by James Morrow
“I pray you, grant me an hour of your time.”
“I’ve never trusted the knave of clubs”—he retrieved the knave of hearts—“nor his lovelorn cousin, either. I shall exile ’em both from this afternoon’s tournament. Let me guess. You’re here concerning our ne’er-do-well father’s plight, which you imagine his ne’er-do-well son might remedy.”
“Listen, dear brother, and you’ll learn the solution to all our problems—yours, mine, and Papa’s. It involves a game so bold as to put your precious faro in the shadows.”
She took a long swallow of ginger beer, then told Algernon of the great prize and how she’d become privy to a scientific theory that bid fair to claim it. Any persuasive presentation of this argument required live, exotic creatures that she intended to procure by traveling to the Galápagos archipelago. The rakehells had already underwritten one such expedition, a hunt for Noah’s ark, so it seemed reasonable to suppose they would sponsor another.
With each successive revelation Algernon’s eyes increased in diameter. She couldn’t tell which aspect of her tale had most beguiled him—the size of the purse, her plan to sail around Cape Horn to the equator and then back to England, or her intention to pass off Mr. Darwin’s idea as her own—but in any event she felt emboldened to set forth the hypothesis itself, and so she offered up her narrative of bat wings and baby tails, horse hooves and porpoise paddles, whale teeth and Welshmen’s nipples.
“Being possessed of a hazy belief in a nebulous God, I’m not eager to cast my lot with atheism,” Algernon admitted. “That said, I shan’t reject your theory out of hand. The problem is simply this—I cannot make any sense of it.”
“We shall begin anew,” said Chloe, at once exasperated and galvanized. Leaning over the array of faceup cards, she extracted the knave, queen, king, and ace of diamonds, plus the deuce of spades. “Imagine that everyone in this den has become enamored of that great American bluffing game, poker. Let us further assume that, according to the house rules, a sequential run of royalty can turn the corner to embrace a deuce. Ergo, I’m holding a desirable hand—”
“A straight.”
“A straight, exactly: knave, queen, king, ace, deuce, likely to prosper once the final bet is called. Now suppose my environment changes, and I find myself in a different gaming establishment, such as—”
“The Tinker’s Damn!” cried Algernon.
“The Tinker’s Damn, where the rules forbid a leap to the deuce. Owing to its altered habitat, my hand has been enfeebled, a mere ace high. Destined for a quick death, it will leave no progeny behind.”
“Nothing would please me more than to say I follow your reasoning.”
“Now consider a different set of circumstances. I’m back in the Hook, pondering my round-the-corner straight, when I’m suddenly whisked away to—”
“The Drunken Lord!”
“The Drunken Lord, an establishment where aces aren’t allowed to leap but—voilà!—deuces are always wild, so that my two of spades has become—”
“A ten of diamonds, for a—”
“A royal flush, brimming with adaptive traits and thus certain to propagate those advantages through subsequent generations. Now do you follow my reasoning?”
“I know that royal flushes generally reign supreme, but does that mean I understand Mr. Darwin’s idea? If I had to make a wager, I’d say no.”
“You disappoint me, Algernon.”
“Chloe, ma chère, listen to your one and only twin brother. Whoever God might be, His divine self surely does not play at cards. I, on the other hand, do little else, and so I must take leave of you and attempt to turn my fifty quid into a hundred.”
“First you must agree to help me reach Galápagos.”
“I think not,” said Algernon, quaffing the dregs of his stout.
“Would you rather Papa dropped dead from breaking stones in a workhouse?”
Algernon rolled his eyes, pursed his lips, and, gathering up his playing cards, marched towards a corner of the room shrouded in a fug of cigar smoke and oil-lamp vapor. Chloe remained in the booth and sipped her ginger beer, her mind abuzz with her favorite passage from Mr. Darwin’s essay. “Amongst wild creatures,” he’d written, “the choice of a mate oft-times resides with the female.” In other words, a savannah was arguably more civilized than a city, for how could one improve upon an arrangement whereby a female bird or beast pondered a pool of suitors, weighed their respective merits, and selected the one who most struck her transmutational fancy?
