Kate looked at them and did not quite believe it. This was just their
merry way of putting off their marriage until Marvin had established
himself, so as not to be dependent on his father or on Gratia’s. Kate
had fostered this mating, and took pride in it, and had it all settled
in her mind. So she laughed and said she’d wait and see.
Marvin however did not wait for dinner or to see the frock of Veronese
green, but tried to heat the chromium out of his ball bearings as he
shot back to Wickford. He exulted all the way to New York and went to
bed exulting.
Next morning on the Pennsylvania road his elation had cooled down a bit.
He was completely depolarized from Gratia, but the reaction was not
wholly pleasant. In the first place, the loss of his hand had evidently
made a difference. That polite “Not much” of hers concealed a certain
physical shrinking and a certain unwillingness to spend a lifetime in
tying cravats. Perhaps he had no right to ask any woman to share his
mutilated life. In the second place, he felt lost. There was nothing now
to prevent him from going to the dogs—nothing to prevent him from
indulging his passions and palliating them with the name of nature.
The train reached Philadelphia, where once was signed the only treaty
between savages and Christians not ratified by an oath—and the only one,
if we may believe Voltaire, never broken by Christians. But though
little was left of Penn’s dream of peace, Marvin remembered gratefully
the Quakers in their war work. They had not sent their passions on God’s
errands or palliated them with God’s name.
The train passed on into Pennsylvania, a great and stately volume of
natural things in which Penn had desired youth to read. And this youth
read a little. To the south and west lay Gettysburg, where a great issue
had been fought out. He was not quite sure what the issue was, but it
had been very real to his grandfather.
To the south, beyond those hills green as chromium oxide and viridian,
lay chromite in the rocks and the streams. There was even a town called
Chrome, and he wondered if instead of importing chromite from Africa the
steel men were not reviving the old industry. It had taken them two
centuries to perceive either the tensile strength of chromium or the
intense hardness which pierces armor plate.
Could steel heal the wounds of steel? He had asked himself the question
a thousand times, and always with the same answer—yes. Given cheap power
instead of this anthracite over which men quarreled and under which they
died untimely, machinery would so increase wealth that wars would cease.
If all the present wealth were distributed and miraculously kept
distributed, it would not raise the standard of life ten percent. But
let a hidden nobody in a laboratory discover one new electronic fact—for
instance about the emissions from a heated metal—and everybody was
presently enriched.
A nobody—like Richardson or Grein. Grein wouldn’t marry. Grein, poor
faithful dogged devil, wouldn’t marry. Was Grein right or wrong? Grein
had already added millions to the general wealth, and women who had
never heard of him used his lights by which to compose papers inveighing
against men. What Grein needed was a woman to take care of him, a woman
who had sense enough to see the importance of science. But there seemed
to be few such women. So Marvin concluded, and ended the day with revolt
against the whole sex—except one.
Next day that one met him in the hall, threw her arms round his neck,
and looked up at him anxiously. He smiled down and answered the silent
question.
“She said she’d rather not.”
“I’m so sorry. Perhaps she will think better of it.”
Marvin’s face instantly lost its smile, and looked so grim that it
frightened her into protest “Don’t take it so hard, beloved.”
“I’m not taking it hard. I don’t care a rap.”
She concluded that it was wise to say no more, and so she merely pressed
his glove to her cheek and let him go. It is not strange if she misread
the situation. Her almost clairvoyant perception was swallowed up in
pity.
That night she told her husband.
“It nearly broke my heart. He said that he didn’t care, but the look on
his face told a different story. It seems that she treated him
lightly—just said she’d rather not.”
Chase scowled. “She kept him on the string till she had compared him
with all the young men she knew. Then he got maimed, and she had no more
use for him.”
She came and sat on the arm of his chair. “Chase, dear, we mustn’t jump
to conclusions. Don’t you remember—thirty-eight years ago—how afraid I
was of your fierceness? You had to wait, and you did wait. There was no
breaking your will to marry me. Don’t you underestimate the tensile
strength of your own son?”
“You mean he won’t give her up?”
“I don’t believe he will.”
Chase was silent for some time, lips perfectly quiet, eyes apparently
fixed on her silvery hair.
“Helen, do you wish me to go on with my plot against Ferry?”
“Please do. Win him over to our side.”
“All right, you witch.”
And he lifted her bodily from where she sat, and folded her in his arms.