The Devil's Making Page 3

  The ‘birdcages’ are indeed a grotesque architectural feat, but not disagreeable. They are faced with pink brick and half-timbered to give an Elizabethan effect, though the timbers have been painted red. The roofs are also red, and pagoda-shaped. The main building has a little square bell tower, and is fronted with wooden steps to a door with a fan-light window. Horses were hitched to nearby posts, and the drivers of carts or buggies were standing in conversation in the sun at the edge of pleasant lush lawns. There were even flowerbeds with Michaelmas daisies, asters and chrysanthemums, only slightly frost-blackened. I followed a path which led past the carts and to the back where a wider flight of steps than in front led up to a long veranda on which some men in frock coats were standing arguing. They turned to look at me with cold curiosity. I asked whether Mr Begbie was in Victoria at present.

  ‘You’re in luck. Here’s here now’, one man said. He had fixed intense eyes and a silly coal-scuttle shaped beard sticking aggressively forward. His accent was not quite like the local American.

  The men continued to stare at me as I went in the door which was propped open on a chock of wood. There was a large panelled vestibule lined with benches, a circular staircase, and various doors. A man dressed in a black coat with silver buttons came forward and I handed him my letter of introduction. He took it and went through one of the doors. I sat on a bench and waited, twiddling my thumbs, aware that my Wellingtons were incongruous. Eventually the porter reappeared, followed by another man, who from his fussy air appeared to be a clerk. ‘Mr Hobbes? Mr Begbie will see you now.’

  He escorted me into a large room whose windows looked out onto the front veranda. There was a fireplace with a wood fire, a table with documents strewn over it, and leather chairs.

  ‘Mr Hobbes. I am Matthew Begbie. Welcome to Victoria.’ His voice is English, sharp, and high-pitched for such an imposing man. He is tall, dandyish, but broad shouldered. Thinning hair, a pointed grey-brown beard, aristocratic face with wide brow. Like engravings of Walter Raleigh. An elegant courtier. Frock coat, ruffed cravat, jewelled pin. Frederick mentioned, while I was trying on the boots, that Begbie was a tough customer who travelled by horseback or foot hundreds of miles on circuit, in snow or sun, pitching his own tent in the forest, living off wild game, handing out impartial judgement in the mining camps in an attempt to make Americans into peaceful British citizens. He is known both as a hanging judge and as an Indian-lover: he has hanged quite a few Indians, but believes they have title to the land they live and hunt in. This is apparently unpopular with the Legislature.

  Our conversation turned out to be momentous after its initial parryings.

  ‘An odd letter.’ He held it up delicately. ‘It describes you as a very able young man, but it leaves out something. You began in Divinity and concluded in Jurisprudence. But it doesn’t say why.’

  ‘I lost my faith.’ I felt as if back on the Ariadne, and resolved not to be pompous.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You know of the debate at Oxford between Dr Huxley and Bishop Wilberforce. That was eight years ago, before I was there, but it still echoed. My father is a very earnest sort of parson with evangelical leanings. We used to argue about Low Church versus High Church, with me favouring High Church for the sake of the argument I suppose. But at Oxford, after the Wilberforce debacle, people seemed to have retreated from argument into an emphasis on ritual.’ Here I began to flounder. I remembered Charles Dickens’s remark that High Churchmen were all dandies. Though a Cambridge man, as a dandy Begbie would almost certainly be High Church. ‘At any rate I was so wearied by the High versus Low Church question that Darwin’s Origin of Species took me by storm.’

  ‘Do you think Darwin is an atheist?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘I don’t think he is. He ends The Origin thus: “There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one…” Not the words of an atheist.’

  ‘Indeed not.’

  ‘I’ve always wondered why people think he is one then. Haven’t you?’

  ‘I believe it’s because of his emphasis on Natural Law.’

  ‘Ah, that’s why you changed to studying the law.’

  ‘Yes’.

  ‘You’ve come to the right place, Mr Hobbes, to pursue an investigation of Natural Law. You’ll learn things about it they don’t know at Oxford or in the Inns of Court – or even at Cambridge. I believe there are three laws. Natural Law, God’s Law, and the Law of the Land – which in this Colony is the Common Law of England. You may have been taught it approximates to Natural Law, but I discover every day that they are different. Have you seen Mr de Cosmos?’

