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.
Chapter 84. Polonium
That conclusion was her first sign of yielding, and it was not much of a sign. But when in December she came to think about polonium, her determination was almost shaken. Polonium was the discovery of a woman and a mother. Madame Curie was not afraid of life.
Such a woman had a right to be born, even though as a child she ran the risk of being torn in pieces by the claws of the Russian bear. If one could only hope for such a daughter as Marie Curie! It was not the death of descendants that Jean objected to, or even their tragic death, but their death for no demonstrable purpose.
Though debarred from seeing polonium, she knew enough to be awed by the accounts of it. It was utterly different from anything she had studied. Whereas bismuth apparently lasts forever, polonium—hardly separable from bismuth—lives less than five months! It slowly and steadily explodes from within while seemingly peaceful without! The flying fragments of its atom can be made visible—can be made to appear like fireworks in a fog.
Marvin would have been overjoyed to show her the performance, could she have visited his laboratory. He would have let her bend carefully over a highly charged little engine which was revealing the luminous tracks twice each second. In that little glass-topped chamber the eighty-fourth element was fiercely giving up the ghost to become the eighty-second. Out flamed the unbalanced helium atoms like a sheaf of spreading sunbeams, and often a ray was deflected by hitting some invisible atom.