The Signature of All Things (73 page)

Somehow, Prudence kept her school open through the entire war. She not only endured, she took on yet more children during the conflict. The war ended. The president was assassinated. The union held. The transcontinental railroad was completed. Alma thought perhaps that was what would keep the United States sewn together now—the rough, steel stitches of the mighty railroad. These days America seemed, from Alma’s safe distance, to be a place of uncontrollable, ferocious growth. She was happy not to be there. America was a lifetime ago; she did not think she would recognize the place anymore, nor would it recognize her. She liked her life as a Dutchwoman, as a scholar, as a van Devender. She read every scientific journal, and published in many of them. She had lively discussions with her colleagues, over coffee and pastry. Every summer, the Hortus granted her a month’s leave to go gathering mosses across the Continent. She came to know the Alps quite well, and came to love them, as she tramped across their majesty with her cane and her collecting kit. She came to know the fern-damp woods of Germany, too.

She had grown into a most contented old lady.

The 1870s arrived. In peaceful Amsterdam, Alma entered the eighth decade of her life, but remained committed to her work. She found it difficult to hike anymore, but she tended to her Cave of Mosses, and gave occasional lectures at the Hortus on the subject of bryology. Her eyes began to fail, and she worried that she would no longer be able to identify mosses. In anticipation of this sad inevitability, she practiced working with her mosses in the dark, to learn to identify them by touch. She became quite adept at it. (She did not need to
see
mosses forever, but she would always want to
know
them.) Fortunately, she had excellent help with her work now. Her favorite young cousin, Margaret—fondly nicknamed Mimi—revealed an innate fascination with mosses, and soon became Alma’s protégée. When the girl finished her studies, she came to work with Alma at the Hortus; with Mimi’s
assistance, Alma was able to complete her comprehensive, two-volume
The Mosses of Northern Europe
, which was well received. The volumes were prettily illustrated, though the artist was no Ambrose Pike.

But nobody was Ambrose Pike. Nobody ever would be.

Alma watched as Charles Darwin became ever more the great man of science. She did not begrudge his success; he deserved the praise, and carried himself with dignity. He kept at his work on evolution, which she was pleased to see, with his typical blend of excellence and discretion. In 1871, he published the exhaustive
The Descent of Man
—in which he finally applied his principles of natural selection to humans. He was wise to have waited this long, Alma thought. By this point, the book’s final determination (
Yes, we are apes
) was almost a foregone conclusion. In the dozen years since
Origin
had first appeared, the world had been anticipating and debating “The Monkey Question.” Sides had been drawn, papers had been written, and endless rebuttals and arguments had been brought forth. It was almost as though Darwin had waited for the world to adapt to the unsettling notion that God might not have created mankind from dust, before delivering his calm, well-ordered, carefully argued verdict on the matter. Alma, once more, read the book as closely as anyone, and much admired it.

Still, though, she did not see a solution to the Prudence Problem.

She never told anyone about her own evolutionary theory—and about her own small, tenuous connection to Darwin. She still was far more interested in her shadow brother, Alfred Russel Wallace. She had watched his career carefully over the years too, taking vicarious pride in his successes, and feeling distress at his failures. At first, it had seemed that Wallace would be forever Darwin’s footnote—or even footman, insomuch as he spent a good part of the 1860s writing papers defending natural selection, and, by extension, Darwin. But then Wallace took an odd turn. In the middle of that decade, he discovered spiritualism, hypnotism, and mesmerism, and began exploring what more respectable people called “the occult.” Alma could nearly hear Charles Darwin groaning at this development from across the Channel—for the two men’s names were forever to be linked, and Wallace had taken off on a very disreputable and unscientific flight of fancy indeed. The fact that Wallace attended séances and palm readings, and swore that he had spoken to the dead, was perhaps pardonable, but the fact that he published papers with such titles as “The Scientific Aspect of the Supernatural” was not.

But Alma could not help but love Wallace all the more for his unorthodox beliefs, and for his passionate, fearless arguments. Her own life was becoming ever more sedate and circumscribed, but she took such pleasure from watching Wallace—the wild, unbridled thinker—cause academic mayhem in so many directions at once. He had none of Darwin’s aristocratic propriety; he spilled over with inspirations and distractions and half-baked notions. Nor did he ever stay on a single idea for long, flitting instead from whim to whim.

