Almost, but not quite. Lightning still escaped from earth in the form
called life. Wherever there was water, it stole forth as liquid voltaic
cells. It was balanced and bottled in animals, but always enough escaped
to drive them.
It drove fish through the water like darts. It drove the wings of flies
so fast that no eye could follow them. It flashed out in the tongues of
snakes. In her own body it carried messages from her fingers to her
brain at the rate of several miles a second.
Such were the thoughts that haunted her all that spring, and a dry hot
spring it was. There seemed to be no more rain along the St. Mary’s than
there had been the summer before along the Volga. Even in the clearing,
where the grass had been lusty for a year, the ground began to look
yellow. The gift of half a dozen sheep from Chase Mahan arrived, but
they found little food.
The mosquitoes, which usually hold their revel for about a month along
the river, failed to come. On the other hand, the mayflies, which
usually lie hid in the river till July, arrived a month earlier.
Jean watched them one hot evening from her wonted seat on the Tarpeian.
They had been suppressed in their shells for two years, and now burst
forth for the one day of passion that should end them. Vast swarms of
them hovered and hummed, seeking no food but only their random mates.
The female received the fertilizing flash from the male, laid her eggs
in the water, and floated dead near the dying mate. The watchful
herring, themselves like flashes of living lightning, gorged themselves
on dead lovers.
The electric swiftness of the whole tragedy appalled her, and yet human
beings were not much slower. She herself had felt the lightning-flash
when Marvin first looked into her eyes, and her mother had confessed to
feeling the same thing on meeting Ambrose Rich.
She remembered one of the first things that Marvin ever said to her,
about the likeness of a brain to a burglar alarm. How true she had found
it! How easily she had tired of her studies and plunged into action to
escape thought.
She remembered the little folks who came to her party at Christmas.
Their dear little arms and legs could not stay still a minute. She
wondered if the Christ-child had been like that, so full of electricity
that he could not be cuddled except when asleep.
She wondered many things about the Christ, who was tempted in all points
like as we are, yet without sin. What could that mean? Of course Jesus
did not give way to the urge of anger or envy or avarice, but how strong
he must have been not to have given way to the passion of love! In that
sacred body there had been the same store and potency of fertilizing
flashes, millions of them in comparison with the one cell which is
fertilized, yet all those lightnings of his youth had been restrained.
It must be otherwise with men of her day. The unrestrained hatred shown
in war must be a sign of other unrestrained passions. They who hurled
rivers of lead at each other must—she stopped, remembering something
that had caught her eye in a sociological journal sent for some other
purpose to her father. She remembered with horror the assertion that
lead deliberately produces two million abortions a year in the United
States alone.
She tried to forget it. She must think of the million tons of lead that
are mined every year for good and honest purposes. Men do try to be
decent.
The weather continued terribly hot, and she and her father had all they
could do to save their precious garden. Every evening they carried water
from the fire-ditch, and saved some of the green from running back into
the roots. But the farmers all lost their hay and had to cut their grain
for fodder. This was what life meant—or would mean—ultimate uncertainty
of food.
The fish died by the hundreds and had to be gathered up from the shore
and buried. Every day she saw large perch floating by, each a lost and
golden dinner. Once she saw a sturgeon, a hundred pounds of wasted food,
weltering to the parching wind. But these waters had been robbed of tens
of thousands of sturgeon, making this wretched swollen thing almost the
sole survivor. Out west the salmon were going the same way, and the
Indians who depended on salmon would have to die out.
She read in the papers that the same terrific heat was felt even in
Europe. But she had no hope that such warnings would be heeded. The
birth rate in all the European countries was rising rapidly. England had
made a net increase even during the war, and Vienna—the hardest-hit of
all the great cities—had recovered and was breeding plenty of rickety
children.
Such were her inmost thoughts during that burning summer of 1921, and
not one of them did she breathe aloud. In fact the more terrific the
heat, the more she seemed to flourish. When she was not cooking or
working in the garden, she was mostly in the water. She would swim out
as near to the steamers as it was safe to go, and sometimes nearer, and
from the bubbling sapphire flirt like a mermaid with the deckhands.
One luminous evening her astonished old parent saw her swim across the
channel and land in Canada, half a mile away. The glass that he had used
half a century since in the war now revealed her perched there upon the
pier. Half an hour later she was dancing on the pier in her bathing suit
with several Canadian lads and lassies. He rowed across for her and
brought her home, a very bacchanal of laughter.
Curious are the freaks of lightning.