雙語·居里夫人的故事 第十四章　黑暗

Chapter XIV　Darkness

MARIE and Pierre were famous. France offered them prizes. England sent them an invitation. They carried from France a gift for their English friend, Lord Kelvin, a gift of a tiny particle of radium in a glass phial, which he showed with childish glee to his scientific friends. Pierre was to lecture on Radium to the Royal Institute, and Marie was to be the first woman ever to be admitted to a meeting of that severe and splendid Society. Never had there been so gay a lecture there, for Pierre made the wizard Radium show its strange tricks to the solemn assembly of all the most learned Englishmen. The Royal Society was enchanted, and all London was agog to see the two “parents” of radium. There were banquets in their honor, and the noble and the rich glimmered in pearls and diamonds as they gazed in astonishment at that strange thing—a woman scientist, who dined at night in a simple black dress unrelieved by a single jewel, and whose hands, scarred with acids, were bare of any ring; but she looked no less distinguished than they, with her thin figure, her inspired face, and her great pale forehead over those intense eyes. Marie, herself, loved the glitter around her, but she was a little surprised to see the usually indifferent Pierre apparently absorbed in the dazzling scene.

“Aren't jewels pretty things?” she asked him. “I never dreamed such lovely ones existed.”

Pierre laughed. “Do you know,” he said, “at dinner I hadn't anything to do with my mind so I spent the time working out how many laboratories could have been built and equipped with the price of those jewels!”

No! The Curies were certainly “different.” They understood a substance that gave out its own light, but not jewelled reflectors. They didn't even know what to do with a gold medal when the Royal Society honoured Marie with the Davy Medal. Pierre gave it to Irène as a thoroughly safe and biteable plaything, and she adored it.

They knew still less what to do with fame and crowds and applause and journalists. Marie could only be miserable about them.

On December 10th, 1903, she was awarded half the Nobel Prize for Science. Henri Becquerel had the other half. She was the first woman to be thus honoured in science, but not a word of excitement escaped her. She rejoiced in the real part of the prize: the recognition by her fellow-scientists of her work and the gentle pleasure of having some money to spend; but the glitter and the tinsel, fame, letters of congratulation from strangers, demands for autographs, requests for interviews from photographers and journalists—those things she hated. “I would like to bury myself to get a little peace,” she wrote.

She enjoyed spending the money, and how she spent it showed her in all her sincerity and charm. She banked some of it, so that the family income from it might pay someone to help in the laboratory and also enable Pierre to give up his teaching at the School of Physics and so have time to do research. She gave a large gift to the sanatorium which the Dluskis had founded in Poland. She gave presents to Pierre's brother and her own sisters; she paid subscriptions to scientific societies; she helped some Polish students, her laboratory boys, and a Sèvres girl who was in need. Then she remembered an old French teacher of her own who lived in Poland, who had a lovely, impossible day-dream—that of visiting just once again her dear France. Marie wrote to her, sent her the money for her journey, and invited her to come and stay with her. The old woman wept with joy at the immense unexpected pleasure. Last of all, Marie gave herself a present—a modern bathroom in her house in the Boulevard Kellerman, and new paper for one of her sitting-rooms.

But oh! The foolish crowd! Instead of collecting money to build a laboratory so that the Curies might find out more about Radium, they wasted Marie's time, forced her to play hide-and-seek in the street in order to get into her own house unmolested; published in the newspapers all the little details of their home-life that the Curies loved and would have liked to keep to themselves, even the baby-words that Irène said to her nurse, even the colour of the roof cat. Marie exclaimed, “They prevent our working. Our life is spoilt with honour and glory!” And she meant it. She was shy, and very busy, and the senseless crowd was making her really ill. Once, when the Curies were dining with the French President, a lady went up to Marie and asked if she should present her to the King of Greece. “I don't see the necessity,” said Marie, gently, and then perceived, in an overwhelming glance, that the lady was Mme. Loubet, the wife of the President, and that she was very surprised indeed. “Of course… of course, naturally I'll do anything you like,” she stammered, blushing. To meet kings is a pleasure to so many people, but Marie was different. She was tired and she was young. She wanted a holiday, just to be gay and free and happy, and to be an ordinary mother and an ordinary wife. She wished Irène's whooping-cough wouldn't take so many months to go away and that Pierre's illness wouldn't frighten her. Since she had danced in Poland twenty years before, her life had been nothing but work, and never had she so longed to do nothing, to forget that she was the famous Mme. Curie, and to be mere Manya again and eat too many strawberries and sleep and do nothing.

