The Signature of All Things: A Novel

Chapter Twenty-seven

Alma Whittaker arrived in Holland in mid-July of 1854.

She had been at sea for more than a year. It had been an absurd voyage—or, rather, it had been a series of absurd voyages. She had departed Tahiti in mid-April the year before, sailing on a French cargo ship heading to New Zealand. She had been forced to wait in Auckland for two months before she found a Dutch merchant ship willing to take her on as a passenger to Madagascar, whence she’d traveled in the company of a large consignment of sheep and cattle. From Madagascar, she’d sailed to Cape Town on an impossibly antique Dutch fluyt—a ship that represented the finest of seventeenth-century maritime technology. (This had been the only leg of the voyage where, in fact, she truly feared she might die.) From Cape Town, she had proceeded slowly up the western coast of the African continent, stopping to change vessels in the ports of Accra and Dakar. From Dakar, she’d found another Dutch merchant ship heading first to Madeira, then up to Lisbon, across the Bay of Biscay, through the English Channel, and all the way to Rotterdam. In Rotterdam, she had purchased a ticket on a steam-powered passenger boat (the first steamer she’d ever been on), which carried her up and around the Dutch coast, finally heading down the Zuiderzee to Amsterdam. There, on July 18, 1854, she disembarked at last.

Her journey might have been both swifter and easier if she’d not had Roger the dog along with her. But she did have him, for when the time had come to leave Tahiti at last, she’d found herself morally incapable of leaving him behind. Who would take care of unlovable Roger, in her absence? Who would risk his bites, in order to feed him? She could not be entirely certain that the Hiro contingent would not eat Roger once she was gone. (Roger would not have made for much of a meal; nonetheless, she could not bear to imagine him turning on a spit.) Most significantly of all, he was Alma’s last tangible link to her husband. Roger had probably been there in the fare when Ambrose had died. Alma imagined the constant little dog standing guard in the center of the room during Ambrose’s final hours, barking out protection against ghosts and demons and all the attendant horrors of extraordinary despair. For that reason alone she was honor bound to keep him.

Unfortunately, few sea captains welcome the company of woebegone, hunchbacked, unfriendly little island dogs on their ships. Most had simply refused Roger, and thus sailed on without Alma, delaying her journey considerably. Even when they had not refused, Alma sometimes had been required to pay double fare for the privilege of Roger’s company. She paid. She sliced open yet more hidden pockets in the hems of her traveling dresses, and pulled out yet more gold, one coin at a time. One must always have a bribe.

Alma did not mind the onerous length of her journey, not in the least. In fact, she needed every hour of it, and had welcomed those long months of isolation on strange ships and in foreign ports. Since her near-drowning in Matavai Bay during that raucous game of haru raa puu, Alma had been balancing on the keenest edge of thought she had ever experienced, and she did not want her thinking disturbed. The idea that had struck her with such force while she was underwater now inhabited her, and it would not be shaken. She could not always identify whether the idea was chasing her, or whether she was chasing it. At times, the idea seemed like a creature in the corner of a dream—drawing closer, then vanishing, and then reappearing. She pursued the idea all day long, in page after page of scrawling, vigorous notes. Even at night, her mind tracked the footsteps of this idea so relentlessly that she would awaken every few hours with the need to sit up in bed and write more.

Alma’s greatest strength was not as a writer, it must be said, although she had already authored two—nearly three—books. She had never claimed literary talent. Her books on mosses were nothing that anyone would read for pleasure, nor were they even exactly readable, except to a small cadre of bryologists. Her greatest strength was as a taxonomist, with a bottomless memory for species differentiation and a bludgeoningly relentless capacity for minutiae. Decidedly, she was no storyteller. But ever since fighting her way to the surface that afternoon in Matavai Bay, Alma believed that she now had a story to tell—an immense story. It was not a cheerful story, but it explained a good deal about the natural world. In fact, she believed, it explained everything.

Here is the story that Alma wanted to tell: The natural world was a place of punishing brutality, where species large and small competed against each other in order to survive. In this struggle for existence, the strong endured; the weak were eliminated.

