Death Comes to Cambers (16 page)

‘It's very interesting,' agreed Bobby. ‘What did Lady Cambers think of it?'

‘She was keen on it. I'm not sure how far she saw what it meant. I didn't press that side so long as she paid up. You see, my theory means that mind is the creature of the machine. The machine – the hand – came first. Then came mind, as its product. That knocks out the bishops when they tell you mind can only have come from mind. I show that mind comes from the use of the tool. When you use a tool you have to think, or it's no good. First you do a thing. Then you think about it. Knocks out superstitious fancy about special creation and so on. That's what Andrews saw. I'll give him credit for that. He saw clearly enough what it meant. He couldn't argue, so he excommunicated, as he called it, and, if he could, he would have had me burnt alive. I can tell you he looked murder, and the Spanish Inquisition and the fires of Smithfield, all right, when he came here once and wanted to preach. I cut him short, though. I told him to wait a bit and I would have proof he could rub his nose against if he liked, it would be so plain.'

‘Is that what all this digging outside is about?' Bobby asked.

‘You mean my pot-holes?'

‘Pot-holes?'

‘Technical term,' explained Eddy lightly. ‘I take it you don't know anything about archaeology?'

‘Nothing at all.'

‘I thought you wouldn't,' Eddy observed. ‘Few do – especially archaeologists. What I'm working on is the origin of man. That's what I'll call my book when it comes out –
The Origin of Man
. It'll be as big a thing as Darwin's
Origin of Species
– bigger.'

Bobby looked at him sharply. For a moment he thought the other was joking, but it was perfectly plain that what had been said had been meant literally, that Eddy Dene really saw himself as the pupil, the successor, of Darwin, the carrier-on of the Darwinian torch to heights the earlier master never dreamed of.

‘My book,' Eddy added, very simply, ‘will be a landmark in human thought – after it has been published mental processes will never be quite the same again.'

‘Oh,' said Bobby, slightly overwhelmed at this claim, and by the calm manner in which it was put forward. ‘Well, of course. I don't know anything about all that.'

‘No, of course not,' agreed Eddy, as one might say to a toddling child that as yet it knew nothing of some subject it had heard discussed by its elders.

‘Have you always been interested in that sort of thing?' 

‘I'll tell you about that. When my people took over the – the shop – Bobby noticed that he hesitated for a fraction of a second over the word, as though he found it unpleasant to pronounce – ‘there was an old sketch-book lying about. It had belonged to a man named Winders, an old chap in the village. He had got interested in archaeology picking up eoliths. There are plenty lying about here, you know. You can fill your pockets with them any day, as well as with flints of a later period.'

‘What are – eoliths, did you call them?'

Eddy went across to one of the shelves running round the walls of the shed, and took up three or four roughly shaped stones.

‘Dawn stones,' he said. ‘The first step man took when he stopped being an ape and started to become a man.' Bobby looked at them with interest. To him they did not seem to show much sign of human handiwork. But Eddy handled them with reverence.

‘It may be half a million years since they were worked,' he said slowly. ‘How many generations does that mean? All in their turn, all passing away again. Four generations to a century – how many individuals to a century? Think of all that long slow interminable procession through the ages – years and centuries and millenniums – while the ape was struggling to be primaeval man, and primaeval man to be man barbarian, and the barbarian to be man as we know him to-day; and think of the years and the centuries and millenniums before us till man can call himself civilized – and when you think of it all, can you believe that one life, one little life in all that, counts for as much as we seem to think it does, to judge by the fuss we make when one goes out?'

‘Yes,' said Bobby simply, ‘every brick in a building counts, every soldier in an army. One brick out of place, one soldier sleepy or cowardly, may ruin everything.'

Eddy shrugged his shoulders.

