双语·居里夫人的故事 第九章　玛丽的爱情故事

Chapter IX　Marie's Love Story

MARIE was in a fix. It was not her first, and was not going to be her last. She had been given a most interesting piece of scientific work to do and she had nowhere to do it. The Society for the Encouragement of National Industry had asked her to make a thesis on the magnetic properties of different kinds of steel. It was just the work she loved. She had been getting on with it most successfully in Professor Lippmann's laboratory, but there simply wasn't room for all the heavy apparatus she needed. She had to analyse minerals and group examples of metals, and she hadn't any idea where she could get the loan of floor space. She told her trouble to a scientific Polish friend, M. Kowalski, who had come to Paris with his wife, partly on his honeymoon, partly to give scientific lectures.

Kowalski looked at her seriously. He saw that the matter was important, but what could he, a stranger in Paris, do about suggesting a room.

“I have an idea!” he exclaimed after a few moment's hesitation. “I do know a man of some importance who works in Lhomond Street at the School of Physics and Chemistry. He might have a room to lend, or at any rate he could give you some advice about it. Come and have tea to-morrow evening after dinner. I'll ask the young man to come along, too. He is well known; you must have heard his name, Pierre Curie.”

As Marie entered the sombre boarding-house room where the Kowalskis lodged she noticed at all young man standing in the embrasure of the balcony window. He looked very young, which surprised her because she was expecting to meet a man who had already made his mark. There was something original and very striking about the stranger, an ease, a grace, which seemed all the more marked under his loosely-fitting clothes. There was a clear transparency in the look with which he welcomed the girl to whom he was being introduced, which made him seem very honest, very simple, very young. She liked his grave, yet almost childlike, smile. They began at once to talk of science, for was not that why they had been brought together?

He was an unusual kind of man, the son of a doctor, who had realised, while Pierre was very young, that he was not the kind of boy who fits well into a mould that suits other people; Pierre wouldn't do for a public school, so he had a private tutor to himself. He had grown up a home-keeping boy, loving his father and mother's company and that of his only brother. He had taken to loving science, and also to delving into his own mind and writing down his opinions in his diary. “Women,” he wrote, when he was very young, “love life just for the mere sake of being alive far more than we men: women of genius are very rare. So when we give all our thoughts to some great work which separates us from the ordinary life around us, we have literally to fight against woman. The mother wants the love of her son even though, through loving her, he should make of himself an imbecile. A woman who loves would be ready to sacrifice the greatest genius in the world for the sake of the love of an hour.”

That was a bitter way to think of girlhood or of womanhood, but Pierre had his excuse. In addition to the fact that his observation was sometimes very true, he had had great grief connected with his first love, and he had made up his mind never to speak of it and never to marry. On that fateful evening when he talked science with Marie in the alcove, he was thirty-five. Inside France he was almost unknown, almost neglected, with that strange heart-breaking neglect with which France has the custom of greeting her greatest men, without all the same making them less great.

Outside France he was famous. A discovery that he and his brother had made which had helped to measure very minute quantities of electricity was used with gratitude by the greatest scientists of other countries. His own discovery of the principle of symmetry in crystals was to become a foundation of modern science. He had already given his name to a new balance and a new physical law. He was the honoured master of men like Lord Kelvin; but for all that he was getting only the wage of a superior workman, three pounds a week.

Still, his poverty was somewhat his own fault. He had been offered a post where money was the chief reward, but he had replied, “No, thank you, nothing is more unhealthy for the spirit than pre- occupations of that kind.” He had been suggested for government honours, and had begged to be excused and he had decided never to accept any decoration of any kind.

So this science-lover of stern and settled character stood before Marie and talked, his long, sensitive hand resting on the table, his still, clear eyes watching her with that deep, calm, detached inspection of theirs. Perhaps suddenly he remembered that old opinion of his—“Women of genius are rare.”

At first, conversation had been, as it would be when four people meet, quite general. Then Pierre and Marie had got on to science. Had she not come purely for scientific business? With a touch of deference, she questioned the great man who looked so young, and listened to his suggestions. Then he talked of himself, a thing he so rarely did, of his own aims and of his crystallography, which was puzzling and interesting him and whose laws he was seeking. A sudden thought darted through his mind: how strange it is to find one's self talking to a woman about the work one loves, employing technical terms and complicated formulas, and finding that woman, though charming and young, grow interested and keen, finding her understand, and finding her discuss details with faultless perception… What a delicious experience! He looked again at Marie, at her lovely hair, at her hands, made rough by chemical acids and housework, at her grace, at her absolute freedom from coquetry—so attractive and disconcerting a thing. That was the girl who had worked for years in Poland with the hope of reaching Paris, and was now there, working alone, penniless, in an attic.

“'Are you going to live in Paris always?” he asked.

“No, of course not,” replied Marie. “If I manage my examination this summer I shall return to Warsaw. I should like to come back in the autumn, but I don't know if I shall be able to afford it. In the end I shall teach in a Polish school and try to be useful. No Pole may desert her country.”

The conversation slipped off to the misery of Poland, to her oppressive masters. Pierre, whose one thought had been scientific discovery, listened surprised and distressed to a tale of human beings struggling to be free. Perhaps he thought of how great losses truth and knowledge may suffer when the scientists are obliged to give their thoughts away from science. Perhaps he began to dream that he must fight Poland and keep this rare genius for scientific Paris. At any rate, he was not going to lose touch with her. He took to meeting her at the Physics Society, where she went to hear about new discoveries. He sent her a copy of the limited edition of his own new book. He saw her from time to time at work in her linen overall among her apparatus in Lippmann's laboratory.