But Pierre was in a hurry. There was so much work to do. He couldn't understand Marie's holiday spirit—that was something altogether too girlish, altogether too unscientific. They must devote themselves to science, he told her, and she obeyed. She always obeyed him. But she was terribly tired, so tired that she almost didn't want her new baby, Eve. “Poor little thing,” she said, “to have to live in so hard a world as this.” It was indeed a cruel thing that the hunters and pursuers should have taken all her gaiety and courage, even from Manya.

But Eve did her good, for she loved very new babies, and she was obliged to have the month's holiday that Eve gave her—Eve, with the dark hair and blue eyes, who was so different from Irène, of the fair hair and hazel eyes. Eve wouldn't lie in her cradle, but protested vigorously, and Marie was not a model mother who left her to cry, but a soft-hearted one who took her up and carried her about till she slept.

Just before the coming of Eve, an odd privilege had been granted to Marie by the University of Paris, the right to work in Pierre's laboratory. She had been working there all the time, but suddenly the University woke up and gave her an appointment which allowed her to do so—the appointment of “Physics Organiser” under M. Curie at a salary of ￡96 a year. The University acknowledged, what everyone else had known for a long time, that the Curies always worked together. All their time and their thoughts and their work were quite naturally shared, just as if they were one happy person.

In June, 1905, Pierre and Marie went to beautiful Stockholm, where Pierre had to make a speech, in both their names, in connection with the Nobel Prize. He described Sweden rather. charmingly, as composed of lakes and fjords surrounded by a little dry land, and the two enjoyed the uncrowded calm of the vast spaces and the courtesy of a nation which did not press upon them.

But Marie sometimes made friends with strangers. There was an American baller dancer, Lo?e Fuller, who used strange lighting to make her dancing more beautiful. She wrote to Marie to ask how she could use Radium to light her butterfly wings. Pierre and Marie laughed at the wild idea, but wrote back very gently explaining the queer thing that was Radium. Lo?e replied that she had only one way of thanking them for their letter—to come and dance to them in their own home. The Curies accepted that uncommon thanks, and on the day there appeared at their door an odd-looking girl with baby-blue eyes and an army of electricians. All day the electricians worked. By the evening the Curies' dining-room was transformed into a fairyland of strange lights, and Lo?e danced, making herself by turns flame, flower, bird, and witch.

The little music-hall dancer became a great friend, and took the Curies to introduce them to her friend, Rodin, the great sculptor, and there, in his studio, among the casts and marbles, Science, Sculpture and Dance would sit and talk the evening out.

Then came April, 1906. The hot sun of April in France drew their scent from the violets, purple and white, that coloured the hedgerows in the valley of the Chevreuse. Marie and Pierre, Irène and Eve, were on holiday. In the evening they fetched the milk from the farm; Eve, the little mountebank, making them all laugh as she tottered in the dry cart-ruts. In the mornings, Pierre and Marie, on their bicycles, hunted flowers through the woods and revisited the pond, which they had met on their honeymoon. It was dry and the water-lilies had gone, but yellow-flowering reeds circled the mud with a bright startling crown. And Marie and Pierre, wandering home, gathered violets and powder-blue periwinkle from the banks of the sunken lanes.

At noon on another day they lay in the sun and dreamed, while Irène chased butterflies with a green net, greeting them with high-pitched cries and squeals of glee.

“Life has been sweet with you, Marie,” murmured Pierre.

Then, after dinner, he caught the train to Paris and work, carrying with him the yellow ranunculus they had gathered by the pond. The others joined him the next day, and April, as is the way with April, had turned wet and cold.

The day after Marie and the children came home was April the 19th, 1906—a wet day, with muddy, slippery streets, a cloudy day and dark. Pierre had several engagements in the city; Marie had to get the house in order after the holidays, and many things to do in town. Busily, gaily, she went hither and yon. Six o'clock found her back on her own doorstep, happy to be home again, eager to meet Pierre and to begin another of those delicious evenings working with him at scientific calculations.

She opened the drawing-room door. Three men rose and stood, with deep respect in their attitude; just that, as if she had been a queen; and in their eyes she read a terrible pity. Paul Appell, her old teacher, had to tell her that Pierre had slipped in the street and the wheel of a heavy horse-drawn dray had crushed his head.

“Pierre is dead?… dead? Really dead?” she said.

When Eve grew up, she told us, in the lovely life she wrote of her mother, that from the moment she spoke the words “Pierre est mort,” a cloak of solitude and secrecy enveloped Marie, and that from that April day for ever she was a person apart and lonely.