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The Glory of the Conquered: The Story of a Great Love

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Title: The Glory of the Conquered: The Story of a Great Love

Author: Susan Glaspell


        
Release date: August 1, 2005 [eBook #8664]
                Most recently updated: January 2, 2021

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/8664

Credits: E-text prepared by Suzanne Shell, Mary Meehan, Charles Franks, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE GLORY OF THE CONQUERED: THE STORY OF A GREAT LOVE ***




E-text prepared by Suzanne Shell, Mary Meehan, Charles Franks, and the
Online Distributed Proofreading Team



THE GLORY OF THE CONQUERED

THE STORY OF A GREAT LOVE

BY

SUSAN GLASPELL

1909






To DR. A. L. HAGEBOECK,

Who Made This Book Possible




CONTENTS


PART ONE

      I. ERNESTINE
     II. THE LETTER
    III. KARL
     IV. JACK AND "HIGHER TRUTH"
      V. THE HOME-COMING
     VI. "GLORIA VICTIS"
    VII. ERNESTINE IN HER STUDIO
   VIII. SCIENCE, ART AND LOVE
     IX. As THE SURGEON SAW IT
      X. KARL IN HIS LABORATORY
     XI. PICTURES IN THE EMBERS
    XII. A WARNING AND A PREMONITION
   XIII. AN UNCROSSED BRIDGE
    XIV. "TO THE GREAT UNWHIMPERING!"
     XV. THE VERDICT
    XVI. "GOOD LUCK, BEASON!"
   XVII. DISTANT STRAINS OF TRIUMPH
  XVIII. TELLING ERNESTINE
    XIX. INTO THE DARK

PART TWO

     XX. MARRIAGE AND PAPER BAGS
    XXI. FACTORY-MADE OPTIMISM
   XXII. A BLIND MAN'S TWILIGHT
  XXIII. HER VISION
   XXIV. LOVE CHALLENGES FATE
    XXV. DR. PARKMAN'S WAY
   XXVI. OLD-FASHIONED LOVE
  XXVII. LEARNING TO BE KARL'S EYES
 XXVIII. WITH BROKEN SWORD
   XXIX. UNPAINTED MASTERPIECES
    XXX. EYES FOR TWO
   XXXI. SCIENCE AND SUPER-SCIENCE
  XXXII. THE DOCTOR HAS HIS WAY
 XXXIII. LOVE'S OWN HOUR
  XXXIV. ALMOST DAWN
   XXXV. "OH, HURRY--HURRY!"
  XXXVI. WITH THE OUTGOING TIDE

PART THREE

 XXXVII. BENEATH DEAD LEAVES
XXXVIII. PATCHWORK QUILTS
  XXXIX. ASH HEAP AND ROSE JAR
     XL. "LET THERE BE LIGHT"
    XLI. WHEN THE TIDE CAME IN
   XLII. WORK, THE SAVIOUR
  XLIII. "AND THERE WAS LIGHT"




THE GLORY OF THE CONQUERED




PART ONE




CHAPTER I


ERNESTINE

She had promised to marry a scientist! It was too overwhelming a thought
to entertain standing there by the window. She sought the room's most
comfortable chair and braced herself to the situation.

If, one month before, a gossiping daughter of Fate had come to her
with--"Shall I tell you something?--_You_ are going to marry a man of
science!"--she would have smiled serenely at Fate's amusing mistake and
responded--"My good friend, it is quite true that great uncertainty
attends this subject. So much to be expected is the unexpected, that I am
quite willing to admit I _may_ marry the hurdy-gurdy man who plays
beneath my window. I know life well enough to appreciate that I _may_
marry a pawnbroker or the Sultan of Turkey. I assert but one thing. I
shall _not_ marry a 'man of science.'"

And now, not only had she promised to marry a man of science, but she had
quite overlooked the fact of his being one! And the thing which stripped
her of the last shred of consistency was that she was to marry, not the
every-day, average "man of science," but one of the foremost scientists
of all the world! The powers in charge of things matrimonial must be
smiling a quiet little smile to-night.

But ah--here was the vindication! He had not _asked_ her to marry him. He
had simply come and told her she _was_ to marry him. And he was a great,
strong man--far more powerful than she. She had had positively nothing to
do with it! Was it _her_ fault that he chanced to be engaged in
scientific pursuits? And when he took her face so tenderly in his two
hands--looked so far down into her eyes--and told her in a voice she
would follow to the ends of the earth that he _loved_ her--was there any
time then to think of paltry non-essentials like art and science?

But she thought of them a little now. How could she get away from them
when each year of her past marched slowly in front of her, paused for an
instant that she might get a full view, and then passed grinningly back
to the abyss of things gone, from over the shoulder tossing straight into
her consciousness a jeering, deep sinking "_You too?_"

Ernestine Stanley--that was the name she read in one of her books open
beside her. Why her very _name_ stood for that quarrel which had rent all
the years!

Until she was ten years old she had been nameless. She had been You--and
Baby--and Dear--and Mother's Girl--and Father's Girl, but her mother and
father had been unable to agree upon a name for her. Each discussion
served to send them a little farther apart. Finally they spoke of
Ernestine and reached the point of agreement through separate channels.
Her father approved it for what it meant in the dictionary;--her mother
for the music of its sound. That told the whole story; their attitudes
toward her name spoke for the things of themselves bestowed upon her.

Her father had been a disciple of exact science,--a professor of biology.
He believed only in that which could be reduced to a formula. The
knowable was to him the only real. He viewed life microscopically and
spent his portion of emotion in an aggressive hatred of all those things
which he consigned to the rubbish heap labeled non-scientific.

And her mother--she never thought of her mother without that sad little
shake of her head--was a dreamer, a lover of things beautiful, a hater of
all she felt to be at war with her gods. Ernestine's loyalty did not
permit the analysis to go further, except to deplore her mother's
unhappiness as unnecessary. Even when a very little girl she wondered
why her father could not have his bottles and things, and her mother have
her poems and the things she liked, and just let each other alone about
it. She wondered that long before she appreciated its significance.

As she grew a little older she used to wonder if something inside her
would not some day be pulled in two. It seemed the desire of each of her
parents to guide her from what they saw as the rocks surrounding her.
Elementary science was all mixed up with Keats and Heine and Byron.
Another one of her early speculations was as to whether or not poetry and
science really meant to make so much trouble.

Of course from the very first there had been the blackboard--the
blackboard and all its logical successors. As perversity would have it,
it was her father bought her that blackboard. It was to help turn her in
the way she should go, for upon this blackboard she was to do her sums.
But the sums executed thereon were all performed when some one was
standing at her shoulder, while many were the hours spent in the drawing
of cats and dogs and fish and birds, of lakes and trees and other little
girls and boys. She never had that being-pulled-in-two feeling when she
and the blackboard were alone together. The blackboard seemed the only
thing which made her all one, and she often wished her father and mother
loved their things as she did hers, for if they were only _sure_, as she
was, then what some one else said would not matter at all.

