The Signature of All Things: A Novel

Chapter Twenty-nine

Four years passed.

They were happy years for Alma Whittaker, and why would they not have been? She had a home (her uncle had moved her straight into the van Devender household); she had a family (her uncle’s four sons, their lovely wives, and their broods of growing children); she was able to communicate regularly by mail with Prudence and Hanneke back in Philadelphia; and she held a position of considerable responsibility at the Hortus Botanicus. Her official title was Curator van Mossen—the Curator of Mosses. She was given her own office, on the second floor of a pleasant building only two doors down the street from the van Devender residence.

She sent for all her old books and notes from the carriage house back at White Acre, and for her herbarium, too. It was like a holiday for her, the week her shipment arrived; she spent days in nostalgic absorption, unpacking it all. She had missed every item and volume of it. She was blushingly amused to discover, buried in the bottoms of the trunks of books, all her old prurient reading material. She decided to keep the lot of it—though she was sure to keep it well hidden. For one thing, she did not know how to dispose of such scandalous texts respectably. For another thing, these books still had the power to stir her. Even at her advanced age, a stubborn tug of brazen desire lingered within her body, and still demanded her attention on certain nights, when, under the coverlet, she would revisit her familiar old quim, remembering once more the taste of Tomorrow Morning, the smell of Ambrose, the urgency of life’s most stubborn and unrelenting urges. She did not even attempt to fight these urges anymore; by now, it was evident they were a part of her.

Alma earned a respectable salary—her first—at the Hortus, and she shared an assistant and a clerk with the director of mycology and the overseer of ferns (all of whom became dear friends—the first scientific friends she’d ever had). In due course, she made a reputation for herself not only as a brilliant taxonomist but also as a good cousin. It pleased and surprised Alma not a little that she adapted so comfortably to the bustle and tumult of family life, given that she’d always lived such a solitary existence. She delighted in the clever repartee of Dees’s children and grandchildren at the dinner table, and took pride in their many achievements and talents. She was honored when the girls would come to her for advice or consolation about their thrilling or terrible romantic disturbances. She saw bits of Retta in their moments of excitement; bits of Prudence in their moments of reserve; bits of herself in their moments of doubt.

Over time, Alma came to be regarded by all the van Devenders as a considerable asset both to the Hortus and to the family—which two entities were utterly indistinguishable, in any case. Alma’s uncle gave over to her a small, shady corner of the palm house, and invited her to make a permanent display called the Cave of Mosses. This was both a tricky and a satisfying assignment. Mosses do not like to grow where they are not born, and Alma had difficulty orchestrating the necessary and precise conditions (the correct humidity, the right combination of light and shade, the proper stones, gravel, and logs as substrates) to encourage the moss colonies to flourish in these artificial surroundings. She successfully executed this feat, though, and soon the cave thrived with moss specimens from all over the world. It would be a lifelong project to maintain the exhibit, which required continuous misting (achieved with the help of steam-powered engines), needed to be cooled by insulated walls, and could never be exposed to direct sunlight. Aggressive and fast-growing mosses had to be kept in check, so that rarer, more diminutive species could advance. Alma had read of Japanese monks who maintained their moss gardens by weeding with tiny forceps, and she took up this practice, as well. She could be seen every morning in the Cave of Mosses, removing one tiny invasive strand at a time, by the light of a miner’s lantern, using the tips of her fine steel tweezers. She wanted it perfect. She wanted it to glitter like emerald fire—just as that extraordinary moss cave had glittered for her and Tomorrow Morning, years before, in Tahiti.

The Cave of Mosses became a popular exhibit at the Hortus, but only for a certain type of person: the type who longed for cool darkness, for silence, for reverie. (The type of person, in other words, who had little interest in showy blossoms, mammoth lily pads, or crowds of loud families.) Alma enjoyed perching in a corner of the cave and observing these sorts of people enter the world she had made. She saw them caress the pelts of moss, and watched their faces relax, their posture loosen. She felt an affinity with them—the quiet ones.

