Charles and Emma (27 page)

Happily for Charles—and perhaps not coincidentally—with age also came better health. His symptoms were much less severe, and he spent much less time in pain. Since he was old and had lived such a sickly life, he didn't do more than he used to. Yet he had always been extremely busy and productive, even when he was ill. To his gardener it looked like he wasn't doing much at all when he walked about the grounds observing the flowers. Asked about his master's health, the gardener said, “He moons about in the garden, and I have seen him standing doing nothing before a flower for ten minutes at a time. If he only had something to do, I really believe he would be better.” In fact he was, as usual, making scientific observations.

In the cold January of 1880, Charles's children, concerned that he never dressed warmly enough, gave him a fur coat. He was delighted at the thought but told Emma privately that he doubted he would ever need to wear such a thing. He wrote to the children, “The coat…will never warm my body so much as your dear affection has warmed my heart.” Though he did add, “I should not be myself if I did not protest that you have all been shamefully extravagant to spend so much money over your old father.” But he put on the coat almost immediately and wore it so constantly, as Emma told Lenny, that he was “afraid it will soon be worn out.”

That summer Emma became obsessed with the worms, too. Charles had taken to attempting to train them, but Emma
told Lenny he “does not make much progress, as they can neither see nor hear.” So they could not respond to cues they were given. Still she spent hours with Charles in the garden, watching the worms. She wrote, “They are, however, amusing and spend hours in seizing hold of the edge of a cabbage leaf and trying in vain to pull it into their holes.”

In 1881, Erasmus Darwin died and was buried at Down. When Horace's first child was born in December, he named him Erasmus. They had all loved their uncle. As William said, “To me there was a charm in his manner that I never saw in anybody else.”

That year Charles also published
The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Action of Worms, with Observations on Their Habits.
In the conclusion, he wrote, “Worms have played a more important part in the history of the world than most persons would at first suppose.” And more people were interested in worms than Charles would have thought. This book sold better than any of his others!

In early 1882, Charles suffered several heart attacks. Though not fatal, they left him weak and unable to walk without pain in his chest.

In March he was so sick that it was an occasion on the days he got up to look out the window. But then, when spring came and it got warmer—“exquisite weather,” Emma wrote—Charles was able to get outside. He had lost his lifelong pleasure of walking, but he spent many happy hours sitting in the orchard with Emma. They both knew that the end was probably near as they sat and listened to the birds sing in the spring sunshine and admired the crocuses opening up.

In many ways, both Charles and Emma had been preparing for his death since they were first married. He had been so sickly, and it was really only in his last years of life that his
health was fairly normal. Emma nursed him one last time and recorded his symptoms in her diary. And as she sat by his bed, he told her what he needed her and the family to know. “Tell all my children to remember how good they have been to me,” he whispered to her.

Like Annie, Charles was always polite and grateful when he was sick. “I was so sorry for you, but I could not help you,” he told Emma, thanking her for all her years of taking care of him. And, as he often had told her over the course of their lives together, “It's almost worthwhile to be sick to be nursed by you.”

On Monday, April 17, Emma wrote in her little diary that Charles did some work and went into the orchard with her twice. On Tuesday, she wrote “ditto”—another day of work and sitting in the orchard. But then, at midnight, he had a “fatal attack.”

The next morning, Charles reassured Emma, “I am not the least afraid of death.”

As he slipped slowly away into unconsciousness, he told her what he had said many times before, what she already knew, but what he had to say again: “Remember what a good wife you have been to me.”

Emma held Charles to her one last time.

 

Chapter 32

Happy Is the Man

 

His body is buried in peace, but his name liveth evermore.

—
FROM
G
EORGE
F
RIDERIC
H
ANDEL'S FUNERAL ANTHEM,
SUNG AS THE COFFIN OF
C
HARLES
D
ARWIN
WAS LOWERED INTO THE GRAVE

 

O
n Wednesday, April 19, 1882, Emma wrote in her diary, “3½.” Charles had died at three thirty, with Emma holding him. Etty, Elizabeth, and Frank were also by his side. Charles was seventy-three.