They lived in a university town, her father being a professor in the
school. In the later years of her college life he forced her into the
scientific courses which she hated. She sighed even now at the memory of
those weary hours in the laboratory, though while hating the detail of
it, she responded, as her father had never done, to the glimpses she
caught of the thing as a whole. It was ironical enough that the only
thing she seemed to get from her scientific studies was an enthusiasm for
the poetry of science. In those days many thoughts beat hard against the
door of Ernestine's loyalty. Why did not her mother see all this--and
make her father see it? Was there not a point at which they could have
met--and did they not fail in meeting because neither of them went far
enough?

It was when she was in her senior year that her father died. She finished
out her laboratory work with lavish conscientiousness, feeling a new
tenderness of him in the consciousness that his ideas for her had failed.
That hour before his funeral, when she sat beside him alone, stood out as
among the very vivid moments of her life. The tragedy of his life seemed
that he had failed in impressing himself. His keenness of mind had not
made for bigness. Life had left an aggressiveness, a certain sullenness
in the lines of his face. His mind and his soul had never found one
another--was it because his heart had closed the channel between the two?

And then they went to New York and Ernestine began her study of art.

A great light seemed turned back over it all tonight. She understood much
now which she had lived through wonderingly. She seemed now really to
know that girl who went to New York with all the dreams of all her years
calling upon her for fulfillment. She knew what that girl had dreamed
when she dreamed she knew not what; knew what she thought when she thought
the undefined. She smiled understandingly, tenderly, at thought of it
all--the bounding joy and the stubborn determination, the fearing and the
demanding and the resolving with which she began her work. She was a
great deal like a child on the long-promised holiday, and much like the
pilgrim at the shrine. Somewhere between those two was Ernestine that
first winter in New York.

It was after the second year, after that strange mixture of things within
her had unified to fixed purpose, and after it had become quite certain
her dreams had not played her false, that the other big change had come.
Her mother slipped away from the life which had never held her in the big
grip of reality. She had been so long a longing looker-on from the outer
circle that the slipping away was the less hard. Ernestine stopped work
in order to care for her, reproaching herself with never having been able
to give to her mother with the unrestraint and bounteousness she had
given to her work. During those last weeks she often found her mother's
eyes--sombre, brooding eyes--following her about the room like the spirit
of unrest.

"Try to be happy, Ernestine," she said, when about to leave the house in
which she had ever been a stranger. "Life is so awful if you are not
happy."

She took her back to the little town and put her away beside the man with
whom her soul had never been at peace. That first night she awakened in
the dark hours and fancied she heard them quarreling. The hideous fancy
would not let her go to sleep, though she told herself over and over that
surely death would bring them the peace life had so long withheld.

She went back to her work then with a new steadiness; loneliness feeding
the fire of consecration. Often when alone in her room at night she felt
those disappointed eyes following her about, heard again that plaintive:
"Try to be happy, Ernestine. Life is so awful if you are not happy." She
had many times opened the book in which her mother copied the poems
written at intervals during the years, but always would come the feeling
of their holding something at which it would be hard to look. To-night,
with her new understanding, this wondrous new touchstone, she took them
from her trunk with eagerness. She longed now to know the secret of her
mother's life; she would know why happiness had passed her by.

There was tragedy in those little poems--a soul's long tragedy in their
halting lines, in the faltering breath with which they were sung. Indeed
they were not the songs of a poet at all; they were but the helpless
reaching out of an unsatisfied, unanchored soul. The blackboard had never
given back what it should; the crayon would not write. Was it true there
were countless souls who went away like this--leaving unsaid a word they
had craved to say?

"For our souls were not in tune"--was a line she found in one of the
verses and which she sat a long time pondering. Was not the secret of it
here? This the rock which held the wreckage of their lives?

She left her room and went out of doors. The night was very still.
A tender peace brooded over the world. She lifted her eyes to the
stars--her soul to the great Wonder. Enveloping her was Life--drawing her
straight to the heart of things was Love. Doubts and speculations and
ominous memories seemed blown away by the breath of the night. The years
had no lesson to teach save this--One must love! All that was wrong in
the world came through too little loving. All that was great and
beautiful sprang from love which knew not doubts nor fears. What was a
"point of view" when one throbbed with the memory of his good-bye kiss!

There was a force which moved the world. She was in the grip of that
force to-night. All else was but the tiny whirlpool against the mighty
current. And she was not afraid. Love would deal kindly with her own.
She lifted her soul to the great Mother and Father of the world. "Oh take
me and teach me!"--was her passionate prayer.




CHAPTER II


THE LETTER

What was that story the old Greeks told about love being the union--or
reunion--of the two halves of an originally perfect whole? The envious
gods--who were a very bad lot--cut the original perfect being in two.
Then love is a finding of one's own--also, a getting ahead of the gods. I
have more respect for the old Greeks to-night than I ever had before! But
you cannot know just how it is. You are younger than I, and I do not
believe the fear of life passing you by ever entered and chilled your
heart. You were always sure it was coming some time, weren't you, my
new-found little one? You could not have had that calm, sweet look in
those big eyes of yours had you feared the best of life might be withheld
from you. But can you fancy what it would mean to have felt for many
years that somewhere there was a cool, sweet spring of eternal joy, and
to become fearful your footsteps might never lead you to those blessed
waters? And then can you fancy the profound thankfulness that would fill
one's being, when after long wandering, after several mistakes and
disappointments, the music of those waters was borne to the ear? And
when, almost fearful to believe, and yet very, very sure, one stepped a
little nearer, can you fancy the joy in finding the cooling breeze from
that eternal spring upon one's face, of seeing it there as one had ever
dreamed of it, knowing that beside it one could drink deep--long and very
deep--of those life-giving, soul-satisfying waters? Can you fancy the
all-pervading thankfulness, almost unbelievable joy, in that first hour
of standing beside the long-desired, the half-despaired of water of life?

"Thank God I was not weak enough to resign the whole for the half! There
was once a voice said to me: 'This is a pretty good spring. There is
not much chance of your finding the other. Why not take this?' But
something--your voice from a far distance?--called me on.

"A strange enough letter for a man to be writing the girl who has just
promised to marry him! Conventionally, I suppose, I should say to you:
'I never knew anything like this before.' And instead I am saying: 'There
was something once of somewhat similar exterior. But I was mistaken. I
was disappointed.' But doesn't this make you see--dear new love--dear
_real_ love--how happy I am, and why?

