Edwin Herbert Lewis

“ After that, in the early months of 1916, Cynthia was no more thought of, and even the delightful companionship with Gratia ceased for a while. He had sought girls as instinctively as a metal seeks the most abundant of the elements, and found them all slightly intoxicating, but none had crumbled him into white sparks.
His love was lead. He was less enchanted by carbon than by her sister, who had sung Moseley to sleep to prevent him from revealing her music to the world. But Marvin, listening in, began to recover that music, thrill on thrill. ”

“ At the foot of my bed sat Mainutung. His face was smooth as any Indian’s, and his eyes were laughing at me.
“How far can a man hear from the north when such a storm is blowing from the west? He cannot hear a moose bellow ten rods off. Yet my son’s baby voice was heard for half a mile. Now he hears the voice of Mainutung asking payment—an island for a life.”
Ojeeg rose to his feet and spoke with equal dignity in the same language.
“Ningah, I am not deaf. When the Keen Ear needs Keego for himself, he shall have it. When he needs these hands, he shall have them. But this thief is not Mainutung.” ”

“ But Marvin might well be patient, for it had taken thousands of millions of years to coax the bashful atoms into her young body. Once her carbon had burned in the white incandescent smoke around the sun, and later fled embraces through the storms of earth and countless creatures that never would be man. She was at least as old as thorium, which lay radioactive for twenty billion years before any lover seduced it into a gas-mantle, and which even then refused to glow till a trifle of cerium set it off. ”

“ Suppose she lied to Marvin and said that she had ceased to love him. But she really did not know how to lie.
She turned back to history and harrowed her soul with horrors. She reminded herself that excess of population has driven every race to expose its children. She saw Sicilian graveyards opened and hundreds of babies that had been buried alive in earthen pots. She saw the silver sails of Athens unloading excess of life on every island, and the rock called Tyre unloading its slums on Africa. She saw Europe unloading itself on America. ”

“ It is only the sixth chapter of electricity, but it holds the patterns of human history. It is the most remarkable of all the elements that unite to make a human body.
To conceive of some bodily actions as electric is not difficult. When you lose your temper and hit a man, the very crack of the bones sounds like a crack of lightning. When you discharge a kiss that you never meant to discharge, it seems natural to blame your battery. But what divine fingers could shape the lightning into a steady brain and quiet glands?
Yet for a while this miracle was happening in Marvin. ”

“ She groped along the eastern shore of Seen-ze-bah-cud, and by ten o’clock her right oar, like a fingertip, discovered Ojeeg’s sailboat.
She lighted her lantern and tied her boat to a birch that leaned out over the water. Then she stepped ashore, hung her lantern on a hazel, and put on her blouse. The lantern shone in the bush and pinked out the tufted bunches of hazel-nuts, and shone on Jean herself as she lifted her rosy arms.
Warm in her new sweater, she seized the lantern and started up a path. Sometimes the light revealed a maple with scars, for the Indian tomahawks his sugar trees. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Magnesium If ever a girl had need of courage, it was Jean during the spring of 1916, for her father sat by the hour staring at that old haircloth sofa, and sometimes at a tiny gunboat made of wood, a piteous perfect thing that Horatio had whittled out as a child. So she had to do most of the planting herself, and tend the garden until it picked up its green and grew lusty.
But when the day’s work was done and the supper dishes were washed, she would steal away to the Tarpeian, and bathe her aching soul in stars. ”

“ Then he rowed round to the south and rested on his oars to survey the island that he intended to buy.
But the minute he paused, business gave way to delicious thoughts the like of which he had never known. He had spent a life in training for the sight of her. He must have known all the time that she was there. Just as Mendeleyeff had prophesied an element like boron and an element like aluminum, so he had unconsciously known that there must be a girl as impassioned as Cynthia and as exquisitely self-contained as Gratia. ”

“ Having now a Kittiwake at her disposal, the Humming-Bird embarked to make a ceremony of the signing. Her retinue consisted of one editor of Tacitus, one Scotchman, one Red Leaf, one Black Hawk, one postmistress, one notary-gunsmith, and one dog.
Ojeeg and Shinguakonse were not at home, and Jean had to go after them. She found them in a little hayfield hidden among the cedars, working side by side, their long forks turning the masses of clover with ease. They saw her afar off, and stopped. There in the hidden hayfield the boy stood for a moment like his own tree, tall, and dark, and straight. ”

“ Safe in the trenches for six months, under fire and untouched, singing through it all of the good time coming, relieved and on furlough. And then, passing an ammunition dump of the Canadian army, blown into pure ether. A thermite bomb, dropped from an aeroplane, had exploded the mercury fulminate, and Horatio Rich had disappeared from earth. There was no more search for him than for the effects of lightning on the sea. ”

“ And the noble gas, neon, discovered in the year of Jean’s birth, stood apart in the air and watched the earth. It combines with nothing. It is like the Epicurean gods, reclining beside their nectar while the lightning bolts are hurled. And one morning it was undisturbed to see a German bomb, filled with the two commonest metals, powdered, drop from an aeroplane.
Next morning the doctor had gone off early with his sled, leaving the dog at home. Agricola was not wanted along when his master should bring home the new Jersey calf, which he had named Sempronia the moment he bought her. ”

“ And one day late in June, 1918, when a white and gold yacht came to anchor beside her island, and the steward came ashore for milk and cream, she gave him of Sempronia’s best without charge. Then, guessing from the name “Gratia” on the prow that there were ladies aboard, she added an armful of early lilacs.
After supper the courtesy was acknowledged by two ladies in person. The younger, who was about a year older than she, seemed to her the most exquisite creature she had beheld—so graceful, so self-possessed, with a skin like petals of eglantine and eyes like petals of gentian. ”

