And then, as the autumnal days grew lovelier, she could not help
shifting the emphasis from the horror to the beauty. It seemed to her
that she had never seen colors till now. Nothing was harsh, and all was
balance. Her earth was full of happy marriages. Here a splash of crimson
was offset by a field of grayish blue-green. Here purple lived with
green-yellow, here blue with yellow-red. Whatever chemistry these
married hues concealed, they concealed it like lovers.
From the balance of colors she was led again to the balances of
chemistry. Especially the balance called water held her thought as she
daily watched the river approach its hour of enchainment. Evidently the
balance was not perfect, for water acts like an acid and will slowly eat
away glass. She pondered the balance of acids and bases, and finally
begged Mr. Gillies to get her some zinc, and Ojeeg to get her some
copper, that she might make a battery.
The Scotchman complied, and on his next trip to town brought her a heavy
bar of commercial zinc. But Ojeeg, leaving his wife to carry the mail,
disappeared from home for several days and went on the war-path. From
one old friend and another he ruthlessly took secret treasures—now a
lump and now a spray of virgin copper. For some of them he had to pay,
but what did he care? He had a pension of fifty-seven dollars every
month, not to mention other government money and the rewards of
planting. Never before was such an electrode hammered into shape!
It did the work, and Ojeeg looked on in impassive silence when the acid
began to gnaw the zinc into bubbles of hydrogen. Then when a bit of wire
connected the two bars, and the bubbles shifted to the copper, he was
sufficiently awed. He had always suspected that copper was full of
devils.
But Jean, left alone, was the prey of thoughts less simple. As she
watched the hydrogen exude from the zinc, which contained enough carbon
or iron to start that flow, she wondered first if the whole bar might
not be made of hydrogen. Then she recalled the terrific explosive power
of those tiny bubbles. A few fragments of commercial zinc left by
accident in the boiler of a steamer had been known, when the hot water
attacked it, to give off hydrogen and blow the stokers into shreds.
Zinc, however, was tame as compared with its beautiful cousin,
quicksilver. Mercury fulminate was the very prince of all the devils
that produce explosion. She thought she understood now the elegant
process which had destroyed Horatio. A bomb containing finely divided
aluminum and iron oxide, and a bit of burning magnesium ribbon, came
dropping down out of heaven. On the way the oxygen of the iron united
with the aluminum and made a molten mass. This struck the exquisitely
sensitive mercury fulminate in the shells, and this in turn exploded the
stores of horror in the whole dump of ammunition.
That was the sort of thing that chemists were guilty of. Their brains
were a thousand years ahead of their passions. They were savages with
the intellect of angels. Who knew but that her own lover, in some fit of
anger, might not be capable of just such horrors? She would not marry
him!
But what force can prevent the human eye from seeing and the human mind
from inquiring? As the mercury continued to fall and the river began
again to sheath itself in blue crystal, she simply could not help
wondering why the lovely stuff in the thermometer was so different from
gold. Quicksilver was just a trifle heavier than gold and yet a liquid!
Gold would stand any amount of pounding, and mercury could not be
pounded at all.
The marvel of it wearied her, and she turned aside from her studies to
prepare for Christmas. She hungered for the sight of little children.
She would ask the grange to bring all of them on sleds to her house for
a party, and she would make them toys with her own hands.
It must be confessed that she was happier doing this than in trying to
think out mercury. To fashion a hazel nut into the brown and black head
of an Indian baby, or to split cedar into fairy supports for the wings
of a toy air-plane—this was nearer her intellectual size.
December sped along, and her father cut a superb spruce for a Christmas
tree. She festooned it with popcorn and wished that she had just a few
of the glittering baubles which gleam among the branches of such trees
in town.
Then a day or two before Christmas Ojeeg brought her, along with a
present from his son, a box containing a whole wilderness of ornaments,
together with a letter which ran as follows:
Dearest Jean Winifred:
I can make no apology for addressing you as if I knew you, and
hope you will forgive me. My husband is always telling me that
he owes you a vast sum of money, but that is not why I am
sending you the trifles that used to brighten our tree when the
children were little. When I think that my Augustus is nearly
forty and that you and Anita are grown women, I feel very old
and in need of comfort.
Dearest girl, I must not speak of what is nearest to my heart,
but I am sending you love with this Christmas greeting. Some day
I shall hope to know you, and you will tell me of the mother
whom you never forget.
Helen Marvin Mahan.