"But you poor little girl--how I've cheated you! Why, liebchen--God bless
the Germans for inventing that name for you--you were entitled to weeks
and weeks of beautiful, delicate courtship. Will you forgive me for
jumping right over those days when I should have sent you roses and nice
pretty notes, and prepared you in proper and approved way for all of
this? But I had been waiting for you so long that when I found you, I
just couldn't wait a minute longer.

"And it was Georgia--my red-headed, freckled, foolish cousin Georgia
did this! Why, liebchen, I'll take my oath right this minute Georgia
hasn't a freckle! I'm even willing--(oh Lord, _am_ I?--Yes, by the gods I
_am_)--to read every abominable line she writes for that abominable
paper. Am I an ingrate? Didn't Georgia bring me to _you?_--and is
anything too much, even to the reading of her stuff--yes, by Jove, and
_liking_ it?

"Now prepare yourself to receive the sympathy of every one you know when
you tell them you are going to marry me. Some kind of divine
hallucination is upon you, acting for my good, and you do not see how
profoundly you are to be pitied. But other people will see, and will tell
you about it, only you will think _they_ are under a hallucination, which
is one of the phases of _yours_. The truth is I am a grubbing old
scientist. I prowl around in laboratories and don't know much of anything
else, and more than half the time my hands are stained with unaesthetic
colours you won't like at all. And they tell me I have a foolish way of
sitting and thinking about one thing, and that sometimes I don't do
things I say I am going to--meet my appointments and things like that,
although of course that won't apply to you. And here you might have
married some artist chap, or society fellow who would know all about the
proper thing!

"But never mind, poor little girl--I'll make it up to you. You may miss
some of the lesser, but you'll have the greater. You'll have the
love that enfolds one's whole being--the love that is eternal. Yes,
dear--eternal. The mariner has his compass, the astronomer his stars, the
Swiss peasant has his Alps--and we have our love. It must mean all those
eternal things to us. Don't you feel that it will?

"This train is rushing along jostling my hand so I can scarcely write.
But then my heart is rushing on jostling my brain so I can scarcely
think, so perhaps my handwriting matches my thoughts.

"And we'll work! We'll work to prove how much we love--is there better
reason for working than that? I can work now as I never did before, for
don't I want to prove to this old world that I appreciate its bringing me
to you? And you'll teach me about this art of yours, won't you, my little
girl with the long, serious name? I'm ignorant, sweetheart, I don't know
much about pictures, but don't you think that I can learn? Why, liebchen,
I'm learning already! I never knew what they meant by lights and shadows
until I saw your face.

"But tell me, how does it happen your hair grows back from your temples
that way? Why, no one else's hair does that. And where did you learn
about tilting your chin forward like that and looking straight out of
your eyes at one? It is so strange--no one else does any of those things.
I've often thought of the many things in science I do not understand and
never will, but they are the very simplest things imaginable in
comparison with that puzzling way you smile, the wonderful way your face
lights up when you are happy.

"Are you looking up at the stars? I think you are. And in the heavens do
you see one newly discovered, unvanishable star? That is the star of our
love, dear,--the star which has changed heaven and earth. Are you
dreaming about it all?--Oh but I know you are. I will fulfill those
dreams, dear girl. I have waited for you too long, I prize you too
inestimably not to consecrate my life to the fulfilling of those dreams."




CHAPTER III


KARL

He was one of the men who go before. Out in the great field of
knowledge's unsurveyed territory he worked--a blazer of the trail, a
voice crying from the wilderness: "I have opened up another few feet.
You can come now a little farther." Then they would come in and take
possession, soon to become accustomed to the ground, forgetting that
only a little while before it had been impassable, scarcely thinking of
the little body of men who had opened the way for them, and now were out
farther, where again the way was blocked, trying to beat down a few more
of the barriers, open up a little more of that untrodden territory. And
only the little band itself would ever know how stony that path, how deep
the ditches, how thick and thorny the underbrush. "Why this couldn't have
been so bad," the crowd said, after it had flocked in--"strange it should
have taken so long!"

Not that the little band sought popular acclaim, or desired it.
"Heavens!" he had once exclaimed to a laboratory assistant, after a
reporter had been vainly trying to persuade him to "tell the whole story
of his work in popular vein,"--"you don't suppose medical research is
going to become a drawing-room lap dog!"

But he need not have feared. A capricious fancy might rest upon them for
the minute, but the big world which followed along behind would never
come into any complete understanding of such as they. In an age of each
man seeking what he himself can gain, how could there be understanding of
the manner of man who would perhaps work all of his lifetime only to put
up at the end the sign-board: "Do not take this road. I have gone over it
and found it profitless." Failure is not the name they give to that. They
say his wanderings astray brought others that much nearer to the goal.

In his last year at the medical school one of his professors had put it
to him like this: "You must make your choice. It is certain you can not
do both. You will become a general practitioner, or you will go into the
research work for which you have shown aptitude here. I am confident you
would succeed as a surgeon. In that you would make more money, and, in
all probability, a bigger name. That is certain. In this other, you take
your chances. But if I were you, I would do whichever I cared for more."

That settled it, for he had long before heard the cry from the unknown:
"Come out and take us! We are here--if only you know how to get us."
There was in his blood that which thrilled to the thought of doing what
had not been done before. With the abandonment of his intense and rugged
nature, he yielded himself to the delights of the untravelled path.

At the time of his falling in love, Dr. Karl Hubers was thirty-nine years
old. He had worked in European laboratories, notably the Pasteur
Institute of Paris, and among men of his kind was regarded as one to be
reckoned with. Within the profession his name already stood for vital
things, and it was associated now with one of the big problems, the
solving of which it was believed this generation would have to its
credit. The scientific and medical journals were watching him, believing
that when the great victory was won, his would be the name to reach round
the world.

Three years before, the president of a great university, but newly sprung
up by the side of a great lake, sitting in his high watch tower and with
mammoth spy-glass looking around for men of initiative in the
intellectual domain, had spied Karl Hubers, working away over there in
Europe. This man of the watch tower had a genius for perceiving when a
man stood on the verge of great celebrity, and so he cried out now: "Come
over and do some teaching for us! We will give you just as good a
laboratory as you have there and plenty of time for your own work." Now,
while he would be glad enough to have Dr. Hubers do the teaching, what he
wanted most of all was to possess him, so that in the day of victory that
young giant of a university would rise up with the peon: "See! _We_ have
done it!" And Dr. Hubers, lured by the promise of time and facility for
his own work, liking what he knew of the young university, had come over
and established himself in Chicago.

In those three years he had not been disappointing. He had contributed
steadily to the sum of the profession's knowledge, for he worked in
little by-paths as well as on his central thing, and he himself felt,
though he said but little, that he was coming nearer and nearer the goal
he had set for himself.

