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?”