Archangel

by Andrea Barrett

  “Oh!” one observant student exclaimed. “It’s a kind of starfish!” As indeed it was, the professor explained, back in the laboratory. A brittle star, of the genus Astrophyton. He kept to himself the species name, because it was named after him.

  Happily exhausted, their hands nicked and scored, the students collapsed on the beach that evening and enjoyed the corn roasted over the fire and the plates of clams steamed in a pit filled with hot rocks and seaweed. Two of the teachers, François and Alpheus, had pitched in to help the kitchen staff organize the feast; another, Arnold, had led a toast; he’d made a little speech himself. Now the work was done, the sky had darkened, the plates were crated and back in the kitchen. The students were talking and laughing quietly, idly drawing shapes in the sand, using the tan husks of tiny horseshoe crabs as finger puppets. Someone’s laugh broke into a curious wheeze at the end of each note. Someone knocked over the jar of fireflies someone else had captured. Those who’d already had some experience teaching in high schools and colleges would be sharing what they knew, the professor imagined, with those about to start their first teaching jobs. Alliances would be blossoming, along with at least one rivalry and perhaps a romance or two. Classes all passed through similar stages, which he pretended not to notice although sometimes, as had happened this evening, he caught himself eavesdropping. She said, he said, I wish I knew, when I go home … All trying so hard to make themselves known to each other. All eager to learn from him and from his dear former students, who loyally continued to follow his teachings despite, as he well knew, secretly leaning in other directions.

  François, who’d patiently rigged the dredging equipment and pulled up the prize Astrophyton, was considering where he should take the next expedition. Charles—when had he gotten so bald?—wanted permission to extend the trench he’d opened in the rise above the salt marsh, which he was using to illustrate soil formation and botanical succession. Arnold wanted to show the rest of them a book a friend had sent him: The Forms of Water in Clouds & Rivers, Ice & Glaciers. Perhaps it might be useful in a class. Odd, though, to find within it their own exploits from the early 1840s.

  “He gives all our names,” Arnold said, holding the book close to his lantern, “and then describes where we worked, the Bernese Alps and the Rhône Valley, the glaciers of the Grindelwald and much of course about the glacier of the Aar and what we did there …”

  He smiled, and so, after a second, did the professor. Odd indeed to hear named the places where, after much happy investigation, he’d grasped the nature of glacial movement and formulated the idea of an Ice Age. The surface of Europe, he’d written somewhere, adorned before by a tropical vegetation and inhabited by troops of large elephants, enormous hippopotami, and gigantic carnivora, was suddenly buried under a vast mantle of ice, covering alike plains, lakes, seas, and plateaus. Upon the life and movement of a powerful creation fell the silence of death …

  The nearest students, some still munching on lemon cake, watched the constellations climb over the edge of the ocean. What stood out, as Arnold read a few sample paragraphs out loud, were the cunning experiments, the colored liquids they’d poured into holes to measure the speed of the seepage through the network of fissures below. The facts but not the feeling of those blissful days. Once, hearing a sound as loud as a gunshot, he’d held his hand to the living ice and felt the birth of a new crevasse. Once he’d built a sturdy tripod over an open well in the glacier, suspended from it a board tied to two strong ropes, and had his friends drop him down the hole, so that he might inspect from his spinning seat the walls’ blue laminations. The book described their shelter, built from a boulder at the glacier’s edge, but not the feeling of five of them snugged inside like pencils in a tin, talking quietly about someday establishing a permanent summer school for the study of natural history.

  “Thirty years late,” he said, as if Arnold might have followed his train of thought, “but we finally managed it.” Had he already said that, had he and Arnold already told these stories about their work on glaciers to these same students? Always, these days, he repeated himself, his only question—was this a fresh audience?—itself a repetition. Even the worry that he repeated himself repeated.

  “It credits you,” Arnold announced, “well, us”—he lowered his voice modestly—“with introducing the idea of glaciers as a great geological agent sculpting the landscape. And you with proving, during your visit to Great Britain, that the mountains of Scotland and Wales showed equal evidence of having been molded by an ice sheet.”

