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Roger had raised up his misshapen little head and—as delicately as a fine-mannered lady—removed the cinnamon toast from the tines of the fork. “Well, I’ll be,” Alma marveled, backing off.
Dear heavens, she had just left both her dog and her life’s work in that man’s office, after a mere fifteen-minute interview! What an encounter! What a risk!
She handed Alma her key. “No men in your room tonight, remember.” Not tonight, nor any other night, my dear, thought Alma. But thank you for even imagining it.
Alma thought it would have been far faster to walk. More soothing, too. She
“Oh, Alma,” he said, and he did not bother to brush away his tears. “May God bless you, child. You have your mother’s mind.”
For another thing, these books still had the power to stir her.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?).
Nor could Alma explain why a starving prisoner would give food to a cellmate.
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
beneficence!
sophist!”
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.
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.
Alma discovered that Charles Darwin—that soft-spoken barnacle aficionado, that gentle penguin lover—had been hiding his cards. As it turned out, he had something quite momentous to offer the world.
But like two explorers seeking the same treasure trove from two different directions, she and Darwin had both stumbled on the identical chest of riches. What she had deduced from mosses, he had deduced from finches.
it never would have occurred to her that a good scientist need not tackle the entire question right away—on any topic whatsoever! In
“Our nation is too tragic at the moment for visitors,” Prudence reported. “Stay where the world is quieter, and bless that quietness.”
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.)
“But Miss Whittaker,” he said, and his voice grew bright with excitement and comprehension. “This means there were three of us!” For a moment, Alma could not breathe. In an instant, she was transported back to White Acre, to a fine autumn day in 1819—the day she and Prudence first met Retta Snow.
Wallace laughed. “I quite enjoy it, Miss Whittaker, that you call me a young man. For a fellow in his seventh decade, that is quite a compliment.” “From a lady in her ninth decade, sir, it is simply the truth.”
“I will tell you why we have these extraordinary minds and souls, Miss Whittaker,” he continued, as though he had not heard her. “We have them because there is a supreme intelligence in the universe, which wishes for communion with us. This supreme intelligence longs to be known. It calls out to us. It draws us close to its mystery, and it grants us these remarkable minds, in order that we try to reach for it. It wants us to find it. It wants union with us, more than anything.”
“Thank you, Mr. Wallace. You say the kindest things. But you needn’t comfort me. I am too old to fear the great changes of life.”
“And don’t you have that need, Miss Whittaker? To feel significant?”
I once had a fortune, but I gave it away.
“You see, I have never felt the need to invent a world beyond this world, for this world has always seemed large and beautiful enough for me.
She reached up and touched his face. He allowed her. She explored his warm features. He had a kind face—she could feel that he did.
so she rested a spell,