  ‘No’.

  ‘That is he.’ He gestured grandly to the window and those arguing men gesticulating outside, whose heads we could see passing now and then, the man with the coal-scuttle beard, the most vehement. ‘Amor de Cosmos – Lover of the Cosmos. A Canadian whose real name is Bill Smith. But that is by the by. You cannot yet practice the law of the land here. A pity you didn’t go to the bar in England. It would be good to have a barrister of your background – in the long run, that is. There’s no work now. And no solicitor will take you on for articling – unless you pay him a fortune for doing nothing to teach you. It’s a bad time. And I should say right away, I have no personal need of your services: I have my clerk already. Have you much money?’

  ‘Very little.’

  ‘If you had you might go into farming. You look as if you have the energy. Then we could eventually make a Magistrate of you. But that’s a time ahead. Who knows what will happen? Our Americans here are mostly good citizens. They like British orderliness. But if the United States were permitted to annex this Colony, I should leave for England at once. However, I’m not of that man’s party.’ Another glance at the window. ‘Are you interested in the theatre? I mean, have you acted?’

  ‘I’m afraid not.’

  ‘No matter. You must come to the Amateur Dramatic Society – and of course attend the Theatre Royal. I own it.’ He smiled mysteriously. ‘You won’t have met a judge before who owns a theatre.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’ I was beginning to fear that the meeting was becoming purely social.

  ‘I have an idea for you.’ A dramatic pause. ‘But it will displease you at first. Did you notice any policemen in this town?’

  ‘Not so far.’

  ‘There are a dozen or so, under the direction of my friend the Stipendiary Magistrate, Augustus Pemberton. They keep the peace, and they look after the jail which is part of the courthouse on Bastion Street, and is also our lunatic asylum – an unsatisfactory combination. Now, I say to myself, why shouldn’t an educated young man like you, educated in the law, become a Constable?’ Another dramatic pause. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I don’t see how…’

  ‘Of course. You’re a gentleman. Police Constables aren’t gentlemen. Correct? But if a gentleman cannot, at present, find other employment, why not become a Constable? After all, there are university men here in Victoria who work as assistants in shops. Others have degenerated and become drunken sots. A gentleman may fall very rapidly in a Colony. I remember one man, the Honourable So-and-So, who came out here in the Gold Rush with his man-servant whom he dismissed soon after their arrival for being impertinent. Two years later the Honourable So-and-So was reduced to the point where he had to take employment in a draper’s shop. The draper was his former man-servant.’

  ‘You mean I should become a sort of Bow Street runner? – a “Peeler”?’

  ‘I can suggest to Augustus Pemberton that you be taken on as a Constable. I believe the pay is only £25 a month. Not much, though it goes further here in Victoria than up in the Cariboo where a good meal costs over a pound. You’ll have to take your shifts with the rest of them, do your stint as jailer, supervise the chain-gang, go out and arrest the more violent drunks, keep the ladies of the night within bounds. But you might al
so be the ideal man to do criminal investigation. The Victoria police is modelled on that of London. And if they can have a department of Criminal Investigation in London, why don’t we send for an expert from the London Metropolitan police to start one here? Oh well, I see you smile. We are minuscule compared to London. If we were to have a ‘detective’ it could only be part time – one of the Constables at first. You will find your colleagues a rough and ready bunch. The Superintendent and Inspectors were recruited in a hurry ten years ago, as Constables then, at the start of the Gold Rush. The only requirements for entry were good character and a height of five feet nine. Mr Pemberton was formerly a barrister in Dublin and is a very capable and resolute man. I’m sure he will be more than interested in a man of your brain and calibre. I assume you can shoot a gun.’

  ‘Yes. I grew up in the country. I’ve done a fair amount of rough shooting.’

  ‘You’ll learn how to use a revolver. And yes, you will learn about Natural Law, Mr Hobbes. That is, if you’re the man for the job. Are you?’

