Archangel

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Archangel Page 11

by Andrea Barrett


  As he spoke the Cyanea contracted, its circumference shrinking as if it were pulling in its skirts. Deep in the blubber Henrietta dimly saw knotted strands and loops, like the delicate assemblages in the Aurelia grown heavy and gross. If the professor was right, the Divine Mind had, for its own pleasure, worked the same pattern on two different scales. If Daphne and Mr. Darwin were right, the pattern repeated because the creatures were related. Affinity represented either descent, on Mr. Darwin’s theory, or God’s delightful repetition with variety, on the professor’s, whereas analogy—did she have these definitions right?—was an accidental correspondence related to function, a bat’s wing superficially like a bird’s, a whale’s tail superficially like a fish’s. The sea blubber heaved again, writhed as if it were in pain, and then sank out of sight. Henrietta leaned over and vomited into the water.

  AFTERWARD, THE PROFESSOR was badly shaken. He’d been perfectly calm, as always; his wife had wiped the student’s face and wrapped her hand in a damp cloth and they’d carried on with the lesson for a few more minutes before turning the fleet around and heading for shore. They’d acted, he and his wife, François and Arnold and the others, as if nothing surprising had happened, as if there was nothing unusual in a student carelessly poisoning herself. After all, she was known to be clumsy; on their first excursion to the grotto, only she had cut herself on the barnacles. They’d all been frightened, though. And even after her color returned, her evident pain and confusion had made him feel terrible.

  Not to François, not to Arnold, not even to his wife had he confided the hopes he’d had during the first few weeks of the session. Back on the mainland, on the rainy evening when she—Henrietta Atkins, he remembered, and then forgot—when she had entered the hotel lobby, her hair dripping wet, so young and frightened and eager that, when she introduced herself to him, her voice was shaking, he’d sensed instantly that she might stick by him. Forty years of teaching had given him an instinct for the one or two in each crowd who, not necessarily the most quick-witted or the most skilled manually, learned deeply, thoughtfully, out of an eagerness to please. Eventually most of them turned from the path, they became disloyal, something in them began to doubt as they grew older—but how wonderful they were at first! He’d been longing for a new disciple. During the three days before the other students came, he’d watched Henrietta closely. He’d seen how quickly she adopted his wife’s rhythms and movements; how she listened intently to every word about his work. Oh, he could have taught her everything! Then through his own mistake, through pairing her with that Daphne, he’d ruined it all.

  With her yellow hair heaped atop her tiny body, and her face all points and lines, Henrietta’s annoying partner looked to him like a wizened child. What about sexual selection? she asked, bringing up Mr. Darwin’s theories no matter what they were observing. About succession in time and space, variation under domestication, the evidence of embryology? That her dissections were impeccable, her drawings elegant and accurate, only made matters worse. Without her, Henrietta wouldn’t have succumbed to Mr. Darwin’s theories. Without this very bad influence, she would have listened attentively to him, learned some useful portion of what he knew; gone home after this experience ready to spread his teachings.

  Even that night, when he and his wife went to the dormitory to check on Henrietta, Daphne blocked his way. His wife brought cod and roasted potatoes left over from supper and he brought a volume of Mr. Emerson’s essays, food for body and soul; his wounded student would be lonely, he thought. Perhaps a little frightened. Instead he found her resting comfortably, propped on pillows Daphne had gathered, eating the supper Daphne had already brought. Listening, in fact, to Daphne read from a book whose title he couldn’t see and didn’t want to know.

  “Excellent!” his wife said, apparently pleased with the scene. “You’re feeling better, I see.” She set down the plate and smiled at both young women. “I’ll leave this in case you want a second helping.”

  He stood, stiff as a sea fan, unable to say anything to Henrietta in Daphne’s presence. His wife murmured some other small politeness, and beneath that cover he retreated down the stairs. Short of breath, oddly addled—when had that happened?—he paused outside in the moon’s dull light, herding his scattered thoughts. Then he hurried toward the barn for his evening lecture.

  The students were already gathered; he was late. Without notes, without a plan—he could do this in his sleep, and perhaps he was—he spoke about his trip to Brazil and his voyage up the Amazon. Here was evidence, in his opinion, for a continental glacier. All previous travelers had missed these signs of ice filling the valley and choking the river, ice flowing implacably down from the Andes, a continental sheet of ice that had wiped out all the plants and animals, so that there could be no connection of descent between the fossil forms and the living forms found now. Here, once more, was firm evidence that the theories of the transmutationists were mistaken and he had found it, he alone …

  But here, once more, was Daphne, who’d slipped in through the side door to join her usual group of friends. “Could you tell us,” she asked, her tone falsely respectful, falsely sweet, “exactly what evidence you found of glaciation? Mr. Bates and Mr. Wallace, who spent such a long time investigating the Amazon basin, found no such evidence at all. And I know your colleague Mr. Gray disputes your findings in this area.”

  In the dormitory, left behind, lay a young woman with a yielding nature, who might have absorbed all he had to give, had this one not interfered. He straightened his back and expanded his diaphragm, lifting his cane as if it were a sword. “I do have evidence,” he said frostily. “The fantastic quantities of glacial drift evident at Rio and every place near it, as well as along both banks of the Amazon. The—”

  “Then you saw glacial furrows?” Daphne inquired. “Striae? Erratics?”