His place in the university was an enviable one. The enthusiasm of the
students for him quite reached the borderland of reverence. To get some
work in Dr. Hubers' laboratory was regarded, among the scientific
students, as the triumph of a whole university career. And it was those
students who worked as his assistants who came to know the fine fibre of
the man. They could tell best the real story of his work. They it was who
told him when he must go to his classes and when he must go to his meals,
who kept him, in times of complete surrender to his idea, in so much of
touch with the world about him as they felt a necessity. Their hearts
beat with his heart when a little of the way was cleared; their spirits
sank in disappointment as they lived with him through the days of
depression. And as they came day by day to know of the honesty of his
mind, the steadfastness of his purpose, to feel that flame which glowed
within him, they fairly spoke his name in different voice from that used
for other things, and when they told their stories of his eccentricities,
it was with a tenderness in their humour, never as though blurring his
greatness, but rather as if his very little weaknesses and foibles set
him apart from and above every one else.

Generations before, his ancestors up there in North Europe had swept
things before them with a mighty hand. With defeat and renunciation they
did not reckon. If they loved a woman, they picked her up and took her
away. And civilisation has not quite washed the blood of those men from
the earth. Germany gave to Karl Hubers something more than a scholar's
mind. At any rate, he did a very unapproved and most uncivilised thing.
When he fell in love and decided he wanted to marry Ernestine Stanley,
and that he wanted to take her right over to Europe and show her the
things he loved there, he asked for his year's leave of absence before he
went to find out whether Miss Stanley was kindly disposed to the idea of
marrying him. Now why he did that, it is not possible to state, but the
thing proving him quite hopeless as a civilised product is that it never
struck him there was anything so very peculiar in his order of procedure.

His assistants had to do a great deal of reminding after he came back
that week, and they never knew until afterwards that his abstraction was
caused by something quite different from germs. They thought--unknowing
assistants--that he was on a new trail, and judged from the expression of
his face that it was going to prove most productive.




CHAPTER IV


FACTS AND "HIGHER TRUTH"

"Mr. Beason," said Georgia McCormick, looking across the dinner table at
the new student who had come to live with them--almost every one who
lived around the university had "students"--"if you had a dear cousin who
had married a dear friend, if said dear cousin and dear friend had gone
skipping away to Europe, and for one year and a half had flitted gayly
from country to country, looking into each other's eyes and murmuring
sweet nothings all the while that _you_ had been earning your daily bread
by telling daily untruths for a daily paper, if at the end of said period
said cousin and friend, forced by a steadily diminishing bank account to
return to the stern necessities of life, had written you a nonchalant
little note telling you to 'look up a place for them to lay their
heads'--which being translated in terms of action meant that you were to
walk the streets looking for vacant houses when vacant houses there were
none--if this combination of circumstances befell you, Mr. Beason--just
what would you do?"

Beason pondered the matter carefully. Mr. Beason applied the scientific
method to everything in life, and was not one to commit himself rashly.
"I think," he announced, weightily, "that I would tell them to go to a
hotel and stay there until they could look up their own house."

"But Mr. Beason," she rambled on, eyes twinkling--Georgia had decided
this young man needed "waking up"--"suppose you loved them both very
dearly--suppose they were positively the dearest people who ever walked
the earth--and that breaking your neck for them was the greatest pleasure
life could confer upon you--what would you do _then?_"

"I'm sure I don't know," said Beason, bluntly; "I never loved any one
that dearly."

"'Tis better to love and break one's neck,"--began Harry Wyman, who
aspired to the position of class poet.

"If you had ever known Ernestine and Karl,"--a tenderness creeping into
Georgia's voice--"you'd be _almost_ willing to hunt houses for them.
Almost, I say--for I doubt if any affection on earth should be put to the
house-hunting test. Even my cousin Dr. Karl Hubers------"

"Your--_cousin?_"--Beason broke in. "_Your--?_"--in telling the story
Georgia always spoke of the unflattering emphasis on the final your. But
at the time she could think of nothing save the transformed face of John
Beason. The instantaneousness with which he had waked up was fairly
gruesome. He was looking straight at Georgia; all three were held by his
manner.

"Now my dear Mr. Beason," she laughed finally, "don't be so hard on
us. My mother and Dr. Hubers' mother were sisters, but please don't
rub it in so unmercifully that poor mother has been altogether
distanced in the matter of offspring. You see mother married an Irish
politician--hence me. While Aunt Katherine--Karl's mother--married a
German scholar--therefore Karl. And the German scholar was the son of a
German professor. In fact, from all I have been led to believe the Hubers
were busily engaged in the professoring business at the time Julius
Caesar stalked up from Italy."

"Now Georgia," hastened Mrs. McCormick earnestly, "this newspaper work
gives you such a tendency to exaggerate. I never heard it said before
that the family went _that_ far back."

"Perhaps not. But just because a thing has never been said before, isn't
there all the more reason for saying it now? And I'm just trying to make
Mr. Beason understand"--demurely--"why some people are scholars and
others are not."

But Season's mind was working straight from the shoulder.

"Does he ever come here?" he demanded.

"Yes, indeed; he honours our poor board quite often with the light of his
countenance."

Beason accepted that as unextravagant statement of fact.

"Well, do you--know about him?" he asked, bluntly.

"That he's 'way up? Oh, my, yes. And we're tremendously proud of him."

"I should think you would be," said Beason, rather grimly.

"Karl is indeed remarkable," said Mrs. McCormick, blandly expansive, well
pleased with both Karl and her own appreciation of him. "I feel that our
family has much to be proud of, to think both he and Georgia have done so
well with their work."

The expression of Beason's face was a study. Georgia laughed over it for
weeks afterwards.

"Now my chief interest," said Wyman, who was at the stage where he put
life in capital letters, and cherished harmless ideas about his own
deep understanding of the human heart, "is in Mrs. Hubers. There, I
fancy,"--it was his capital letter voice--"is a woman who understands."

"A dandy girl," said Georgia, briskly.

"She has the artistic temperament?" he pursued.

"Oh, not disagreeably so," she retorted.

"You see," turning to Beason, who was plainly impatient at this shifting
to anything so irrelevant as a wife, "I play quite a leading part in Dr.
Hubers' life. I'm his cousin--that's the accident of birth; but I handed
over to him his wife, for which he owes me undying gratitude. I'm looking
for something really splendid from Europe."

"I wish I hadn't gone home so early that spring," sighed Wyman. "I'd like
to have seen that little affair. It must have been the real thing in
romance."

"But it was nothing of the sort! It was the most disgraceful thing I ever
had anything to do with."

"Now Georgia," protested her mother, "you know you are so apt to be
misunderstood."

