It was such a note as might have been written to a girl disappointed in
love, but Jean felt sure that it was no such thing. Marvin loved her
still, and his mother knew it and was pleading for him.
It had to be answered, and after Christmas a very tremulous girl managed
to write as follows:
Dearest Mrs. Mahan:
My mother would have loved you dearly for what you have written
to me. And if you could have seen the faces around our Christmas
tree, you would have been comforted for your own children who
have grown so big and splendid. One of the smallest boys—his
father works on the patrol boat—kept pointing his little pink
finger at the biggest ornament and saying “Moon.” So finally I
had to give him the moon to carry home. It made me think of the
very first summer I can remember, when I started up the hill to
get the moon as it rose through the pines. I have got over doing
that, but it has not been easy.
Now that Christmas is over, our life slips along in the same
quiet way as ever. My father stays perfectly well in this cold
air. Just now he is sitting on the porch all wrapped up in his
old buffalo robe and wearing his old beaver cap. One squirrel is
sitting on his shoulder and another on top of his cap, eating
hazel nuts, while he is probably thinking out the form of some
lost Scythian word from which “squirrel” is derived. He says
that the Greeks were not very critical when they thought it
meant “shadow-tail.”
Will you please give my love to Mr. Mahan and to Anita? I envy
her the work she does for the soldiers. And please believe that
I am always your grateful
Jean Winifred.
Having thus evaded a mother’s love as well as she could, Jean again
tried to lose herself in the affairs of the universe. Again she watched
her star swing through its wintry orbit, a process which thrilled her
with its accuracy. To be sure it seemed to have no purpose, but she no
longer felt obliged to defend God’s purposes to anybody.
She extracted what pleasure she could out of another recurrence—that of
similar qualities in boron, aluminum, scandium, gallium, yttrium,
indium, the rare earths, and thallium. These were fresh disguises for
the one substance, whatever that might be.
Her hold on it, in this group, was through common clay. Her rough old
star, all gleaming with silica under the moon, had so long been washed
with showers that now it was fairly smooth and finished in aluminum
silicate. Wonderful stuff it was, this clay, which could be caught in
its festal moments as sapphire and ruby, and which could be molded into
wasps’ nests and porcelain vases and brick houses. She could chase its
finer essence, along an electric route, into the silvery metal of her
best sauce-pan.
Slowly the sun’s rays began to straighten, and the clay began to show
through in spots. The river resumed its liquid phase, and the deliberate
delicate lichens grew faster. Young shoots began to veil the maiden
birches in a mist of green. Below them emerged the slender ferns, downy
and curled. Aluminum was laying a restraining finger on them, lest iron
make them grow too fast.
By and by came a bluebird, little guessing that aluminum had a part in
his azure. The last of March arrived, and she read in the paper that
John Burroughs had died. She grieved at this, for Mr. Burroughs had been
one of the few people who really seemed to love the earth.
She broke her treasured double-eagle and sent for his last book. She
found it very temperate and wise, all about accepting the universe. But
somehow he remained very old while she remained but two and twenty. He
was like her father, apparently quite reconciled to Horatio’s death.
He did not believe in a God of love, but she noted that he kept
referring to nature as “She,” just as Ojeeg did. Evidently nobody could
escape some sort of religion, and naturalists preferred their mothers or
grandmothers as their models for God. But if she had to think of the
earth as Nokomis, her grandmother, she would never call Nokomis
“impartial.” The earth wanted her to marry Marvin Mahan. The earth was
just stupid enough to keep urging her to do it.
She watched the spring matings and wondered that Mr. Burroughs dared use
such a word as “impartial.” Her thrushes, pouring out their heavenly
celebrations of marriage, were merely notifying the hawks and squirrels
where the nests were. The hawks and squirrels listened with amused ears,
knowing they could count on maternal love to furnish them with warm meat
of baby thrushes. So statesmen listened to mothers’ lullabies, which
would always assure them armies.
But in spite of the bitterness which the innocent old man thus aroused
in her, she presently owed a debt to John Burroughs. She found him
ironically asking if it helps us to think of the soul in terms of light,
or radioactivity. She pondered that and differed with him. It certainly
did help her to think of Horatio’s soul as light or electricity. As for
radioactivity, she had never thought of it at all. She knew the word,
but it had meant no more to her than the phosphorescence that she saw in
Wah-wah-taysee, the firefly.
In the Britannica she at once found an article on radioactivity. It had
long been lying there unobserved, quite after the fashion of other
divine riches. She read it with amazement, and though it offered no
theory of matter, arose with the conviction that matter is built up from
hydrogen, which is merely the smallest neutral unit of electricity. She
had found the one substance. She guessed that all the lovely colors and
shapes of earth are made by the different arrangements of electricity.
By the time supper was over she was living in a new world, feeding on
electricity. Her star had become electric to the core. Sunlight was
still reflected from the sphere, but the sphere itself was lightning.
After she washed the dishes she went out and looked at the universe. The
neutral lightning called the St Mary’s was flowing peacefully. The
neutral lightning called her island seemed immobile, but was vibrating
in every atom. The pines were not coruscating, but garbed their
thunderbolts in shadowy green.
And so the spring of 1921 passed into summer, opening her eyes. A
billion years ago this gem beneath her feet had been an ammunition dump
constantly exploding. For some reason God had slowly closed His hand
around it and almost hushed it.