“One must make ends meet,” confirmed Audrius matter-of-factly, “or meet one’s end.”
Richard studied the bartender for a moment.
“Well, that’s the very essence of it, isn’t it?”
Audrius shrugged, acknowledging that the essence-of-it was a bartender’s stock-in-trade, and then he excused himself to answer the phone behind the bar. As he walked away, the Count seemed particularly struck by the bartender’s remark.
“Are you familiar with the moths of Manchester?” he asked Richard.
“The moths of Manchester . . . Isn’t that a soccer team?”
“No,” said the Count with a smile. “It is not a soccer team. It is an extraordinary case from the annals of the natural sciences that my father related to me as a child.”
But before the Count could elaborate, Audrius returned.
“That was your wife on the phone, Mr. Vanderwhile. She asked me to remind you of your appointment in the morning; and to alert you that your driver is waiting outside.”
Though most of the customers in the bar had never met Mrs. Vanderwhile, she was known to be as unflappable as Arkady, as attentive as Audrius, and as aware of whereabouts as Vasily—when it came to drawing Mr. Vanderwhile’s evenings to a close.
“Ah, yes,” conceded Mr. Vanderwhile.
Agreeing that duty comes first, the Count and Mr. Vanderwhile shook hands and wished each other well till next they met.
When Richard left, the Count looked once around the room to see if there was anyone he knew, and was pleased to discover that the young architect from the Piazza was at a table in the corner, bent over his sketchbook, presumably rendering the bar.
He too, thought the Count, is one of the moths of Manchester.
When the Count was nine years old, his father had sat him down in order to explain Darwin’s theory of natural selection. As the Count listened, the essence of the Englishman’s idea seemed perfectly intuitive—that over tens of thousands of years a species would slowly evolve in order to maximize its chances of survival. After all, if the claws of the lion grow sharper, the gazelle had best grow more fleet of foot. But what had disconcerted the Count was when his father clarified that natural selection didn’t need tens of thousands of years to take place. It didn’t even need a hundred. It had been observed unfolding over the course of a few decades.
It was true, his father said, that in a relatively static environment the pace of evolution should decelerate, as individual species have little new to adapt to. But environments are never static for long. The forces of nature inevitably unleash themselves in such a manner that the necessity for adaptation will be stirred. An extended drought, an unusually cold winter, a volcanic eruption, any one of these could alter the balance between those traits that improve a species’ chance for survival and those that hinder it. In essence, this is what had occurred in Manchester, England, in the nineteenth century, when the city became one of the first capitals of the industrial revolution.
For thousands of years, the peppered moths of Manchester had white wings with black flecking. This coloring provided the species with perfect camouflage whenever they landed on the light gray bark of the region’s trees. In any generation there might be a few aberrations—such as moths with pitch-black wings—but they were snapped off the trees by the birds before they had a chance to mate.
But when Manchester became crowded with factories in the early 1800s, the soot from the smokestacks began to settle on every conceivable surface, including the bark of the trees; and the lightly speckled wings that had served to protect the majority of peppered moths suddenly exposed them remorselessly to their predators—even as the darker wings of the aberrations rendered them invisible. Thus, the pitch-black varieties that had represented less than 10 percent of the Manchester moth population in 1800, represented over 90 percent by the end of the century. Or so explained the Count’s father, with the pragmatic satisfaction of the scientifically minded.
But the lesson did not sit well with the young Count. If this could happen so easily to moths, he thought, then what was to stop it from happening to children? What would happen to him and his sister, for instance, should they be exposed to excess chimney smoke or sudden extremes of weather? Couldn’t they become victims of accelerated evolution? In fact, so disconcerted by this notion became the Count that when Idlehour was deluged by rainstorms that September,