Archangel by Andrea Barrett

Author:Andrea Barrett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2013-06-20T16:00:00+00:00

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.”

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.

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