The Difference Engine

  “I will.”

  Oliphant stood. “And remember, should anyone ask, that today we have discussed nothing more than the affairs of the Geographical Society.”

  “You’ve yet to tell me the name of your own employers, Mr. Oliphant. Your true employers.”

  Oliphant somberly shook his long head. “Such knowledge never profits, sir; there is nothing but grief in such questions. If you’re wise, Dr. Mallory, you’ll have nothing more to do with dark-lanterns. With luck, the whole affair will simply come to nothing, in the end, and will fade away, without trace, as a nightmare does. I shall certainly put your name forward for the Geographical, as I have promised, and I do hope that you will seriously consider my proposal regarding possible uses of the Bow Street Engines.”

  Mallory watched as this extraordinary personage rose, turned, and strode away, across the Palace’s rich carpet, his long legs flashing like scissors.

  Clutching his new valise with one hand, the overhead straps with another, Mallory inched his way along the crowded aisle of the omnibus to the rattling exit-platform. When the driver slowed for a filthy tarmac-wagon, Mallory jumped for the curb.

  Despite his best efforts, Mallory had boarded the wrong ’bus. Or perhaps he had ridden too far on the correct vehicle, well past his destination, while engrossed in the latest number of the Westminster Review. He’d purchased the magazine because it carried an article of Oliphant’s, a witty post-mortem on the conduct of the Crimean War. Oliphant, it developed, was something of an expert on the Crimean region, having published his The Russian Shores of the Black Sea a full year prior to the outbreak of hostilities. The book detailed a jolly but quite extensive Crimean holiday which Oliphant had undertaken. To Mallory’s newly alerted eye, Oliphant’s latest article bristled with sly insinuation.

  A street-arab whipped with a broom of twigs at the pavement before Mallory’s feet. The boy glanced up, puzzled. “Pardon, guv?” Mallory realized with an unhappy start that he had been talking to himself, standing there in rapt abstraction, muttering aloud over Oliphant’s deviousness. The boy, grasping at Mallory’s attention, did a back-somersault. Mallory tossed him tuppence, turned at random, and walked away, shortly discovering himself in Leicester Square, its gravel walks and formal gardens an excellent place to be robbed or ambushed. Especially at night, for the streets about featured theatres, pantos, and magic-lantern houses.

  Crossing Whitcomb, then Oxenden, he found himself in Haymarket, strange in the broad summer daylight, its raucous whores absent now and sleeping. He walked the length of it, for curiosity’s sake. It looked very different by day, shabby and tired of itself. At length, noting Mallory’s pace, a pimp approached him, offering a packet of French-letters, sure armor against the lady’s-fever.

  Mallory bought them, dropping the packet into his valise.

  Turning left, he marched into the chuffing racket of busy Pall Mall, the wide macadam lined by the black iron palings of exclusive clubs, their marbled fronts set well back from the street-jostle. Off Pall Mall, at the far end of Waterloo Place, stood the Duke of York’s memorial. The Grand Old Duke of York, Who Had Ten Thousand Men, was a distant soot-blackened effigy now, his rotund column dwarfed by the steel-spired headquarters of the Royal Society.

  Mallory had his bearings now. He tramped the elevated pedestrian-bridge, over Pall Mall, while below him sweating kerchief-headed navvies ripped at the intersection with a banging steel-armed excavator. They were preparing the foundation of a new monument, he saw, doubtless to the glory of the Crimean victory. He strode up Regent Street to the Circus, where the crowd poured endlessly forth from the underground’s sooty marble exits. He allowed himself to be swept into swift currents of humanity.

  There was a potent stench here, a cloacal reek, like burning vinegar, and for a moment Mallory imagined that this miasma emanated from the crowd itself, from the flapping crannies of their coats and shoes. It had a subterranean intensity, some fierce deep-buried chemistry of hot cinders and septic drippings, and now he realized that it must be pistoned out somehow, forced from the hot bowels of London by the charging trains below. Then he was being jostled up Jermyn Street, and in a moment he was smelling the heady wares of Paxton and Whitfield’s cheese emporium. Hurrying across Duke Street, the stench forgotten, he paused below the wrought-iron lamps of the Cavendish Hotel, secured the fastenings of his valise, then crossed to his destination, the Museum of Practical Geology.

