Elective Affinities (6 page)

Charlotte, accustomed in any event to improving the hour, felt she could put the good mood her husband was evidently now in to her own advantage. Domestic improvements she had long wanted to make but had been unable to were now put in hand through the Captain. The domestic dispensary, which had consisted of only a few medicines and remedies, was enlarged. Charlotte was industrious and helpful by nature and through discussion and by reading comprehensible textbooks she was enabled to be so more effectively and more often.

They also thought about emergencies which might arise. Emergencies were really quite commonplace, nonetheless they too often took them by surprise. They bought everything they might need for lifesaving and this was all the more necessary in that, because there were so many lakes, watercourses and waterworks, accidents often occurred. The Captain took
very detailed care of this department, and Eduard let fall the remark that a case of this sort had in the strangest way made an epoch in his friend’s life. But when the Captain was silent and seemed to be finding the recollection of it unpleasant, Eduard checked himself and Charlotte too, who was in general no less informed about it, paid no attention to what he had said.

‘We have done well to make all these arrangements,’ the Captain said one evening, ‘but we still lack what we need most, which is an able man who knows how to use them. I can suggest for this post a field-surgeon I know who can be had on tolerable terms, an excellent man in his trade and one who has oftentimes treated me for serious internal troubles too, and better than a specialist might have done; and immediate aid is, after all, what is most seriously missed in the country.’

The man was immediately written to and Eduard and Charlotte were glad to have been enabled to use so well so much money they might otherwise have frittered away.

Thus Charlotte too exploited the Captain and she began to be very content he should be there and not at all worried about any consequences that might ensue. When she met him she usually had a number of questions in her head to ask him. She liked being alive and so she sought to do away with anything that might be harmful or deadly: the lead-glazing on the earthenware crockery and the verdigris that formed on copper pots had worried her for a long time and she had him instruct her about this and the instruction had naturally to begin with the fundamental principles of physics and chemistry.

Chance but welcome opportunity for talking about these things was offered by Eduard’s taste for reading aloud. He had a very melodious deep voice and had in earlier days been well-received and well-known for his lively and sensitive recitation of oratory and poetry. Now it was other subjects that engaged him and other books from which he read, and as it happened
these had for some time been principally works on physics, chemistry and technical matters.

A particular trait of his, but one which perhaps he was not alone in, was that he could not bear someone else looking over at a book when he was reading from it. In earlier times, when he read poems, plays and stories, it was the natural consequence of the desire, possessed as much by a reciter as by a poet, an actor or a story-teller, to evoke surprise, to vary the pace, to arouse tension; and it militates very greatly against these intended effects if a third party is already looking ahead and knows what is coming. This was one reason it was his practice when reading before company to sit so that he had no one behind him. Now that there was only the three of them this precaution was unnecessary, and since his objective was no longer to stir the emotions or startle the imagination he did not think about being particularly careful.

Only, one evening when he had sat down without thinking about where, he noticed Charlotte was reading over his shoulder. His old impatience came to life again and he rebuked her for it rather roughly, saying bad habits of that kind, like so many others that were an annoyance to society, ought to be broken once and for all. ‘If I read aloud to someone,’ he said, ‘is it not as if I were speaking to him and telling him something? What has been written down and printed takes the place of my own mind and my own heart; and would I ever take the trouble to speak at all if a window were constructed in my forehead or in my chest, so that he to whom I want to expound my thoughts one by one, or convey my feelings one by one, could always know long in advance what I was getting at? Whenever anyone reads over my shoulder it is as if I were being torn in two.’

Charlotte, whose address in great or intimate society was revealed especially in her ability to circumvent any unpleasant, forcible, or even merely lively remark and to interrupt
a conversation that was going on too long and stimulate one in danger of breaking down, was quite equal to this occasion. ‘You will forgive me, I know,’ she said, ‘when I confess the reason for my error. I heard you speak of ‘affinity,’ and straightway there came into my mind my own affinity, a pair of cousins who happen to be troubling me at this very moment. I attend again to your reading; I hear that what is being spoken of is quite inanimate things, and I look over your shoulder to find out where I am.’

