Charles and Emma (19 page)

Late Tuesday afternoon, Dr. Gully came to see Annie. He told Charles and Fanny that she had not gained ground. They had to prepare for the worst. Fanny wrote to Emma that “he thinks her in imminent danger…Oh that I have to send you such sad, sad news.”

As the day wore on, Annie's pulse weakened. Her breaths became more and more shallow. She dropped into unconsciousness. At noon on Wednesday, April 23, with Charles beside her, Annie took her last breath.

Charles threw himself on his bed in physical and emotional agony.

At Down, with a gap in the letters, Emma feared the worst.

On Thursday, the postman brought the news.

“My dear dearest Emma,” Charles had written when finally he could get up from his bed, “I pray God Fanny's note may have prepared you.”

Emma read on. “She went to her final sleep most tranquilly, most sweetly at twelve o'clock today.”

Dr. Gully had written up the cause of death as a “Bilious Fever with typhoid character.”

“Our poor dear child has had a very short life, but I trust happy, and God only knows what miseries might have been in store for her,” Emma read. “She expired without a sigh. How desolate it makes one to think of her frank cordial manners.” A year earlier, Charles had had a picture of Annie made. He told Emma, “I am so thankful for the daguerreotype. I cannot remember ever seeing the dear child naughty. God bless her.”

Charles ended his letter with another hope, a most heartfelt prayer: “We must be more and more to each other, my dear wife.” Losing a child ruins many a marriage; he could not bear to live without Emma. “Do what you can to bear up, and think how invariably kind and tender you have been to her. I am in bed, not very well.”

Emma wrote Charles that he should come home. “You must remember that you are my prime treasure (and always have been).” She needed to be with him as much as he needed to be with her. She feared for his health and his life, so she told him not to hurry. She could not bear it if he died, too. But she knew “we shall be much less miserable together.”

In her diary, on the day for April 23, she noted simply, “12 o'clock.”

 

Chapter 22

A Dear and Good Child

 

She must have known how we loved her. Oh, that she could
now know how deeply, how tenderly, we do still and shall
ever love her dear joyous face! Blessings on her!

—C
HARLES, THE END OF HIS MEMORIAL TO
A
NNIE
, A
PRIL
30, 1851

 

W
hen he was on the
Beagle
voyage, Charles had witnessed the funeral of another beloved daughter, the daughter of a native chief in New Zealand. Charles recounted the scene in his
Journal.

 

The hovel in which she had expired had been burnt to the ground: her body being enclosed between two small canoes was placed upright on the ground, and protected by an enclosure bearing wooden images of their gods, and the whole was painted bright red, so as to be conspicuous from afar. Her gown was fastened to the coffin, and her hair being cut off was cast at its foot. The relatives of the family had torn the flesh of their arms, bodies, and faces, so that they were covered with clotted blood;…On the following
day some of the officers visited this place, and found the women still howling and cutting themselves.

 

There would be no howling, no tearing of flesh at Annie's funeral in Malvern. It would be a quiet ceremony in the graveyard in the town where she died, but Charles did not want to stay. He would get no relief or release from his daughter's funeral. What comfort could he get from a Christian service? How could he believe that his dear Annie suffered for sins she committed? She had been an innocent; nothing could convince him otherwise. Even while she was dying, she was sweet and polite. Even while she was dying, she worried about her little sister. “Where is poor Etty?” she had asked Brodie. Annie was Annie until the end—sweet, considerate, sensitive.

Although Charles felt torn about leaving, because he was not one to shirk his duties, he just could not remain in Malvern. Fanny would stay, and Hensleigh would come, too. They, with Brodie and Miss Thorley, would be there to see Annie buried. He knew the only thing that would give him any consolation would be holding Emma and being held by her. Although Fanny had been a comfort, and although he wrote to Emma constantly, it was he alone who had watched their cherished daughter leave the earth. His letter to Emma telling her that Annie had died seemed calm and composed. He had been anything but. As the end came near, he had sat beside her crying, knowing there was nothing he could do; knowing deep in his soul that no matter what Emma believed about heaven, he would never see Annie again. Death was the true end, and his little girl was gone forever.