In his most transcendent fascinations, Wallace inevitably reminded Alma of Ambrose, and this made her fonder of him than ever. Like Ambrose, Wallace was a dreamer. He came down strongly on the side of miracles. He argued that nothing was more important than the investigation of that which appeared to defy the rules of nature, for who were we to claim that we understood the rules of nature? Everything was a miracle until we solved it. Wallace wrote that the first man who ever saw a flying fish probably thought he was witnessing a miracle—and the first man who ever
described
a flying fish was doubtless called a liar. Alma loved him for such playful, stubborn arguments. He would have done well at the White Acre dinner table, she often thought.

Wallace did not completely neglect his more legitimate scientific explorations, however. In 1876, he published his own masterpiece:
The Geographical Distribution of Animals
, which was instantly celebrated as the most definitive text on zoogeography yet produced. It was a stunning book. Alma’s young cousin Mimi read most of it to her, for Alma’s sight had grown quite dim by now. Alma enjoyed Wallace’s ideas so much that during certain passages of the book, she sometimes even cheered aloud.

Mimi would look up from her reading and say, “You do quite enjoy this Alfred Russel Wallace, don’t you, Auntie?”

“He is a prince of science!” Alma smiled.

Wallace soon undermined his own rescued reputation, however, with an increased involvement in radical politics—fighting vociferously for land reform, for women’s suffrage, for the rights of the poor and the dispossessed. He simply could not stay above the fray. Friends and admirers in high places tried to secure him stable positions at good institutions, but Wallace had become known as such an extremist that few would risk hiring him. Alma worried about his finances. She sensed he was not wise with his money. In every way, Wallace simply refused to play the part of the good
English gentleman—probably because he was not, in fact, a good English gentleman, but rather a working-class firebrand who never thought before he spoke, and never paused before he published. His passions made for a certain amount of chaos, and controversy stuck to him like a burr, but Alma did not want him ever to back down. She liked to see him needling the world.

“You tell them, my boy,” Alma would murmur, whenever she heard of his latest scandal. “You tell them!”

Darwin never publicly spoke an ill word about Wallace, nor Wallace about Darwin, but Alma always wondered what the two men—so brilliant, and yet so opposite in disposition and style—truly thought of each other. Her question was answered in April of 1882, when Charles Darwin died and Alfred Russel Wallace, per Darwin’s written instructions, served as a pallbearer at the great man’s funeral.

They loved each other, she realized.
They loved each other, because they knew each other.

With that thought, Alma felt deeply lonely, for the first time in dozens of years.

D
arwin’s death alarmed Alma, who was now eighty-two years old, and increasingly frail. He had been only seventy-three! She had never expected to outlive him. The sense of alarm stayed with her for months after Darwin passed away. It was as though a piece of her own history had died with him, and nobody would ever know it. Not that anyone had known it before, of course, but a link was undoubtedly lost—a link that meant a great deal to her. Soon Alma herself would die, and then there would be only one link left—young Wallace, who was then nearing sixty, and maybe not so young anymore, after all. If things went on as they always had, she would die never having known Wallace, just as she had never known Darwin. It felt unbearably sad to her, quite suddenly, that this might come to pass. She could not allow it to happen.

Alma pondered this. She pondered it for several months. Finally, she took action. She asked Mimi to write a nice letter, on Hortus stationery, asking Alfred Russel Wallace to please accept an invitation to speak on the subject of natural selection at the Hortus Botanicus in Amsterdam, in the
spring of 1883. A honorarium of nine hundred pounds sterling was promised for the gentleman’s time and trouble, and all travel expenses, naturally, would be covered by the Hortus. Mimi balked at the fee—this was several years’ wages, for some people!—but Alma calmly replied, “I will be paying for everything myself, and what’s more, Mr. Wallace needs the money.”