"Well I couldn't be misunderstood about this! Oh, it was awful!--the
suddenness of it, you know. You see Miss Stanley was an old college
friend of mine. In fact, I roomed at their house,"--she paused and seemed
to be thinking of other things--serious things. "A year ago last spring,"
she went on, "Ernestine stopped here on her way home from New York. Her
parents had died, but an old aunt lived in their house, and she was going
to see her. I had always told her about Karl, but she had never met him,
because when Ernestine and I were together so much, he was in Europe. So
I wanted her to meet him--well, principally because he was a good deal of
a celebrity, and I thought it would be nice. I'll be real honest and
confess it never occurred to me there would be anything exciting doing.
Well, Karl didn't want to come. First he said he would, and then he
telephoned he was busy. So I just went over to the laboratory and _got_
him. I told him he was expected, and if he didn't come, mother and I
never would forgive him. He washed his hands and came along, grumbling
all the way about how one's relatives interfered with one's life--oh,
Karl and I are tremendously frank, and then when he got here--well, I'll
just leave it to mother."

"He did seem to be greatly impressed with Georgia's friend." said Mrs.
McCormick, consciously conservative.

"I never saw him act so stupid! Oh, but I was mad at him! I wanted him to
talk about Europe and be brilliant, but he didn't do anything but sit and
look at Ernestine. Fact of the matter is, Ernestine doesn't look quite
like the rest of us. At least Karl thought she didn't, and evidently he
made up his mind then and there he was going to have her. Ernestine left
Chicago sooner than he thought she was going to, and what does he do but
go after her--and get her! You see, all of Karl's ancestors weren't meek
and gentle scholars and wise professors. Lots of them were soldiers and
bloodthirsty brigands, and those are the ones he brags about most and in
spite of his mind, and all that, those are the ones he is most like. I
suppose it was in the blood to get what he wanted. I'm sure I don't
know how he did it. Lots of men had wanted Ernestine, and she had the
caring-for-her-art notion--she's made good tremendously, you know--but
art took a back seat when Dr. Hubers arrived on the scene. That's all
there is to it. I wouldn't call it a romance. It was more in the line of
a hop, skip and jump."

She had pushed back her chair a little, but laughed now, reminiscently.

"Oh it was just too funny! Some of it was too rich to keep. Karl came
here the day after he returned--wanted to hear me talk of Ernestine, you
know. People in love aren't exactly versatile in their conversation. I
did talk about her for two hours, and then I ventured to change the
subject. 'Karl,' I said, 'what do you think of the colour they're
painting the new Fifty-seventh Street station?'

"He had been sitting there in rapt silence and he looked up at me with a
seraphic, far-away smile. 'Colour,' he said, dreamily, 'was there ever
such a colour before?'

"'There certainly never was,' I replied, meaning of course the brick red
of the aforesaid station.

"'That divine brown,' he pursued,' that soft, dark, liquid brown of
unfathomable depth!' Now there," nodding laughingly at Beason, "you have
a sample of the great Dr. Hubers' mighty intellect."

Beason hovered around, hoping for a few more stray words, but as Harry
Wyman and Georgia were talking about some foolish newspaper affairs, he
went to his room and tried to settle down to work.

A half hour later Wyman, who had also gone in to do a little studying,
came out to where Georgia was looking over the other evening papers.

"Say," he laughed, "you've got to do something for that fellow in
there--he's crazy as a loon. You've got him all stirred up, and if you
don't go in and get him calmed down he won't sleep a wink to-night, and
neither will I. He says Dr. Hubers is the greatest man in the world. He
says he won't except anybody--no, sir, not a living human soul! He's been
walking up and down the floor talking about it. Gee! you ought to hear
him. He says he came to this university on purpose to get some work with
Dr. Hubers, that his life will be ruined if he doesn't get it, and that
he's going to make all kinds of a ten-strike, if he does. And you can't
laugh at the fellow, for he's just dead down in earnest! He wanted me to
come out here and ask you some questions--I can't remember 'em straight.
How he worked--whether he was approachable. Oh, he fired them at me
thick. Say now, he would appreciate it, if you'd just go in and give him
a little talk about your cousin. Kind of serious talk, you know. Why,
he'd just hang on every word."

And Georgia, laughing--Georgia was strongly addicted to laughing--said if
there was any man ready to hang upon her every word, that she, being
twenty-seven and prospectless, must not let him get away.

She told Beason many things--some of them facts and some of them "higher
truth," Georgia holding that things which ought to be true were higher
truth. She told him how Karl had tried to burn down his father's house,
when a very small boy, to see if something somebody had said about fire
was true, how he dissected a strange and wonderful bird which came to the
house on a visitor's hat, how he inspired a whole crew of small boys to
run away from home as explorers, how he whipped a bigger boy most
unmercifully for calling the Germans big fools. Georgia arranged for her
cousin what she called a thoroughly consistent childhood. And then some
less high truth about his working his way through college, getting money
enough to go abroad, his absolute forgetfulness of everything when
immersed in work--facts and higher truth tallied here.

"Karl's queer," she said. "He's roasted a good deal by the academic
folks--pooh-hoos a lot of their stuff, you know. He seems to have a
strange notion that science, learning, the whole business is for
humanity. Unique conception, isn't it?"

After she went away, Beason said he had no doubt that when one came to
know Miss McCormick, he would see, in spite of her lightness of manner,
that she had many fine qualities.

"Qualities!" burst forth the enthusiastic Wyman. "Say--you just
ought to hear the newspaper fellows talk about Georgia McCormick! I
tell you she's a peach, and more than that, she's a brick. She's the
divide-her-last-penny kind--Georgia McCormick is. And I want you to know
that if ever any one had the joy of living stunt down pat, she's it. It's
an honest fact that if she was put in the penitentiary and you went to
see her after she'd been there awhile, she'd tell you so many funny and
interesting things about the pen. that you'd feel sore to think you
weren't in yourself. And _smart?_ And a hustler? Well, her paper's done
some fool things, but it's had sense to hold on to _her_ all right-all
right."

And Beason replied that of course Dr. Hubers' cousin was bound to be
smart.




CHAPTER V


THE HOME-COMING

"Yes, suh, Chicago only two hours, suh," and the porter smiled broadly.
There was both memory and anticipation in that smile.

The car was almost empty. Across the aisle a man slept peacefully; a
little farther ahead a young lady read of the joys and sorrows of a
knight and his lady who had lived some several hundred years before, and
still farther on a lady all in black was looking from the window,
evidently lost to sorrows of more recent date. As no one was paying any
attention to the man and woman back there in the rear of the car it was
perfectly safe, when the porter passed on, for her hand to slip over into
his.

He responded with that quiet, protecting smile which always made it seem
no bad thing could ever come to her.

"Almost home, dear," he said, and then for a long time neither of them
spoke. Many big forces flowed freely into the silence of that moment.

She looked up at him at last with a smile which broke from her
seriousness as a ripple breaks from a wave.

"Suppose we had to say everything in words!"

