雙語·居里夫人的故事 第十章　居里夫人

Chapter X　Madame Curie

PIERRE and Marie set out for an unusual honeymoon. They had no tickets to get and no rooms to reserve, because they were going off on bicycles just wherever their fancy led. They strapped a few clothes to the bicycles and, as the summer had been wet, two long rubber mackintoshes. Their tyres glided silently over the wet roads; bright, fitful sunshine flecked the tall trunks of the trees that make an avenue of all Frenck roads; overhead, the heavy summer leaves dappled the road with shade like a snakeskin and shook raindrops on the travellers from the last shower.

Upon what an adventure they were setting out, the two alone together! They couldn't see the end of it or imagine how exciting it was going to be, any more than they could see the end of the long avenue or know where they would sleep the night.

Pierre had always loved to wander in lonely woods. He liked them cool and wet, and, when he came out on to the rocky hillsides, he liked the smell of rosemary and marjoram and eglantine that made a wild jungle there. It was all one to him whether he walked by day or by night, by dawn or gloaming; whether he ate at eleven or three, seven or ten. Now all the things he cared for were lovelier still, because Marie was with him and she didn't bother him about time or punctuality.

They were not going to be extravagant; there should be no hotels for them. When they came to a village at evening, they found a simple inn, a place with one large tap-room, with a few tables and many chairs. The “Patron” spread a clean white cloth for them and brought them thick, hot soup. After dinner, they went up the creaking wooden stairs, along a rambling passage to a room where the light of one candle was not likely to show up the faded paper. French village inns are often like that; the supper is good, the bed is clean and delicious, and the charge small.

Next day after breakfast on coffee and rolls, they pedalled on along another highway under the trees with the forest on either hand. A long green ride that led into mysterious depths of trees tempted them; they dismounted and left their bicycles at a roadside cottage; saw that they had their compass safe, because it is easy to be lost in those great French forests; put apples in their pockets and found their feet sinking through soft moss into squelching mud. Lovely! For them, there was no such thing as direction, no such thing as time, and nobody to wonder when they would be back.

Pierre went in front, striding along absent-mindedly. Marie followed with shorter steps, but keeping up all the same. She was hatless, though at that time other women never walked without a hat. It wasn't the only fashion she was to set. Her skirt, which was meant to trail on the ground and plaster her shoes with caked mud, was gathered quite shockingly high into an elastic band, so that her ankles showed! Her shoes were thick and sensible and her leather belt had pockets for a knife, money and a watch. She could hear well enough what Pierre said, covering the ground there in front as if he had a train to catch. He was evidently talking to her, though, as he never turned his head, it might have been the tree she was addressing on the quaint customs of crystals. There is no conversation more learned or more difficult to follow than a conversation on crystals, or to put it more scientifically, on crystallography. Marie listened with joy, and her answers and remarks and suggestions were as clever as Pierre's, so that it seemed as if the two voices were the expression of one thought.

Marie was beginning to grow tired, when suddenly they came to an opening in the forest; and in the opening was a reedy pool. Marie threw herself down on the bank to bask in the sun, and Pierre went hunting like a small boy for what the pool might contain: dragonflies, tritons, salamanders. Far out in the water there were waterlilies; nearer at hand, yellow irises in bloom. He wanted them to decorate Marie, but there was no boat. A little way away a tree had fallen over the water—the very thing, a little slippery, perhaps, but what did a wetting matter to a lover? Luck was with him, however, and he was soon back arranging a crown of rather damp lilies and irises in his wife's hair.

Then, as if he had suddenly seen something to hunt, he crept on all-fours quietly close to the water again. Marie was not attending; it was so delicious to sit and do nothing in the August heat. Suddenly she screamed and looked with horror at her hand. A cold, wet frog was sitting in it!

“Don't you like frogs?” asked Pierre surprised; he had always liked them himself.

“Yes, but not in my hand.”

“What a mistake! They are such jolly things to watch. Look at him; isn't he handsome?”

But he relieved her of the handsome clamminess and let it go back to its pool to the joy of two of the party.