Algernon returned sooner than Chloe expected, grim, stooped, and crestfallen. “Might I finish your drink?” he mumbled in the voice of a man noticing he’d forgotten to put on his trousers that morning. “My brain’s now so befuddled it can’t tell ginger beer from ale.”
She seized her glass and plunked it down before Algernon. “Having just lost fifty quid, the thought of winning ten thousand now appeals to you—am I correct?”
“I have a friend and fellow gambler,” he said, nodding, “one Merridew Runciter, a criminal of considerable accomplishment.” He drained the ginger beer in a single gulp. “Upon inheriting the brigantine Equinox from his late uncle, old Merry abandoned his scandalous vocation as a highwayman to pursue a respectable career in smuggling. I’m confident I can inveigle him into lending us his ship and assuming command.”
“That’s the spirit, brother,” said Chloe, assembling a fragile house from his playing cards. “You’ve caught the fever.”
“I suggest we offer the old rascal a five percent interest in the Shelley Prize, plus a second five percent to divide amongst his crew, which leaves us with a sum sufficient to free our father and feather our nests.” Algernon licked a lacy veil of foam from his mustache. “This is a bad business, sister—I hope you know that. As our Savior once remarked, there’s no profit in gaining the world only to lose one’s soul.”
“We’re not talking about the world, Algernon, merely ten thousand pounds.” She poked the house of cards, causing it to wobble and then collapse. “Let us gather our tortoises whilst we may, and let the Devil take the difference.”
* * *
True to Algernon’s prediction, Merridew Runciter proved eager to donate both his ship and his avarice to the lucrative cause of God’s demise. He drafted a statement explaining “to the Right Honorable Lord Woolfenden” that, as master of the brigantine Equinox, he would “lease said vessel to the Albion Transmutationist Club for the purpose of bearing biological specimens from the Galápagos archipelago to England.” Although attracting a crew would not be difficult—he need merely promise them pieces of the Shelley Prize—he hoped the Society would grant the expedition £300, so he might “provision the ship, repair the hull, and retain competent officers.”
On the ides of August, Chloe and Algernon visited the administrator of the Great God Contest, Mr. Gillivray, in whose Kensington offices all petitioners were required to audition. When he’d met with the Diluvian League, she speculated, Mr. Gillivray must have been particularly struck by their daguerreotypes of Noah’s ark, and so she’d resolved to impress him with an equally vivid prop. After introducing herself as a zookeeper and her brother as an importer of gaming supplies, she flourished a two-foot-high piece of shrubbery she’d pilfered from the Adelphi, all wire twigs and silk leaves, explaining that the world’s every bird and beast had come into being without divine assistance, as branches on a majestic but entirely natural Tree of Life. Mr. Gillivray listened carefully, frowned thoughtfully, and proclaimed that her presentation was certain to amuse his employers. Come Saturday the 22nd of September, she and her brother should betake themselves to 4 Mansfield Road, Oxford, arriving punctually at eight o’clock in the evening.
When the fateful day arrived, Chloe and Algernon boarded a crowded steam train out of Paddington Station, passing the two-hour journey to Oxford wedged into a compartment with four rowdy students, the wire tree sitting on her knees like a lap dog. Upon reaching their destination, she and her brother purcha
sed meat pies from a street vendor and gobbled them down, forgoing the final bite to keep their fingers clean. They proceeded on foot along High Street, pausing to admire the spired splendor of University College, the institution from which Percy Shelley had been expelled for his essay celebrating atheism. Although darkness was coming on fast, Chloe could still make out the entablature above the door—a priest blessing a student, the surmounting caption reading Domimina Nustio Illumea, “The Lord Is My Light.”
They bid the stone scholar farewell, then followed the crenellated town wall to Alastor Hall, a three-storied, Corinthian-capitaled monstrosity dwarfing the adjacent structures, bowing only to honey-colored Mansfield College across the way. Chloe checked her brooch-watch: 7:30 p.m. A liveried footman answered Algernon’s knock, then admitted the contestants to the vestibule, a rotunda ringed by portrait heads of wrinkled Romans, each set on a pedestal. Outfitted in a white peruke and a peach cutaway coat, an ancient gentleman tottered into view, identifying himself as Lippert, the majordomo. After determining that the woman and her brother were the expected atheists, Lippert led them into an antechamber and bade them wait until Lord Woolfenden introduced the evening’s disproof of God. Whilst Algernon lounged on the méridienne, Chloe opened the library doors a crack and stared through the chink like Pyramus seeking a glimpse of Thisbe.