"Suppose we had to walk on one leg!"

"Oh, but that--you know, Karl, it's a little like the rivers and the
ocean. The words are the rivers flowing into the ocean of silence. Rivers
flow into oceans--but do they _make_ them? And then the ocean gives back
to the rivers in the things which it breathes out. There are so many
reasons why it seems like that."

"Ernestine, where did you get all this? I sometimes think I'm not square
with you at all. Why, I've been in all those places before! I saw the Bay
of Naples long before I ever saw you--and yet I didn't really see it
before at all. Don't you see? Eyes and appreciation and every decent
thing I take from you. Where did you get it all, Ernestine?"

She pushed back a little curl which was always coming loose,--he loved
that little curl for always coming loose.

"Perhaps I 'got it' from that way you have of looking at me--the way
you're looking at me now; or maybe I got it from the way you say
'Ernestine'--the way you said it just now. But does it matter much what
comes from which?"--with which bit of lucidity she wrinkled up her nose
at him in a way which always vanquished argument and returned to the
silence which seemed waiting to claim her.

He watched her then; he loved so to do that--just see how far he could
follow. Ernestine seemed to draw things to her in a way very wonderful to
him.

"You know, liebchen,"--as he saw that steady light of resolution shine
through the veil of her tenderness--"it seems so queer to me that you
really _do_ anything."

"Well for a neatly turned compliment--"

"I mean it seems so queer you should really _amount_ to anything."

"Now before you overwhelm me with further adulation, what _are_ you
talking about?"

"I'm talking about your being an artist. I can't get used to your being
anything but _Ernestine_! That day last spring when we went to see your
Salon picture, and when those chaps were talking to you, and I realised
that they just simply accepted you as one of them--that you belonged, and
that that was all there was about it--I, oh I had such a funny feeling
that day. And now, a minute ago, when I saw that look, I had it again."

"Why, Karl, you don't _mind_, do you?"

"No, it's just that it seems queer. You see you're such a wonderful
sweetheart, it's hard to think of you as anything else. I'll never forget
that day over there. Something just seemed to leap up within you. I--well
I think I was a little scared--or was I awed? Something that was shining
from your eyes made me feel things in my backbone."

"But you're glad?" she laughed.

"Of course I'm glad; and I'm proud. But it's--queer."

She smiled at him understandingly; the understandingness of her smile
always went beyond her words. It was a beautiful face upon which he
watched the play of lights, saw the changing currents of thought and
dreams and purpose. But the thing most rare in it, that which made one
quite forget accepted standards, was the steadfastness with which a
certain great light shone through the aura of her tenderness. There were
moments in which she transcended both her beauty and her beauty's
weaknesses.

As the flower to the sun, naturally, quietly, inevitably, she had
expanded under the breath of life. With the fullness of a rich nature she
had responded to the touch of the spirit of living. Love loved her for
what she had been able to take.

And in the year which had passed, life, with tender rather than defacing
lines, had put upon her face the touch of sorrow. Europe meant more to
her than an Old World civilisation, more than tradition, beauty or art.
It even meant more than the place where she had spent those first dear
months of her love. It meant to her the place where she had hoped with
woman's dearest hope, and where she had given up the child which should
have been hers. Her tenderest, deepest thoughts were not of the wonders
and beauties she had seen; they were of the dreams within, of the holy
happiness of first knowledge, and then the grief in giving up the much
desired, which she had known only in anticipation. The most cherished
memories of their love were memories of those days in which he had
comforted her, of the tenderness with which he had consoled, the strength
with which he had upheld. Those hours had reached far into her soul,
deepening it, giving her, as if in compensation, new channels for love,
new understanding of those innermost things of life. But in those first
days, even while the soul of the woman was deepening, the bruised heart
was as the heart of a child. It was as a child she had been to him in
those days, and he had comforted her as one would comfort an idolised
child, whose hurt one strove to take wholly unto one's self. The memory
of those hours knit them together as no other thing could have done.

Looking down at her face now he saw that look he had come to know--that
far-away, frightened, wistful look. Very gently he laid his hand upon her
knee.

"I am going to make you so happy. Life is going to be so beautiful," he
said.

She smiled at him, but the tears were in it.

"Yes, Karl--I know. But now that we are coming home--together--alone,
doesn't it seem--"

He turned away. The man had suffered too.

"And we are leaving it over there--over there, alone--away from us--the
life that should have been--"

With that he turned resolutely back to her.

"Ernestine, isn't there another way to look at it? It came of our love,
and now, dear, it has gone back into our love. It isn't something apart
from us,--something gone. We have taken it back unto ourselves. It is
here with us. The greater love we have--that is it, dear."

The flame of understanding leaped quickly to her eyes.

"Oh, I like that Karl," she whispered. "I like that better than anything
you ever said."

She turned then and looked from the window. Across the fields, over near
the horizon, she could see a little house. The smoke was curling from the
chimney. The autumn twilight had come on and they had lighted the lamp. A
bit of home! The tears came to her eyes--tears of tender anticipation.
She too was to make a home. And was it not good to think that smoke was
coming from many chimneys and many lamps were being lighted? Was it not
good to feel that the dear world was full of homes?

To the man this coming back to Chicago, returning to his work after the
year and a half he had been away, was charged with a happy significance.
As they drew nearer and nearer, an impatience possessed him to begin at
once; that desire of the worker to start in immediately. He had worked
some over there, had done a few things which were most satisfactory, but
he wanted now to settle down to actual work in his old place, 'with his
own things. He fell to wondering if they had changed the laboratory,
resentful at the possibility.

"Why look here, Ernestine," he suddenly burst forth, turning to her
eagerly, "to-morrow's a school day, we're late getting home, everything
is in swing--they're waiting for me, and, by Jove, I can just as well as
not begin to-morrow!"

A woman who never made one feel things in one's backbone might have
resented the quick, eager plunge into work, but Ernestine knew the love
of work herself, and her eyes brightened to his spirit.

"But dear me, Karl," after a second's hesitation, "it seems you should
take a day or two first."

"Why?" he demanded.

"Well,"--vaguely--"to get rested up."

"Rested up!" He stretched forth his arm and then doubled it back, and
they both laughed. "That's a joke--my getting rested up. Why I feel like
a fighting cock!"

"And crazy to get to work?"

"Getting that way. Oh, I tell you, Ernestine, there's nothing like it."

Again she did not mind; she understood. She looked at his glowing face,
all alight with enthusiasm for the work to which he was going back. She
was never tired of thinking how Karl's face was just what Karl's face
should be--reflective of a clear-cut, far-seeing, deeply comprehending
mind. It seemed all written there--all those things of mind and
character, and something too of those other things--the things which
were for her alone. Ernestine held that one could tell by looking at Karl
that he was doing some great thing.