‘That's the sentimental view,' he pronounced. ‘I find it a little hard to suppose any one ordinary individual counts against the enormous background of the past.' He put down on the table the eolith he had been holding. ‘There's a theory they aren't human work at all,' he went on, ‘but they are all right. You have only to hold them to feel the human touch. It's how we began. Now we've got to the aeroplane and the wireless – and the daily Press. To-morrow – but ask the daily Press about that. And all comes from the accident that a few odd hundreds of thousands of years ago a freak ape was born with the power to pronate his hand. That was what I found in that sketch-book I told you about. There were sketches that showed both the ape formation and the human quite plainly. The difference was picked out by the use of different colours. Winders, the man it belonged to, was a wheelwright about here. Then he took to digging wells – and to bone-setting. He had quite a reputation for treating sprains and so on. And for finding water. There's lots of water here, but it runs underground and wants finding – even the stream at the bottom of the field dries up at times, for no known reason. A bit awkward for a farmer who wants a permanent water-supply. Apparently old Winders always knew where you could sink a well. It was when he was digging one for Mr. Hardy, the man who rents Mounts Farm, that he came across some fossil bones, dating from back in the tertiary period, I should think. Perhaps the pliocene, perhaps the eocene. That's a difference, but in this business you need a wide margin. Anything within a hundred thousand years is getting warm. Winders couldn't read or write, but he had eyes in his head, which is more than most have, and he could draw. He spotted the different formation in the wrist-bones – he saw some were purely human and some purely ape, yet they came from the same spot. Well, you see what that means?'

‘Not very clearly,' Bobby confessed.

‘It means we can put our finger, if I'm right, here and now on the very spot where man became man. Not in any mythical Garden of Eden early one morning, but right here at that one moment – and there's the fossil to show. No special creation, but just a freak – a sport. Proves that mind is only a function of the body – a result of the accident of a freak ape baby being born with a slightly different formation of the bones of the wrist, so he could use tools, and in order to do so had to think. Well, that's how thought came into the world.'

Eddy was speaking now with an intensity of belief that seemed, as it were, to light up his personality with a kind of inner fire. He looked taller even; his eyes were bright and fervent. Bobby reflected that when Eddy called the vicar a ‘fanatic' he was making use of a word that could with equal justice have been applied to himself. But then science, just as much as religion, has always had its fanatics and its bigots; it has more than once tried to establish something like an inquisition. If it had the power, even to-day it would probably have its
autos-da-fé
for those who refused to subscribe to the true faith – for the osteopath, the scoffer at vaccines, the supporter of any theory not yet generally accepted.

Why, only that week-end Bobby remembered he had been reading an article in which a very learned professor traced the Oedipus complex and the castration motive as implicit all through the study of Esperanto!

But then, after all, that is only to say that the scientist, like the priest, is human, and that humanity has always found it less trouble to stone its prophets than to change its way of thinking.

And Bobby found himself wondering to what the clash of these two fanaticisms – the scientific and the religious – might not in this affair have given birth. Yet, even so, what bearing could there be upon the tragedy it was his business to investigate? Eddy was going on talking. He said: ‘Well, now, then, you can see for yourself, when 1 get my book out, it means the whole current of contemporary thought has got to change. All superstition will be ended for good. People will see the truth of things – see them as they are. There'll be no more putting up with slums and starvation here and now in the hope of golden crowns and harps hereafter. Man will be himself at last, standing on his own legs, putting his trust in himself, and not in flopping down on his knees to ask an old man with a beard to do conjuring-tricks.'

‘And these proofs you speak of?' Bobby asked.

‘Yes, I know, it all hangs on that,' Eddy admitted, his fervour slightly diminished. ‘Proof's no good unless it's the sort of proof you can rub people's noses on. Pure reason gets you nowhere. Well, that's what I've been spending Lady Cambers's money trying to find. It's a fight for the freedom of the human mind that's been going on between vicar and me, and now it looks like vicar coming out on top, unless I can find someone to take poor Lady Cambers's place and cash up like her. Not too easy.'