  It was an imposing, sturdy, fortress-like edifice; Mallory thought it much like the mind of its Curator. He trotted up the steps into a welcome stony chill. Signing the leather-bound visitor’s book with a flourish, he strode on, into the vast central hall, its walls lined with shining glass-fronted cabinets of rich mahogany. Light poured down from the great cupola of steel and glass, where a lone cleaner dangled now in his shackled harness, polishing one pane after another in what Mallory supposed would amount to an unending rota.

  On the Museum’s ground floor were displayed the Vertebrata, along with various pertinent illustrations of the marvels of stratigraphical geology. Above, in a railed and pillared gallery, were a series of smaller cabinets containing the Invertebrata. The day’s crowd was of gratifying size, with surprising numbers of women and children, including an entire uniformed class of scruffy, working-class school-boys from some Government academy. They studied the cabinets with grave attention, aided by red-jacketed guides.

  Mallory ducked through a tall, unmarked door and down a hall flanked by locked storerooms. At the hall’s end, a single magisterial voice was audible through the closed door of the Curator’s office. Mallory knocked, then listened, smiling, as the voice completed a particularly orotund rhetorical period. “Enter,” rang the voice of the Curator. Mallory stepped inside as Thomas Henry Huxley rose to greet him. They shook hands. Huxley had been dictating to his secretary, a bespectacled young man with the look of an ambitious graduate student. “That will be all for now, Harris,” Huxley said. “Send in Mr. Reeks, please, with his sketches of the Brontosaurus.”

  The secretary tucked his penciled notes into a leather folio and left, with a bow to Mallory.

  “How’ve you been, Ned?” Huxley looked Mallory up and down, with the narrow-set, pitilessly observant eyes that had discovered “Huxley’s Layer” in the root of the human hair. “You look very well indeed. One might even say splendid.”

  “Had a bit of luck,” Mallory said gruffly.

  To Mallory’s surprise, he saw a small, fair-haired boy, neatly dressed in a flat-collared suit and knee-breeches, emerge from behind Huxley’s heaped desk. “And who is this?” Mallory said.

  “Futurity,” Huxley quipped, bending to pick up the child. “My son, Noel, come to help his father today. Say how-do-you-do to Dr. Mallory, son.”

  “How do you do, Mr. Mellowy?” the boy piped.

  “Doctor Mallory,” Huxley corrected gently.

  Noel’s eyes widened. “Are you a medical doctor, Mr. Mellowy?” The thought clearly alarmed him.

  “Why, you could scarcely walk when last we met, Master Noel,” Mallory boomed heartily. “And here you are today, quite the little gentleman.” He knew that Huxley doted on the child. “How’s your baby brother, then?”

  “He has a sister now as well,” Huxley announced, setting the boy down. “Since you were in Wyoming.”

  “You must be happy at that, Master Noel!”

  The little boy smiled briefly, with guarded politeness. He hopped up into his father’s chair. Mallory set his valise atop a bookcase, which contained a morocco-bound set of the works of Cuvier in the original. “I have an item that may interest you, Thomas,” he said, opening his valise. “A gift for you from the Cheyenne.” Remembering to tuck the French-letters beneath the Westminster Review, he brought out a string-tied paper bundle and carried it to Huxley.

  “I hope this isn’t one of those ethnographical curios,” Huxley said, smiling, as he parted the string neatly with a paper-knife. “I can’t abide those wretched beads and
whatnot.…”

  The paper held six shriveled brown wafers, the size of half-crowns.

  “A helpful bequest to you from a Cheyenne medicine man, Thomas.”

  “Rather like our Anglican bishops, are they?” Huxley smiled, holding one of the leathery objects to the light. “Dried vegetable matter. A cactus?”

  “I would think so.”

  “Joseph Hooker of Kew could tell us.”

  “This witch-doctor chap had a fair grasp of the purpose of our expedition. He fancied that we meant to re-vivify the dead monster, here in England. He said that these wafers would enable you to journey far, Thomas, and fetch back the creature’s soul.”

  “And what do I do, Ned, string them on a rosary?”

  “No, Thomas, you eat them. You eat them, chant, beat drums, and dance like a dervish, until you fall down in a fit. That’s the standard methodology, I take it.” Mallory chuckled.