"But see here, Dr. Hubers, a nice way you have of shirking your domestic
duties! Who is going to help me settle this famous house Georgia tells
about?"

"I'll do it at night," he protested eagerly. "I'll work every night until
the house is spick and span."

Ernestine sighed. "I have a sad feeling that our house never will be
spick and span. But we'll have some fun,"--eagerly--"fixing it up."

"Of course we'll have fun fixing it up! Georgia's sure to be on hand, and
I'll make old Parkman get busy too--do him good."

"I don't care about knowing a lot of men--"

"Well I should _hope_ not"

"You didn't let me finish. I was going to say that Dr. Parkman is one man
I do want to know."

"You'll like Parkman; and he'll like you. By Jove, he's got to! You
mustn't mind if he snaps your head off occasionally. His life's made
him savage, but even his life--he's had an awful one, Ernestine--couldn't
make him vicious. He's the gruffest, snarliest, biggest man I ever
knew--meaner than the devil, and the best friend on top of earth. And
Lord, how he works! I don't know any other three men could swing the same
load. And I tell you, Ernestine, he's great. There's not a better surgeon
in all Europe. Parkman's a tremendous help to me. Oh, it's going to be
_great_ to get back!"

"We have some really nice things for our house," mused Ernestine. "I'm
glad we decided to take that rug for the library. Of course it seemed
pretty high, but a library without a nice rug wouldn't do at all--not for
us."

"No--that's right--library without a rug--now I wonder if I am to have my
old eight o'clock lecture hour? I _want_ that hour! I want to get all the
school business out of the way in the morning. I must have plenty of
uninterrupted time for myself. I tell you what it is, Ernestine, I'm
going to _get_ it! What I saw over there of the other fellows makes me
all the more sure of myself. And coming back now after being made all
over new--you see there's such a thing as inspiration in my work, just as
there is in yours. Of course it's work--work--work, work your way through
this and that, but there's something or other that leads you on--and I
_know_ I'm going to do something now!"

"I know it too, Karl," she responded, and the steadfastness shone strong
through the tenderness now. "We all know it."

"I've got to," he murmured--"got to." And then his whole mind seized upon
it; some suggestion had come to him, some of that inspiration of which he
had spoken. He sat there looking straight ahead, brows drawn, eyes
sometimes half closing, occasionally nodding his head as he saw a point
more clearly. He looked in such moments as though indeed made for
conquest,--indomitable. One could almost feel his mind at work, could
fancy the skillful cutting away of error, the inevitable working ahead to
truth.

At last he turned to her. "There's no reason for not beginning
to-morrow," he said, with the eagerness of a boy who would try a new gun
or fishing rod. "There are a whole lot of things I want to get right
at now."




CHAPTER VI


"GLORIA VICTIS"

"We'll just put our Russian friend back here in the corner, where the
shelf suppresses him," said Georgia, who seemed to have accepted the
self-appointed position of head cataloguer. "Some of the students might
happen to call."

"This," said Dr. Parkman, who was dusting Gibbon's Rome, "is the sort of
thing that is called the backbone of a library."

"Consequently," replied Georgia glibly, "we will put it up here on the
top shelf. Nobody wants a library's backbone. It's to be had, not read.
Now the trimmings, like our friend Mr. Shaw here, must be given places of
accessibility."

The host was picking his way around among the contents of a box which he
had just emptied upon the floor. The hostess was yielding to the
temptation of an interesting bit which had caught her eye in dusting "An
Attic Philosopher in Paris."

"Now here," said Dr. Hubers, picking up a thick, green book, "is Walt
Whitman and that means trouble. No one is going to know whether he is
prose or poetry."

"When art weds science," observed Georgia, "the resulting library is
difficult to manage. Mr. Haeckel and Mr. Maeterlinck may not like being
bumped up here together."

"Then put Haeckel somewhere else," said Ernestine, looking up from her
book.

"No, fire Maeterlinck," commanded Karl.

"See," said Georgia--"it's begun. Strife and dissension have set in."

"I'm neither a literary man nor a librarian," ventured Dr. Parkman, "but
it seems a slight oversight to complete the list of poets and leave
Shakespeare lying out there on the floor."

"Got my Goethe in?" asked Karl, after Shakespeare had been left immersed
in Georgia's vituperations.

"I think Browning and Keats are over there under the Encyclopedia
Britannica," said Ernestine, roused to the necessity of securing a
favourable position for her friends.

"Observe," said Georgia, "how they have begun insisting on their
favourite authors. This is one of the early stages."

Ernestine, looking over their shoulders, made some critical remark about
the place accorded Balzac's letters to Madam Hanska, which caused
Georgia to retort that perhaps it would be better if people arranged
their own libraries, and then they could put things where they wanted
them. Then after she had given a resting place to what she denounced as
some very disreputable French novels, she leaned against the shelves and
declared it was time to rest.

"This function," she began, "will make a nice little item for our
society girl. Usually she disdains people who do not live on the Lake
Shore Drive, but she will have to admit there is snap in this 'Dr. and
Mrs. Karl Ludwig Hubers,'"--pounding it out on a copy of Walden as
typewriter--"' but newly returned from foreign shores, entertained last
night at a book dusting party. Those present were Dr. Murray Parkman,
eminent surgeon, and Miss Georgia McCormick, well and unfavourably known
in some parts of the city. Rug beating and other athletic games were
indulged in. The hostess wore a beautifully ruffled apron of white and
kindly presented her guest with a kitchen apron of blue. Beer was served
freely during the evening.'"

"Is that last as close as your paper comes to the truth?" asked
Ernestine, piling up Emerson that he might not be walked upon.

"That last, my dear, is a hint--a good, straight-from-the-shoulder hint.
I did it for Dr. Parkman. He looks warm and unhappy."

Dr. Parkman protested that while a little warm, he was not at all
unhappy, but upon further questioning as to thirst was led into damaging
admissions. So the little party divided, Georgia calling back over her
shoulder that as the host was of Teutonic origin, there need be no fear
about the newly stocked larder.

Left alone a curious change came over the two men. They had entered with
the heartiness of schoolboys into the raillery of a few minutes before,
but all of that dropped from them now, and as they pulled up the big
chairs and Dr. Parkman's "Well?" brought the light of a great enthusiasm
to the face of his friend, drawing him into the things he had been so
eager to reach, one would not readily have associated them with the
flippant conversation from which they had just turned.

For here were men who in truth had little time for the lighter, gayer
things of life. They stood well to the front in that proportionally small
army of men who do the world's work. "Tommy-_rot_!" Dr. Parkman had
responded a few days before to a beautiful tribute some one was seeking
to pay "The Doctor"--"A doctor is a man who helps people make the best of
their bad bargains--and damned sick he gets of his job. A man must make a
living some way, so some of us earn our salt by bucking up against the
law of the survival of the fittest, thereby rendering humanity the
beautiful service of encumbering the earth with the weak. If the medical
profession would just quit its damn meddling, nature might manage, in
time, to do something worth while."