This in itself was not an original idea. Scientists had been using the phrase “the struggle for existence” for many decades already. Thomas Malthus used it to describe the forces that shaped population explosions and collapses across history. Owen and Lyell used it as well, in their work on extinction and geology. The struggle for existence was, if anything, an obvious point. But Alma’s story had a twist. Alma hypothesized, and had come to believe, that the struggle for existence—when played out over vast periods of time—did not merely define life on earth; it had created life on earth. It had certainly created the staggering variety of life on earth. Struggle was the mechanism. Struggle was the explanation behind all the most troublesome biological mysteries: species differentiation, species extinction, and species transmutation. Struggle explained everything.

The planet was a place of limited resources. Competition for these resources was heated and constant. Individuals who managed to endure the trials of life generally did so because of some feature or mutation that made them more hardy, more clever, more inventive, or more resilient than others. Once this advantageous differentiation was attained, the surviving individuals were able to pass along their beneficial traits to offspring, who were thus able to enjoy the comforts of dominance—that is, until some other, superior, competitor came along, or a necessary resource vanished. During the course of this never-ending battle for survival, the very design of species inevitably shifted.

Alma was thinking somewhat along the lines of what the astronomer William Herschel had called “continuous creation”—the notion of something both eternal and unfolding. But Herschel had believed that creation could be continuous only at the scale of the cosmos, whereas Alma now believed that creation was continuous everywhere, at all levels of life—even at the microscopic level, even at the human level. Challenges were omnipresent, and with every moment, the conditions of the natural world changed. Advantages were gained; advantages were lost. There were periods of abundance, followed by periods of hia‘ia—the seasons of craving. Under the wrong circumstances, anything was capable of extinction. But under the right circumstances, anything was capable of transmutation. Extinction and transmutation had been occurring since the dawn of life, were still occurring now, and would continue to occur until the end of time—and if that did not constitute “continuous creation,” then Alma did not know what did.

The struggle for existence, she was certain, had also shaped human biology and human destiny. There was no better example, Alma thought, than Tomorrow Morning, whose entire family had been annihilated by unfamiliar diseases brought upon them by the Europeans’ arrival in Tahiti. His bloodline had nearly been rendered extinct, but for some reason Tomorrow Morning had not died. Something in his constitution had enabled him to survive, even while Death had come harvesting with both hands, taking all others around him. Tomorrow Morning had endured, though, and had lived to produce heirs, who may even have inherited his strengths and his extraordinary resistance to illness. This is the sort of event that shapes a species.

What’s more, Alma thought, the struggle for existence also defined the inner life of a human being. Tomorrow Morning was a pagan who had transmuted into a devout Christian—for he was cunning and self-preserving, and had seen the direction the world was taking. He had chosen the future over the past. As a result of his foresight, Tomorrow Morning’s children would thrive in a new world, where their father was revered and powerful. (Or, at least, his children would thrive until another wave of challenge arrived to confront them. Then they would have to make their own way. That would be their battle, and nobody could spare them it.)

On the other hand, there was Ambrose Pike, a man whom God had blessed fourfold with genius, originality, beauty, and grace—but who simply did not have the gift of endurance. Ambrose had misread the world. He had wished for the world to be a paradise, when in fact it was a battlefield. He had spent his life longing for the eternal, the constant, and the pure. He desired an airy covenant of angels, but was bound—as is everyone and everything—by the hard rules of nature. Moreover, as Alma well knew, it was not always the most beautiful, brilliant, original, or graceful who survived the struggle for existence; sometimes it was the most ruthless, or the most lucky, or maybe just the most stubborn.

The trick at every turn was to endure the test of living for as long as possible. The odds of survival were punishingly slim, for the world was naught but a school of calamity and an endless burning furnace of tribulation. But those who survived the world shaped it—even as the world, simultaneously, shaped them.

Alma called her idea “A Theory of Competitive Alteration,” and she believed she could prove it. Naturally, she could not prove it using the examples of Tomorrow Morning and Ambrose Pike—although they would live forever in her imagination as outsized, romantic, illustrative figures. Even to make mention of them would be grossly unscientific.

She could, however, prove it with mosses.

Alma wrote quickly and copiously. She did not slow down to revise, but would simply tear up old drafts and begin again from scratch, nearly every day. She could not slow her pace; she was not interested in slowing her pace. Like a besotted drunk—who can run without falling, but who cannot walk without falling—Alma could only propel herself through her idea with blind speed. She was afraid to slow down and write more carefully, for she feared she might tumble over, lose her nerve, or—worse!—lose her idea.