So they went on with the walk and the talk, Marie wearing her startling crown, till they reached the road again and their bicycles.

In mid-August, having gone round Paris by far woodland ways, they came to Chantilly in the north, a town buried in immense forests, where nowadays racehorses always peep at passers-by from their lordly stables. Marie and Pierre were due to join the family at a farm in the woods called “La Biche,” or The Hind. There they found Bronia, Casimir and baby Hélène, whom everyone called Lou; Grannie Dluska, Professor Sklodovski and Hela.

A farm in those woods has a charm of its own; never a sound comes near except the barking of a dog, the snapping of a branch, a woodman's distant axe against a tree-trunk, a hasty flutter of a startled pheasant or the skurry of a hare. Everywhere, as far as a man can walk or an eye can see, is an invitation to come in May, for the earth is hidden under the yellow, withering leaves of lilies-of-thevalley.

Inside the farm they talked apace, and often with Lou, who was beautiful, comic and gay and three years old. Sometimes they talked of solemn science with Professor Sklodovski and sometimes of the mysteries of bringing up children. Sometimes they discussed medicine and politics with Pierre's father and mother, who came from Sceaux on visits. France is the land for great talk, and often Marie was surprised to hear with what terrible vigour her French father-in-law and his friends talked politics. Politics were their very life; they cared intensely how their country was governed, and in free France they could say what they liked, which made their talk interesting. But Pierre was different. He disliked politics, because he said he was not clever at getting angry. But when a policy was unjust or cruel, he took sides—the side of the oppressed and persecuted.

So the honeymoon came to an end and Pierre and Marie settled to housekeeping in a Paris flat, and a strange, uncommon housekeeping it was! There were to be no visitors, so there were only two chairs. If a mistaken stranger toiled up the four storey's to pay a formal call and found the couple at home working, he had only to look round for a seat to see, without being told, that there was no place for him. The most pushing would beat a retreat in humbler mood. The Curies did not intend to have time to entertain. Marie, at any rate, would have, as it was, to do the work of two women: the work of a wife, which most wives find enough, and that of a scientist, which most scientists find more than enough.

She determined to make her home as simple and as little time-wasting as possible. There were to be no rugs to shake, no armchair or sofa to brush, nothing on the walls to dust, nothing to polish. The table, the two chairs and the bookshelf were of unpolished deal, which is a pleasant, untroublesome wood. The room depended on simplicity and a vase of fresh flowers for its beauty, while books, a lamp and piles of papers on physics showed it to be a scholar's den. Two people who loved one another, who loved Nature and learning, could desire nothing more. Yet they had to be fed. Doubtless that seemed a pity to them both, but Marie would not again neglect facts.

The first thing she bought to help her with her housekeeping was a black notebook with Accounts printed in letters of gold on the cover. She knew that faultless household arithmetic was a most important foundation of a happy home, especially of a home that had to be run on ￡240 a year exactly.

Her cooking would have to be faultless, too, or Pierre's digestion would go wrong. In addition, she had to find some scheme by which the dinner would cook itself while she spent most of the day at the laboratory doing science. Facts are fierce, strong things, but brains can use them against themselves. The first point was to make the day long. She got up early to go to market; she came home to make the bed and sweep the floor and prepare the evening dinner. Oh, that cooking! She had taken cooking lessons from Bronia and Madame Dluska before her marriage, but one doesn't learn much from lessons; mistakes are far better teachers. It was all very well that Pierre didn't know what he ate, and was as pleased when the dinner was wrong as when it was right, but Marie couldn't bear the idea that her French mother-in-law, a member of that famous cooking nation, might think that Polish girls couldn't cook. She read over and over again her book of recipes, she learned them as if they were science; she wrote notes in the margin and kept a record of her successes and failures. But there are things that printed recipes forget to tell you. Does one put beef to boil in hot or cold water? How long do beans take to boil? What keeps a stick of macaroni from sticking fast to the next piece? Those were mysteries needing a scientific experiment. Little by little, Marie grew clever; she invented dishes that could be left on the gas to cook while she was out; she calculated exactly the height of the gas flame that this or that stew would need for such and such hours; and, having set her burner exactly, she left the house and spent eight hours at the laboratory. Let no one say that a knowledge of science is no use for cooking.

