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.