To tell this story—the story of species transmutation, as demonstrable through the gradual metastasis of mosses—Alma did not need notes, or access to the old library at White Acre, or her herbarium. She needed none of this, for a vast comprehension of moss taxonomy already existed within her head, filling every corner of her cranium with well-remembered facts and details. She also had at her fingertips (or, rather, at her mind’s fingertips) all the ideas that had already been written over the last century on the subject of species metamorphosis and geological evolution. Her mind was like a terrific repository of endless shelves, stacked with untold thousands of books and boxes, organized into infinite, alphabetized particulars.

She did not need a library; she was a library.

For the first few months of her journey, she wrote and rewrote the fundamental guiding assumptions for her theory, until she finally felt she had it correctly and irreducibly distilled to these ten:

That the distribution of land and water across the face of the earth has not always been where it is now.

That, based upon the fossil record, mosses appear to have endured all geological epochs since the dawn of life.

That mosses appear to have endured these diverse geological epochs through a process of adaptive change.

That mosses can change their fate either by altering their location (i.e., moving to a more favorable climate), or by altering their internal structure (i.e., transmutation).

That the transmutation of mosses has expressed itself over time in a nearly infinite appropriation and discarding of traits, leading to such adaptations as: increased resistance to drying, a decreased reliance upon direct sunlight, and the ability to revive after years of drought.

That the rate of change within moss colonies, and the extent of that change, is so dramatic as to suggest perpetual change.

That competition and the struggle for existence is the mechanism behind this state of perpetual change.

That moss was almost certainly a different entity (most likely algae) before it was moss.

That moss—as the world continues to transform—may itself eventually become a different entity.

That whatever is true for mosses must be true for all living things.

Alma’s theory felt audacious and dangerous, even to herself. She knew she was in treacherous territory—not only from a religious perspective (though this did not much concern her), but also from a scientific perspective. As she marched toward her conclusion like a mountaineer, Alma knew she was at risk of falling into the trap that had consumed so many grandiose French thinkers over the centuries—namely, the trap of l’esprit de système, where one dreams up some giant and thrilling universal explanation, and then tries to force all facts and reason to bend to that explanation, regardless of whether it makes any sense. But Alma was certain that her theory did make sense. The trick would be to prove it in writing.

A ship was as good a place as anywhere to write—and several ships, one after another, moving ponderously across the empty seas, were better still. Nobody disturbed Alma. Roger the dog lay in the corner of her berth and watched her work, panting and scratching at himself and often looking terribly disappointed in life, but he would have done that wherever in the world he happened to be. At night, he would sometimes jump into her bunk and curl up against the crook of her legs. Sometimes he woke Alma with his little moans.

Sometimes Alma, too, uttered little moans in the night. Just as she had found during her first voyage at sea, she discovered that her dreams were vivid and powerful, and that Ambrose Pike figured prominently in them. But now Tomorrow Morning made frequent appearances in her dreams, as well—sometimes even melding with Ambrose into strange, sensual, chimeric figures: Ambrose’s head on Tomorrow Morning’s body; Tomorrow Morning’s voice emerging from Ambrose’s throat; one man, during sexual congress with Alma, suddenly transforming into the other. But it was not only Ambrose and Tomorrow Morning who blended together in these strange dreams—everything seemed to be merging. In Alma’s most compelling nighttime reveries, the old binding closet at White Acre metamorphosed into a cave of mosses; her carriage house became a tiny but pleasant room at the Griffon Asylum; the sweet-smelling meadows of Philadelphia transformed into fields of warm black sand; Prudence was suddenly dressed in Hanneke’s clothing; Sister Manu tended to the boxwoods in Beatrix Whittaker’s Euclidean garden; Henry Whittaker paddled up the Schuylkill River in a tiny Polynesian outrigger canoe.

Arresting though these images may have been, the dreams somehow did not disturb Alma. Instead, they filled her with the most astonishing sensation of synthesis—as though all the most disparate elements of her biography were at last knitting together. All the things that she had ever known or loved in the world were stitching themselves up and becoming one thing. Realizing this made her feel both unburdened and triumphant. She had that feeling again—that feeling she had experienced only once before, in the weeks leading up to her wedding with Ambrose—of being most spectacularly alive. Not merely alive, but outfitted with a mind that was functioning at the uppermost limits of its capacity—a mind that was seeing everything, and understanding everything, as though watching it all from the highest imaginable ridge.

She would awaken, catch her breath, and immediately begin writing again.

