“Is this division of the animals into four groups,” he concluded, “the invention of a great naturalist? Or is it simply the reading of the Book of Nature? Can the book have more than one reading? If our classifications are not mere invention, if they are not an attempt to classify for our own convenience the objects we study, then they are thoughts which, whether we detect them or not, are expressed in Nature. So then Nature is the work of thought, the production of intelligence, carried out according to plan, therefore premeditated — and in our study of natural objects, we are approaching the thoughts of the Creator, reading his conceptions, interpreting a system that is his and not ours.”
Two swallows darted past as he spoke, headed for the rafters, and half the young people assembled before him looked up.
IN THE FIRST batch of mail for the students, delivered by the same little boat that had brought her to the island, Henrietta had a letter from her mother. After giving the family news, and wondering how Henrietta’s journey had gone and how her boots were holding up, she asked about the professor:
What is he really like? I imagine him sitting down with you individually, showing you the secrets of a turtle’s egg or a minnow, but perhaps I imagine this wrongly and he doesn’t spend that much time with you. Does he lecture, or does he leave that to the other teachers? If you do get to talk to him alone, please tell him how much we treasure his books in our home, and how seriously we in our small village have taken his work. Your father and Hester send love, as do I.
She’d written, Henrietta imagined, with those very books around her, her pen moving briskly while Hester, who had just turned twelve, fussed over the brood of tawny hens she’d raised herself. Already she dreamed of having a big family, while Henrietta had wanted only this. Because of the professor’s books, she’d sailed through the zoology questions on the entrance exam for Oswego: Give the names of the sub-kingdoms of animals. Give briefly the characteristics of each sub-kingdom, speaking particularly of the arrangement of the circulatory, digestive, and nervous systems. What mental and moral powers has the cat? Prove it. Describe your right hand.
It should have been easy to write to her mother about their household god — but the truth, Henrietta thought as she folded the letter away, was that she had little to say, despite her early arrival at the island. During those three days of working like one of the servants, she’d shared meals with the professor and his wife and awaited his brilliant insights. Instead, he’d talked about the money due to the carpenters and kitchen staff, the price of coffee and sugar, the state of the sheets. He drank tea without sugar, she learned. Stripped the meat from fish heads and the marrow from bones. As his teaching staff trickled in, she also learned that he greeted old friends with a kiss on each cheek. Six times, while she occupied a place at the table where she had no right to be, she listened to the professor’s wife explain how Miss Atkins had mistaken the date, shown up at the inn in New Bedford wet and confused, accompanied them to the island, and then—“She’s been such a help!”
Six times she smiled ruefully as the professor beamed across the table and agreed with his wife — and this was, apparently, the closest she was going to get to him. The minute the other students swarmed into the barn she’d felt herself disappear, one minnow among a shoal in dark skirts and striped shirtwaists, mingled with young men in loose jackets, all looking up at him. An honest report to her mother would read: I see him from the back of the room. From across the field. From the far end of the dining hall. He was simultaneously genial and boastful, brilliant, confused, brimming with life, half-asleep; unable to remember anyone’s name — he’d twice confused her with a woman from Bridgeport, whose dark curly hair resembled her own — yet strangely alert to their inner selves. I don’t understand a thing about him, she’d have to write. Any more than I understand if I like it here, or hate it.
At first either too lonely, or too surrounded by company, she put off answering the letter. On Monday night she was alone in the empty, echoing dormitory; on Tuesday night it was filled with people; by Wednesday night, when she went upstairs after a day that seemed to have lasted a week, she found that the long, open, empty space had been not only populated but partially divided. Three beds along each wall had been enclosed like oysters within tiny planked rooms, which the workmen had built that afternoon. They’d build more each day, she knew. The professor’s lessons would be punctuated with the repeated tap-tap-TAP of nails being driven home, and each night the common room would seem smaller, the walls advancing toward her own bed until finally she too was enclosed. I wish, she might have written to her mother, that you and Hester were here. Or that I had a friend.
In the dining hall she ate each meal with different students and compared notes with still others in lectures. The blind fish of the Mammoth Cave, she wrote, thought by some to demonstrate direct modification of an organism by the environment … At bedtime, in the women’s wing, she passed soap to the two Marys and chatted with Lily, who slept next to her, and with Laura and Katherine, whose beds faced hers. All of this, the patient rubbing of elbows and the accidental, meaningless intimacy, was familiar from her time at Oswego. But here everything seemed to happen more quickly and some of the students had already formed attachments. Already there were pairs and trios who always sat together at meals, walked together afterward — how had they so swiftly found companions?
By Friday, when the entire class followed the professor, his wife, and two of the assistant teachers to the southwest tip of the island, for a lesson observing and collecting marine invertebrates, she was beginning to think that her days alone with the professor and his wife had done nothing but separate her from the other students. The professor, standing on a rock, said that because the grotto he’d found was accessible only from an hour before dead low tide until an hour after it turned, they would for the sake of efficiency be collecting in pairs. She stood uncomfortably behind a group who seemed at ease with each other, nodding seriously and exchanging glances as he read their names from a list. Her new partner was someone she didn’t know, a slip of a girl she’d glimpsed darting down the stairs while the others were still dressing.
On the rocks, where the professor lined them up, they faced a horseshoe of rocky ledges, roofed over by a boulder to form a watery cave. The professor perched on a wooden stool next to the boulder. At his command, the first pair, a high school teacher from Maine and an instructor at Antioch College, scrambled down the weedy rocks toward the grotto, pausing at the entrance.
“Crawl right inside!” the professor encouraged them. He waved his cane and the wind rose, lifting strands of his white hair. “Don’t worry about getting wet!”
The men disappeared, leaving visible only the soles of their rubberized canvas boots. Henrietta, clenching her bucket and pocketknife, stole a glance at her partner’s tiny feet. Above them the professor consulted his pocket watch. Five minutes later — only by such strict scheduling, he’d said, could they all see the place for themselves — he cried “Time!” and the two young men backed out and stood, grinning, guarding their sloshing buckets as they picked their way back to the shore.