During those years, Alma also spent a considerable amount of time working over her theory of competitive alteration. Uncle Dees had been urging her to publish the paper since he’d read it upon her arrival in 1854, but Alma had resisted then, and she continued to resist. Moreover, she refused to allow him to discuss her theory with anyone else. Her reluctance brought nothing but frustration to her good uncle, who believed Alma’s theory both important and very probably correct. He accused her of being overly timid, of holding back. Specifically, he accused her of fearing religious condemnation, should she make public her notions of continuous creation and species transmutation.

“You simply do not have the courage to be a God-killer,” said this good Dutch Protestant, who had attended church quite devoutly every Sabbath of his life. “Come now, Alma—what are you afraid of? Show a little of your father’s audacity, child! Go forth and be a terror in the world! Wake up the whole barking dog-kennel of controversy, if you must. The Hortus will protect you! We could publish it ourselves! We even could publish it under my name, if you dread censure.”

But Alma was hesitating not from fear of the church, but from a deep conviction that her theory was not quite yet scientifically incontrovertible. A small hole existed in her logic, she felt sure, and she could not deduce how to close it. Alma was a perfectionist and more than a little bit of a pedant, and she certainly was not going to be caught publishing a theory with a hole in it, even a small hole. She was not afraid of offending religion, as she frequently told her uncle; she was afraid of offending something far more sacred to her: reason.

For here was the hole in Alma’s theory: she could not, for the life of her, understand the evolutionary advantages of altruism and self-sacrifice. If the natural world was indeed the sphere of amoral and constant struggle for survival that it appeared to be, and if outcompeting one’s rivals was the key to dominance, adaptation, and endurance—then what was one supposed to make, for instance, of someone like her sister Prudence?

Whenever Alma mentioned her sister’s name, with respect to her theory of competitive alteration, her uncle groaned. “Not again!” he would say, pulling at his beard. “No one has heard of Prudence, Alma! No one cares!”

But Alma cared, and the “Prudence Problem,” as she came to call it, troubled her mind considerably, for it threatened to undo her entire theory. It especially troubled her because it was all so personal. Alma had been the intended beneficiary, after all, of an act of great generosity and self-sacrifice on Prudence’s part almost forty years earlier, and she had never forgotten it. Prudence had silently given up her one true love—with the hope that George Hawkes would marry Alma instead, and that Alma would benefit from that marriage. The fact that Prudence’s act of sacrifice had been utterly futile did not in any way diminish its sincerity.

Why would a person do such a thing?

Alma could answer that question from a moral standpoint (Because Prudence is kind and selfless), but she could not answer it from a biological one (Why do kindness and selflessness exist?). Alma entirely understood why her uncle tore at his beard whenever she mentioned the name Prudence. She recognized that—in the vast scope of human and natural history—this tragic triangle between Prudence, George, and herself was so tiny and so insignificant that it was almost farcical to raise the subject at all (and within a scientific discussion, no less). But still—the question would not go away.

Why would a person do such a thing?

Every time Alma thought about Prudence, she was forced to ask herself this question again, and then watch helplessly as her theory of competitive alteration fell apart before her eyes. For Prudence Whittaker Dixon, after all, was scarcely a unique example. Why did anyone ever act beyond the scope of base self-interest? Alma could make a fairly persuasive argument as to why mothers, for instance, made sacrifices on behalf of their children (because it was advantageous to continue the family line), but she could not explain why a soldier would run straight into a line of bayonets to protect an injured comrade. How did that action bolster or benefit the brave soldier or his family? It simply did not: through self-sacrifice, the now-dead soldier had negated not only his own future, but the continuation of his bloodline, as well.

Nor could Alma explain why a starving prisoner would give food to a cellmate.

Nor could she explain why a lady would leap into a canal to save another woman’s baby, only to drown in the process—which tragic event had just occurred, not long ago, right down the street from the Hortus.