  ‘I think so. Why not? Yes. I’ll give it my best.’

  ‘Good man.’ He reached forward and shook my hand earnestly. ‘I’ll keep this letter, if you don’t mind, and I’ll discuss the matter with Augustus Pemberton very shortly. Where are you staying?’

  ‘The Argyle.’

  ‘I shall send you a note there.’

  Which he did.

  Here I am, Constable ‘Obbes, at your service, Sir or Ma’am!

  3

  November 1868 – February 1869

  I’m in prison. Or at least the court-house which also functions as police station, lunatic asylum and jail. It’s less than ten years old but already decrepit. Worn and peeling paint on doors. Brick walls edged with stone and topped with fake battlements, irregular and sagging. All windows, not only those of the jail section, with bars. At £25 a month, room and board in a lodging house would have left nothing to spare. I could always have rented (or even constructed with my own hands – it’s no more difficult than building a hen-house) a one room hovel, at the edge of town or along the rocks by the dead water of the Inner Harbour. But there’s a spare room in the court-house, and the jailor, Archie Seeds, needs the help. Although he never says so he also needs company. His wife ran off to California last year with a returning gold-miner who although he was ‘skunked’ penniless in the Cariboo was able to afford to get drunk and disorderly in Victoria, and was thrown into jail – from which he departed with Seeds’s wife and savings.

  Lower Bastion Street is in fact a square, like a platform, once part of the HBC fort which has been pulled down. There is a fine view out over the wharves to the Inner Harbour and the Songhees village, like a smoking dump on the other side. In the square, executions are held, although none is in the offing. In the jail are a hard core of seven prisoners (a year or two for robbery or assault) and an extra one or two a night, though more at weekends, drunk and disorderly. The hard core are mostly American, including a Negro. The one-nighters are white, black, occasionally Indian. Almost never Chinamen. The ‘Celestials’ police themselves. The occasional corpse is found, throat slashed, butcher’s knife in hand to indicate suicide, at dawn in Cormorant Street or Fan Tan Alley. Fan Tan is a Chinese gambling game. The gambling dens are also opium dens. We leave them alone. Begbie’s remark about the jail doubling as a lunatic asylum is technically true, but there are no lunatics at present. ‘There are too many out there to lock up’ is the joke.

  * * *

  I have plenty of time to write my account, at night in my room. Now I am in a prison, in what seems like a lunatic world compared to any I knew in England, perhaps I should be feeling and thinking differently. But I am not. Instead I have been sparked by Begbie’s brisk remarks about Darwin’s possible atheism into a return of my old agonies about belief. In England I have heard both that Darwin is an atheist and that he is not. I have seen cartoons of him in the form of an ape – although his kindly face does not lend itself so readily to this caricature as that of his ferocious looking disciple Huxley. But of course he does end the Origin with the implication that good old God must have got evolution going. Perhaps it is just a debate about the time scale: God started the clock going millions of years ago, not in 4,004 BC as that mad Irish bishop Ussher calculated by adding up the life spans in the Bible.

  It was never these arguments in philosophy and theology that bothered me. Since I read the Voyage of the Beagle it has been the obsvervations. Species unfold, just as geological formations change, over millennia. And we humans unfold too. We are unstable, changing, we adapt to circumstances – also over millennia. That is what shocked me into disbelief, the realisation that the stable world of my parents was just a tiny point in circumstances. I had an argument with my father about conscience. ‘It’s universal’, he said. ‘God has planted it in every man.’ ‘Does a cannibal in the Pacific eating a sailor in the form of “long pig” exhibit any conscience about this?’ I argued. I could also have argued that my brother Henry showed no sign of conscience in seducing village girls. Whereas I was myself so tormented with conscience – or fear – that I couldn’t give in to one. Anyway I stuck with the cannibal argument, then added what could be called the Fuegian argument, mentioning the dreaded Darwin. ‘I have never met a man without a conscience!’ my father thundered. ‘Nor a woman, and not even a child. Show me the child who does not feel a prick of conscience when he steals an extra slice of cake!’ I could have shown him Henry. Instead I returned to the charge with the Fuegians who kill strangers without compunction. I said conscience was merely instilled by a particular society, and enforced by the law. But I did not really know what I was talking about.

