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 replaced 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 Schooclass="underline" 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