Alma did not know whether, if so confronted, she herself would ever behave in such a noble manner, but others inarguably did so—and fairly routinely, all things considered. Alma had no doubt in her mind that her sister and the Reverend Welles (as another example of extraordinary goodness) would unhesitatingly deny themselves food that another might live, and would just as unhesitatingly risk injury or death to save a stranger’s baby, or even a stranger’s house cat.

Furthermore, there was nothing analogous to such extreme examples of human self-sacrifice in the rest of the natural world—not so far as she could see. Yes, within a hive of bees, or a pack of wolves, or a flock of birds, or even a colony of mosses, individuals sometimes died for the greater good of the group. But one never saw a wolf saving the life of a bee. One never saw an individual strand of moss choose to die, by giving over its precious water supply to an ant, out of simple beneficence!

These were the sorts of arguments that exasperated her uncle, as Alma and Dees sat up together late into the night, year after year, debating the question. Now it was the early spring of 1858, and they were debating it still.

“Don’t be such a tiresome sophist!” Dees said. “Publish the paper as it is.”

“I cannot help but be, Uncle,” Alma replied, smiling. “Remember—I have my mother’s mind.”

“You tax my patience, niece,” he said. “Publish the paper, let the world debate the subject, and let us rest from this wearisome, long-nosed fault-finding.”

But she would not be swayed. “If I can see this hole in my argument, Uncle, then others will surely see it, and my work will not be taken seriously. If the theory of competitive alteration is indeed correct, then it needs to be correct for the entirety of the natural world—humanity included.”

“Make an exception for humans,” her uncle suggested with a shrug. “Aristotle did.”

“I am not talking about the Great Chain of Being, Uncle. I’m not interested in ethical or philosophical arguments; I’m interested in a universal biological theory. The laws of nature cannot admit exceptions, or they cannot stand as laws. Prudence is not exempt from gravity; therefore, she cannot be exempt from the theory of competitive alteration, if that theory is, in fact, true. If she is exempt from it, on the other hand, then the theory cannot be true.”

“Gravity?” He rolled his eyes. “My goodness, child, listen to you. You wish to be Newton now!”

“I wish to be correct,” Alma corrected.

In her lighter moments, Alma found the Prudence Problem almost comical. During the entirety of their youth Prudence had been a problem to Alma, and now—even as Alma had learned to love, appreciate, and respect her sister enormously—Prudence was a problem still.

“Sometimes I feel that I would like never to hear the name Prudence spoken in this household again,” Uncle Dees said. “I’ve had it up and down with Prudence.”

“Then explain her to me,” Alma insisted. “Why does she adopt the orphans of Negro slaves? Why does she give her every last penny to the poor? How does this advantage her? How does this advantage her own offspring? Explain it to me!”

“It advantages her, Alma, because she is a Christian martyr, and she relishes a bit of crucifixion from time to time. I know the type, my dear. There are people, as you surely must realize by now, who take every bit as much pleasure in ministration and self-sacrifice as others do in pillage and murder. Such tiresome exemplars are rare, but they decidedly exist.”

“But there we touch upon the heart of our problem again!” Alma retorted. “If my theory is correct, such people should not exist at all. Remember, Uncle, my thesis is not called ‘A Theory of the Pleasures of Self-Sacrifice.’”

“Publish it, Alma,” he said wearily. “It is a fine piece of thinking, all in one piece. Publish it as it is, and let the world argue this point.”

“I cannot publish it,” she insisted, “until the point is inarguable.”

Thus the conversation rotated and circled and ended as always, stuck in the same frustrating corner. Uncle Dees looked down at Roger the dog, curled up in his lap, and said, “You would rescue me if I were drowning in a canal, wouldn’t you, my friend?”

Roger thumped his interesting version of a tail in reply.