Then Pierre asked for Marie's address and called at 11 Rue des Feuillantines. Perhaps he remembered it as the street in which Pasteur had, also, once lived. As, after six flights of stairs, he entered the attic, the doctor's son was moved by the sight of the extreme poverty of the room. Yet how well it suited Marie! Never had she seemed so lovely as when she came to meet him in her threadbare frock across that almost empty room; so thin, so ascetic, so on fire, so stubborn, so self-willed she looked, so beautifully framed in emptiness.

All Pierre's bitterness went, like fog when the sun breaks through. They talked and he went back to work with quite another spirit; what had seemed to him little worth doing became more important and more clear. His new theory worked itself out into a most brilliant doctor's thesis and he made the discovery that one woman, at any rate, so far from killing genius in a man, had awakened it. He gave himself better to his high thoughts because he had given his heart to Marie.

But what of her heart? Pierre tried to find out. He took her into the lovely French country they both loved; together they gathered marguerites and brought them home to lend an air of whiteness and grace to the attic. He took her home to Sceaux, outside Paris, to meet his mother and his delightful old father. Marie found herself as if in a second home, a home oddly like hers in Warsaw, among calm, affectionate people who loved one another, loved books, loved nature and, above all, loved science. They talked of beautiful Poland, of Marie's long walks through its beautiful wide-spreading meadows, of her joy at the thought of the coming holidays there and among the Swiss mountains.

“But you are coming back in October?” exclaimed Pierre, a sudden chill clutching his heart! “It would be a sin on your part to abandon science.”

Marie was not deceived. She knew already that he meant it would be a sin to abandon him.

But Poland held her heart. Yet she said, looking shyly up at him, “I think you are right. I should very much like to come back.”

It was not long before Pierre felt brave enough to put his thought into words and to ask her to be his wife. But that she could never be, she said. She could never marry a Frenchman and turn her back on Poland. So many discussions followed that word, for Pierre knew that science was on his side and he could not believe that it was anyone's duty to give up science, which belonged to the whole world, for the sake of working for a mere country.

So Marie went home again for her holidays promising Pierre nothing but that he should always be her friend. He wrote her long persuading letters. He planned to meet her in Switzerland for a few days, but she was meeting her father there and he decided that his presence might spoil the girl's perfect holiday. He told her by post all his thoughts and his hesitations, never forgetting to slip in his opinion that the only dream that a man should live for was the scientific dream. “In politics,” said he, “you never know what you may be doing; you may be ruining your country while trying to help her. If you dream of helping humanity, you don't know how to do it. But science is solid. Any discovery, however small, that you make in that, remains made. Truth, once found, can't disappear and can never be wrong.

Believe me,

Your devoted,

Pierre Curie.”

Marie liked to write to him about her freedom.

“Talk!” he answered. “We're all slaves, slaves of our affections, slaves of prejudice, slaves when we have to earn a living, wheels in a machine, We have to yield something to the things around us! If we yield too much, we are poor mean things; if we don't yield enough, we are crushed.”

In October Marie returned to Paris, and it wasn't only she who was stubborn. What about that yielding to the things around one, about which Pierre spoke? He began to wonder if it should be he who should yield. The thought had no sooner come than he acted on it! He offered to give up Paris and to go to Poland. For a time he would give up science and teach French for a living; then somehow he would get back into scientific work.

Marie confided her hesitations to Bronia and asked her what she thought about that wonderful offer of Pierre's to give up his country. For herself, she felt that no one had the right to ask such a sacrifice of another. She was overwhelmed at the thought that Pierre had offered it to her. Pierre, too, went to the Dluskis. They were entirely on his side.

Bronia began to go with Marie to visit his parents, and heard from his mother so tender an account of the wonderful son Pierre was, that she knew that her sister's happiness would be safe in his hands.

Ten months more Marie hesitated, and then the two who had both promised themselves that they would never marry abandoned their high-flown ideas, and said yes to happiness.

Marie's brother wrote her a charming letter from Poland full of understanding. It was as if Poland itself spoke to tell the Polish girl that she could do more good to Poland by marrying a French scientist who happened to be Pierre Curie than she could by returning to be a schoolmistress in Warsaw. And, indeed, all that was about to happen showed that Marie had chosen the right.

So Marie could plan her wedding in all happiness; and what an odd wedding it was to be!

On the 26th of July, 1895, the sun rose in a clear sky, and Marie Sklodovska with it. Her beautiful face was lit with joy as she did her lovely hair and put on her new navy-blue dress with the striped blue blouse that Casimir Dluski's mother had given her. She hadn't wanted a real wedding dress; she was glad to have a new one because she only possessed one she wore every day, but she much preferred something useful that she could wear afterwards in the laboratory.

When she was dressed, Pierre fetched her and they left by the bus to catch the train to Sceaux, where the wedding was to be. Down the Boulevard St. Michel the heavy horses clop-clopped, passing the Sorbonne that the two looked at with loving eyes, for had it not brought them together?

At Sceaux there were to be no guests except Bronia and Casimir, Mr. Sklodovski and Hela, who had come all the way from Warsaw. They couldn't afford a gold ring or a wedding breakfast. For wedding presents, the most important were two shining bicycles, given them by a cousin, on which they were going to spend their honeymoon.

Said the one father to the other father, as they met the bride and bridegroom in the garden after the wedding, “You will have in Marie a daughter you can love, for since the day of her birth she has never given me a moment's pain.”