. Insolent. He did not fear the dark. Maybe he put his trust in God's protection. A vain hope. God's in heaven; we men are here in the bushes.

Harry reasoned that God's punishment was too long in coming. That was true.

I straightened up. My knees clicked. Lewis's shoes rasped on the gravel.

I crept along the hedge, crouching. Right place, right time. Blood began to circulate in my fingers and toes.

Harry's target was not far. Lewis walked fast. He was early. I trotted, half running, behind the hedge. Suddenly the darkness was filled with teeming shadows, stifled noise. The walker was surprised. He stopped. He was tripped up. A potato sack was pulled over his head. The black swarm of shadows flailed, thumped, knocked. I raised my umbrella. I could not squeeze into the circle. I stabbed with the tip. It hit Henry's leg, judging from his scream. Thump, knock, thump. Moaning from the bag. God's punishment. All together. That means nobody.

It was over quickly. The body lay on the road. Someone threw the embroidered travel bag next to it. Shadows disappeared into shadows.

My stomach was churning. I would have liked to say something. Good night. I was frightened and freezing, and I ran as fast as my legs would carry me. Did the foxes and the chickens and the whole village hear? No one heard. Everyone had stopped up their ears that night. I nestled in the bedclothes. My head had left a dent in the pillow. My place. I was away only a moment. God help me.

Sparrows chattered in the holm-oak hedge as Henry Faine walked along the Luxton road. The sun was still shining on high, for it does not take long to write a poor man's will. Though such a will too can trigger lengthy quarrels over silver spoons and linen cloths.

Shut your beaks, birds.

I have kept silent about that night.

In the morning, there was no sign of the body or the travel bag. The whole village was silent.

Crime makes men stick together, like mortar, only better. So said the Professor of Criminology at university. If several men take part in a robbery or murder, a crowbar will not prise open a single mouth.

It is true. We walled ourselves in and then bricked up the door.

I wondered how Lewis got back on his pins unaided. He had gone through a real walloping, after all.

As a solicitor I should have…

But a village is a village, and men are men. Stuart Wilkes, a schoolmaster, and Dr Kenny, too, were in the fray. A company of avengers has something upright and unifying about it. It is as if one had found a form of sport that does not differentiate between a merchant and a tinker, or a miller and a horseman.

Terribly shameful. Wrong. Wrong and repulsive.

But I am not one to rebel; I am a fool rather than a lord. Eileen's father's former errand boy. Not the lord of a manor but a scribe. If you break your toes as a result of kicking, how are you going to walk? If you throw a punch and break your fingers, how will you hold a pen?

It is easiest to be on good terms with everyone; then no one takes any notice of you.

Stuart Wilkes drank water, but the thirst would not leave him. A strange taste was clinging to the jug; the water tasted of graphite. Ugh.

I ran off and forgot the umbrella under the hedge.

I wrote in my notebook: when an idea combines with both matter and action, the result is an invention. But that insight applies to other things.

A wave of shame. His ears twitched and flattened like a dog's. Robert Kenny walked, stopped, kicked a tree root. Branches arched over the path, a dense green canopy. When autumn comes, the leaves fall. The two or five or eleven leaves that stick to their stalks are old news.

A deed becomes old, too.

No body lay on the road, no bag. Stuart asked me to look for his umbrella; I did not find it. I expect some passer-by thought it worth picking up. A misdemeanour is less than a crime, because malice aforethought is lacking. Collusion is more or less accidental, the result of susceptibility.

What does the law say? Harry Rowe lay in bed, perspiring. Let the law say what it will. I did the right thing. For Margaret's sake. Wherever she may be. Malicious gossip would damage business. I won't get up. I will get up.
Margaret's gone. The whoremonger was left on the road. Quite right. He didn't die. James came to tell Rosemary. Good or bad. He might as well have died. Remember the Sixth Commandment. And remember business. The police have no call to visit us. Nothing has happened. I have to arrange the nail boxes. I won't give Wilkes credit any longer. He was there. I must do some selling. I don't get up. I lie back and listen to the jackdaws. They make a loud noise. Jackdaws are a pestilence in this village. In the garden, they peck Rosemary's tablecloth to tatters. Build their nests in the chimney. Kenny's flue was blocked. Marsh keeps sweeping the flues because of the jackdaw nests. A big man, he huffs and puffs, but he climbs up on to the roof. I am sweating. The pillow is cool. I have no regrets. I did the right thing. Dead bodies don't walk by themselves. I don't sleep. I turn over and swing my feet on to the floor. Black hairs grow on my legs. Man is an animal. Grows hair. I got up, went into the shop, sold lace and paraffin. As always the customers said good day and thank you and goodbye.

What if the body did not walk by itself but was buried in the woods? James Bailey asked. Who buried it? Harry – who else? It was his revenge, though the rest of us had our share. You could not ask aloud, not Harry, not anybody. I kept asking myself, the next day, and the day after, for many weeks. I grew fearful; I am not a brave man. I was fearful especially in the dark. What if he were buried in a hole and the spectre rose up because the body was not resting in hallowed ground? Martha would have said
fiddlesticks
, if she had known. She did not know. I did not say a word, a deal's a deal. But I started every time the front door went. Would a policeman come in, if not a spectre?
Either would have been bad for business. The sign says ‘The Anchor', and there I read my prayer:
Which hope we have as an anchor of the soul, both sure and steadfast, and which entereth into that within the veil.

Henry Faine brought the newspaper into the pub in October. He read the article aloud, and the paper passed from hand to hand. We all read the article by ourselves many times, too, for the date was a great relief. No dead man, or even a half-dead one, writes articles. We swallowed the last gulp of stale shame, because the article raised fresh froth around Daniel Lewis. The effervescence was further enhanced by Thomas Davies. It was as if a teaspoonful of salt had been added to the tankard.

