THE YACHT CONTRIBUTED by one of the professor’s friends from Boston arrived the following week; a colleague at the Coast Survey donated a dredging outfit; by the second weekend the students, grouped into boatloads of eight or ten, had all made at least one excursion, learned to use the implements, and collected some deep-water specimens. On the second Sunday, François spilled from the dredge an excellent example of a basket-fish, which obligingly gathered its five sets of finely branched arms around itself until it looked exactly like woven wicker. Later, as the deck dried and it began to want water, it relaxed into a lacy disk, arms extended around its pentagonal body.
“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.