When her little laboratory was ready, even to an air-tight stove, Jean
moved in. She had her Lucretius, a recent text-book, a few chemicals,
and her dog for company.
Far away her lost lover was deep in the study of carbon—so she thought.
That must be an awfully difficult subject, and she must begin with
something easier. She plunged into oxygen, and did so with as much joy
as ever she plunged from a rock into her river. It did not spoil the St.
Mary’s to be made mostly of oxygen. She found it more beautiful than
ever. The feel and look and taste and rush of it were all there, only
now she was getting deeper into it. Her own body was mostly composed of
the St. Mary’s, and now a swim was like being stroked by one’s own
mother.
With great care she prepared some oxygen by heating potassium chlorate,
and watched a bit of iron wire burn in it with dazzling brightness. By
the same element her own body was daily burning, a slow and steady flame
in the midst of the earth’s vapors. But how amazing that the flame of
oxygen burst out so rarely! It puzzled her that her island, though half
oxygen, should be crystalline and cold.
She ran over the list of elements and was astonished to find them
arranged in a sort of musical scale. Each octave began with a sharp
metallic clang and then became less metallic. She wondered why some
great composer had not perceived this and written a symphony about it.
In the evenings she began to improvise on the little old rosewood piano.
When her fingers went flickering upward into the treble with soft
murmurs or bright passion, and her delighted old father would ask her
what she was playing, she would answer, “Oh, only oxygen.”
She was equally astonished to find that if she read the successive
octaves downward, the elements fell into families. Thus oxygen was
related to sulphur, chromium, selenium, molybdenum, tellurium, and
tungsten. How in the world could anything so light as oxygen be like
anything so heavy as tungsten?
Sulphur was the only one of that family she knew when she met it. So she
melted some crystals of sulphur and froze them into long needles, while
Agricola lay by the little stove concealing his sulphur beneath his
color. She knew now what a solid is, and that only crystals are true
solids. As for sulphuric acid, which is perhaps the most useful of all
chemicals, she chiefly wondered why it or anything else was acid.
The year 1919 came to a close, leaving her with a sense of almost
nothing accomplished, but grateful that she had found a wonderful new
interest to keep her from moping. If she could not share Marvin’s life,
she could follow him afar off and feel him nearer.
In the paper she read a list of famous persons who had died in the
course of the year. She read such utterly different names as Carnegie,
Crookes, Emil Fischer, Habibullah, Laurier, Liebknecht, Osier, Patti,
Rayleigh, Roosevelt. How hard they had tried, each in his own way, to be
of some use in the world! Carnegie had given the world libraries,
Crookes had warned it against famine, Fischer had endeavored to make
foods, Habibullah had ruled his savages, Laurier had kept two races from
biting each other, Liebknecht had wanted the poor to be comfortable,
Osier had healed thousands, Patti had taken people’s minds off their
troubles, Rayleigh had discovered something wonderful in the air, and
Roosevelt had actually united two oceans.
And how were they rewarded? Well, Habibullah and Liebknecht were
assassinated, and Osier and Roosevelt robbed of their sons by war. If
Dr. Osier and Colonel Roosevelt could speak to her now, would they
advise her to marry? She did not believe that they would.