A year had passed, and still no word from Marvin. Evidently he had not
yet gone back to the wonderful Gratia with the hair like spun gold and
the eyes like gentians by the river’s edge. But he had two more years in
which to reclaim Gratia or find somebody else.
How like a dream were now that visit to the East, and the meeting with
her mother’s old friend, and the confession to Kate Coggeshall in the
gloaming, and that gift of paper which might have been sold for a
hundred thousand dollars! She, Jean Winifred Rich, had actually refused
a hundred thousand golden dollars, flattering herself that it was
because she had not earned it. How slenderly she had known herself! The
real reason was that she could not accept money from the father of the
man she loved!
Now all the gold remaining to her was the unspent double-eagle given her
by Susan Endicott Hogg. No—there was the other tiny mass of it. Up on
the hill lay a ring on a dear and crumbling hand.
During the magical autumn days of 1920 she was but little in her
laboratory and oftener sitting by the grave beneath the pines. It was
covered now by the scarlet berries of mitchella, on which the sunlight
rested warm. And beside it Jean lingered as if clinging to the one thing
intelligible in a chaotic world. Her mother’s love seemed about the only
fact that she could understand.
Certainly she could not understand gold. It was a lovely substance,
looking as if all the fires of a star had been compacted in one lump,
and it had always been dear to poets. It was so beautiful that she would
fain have given the Red Leaf a mixing bowl of the purest gold to mix her
corn bread in. That of course was impossible, because there are so few
grains of it on earth. To make up one-tenth of one percent of the rocks
it takes all the gold and all of sixty-three other elements.
But this stuff so dear to the poets had also been cursed by every great
writer from Isaiah down. It was saint-seducing gold. It was the cause of
theft and murder and war. It meant misers and misery. She felt dimly
that Horatio had been sacrificed to somebody’s love of gold, but she
could not prove it. All that she could do to help the world was to bring
no more Horatios into it.
Just as her poor little mind was baffled by gold, so for the first time
it was baffled by the gold of autumn.
The green had run back from the leaves of the maples into the trunks,
leaving thin gold to bask in the air till the wind should tear it loose.
The action of retreat stored the sweetness in trunk and root, but it was
all the unintending deed of the tipping earth. So too the apples and
pears and wild grapes were vials of sweet golden sun, stored without
intent.
Or, if there was intent, it meant chiefly the scattering of seed, as if
every plant wished to inherit the earth for itself. The very berries on
her mother’s grave seemed to harbor some such purpose. The weeds were
even worse, flinging their seeds afar in sudden spasms or catching the
fur of passing rabbits and clinging to such carriers. Thistledowns
drifted along the breeze like airplanes bearing invaders. Tiny spiders
set themselves afloat and drifted in gossamer, borne on the congealed
silver of their own bodies to conquer the world.
Of all those seeds not one in thousands would survive, yet life poured
them out unceasingly. They were produced unconsenting and uncomputed,
and wasted unabashed.
This star of hers, which at the distance of a few million miles seemed a
jewel, was in reality vast and awful. The mist of life upon it was a
mist of blind struggle. A good map of any mile of it would show
beautiful weeds and men and bacteria all wasting their life in the
struggle for possession. It was beautiful, but it was horrible.