by James Morrow
“Hear me, Herr Professor,” he would say, flourishing the canvas. “Fifteen years from now this Moldavian monk will send you a monograph. Study it carefully, lest you do its author, yourself, and the scientific world a disservice. If you think me mad”—here he would hand Nägeli the pigeon missives—“then read these messages from the future.”
Already Granville could hear Dr. Earwicker’s voice chirping in protest. “I’m sorry, Reverend, but we cannot allow you such an outing. Your plan is more irrational, even, than your project of eating the Apocalypse.”
Amongst the many disadvantages of being thought insane, Granville concluded ere falling asleep, was that nobody believed a word you said.
* * *
Shortly before the Rainha da Selva steamed free of Belém, Malcolm Chadwick had wisely told himself that a difficult and protracted voyage lay ahead. He knew to expect an ordeal. And yet, despite these mental precautions, he was not prepared for what actually befell him, that most primeval of Christian trials, a long dark night of the soul.
The farther Malcolm traveled up the sinuous ochre Amazon, contemplating the world as reflected in the great equatorial basin, the more dreadful that world became, forsaken by the Hebrews’ Yahweh, the Mussulmans’ Allah, and Her Majesty’s God. He could barely bring himself to eat. The faculty of prayer deserted him. Celebrating the Eucharist, he decided, would be as pointless as serving a banana to a cat.
The first five days elapsed without incident, the packet-steamer chugging effortlessly past a northern piedmont of thicketed hills and a southern plain planted with sugarcane and tobacco, both shores punctuated by the occasional Indian cottage, trading post catering to caboclos frontiersmen, or fishing village populated by mestizo river-folk, the flamboyant ribeirinhos. Screeching and squawking, gulls, noddies, and other seabirds wheeled overhead, reminding travelers that for many miles the lower Amazon was synonymous with the Atlantic Ocean. Throughout this phase of the journey Malcolm took genuine pride in his job as homem da proa, shouting warnings to Mr. Pritchard at the helm whenever the Rainha appeared headed for a canoe, ketch, rock, grass island, or barco da borracha coursing towards Belém under full sail.
By the sixth day the jungle was upon them, ranks of twisted trunks forming living ramparts along both banks, their branches festooned with tangled vines and gobbets of hanging moss. Sanctuary to multitudes of visible predators and hidden contagions, the trees cast thick and malignant shadows on the river, so that its waters now seemed a kind of weeping wound scored in the flesh of a black-blooded demon. It was as if the Rainha had steamed into the heart of the Argument from Evil, and with each passing mile Malcolm felt yet another stone drop from the mosaic of his faith.
As endured by Saint John of the Cross, the long dark night of a believer’s soul signaled eventual redemption. Such despair foretold an ecstatic union with Christ. But Malcolm could imagine no such light shining at the headwaters of the Amazon—only more mosquitoes, scorpions, and predatory candiru fish, only more malaria, typhus, and yellow fever, only more Jesuits acquiescing to a forced-labor economy. He saw at best the Divine Clockmaker of eighteenth-century Deism, though the inert and indifferent gods of Epicurean philosophy seemed a more plausible hypothesis, as did the nonexistent God of Miss Bathurst’s ambitions.
Curiously enough, his one reliable source of solace was that same exasperating actress. He and Miss Bathurst had of late enjoyed several stimulating conversations (despite the wretched heat, infinitude of mosquitoes, and endless throbbing of the Rainha’s engine) concerning the mystery of art and the enigma of personhood. If Miss Bathurst could be believed, then her she-devil side, so appealing to the fawning Miss Kirsop, was naught but an affectation—a costume to be put on and taken off as readily as her pirate regalia.
“I shall remain the Covent Garden Antichrist for as long as the role suits my purposes,” she insisted, “not one minute more.”
“Let me suggest that the role has never suited your purposes,” said Malcolm. “Renounce your mystique whilst ye may, Miss Bathurst, ere you start believing it.”
“You forget I’m a professional player.” Her eyes narrowed with scorn. “I know the difference between beguiling an audience and fooling myself.”
“Whether actors, actresses, vicars, harlots, gamblers, or sailors, we’re all members of our own audiences and thus vulnerable to self-deception,” said Malcolm. “I fear you take too much pleasure in this antichrist affectation. Beware, Miss Bathurst, lest you carry the game too far.”
