The frosty sky was more glorious than ever. It bore no trace of a new year, for it was timeless. She looked for Venus, and found it, a great jewel reflecting the purest white. Then she remembered that in her valedictory she had referred to it as Phosphor and Hesperus.
How often since then she had quoted Sappho in her heart, wishing that Hesperus might bring the child home to its mother. But she remembered avoiding the word Lucifer. It meant the same as Phosphor, but she had been afraid that some bad boy might be reminded of the devil.
Why was Lucifer a name of reproach? Because he tried to equal God. And when defeated he whispered to God’s innocents that they were naked, and sent them a boy who killed his brother!
She remembered that her father as a sharpshooter had slain forty of his own brothers—the notches were still to be seen on his old rifle. She suddenly understood why he had not married till forty-six. Ambrose Rich had come out of the army determined to engender no boys to be slain by sharpshooters. That was the secret of his traveling away off up here and staying for half of every year from 1869 to 1892. Here he had silently atoned for his sin. Here he had edited the most severe of all criticisms of civilization.
On the whole she was sorry that father had not stuck to his resolution. She was glad to have been born, but as for Horatio, it was clearly a mistake to summon him out of some evening star to be blown to pieces on this one.
For consider what life on earth is. It is a mere stain on the rock, a mist that clings with hands, happy so long as it is stupid. Jean was freed from sentimentality by knowing so much about fish. They would lie still while she skinned them, and she concluded that really normal human beings are almost as free from nerves. She had read of a Zulu so insensitive to pain that when his back brain was cloven by a sword he was laid up for only two days.
And what was the history of civilization on her star? Only those persons survived who could live on very little. The kings of Egypt were gone, but the slaves of Egypt still lived, eating corn and never needing a dentist. In China the slaves ate rice and outlasted all their conquerors. There it was in a nutshell. The earth belonged to people whose teeth would wear down to the root. The earth had always been inherited by the meek, and always would be.
Clearly earth was not a proper place for a superior mind like Horatio’s. He ought never to have come. He might better be in the loftiest star of unascended heaven, pinnacled dim in the intense inane. So, on the whole, she would never summon any Horatios down. She would never get married. And when she got over missing her mother and brother, she would be the cheerfulest little old maid in the world.
Chapter 16. Sulphur
On that same first day of 1918, Lieutenant Mahan was commanding a machine gun company composed of men chosen by himself. Down in Carolina he had picked them for their sinews and their eyesight, not for their language, which sometimes reminded him of the sixteenth element. And a month later he sailed with the advance detachment of the third division.