That afternoon, Emma went down to the drawing room for tea as usual. Etty and the others watched in wonder as she let herself be amused. She smiled a little, and once almost even laughed. It was so like Emma to bear her grief alone, to hold it inside and be strong for the others, who were crying inconsolably. Charles's absence would hit Emma again and again over the years, painfully, but for now she had a family to take care of and a funeral to consider.

Emma wanted Charles buried at the church graveyard
at Down. He had wanted to be buried at Down, too, in the village where he had spent most of his life. That was where the two babies lay; that was where Charles had buried his brother Erasmus the year before. Down was near Emma; it was home.

The next day, as the rest of the family began to arrive, Polly, the dog who had been so attached to Charles, suddenly grew deathly ill. Frank had to put her down. In her diary, Emma wrote “Polly died” and “all the sons arrived.”

They buried Polly under a Kentish Beauty apple tree.

The undertaker came to Down House and laid Charles out in the coffin on his wheeled cart. The plan was still to bury him in the church graveyard near his babies and his brother. But when Frank informed Huxley, Hooker, Lubbock, and other friends of his father's death, they felt strongly that Charles should be given a hero's burial. A quick campaign began, and within a day or two, twenty members of Parliament signed an edict that Charles should be buried in Westminster Abbey. He would be laid to rest in the nave, next to Sir John Herschel, the astronomer, whose quote calling the origin of species the “mystery of mysteries” Charles had used in the introduction to his
Origin of Species.
He would also be near the great Sir Isaac Newton. Emma, who finally agreed that Charles would have graciously accepted the offer, only wished he could be closer to his friend Charles Lyell, who was buried in the nave of the abbey, too.

The funeral was held on April 26. Emma and Charles had been married just over forty-three years. Emma did not go to London. She stayed at Down, at home, where she felt closer to Charles. She wanted to mourn alone. She told Etty she wanted now, and later, to live through her desolation by herself and be left to rebuild her life as well as she could without Charles. She wanted time, too, to think about her precious past with him.

The rest of the family went up to London, as did Parslow and a few other servants.

It was a stately affair, large and ceremonious. Charles's body had been moved from the country coffin to an elegant city casket draped in black velvet and sprinkled with white blossoms. Most of the important people of the day came to show their respects to the great man of science. And as he was buried in a church, a gulf—there, at least—was bridged. A special hymn was written for the occasion. It began with words from the Book of Proverbs: “Happy is the man that findeth wisdom, and getteth understanding.”

William, as the eldest son, the one upon whom “the nation's eyes” rested, as the family always said afterward, lent the affair a casual, no-nonsense Darwin atmosphere. After he removed his hat, as one had to do in church in polite society, his bald head got cold. Not wanting to offend by putting his hat back on, but worried, of course, as any Darwin child would be, about getting sick, he balanced his black gloves on the top of his skull to keep it warm. He sat that way through the whole service.

 

Chapter 33

Unasked Questions

 

I feel a sort of wonder that I can in a measure
enjoy the beauty of spring.

—E
MMA TO
L
EONARD
, 1882

 

E
mma spent that summer at Down, but she felt it would be too lonely to stay there without Charles in the winter. The house was large, and it would be too empty without the person on whom Emma fixed all her routines, as she said. In summer the children and grandchildren would come and help her fill up the empty space, the empty hours. But for the rest of the year, she needed a different place to live. So she bought a house in Cambridge, where two of her sons, George and Horace, already lived. Her new house, the Grove, gave her a place to rebuild her life without Charles, though she never went anywhere without her “precious packet”—the few letters she had saved that he had written to her over the years. She wished she had saved every scrap, every note he had written to her.

Frank and Bernard moved to Cambridge with her. And when Frank got engaged the following year, he built a house on Emma's property so that Bernard could see his grandmother every day, as ever.