Her first impression of the Byssheans was that they cultivated so towering a caliber of fakery as to make Bulwer-Lytton’s ridiculous historical melodramas seem like eyewitness chronicles. Whereas Algernon had acquired his reputation as a lotus-eating sybarite by following his natural inclinations, these overdressed toffs (with their chalked faces, perfumed neckcloths, pomaded hair, and mistresses in dishabille) were merely playing roles, like actors strutting across the boards. Only one audience member aspired to respectability, being modestly attired and neatly coiffed—most likely the Evening Standard journalist, Mr. Popplewell.
A person of Falstaffian figure and Mephistophelean smile, Lord Woolfenden introduced the night’s first contestant as “Mr. Venables, instructor in entomology at Eton College.”
The petitioner, a squat dumpling of a man with a surfeit of chins, strode confidently towards the judges’ bench. From his valise he extracted three objects and set them on the dais: a big glass jar, a ceramic Star of David, and a globe the size of a Galápagos tortoise egg, mounted on a stand and painted to represent Earth’s moon.
Shifting her constricted gaze, Chloe surveyed the Anglican judges. Thanks to her familiarity with Mr. Darwin’s book collection, she quickly identified Professor Owen (whose choleric countenance decorated the title page of Report on British Fossil Reptiles) and also the Reverend Mr. Symonds (whose engraved portrait served as the frontispiece of Old Stones). It followed that the remaining Anglican, a somber and gangly young man, must be the Reverend Mr. Chadwick.
“The Argument from Cosmic Correlations turns on the improbably large number of symmetries in the universe,” Mr. Venables began, “all of them best understood as evidence planted by our Creator, that we might feel confident of His existence.” The contestant picked up the lunar globe, showing it to the judges. “Consider how, viewed from Earth, the diameter of the moon appears the same as that of the sun. Owing to this congruence, the human race is periodically awed by solar eclipses, those grand displays of indomitable sunbeams fringing our planet’s satellite. ‘God is real,’ the corona tells us. ‘God is love and light, eternally shining behind whatever lumps of woe might briefly block a person’s way in life.’”
Next Venables presented the bench with his Star of David. “Now consider this familiar image, sacred to God’s Chosen People. Not only does the Mogen David decorate many a synagogue, it also adorns the heavens. For as every schoolboy knows, our planet revolves about the sun accompanied by six other such bodies: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus—that’s right, six, the number of vertices that define a Star of David. ‘God is near,’ the configuration tells us. ‘Even before the Creator revealed Himself to the Hebrews, He had announced Himself to all Mankind.’”
The petitioner removed a brass bell from his vest pocket and rang it vigorously. An instant later Lippert and the footman appeared, straightaway making a circuit of the library, snuffing candles and stanching gas lamps. The resulting darkness drew everyone’s attention to the glass jar, which—mirabile dictu—was filled with tiny twinkling lights.
“Behold those creatures called fireflies,” said Venables, displaying the luminous receptacle to the judges. “After my uncle in Pennsylvania shipped me the necessary chrysalises, I raised seven generations at Eton. Of a summer night nothing delights me more than to release a colony of fireflies in my orchard and watch them flashing against the vault of Heaven until they become indistinguishable from the stars. The message could scarcely be clearer. Just as God made every fire that burns in the sky, so did He fashion every beast that crawls upon the Earth.”
Whilst Lippert and the footman reignited the candles and turned on the gas lamps, a plump woman—the notorious Lady Isadora, no doubt—invited the judges to evaluate Mr. Venables’s efforts.
“This is perhaps the most persuasive demonstration we’ve encountered thus far,” insisted Professor Owen. “I’m quite prepared to reward our visiting entomologist.”
