For that matter, everything was wedded to something else. All the noble
metals seemed to happen together. The osmium and iridium in the tip of
her fountain pen were so much alike that they could be called by the
name osmiridium. Perhaps all the world was like that, one stuff with
different appearances. Had not her planet once been something very hot
and uniform, which had cooled in many shapes?
One evening, as they sat before the glowing coals, she coaxed her father
to talk about the one substance. He told her of Thales, who thought it
water; of Anaximenes, who thought it air; of Heraclitus, who saw the
earth as ever-changing fire; of the Stoics, who thought that God’s
reason is a creative fire forming the earth and preserving it, a
doctrine which Lucretius could not abide; of Plato, who conceived earth
as made of little cubes and fire of little pyramids.
For Ambrose Rich all these substances were evidently only forms of
thought. He was chary of expressing opinions, but his daughter fancied
that nothing was real to him except thought. For him the splendidly
broken living coals did not fade into atoms but into spirit.
In Jean’s mind they met no such fate. The indescribable glow, far too
delicate and luminous to be called red, was to her the actual glow of
atoms. She did not attribute the color to her mind. What she longed for
was keener senses to see into the heart of things.
And if she was inclined to agree with Heraclitus, it is hardly necessary
to ascribe her feeling to her wintry isolation or her longing for
Marvin’s warm clasp. It is human nature to love the fire that burns in
its own veins.
She often reflected that anything will burn. Nothing is so solid or so
wet but it can fade away in heat. Some day the whole round earth would
vanish as a round knot of birch vanishes up the chimney. She was not to
be deceived by the cold look of ice or silica, for you never could tell
what might happen.
So February sped along and the spring of 1920 approached. The warm round
crystal called earth made its way through the interstellar spaces and
tipped its darkened pole into the sun’s rays. The ice began to melt,
keeping its chill to the last lump. Everything else began to expand a
little, as if softly burning. Inert snails and frogs and buds began to
swell. The pussywillows came forth in gray velvet and stood near each
other like bashful lovers, for male and female created He them.
Presently the hidden fires began to glow pink in arbutus among the
pines, and ran like blue flame along the shore in violets, and then to
fill the upland woods with the frank conflagration of adder’s tongue.
Jean went about feeling fire of every imaginable temperature.
She delighted to call it out of all sorts of things in her laboratory
and out of doors. With a bit of steel she struck fire from every part of
her island. And having abandoned the impossible task of playing the
elements on her little old rosewood piano, she contented herself with
making up a melody for some words of Browning:
Fire is in the flint: true, once a spark escapes,
Fire forgets the kinship, soars till fancy shapes
Some befitting cradle where the babe had birth—
Wholly heaven’s product, unallied to earth.
Splendors recognized as perfect in the star!—
In our flint their home was, housed as now they are.