The happy youth rowed off to his own hired island and for a time sat
watching the port lights coming up the river, red as a nitrate of the
thirty-eighth element. Then he went to his tent and wrote a letter to
his father. In case any lectures were to be offered in the Yale summer
school he would like to suggest that two by Dr. Ambrose Rich on “State
Help to Farmers” would prove acceptable. He wrote also to Kate
Coggeshall, expressing the hope that if Dr. Rich came to New Haven, she
would see her way clear to invite him to Wickford, to talk about Roman
ladies. He begged her to use the enclosed hundred as a lecture fee.
These letters written, he took his fill of deep and liquid sleep.
He awoke with the thrushy dawn and lay listening. He summed up yesterday
in a flash, and was sure he had made no mistake. It was a century of new
life, and there was more to come. He should feel very sorry to miss any
of it, and he’d better be up.
He rubbed the delicious sleep out of his eyes. He arose in pyjamas and
made his way toward the east. When he emerged on the long even rim next
to the channel, what he saw was beryl beneath and magnesium garnet
above, with the sun still hidden. A year ago that unrevealing glory hid
some thirty million men busy at the day’s killing. Now it was full of
new starts, like the tuning up of these birds.
As he stood there he began at last to see why electricity shaped itself
into hydrogen and so on up, till it attained to dawns, and thrushes, and
Jean. It was art. It was the divine art of making vibrations audible or
visible. Just now he was supremely content with his own level of
perception, for any other would have meant different sights and sounds.
Much as he loved her cheeks, he had no desire to hear the ruddy waves
within them boom like surf on a limestone shore. Much as he loved a
short ray, he would rather not be tuned up to three quintillion
vibrations a second, at which rate he would see only her bones.
Thus content with every common sight, he perceived one coming up the
river. It was the patrol boat going to town. He ran down the rocks with
his letters, seated himself on a thwart all covered with dew, rowed out,
and was relieved of his burden.
The row warmed him a little, and he determined to have a swim. He
presently emerged from his tent as God made him, with soap and towel
next to his godliness. He walked through the tickling woods and searched
out a southern rock below which the beryl looked bluer, and plunged.
His first impression was that he was done for. It seemed impossible to
get his breath as he came up. He managed a stroke or two, and hung to
the rock like a dead man. But his heart presently picked up its beat, he
dragged his numb limbs out, and after a good rub-down he felt better
than ever.
So he rowed across and hunted up Dr. Rich. He walked half way up the
hill to a little meadow hidden in the cedars, which were wonderful to
look at in the dawn. The sun was turning them into luminous aquamarine,
as if in a vain effort to reveal the atoms of that living wall.
Music was gently issuing from a barn made of logs. He stole near, and
beheld the good white head like a drift of snow against the deer-like
flank of a Jersey. The doctor was milking a cow and singing a hymn,
while Agricola stood guard.
Marvin stopped and listened. The old sweet baritone continued to arise,
there where the clover was lofted like immortelles: “Love divine, all
love excelling, joy of heaven to earth come down.”
“Good morning, my son. Don’t ask whether is such a thing as love divine,
all love excelling. Just enjoy it.”
“Shouldn’t I look facts in the face, sir?”
“By all means, but the more you look them in the face, the more likely
you are to see the face of God. You should not believe in God if you can
help it but you can’t very well help it. Note how you fall into theology
at every word. You speak of looking facts in the face, forgetting that
facts have no faces. You chemists simply give them a face, thus acting
the part of God. It’s all right. If there is no Good Lord in heaven, be
a good lord yourself.”
Marvin laughed, and promised to remember the advice.
The milker rose with the pail, on which the foam was deep and white. The
observer stood and admired the cow.
“Doctor, note the way that front haunch comes down.”
“Why, man, I’ve noted it every morning since she was a fawn. She comes
home every night like a tame doe.”
They strained the milk and took it to the ice house. From within the
kitchen came the sound of a sweet voice humming a tune about the twelve
days of Christmas and the gifts her true love sent to her, which
included four Cornish birds, three French hens, two turtle doves, and a
partridge upon a pear tree.
The two men stood smiling and listening.
“Doctor, maybe I’d better get her some little gift before breakfast.
What do you advise?”
“My son, that partridge is a corruption of ‘part of a mistletoe bough’,
alias golden bough. So you’d better bring her some sort of golden bough.
Agricola, flowers!”
The dog started up the hill, and Marvin followed. Resting on the ridge
for a few minutes, he discovered a grave beneath the pines, nameless,
but covered with little white blooms of mitchella, fragrant as any
flower that blows.
He went on down to the doctor’s small paradise enclosed by woven wire to
keep the deer out, and easily discovered the right flower, a kind of
golden iris. Its petals had a thin luxuriance that suggested wither, as
if gold had indeed been persuaded to grow like organic stuff.
He brought it home to her, and she called him Midas, and let him place
his tribute on the breakfast table.
A little later she let him share the fun of baking buckwheat cakes.
“But,” said the doctor, “I didn’t know we had any buckwheat.”
“Oh, it’s a present from Mr. Gillies. He sent it up by the dog, and he
sent back ten dollars that he owes you for potatoes.”
And Marvin grinned in the kitchen while he baked griddle cakes as big as
a stove cover. Her own versions of beechnut wheat were about as large as
the first ring that breaks from a beechnut falling into a pool, but she
did not refuse to eat his.