  “A fine trip,” the professor said, aiming his voice across the fire. “One of the best.”

  “A triumph,” Arnold agreed, adding, “There’s even a section about the parallel terraces of Glen Roy.”

  “There, at least,” the professor said, “I convinced Mr. Darwin of something.”

  “Tell us,” said his wife, who had just returned after helping organize the removal of the plates. Countless times she’d encouraged him like this at dinner parties, watching while the wealthy industrialists from Boston or New York reached for their wallets. So had this very island come to him.

  “Mr. Darwin,” he said, “when he was young, contended that those terraces represented ancient beaches, left behind from a time when the sea pushed its way farther inland and the valley was essentially a fjord. I simply noted the obvious: that the Scotch Highlands exhibit to perfection all the traces of glacial action. Polished surfaces, striated and marked by grooves and furrows; lateral moraines bordering the valleys and transverse moraines crossing them; boulders sitting by themselves. Anyone could see that a meltwater lake had once filled the area, dammed by a wall of ice and rubble, and that the parallel terraces represented the lake’s different levels. Mr. Darwin wrote me, after I published my explanation. He said that as soon as he read it, he knew I was right.”

  A few yards to his left, the diminutive young woman with the improbably vigorous hair—he’d paired her with Henrietta; was she called Iris?—said, “I didn’t know that you and Mr. Darwin were ever friendly enough to talk.”

  Was she being sarcastic? Perhaps what he heard as an edge to her voice was simply curiosity; after fourteen years of opposing Darwin’s theories, his opposition itself had grown famous. “Mr. Darwin and I,” he explained, “corresponded when we were younger about our shared interests.” Overhead a cloud bit into the edge of the moon. “And indeed I felt lucky to know him, and pleased when he inscribed a copy of his book to me.” Which, Darwin claimed in his letter, had not been sent “out of a spirit of defiance or bravado.” Although within the book he’d found several places where Darwin had used his own work against him.

  Calmly, he continued, “He’s widely acknowledged to be one of Great Britain’s best naturalists, and I don’t dispute that. His work on coral reefs and barnacles shows skill and care and the narrative of his long voyage is a compendium of useful observations. It’s a shame he’s thrown all that away to chase such a wrongheaded theory.”

  THE BOLD QUESTION Daphne asked about Mr. Darwin was, Henrietta knew by then, more typical than not; Daphne was surprisingly self-assured. She spoke to the teachers as if she were one of them, asked questions without raising her hand, rose from her seat in the dining hall and walked calmly to the professor’s table to confirm an idea she’d had. In the laboratory, where she and Henrietta worked at the same dissections and experiments, their notebooks looked like they were taking two different courses. Henrietta did as she’d learned at Oswego: neat ruled columns, numbered lists of observations, modest questions framed without any trace of personality, and in such a way that they might be answered. The “I,” Mr. Robbins had said, has no place in scientific study. Daphne’s pages seemed, in contrast, to be filled with everything Henrietta had expunged. Scores of drawings filled the margins, everything from fish eggs to the fringed feelers of the barnacle’s waving legs. Describing a beach plum’s flowering parts, she broke into unrelated speculations—when an individual polyp of Laomeda geniculata dies,
does it affect the entire compound creature?—circled these darkly, and then drew arrows from there to cartoons of the professor.

  She had grown up, Henrietta learned, on a small farm in a hilly part of central Massachusetts. Her family kept an apple orchard and also some sheep, a vegetable garden, a grove of maple trees tapped for syrup. Her chaotic, lively notebook, in which she wrote down whatever occurred to her, was only the latest in a long series. She’d started writing for a local magazine when she was still in school, little articles about common plants and animals, and although for five years now she’d had a teaching job at a coeducational academy, she continued writing, sneaking back into the empty study room to work after everyone else was asleep. Recently she’d started describing insect pests.

