Marvin lay in the hospital, trying to realize what had happened to him.
Never again could he hope to stir a solution with one hand while he
regulated a stopcock with the other. Nor could he see himself making
bulbs of laboratory glass, no matter how tough it had been rendered by
the nineteenth element.
But presently a cable arrived from his father:
Still a lucky dog proud of you
glad to pay for laboratory assistant
dearest love from all.
The message gave him back his courage. He would not accept a cent. He
would teach his right hand to do the work of two, and then apply to
Grein for a job. He would do nothing for the rest of his life but study
how to blow Berlin off the face of the earth. Nothing but subatomic
lightning would teach the Germans anything. They had a natural monopoly
of potash, they had mastered nitrogen, they had phosphates the secret of
which they owed to a British chemist. Their next war with America would
be over dye-stuffs.
But wait—he was forgetting Gratia. He was probably going to marry
Gratia. He was not exactly in the mood to do so, but he must remember
that she could hardly live on the salary of a laboratory assistant.
Who was this lovely creature, anyhow? He asked the nurse to bring him
the letters from his trunk. There were twenty-four from Gratia, and he
read them all.
They were written in a neat round hand, every _i_ dotted. They were most
friendly. They kept track of him. In the earlier ones there was much
about the life at Eglantine. Several concerned boxes that she was
sending for his men. She described in pretty detail the commencement of
1917, when she was class president. She described her return to Chicago,
her bandage-making, the club for soldiers and sailors, the Waukegan club
for the blue-jackets, and so forth and so on. But the letters of the
current year were less interesting. She seemed to be running out of
subjects. When he had been watching the enemy, she had been watching the
sunsets from her father’s yacht. Up in the straits of St. Mary a very
quiet farm-girl had given her some flowers. She did not seem to realize
that he was not concerned with farm-girls.
He spent half an hour in tying those twenty-four letters up again. They
were not so fascinating as the job of learning to use his teeth and
hand. He let the nurse return the mass of expensive note-paper to his
trunk, but would not let her take his mother’s letters. Over these he
laid a protecting arm, and went to sleep holding them close to his side.
Next day he read those two hundred and was sorry they were so few. She
wrote of the boyish delight exhibited by his father on receiving from
Dr. Grein a copy of the article on lead. She sent him a solemn parody of
the article composed by mother and daughter. She told how his enlistment
had stirred his oldest brother, and how Augustus had camped in
Washington till he succeeded in getting a job with the Red Cross. She
recorded the profanity uttered by his brother Charles when his services
at Washington were finally considered more valuable than his probable
services in the field. She told of his sister Anita, who was teaching
shut-ins to do things that nobody thought they ever could do, and
getting them paid for it. Jimmy Hogg was often in for Sunday evening
supper, but never had much to say, and wouldn’t make love to Anita,
though plenty of others did. She thought Jimmy pure gold, but described
him as understatement incarnate. She presumed that if he were addressed
in a thunder storm to the effect that it was raining, he would say that
on the whole he didn’t imagine that he was prepared to deny it. In
short, as Marvin read and read, he laughed and cried, and was very
homesick for his mother.
And then it came over him that he did not long for Gratia. She was sweet
and sensible and beautiful, but he did not care two straws if he never
saw her again. He had been an idiot to ask her to marry him. It would
cost him a good deal to make that proposal again, as he certainly would
do. To be the one-handed husband of so elegant a creature was a sorry
prospect.
He could see how it all happened. Girls had rather flung themselves at
him just because he had chestnut hair, and he had taken refuge in
Gratia. Offering himself to Gratia was all mixed up with offering
himself to the United States. If he did not grouch about losing a hand,
he must not grouch about winning the girl.
Good-by to all thoughts of radiochemistry. He must get back into fuels
and show manufacturers how to stoke. He must even be glad over Gratia,
and in due time give her a child.