At home Emma waited for Charles and tried to comfort the other children. She had written that “my feeling of longing after our lost treasure makes me feel painfully indifferent to the other children, but I shall get right in my feelings to
them before long.” Yet according to her sister Elizabeth, Emma was being wonderful, crying at times, but also coming to the meals with the little children and helping them with their food, attending to their needs. Willy had arrived from school and, though he was grief-stricken, his presence was a gift to his mother. And she had the new life growing inside her. That was a gift, too. But she was bereft.

When Charles got home, Emma met him at the door. They clung to each other and wept. They went over the details of the last days again. It was necessary to go through it all together, side by side.

Charles said he took some consolation in the thought that had Annie lived she might have suffered a life of ill health, as he was now suffering. He also took solace in the knowledge that he had never said a mean word to his daughter. But these were small comforts compared to his grief.

Everyone at Down was devastated. Brodie, Annie's beloved nurse, took her death especially hard. She came back for a while, but at sixty she found it was just too painful to be at Down without her Annie. She was close to retirement anyway, so she left the family and Charles provided her with an annual pension for the rest of her life. She came back to Down House many times afterward for long visits.

Charles asked Erasmus to put a notice in the
Times
of London in the “Deaths” column: “On the 23rd inst; of April, at Malvern, of fever, Anne Elizabeth Darwin, aged 10 years, eldest daughter of Charles Darwin, Esq., of Down, Kent.”

A week after Annie died, Charles took out pen and paper and wrote a memorial portrait of Annie. It was just for him and Emma to capture the essence of their child on paper.

“We have lost the joy of our household,” he wrote, “and the solace of our old age.”

Emma experienced premature labor pains the day Charles wrote the memorial, but then the pains stopped. Twenty days after they lost Annie, on May 13, a new child, a son, Horace, was born. Emma's sister Elizabeth was still there, and she and their aunts had hoped that Emma would be healed by the birth. When Elizabeth reported that Emma was still very much in grief, an aunt wrote, “We are disappointed at your account of dear Emma…However, we must have patience and wait.”

 

In July, with Emma recovered enough from the pregnancy and birth to travel, she and Charles took the family to London for a week. Emma held baby Horace close. The baby and the normal activities of everyday life were starting to help a little. In London the Darwins stayed with Erasmus, who hired three horse-drawn cabs for Charles, Emma, and all the children and their nurses and governesses to go to the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park. It had opened a week after Annie died. Held in the architecturally magnificent Crystal Palace, the “Great Exhibition of Works of Industry of all Nations” was a celebration of technology and progress. Charles enjoyed the exhibits. There were displays of power looms, rope-making lathes, marine engines, hydraulic presses, steam machines, and other tools, machines, and crafts from around the world. The children enjoyed the sweets Uncle Erasmus gave them. But the exhibit itself was boring for the young Darwins, and given a chance to go a second time, Etty stayed at her uncle's house to scrub the back stairs, which she thought would be much more fun.

After trips to the zoo and other excursions around town, Charles and Emma took their family home to Down. It was a relief to be back in the country. The city always made them both feel worse physically. And life had to go on. Charles had
two books on barnacles coming out:
A Monograph on the subclass Cirripedia
and
A Monograph on the fossil Lepadidae.
He planned to write at least two more. He had more work to do when he was ready. He would not have Annie to make his hair beautiful or whirl around the Sandwalk with him. But he had Emma and the other children.

 

Over the summer, Emma realized that Etty, who was not quite eight, was suffering terribly from her sister's death. She had lost her playmate just as Emma had lost Fanny all those years ago. But Etty was just a small child. She did not have a real understanding of death. Emma had told the children that Annie had gone to heaven. This did not comfort Etty at all.