  “The potato worm, the pickle worm, the cabbage worm,” she told Henrietta. “All those hungry grubs and borers and maggots chewing up whatever we try to grow in our gardens and orchards. Teaching is a perfectly fine way to make a living, but—a person must have a project of her own, don’t you think?”

  Henrietta nodded, abashed. Until now she’d thought that finding a job was by itself a huge accomplishment. In just a few weeks she would meet her first class, teach her first lessons without supervision. The prospect of simply completing those tasks each day had seemed formidable enough.

  “I may try to do a whole book,” Daphne said. “Once I dispose of Ezra.”

  Ezra, Henrietta learned, was a young clergyman from Daphne’s hometown, a friend since childhood suddenly grown determined to marry her. Her parents, eager for grandchildren and worried about her age—she was already twenty-six—were pushing her to accept.

  “You must have an Ezra, yourself,” Daphne added, as they sifted dirt in the potato field near the barn. “Several Ezras, perhaps.” Her gaze brushed over Henrietta’s face. “Waiting at home to tie you down … do you think of marrying?”

  “I don’t,” Henrietta said. There were men she’d been drawn toward at Oswego, men even here she found attractive, but marriage—her mother, with all the miscarriages and stillbirths she’d suffered in the eleven years between Henrietta and Hester, had taught her more than she’d meant. “But what’s wrong with your Ezra?”

  “Everything, really,” Daphne said scornfully. She turned over another clump of dirt. “His carefulness, his closed-mindedness. Even if I wanted to marry in the first place, why would I choose a clergyman as backward as the professor?”

  “I don’t see how you can call the most famous naturalist in the country backward.”

  “He is Mr. Darwin’s staunchest enemy,” Daphne said. “Which in my opinion makes his own work suspect. Ha!” She plucked out a handsome striped pupa. “Our friend the potato worm.”

  “Is that its tail?” Henrietta asked. A long, thin tube curved from one end and bent back under the body like a handle.

  “Tongue case,” Daphne said, sticking out her own pink tongue. “Once it hatches into a sphinx moth, it’ll have a tongue that unrolls to be five or six inches long. You must have seen the moths hanging in the air at dusk, lapping up nectar from flowers. Mr. Darwin would say the tongue is a marvelous adaptation, slightly different in each species, selected for over time in response to the shape of blossoms. Whereas our professor would have some rapturous phrase about the elegant contrivances of the Creator.”

  The two men, Daphne continued, were philosophical opponents, glaring at each other across an unbridgeable divide. Everything the professor taught about the immutable nature of species, Mr. Darwin opposed. Which was the same, Henrietta realized with a shock, as saying that everything she’d been taught, both at her village school in Hammondsport and, later, at Oswego, was in Daphne’s opinion purely wrong.

  “You,” she said, “you think, then …”

  She stepped over the dusty leaves behind her, suddenly queasy from standing so long in the sun and afraid to finish her question. Surely potato worms were and always had been only, exactly, potato worms. Even when they became sphinx moths. Mumbling something about needing more drawing paper, she left Daphne in the field.

  A few days later, though, despite Henrietta’s efforts to avoid it, Daphne picked up that discussion again. Another of the professor’s wealthy supporters had supplied simple microscopes for each laboratory pair and the professor had shown them how to fashion stands using blocks of wood, metal rods, corks and wire and bits of glass. “Useful,” Daphne said approvingly, as they chloroformed bumblebees and prepared to examine the parts. “We could make these inexpensively for our own classes.” This sort of practical laboratory skill made the course seem worthwhile; she did not respect the professor’s old-fashioned views and she might not, she confided, have signed up for the session had she not needed to see less of Ezra.

  She held a dead bee’s head as she spoke, waiting for Henrietta to drip a bit of melted sealing wax onto a glass slide. When the wax began to cloud she pressed the head onto the glass and passed the slide back to Henrietta, who positioned it under the lens. Whether he was talking about echinoderms or fossil fish, Daphne continued more quietly, all the professor’s lectures circled back to the same essential argument, in her opinion theological rather than scientific.