George married an American, and they had a baby whom they named Gwen. Emma took much pleasure in this baby, as she did in all her grandchildren. She wrote to Etty when Gwen was three months old, “I am so pleased to find how comfortable I can make this baby. She is so placid and spends her time devoted to the gas; but answering any attention by a smile and gathering herself in a lump with both fists in her mouth.”

But she missed Charles. Reading over his books and letters made her feel closer to him. Three years after he died, she sat down and read his
Voyage of the
Beagle again. There was Charles's voice, his hand reaching out to her, Come with me. She told Etty, “It gives me a sort of companionship with him which makes me feel happy—only there are so many questions I want to ask.”

That year there was an unveiling of a statue of Charles in the Natural History Museum in London. Emma would have liked to be there, but she did not want to have to see people. “I should prefer avoiding all greetings and acquaintances.” She went later to see the statue, and she liked the pose, though she did not think it looked enough like Charles. How could a stone image look to her like the man she had loved for so long?

Frank was working to publish his father's letters, as well as reminiscences he culled from the autobiography Charles had written. Emma read the letters, too, and found that “in almost every one there is some characteristic bit which charms one. A little mention of me in a letter…sent me to bed with a glow about my heart coming on it unexpectedly.”

But Emma was worried about the publication of the autobiography. Charles had written it for his family, not for strangers. And there were things Charles had written that she felt would offend others, because they offended her. Not surprisingly, they were about religion. She asked Frank to take out certain passages, writing to him, “There is one sentence in the
Autobiography
which I very much wish to omit, no doubt partly because your father's opinion that all morality has grown up by evolution is painful to me; but also because where this sentence comes in, it gives one a sort of shock…“The sentence Charles had written was “Nor must we overlook the probability of the constant inculcation in a belief in God on the minds of children producing so strong and perhaps inherited effect on their brains not yet fully developed, that it would be as difficult for them to throw off their belief in God, as for a monkey to throw off its instinctive fear and hatred of a snake.” Emma felt this sentence would give people “an opening to say, however unjustly, that he considered all spiritual beliefs no higher than hereditary aversions or likings, such as the fear of monkeys towards snakes.”

Emma told Frank she thought it was fine to leave in the first part of the sentence, but asked that he take out the last—it was not good to equate religious feeling with the fear of snakes. She added, “I should wish if possible to avoid giving pain to your father's religious friends who are deeply attached to him, and I picture to myself the way that sentence would strike them.” She named some friends, Charles's sister Caroline, and “even the old servants.”

Emma asked Frank to omit other sentences as well, and he complied. She did not exactly censor Charles's autobiography, but she did clean it up as much as she could so that nothing would be misunderstood, and nothing, she hoped, would give
offense. She was, as always, Charles's editor. But he wasn't there to argue his points.

She left in “I gradually came to disbelieve in Christianity as a divine revelation” but took out “Beautiful as is the morality of the New Testament, it can hardly be denied that its perfection depends in part on the interpretation which we now put on metaphors and allegories.”

Most significantly, Emma expurgated this passage: “I can indeed hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true; for if so the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my Father, Brother and almost all my best friends will be everlastingly punished. And this is a damnable doctrine.”

Was this true? Were Erasmus and Dr. Darwin, and Charles himself, in hell? Would she see Charles again? These were questions that could not be answered.

Other than helping Frank, Emma spent the years of her life after Charles's death much as she had the years before she married him. She read constantly and offered, in letters to Etty mostly, her literary criticism. She read some of her favorite old books again. She spent much of her time reading, and in 1894 she wrote, “I am rather ashamed to find I use up rather more than a volume a day of novels.” She read the Brontës and Robert Louis Stevenson. She read the novels of Jane Austen and Elizabeth Gaskell. One of Mrs. Gaskell's books, her last one, was left unfinished. In this book,
Wives and Daughters,
Roger Hamley, a wonderful, likeable hero, was modeled after Gaskell's friend Charles Darwin. Because Gaskell died in 1866 before finishing the book, Roger and his sweetheart, Molly, were not yet together. But the book points to a happy ending.