  “Certain vegetable toxins have the quality of producing visions,” Huxley remarked, putting the wafers carefully away in a desk-drawer. “Thank you, Ned. I’ll see they’re properly catalogued, later. I fear the pressure of business has confounded our Mr. Reeks. He is usually more prompt.”

  “It’s a good crowd out there, today,” Mallory offered, to fill the silence. Huxley’s boy had pulled a toffee from his pocket and was unwrapping it with surgical precision.

  “Yes,” Huxley said, “Britain’s museums, our fortresses of intellect, as the P.M. puts it in his eloquent way. Still, no use denying that education, mass education, is the single great work at hand. Though there are days when I would throw it all over, Ned, to be a field-man like yourself again.”

  “You’re needed here, Thomas.”

  “So they tell me,” Huxley said. “I do try to get out, once a year. Wales, mostly … tramp the hills. It restores the soul.” He paused. “Did you know I am up for a Lordship?”

  “No!” Mallory cried, delighted. “Tom Huxley, a Lord! ’Struth! What splendid news.”

  Huxley looked unexpectedly morose. “I saw Lord Forbes at the Royal Society. ‘Well,’ Forbes said, ‘I am glad to tell you that you are all right for the House of Lords; the selection was made on Friday night, and I hear that you were one of those selected.” ’ Huxley, without apparent effort, had Forbes’ gestures, his phrasing, even his tone of voice. He glanced up. “I haven’t seen the List, but the authority of Forbes is such that I feel somewhat assured.”

  “Of course!” Mallory exulted. “A stout fellow, Forbes!”

  “I shan’t feel entirely certain until I receive official confirmation,” Huxley said. “I confess, Ned, to some anxiety about it, the health of the Prime Minister being what it is.”

  “Yes, a pity he’s ill,” Mallory said. “But why should that concern you so? Your accomplishments speak for themselves!”

  Huxley shook his head. “The timing seems no accident. I suspect this is some ploy of Babbage and his elite cronies, a last attempt to pack the Lords with scientific savants while Byron still holds sway.”

  “That’s a dark suspicion,” Mallory said. “You were Evolution’s greatest advocate in debate! Why question your good fortune? It seems to me a matter of simple justice!”

  Huxley grasped his own lapels, two-handed, a gesture of deep sincerity. “Whether I have the Lordship or not, I can say one thing: I have left my case to stand on its own strength. I have never asked for special favor. If the title is mine, it is not through any intrigue of my own.”

  “Intrigue does not enter into it!” Mallory said.

  “Of course it does!” Huxley snapped. “Though you’ll not hear me say it publicly.” He lowered his voice. “But you and I have known each other many years now. I count you as an ally, Ned, and a friend of truth.”

  Huxley began to pace the Turkish carpet before his desk. “It is no use, our having any false modesty about a matter so important. We have certain vital duties to perform; to ourselves, to the outside world, and to Science. We swallow praise, which is no great pleasure, and endure multitudinous difficulties, involving a good deal of unquestionable pain, pain and even danger.”

  Mallory was unsettled, taken aback both by the speed of the news and the sudden weight of Huxley’s sincerity. Yet Huxley had always been like this, he thought; even as a young student, there had been a shock and an impetus to the man’s company. For the first time since Canada, Mallory felt himself back in his true world, in the cleaner, higher plane that Huxley’s mind inhabited. “Danger of what kind?” he asked belatedly.

  “Moral danger. Physical danger as well. There is always hazard in the struggle for worldly power. A Lordship is a political post. Party and Government, Ned. Money and law. Temptation, perhaps ignoble compromise … The nation’s resources are finite; competition is sharp. The niche of Science and Education must be defended; nay, expanded!” Huxley smiled grimly. “Somehow we must grasp the nettle. The alternative would be to lie still and let the devil have his way with the world to come. And I for one should rather burst to pieces, than see Science prostituted!”

  Startled by Huxley’s bluntness, Mallory glanced at the little boy, who was sucking his toffee and kicking his bright shiny shoes against the chair-legs.

  “You’re the man for the task, Thomas,” Mallory said. “You know that you may have whatever help I can offer, if the cause ever needs me.”

  “It cheers me to hear that, Ned. I do trust in your strength of heart, your stubborn fixity of purpose. Proved true as steel, two years’ hard labor in the Wyoming wilderness! Why, there are men I see every week, who claim great devotion to Science, yet dream of nothing but gold medals and professors’ caps.”

