Two more pairs of men entered, and then it was time for the first pair of women. Henrietta realized, as the professor signaled, that she hadn’t quite registered her partner’s plant-like name. “Clover?” she said tentatively.
“Daphne,” her partner responded. “Ready?”
Henrietta nodded and they clambered over the stones. Somewhere in the writings of Ovid, a Daphne turned into a tree. And indeed her partner was as slim as a tree and had pale green eyes. They reached the opening in the rocks and paused.
“Yesterday,” the professor said from above them, waving his cane encouragingly, “my wife was able to reach quite a few specimens by kneeling at the entrance and reaching inside.”
Yesterday, Henrietta recalled, he’d reminded them all that their previous training meant nothing to him, and that he didn’t care what they already knew, or thought they knew. He was interested only in what they could learn by careful observation here. Both she and Daphne balanced themselves on their hands and knees and inched forward, lowering their heads beneath the lip of the roof. Although they’d folded the tops of their skirts around their belts, the hems were already wet and hung heavily around their calves. The sheer bulk of the material kept their lower halves outside the grotto.
“How stupid our clothes are,” Daphne muttered.
Henrietta tugged and shifted, but the folds of her skirt, which dragged on the shells and tore at the algae, kept blocking her way. No wonder the professor’s wife had stopped where she had. “Ridiculous,” she said, trying to fit herself alongside Daphne’s slim torso. From the shore they must look like a pair of handbells, stems slipped into the cave. Still, even if they couldn’t crawl inside as far as the men had, they could see all around.
As her eyes adjusted to the dimness, she spotted pink algae, red algae, and something that looked like tiny green tomatoes or grapes. Starfish, barnacles, and sea anemones everywhere, Metridium marginatum: some fully withdrawn into dull lumps of jelly, others showing a coy frill, the boldest drawn tall and waving their tentacles, purple or pink or white or brown, orange or scarlet, absurdly plant-like yet fully animal. When she touched one, the plumy fringe shrank and disappeared.
Daphne, who had already pried loose several Metridium with her pocketknife, fixed her gaze on a patch of seaweed matted over one particular nook. “There is someone,” she said, moving like a cobra, “hiding under that …” She pounced and came up with a sea urchin. The walls were covered, Henrietta saw; the walls were entirely alive; more of the prickly mounds hid here and there, along with terraces of barnacles, which made room for rows of mussels, which gave way to clumps of sea anemones. Every inch of the rock was used in a way that seemed not random but purposeful, a pattern that, like the tiles on a floor, wasted no space but still allowed each creature access to the nourishing tide. How did that happen? She’d seen clumps of mosses and ferns make similar patterns at the Hammondsport Glen, near home.
“Better hurry,” Daphne advised, sliding something from the blade of her knife. “We only have another minute or two.”
Quickly Henrietta gathered a starfish, her own sea urchin, two sea anemones with waving white fronds and another mostly orange, three small crabs, a couple of mussels, algae red and green and pink, and a bit of Fucus encrusted with a kind of hydrozoan.
“Time!” the professor called from above. The previous day he’d drawn a map of the western hemisphere on the board and then divided it into five zoological regions. Each was inhabited, he explained, by animals perfectly suited to that province, confined to those geographical limits. In each the animals were endowed with instincts and faculties perfectly corresponding to the region’s physical character. But because the climate of a country was allied to the peculiar character of its fauna, that didn’t mean that the one was the consequence of the other; were that the case, all animals living in similar climates would be identical. Rather, the perfect distribution signified the work of a Supreme Intelligence who created, separately and successively, each species at the place, and for the place, which it inhabits. The animals were autochthonoi: originating, like plants, on the soil where they were found.
Henrietta’s wet skirts dragged as she lowered her head and began to move back into the sunlight. Did that mean, then, that the creatures in the grotto had each been created to fill its own tiny niche? That they were — did one use the adjective? — autochthonous? Wondering about this, trying to remember what, exactly, the professor had said, which had seemed far clearer yesterday, she set her knee down squarely on a patch of barnacles. As she jerked her leg she somehow kicked Daphne, who in an effort to steady herself overturned her bucket, letting out a cry louder than Henrietta’s.
The professor leaned over the ledge, nearly falling from his stool as he called, “Are you all right?”
Daphne, grasping futilely at her escaping prey, said something under her breath.
“Barnacles,” Henrietta gasped. The sharp plates had razored through her skirt, but she was more concerned at the misery on Daphne’s face. “I’m sorry,” she said. “That was so clumsy — you’ll share what’s in my bucket?”
Daphne pressed her lips together. “What choice do I have, now?”
“Take some samples of your assailant!” the professor called genially. “The Cirripedia are fascinating, even if their armor is painfully sharp. God has so ordained that these creatures, who in their second larval stage resemble little shrimps, should swim about until they find a home and then cement themselves headfirst in place, transforming themselves into stony lumps that gather food by waving their feathery little legs. As miraculous, if you think about it, as if a creature born in the form of a perch should shed its skin to turn into an eel and then into a robin, only to glue its forehead to a rock and transform itself into a horse waving its hooves in the air.” He pointed at the blood staining Henrietta’s skirt. “You have been kicked, though. Do take care of that knee.”
Daphne, loaning her a handkerchief and then spreading her own skirt wide to block Henrietta’s legs from view, said crossly, “If he wasn’t going to give us a chance to replace our lost specimens, he might at least have found a more original comparison.”
“What are you talking about?” said Henrietta, dabbing at her wounds.
“Comparing the stages of barnacles to a fish that turns into a horse — someone else said that, I read that in an old book about microscopy.” Pointing at Henrietta’s knee, she added, “You missed a spot.” And then, as Henrietta dabbed again, “Swish the handkerchief around in the water when you’re done. Then the stain won’t set.”
Smart as well as practical, Henrietta noted. Not to mention sharp-tongued. Back at the laboratory, where the professor directed them to their workstations, she was pleased to learn that, for the next six weeks, she and Daphne would share not only the contents of a collecting bucket but an aquarium, a table, and a window.
“Lucky me,” Daphne said.
Her lips twisted so briefly that Henrietta couldn’t be sure she saw the movement. Impulsively, she pushed the bucket across the table. “These are yours now, not mine. Could we start again? I’m not usually so clumsy.”
Daphne looked at the bucket, at Henrietta’s hand on the bucket, finally at Henrietta’s face — and then she smiled, so openly that Henrietta felt a huge rush of relief. Together they decanted their specimens into glass bowls and jars and worked through the afternoon, exchanging quiet comments as the professor talked and strolled between the tables. One mussel they’d collected had a broken shell; they fed it to a hungry sea anemone and watched the tentacles draw it inside. After dinner, they listened to one of the assistant teachers talk about the remarkable ability of the holothurians, or sea cucumbers, to escape their predators by ejecting their viscera and later regrowing them.