‘It is a metaphor which has misled and confused you,’ said Eduard. ‘Here, to be sure, it is only a question of soil and minerals; but man is a true Narcissus: he makes the whole world his mirror.’

‘Very true,’ the Captain continued: ‘that is how he treats everything he discovers outside himself; his wisdom and his folly, his will and his caprices, he lends to the beasts, the plants, the elements and the gods.’

‘As I do not wish to lead you too far away from the present subject,’ Charlotte said, ‘I wonder if you would tell me just briefly what is actually meant here by affinities?’

‘Very gladly,’ replied the Captain, to whom Charlotte had directed the question, ‘as well as I can from what I learned from reading about it some ten years ago. Whether the scientific world still thinks of it in the same way, or whether it agrees with the latest theories, I cannot say.’

‘It is a great annoyance,’ cried Eduard, ‘that one can no longer learn anything once and for all. Our ancestors observed their whole life long the instruction they received in their youth; but we have to learn anew every five years if we do not want to fall completely out of fashion.’

‘We women are not so particular about that,’ said Charlotte; ‘and, to be frank, all I am really interested in is knowing what the word means; for nothing makes you look so silly in society as to misapply an unfamiliar coinage. That is why all I want to know is in what sense this expression is employed
in the present context. Let us leave what its scientific status may be to the scientists, who are in any case, as I have been able to observe, hardly ever in agreement.’

‘But where shall we begin, so as to get to the point with the least delay?’ Eduard asked the Captain after a pause. The Captain, having thought it over, replied: ‘If I may be allowed to go what will seem a long way back, we shall soon get to the point.’

‘I am all attention, you may be sure,’ said Charlotte, laying aside her work.

And the Captain began: ‘In all the phenomena of nature of which we are aware, the first thing we observe is that they adhere to themselves. It sounds odd, I know, to expound something that goes without saying; but it is only when we have fully comprehended what is already known that we can go forward together into the unknown.’

‘I should think,’ Eduard interrupted, ‘that examples will make the matter clearer to her, and to us. If you think of water, or oil, or quicksilver, you will find a unity and coherence of their parts. They will not relinquish this unified state except through the action or force of some other agent. If this is removed, they immediately come together again.’

‘Unquestionably,’ Charlotte said, agreeing. ‘Raindrops like to join together into streams. And even as children we play with quicksilver, and see in amazement how we can separate it into little balls and then let it run together again.’

‘And therefore I may mention in passing this significant point,’ the Captain added, ‘that this unalloyed adherence made possible by liquidity is always definitely distinguished by the spherical form. The falling water-drop is round; you yourself have spoken of little balls of quicksilver; indeed, a falling drop of molten lead, if it has time completely to solidify, arrives in the form of a ball.’

‘Let me hurry on,’ said Charlotte, ‘and see whether I have
guessed aright what you are coming to. Just as each thing has an adherence to itself, so it must also have a relationship to other things.’

‘And that will differ according to the difference between them,’ Eduard hurriedly went on. ‘Sometimes they will meet as friends and old acquaintances who hasten together and unite without changing one another in any way, as wine mixes with water. On the other hand, there are others who will remain obdurate strangers to one another and refuse to unite in any way even through mechanical mixing and grinding, as oil and water shaken together will a moment later separate again.’

‘It needs little imagination,’ said Charlotte, ‘to see in these elementary forms people one has known; what they especially suggest is the social circles in which we live. But most similar of all to these inanimate things are the masses which stand over against one another in the world: the classes, the professions, the nobility and the third estate, the soldier and the civilian.’

‘And yet,’ Eduard replied, ‘just as these can be unified through laws and customs, so in our chemical world too there exist intermediaries for combining together those things which repulse one another.’

‘Thus,’ the Captain interposed, ‘we combine oil with water by means of alkaline salt.’

‘Not too fast with your lecture,’ said Charlotte. ‘Let me show that I am keeping up. Have we not already arrived at the affinities?’

