The Signature of All Things

by Elizabeth Gilbert

  It was still incomplete.

  * * *

  But soon enough, Alma grew distracted, then increasingly captivated, by something else.

  Dimly and incrementally, as the entire Darwin debate raged on, she became cognizant of another figure concealed along its shadowy margins. In the same way that Alma—when she was young—would sometimes catch a glimpse of something moving on the periphery of her microscope slide and struggle to focus on it (suspecting, before she knew what it was, that it might be important), now, too, she could see something strange and perhaps significant hovering in the corner. Something was out of place. Something existed in the story of Charles Darwin and natural selection that should not exist. She twiddled the knobs and raised the levers and aimed her complete attention upon the mystery—and that is how she learned of a man named Alfred Russel Wallace.

  Alma first saw Wallace’s name when, out of curiosity, she went back to explore the first official mention of natural selection—which had been on July 1, 1858, at a meeting of the Linnaean Society in London. Alma had missed the notes of that meeting’s proceedings when they’d originally been published, owing to her period of mourning, but now she went back and studied the record quite carefully. Immediately, she noticed something peculiar: another essay had been presented that day, just after the introduction of Darwin’s thesis. That other essay was titled “On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type,” and it had been written by one A. R. Wallace.

  Alma tracked down the essay and read it. It said exactly the same thing Darwin had said, in his theory of natural selection. In fact, it said exactly the same thing Alma had said, in her theory of competitive alteration. Mr. Wallace argued that life was a constant struggle for existence: that there were not enough resources for all; that population was controlled by predators, illness, and food scarcity; and that the weakest would always die first. Wallace’s essay went on to say that any variation in a species that affected the outcome of survival might eventually change that species forever. He said that the most successful variations would proliferate, while the least successful would be rendered extinct. This was how species arose, transmuted, thrived, and vanished.

  The essay was short, simple, and—to Alma’s mind—extremely familiar.

  Who was this person?

  Alma had never before heard of him. This was unlikely in and of itself, for she made an effort to be aware of everyone in the scientific world. She wrote letters to a few colleagues in England, asking, “Who is Alfred Russel Wallace? What are people saying about him? What happened in London in July 1858?”

  The stories she learned intrigued her only more. She discovered that Wallace had been born in Monmouthshire, near Wales, to middle-class parents who later fell on hard times; and that he was more or less self-educated, a surveyor by trade. As an adventurous young man, he had shipped off to various jungles over the years, and became a tireless collector of insect and bird specimens. In 1853, Wallace had published a book entitled Palm Trees of the Amazon and their Uses, which Alma had missed entirely, as she’d been traveling between Tahiti and Holland at the time. Since 1854, he had been in the Malay Archipelago, studying tree frogs and the like.

  There, in the distant forests of the Celebes, Wallace had contracted malarial fever and had nearly died. In the depths of his fever, focused upon death, he’d had a flash of inspiration: a theory of evolution, based on the struggle for existence. In a mere few hours he’d written down his theory. He then mailed his hastily penned thesis all the way from the Celebes to England, to a gentleman named Charles Darwin, whom he’d met on one occasion, and whom he much admired. Wallace, quite deferentially, asked Mr. Darwin if this theory of evolution might perhaps have any value. It was an innocent question: Wallace had no way of knowing that Darwin himself had been toiling on this exact idea since approximately 1840. In fact, Darwin had already written nearly two thousand pages of what would become On the Origin of Species, but had shown his work to no one except his dear friend Joseph Hooker, of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. Hooker had for years been encouraging Darwin to publish, but Darwin—in a decision that Alma could well appreciate—had held back, from lack of confidence or certainty.

  Now, in one of the great coincidences in scientific history, it appeared that Darwin’s beautiful and original idea—which he had been privately cultivating for almost two decades—had just been expressed, almost word for word, by a nearly unknown, thirty-five-year-old, malaria-suffering, self-taught naturalist on the other side of the planet.

  Alma’s sources in London reported that Darwin had felt compelled by Wallace’s letter to announce his theory of natural selection, afraid that he would lose ownership of the entire notion if Wallace were to publish first. Quite ironically, Alma thought, it appeared Darwin feared being out-competed over the idea of competition! Out of gentlemanly courtesy, Darwin had decided that Wallace’s letter should be presented at the Linnaean Society on July 1, 1858—right alongside his own research on natural selection—while at the same time putting forth evidence that the hypothesis had belonged to him first. The publication of his Origin of Species had swiftly followed, less than a year and a half later. That rush to publish now suggested to Alma that Darwin had panicked—as well he should have! Wallace was closing in! As do many animals and plants under threat of annihilation, Charles Darwin had been forced to move, forced to take action—forced to adapt. Alma remembered what she herself had written in her own version of the theory: “The greater the crisis, it seems, the swifter the evolution.”

  Reviewing this extraordinary story, there was no question in Alma’s mind: natural selection had been Darwin’s idea first. But it had not been Darwin’s idea uniquely. There was Alma, yes, but there had been somebody else, too. Alma was beyond amazed to learn of this. It seemed an utter intellectual impossibility. But it also brought her strange comfort, to know that Alfred Russel Wallace existed. She drew warmth from the knowledge that she was not alone in this. She had a peer. They were Whittaker and Wallace: comrades in obscurity—although Wallace, of course, had no idea that they were comrades in obscurity, because she was even that much more obscure than he. But Alma knew it. She felt him out there—her strange, miraculous younger brother of the mind. If she had been more religious, she might have thanked God for Alfred Russel Wallace, for it was that small sense of kinship that helped her move gracefully and safely—without debilitating resentment, despair, or shame—through all the clamoring commotion surrounding Mr. Charles Darwin and his colossal, transfiguring, world-changing theory.

  Darwin would belong to history, yes, but Alma had Wallace.

  And that, at least for now, was comfort enough.

  * * *

  The 1860s passed. Holland was quiet, while the United States was riven by an unthinkable war. Scientific discourse carried less weight for Alma during those terrible years, with the news from home of endless, appalling slaughter. Prudence lost her eldest son, an officer, at Antietam. Two of her young grandsons died of camp diseases before even seeing a battlefield. All her life, Prudence had fought to end slavery, and now it was ended, but three of her own had been lost in the fight. “I rejoice and then I grieve,” she wrote Alma. “After that, I grieve some more.” Again, Alma wondered if she should return home—and even offered to—but her sister encouraged her to remain in Holland. “Our nation is too tragic at the moment for visitors,” Prudence reported. “Stay where the world is quieter, and bless that quietness.”

  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 wo
uld 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.

  * * *

  Darwin’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

  He 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.