Her twenty-third birthday came, and with it a letter from Mrs. Hogg, who
evidently wished to know when she would have to furnish that trousseau,
though she did not say so in exactly those words. Also she seemed to
think that Marvin had kept Jean informed of all things pertaining to
Wickford and Chicago. She made references to her new grandson, Asher La
Hogue, now more than a month old. She had not seen him yet, but
understood that he looked like Gratia.
This was the first that Jean had heard of Jimmy’s marriage or his
transmogrified name, but her heart leaped up because the child was not
Asher Mahan. She was willing to grant him the most beautiful boy baby
ever born, with eyes of gentian and hair of gold, and enough latent
business ability to manage the biggest factory on earth.
Then to rebuke her wicked heart for singing within her she reminded
herself that a baby more or less is of little importance. There in the
presence of the Laurentians, which existed before any life arrived on
earth, it was easy for her now to deride life. Life was merely an
incidental product of thunderstorms and sunlight.
It had taken a hundred million years to make little Asher, but he was
essentially an accident. The chemistry that produced him could roughly
be understood by anybody.
Positive and negative electricity had blocked each other and turned into
a planet. If the blocking had been perfect, it would have produced a
planet of bismuth, the heaviest element that does not disintegrate. But
the actual earth was not even lead or gold or tungsten or iodine. It was
mostly iron, a comparatively light stuff, and shaded off on the surface
in ever lighter elements—calcium, potassium, chlorine, sulphur,
phosphorus, magnesium, sodium, fluorine, oxygen, nitrogen, carbon,
hydrogen. All these occurred in a baby, and a baby was an occurrence of
these.
These were the stuff of rock and air and water. The lightnings tore
nitrogen out of the air, the rains washed it down upon the rock, the
moistened rock absorbed the sun, and presently there was a baby. Of
course she could make it seem less precipitate by taking into account
the hundred million years of evolution, but what do they amount to in
the life of stars? A baby is something too unadvised, too sudden, too
like the lightning which doth cease ere one can say it lightens.
It quivers on the planet and presently acts like lightning. It wants to
go as fast as possible and feel the thrill in every nerve. It wants to
drink fire out of a glass, and dance all night. It wants to ride wild
horses and the wild winds. It wants to fight and be praised for
fighting. It wants to kiss and clasp and separate without much
responsibility.
What is more, it manages to do these things. The old folks, she
reasoned, call it immoral because they are past such achievement, or
perhaps because some inarticulate instinct warns them that there is not
food enough to support so much combustion, but the actual life of
nature’s darlings is electric and irresponsible.
She felt a good deal of sympathy for the sinners. She had not been
called the humming-bird for nothing. She was American, as all
humming-birds are, and had small use for the languors of Africa or
India. By the same token she loved a humming motor and a humming
picture-show. Marvin was doubtless having oceans of fun in making fuels
that would render all sorts of humming possible.
He was working, she thought, in carbon compounds, and though she knew
little about such matters, she knew something. Carbon compounds, such
for instance as the alcohols and atropine and quinine, were very
different from such horrible things as lead. She knew too that decent
girls in every civilized country are getting acquainted with them for a
certain reason.
And the reason was that a country like Holland, with a population of
five hundred human beings to the square mile, was simply obliged to
control its birth-rate. All the world would have to come to that point
of view within a century. By closing their eyes to the flashing facts,
good people were simply driving the young to vice.
Might she not, then, marry Marvin and share his intellectual gladness
and his animal gladness without becoming a mother? Why should
unconscious cells stand in the way of her happiness?
The question was no sooner asked than answered. All her heredity shrank
back and cried out against it. She thought again of Phosphor, the
morning star, and how his element lay hidden in her cells like some
divine and sacred light-bearer. The elements were subtly wrought within
her that some child might come and smite himself into them, as once the
Christ-child, bright as any fire, came and smote himself into the bread
of Sangreal. Rather than prevent him she might better bring forth many
sons to bear the duress of the world.