The last day of 1917 came, but she did not attend the grange party to
see the old year out. At nine o’clock she lighted her candle, wished
daddy a happy New Year, and went to bed.
She awoke long before daylight, and wondered what the new year would
bring. Perhaps her father would slip away and leave her all alone. The
thought was intolerable, and she sprang out of bed. It was far too early
to get breakfast, but she dressed herself warmly and went out.
The frosty sky was more glorious than ever. It bore no trace of a new
year, for it was timeless. She looked for Venus, and found it, a great
jewel reflecting the purest white. Then she remembered that in her
valedictory she had referred to it as Phosphor and Hesperus.
How often since then she had quoted Sappho in her heart, wishing that
Hesperus might bring the child home to its mother. But she remembered
avoiding the word Lucifer. It meant the same as Phosphor, but she had
been afraid that some bad boy might be reminded of the devil.
Why was Lucifer a name of reproach? Because he tried to equal God. And
when defeated he whispered to God’s innocents that they were naked, and
sent them a boy who killed his brother!
She remembered that her father as a sharpshooter had slain forty of his
own brothers—the notches were still to be seen on his old rifle. She
suddenly understood why he had not married till forty-six. Ambrose Rich
had come out of the army determined to engender no boys to be slain by
sharpshooters. That was the secret of his traveling away off up here and
staying for half of every year from 1869 to 1892. Here he had silently
atoned for his sin. Here he had edited the most severe of all criticisms
of civilization.
On the whole she was sorry that father had not stuck to his resolution.
She was glad to have been born, but as for Horatio, it was clearly a
mistake to summon him out of some evening star to be blown to pieces on
this one.
For consider what life on earth is. It is a mere stain on the rock, a
mist that clings with hands, happy so long as it is stupid. Jean was
freed from sentimentality by knowing so much about fish. They would lie
still while she skinned them, and she concluded that really normal human
beings are almost as free from nerves. She had read of a Zulu so
insensitive to pain that when his back brain was cloven by a sword he
was laid up for only two days.
And what was the history of civilization on her star? Only those persons
survived who could live on very little. The kings of Egypt were gone,
but the slaves of Egypt still lived, eating corn and never needing a
dentist. In China the slaves ate rice and outlasted all their
conquerors. There it was in a nutshell. The earth belonged to people
whose teeth would wear down to the root. The earth had always been
inherited by the meek, and always would be.
Clearly earth was not a proper place for a superior mind like Horatio’s.
He ought never to have come. He might better be in the loftiest star of
unascended heaven, pinnacled dim in the intense inane. So, on the whole,
she would never summon any Horatios down. She would never get married.
And when she got over missing her mother and brother, she would be the
cheerfulest little old maid in the world.