Alma had to admit: Roger likely would rescue Uncle Dees if he were drowning in a canal, or trapped in a fire, or starving in a prison, or pinned beneath a collapsed building—and Dees would certainly do the same for him. The love between Uncle Dees and Roger was every bit as enduring as it had been immediate. They were never to be seen apart, man and dog, not since the moment of their introduction. Very quickly after their arrival in Amsterdam four years earlier, Roger had given Alma to understand that he was no longer her dog—that, in fact, he had never been her dog, nor had he ever been Ambrose’s dog, but that he had been Dees’s dog all along, by force of pure and plain destiny. The fact that Roger was born in distant Tahiti, whereas Dees van Devender resided in Holland, had been the result, Roger appeared to believe, of an unfortunate clerical error, now thankfully rectified.

As for Alma’s role in Roger’s life, she had merely been a courier, responsible for transporting the anxious little orange fellow halfway around the world, in order to unite dog and man in the eternal and devoted love that was their rightful due.

Eternal and devoted love.

Why?

Roger was another one Alma couldn’t figure out.

Roger and Prudence, both.

The summer of 1858 arrived, and with it a sudden season of death. The sorrows began on the last day of June, when Alma received a letter from her sister, delivering an awful compendium of sad news.

“I have three deaths to report,” Prudence warned in the first line. “Perhaps, sister, you had best sit down before you read on.”

Alma did not sit down. She stood in the doorway of the van Devender residence on Plantage Parklaan, reading this lamentable communication from distant Philadelphia, while her hands shook in distress.

Firstly, Prudence reported, Hanneke de Groot was dead at the age of eighty-seven. The old housekeeper had passed in her rooms in the basement of White Acre, safe behind the bars of her private vault. She appeared to have died in her sleep, and without suffering.

“We cannot conceive of how we shall carry on here without her,” Prudence wrote. “I need not remind you of her goodness and value. She was as a mother to me, as I know she was to you.”

But scarcely had Hanneke’s body been discovered, Prudence wrote on, than a boy arrived at White Acre with a message from George Hawkes that Retta—“transformed these many years by madness, beyond all recognition”—had expired in her room at the Griffon Asylum for the Insane.

Prudence wrote, “It is challenging to know what one should regret more arduously: Retta’s death, or the sad circumstances of her life. I strive to remember the Retta of long ago, so gay and carefree. Scarcely can I see her in my imagination as that girl, before her mind became so dreadfully clouded . . . for that was so long ago, as I have said, when we were all so young.”

Then came the most shocking news. Not two days after Retta’s death, Prudence reported, George Hawkes himself had died. He had just come from Griffon’s, straight from making arrangements for his wife’s funeral, and had collapsed on the street in front of his printing shop. He was sixty-seven years old.

“I apologize that it has taken me more than a week to write you this unhappy missive,” Prudence concluded, “but my mind is beset by so many thoughts and distresses that it has been difficult for me to proceed. It staggers one’s mind. We are all grievously shocked here. Perhaps I have delayed so long in writing this letter because I could not help but think: Every day that I do not tell my poor sister this news, she does not have to bear it. I search my heart for a peppercorn’s worth of comfort to offer you, but find it difficult to come by. I scarcely can find comfort for myself. May the Lord receive and preserve them all. I am at a loss for what else to say, please forgive me. The school continues well. The students thrive. Mr. Dixon and the children send their abiding affection—most sincerely, Prudence.”

Now Alma did sit, and she put down the letter beside her.

Hanneke, Retta, and George—all gone, in one sweep of the hand.

“Poor Prudence,” Alma murmured aloud.

Poor Prudence, indeed, to have lost George Hawkes forever. Of course, Prudence had lost George long ago, but now she had lost him again, and this time forever. Prudence had never stopped loving George, nor he her—or so Hanneke had told Alma. But George had followed poor Retta to her grave, bound forever to the destiny of the tragic little wife he had never loved. All the possibilities of their youth, Alma thought, all run to waste. For the first time, she considered how similarly her fate and her sister’s had unfolded—both of them doomed to love men they could not possess, and both of them resolved to carry on bravely despite it. One did the best one could, of course, and there was dignity to be found in stoicism, but truly there were times when the sadness of this world was scarcely to be endured, and the violence of love, Alma thought, was sometimes the most pitiless violence of all.

