Andrea Barrett - Archangel

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?”

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 School: 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.”