It did not help Malcolm’s disposition when, in the middle of their second week on the river, Mr. Flaherty was eaten alive by piranhas. The catastrophe was of the drunkard’s own making. Shortly after they’d put to shore for the evening, anchoring in an inlet two miles east of the Rio Tapajós, Flaherty declared that he was going for a swim, the torrid climate having become unbearable. Despite his companions’ protestations, he swallowed some grog, stripped down to his linen, and dove off the transom. Unfortunately, the crew of a passing barco da borracha had selected that moment to throw overboard the bloody residue of their roasted peccary dinner, and by the time Malcolm, Dartworthy, and Gonçalves realized the implications of this action, it was too late.
For several minutes the famished fish were content to fillet the peccary’s remains, but then they turned on the swimmer, and the banks of the Amazon reverberated with screams so ghastly they seemed to shred the veil of dusk. Gonçalves raised the amidships lantern high, casting its beams across the water. Pritchard threw out a lifeline. Dartworthy launched the dinghy and paddled it into the darkness, returning in time with a version of Flaherty in the stern, an abridgement so pitiable that Malcolm took to muttering, again and again, “There is no God.”
In the soft glow of the lantern Flaherty appeared to be dressed in a sailor’s white trousers, but then Malcolm realized that the brilliant stalks extending from the man’s pelvis were not breeches but bones, their flesh shucked away. Astonishingly, he still lived, and after they lifted him onto the afterdeck he groped towards his naked femurs, as if seeking to move them in the absence of tendons. Somehow he put words to his predicament, alternately begging God to have pity on him and cursing that same deity for a monster. At length his body ran short of blood, and he gained admittance to the hospice of Heaven.
Within twenty-four hours of Flaherty’s death, Malcolm attempted to disown his earlier convulsions of doubt. “I truly love Thee, Lord,” he muttered repeatedly, until he believed it, or believed that he believed it—though he no longer imagined that the institutions of religion, especially the Church of England, enjoyed any prestige in the Almighty’s eyes. To wit, he must forswear the chicanery he’d been sustaining on the Oxford Diocese’s behalf. He was not ready to tell Miss Bathurst about the plot against the Encantadas fauna (she would surely vilify him for not informing her sooner, so he might as well inform her later), but he would certainly confess that he’d boarded the Equinox under false pretenses, at the behest of Bishop Wilberforce, on a mission to identify the person who’d actually devised the species theory.
“I implore your forgiveness,” he pleaded after apprising her of the ruse.
“I am less offended by your masquerade than by your assumption that I’d failed to penetrate it.” Miss Bathurst’s lips hovered between a smile and a smirk. “As for the originality of my idea—you are correct: it did not spring from my brain alone. But I shan’t name my collaborator, lest you convey the information to Wilberforce, who would proceed to harry the scientist in question.”
“You should know that since leaving Belém I’ve come to see your irreverence in a new light,” said Malcolm. “I keep thinking of Percy Shelley’s ‘Mont Blanc.’ ‘The wilderness has a mysterious tongue which teaches awful doubt.’”
“The loss of Mr. Flaherty weighs on us all. I understand how his wretched death might lower your opinion of Providence.”
Much to his dismay, Malcolm realized that his curiosity concerning transmutation had become so intense that
he wanted to read the thirty-five pages Miss Bathurst had composed several days before the Equinox went down. “If I’m doomed to lose my faith, I should like to get it over and done with,” he told her. “Might you grant me a few hours alone with your essay?”
“Though continually seeking converts to the Church of Awful Doubt, I fear you wish to scan my sketch for errors, the better to gainsay my presentation to the Oxford judges.”
“When I said I had recused myself, I meant it,” said Malcolm. “Never again shall I darken the door of Alastor Hall. Consider your situation as follows. To transfix the judges, you must practice your presentation on another intellect, and yet none aboard the Rainha, including that dilettante Dartworthy, is capable of sustaining such a conversation—with the possible exception of myself.”