  Huxley was pacing faster. “An abominable blur of cant, of humbug and self-seeking, surrounds everything in England today.” Huxley stopped dead. “That is to say, Ned, that I sometimes suppose that I myself am tainted, the possibility of which I hold in morbid dread.”

  “Never,” Mallory assured him.

  “It’s good to have you back among us,” Huxley said, resuming his pacing. “And famous, better yet! We must capitalize on that advantage. You must write a travel-book, a thorough account of your exploits.”

  “Odd that you should mention that,” Mallory said. “I have just such a book here in my bag. The Mission to China and Japan, by Laurence Oliphant. A very clever chap, it seems.”

  “Oliphant of the Geographical? Man’s a hopeless case; too clever by half, and lies like a politician. No, I propose a popular rendition, something a mechanic can understand, the sort of chap who furnishes his sitting-room with a Pembroke table and a crockery shepherd and shepherdess! I tell you, Ned, that it’s vital to the great work. Good money in it as well.”

  Mallory was taken aback. “I talk well enough when I’ve a head of steam up, but to write a whole book in cold blood …”

  “We’ll find you a Grub Street hack to varnish the rougher bits,” Huxley said, “a common enough stratagem, believe me. This fellow Disraeli, whose father founded Disraeli’s Quarterly, you know. Bit of a madcap. Writes sensation-novels. Trash. But he’s steady enough when he’s sober.”

  “Benjamin Disraeli? My sister Agatha dotes on his romances.”

  Something in Huxley’s nod was meant to tell Mallory that a female of the Huxley clan would not be caught dead with a popular novel. “We must talk about your Royal Society Symposium, Ned, your forthcoming address on the Brontosaurus. It will be quite the event, a very useful public podium. Do you have a good picture, for publicity?”

  “Why, no,” Mallory said.

  “Maull and Polyblank are your men, then, daguerreo-typists to the gentry.”

  “I’ll make a note of that.”

  Huxley crossed to the mahogany-framed blackboard behind his desk, taking up a sterling chalk-holder. Maull & Polyblank, he wrote, in quick, flowing cursive.

  He turned. “You’ll need a kinotropist as well, and I’ve just the fellow. He does a good deal of Royal Society work. Tends to somewhat excessively fancy work, so he’ll s
teal your show with his clacking, given half a chance. Loading every rift with ore, as he puts it. But he’s a clever little chap.”

  John Keats, he wrote.

  “This is invaluable, Thomas!”

  Huxley paused. “There’s another matter, Ned. I hesitate to mention it.”

  “What is that?”

  “I don’t wish to wound your personal feelings.”

  Mallory smiled falsely. “I do know I’m not much of a speaker, but I have held my own in the past.”

  Huxley paused, then lifted his hand abruptly. “What do you call this?”

  “I call it a piece of chalk,” Mallory said, humoring him.

  “Chaark?”

  “Chalk!” Mallory repeated.

  “We must do something about those broad Sussex vowels, Ned. There’s a fellow I know, an elocutionist. Very discreet little man. French, actually, but he speaks the finest English you’ve ever heard. A week’s lessons with him would do wonders.”

  Mallory scowled. “You’re not saying I need wonders, I should hope?”

  “Not at all! It’s a simple matter of educating one’s ear. You’d be surprised to know how many rising public speakers have patronized this gentleman.” Jules D’Alembert, Huxley wrote. “His lessons are a bit dear, but—”

  Mallory took the name down.

  A knock came at the door. Huxley swiped at the board with the dusty felt of an ebony-handled eraser. “Enter!” A stocky man in a plaster-spotted apron appeared. “You’ll remember Mr. Trenham Reeks, our Assistant Curator.”

  Reeks tucked a tall folio-binder under his arm and shook Mallory’s hand. Reeks had lost some hair and put on weight since Mallory had last seen him. “Sorry for the delay, sir,” Reeks said. “We’re having a time of it in the studio, casting those vertebrae. Astonishing structure. The sheer scale presents terrific problems.”

  Huxley cleared a space on his desk. Noel tugged his father’s sleeve, and whispered something. “Oh, very well,” Huxley said. “Pardon us a moment, gentlemen.” He led Noel from the office.

  “Congratulations on your promotion, Mr. Reeks,” Mallory said.