  That is why I am here. To answer questions which cannot even be easily asked in Christian circles in England. For example, to see for myself whether so called savages are really different from us in having a different, or no, conscience. So far the evidence is on my side. Chief Freezy who chopped his wife’s head off on the shore as a demonstration, hardly had a conscience. Or more exactly, he did not have a conscience like mine. But he seems to have had a reason. As Jeroboam put it, she might have been doing jig-a-jig with someone. In which case Freezy can be described as having a conscience of good and evil, by his lights. I wonder if anyone asked Freezy: why? At any rate he was not punished. The police from this jail did not arrest him. In this new world I am wrong on two counts: perhaps someone like Freezy does have a sort of conscience – and the law certainly does nothing to instill one. Furthermore, I know almost nothing about jig-a-jig.

  * * *

  My Superintendent, Francis Parry, is not about to let his new Constable-Detective do only guard duties while waiting for a knotty investigation to challenge his intellect. He tells me that there are 80,000 prostitutes in London, and that over 20 corpses a day float down the Thames. He challenges me to believe this. I don’t want to but he is a very credible man. The quintessential English Sergeant-Major. Which he was, in the Crimean War. He talks about Inkerman, the ‘soldiers’ battle’. In pouring rain in the dark then for a day in fog and smoke, English and Russian infantrymen fought it out hand to hand without benefit of command. They ran out of ammunition and were reduced to bayoneting each other, clubbing each other with rifle butts, braining each other with heavy stones, and strangling each other with bare hands. Parry did all these things. He also watched the magnificent charge of the Light Brigade. He says he heard its leader, Lord Cardigan, afterwards, indignantly complaining not at the folly of the charge but at the bad behaviour of the Irish officer whose message to ‘Charge for the guns’ neglected to specify which guns. This man realised the error too late and tried to call Cardigan back, but got his arm and shoulder shot off and, as Cardigan said furiously in Parry’s hearing, ‘screamed like a woman.’ Parry is not a brute, but a decent man with a faded pretty wife and grown-up sons, who build houses when there is a demand for them. He seems to have had a revelation in the Crimea that without authority and hierarchy life is a hell
which leads to quick and indecent death. But he is a remarkably un-snobbish man. He is not in the least embarrassed – though in English terms my social inferior, not a gentleman etc. – to be my superior in command. Why should he be? Though he sees me frankly as a protégé of Begbie and Pemberton, I must do my apprentice work. But policing in Victoria is not an active pursuit of trouble, with regular beats and raids. The policy is to leave well alone. Most drunken brawls sort themselves out: the sawdust on the floors of the taverns (95 of them!) is there to soak up blood as well as the usual dirt and spit.

  When a complaint comes in – someone knocking at the courthouse door late at night howling that a man is getting killed – the other duty constable and I throw our capes over our blue brass-buttoned tunics and set off into the rain, truncheons in hand. (Long-barrelled pistols are available but we seldom carry them). If the brawl is not over by the time we arrive we separate the combatants and haul them off to jail in handcuffs. This is easier than I had feared. The men are usually too drunk to be effective and are often pleased to have the excuse to stop fighting. The other night I did have to call for reinforcements. A sailor went berserk after rejection by a girl and attacked the entire population, male and female, of the Olympic dance hall. The reinforcements consisted of Sergeant Parry himself. He cracked the berserker’s skull with his truncheon. The man survived.

  A dance hall is a relatively genteel version of a brothel. Parry says they are modelled on Almack’s Rooms in London, but I hardly know London. A long room lined with tables and chairs for sitting out with an over-expensive beverage, a small orchestra at one end, and a number of over-dressed young and not-so-young ladies with whom the men dance – for a fee (not apparently the practice at Almack’s). There are further fees for a visit to the next door ‘hotel’. The dance halls give no trouble in themselves, and we keep away from them unless an altercation occurs, which is not often, since minor quarrels are dealt with by a ‘chucker-outer’. There are two dance halls: the Olympic (25 cents a dance) and the more elegant Windsor Rooms (50 cents).