This reasoning evidently struck a chord in Miss Bathurst, for the following morning, shortly after Malcolm had assumed his post in the prow, she appeared beside him and silently deposited the sandalwood box in his hands. He dared not study the pages just then, lest the price of his enlightenment be the Rainha’s collision with a sandbar, but once his watch had ended he disappeared into his cabin and pored over “An Essay Concerning Descent with Modification.” Risking the annoyance of Dartworthy, Pritchard, and Miss Bathurst’s cardsharp brother, he read many sentences aloud, the better to grasp their import, including the author’s final ringing insistence that there was “grandeur in this view of life,” according to which perspective “endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been evolved.”
As an account of the origin of species, Miss Bathurst’s transmutation sketch was lamentably bereft of implausibility. As an alternative to the Book of Genesis, it was woefully lacking in contrivance. True, an enemy of the theory might point to mankind’s presumably divine attributes (speech, reason, the moral sense), but the essay insisted that those faculties were all prolifically prefigured in Nature. Too, there was the dilution problem—the question of why a desirable trait bequeathed to a creature by its mother was not canceled by a contrary trait from the father—though the author noted that the persistence of hemophilia from generation to generation argued against “treating simple blending as the essential mechanism of heredity.”
With a leaden heart Malcolm returned the essay to the sandalwood box, which now seemed to him a coffin, or more precisely a royal sarcophagus, the sweet-smelling cavity holding not only an apparent disproof of God but also His heavenly remains. For a full minute he contemplated the receptacle, then climbed into his hammock and blew out the candle. The sudden darkness startled Pritchard’s capuchin, who issued a piercing chee-chee-chee.
Hush, jesting Bartholomew, thought Malcolm. Softly now, thou foolish monkey. Good night, my clownish little cousin.
* * *
As her journey aboard the Rainha da Selva progressed, Chloe found herself comparing her present environment with the only other river of her acquaintance. Whereas the Thames was simply another London thoroughfare (wetter than most but easily negotiated by bridge or skiff), the Rio Amazonas was a world unto itself, at times exhibiting the quietude of a sepulcher, at other times unleashing so loud a cacophony—bird squawks, monkey howls, the roars of jaguars and ocelots, the percussive glunks of Surinam toads—as to become a vast concert hall, inhabited by creatures of such rapturous beauty, from golden pierid butterflies to rainbow-colored macaws, scarlet hibiscus to purple orchids, they seemed émigrés from Eden. And always there was the awesome scale of the thing, three thousand miles from genesis to gulf, its tidal depths drawn (or so Gonçalves averred) from the snowy mountains and rushing rivers of six great nations—Ecuador, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, Bolivia, Brazil—their waters spilling ever downward, ever eastward, to form a phenomenon larger than the continent of Europe.
Indifferent though the Amazon basin might be to the prosperity of mortals, for the Rainha’s company the place soon proved nutritious beyond measure, a vast tureen filled with an inexhaustible soup. As the unofficial cook aboard the side-wheeler, Mr. Pritchard was forever supplementing their food stores with the river’s bounty, using the galley’s corroded iron stove to prepare clams, eels, snails, and a succulent sort of manatee called a cowfish. If the Albion Transmutationist Club was ultimately bested by the Mayfair Diluvian League, it would not be because the freethinkers were less well fed than the ark hunters—though sometimes Chloe longed for a lump of butter on her clams or a dollop of jam on her cassava bread.
As she pursued her new vocation as a bicho da seda, she occasionally pondered Fanny Mendrick’s suggestion that, having been dismissed from her theatrical employment, she should consider the vocation of seamstress. At the time this notion had seemed ridiculous, and yet a seamstress was what she’d become. Just as Homer’s Penelope had wrought and unraveled a perpetual tapestry, so did Chloe and Solange regularly mend the fragile curtains using silk filaments threaded through steel needles, thus securing the weather deck against marauding vermin. Each invader favored a particular time of day, the wasps sallying forth in the morning, the sand-flies and piums in the afternoon, the mosquitoes in the evening, the vampire bats at night. Chloe took satisfaction in knowing that, beyond their affection for hideous lizards, she and the master of Down House now shared a connection to the vermicular world: Darwin the student of earthworms, intrigued by their sensoria (or lack thereof), she the aficionado of silkworms, grateful to them for saving herself and her companions from innumerable stingers, fangs, and proboscises.
