Curious are the freaks of lightning.
Chapter 83. Bismuth
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.