When she walked home with Pierre in the evening, she bought the groceries or the fruit. Then at home, dinner over, her household work finished and expenditure entered in the notebook, she took out her books to study for another degree, and went on with it till two in the morning. It was a long day that stretched from 6.0 a.m. to 2.0 a.m. But still she was able to write to her brother: “All is well with us—health good and life kind. I am getting the flat gradually as I want it, but I intend that it shall be so simple it won't give us any worries or need any looking after, because I have very little help. A woman comes for an hour a day to wash-up and do the hardest part of the work.”

They had no excitements. They went frequently to see Pierre's parents at Sceaux, but they took their work with them and had two rooms set apart for them so that they might be just as if they were at home, just as hard-working. They scarcely ever went to the theatre and they went to nothing else. They could not even afford to go to Hela's wedding in Warsaw. They worked the year round with only a few days' holiday at Easter, till it was August again and Marie's examination in full swing.

Again she passed first on the list. Pierre threw an arm proudly round her neck and marched her home. No sooner had they arrived there than they pumped their bicycles, filled their bags, and set off for the mountains of Auvergne.

Marie wrote of that holiday: “What a radiant memory we have of a certain sunny day, when after a long, painful climb, we found ourselves crossing a fresh green Aubracian meadow in the clear air of those high tablelands. Another vivid memory is of an evening when we were caught by twilight in the gorge of the Truyère, and up the valley came, as by enchantment, a far-away melody from a boat disappearing down the stream. We had miscalculated our distances and couldn't get back to our beds before dawn. Then we met a string of carts whose horses took fright at our bicycles and obliged us to cut across ploughed fields. When we got back to the road high tableland was bathed in the moon's unreal light and the cows, in the paddock for the night, came gravely across one by one to gaze at us with their big, calm eyes.”

After holiday came work again, and life went on teaching Marie Curie as it had taught Manya Sklodovski, with great blows of hardship, that the best things in the world have to be paid for dearly.

Marie wanted a baby as much as she wanted Science, and as much as she wanted to be able to share everything with Pierre.

But she found that this time she just couldn't do everything. She could not stand eight hours studying the magnetization of steel, and she could not bicycle all day with Pierre among the blue bays of Brittany. She was surprised and disgusted to find that she had to yield to some things. When her father came from Poland on purpose to give her an early holiday, Pierre wrote her charming letters in simple Polish, because he was finding the language difficult, but was proud of his progress.

“My little girl, so dear, so sweet, whom I love so much. I got your letter to-day and I am very happy. Here, there is nothing new, except that I miss you; my very soul has fled with you.” And Marie answered, making her Polish easy for him: “It is fine. The sun is shining. It is hot. I am very sad without you. Come quickly. I sit watching from morn till eve and still you do not come. I am well. I work as much as I can, but Poincaré's book is harder than I expected. I must talk to you about it and we must go over together what I have found so hard.”

Then Irène came to add to Marie's work and joy. She called her her little queen; fed her herself; washed and dressed her, and would have done without a nurse had not the doctor ordered her to have one.

So now Marie had four things to take all her time instead of three: the laboratory, her husband, her house and her daughter. When she wanted to work, Irène was cutting her teeth and crying the house down; or Irène had a cold, or she had knocked her head, or she was a little feverish. Then both the great scientists, who happened to be her father and mother, had to sit up all night to watch a blue-eyed scrap. Sometimes, even when Irène was quite well, Marie, busy with science at the laboratory, would be seized with panic, leave her reports and rush off to the park to see if Nurse had mislaid her baby. No! There was Nurse pushing the pram with Irène safely inside. When Nurse left, Irène found a devoted slave in her grandfather, with whom Marie could leave her whenever the laboratory was having its turn.

But no one can wonder that Irène's mother grew thin. She was lucky, however, and thinness made her more beautiful than ever, with a sort of noble, ghostly beauty. She was almost unreal, as if the wind might have blown her away, except for her great brow and intense dreamy eyes.