  Henrietta made a careful diagram of the cavity housing the mouth parts, moving the mandibles with a needle and spreading open the sucking apparatus. Instead of returning to the field, Daphne claimed, and gathering actual data, the professor had wasted the last decade opposing Mr. Darwin’s theories. He could say as many times as he liked—indeed, he said it here—that the simple structural plans uniting groups of species were actually ideas, Divine Conceptions, which existed independent of any material expression of them: but what had he ever found to prove that? At home, all the young teachers in her natural history study group were ardent Darwinians, as was she. The professor was nearly alone in his beliefs.

  “I think you exaggerate,” Henrietta said. She moved the slide clumsily, smearing the wax: spoiled, now. How disturbing it was to hear this! She thought of her mother, back home in Hammonds-port, reading aloud to her from the professor’s books. “Perhaps not everyone agrees with him, but still …” Her teachers, two of whom had been his students, admired him enormously. Were they so behind the times?

  Daphne fell silent but later, when they were out in the marsh, plucking periwinkles from the eelgrass, she started up again. “He’s a wonderful speaker,” she said. As persistent as a starfish prying at a clam. “He hypnotizes people. That doesn’t make him right.”

  Henrietta held up a shell. “I was taught that science depends on facts, not speculations,” she said firmly. “Observations, not wild flights of fancy. It’s a fact these are specimens of Littorina rudis, also that gasteropods have a radula covered with rows of chitonous teeth. This has a radula, as I do not; it rasps algae from these leaves, as I cannot; these are also facts. The stability of species is a fact. The fossil record, which in no place shows evidence of transitional forms, is another fact. My teachers who read Mr. Darwin’s book said it was riddled with fallacies and wild speculations. And that Mr. Darwin departed so far from Baconian methods that his work was not worth reading.”

  Daphne poked at the tiny turbans in Henrietta’s palm. “Why,” she said, “don’t you just read the book for yourself?”

  She loaned to Henrietta her own, much marked-up copy, which she’d brought to the island. Henrietta read it over the next week in secret, hoping to avoid upsetting either the professor or his wife, but it was so absorbing that she began skipping meals and lectures, which made her conspicuous in another way. Soon the professor, who when they first met had seemed so pleased with her, was frowning with disappointment. Twice the professor’s wife asked if she was unwell—and still, she kept reading. One sentence locked into the next and the next, the book itself quite different from the ideas as they’d been summarized by her teachers and then dismissed. A gigantic crowd of examples alternately crushed her and then swept her wonderfully, relentlessly along. From variation under domestication—
pigeons, who had ever written so much about pigeons?—to the variations found in nature; from the great struggles for existence to the complex modes of finding a place in the natural economy; from natural selection and sexual selection to divergence of character and extinction: she was overwhelmed. Yet she was also troubled by how well the pieces seemed to fit together.

  The tide went out as she read about an entangled bank, covered with many kinds of plants. Her legs went numb and the wind stirred up tiny spirals of sand; she missed an entire lecture about clams. The bank was colonized by singing birds and buzzing insects and burrowing worms, each different but all interdependent, produced by the laws Mr. Darwin had earlier described. She looked up and saw the bay gleaming before her. At school, Mr. Robbins had argued this: If species arise by transmutation, then why can we find nowhere in the geological record traces of the intermediate varieties connecting specific forms? We ought to see finely graduated chains; we see no such thing. Indeed we see the opposite: whole groups of allied species suddenly arising in specific formations. The professor had addressed this himself in a lecture about the teleostean fish. Once there were no such things as ray-finned bony fishes. And then there they were, a beautiful array of variations on a single new plan.

  Out in the bay, hidden from her eyes but indisputably there, mackerel and cod and bluefish and bass finned swiftly through the water and a question surfaced in her mind: if those fish had been created all at once, in the blink of an eye, what about the creatures they ate, or the creatures who ate them? The whole tangled web of relationships in which each part depended on the others—Mr. Darwin’s book, not the professor’s lectures, explained this.