Darwinia (11 page)

“Photographing the animals, if that’s all right.”

“You might have asked first.”

Guilford didn’t respond. Erasmus breathed a few minutes more, then. “So that’s a camera, is it?”

“Yes sir,” Guilford said, “a Kodak plate camera.”

“You take plate photos? Like in
National Geographic
?”

“Just about exactly like.”

“You know that magazine —
National Geographic
?”

“I’ve worked for it.”

“Eh? When?”

“Last year. Deep Creek Canyon. Montana.”

“Those were your pictures? December 1919?”

Guilford gave the snake herder a longer look. “Are you a member of the Society, Mr., uh, Erasmus?”

“Just call me Erasmus. You?”

“Guilford Law.”

“Well, Mr. Guilford Law, I’m not a member of the National Geographic Society, but the magazine comes upriver once in a while. I take it in trade. Reading material is hard to come by. I have your photographs.” He hesitated. “These pictures of my stock — they’ll be published?”

“Perhaps,” Guilford said. “I don’t make those decisions.”

“I see.” Erasmus pondered the possibilities. Then he drew in a great gulp of the heavy kraal air. “Would you care to come back to my cabin, Guilford Law? Now that Finch is gone, maybe we can talk.”

Guilford admired the snake farmer’s collection of
National Geographic
stacked on a wooden shelf — fifteen issues in all, most of them water-stained and dog-eared, some held together with binding twine, sharing space with equally tattered obscene postcards, cheap Westerns, and a recent
Argosy
Guilford hadn’t seen. He praised the meager library and said nothing about the pressed-earth floor, the reek of crudely cured hides, the oven-like heat and dim light, or the filthy trestle table decorated with evidence of meals long finished.

At Erasmus’ prodding Guilford reminisced for a time about Deep Creek Canyon, the Gallatin River, Walcott’s tiny fossil crustaceans: crayfish from the siliceous shale, unbelievably ancient, unless you accepted Finch’s caveats about the age of the Earth. The irony was that Erasmus, an old Darwinian hand who had been born in Milwaukee and lived downstream from the alien Rheinfelden, found the idea of Montana creek beds intensely exotic.

Talk drifted at last to the subject of Preston Finch. “Don’t mean to offend,” Erasmus said, “but he’s a pompous blowhard, and that’s that. Wants twenty head of snake at ten dollars a head, if you can imagine such a thing.”

“The price isn’t fair?”

“Oh, the
price
is fair — more than fair, actually; that’s not the problem.”

“You don’t want to sell twenty head?”

“Sure I do. Twenty head at that price would keep me through the winter.”

“Then, if I may ask, what’s the problem?”

“Finch! Finch is the problem! He comes into my home with his nose in the air and talks to me like I’m a child. Finch! I wouldn’t sell Preston Finch a road apple for a fortune if I was starving.”

Guilford considered the impasse. “Erasmus,” he said finally, “we can do more and go farther with those animals than without. The more successful the survey, the more likely you are to see my photographs in print. Maybe even in the
Geographic
.”

“My animals?”

“Your animals and you yourself, if you’re willing to pose.”

The snake breeder stroked his beard. “Well. Well. I
might
pose. But it makes no difference. I won’t sell my animals to Finch.”

“I understand. What if I asked you to sell them to me?”

Erasmus blinked and slowly smiled. “Then maybe we have the making of a bargain. But look, Guilford Law, there’s more to it. The animals will carry your boats above the Falls and you can probably follow the river as far as the Bodensee, but if you want pack animals into the Alps someone will have to herd them from above the falls to the shore of the lake.”

“You can do that?”

“I’ve done it before. Lot of herds winter there. That’s where most of my stock comes from. I would be willing to do it for you, sure — for a price.”

“I’m not authorized to negotiate, Erasmus.”

“Bullshit. Let’s talk terms. Then you can go dicker with the treasury or whatever you have to do.”

“All right… but one more thing.”

“What?”

“Are you willing to part with that
Argosy
on your shelf?”

“Eh? No. Hardly. Not unless you have something to trade for it.”

Well, Guilford thought, maybe Dr. Farr wouldn’t miss his copy of
Diluvian and Noachian Geognosy
.

Postscriptum. With the aid of our “Martian mules” we will be able to portage the folding motor-launches — clever light constructions, white oak and Michigan pine, sixteen-footers with watertight storage and detachable skags — and travel above the cascades probably as far as Lake Constance (which Erasmus calls the Bodensee). All that we have collected and learned to date sails back to J’ville with the
Weston
.

Caroline adjusted to the rhythms of her uncle Jered’s household, strange as those rhythms were. Like London, or most of the world these days, there was something provisional about her uncle’s home. He kept odd hours. Often it was left to Alice (and more often now, Caroline herself) to mind the store. She found herself learning the uses of nuts and bolts, of winches and penny nails and quicklime. And there was the mildly entertaining enigma of Colin Watson, who slept on a cot in the storeroom and crept in and out of the building like a restless spirit. Periodically he would take an evening meal at the Pierce table, where he was faultlessly polite but about as talkative as a brick. He was gaunt, not gluttonous, and he blushed easily, Caroline thought, for a soldier. Jered’s table talk was sometimes coarse.

Lily had adjusted easily enough to her new environment, less easily to the absence of her father. She still asked from time to time where Daddy was. “Across the English Channel,” Caroline told her, “where no one has been before.”

“Is he safe?”

“Very safe. And very brave.”