A REGRETTABLE HOAX

In accordance with the policy of our newspaper, we refrain from expressing a view on
The Origin of Species,
the work by Mr Charles Darwin that was published in 1859, and on the polemics to which it has given rise. Such discussions may no longer be as lively as they once were, now that twenty years have passed since the publication of the book. We would like, however, to report the
following
incident, which bears witness to the fact that dubious characters invariably follow in the wake of celebrity. There are those who wish, in a mendacious and unscrupulous fashion, to take advantage of anything they believe will advance their own cause.

Ian Balfour, Emeritus Professor of Exegetics at the University of Edinburgh, by chance acquired a
pamphlet
drawn up by militant free-thinkers. The author of the text inside was one
D.M. Lawson.
According to Professor Balfour, the tract, printed on cheap paper and published on 17th September of this year, was fervent but muddled gobbledygook. Nevertheless, it aroused his interest because of the title,
Conversations with Charles Darwin.
Professor Balfour tracked down the real name of the man who, among his circle of free-thinkers, is known
as D.M. Lawson:
Daniel Lewis.
Lewis, later known as Lawson, was for five years verger of the parish of Downe, until the vicar,
Brodie Innes,
dismissed him in connection with irregularities concerning e.g. collection moneys and the church wine. Professor Balfour points out that it was possible Lewis had met Mr Darwin, who moved to the village of Downe in 1842 and is on good terms with the vicar and indeed the whole congregation. However, on the basis of all available evidence, it is unlikely that Lawson ever conversed with Mr Darwin in person. That is nevertheless what D.M. Lawson leads his readers to believe. In an aside, Professor Balfour comments that the author of the pamphlet was impudent in his choice of
nom de plume.
The word Law is associated with legal proceedings, but in Gaelic it also means ‘hill' and thus refers, in a roundabout way, to the hilly village of Downe.

In order to ground his opinion in fact, D.M. Lawson offers anecdotes associated with Mr Darwin's life and environment. The subject, if he were aware of this
publication
, could no doubt prove these tales questionable. The pamphlet states that Mr Darwin read a report in a newspaper (we assure readers that it was not this paper) claiming that in that particular year, all the beans had grown on the wrong side of the pod. Mr Darwin then went to his gardener, at the time an elderly Kentish man, and asked him if the story was true. The old man replied: ‘Of course not, it's a mistake. Beans only grow on the wrong side during a leap year, and it isn't a leap year now.' Such superstitious information has never appeared in the pages of this paper.

As stated, our paper does not take a view on the religious and philosophical questions associated with the doctrine of evolution.

In the pamphlet, D.M. Lawson comes across as both philosophical and poetic. However, there is good reason to doubt everything he writes, above all about the encounter with Mr Charles Darwin. We quote Lawson's article, sent by Professor Balfour (the text is certainly not worth publishing in its entirety):

I left Mr Darwin's house at sunset, having spent several hours with the famous scientist discussing the origin of species. The theory incontrovertibly proves the biblical story of creation to be a childish tale. Man has no need for a make-believe Creator or God. Our Creator is Nature itself, and the as-yet-uncharted millennia that have moulded soil, plants, animals and man into what they are today.

The sun was setting. A religious soul would no doubt have seen the mounds of cloud, dyed by the dusk, as a vision of the heavenly kingdom to come. My scientific mind, however, pondered over atoms, spectra and the angle of daylight in relation to the surface of the earth. In the garden, I met a tall, sturdy man, who was striking his spade into the earth and turning over soil. His posture made me think of a gravedigger at work. I thought of our decomposing bodies, feeding future life. We, the species roaming the surface of the earth, compete with one another, while ever-evolving nature spares the best individuals. Such specimens change the world for the better in procreating. The wheelbarrow held manure for enriching the soil. The smell made my nose sting, but manure is part of the natural cycle, just as cabbage heads and men are.

The man was Thomas Davies, Mr Darwin's gardener, born in Wales, in the town of Merthyr Tydfil, which is known for its thriving mining industry. Because the evening dew was already descending, and Mr Davies was about to finish his work, he entered into a conversation with the
undersigned. Davies's opinions about man's nature and significance, and about the laws of nature, closely
followed
Mr Darwin's own writings. Nowadays, I thought, the great scientist has a worthier gardener at his service than the boor who presumed to know which side of the pod beans grow each year.

Mr Davies lamented the fact that he did not have the opportunity to take part in Mr Darwin's scientific experiments on plants, because the respected scientist has reached an advanced age and the state of his health is not good. What touched the undersigned most, however, was what Mr Davies told me about his own life. His wife died at the age of thirty-two, and both of his children are disabled or sick. Mr Davies opined that, according to the natural order, the likes of him should perhaps not live. His offspring are not capable of producing offspring who could survive in the cruel battle of life. I think it is a rare person who is capable of seeing his situation as clearly and boldly as Mr Davies. Indeed, his statement prompts one to consider how our society should view individuals who are not fit for survival. We should stop wasting our meagre common resources on sustaining the old, the sick and the poor. We should instead support improvements in the living conditions of strong, go-ahead individuals, irrespective of their social background and only taking into account intellectual gifts and bodily health.

Like Professor Ian Balfour, our paper suspects that D.M. Lawson never conversed with Mr Darwin. With the permission of the
Edinburgh Review,
a respected publication based in Edinburgh, we have acquired the rights to publish information about the regrettable hoax, including quotations extracted from the original article.