At commencement time Marvin’s father happened to be in South America,
but his mother came on to New Haven, where she met not only Mrs. Hogg
and Jimmy, but also Gratia. Her son surprised her by refusing to take a
vacation. She therefore returned with him to New York, and saw him
settled.
Before she left him she had learned, in the gentle way of mothers, what
he had said to Kate Coggeshall, and had given him her check that he
might buy a car. She knew him for what he was, masculine, able, and
intermittent, and saw that friendship with Gratia would go far to keep
him straight.
But he did not soon spend the check. He plunged into the study of
carbon, especially the forms that need to be more perfectly carbonized
to yield smokeless fuel.
Great is carbon, and deep as the shining sea, and a man may plunge into
it without going far. It is only the sixth chapter of electricity, but
it holds the patterns of human history. It is the most remarkable of all
the elements that unite to make a human body.
To conceive of some bodily actions as electric is not difficult. When
you lose your temper and hit a man, the very crack of the bones sounds
like a crack of lightning. When you discharge a kiss that you never
meant to discharge, it seems natural to blame your battery. But what
divine fingers could shape the lightning into a steady brain and quiet
glands?
Yet for a while this miracle was happening in Marvin. His limbs held
still while he thought. His glands stored up their treasures unnoticed,
or sent them secretly through his blood.
How could he think of Gratia when he was swimming in low-temperature
coal-tar, or convincing himself that coal cannot be turned into water
gas at the mine? Gratia was sweet—men cannot speak of girls without
using that carbonic word—but he had not time to smell even the jasmine
of coal-tar, much less its orange blossoms.
What was worse, he found it hard to stick to carbon. His mind kept
running ahead. As the avaricious are fascinated by crystals of carbon,
so he was fascinated by crystals of ordinary calcite. He could not keep
away from a certain laboratory to which new crystal spectrometers were
being added for the study of atomic structure.
Grein, the young dean and professor of radiochemistry, soon found him
there, and a real friendship sprang up. Grein found that Marvin not only
knew about Moseley but had read Harkins’s June article proposing a
definite hydrogen-helium theory for the constitution of all atoms. And
Marvin seemed to like a man for being overworked and irritable.
In Marvin’s room there was a telephone, and one August morning it rang
with the sudden pressure of Grein’s voice against its carbon granules.
“Come over here, prepared for a shock.”
Marvin ran to the laboratory, and Grein handed him a cable message:
Lieutenant Moseley shot through head instantly killed tenth Suvla Bay
while telephoning as signal officer.
The look on Marvin’s face was ghastly. At last he managed to ejaculate,
“Only twenty-seven!”
“Yes,” muttered Grein, “and any one of his frequencies was worth more to
England than the whole damned British army!”
Marvin’s unconscious fingers closed like clenching tools as he dully
uttered one word:
“Lead!”
“Exactly. Lead driven through the one brain that really understood lead.
Better drop your fuels and study lead.”
“No. I’m not in that class.”
“Who knows what class you’re in? I’m no Boltwood, and I’m too busy to
pace you, but I’ll see that you have some salts and minerals to work
with, and you can have a corner to yourself for the rest of the year.”