Lily asked about her father most often at bedtime. It was Guilford who had always read to her, a ritual that left Caroline feeling faintly and unreasonably jealous. Guilford read to Lily with a wholeheartedness Caroline couldn’t match, distrustful as she was of the books Lily liked, their unwholesome preoccupation with fairies and monsters. But Caroline took up the task in his absence, mustering as much enthusiasm as she could. Lily needed the reassurance of a story before she could wholly relax, abandon vigilance, sleep.

Caroline envied the simplicity of the ritual. Too often, she carried her own burden of doubt well into the morning hours.

Still, the summer nights were warm and the air rich with a fragrance that was, though strange, not entirely unpleasant. Certain native plants, Jered said, blossomed only at night. Caroline imagined alien poppies, heavy-headed, narcotic. She learned to leave her bedroom window open and let the flowered breezes play over her face. She learned, as the summer progressed, to sleep more easily.

It was Lily’s sleeplessness, as July waned, that served as notice that something had changed in Jered’s house.

Lily with dark bands beneath her eyes. Lily picking dazedly at breakfast. Lily silent and grim at the dinner table, cringing away from Caroline’s uncle.

Caroline found herself unwilling to ask what was wrong — wanting nothing to
be
wrong, hating the idea of yet another crisis. She summoned her courage one warm night after another chapter of “Dorothy,” as Lily called these repetitious fables, when Lily was still restless.

The little girl drew her blanket above her chin. “It wakes me up when they fight.”

“When who fight, Lily?”

“Aunt Alice and Uncle Jered.”

Caroline didn’t want to believe it. Lily must be hearing other voices, perhaps from the street.

But Lily’s room had only a postage stamp of a window, and it looked out on the back alley, not the busy market street. Lily’s room was in fact a reconstructed closet off the rear hall, a closet Jered had converted into a tiny but comfortable bedchamber for his niece. Enough space for a girl, her bear, her book, and for her mother to sit a while and read.

But the closet shared a wall with Jered and Alice’s bedroom, and these walls weren’t especially thick. Did Jered and Alice argue, late at night, when they thought no one could hear? They seemed happy enough to Caroline… a little aloof, perhaps, moving in separate spheres the way older couples often do, but fundamentally content. They couldn’t have argued often before or Lily would have complained or at least showed symptoms.

The arguments must have started after Colin Watson arrived.

Caroline told Lily to ignore the sounds. Aunt Alice and Uncle Jered weren’t really angry, they were only having disagreements. They really loved each other very much. Lily seemed to accept this, nodded and closed her eyes. Her demeanor improved a little over the next few days, though she was still shy of her uncle. Caroline put the matter out of her mind and didn’t think of it again until the night she fell asleep halfway through a chapter of Dorothy and woke, well after midnight, cramped and uncomfortable, next to Lily.

Jered had been out. It was the sound of the door that woke her. Lieutenant Watson had been with him; Jered said a few inaudible words before the Lieutenant retired to his cellar. Then came Jered’s heavy tread in the corridor, and Caroline, afraid for no reason she Could define, pulled Lily’s door closed.

She felt a little absurd, and more than a little claustrophobic sitting cross-legged in this lightless chamber in her nightgown. She listened to the unbroken rhythm of her daughter’s breath, gentle as a sigh. Jered rumbled down the hallway on his way to bed, trailing a steam-engine reek of tobacco and beer.

Now she heard Alice’s low voice greet him, almost as deep as a man’s, and Jered’s, all chest and belly. At first Caroline couldn’t distinguish the words, and she couldn’t hear more than a phrase even when they began to raise their voices. But what she did hear was chilling.

… don’t know how you could get involved…
(Alice’s voice.)

… doing my Goddamned duty…
(Jered.)

Then Lily woke and needed comforting, and Caroline stroked her golden hair and soothed her.

And then quite suddenly the voices lapsed into silence. She imagined Jered and Alice dividing the big bed into territory, marking borders with shoulders and hips, as she and Guilford had sometimes done, after an argument.

They know something
, she thought.
Something about Guilford, something they don’t want to tell me.

But she was too tired, too shocked to make sense of it. She kissed Lily mechanically and retreated to her own room, to her open window and lazily twining curtains and the odd perfume of the English night. She doubted she could sleep, but slept in spite of herself; she didn’t want to dream but dreamed incoherently of Jered, of Alice, of the sad-eyed young Lieutenant.

The summer of 1920 was a chill one, at least in Washington, for which people blamed the Russian volcanoes, the fiery line of geologic disturbance which marked the eastern border of the Miracle and which had been erupting sporadically since 1912, at least according to the refugees who left Vladivostok before the Japanese troubles. Blame it on volcanoes, Elias Vale thought, on sunspots, on God, the gods — all one and the same. He was simply glad to step out of the dreary rain, even into the drearier Main Hall of the National Museum, currently under renovation — work which had been postponed in 1915 and each of the four following years, but for which Eugene Randall had finally prodded funds from the national treasury.

Randall turned out to be an administrator who took his work seriously, the worst kind of boor. And a lonely man, compounding the vice. He had insisted on bringing Vale to the museum the way mothers insist on displaying their infants: the admiration is expected and its absence would be considered an insult.

I am not your friend
, Vale thought.
Don’t humiliate yourself.

“So much of this work was postponed for so long,” Randall was saying. “But at last we’re making headway. The problem is not what we lack but what we have — the sheer
volume
of it — like packing a trunk that’s a size too small. Whale skeletons to the South Hall, second story, west wing, and that means marine invertebrates to the North Hall, which means the picture gallery has to be enlarged, the Main Hall renovated…”

Vale gazed blankly at the scaffolding, the tarpaulins protecting the marbled floor. Today was Sunday. The workers had gone home. The museum was gloomy as a funeral parlor, the corpse on view being Man and All His Works. Rain curtained the leaded windows.