雙語·居里夫人的故事 第十八章　出國

Chapter XVIII　Abroad

IT was May, 1920. The sun was hot. The chest-nuts in Paris were all in bloom, and Marie was, as usual, working. But an event was about to break in on her work; a most surprising event that she didn't expect in the least.

Marie never saw newspaper men, still less newspaper women. She hated being interviewed; she hated publicity. She had neat slips printed to say politely and firmly to strangers who wanted to meet her: “Madame Curie regrets…”

But people with Irish names who live in America sometimes have an odd little way of finding a right, irresistible word, and there was a certain Mrs. Meloney who had written to Marie: “My doctor father always used to say that it is quite impossible to exaggerate the littleness of human creatures. But for twenty years you have been great in my eyes, Madame, and I want to see you, only for a few minutes.” That was another way of saying: “Might a very little cat look at a queen?” and Marie, breaking all her own rules, said “Yes.”

So Mrs. Meloney waited on that May morning in Marie's tiny waiting-room at the Radium Institute, and this is how she described what happened:

“The door opened, and I saw come in a pale, timid woman with the saddest face I have ever seen. She had on a black cotton dress. Her splendid, patient, gentle face had the absent-minded look of people who study much. Suddenly, I felt that I was a mere intruder; I became even shyer than Madame Curie. I had been a professional reporter for more than twenty years and yet I couldn't manage to ask a single question of this defenceless woman in black cotton.”

It was Marie who set the reporter at ease by talking about America and Radium. She told her that America had fifty grammes of Radium, and she knew exactly how many grammes were in each town. “And how many has France?” asked Mrs. Meloney. “My laboratory possesses a little more than a gramme.”

“You have only a gramme of radium?”

“I? I haven't any. This gramme belongs to my laboratory.”

Then Mrs. Meloney began to speak of patents. She imagined, she said, that Marie must be drawing much money from those who used her methods of producing Raduim.

“Radium ought not to enrich anyone,” said Marie. “It is an element. It belongs to everybody.”

Mrs. Meloney must have felt then that the whole world ought to give Marie a present in return for what she had given the world. She said suddenly, “If you could choose out of the whole world the thing you would have, what would it be?”

Marie hesitated, “I need,” she said, “a gramme of radium to go on with my researches. But I can't buy it. Radium is too dear for me.”

It was then that Mrs. Meloney determined that America should give Marie Curie a gramme of Radium. She went home and tried to persuade ten rich women to give ￡3,000 each. But she could find only three. Then she turned from the few rich to the many poor. All the women of America should join together to give Marie the gift. In less than a year she wrote to Marie: “We have the money. Your Radium is yours.”

But America had grown excited over the collection. Soon all the girls and women had heard of the Madame Curie Radium Fund; everyone wanted to see Madame Curie. But Marie hated crowds. She did not want to go, but she had never before been offered so lovable a gift. Still she began to make excuses. She couldn't be separated from her daughters. That didn't worry hospitable America; they invited the girls, and told Marie that the gramme of Radium would be presented to her by the President himself.

So Marie, Irène and Eve packed all their clothes into one single trunk and set sail in the Olympic's most luxurious cabin, for America willed it so. France gave them a great send-off with a gala performance at the Opera, in which the greatest actors, Sarah Bernhardt, and the famous Guitrys, took part. Only the Atlantic refused to join in honouring Science; the ocean remained morose, dark and uncivilised, and encouraged Marie to dream with longing of the blue sunlit seas at home.

As the Olympic docked, Mrs. Meloney, who had travelled with her, brought Marie from her cabin to meet a real American welcome, and only those who have experienced it can imagine the warm-hearted sincerity of it. The crowd had been waiting five hours to greet her whom they named, “The benefactor of the human race.” It was summer; the skies were blue above the splendid white skyscrapers. The quay was colourful with the flags of Poland, France, and America. Students, girl-guides, three hundred women representing the Polish women of America, waved red and white roses before her. She sat, rather like a child trying to be good, in an armchair on the upper deck, while Mrs. Meloney took away her hat and her handbag and posed her for the photographers. “Your head to the right, please, Madame Curie.” “A little more this way please... !”

America went mad with welcome. The Americans were determined that the world should see through their eyes that a scientist is perhaps the greatest human-being. Their hearts were captured by Marie's love for pure science, by her scorn of profit, and by her conviction that to serve is the true purpose for which men live.

Nothing that they could invent to honour her was neglected. They wanted to welcome her everywhere and forgot the long distances of their great country. They offered her banquets where the guests were five hundred, and forgot the long hours. They offered her titles of honour by the bagful, and forgot that in her own country she refused them all. They asked her to university ceremonies and were surprised that she had no cap and gown. They offered her flowers grown especially for her, and forgot that she preferred them wild. Love is often like that; but Marie, though tired, understood. The only thing she could not tolerate was the magnificent university gown they made for her, for to expect her to wear silk was just a little too much, because silk irritated her fingers that Radium itself had injured.

Marie's first visits were to the women's colleges. Everywhere she went, girls in white made hedges to the roads or ran in immense clusters across fields to greet her carriage. And above the white masses were always the coloured streamers of the flags. At an immense gathering in New York the university women passed in long file before her, bowing and presenting alternately the Lily of France and the Rose of America. In another gathering of ambassadors and the great of many Lands, at which she was given the “Freedom of New York”, the most famous person after herself was Paderewski, whom long ago, when he was a struggling pianist, she had encouraged with her clapping.

Then came the great event: the presentation of the gramme of Radium.