  “None,” he said. “For a perfectly good reason. The rocks aren’t hard enough, there, to have preserved these traces. Everywhere the rock is friable, decomposed by the burning sun and the torrential rains, and so I have no positive evidence. Instead I make a sure assumption, founded on the resemblance of the materials in the Amazonian valley to that found in glacier bottoms elsewhere. Consider the identical deposits of drift at the same level on both sides of what is now the river, the coarser materials settling to the bottom and the finer clays on top.”

  He turned and picked up the chalk. With his old friends at his side, with the chalk behaving in his hand and the blackboard accumulating drawings as his own voice rippled reassuringly in his ears, he began to feel better. Thirty years ago he’d taken the world by storm with his theory of glacial action; like a young knight he’d gone off to do battle against the established theories and he had triumphed even over Mr. Darwin, convincing everyone that a sheet of ice had descended over Europe and North America, carving the landscape into its present forms. Now he would triumph again.

  “Why,” he said happily, “is it so improbable that, when Central Europe was covered with ice thousands of feet thick; when the glaciers of Great Britain ploughed into the sea, and when those of the Swiss mountains had ten times their present altitude; when every lake in Northern Italy was filled with ice and these frozen masses extended even into Northern Africa; when a sheet of ice, reaching nearly to the summit of Mount Washington in the White Mountains, moved over the continent of North America—why, then, is it so improbable that, in this epoch of universal cold, the valley of the Amazons also had its glacier poured down into it from the accumulations of snow in the Cordillera, and swollen laterally by the tributary glaciers descending from the tablelands of Guiana and Brazil?”

  There. Once more he’d quoted his own writings but let it stand, it was good the first time he wrote it and better now, charged with this night’s enthusiasm. Let it stand, and let its meaning shine forth. A sea of ice, God’s great plough, periodically reshaped the landscape and extinguished whole sets of flora and fauna, obliterating His living creations so that they might be repla
ced afresh. That was the explanation for the sudden appearances and disappearances in the fossil record. If the younger crowd of scientists seemed more impressed by Mr. Darwin’s transmutation theories than with his own vision—well, that was only a tiny disturbance in the sea of time. Nothing changed, really. Beneath the superficial transformations lay the unchanging truth, pure as glacial melt.

  IN HER NARROW bed, no longer floating in a vast and airy space but confined now within planked walls and uncomfortably close despite the window, Henrietta lay for another day. When she was well enough to rise, she packed her bag, made excuses to the professor and his wife, and arranged to leave the island early. One last time, before the boat fetched her, she and Daphne sat on the dock together.

  “You’re sure?” Daphne said. She’d taken off her boots and her stockings and tucked her feet beneath her skirt.

  “Perfectly,” Henrietta said. “It’s a waste of time for me, now. And I don’t have any to waste. If I’m not learning things I can use, I ought to be back in Hammondsport, preparing for classes. I have to redo everything. All my lesson plans, everything I meant to teach: all of it’s wrong.”

  She plucked at her own worn skirt, mended clumsily where the barnacles had torn it and stained by blood from her first outing, and by tentacle slime from her last. In the dory, surrounded by lumps of protoplasm, Mr. Darwin’s vision of the natural world had finally, completely, pierced her. All she’d read and discussed with Daphne became a part of her; she saw what he’d seen, her thoughts followed his. Apparently Daphne had felt this years ago. “I still don’t understand why you came here, though, if you think the professor is such a fool.”

  “He’s not a fool,” Daphne said calmly. “He’s a brilliant observer, and he is, or was, the most powerful naturalist in the country. Even now, even a decade after most working naturalists have discarded his views and accepted Mr. Darwin’s, his lecture series are packed and we’re all still using his textbooks. Look at you—a smart person, trained at a good Normal School: and the place you most wanted to study was here, just as your teachers suggested. I want in my teaching, and in my writing too, to have some real influence. I wanted to see how he did it. Not how he did science—how he spread the word.”

  “You’ll write to me?” Henrietta asked. The boat was moving toward them.

  “If you’ll write back,” Daphne said. “I could use a reader for some of what I want to do this winter. You can tell me how the pieces strike you, and how I might improve them.”

  Although they exchanged addresses, Henrietta left the island worrying that Daphne’s promise had been only politeness. A week after the end of the course, though, the first fat envelope arrived in Hammondsport: ten pages about the tent caterpillar infesting apple trees, complete with Daphne’s drawing of a web filled with writhing worms, diligently spinning their common tent before marching out to eat leaves. Henrietta sent back her comments, along with questions about something she’d read, and after that drawings, hypotheses, speculations, and books moved steadily between them. What, Henrietta wondered, would the professor make of this? She retained not his ideas but an image of his shining, enthusiastic face. Of his cane, which he’d held like a trident; of his wife’s steady gaze, welcoming as they’d made beds together; guarded—had she known what would happen?—as Henrietta reached for the Cyanea.

