The Devil's Making Read Online Free PDF Page B

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