The White House at Washington was prepared for the fête. The President of the United States and all the great people of America were there to meet Marie, but Radium itself was absent. It was too dangerous and too precious to sit about on tables and be handled by a president. It stayed safely in the factory and was present only by proxy. On a table in the east room during the ceremony stood a Radium casket containing tubes of imitation Radium.

At four o'clock the double doors were thrown open and the procession entered, Marie on the arm of President Harding.

In his address, the President reminded the guests that Marie was not only a great scientist, but a devoted wife and mother. She had done the daily work of a man and all her womanly duties in addition.

At the end of his speech, he gave her a rolled parchment, the deed of gift, and hung the tiny gold key of the real casket round her neck. Then, in the blue room, Marie sat while all the guests passed in procession before her and shook hands with Irène and Eve, because she herself was too tired.

So Marie possessed a gramme of Radium! By no means. On the evening before the ceremony, Mrs. Meloney had shown her the deed of gift and she had insisted, then and there, though it was late at night, that a lawyer should be sent for to give the gramme legally to her laboratory. When Mrs. Meloney suggested that the week after would do, Marie exclaimed: “I might die tonight!” From that evening her gramme was just something to work with which belonged to the laboratory.

There were other visits to make. America, full of penitence at having tired its guest, tried to spare her fatigue in every possible way. Sometimes they arranged for her to arrive at the station before the one at which she was expected, and when the excited people found out what had been done, there was a stream of cars along the road to meet the traveller. Sometimes Marie had to get out of the train on the wrong side, jump down to the rails and walk across them, which could not have been really restful. Sometimes Irène and Eve were accepted as their mother's understudies, and nobody smiled when staid professors spoke to sixteen-year-old Eve of her “magnificent discoveries” and “her lifetime of labour.”

But Marie was present herself when the Poles fêted her in Chicago. To them she was a symbol of their distant birthplace and her triumph was Poland's. Men and women, their faces wet with tears of joy, tried to kiss her feet or the hem of her dress.

On the Olympic, on which she sailed home at the end of June, was the Radium itself, locked in behind the complicated locks of the ship's safe. But in her letters, it was not of Radium she wrote, but of a little touch of gladness in her heart because she had been able to win just a little more American friendliness for France and Poland.

America's joy in her had taught Marie how much she meant to the great world. She realised that her mere name, her mere presence, could help the things she cared for and loved. So she began to travel more and face ceremonies and congresses. She became known the world over. She visited South America, Spain, England and Czechoslovakia. Even in China, though she did not go there, there was a portrait of her in a temple of Confucius side by side with the Buddhas and the Emperors of the Celestial Empire.

In all her travels she enjoyed the odd things she saw. She liked the fish that jump out of the water and fly through the air and, at the

Equator, it amused her that she lost her shadow, and she loved the wild flowers, new and old, that met her in strange places.

But apart from the things that she merely looked at and loved, there were the other loved things that she journeyed to fight for. Like everyone else who had served mankind, she hated war. She had been willing in war to do a soldier's work in defence of her country; but in peace, she was eager to serve in preventing future wars. She refused to take time from research to belong to Soceities, but she made one exception: she allowed herself to be nominated by the Council of the League of Nations as a member of the society of men and women who decided to use their brains to find ways of getting different nations to work together. That Society was called “The International Committee on Intellectual Co-operation.” Marie did not belong to it merely to talk. She set to work to do definite things. One was to get scientific people of all nations to use the same scientific terms and to make complete lists of all the scientific books and discoveries all the world over, so that every student could know what work had already been done.

Next, Marie wanted a scheme to help any scientific genius who might, in any nation, be too poor to develop its gifts. It is horrible waste, she thought, to throw away a genius. She gave all her strength to help to create a world in which freedom, peace and science were ever more and more. Now that the Radium Institute in Paris was working, Marie determined to build a Radium Institute in Warsaw. Her sister Bronia, who was in Poland, launched the appeal. All Poland was soon covered with placards; all the post-offices sold stamps with Marie's picture; postcards invited everyone to “buy a brick to build the Marie-Sklovodska-Curie Institute,” and, on them in Marie's writing, were the words: “My most ardent desire is the creation of a Radium Institute in Warsaw.”

1925, Marie was able to go to Warsaw for the foundation of the Institute. The President of the Republic laid the first brick, Marie the second. Laughingly, he asked her if she remembered the travelling pillow she had lent him when he was poor. She replied: “Yes, and you forgot to return it.” She remembered, too, that the famous actor who complimented her from the stage was none other than Monsieur Kotarbinski, for whom Manya had once plaited a crown of wild flowers.

But a Radium Institute was a queer place without Radium. Mrs. Meloney had again to persuade the United States to give Marie another gramme, and again Marie went to New York. On that occasion it was to thank the Americans in the name of Poland. She stayed at the White House and found it very amusing to see it full of elephants, large elephants, small elephants, minute elephants, white elephants. As a parting gift she was given two elephants, a little ivory one and an almost invisible one. Elephants were the badge of the governing party. With her two and the Radium, she returned to Warsaw to see the Institute begin its work of curing the sick.

As she had done when she was a little girl, she wandered by the great Vistula and wrote about it:

“The river winds, broad and lazy, gray near at hand and blue as heaven in the distance. Adorable sandbanks, sparkling in the sun, show here and there and mark the capricious course of the stream. At the edge of these banks, strips of more brilliant light show where the waters grow deep. I simply have to wander by these light-filled magnificent shores…There is a song which says: ‘In this Polish water there is such charm that those who love it once, love it for ever.’ To me that is true. This great river has a deep inexplicable fascination.”