  Her mother, so upset when Henrietta returned home early, and so disbelieving when Henrietta explained how her views had changed, at her urging read Mr. Darwin’s book, which had been in the village library all along. When she finished she read it again; then, troubled but not convinced, she began to argue with Henrietta. Hester sat between them at the dining room table, beneath the professor’s signed letter, listening to both of them. A deep furrow, Henrietta was pained to see, sometimes appeared between Hester’s eyebrows, as if the two sets of ideas were pulling her brain apart. Then Hester would say that her head hurt, and their mother would frown at Henrietta and declare their discussions closed for the day.

  On those nights Henrietta went to bed feeling even more lonely than she had during her first days on the island. She reminded herself, and her mother, too, that she was far from discarding all that she had learned from the professor. At her new job, she used his methods—few books, many specimens, constant close observation—to teach Mr. Darwin’s theories. And at least once a week, as he would have recommended, she gathered her students for expeditions outside.

  In December, she took them to the Glen at the edge of the village, where the waterfall had frozen. Dormant ferns dotted the shale cliffs, which were layered with fossils; the fields rippled with glacial moraines and she could not, she thought, have found a better place to demonstrate the workings of time. They picked their way along the icy rocks, some of the students searching for weathered-out brachiopods while others attacked the gorge wall with chisels. Some collected lichens and frozen mosses and ferns, some inspected the swallows’ nests, some looked for tracks in the light snow. She found a frozen mole carcass, which she brought home for Hester.

  That night her mother, after admiring the mole, sat her down at the table and passed her a plate of stew with dumplings. There was a folded newspaper near Henrietta’s spoon. She glanced at the front page and then looked again and unfolded it and read. The professor had died unexpectedly, she learned, after eating a heavy meal and smoking a forbidden cigar. The article, which filled an entire page, included remarks by many of his students, among them several who’d taught her at the island. No one mentioned disagreements with Mr. Darwin. They concentrated, instead, on his great enthusiasm for natural history, which had never waned, and on his ability to inspire students of all ages and backgrounds. One woman wrote fondly of a class she’d taken years ago, when she was young herself, during which he’d pressed a living grasshopper into each of their hands. They were supposed to follow his lead as he lectured, inspecting a leg joint or a wing, but the grasshoppers kept escaping and popping into the air. What the woman remembered most was the way the professor had laughed and stopped his lecture each time, waiting for them to recapture the runaways.

  That was one side, which Henrietta cherished. The other was apparent in the poem Whittier offered, memorializing the professor’s last project. Of the endless stanzas, too many to finish, she read these:

  On the isle of Penikese,

  Ringed about by sapphire seas,

  Fanned by breezes salt and cool,

  Stood the Master with his school.

  Over sails that not in vain

  Wooed the west-wind’s steady strain,

  Line of coast that low and far

  Stretched its undulating bar,

  Wings aslant along the rim

  Of the waves they stooped to skim,

  Rock and isle and glistening bay,

  Fell the beautiful white day.

  Said the Master to the youth:

  “We have come in search of truth,

  Trying with uncertain key

  Door by door of mystery;

  We are reaching, through His laws,

  To the garment-hem of Cause,

  Him, the endless, unbegun,

  The Unnameable, the One

  Light of all our light the Source,

  Life of life, and Force of force.

  As with fingers of the blind,

  We are groping here to find

  What the hieroglyphics mean

  Of the Unseen in the seen,

  What the Thought which underlies

  Nature’s masking and disguise,

  What it is that hides beneath

  Blight and bloom and birth and death.”

  Blight and bloom and birth and death, Nature’s mask—there was no mask, no underlying thought, only life itself. Behind the garment-hem of Cause, the real skirt she’d torn and stained. In place of sapphire seas, the real, gray, salty ocean, ringing the island—not an isle—where she and Daphne had met.

  “I’m sorry,” her mother said quietly.

  A little black
cricket, Henrietta remembered, had leapt into the air that first day at the island, as if presenting itself for the professor’s inspection and delight. “I am too,” she said.

  The Particles

  (1939)

  Once he was in the water, it was easier to see what had happened to the ship. The stern already low in the waves, the empty lifeboat davits and twisted rigging and the blackened, shattered wood on the deck, where the exploding hatches had blown deck chairs and people to bits. They’d been at dinner, spoons clicking on soup bowls, cooks poised over pots, Sam Cornelius thrown from his chair as he pushed aside a bit of carrot. Now it was past nine and fully dark. The searchlight picked out bodies floating near the boat, and when the woman crouched behind him gave her life belt to her wailing son, Sam gave her his and then was even more frightened; despite his age—he was thirty-four—he could barely swim.

  In the distance a shape, which might have been the guilty submarine, seemed to shift position. The moon disappeared behind a bank of clouds and then it rained, drenching those who weren’t yet soaked; more than eleven hundred people had been on board. When the rain stopped, the moon again lit the boats scattered around the slowly sinking ship. The three of the Athenia’s crew in Sam’s boat took oars, as did the three least wounded—Sam was one—of the four male passengers. The others, just over fifty women and children, bailed with their shoes and their bare hands, scooping out the oily water rising over their shins.

 

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