The letter went on to inform Mr. Wallace that he was more than welcome to stay at the van Devenders’ comfortable family residence, which was conveniently situated just outside the gardens, in the prettiest neighborhood of Amsterdam. There would be plenty of young botanists about the place who would be happy to show the famous biologist all the delights of the Hortus, and the city beyond. It would be an honor for the gardens to host such a distinguished guest. Alma signed the letter, “Very sincerely yours, Miss Alma Whittaker—Curator of Mosses.”

A reply came swiftly, from Wallace’s wife, Annie (whose father, Alma had been thrilled to learn, was the great William Mitten, a pharmaceutical chemist and first-rate bryologist). Mrs. Wallace wrote that her husband would be delighted to come to Amsterdam. He would arrive on the nineteenth of March, 1883, and would stay a fortnight. The Wallaces were most grateful for the invitation, and praised the honorarium as very generous, indeed. The offer, the letter hinted, had arrived at just the right time—as had the money.

Chapter Thirty-one

H
e was so tall!

Alma had not expected this. Alfred Russel Wallace was as tall and lanky as Ambrose had been. He was not far from the age Ambrose would have been, either, if Ambrose had survived—sixty years old, and in fine health, if a bit stooped. (This was a man who had plainly spent too many years bent over microscopes, peering at specimens.) He was gray-haired, with a heavy beard, and Alma had to resist the urge to reach up and touch his face with her fingertips. She could not see well anymore, and she wanted to know his features better. But that would have been rude and shocking, so she restrained herself. All the same, as soon as she met him, she felt she was welcoming her oldest friend in the world.

At the beginning of his visit, though, there was such a bustle of activity that Alma was a bit lost in the crowd. She was a large woman, true, but she was old, and old women do tend to get pushed aside at big gatherings—even when they have footed the bill for that gathering. There were many who wanted to meet the great evolutionary biologist, and Alma’s young cousins, all enthusiastic young students of science themselves, took much of his attention, crowding him like hopeful beaux and belles. Wallace was so polite, so friendly—especially with the younger set. He permitted them to boast of their own projects, and to seek his advice. Naturally, they wished to parade him about Amsterdam, too, and thus several days were occupied with silly tourism and civic pride.

Then there was his speech in the Palm House, and the ponderous questions afterward from scholars, journalists, and dignitaries, followed by the requisite long, dull dinner in formal dress. Wallace spoke well, both at his lecture and at the dinner. He managed to avoid controversy, answering all the tedious and uninformed questions about natural selection with thorough patience. His wife must have coached him to be on his best behavior, Alma thought.
Good girl, Annie.

Alma waited. She was not one who was afraid to wait.

In time, the novelty surrounding Wallace’s visit died down, and the clamoring crowds thinned. The young moved on to other excitements, and Alma was able to sit next to her guest for a few breakfasts in a row. She knew him better than anyone, of course, and she knew that he didn’t want to talk about natural selection forever. She engaged him instead on subjects that she knew were dear to his heart—butterfly mimicry, beetle variations, mind-reading, vegetarianism, the evils of inherited wealth, his plan to abolish the stock exchange, his plan for the end of all war, his defense of Indian and Irish self-governance, his suggestion that British authorities beg the world’s forgiveness for the cruelties of their empire, his desire to build a four-hundred-foot-diameter scale model of the earth that people could circle in a giant balloon for educational purposes . . . that sort of thing.

In other words, he relaxed with Alma, and she with him. He was a delightful conversationalist when fully unfettered, as she had always imagined he would be—willing to converse on any number of wide-ranging subjects and passions. She had not enjoyed herself this much in years. Because he was so kind and engaging, he inquired about her life, as well, and did not merely speak of himself. Thus Alma found herself telling Wallace about her childhood at White Acre, about collecting botanical specimens as a five-year-old on a silk-draped pony, about her eccentric parents and their challenging dinner-table conversation, about her father’s stories of mermaids and Captain Cook, about the extraordinary library at the estate, about her almost comically outdated classical education, about her years of study in the moss beds of Philadelphia, about her sister the brave-hearted abolitionist, and about her adventures in Tahiti. Incredibly—though she had not spoken to anyone of Ambrose in decades—she even told him about her remarkable husband, who had painted orchids more beautifully than any man who ever lived, and who had died in the South Seas.