Her first instinct was to return home with all haste. But White Acre was no longer her home, and even to imagine walking into the old mansion without seeing Hanneke de Groot’s face made Alma feel sick and lost. Instead, she went to her office and wrote a letter in reply, searching her own heart for peppercorns of comfort, and finding them scarce. Uncharacteristically, she turned to the Bible, to Psalms. She wrote to her sister, “The Lord is near unto them who are of a broken heart.” She spent the entire day behind her closed door, bent quietly in half by grief. She did not burden her uncle with any of this sad news. He had been so pleased to know that his beloved nursemaid Hanneke de Groot still lived; she could not bear to inform him of this death, or the others. She did not wish to lay any trouble upon his good and cheerful spirit.

Only a fortnight later, she would be glad of this decision, when her uncle Dees contracted a fever, took to his bed, and died within the space of a day. It was one of those periodic fevers that swept through Amsterdam in summertime, when the canals grew stale and fetid. One morning, Dees and Alma and Roger shared breakfast together, and by the next breakfast Dees was gone. He was seventy-six. Alma was so ruptured by this loss—on the heels of the others—that she barely knew how to contain herself. She found herself pacing her rooms in the night, pressing one hand against her chest, for fear her ribs would cleave open and her heart would fall to the ground. Alma felt that she had known her uncle for such a short while—not nearly long enough! Why was there never enough time? One day he had been there, and then, the next, called away. All of them had been called away.

Half of Amsterdam, it seemed, gathered for the funeral of Dr. Dees van Devender. His four sons and two eldest grandsons carried the casket from the house on Plantage Parklaan to the church around the corner. A bundle of daughters-in-law and grandchildren clutched each other and wept; they pulled Alma into their midst, and she drew comfort from this press of family. Dees had been much adored. All were bereft. What’s more, the family pastor revealed that Dr. van Devender had been a quiet paragon of charitable works for all his life; there were many in this crowd of mourners whose lives he had aided or even saved over the years.

The irony of this revelation—in light of Alma and Dees’s interminable midnight debates—made Alma want to cry and laugh at the same time. His lifetime of anonymous generosity certainly placed him high on Maimonides’s ladder, she thought, but he might have mentioned it to me at some point! How could he have sat there, year after year, dismissing the scientific relevance of altruism, while at the same time secretly dedicating himself to it quite tirelessly? It made Alma marvel at him. It made her miss him. It made her want to question him and tease him—but he was gone.

After the funeral, Dees’s eldest son, Elbert, who would now be taking over directorship of the Hortus, had the good grace to approach Alma and pledge to her that her place, both within the family and at the Hortus, was absolutely assured.

“You need never worry for the future,” he said. “We all wish for you to stay.”

“Thank you, Elbert,” she managed to say, and the two cousins embraced.

“It comforts me to know that you loved him, as did we all,” Elbert said.

But no one had loved Dees more than Roger the dog. From the first moment of Dees’s illness, the little orange mutt had refused to move from his master’s bed; he would not leave after the corpse had been removed, either. He planted himself in the cold sheets and would not budge. He refused to take food—not even the wentelteefjes Alma had prepared for him herself, and which she had tearfully tried to feed him by hand. He turned his head to the wall and closed his eyes. She touched his head, spoke to him in Tahitian, and reminded him of his noble lineage, but he did not respond in the least. Within a matter of days, Roger was gone, too.

Were it not for the black cloud of death that swept across Alma’s landscape in that summer of 1858, she almost certainly would have heard about the proceedings of the Linnean Society of London on July 1 of that year. She generally made a point of reading notes from all the more important scientific gatherings across Europe and America. But her mind was—forgivably—much distracted that summer. Journals piled on her desk unread, as she grieved. Looking after her Cave of Mosses absorbed whatever scant energy she could muster. Much else went unattended.

And thus she’d missed it.

In fact, she would hear nothing of it until one morning in late December of the following year, when she opened her copy of The Times and read a review of a new book, by Mr. Charles Darwin, entitled On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.