He went to the window of the shed and stood there in silence, staring out intently, and Bobby divined that what he saw was no such common pasture-field as every parish in England could display, but a battlefield where knowledge and ignorance, science and superstition, tremendously fought for dominion over the soul of man.

‘All the same,' Bobby said, half to himself, ‘I don't see why your ape's wrist becoming human in type shouldn't have been a special creation.'

Eddy was not listening. He said from the window, still staring from it at the quiet, empty field where to his fevered imagination was being fought the ultimate battle, the Armageddon of the soul: ‘The proof's there, and I'll get it if I have to dig up the whole field with my bare hands.' Then he laughed a little, as if there were no more to be said and he was glad. He turned away, and Bobby said: ‘If you've got it all in this sketch-book you speak of, isn't that enough?'

‘Standing by themselves the sketches can't prove anything,' Eddy replied. ‘I showed them once to a man who is supposed to have some reputation. He does know a lot, too. But he wasn't interested. I think sometimes a man gets to know so much he simply can't take anything more in – no room. But then people are like that. If a thing's new, they just can't grasp it. He couldn't see what it meant; he wanted to know how I could tell the sketches weren't pure fancy. As if an old illiterate man like Winders could have had an idea like that. I saw, then, I had to find the actual fossils and show them.'

‘Winders must have had them in his possession if he drew them?'

‘That's right,' Eddy agreed. ‘And do you know what became of them? They were thrown away at his death. Used for road-metal, most likely, or perhaps burnt for manure.'

His voice was tragic; he drooped as he stood there, almost one expected to see him fall flat – crushed beneath the weight of such a thought.

‘It's happened often enough,' he said. ‘Another hour or two, and most likely the Piltdown skull would have gone that way. Over and over again that must have happened. Just think of it. The key to open the door to a new humanity, freed for ever from all the dead old soul-destroying superstitions, used to mend a road for the carts of country bumpkins. That's tragedy!'

‘You are expecting to find other fossil bones of the same sort?' Bobby asked.

‘Yes. I managed to get a talk with old Mrs. Winders. She was very feeble; she didn't live much longer. I don't think Winders quite understood the importance of his discovery. But he did understand that once there had been a big river here. Of course, that's plain enough when you know, but not many men in his position would have seen it – or cared if they had. It was along the banks of this river the ape community lived when was born the little freak ape that was the dawn man. Apparently some catastrophe happened. Possibly an earthquake. We had them in England in those days, before we were separated from Europe. Perhaps it was a sudden flood. Whatever it was Winders found, it can't have been a burying-place, because, of course, apes don't have them. But there were a number of these fossil bones, all miraculously preserved. It may be the only spot in the world where that's happened. Anyhow, there it is. Winders had dug down to the “floor”. I don't suppose he knew what a “floor” is, but his instinct told him it was something that counted. And there was this collection of fossil bones. He drove out small longitudinal galleries in each direction. Always more bones. Evidently a whole community had been destroyed at once and all their bodies heaped together. Then water was found – lots of it – in another well he was sinking not far away, so there was no need to go on with this one. He made a collection of a few of the bones, and then the shaft he had sunk was filled in. You see the significance of their provenance? The fossils all came from the same spot at the same level – all part of one and the same lot. And most of them were pure ape, and one or two were of the human type. That means the human type and the ape type were living together –
in the same community
.'

He had been speaking quickly and with a growing excitement. Bobby watched him curiously, realizing that to Eddy these speculations on the remote past, on the origin of man, seemed the most important thing in the world. But he did not offer any comment, and Eddy, who had apparently expected him to speak, went on more quietly after waiting for a moment or two: ‘That means differentiation had not yet begun. The ape was still the ape; the human type had not yet begun to think itself out of apehood into humanity. Well, what I'm out for is to trace the old river-banks that lie thirty feet deep under the present-day surface, find again the bones Winders found and sketched – and find more perhaps. And what I'm up against now,' he added abruptly, ‘is, where's the coin coming from?'