One evening that summer, as the family listened to Miss Thorley sing, Emma noticed that Etty looked upset. She took her out of the room and asked her what was the matter.

“But Mamma,” Etty said, “where do the women go, for all the angels are men.”

Emma asked her if she was thinking of Annie. Etty said she had not been thinking of Annie, but then she burst into tears.

Etty agonized over heaven and hell because she felt she was not as good a girl as Annie had been. On a few occasions Emma tried to reassure her, but Etty focused on the fact that she was deficient somehow. She kept trying to be “better.” The maids did not help—they told her that Annie had been much sweeter and nicer than she was.

“I used to be a very naughty girl when Annie was alive, do you think God will forgive me?” she asked her mother another evening. And she pleaded, “Will you help me to be good?”

“Annie was a good child,” Emma told her. “I do not think you will find it difficult to be as good as she was.” But
something was bothering Etty. Emma asked her what made her so unhappy.

“I am afraid of going to hell,” Etty replied.

Emma told her, “Annie is safe in heaven.” The implication was that Etty, if she was a good girl, would go to heaven, too.

But Etty knew that she was not Annie.

“Come to me,” Emma said, “and I will try to help you as much as I can.”

“But you are always with somebody,” Etty challenged her.

Emma
was
always busy, with other children, with servants, with visitors. But she was concerned enough about Etty to write down these conversations. She told Etty to pray, and she prayed with her, but Etty was not consoled. She worried that she was too proud, too selfish to go to heaven. Unlike Emma, who had been old enough at twenty-four to commit herself to faith and to being a good and religious person like Fanny, Etty was just eight. Emma had written that note to God: “help me to become more like her, and grant that I may join with Thee…” But what could Etty, a small child, do to come to terms with her sister's death and to make herself feel better?

Emma took it as a good sign when Etty asked for some of Annie's hair to put in a locket, and that she was able to talk about her sister's death. The following February, Etty told Emma, “I think about Annie when I am in bed.” And, “Mamma when I see anything belonging to Annie it makes me think of her. Sometimes I make believe (but I know it's not true) that she is not quite dead, but will come back again sometime.”

Emma knew it was good for Etty to talk about Annie. But she found it too difficult and painful to talk about her lost daughter. So did Charles. He did not speak of Annie more than once or twice for the rest of his life.

Etty said later that her mother never got over Annie's
death. When Emma died, an old woman of eighty-eight, Etty found a “little packet of memorials” that Emma had kept: a half-finished piece of wool work, a child's desk, paper of texts in a child's hand, and two ornamental pocket books. Emma had also copied out part of a poem, “Early Death,” by Hartley Coleridge:

 

She pass'd away, like morning dew
Before the sun was high;
So brief her time, she scarcely knew
The meaning of a sigh.

 

Charles had also kept something in addition to his memorial of Annie. He kept the notes he had taken of Annie's symptoms during her illness and while she lay dying.

Emma and Charles coped with Annie's death the best they could—both together and separately. What united them was their love for each other and their love for Annie and their other children. Would their religious differences divide them? Aunt Jessie had written a year and a half earlier, “We have none of us to choose our religion. It comes to us by the atmosphere in which we live, we modify it afterwards according to our different minds, and many by our hearts only.” Would Emma and Charles modify their religious feelings together or separately?

Emma held on to the hope of heaven. Charles could not.

Soon after Annie died, Charles wrote to his cousin Fox, “I do not suppose you will have heard of our bitter & cruel loss…Thank God, she suffered hardly at all, and expired as tranquilly as a little angel…She was my favourite child; her cordiality, openness, buoyant joyousness and strong affections made her most lovable. Poor dear little soul. Well it is all over.”

For Charles it was all over. Although he knew he would continue to think, to read, and to talk with Emma about his religious beliefs, he was certain he would never see Annie again.

When he had arranged for Annie's tombstone at Malvern, he put no quotes from scripture on it, as was usually done. The marker read only: