With great care she prepared some oxygen by heating potassium chlorate, and watched a bit of iron wire burn in it with dazzling brightness. By the same element her own body was daily burning, a slow and steady flame in the midst of the earth’s vapors. But how amazing that the flame of oxygen burst out so rarely! It puzzled her that her island, though half oxygen, should be crystalline and cold.
She ran over the list of elements and was astonished to find them arranged in a sort of musical scale. Each octave began with a sharp metallic clang and then became less metallic. She wondered why some great composer had not perceived this and written a symphony about it. In the evenings she began to improvise on the little old rosewood piano. When her fingers went flickering upward into the treble with soft murmurs or bright passion, and her delighted old father would ask her what she was playing, she would answer, “Oh, only oxygen.”
She was equally astonished to find that if she read the successive octaves downward, the elements fell into families. Thus oxygen was related to sulphur, chromium, selenium, molybdenum, tellurium, and tungsten. How in the world could anything so light as oxygen be like anything so heavy as tungsten?
Sulphur was the only one of that family she knew when she met it. So she melted some crystals of sulphur and froze them into long needles, while Agricola lay by the little stove concealing his sulphur beneath his color. She knew now what a solid is, and that only crystals are true solids. As for sulphuric acid, which is perhaps the most useful of all chemicals, she chiefly wondered why it or anything else was acid.
The year 1919 came to a close, leaving her with a sense of almost nothing accomplished, but grateful that she had found a wonderful new interest to keep her from moping. If she could not share Marvin’s life, she could follow him afar off and feel him nearer.
In the paper she read a list of famous persons who had died in the course of the year. She read such utterly different names as Carnegie, Crookes, Emil Fischer, Habibullah, Laurier, Liebknecht, Osier, Patti, Rayleigh, Roosevelt. How hard they had tried, each in his own way, to be of some use in the world! Carnegie had given the world libraries, Crookes had warned it against famine, Fischer had endeavored to make foods, Habibullah had ruled his savages, Laurier had kept two races from biting each other, Liebknecht had wanted the poor to be comfortable, Osier had healed thousands, Patti had taken people’s minds off their troubles, Rayleigh had discovered something wonderful in the air, and Roosevelt had actually united two oceans.
And how were they rewarded? Well, Habibullah and Liebknecht were assassinated, and Osier and Roosevelt robbed of their sons by war. If Dr. Osier and Colonel Roosevelt could speak to her now, would they advise her to marry? She did not believe that they would.
Chapter 75
January of 1920 came, and the river was frozen over. The flowing oxygen was solid enough for men and horses to walk on. There they went in beaten paths, warm water trudging along on cold! Jean had always been amazed by such miracles, but their potency was doubled for her now, and they kept her from breaking her heart.
Twice a week she and the dog tramped up the ice to the post-office, always with the hope of not hearing from Marvin. Any letter from him would mean that he had found a new girl. She ought to be hoping for such a letter, but somehow her wicked heart declined to hope.