Fully prepared to take his medicine, Marvin escaped from the hospital
and took account of stock. Somewhere near Mezy his good left hand was
depositing its calcium, or was at least on its cheerful deliquescent way
to do so. He must get him another, as fine a piece of mechanism as the
new alloys of steel could furnish. In fact he must have two, one fit for
heavy work. After much investigation he got them made to suit him. One
wore a glove, the other was a set of tools. He named the fine gentleman
Pat, and the tools Maisie, which was about as near as he could spell
Mezy in English.
Long before the armistice he was drilling troops again. And just before
it was signed he received a curious note from Gratia. She was glad that
the enemy was showing symptoms of collapse, because she hoped that now
her friends would treat her better. He did not understand this, and
wrote at once to beg for an explanation.
But when, a day or two later, a bundle of papers arrived, it threw light
on that sentence of Gratia’s. His father had been criticising Asher
Ferry.
Chase had been interviewed in Winnipeg, where Ferry’s name was well
known to the farmers, and the reporter had asked if he were personally
known to Mr. Mahan. Chase replied that he had once met Mr. Ferry at a
club, but that neither of them was much of a clubman. Being asked if he
did not belong to several clubs, the famous engineer admitted that he
did, and humorously inquired if the reporter always went to church.
Being asked if Mr. Ferry was a good American, Mr. Mahan flatly declined
to discuss the gentleman further.
When back in Chicago, Chase was immediately confronted by a reporter
carrying a copy of the Winnipeg interview. He then loosened up. He said
that in March, 1917, Ferry attempted to dissuade one of his employees
from enlisting, on the ground that the work he was doing was more
important than anything he could do as a soldier. The employee
nevertheless presented himself at a recruiting station, and was rejected
on account of his eyes. Unwilling to accept this decision, because
though rather near-sighted he was performing his usual duties as a
designer, he applied in vain at another recruiting station. The
designer’s name would be furnished if necessary, but as the disclosure
would doubtless cost him his job, the reporter had better inquire round
for other proofs of Ferry’s disloyalty.
Marvin laid the paper down. So it was Jimmy who had made all this
trouble. Though not much of a letter writer, Jimmy had long since
informed his chum of the work he was doing. He was making punch-presses
fool-proof. In December, 1916, Mr. Ferry had sent for him and asked him
what department appealed to him most, and Jimmy had asked to be allowed
to remodel the punch-presses. It would be a slow job to change them all,
but it ought to be done, because they crushed a good many hands.
Marvin immediately wrote again to Gratia, saying that he now understood
the case and thought her father mistaken but not disloyal. He trusted
that by June he would be home, and that then she would give him the
right to stand by her always. Evidently this letter did not help
matters, for it was never answered.
Her silence tempted him. If she would only refuse him, he would feel
free to turn again to his first love. And when presently relieved from
drilling troops and set to organizing a corps of instructors in
mathematics, he was tempted and fell. That is to say, he fell to doing
sums.
They led him far, and he found himself grappling with contradictions.
The first was the fact that light seems to be an ethereal wave, and yet
a bundle of etherless energy. The second was that an atom seems to be a
whirling system and yet to vibrate rather than whirl. With these two
paradoxes he wrestled mathematically until he felt convinced that the
whirling was a reality. As a chemist he would rather see an atom stand
still, but as a physicist he was compelled to see it whirl.
He so enjoyed this fall from grace and Gratia that on he went,
calculating the mutual electromagnetic mass of a simple system, to find
out why hydrogen loses weight when it enters a heavier atom. This was by
far the hardest job he had ever undertaken, but it gave him an equation
that would always express the total mass of a positive and a negative.
After that he went ahead with two lines of theory, one concerning the
interpenetration of elliptical orbits, one predicting the probable
varieties of each atomic species. Of course it was all in the dark, but
it was the best sort of discipline.
To take an example of his simplest results, he calculated that calcium
was forty positives and forty negatives, half of the latter in the sky
and half cementing the diminutive sun. Diminutive would seem to be the
right word, since it takes six billion billion positives or negatives to
make one ampere. Argon, he reckoned, was also forty forty, but its
nucleus was more firmly bound, leaving only eighteen planets. Argon was
so compact in the middle that nothing could brush an electron off.
Calcium, less firmly cemented, would burn in air or join with phosphorus
to make bones—like his up at Mezy.
He could see in his mind’s eye a laboratory devoted to nothing but these
matters—just the testing of these theories by six or eight methods and
many new pieces of apparatus. He could see a group of friends keeping at
it for years. And other things he fancied. If some lad in his imaginary
group chafed under the routine, he might be allowed to explode heavy
metals in the hope of securing helium, or coat those metals with radium
emanation and then explode them—any device by which the hand of man
might chance to deflect the course of nature within the atom. Suppose
that the result reduced the estimate of controllable power by one-half,
it would nevertheless make America the master of the world, and he
believed that she would use such might humanely.
In March he wrote it all out, in a paper of great length, not for
publication but to free his mind, and sent it on to Grein.
April came, and earth was called upon to part with Sir William Crookes,
who was perhaps the first to suggest that the atoms of earth are of
electric origin. Hardly had he read of Sir William’s death when Marvin
was invaded by the influenza germ. It laid him low, kept him in bed six
weeks, and left him with a weakened heart. The man who sailed for home
was thin enough to serve for his own radiograph. If Gratia suggested
pearl, he suggested a structure of calcium less beautiful.