“Aquinas argued that a doubter might find his way to God through reason alone,” said Mr. Symonds. “Our contestant’s fiery insects illuminate that very path.”
“Though I appreciate the cleverness of Mr. Venables’s correlations,” said Mr. Chadwick, “I cannot give this presentation my assent, for his examples seem to me arbitrary in the extreme.”
The first freethinker to speak was Mr. Holyoake, whose bulbous nose and profuse side-whiskers Chloe recalled from an engraving accompanying a newspaper account of his trial. “The Correlative Proof has always suffered from a fatal statistical naiveté,” the convicted blasphemer began. “A one-in-a-million event cannot be thought supernatural if there are a million opportunities for it to occur. Because our planet is home to a vast insect population comprising hundreds of thousands of species, it would be surprising not to find one or more kinds endowed with the trait of phosphorescence.”
Next to speak was a hatchet-faced woman—this had to be Miss Martineau—holding an ear trumpet and dressed in black crêpe, as if in mourning for the Deity in whom she did not believe. “Here’s another fact Mr. Venables won’t find soothing: the Earth’s celestial brethren no longer number six, the planet Neptune having been observed and named three years ago. Let me suggest that, if our guest wishes to corroborate God through astronomy, he should keep abreast of the field.”
Last to hold forth was a nondescript gentleman whom, by process of elimination, Chloe identified as Mr. Atkinson. “The philosopher David Hume put it well. The human ego is predisposed to, quote, ‘spread itself on the world,’ projecting private prejudices onto public domains. Mr. Venables’s globe, star, and fireflies are no more theologically significant than those other phenomena in which we see meanings that aren’t there, such as clouds, crystals, tea leaves, and ink stains.”
For a prolonged and poignant moment Mr. Venables stared blankly into space, fuming silently. Lord Woolfenden thanked the contestant for diverting the Byssheans with his “lambent though fallacious God proof,” then abruptly dismissed him.
An intermission ensued, during which the rakehells indulged in a majority of the sins on view in Seven Dials.
“Tonight’s atheist presentation will come from Miss Chloe Bathurst, formerly of the Adelphi Theatre Company,” said Lord Woolfenden upon reconvening the contest. “Since leaving the stage, she has pursued a career as a naturalist and currently presides over the Albion Transmutationist Club. Assisted by her brother, Mr. Algernon Bathurst, a dealer in gaming implements, she will enlighten us with a theory drawn from her zoological ruminations.”
Affecting a confident air, and doing so with such skill as to feel appreciably imperturbable, Chloe swooped into the library, leafy prop
in hand, Algernon at her side. “Behold the Tree of Life!” she exclaimed, setting the little bush on the dais. “No, I do not show you a sacred shrub from Eden, for this specimen is of a quite different order. Gourmands agree that, although its fruits may at first burn the tongue like gall, in time they come to taste sweet as honey!”
Having delivered her carefully rehearsed prologue, she proceeded to improvise a tissue of lies, declaring that, as the keeper of a large private menagerie, she had oft-times found herself in conversation with “scientists who roam the world collecting biological specimens.” Over the years her curiosity had been aroused by travelers’ accounts of “creatures that belong to different species yet retain membership in one grand family or another—the finches, thrushes, turtles, vipers, toads, and so forth.” Inevitably she’d found herself wondering “why God would make so many kinds to so little purpose.” The more she thought about the problem, the more convinced she’d become that, by appealing to natural processes of selection and transmutation, “we can trace each particular type of plant and animal back through countless generations and innumerable varieties to one primordial creature, just as each leaf on this shrub leads to a branch that then takes us to the trunk, which in turn brings us to the taproot, from which we may infer an original seed.”
Every eye in the library, she sensed, was fixed on her face and form. Each ear was attuned to her voice. Even the surrounding ramparts of books seemed alive to her words.
“I ask you, ladies and gentlemen, where and when in this grand spectacle of unsupervised speciation must God appear? Where and when do we need the flashy theatrics of Genesis chapter one? I answer as follows: nowhere and never.”
Miss Martineau said, “So it’s your contention that all living things owe their existence to a single germ cell?”