Having established the ten guiding principles of her daring theory, Alma now harnessed her most quivering, electrified energies, and wrote the history of the Moss Wars of White Acre. She wrote the story of the twenty-six years she had spent observing the advance and retreat of competing colonies of moss across one tumble of boulders at the edge of the woods. She focused her attention most specifically upon the genus Dicranum, because it demonstrated the most elaborate range of variation within the moss family. Alma knew of Dicranum species that were short and plain, and others that were dressed in exotic fringe. There were species that were straight-leafed, others that were twisted, others that lived only on rotting logs beside stones, others that claimed the sunniest crests of tall boulders, some that proliferated in puddled water, and one that grew most aggressively near the droppings of white-tailed deer.

Over her decades of study, Alma had noticed that the most similar Dicranum species were the ones that could be found right next to each other. She argued that this was not accidental—that the rigors of competition for sunlight, soil, and water had forced the plants, over the millennia, into evolving minuscule adaptations that would advantage them ever so slightly over their neighbors. This is why three or four variations of Dicranum could simultaneously exist on one boulder: they had each found their own niche in this contained, compressed environment, and were now defending their individual territory with slight adaptations. These adaptations did not have to be extraordinary (the mosses did not need to grow flowers, or fruit, or wings); they simply needed to be different enough to outcompete rivals—and no rival in the world was more threatening than the rival who was brushing right up against you. The most urgent war is always the one fought at home.

Alma reported in exhaustive detail battles whose victories and defeats were measured in inches, and over decades. She recounted how climate alterations over those decades had given advantages to one variety over another, how birds had transformed the destiny of the mosses, and how—when the old oak beside the pasture fence fell and the pattern of shade shifted overnight—the whole universe of the rock field changed with it.

She wrote, “The greater the crisis, it seems, the swifter the evolution.”

She wrote, “All transformation appears to be motivated by desperation and emergency.”

She wrote, “The beauty and variety of the natural world are merely the visible legacies of endless war.”

She wrote, “The victor shall win—but only until he no longer wins.”

She wrote, “This life is a tentative and difficult experiment. Sometimes there will be victory after suffering—but nothing is promised. The most precious or beautiful individual may not be the most resilient. The battle of nature is not marked by evil, but by this one mighty and indifferent natural law: that there are simply too many life forms, and not enough resources for all to survive.”

She wrote, “Ongoing battle between and among species is inescapable, as is loss, as is biological modification. Evolution is a brutal mathematics, and the long road of time is littered with the fossilized remnants of incalculable failed experiments.”

She wrote, “Those who are ill-prepared to endure the battle for survival should perhaps never have attempted living in the first place. The only unforgivable crime is to cut short the experiment of one’s own life before its natural end. To do so is a weakness and a pity—for the experiment of life will cut itself off soon enough, in all our cases, and one may just as well have the courage and the curiosity to stay in the battle until one’s eventual and inevitable demise. Anything less than a fight for endurance is cowardly. Anything less than a fight for endurance is a refusal of the great covenant of life.”

Sometimes she had to cross out entire pages of work, when she looked up from her writing only to realize that hours had passed, and she had not stopped scribbling for a moment, but was no longer exactly discussing mosses.

Then she would go for a brisk circumambulation of the ship’s deck—whatever ship it happened to be—with Roger the dog trailing behind her. Her hands would be trembling and her heart racing with emotion. She would clear her head and her lungs, and reconsider her position. Afterward, she would return to her berth, sit down with a fresh sheet of paper, and begin writing all over again.

She repeated this exercise hundreds of times, for close to fourteen months.

By the time Alma arrived in Rotterdam, her thesis was nearly complete. She did not consider it entirely complete, for something about it was still missing. The creature in the corner of the dream was still gazing at her, unsatisfied and unsettled. This sense of incompletion chewed at her, and she resolved to keep at the idea until she had conquered it. That said, she did feel that most of her theory was irrefutably accurate. If she was correct in her thinking, then she was holding in her hand a rather revolutionary forty-page scientific document. And if, instead, she was incorrect in her thinking? Well, then she had—at the very least—written the most detailed description of life and death in a Philadelphia moss colony that the scientific world would ever see.