‘Quite right,’ the Captain replied; ‘and we shall straight way go on to see exactly what they are and what their force consists in. Those natures which, when they meet, quickly lay hold on and mutually affect one another we call affined. This affinity is sufficiently striking in the case of alkalis and acids which, although they are mutually antithetical, and perhaps precisely because they are so, most decidedly seek
and embrace one another, modify one another, and together form a new substance. Think only of lime, which evidences a great inclination, a decided desire for union with acids of every kind. As soon as our cabinet of chemicals arrives we will show you some very entertaining experiments which will give you a better idea of all this than words, names and technical terms.’

‘Let me confess,’ said Charlotte, ‘that when you call all these curious entities of yours affined, they appear to me to possess not so much an affinity of blood as an affinity of mind and soul. It is in just this way that truly meaningful friendships can arise among human beings: for antithetical qualities make possible a closer and more intimate union. And so I shall wait to see how much of these mysterious effects you are going to reveal. Now I will not interrupt your reading further,’ she said, turning to Eduard, ‘and, being so much better instructed, I shall be listening to you with attention.’

‘Now you have summoned us up,’ Eduard said, ‘you cannot get away as easily as that: for the most complicated cases are in fact the most interesting. It is only when you consider these that you get to know the degrees of affinity, the closer and stronger, the more distant and weaker relationships; the affinities become interesting only when they bring about divorces.’

‘Does that doleful word, which one unhappily hears so often in society these days, also occur in natural science?’ Charlotte exclaimed.

‘To be sure,’ Eduard replied. ‘It even used to be a title of honour to chemists to call them artists in divorcing one thing from another.’
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‘Then it is not so any longer,’ Charlotte said, ‘and a very good thing too. Uniting is a greater art and a greater merit. An artist in unification in any subject would be welcomed the
world over. – But now you are in the vein for once, let me hear of a few such cases.’

‘Let us then go straight ahead,’ said the Captain, ‘and connect this idea with what we have already defined and discussed. For example: what we call limestone is more or less pure calcium oxide intimately united with a thin acid known to us in a gaseous state. If you put a piece of this limestone into dilute sulphuric acid, the latter will seize on the lime and join with it to form calcium sulphate, or gypsum; that thin gaseous acid, on the other hand, escapes. Here there has occurred a separation and a new combination, and one then feels justified even in employing the term “elective affinity”, because it really does look as if one relationship was preferred to another and chosen instead of it.’

‘Forgive me,’ said Charlotte, ‘as I forgive the scientist, but I would never see a choice here but rather a natural necessity and indeed hardly that; for in the last resort it is perhaps only a matter of opportunity. Opportunity makes relationships just as much as it makes thieves; and where your natural substances are concerned, the choice seems to me to lie entirely in the hands of the chemist who brings these substances together. Once they have been brought together, though, God help them! In the present case I only feel sorry for the poor gaseous acid, which has to go off and drift around again in the void.’

‘All it has to do,’ the Captain replied, ‘is to join up with water and it will then, as a mineral spring, serve as a source of refreshment to sick and healthy alike.’

‘It is all very well for the gypsum to talk,’ said Charlotte; ‘the gypsum is now complete, a finished body, it has been taken care of; whereas that expelled substance may go through a very hard time before it again finds refuge.’

‘Unless I am much mistaken,’ said Eduard with a smile, ‘your remarks carry a double meaning. Confess it now! When all is said, I am in your eyes the lime which the Captain,
as a sulphuric acid, has seized on, withdrawn from your charming company, and transformed into a stubborn gypsum.’

‘If your conscience prompts you to such reflections,’ Charlotte replied, ‘I have no need to worry. These figures of speech are pretty and amusing, and who does not like to play with analogies? But man is so very much elevated above those elements, and if he has in this instance been somewhat liberal with the fine words “choice” and “elective affinity”, it is well for him to turn and look within himself, and then consider truly what validity such expressions possess. I know, alas, of all too many cases in which an intimate and apparently indissoluble union between two beings has been broken up by a chance association with a third and one of the couple at first so fairly united driven out into the unknown.’