At first Mr. Flaherty’s grisly demise occasioned in Chloe sharp pangs of remorse: were it not for her quest, he would still be alive—but then Mr. Chadwick reminded her that the drunkard had joined the adventure of his own free and greedy will, “knowing that a journey to Galápagos might entail lethal hazards.” Even so, she could not fully extricate her conscience from the situation, and she resolved that if her club claimed the prize in the end, she would give part of her share to the wretch’s surviving relations.
As the listless days slogged by, Chloe came to feel she’d made a mistake in lending the transmutation sketch to Mr. Chadwick. At the time her decision had felt like a rational response to his argument that, once he’d internalized the pages, his brain might become a whetstone on which to hone her forthcoming Oxford presentation. But now she imagined the vicar recapitulating her own mischievous act, secretly copying the essay word for word. Upon reaching Manáos, he would post the transcription to Wilberforce, so that when she finally appeared before the judges, lizards and tortoises in train, a cabal of scientifically inclined clerics would be lying in wait, ready to put the ax to the Tree of Life. Thus, her first words when Mr. Chadwick materialized in her quarters, sandalwood box in hand, were not “Has transmutationism acquired a convert?” but rather “May I assume that, as an honorable Christian, you forbore to pen a duplicate?”
“Your suspicions, I shall admit, are not groundless,” he replied. “A man who would pose as a ship’s chaplain, when in fact he’s an agent of the Oxford Diocese, is scarcely the soul of probity. And yet I swear that, whilst in possession of your essay, I was not led into temptation.”
“Then I must ask what sense, if any, you made of it,” said Chloe.
“You will be gratified to learn that I now consider myself a votary of the theory of natural selection.”
“Gratified indeed, and enchanted by the irony. Until this moment, I’d admired your decision to recuse yourself from the contest. ‘There’s a man of integrity,’ I said. But now that you accept my theory, I must ask you to accompany me as I return to Belém and book passage to England. Upon taking Wilberforce’s place at Alastor Hall, you will cast your vote with the freethinking judges.”
“Impossible,” said the vicar.
“Oh?”
“To begin with, by now Wilberforce regards himself as a fixture on the bench. He will not relinquish his seat to anyone—certainly not to my befuddled self. What’s more, when I said I was a votary, I did not mean that I find in natural selection a disproof of God. Your T
ree of Life allows for, and perhaps even demands, the Divine Clockmaker of Mr. Locke’s Deism.”
“An entity that lies about as far from the God of Christendom as does Ganymede from Gravesend.”
“I disagree,” said Mr. Chadwick, weakly: trapped in his own Deistic thicket, Chloe decided—though she would admit that her knowledge of Locke’s philosophy was limited to her understanding (following upon a footnote in the transmutation sketch) that Shelley thought it an untenable alternative to atheism.
Carefully she secured the sandalwood box beneath her mattress, then imagined a question that would prove pleasurable in the asking, for it incorporated the name of the person she most fancied. “By the by, Reverend, as our homem da proa, aren’t you supposed to be relieving Ralph Dartworthy right now?”
“How well apprised you are of our village atheist’s schedule.”
“Mr. Dartworthy’s exact location is always of great interest to me.”
As Chloe and the vicar left her stifling quarters and ascended the companionway to the weather deck, Mr. Chadwick resumed his disquisition. “Mr. Locke’s clockmaker may not be the God of Christendom, but we’re still speaking of a divine agency. When you and your collaborator imagine life ‘being originally breathed into one or a few forms,’ you are postulating an Unmoved Mover and placing that entity at the beginning of time.”
“I wasn’t present at the beginning of time, and neither were you,” she replied, inhaling the mucilaginous air. “I only know that if Genesis is a fable, if Adam was an ape, and if new species may appear sans a supernatural mechanism, then we have fatally wounded theism in all its flavors.”
“I think not,” said Mr. Chadwick.
Chloe and the vicar parted the curtains and proceeded to the foredeck. Mr. Dartworthy sat on a cask of salted fish, alternately surveying the treacherous river and inspecting himself in a small, round mirror. “Tell me your opinion, Miss Bathurst,” he said, rising. “I’m inclined to let my beard come in, thus sparing myself the chore of shaving each morning, but I’m loath to acquire too shaggy a mien.”