“ She would go to the birch-bark lodge which she had helped build, and wake that boy up.
In a few minutes she had stepped into outer darkness, leaving poor Agricola to whine. Once in her dory she fastened her lantern and tucked her sweater under the deck. She worked her way out into the channel and started north. Her blood was up, the night was dark, and she doffed her blouse. Soon she had entered the old unlighted channel and extinguished her light.
The winding swift stream was no place for an amateur. Many a rock barely visible on a quiet morning will rip a canoe. ”

“ What body celestial might he wear? If she could only catch one glimpse of his pure radiance, she would not be afraid. She would not act like the Little Red Leaf, to lock the door against a ghost even though she believed that Penaycee was safe in the lodge of the reindeer. She knew that in seeing Horatio’s body, with brown throat bare to the winds and head thrown back to snuff the breeze, she had seen but the least part of Horatio. ”

“ The earth is so beautiful that it makes me cry. When he was on the ocean, I just wouldn’t think about the submarines. I thought about the waters at their priestlike task of pure ablution round earth’s human shores. If he had to be drowned, he would still be drowned in beauty.”
“Yes,” said Marvin, his voice barely breathing. He dared not look up, for he knew that the triumphantly modeled lips were quivering, and the forgetmenot eyes were full of tears. ”

“ With these two paradoxes he wrestled mathematically until he felt convinced that the whirling was a reality. As a chemist he would rather see an atom stand still, but as a physicist he was compelled to see it whirl.
He so enjoyed this fall from grace and Gratia that on he went, calculating the mutual electromagnetic mass of a simple system, to find out why hydrogen loses weight when it enters a heavier atom. This was by far the hardest job he had ever undertaken, but it gave him an equation that would always express the total mass of a positive and a negative. ”

“ Yet Russia was rich in natural resources, and especially rich in platinum, which it had been using as coins. She had never seen platinum, and had no hope of seeing it, but she knew how precious it is in a laboratory. She knew also that because it is worth five times as much as gold, much of it hangs on the necks of rich women, who are utterly unaware of the sin they are committing. The whole earth produces less than ten tons a year, and every ounce of it is needed for crucibles or wire or apparatus, but the density of platinum is nothing to the density of human minds. ”

“ Nobody looked into a beryl, as Rossetti’s poor Rose Mary did, and saw murder ahead. When May was white with bloom the Lusitania sailed, crowded with women and children, was torpedoed, and sank while the assassin looked on with mingled emotions.
The world received the news with unmingled emotion but not much motion. Asher Ferry was interviewed and said that the sinking of the Lusitania was undoubtedly a criminal act, but that it was precipitated by her own criminal carelessness, a remark for which Chase Mahan never forgave him. Marvin was impotently enraged. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is just as well that he did so, because Cynthia—well, Cynthia’s dramatic passion suddenly turned into a real one. Wise young daughters of New England manufacturers looked on with amusement and rather expected tragedy before the end of the year. After Christmas, though Gratia went home for the holidays, it somehow leaked out that the beryl she now appeared with, its pale elegance shining on her white neck above her green crepe de chine, was the gift of Marvin Mahan. They were astonished that her mother would let her accept such a thing from a man to whom she was not engaged. ”

“ Silicon Jean had not received any journals about lead, but she knew the look and feel of silica. And she knew that the surface of her star was mostly like that of her island—very hard stuff to make a garden of.
She had been wondering if Horatio’s descendants would have got enough to eat. By August, 1917, she had come to the conclusion that they wouldn’t. She had decided that an annual net increase of fifteen million human mouths is sure to happen, and that each year the earth will have to produce twenty billion more pounds of food to feed them. ”

“ To be soberly modern we might say that he had yielded as easily as zinc yields its electrons to copper, plating it round and defending it forever. But the trouble is that Marvin had forgotten all his chemistry.
There he stood, a man of lightning without one word of lightning at his command. There he stood, compounded of hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, fluorine, sodium, magnesium, silicon, phosphorus, sulphur, chlorine, potassium, calcium, iron, and iodine, and not one element had a characteristic thing to say. ”

“ When Marvin had searched the river front in vain and was walking along the stone wall below the locks, idly watching the school of herring pursue a drifting mass of mayflies, an elegant launch cut through the herring and drew up to make fast.
Marvin held out his hand for the rope, and smilingly answered questions. He was invited on board by the youthful owner and was shown how nearly automatic Kittiwake could boast herself to be. Presently the owner cast off again and permitted his new acquaintance to run the launch up to the locks and back again. ”

“ Cobalt He lifted his eyes and gazed on the Laurentians. Pencils of incandescence swept across them, whitening their tender purple and then fading, a sight to thrill the heart. Sometimes the pulsation would cease and the whole mountain, older than any Alp, would deepen to cobalt blue, reminding him that there might be cobalt within ten miles of him. In fact within a hundred all the noble metals were being mined. Like most men he loved blue, and what he chiefly loved was a soft cobalt blue saturated with white light, as in petals of forgetmenot. ”

“ Presently into that pure beauty someone had the courage to paddle a canoe. He looked, and saw that it was the doctor himself, facing forward to see the sunset, and followed by a silvery wedge. Marvin clambered down the rocks and followed the silver.
The point of light slowly became a window. By day a house is mostly a house, but when its evening lights shine out, it becomes a home. ”

“ He wondered just how much electricity lay packed in the nucleus of a radium atom. The nucleus of every atom evidently carried a charge, an excess of positive over negative. He used to go up into the den, from which his father was generally absent, and think about it. He would pick up that old sieve of phosphor bronze and tilt it to an angle of thirty degrees and look at the minerals in the cabinet. If he could only get a spectrum from the positive electricity concealed in the heart of each atom, he could number the elements from hydrogen up. ”