In Rotterdam, she rested for a few days at the only hotel she could find that would accept Roger’s presence. She and Roger had walked the city for much of an afternoon, in an all but futile search for lodging. Along the way, she’d become increasingly irritated by the bilious looks that hotel clerks kept throwing their way. She could not help but think that if Roger were a more handsome dog, or a more charming dog, she would not have encountered so much trouble finding a room. This struck Alma as terribly unjust, for she had come to regard the little orange mongrel as noble in his own fashion. Had he not just crossed the world? How many supercilious hotel clerks could say the same? But she supposed this was the way of life—prejudice and ignominy and their sorry like.

As for the hotel that did accept them, it was a squalid place, run by a rheumy old woman who peered at Roger over the desk and said, “I once had a cat who looked just like him.”

Dear God! Alma thought in horror at the idea of such a sad beast.

“You aren’t a whore, are you?” asked the woman, just to be certain.

This time, Alma uttered her “Dear God!” aloud. She simply could not help herself. Her answer seemed to satisfy the proprietress.

The tarnished mirror in the hotel room revealed to Alma that she did not look much more civilized than Roger. She could not arrive in Amsterdam looking like this. Her wardrobe was a ruin and a havoc. Her hair, which had grown increasingly white, was a ruin and a havoc, as well. There was nothing to be done about the hair, but over the next few days she had several new frocks quickly sewn up. They were nothing fine (she modeled them on Hanneke’s original, practical pattern) but at least they were new, clean, and intact. She purchased new shoes. She sat in a park and wrote long letters to both Prudence and Hanneke, alerting them that she had reached Holland, and that she intended to remain here indefinitely.

She was nearly out of money. She still had a bit of gold sewn into her tattered hems, but not much. She’d kept precious little of her father’s inheritance to begin with, and now—over these last years of travel—the better part of her modest bequest had been spent, one precious coin at a time. She was left with a sum not nearly sufficient to meet the simplest demands of life. Of course, she knew she could always get more money, if true emergency were to arise. She supposed she could walk into any countinghouse at the Rotterdam docks and—using Dick Yancey’s name and her father’s legacy—easily draw a loan against the Whittaker fortune. But she did not wish to do this. She did not feel that the fortune was rightfully hers. It struck her as a matter of utmost personal consequence that she—from this point forth—make her own way in the world.

Letters posted and a fresh wardrobe procured, Alma and Roger left Rotterdam on a steamboat—by far the easiest part of their journey—and headed to the Port of Amsterdam. Upon their arrival, Alma left her luggage at a modest hotel near the docks and hired a coachman (who, for an additional fee of twenty stivers, was finally persuaded to accept Roger as a passenger). The coach took them all the way to the quiet neighborhood of Plantage, straight to the gates of the Hortus Botanicus.

Alma stepped out into the slanting early-evening sun outside the botanical garden’s tall brick walls. Roger was by her side; under her arm was a parcel wrapped in plain brown paper. A young man in a tidy guard’s uniform stood at the gate, and Alma approached, asking in her easy Dutch whether the director was on the premises today. The young man confirmed that the director was indeed on the premises, because the director came to work every day of the year.

Alma smiled. Naturally he does, she thought.

“Would it be possible to have a word with him?” she asked.

“Might I ask who you are, and what your business is?” asked the young man, aiming condemnatory looks at both her and Roger. She did not object to his questions, but she certainly objected to his tone.

“My name is Alma Whittaker, and my business is the study of mosses and the transmutation of species,” she said.

“And why should the director want to see you?” the guard asked.

She drew herself up to her most formidable height and, like a rauti, launched into an imposing recitation of her bloodline. “My father was Henry Whittaker, whom some in your country once called ‘The Prince of Peru.’ My paternal grandfather was the Apple Magus to His Majesty King George III of England. My maternal grandfather was Jacob van Devender, a master of ornamental aloes, and the director of these gardens for thirty-some years—a position that he inherited from his father, who, in turn, had inherited it from his father, and so forth, all the way back to the original founding of this institution in 1638. Your current director is, I believe, a man named Dr. Dees van Devender. He is my uncle. His older sister was named Beatrix van Devender. She was my mother, and a virtuoso of Euclidean botany. My mother was born, if I am not mistaken, just around the corner from where we are now standing, in a private home outside the walls of the Hortus—where all van Devenders since the middle of the seventeenth century have been born.”

The guard gaped at her.

She concluded, “If this is too much information for you to retain, young man, you may simply tell my uncle Dees that his niece from America would very much like to meet him.”