But all the while, by day and by night, at the expense of leisure and
pleasure,--often to the exclusion of sleep and food, he kept steadily at
his "damn meddling,"--proving the most effective enemy nature had in that
part of the country; and sadly enough--for his philosophy--he was even
stripped of the vindication of earning his salt. In the one hour a day
given to his business affairs, Dr. Parkman made more money than in the
ten or twelve devoted to his profession. Men said he had financial
genius, and he admitted that possibly he had, stipulating only that
financial genius was an inflated name for devil's luck. He liked the
money game better than poker, and played it as his pet dissipation, his
one real diversion. But having more salt than he could use during the
remainder of his days, did not tend toward an abatement of this war he
waged against nature's ultimate design. He himself would analyse that as
a species of stubbornness, an egotistic desire to see how good an
interference he could establish, but he gave body and brain and soul to
his meddling with a fire suspiciously like consecration.

They all knew that Dr. Parkman worked hard. Some few knew that he
overworked, and a very few knew why. Of the personal things of his own
life he never spoke, and though he was but fifty, his lined face and
deep-set eyes made him seem much closer to sixty.

The two men were an interesting contrast; Dr. Parkman was singularly,
conspicuously dark, while Karl Hubers was a true Teuton in colouring. Dr.
Parkman was a large man, and all of him seemed to count for force.
Something about him made people prefer not to get in his way. It was his
hands spoke for his work--superbly the surgeon's hands, that magical
union of power and skill, hands for the strongest grip and the lightest
touch, lithe, sure, relentless, fairly intuitive. His hands made one
believe in him.

With Karl it was the eyes told most. They seemed to be looking such a
long way ahead, and yet not missing the smallest thing close at hand. As
he talked now, his face lighted with enthusiasm, it occurred to Dr.
Parkman that Hubers was a curious blending of the two kinds of men there
were behind him. Some of those men had been fighters and some had been
thinkers, but Karl was the thinker who fights. He had drawn from both of
them, and that gave him peculiar fitness for the work he was doing. It
was work for the thinker, the scholar, but work which must have the
fighting blood. Even his appearance bore the mark of the two kinds of
things bequeathed him. He had the well-knit body of the soldier, the face
of the student. He was not a large man, but he gave the sense of large
things. He had the slight stoop of the laboratory, but when interested,
aflame, he straightened up and was then in every line the man who fights.
His eyes, to the understanding observer, told the story of much work
with the microscope. They were curiously, though not unattractively,
unlike. The left he used for observations, the right for making the
accompanying drawings. That gave them a peculiarity only the man of
science would understand.

The things which the two men radiated were different things. One felt
their different adjustment toward life. Dr. Parkman had turned to hard
work as some men turn to strong drink, to submerge himself, to take him
out of himself, to make life possible; while with Karl Hubers, work and
life and love were all one great force. Dr. Parkman worked in order that
he might not remember; Karl in order that he might fulfill.

Their friendship had begun ten years before in Vienna, one of those rare
friendships which seem all the more intimate because formed in a
foreign land; a friendship taking root in the rich soil of kindred
interests,--comradeship which drew from the deep springs of
understanding. To come close to Karl's work had been one of the real joys
of Dr. Parkman's very active but very barren life.--He loved Karl; his
own heart was wrapped up in the work his friend was doing. And the doctor
meant much to Karl; had done much for him. The one was the man of
affairs; the other the man of thought; they supplemented and helped each
other. As the practicing physician, Dr. Parkman could see many things
from which the laboratory man would be shut out. He was Karl's channel of
communication with the human side of the work. And Karl gave Parkman his
complete confidence; that was why there was so much to tell now. He must
go over the story of his year's work, touch upon his plans, his new
ideas. And the doctor had something to say of the observations he had
made for Karl; he told of an operation day after to-morrow he must see
and said he had several cases worth watching.

"You will have to come out to the laboratory," Karl finally urged. "We
can't begin to get at it here."

"We're forgetting the hungry and thirsty men," said Georgia, after they
had been eagerly chatting across the kitchen table for ten or fifteen
minutes. But Ernestine said it did not matter. She knew what was going on
in the library and how glad they were of their chance. She and Georgia
too had much to discuss: the work done in Europe, Georgia's work here,
how splendid Karl was, what a glorious time they had had, something of
the good times they would all have together here, and then this house
which Georgia had found for them and into which they had gone at once.

"I knew well enough," she said, buttering a sandwich in order to stay
her conscience, "that you and Karl didn't belong in a flat. There
couldn't be a studio and a laboratory and library and various other
exotic things in a flat. But only old settlers and millionaires live in
detached houses here, so please appreciate my efforts. I thought this
place looked like you--not that you're exactly old-fashioned and
irregular."

"I liked it at once. Big enough and interestingly queer, and not
savouring of Chicago enterprise."

"Not that there is anything the matter with Chicago enterprise," insisted
Georgia.

"You like Chicago, don't you, Georgia?"

"Love it! I know one doesn't usually associate love with Chicago, but I
love even its abominations. You know I had a tough time here, but I won
out, and most of us are vain enough to be awfully fond of the place where
we've been up against it and come out on top. I haven't forgotten the
days when I edited farm journals and wrote thirty-cent lives of great men
and peddled feature stories from office to office, standing with my hand
on door knobs fighting for nerve to go in, but now that it is all safely
tucked away in the past, I'm not sorry I had to do it. It helps one
understand a few things, and when new girls come to me I don't tell them,
as I was told, that they'd better learn the millinery trade or do honest
work in somebody's kitchen. None of that kind of talk do they get from
me!"

It was always absorbing to see Georgia very much in earnest. Her alert
face kept pace with her words, and her emphatic little nods seemed to be
clinching her thought. People who had good cause to know, said it was
just as well not to turn the full tide of her emotions to wrath. She was
a little taller than Ernestine, very quick in her movements, and if one
insisted on an adverse criticism it might be admitted she was rather
lacking in repose. The people who liked her, put it the other way. They
said she was so breezy and delightful. But even friendship could not deny
her freckles, nor claim beauty for her bright, quick face.

They seemed to fall naturally into more serious things when they met over
what Georgia called the evening bite. Although differing so widely, they
were homogeneous in that all were workers; they touched many things,
their talk live with differences.

"How do you like it?" asked Ernestine, following Dr. Parkman's eyes to
her favourite bronze, a copy of Mercie's Gloria Victis, which she had
unpacked just that day and given a place of honour on the mantel.

"It's so Christian," he objected laughingly.

"Oh, but is it?"

"A defeated man being borne aloft? I call it the very essence of
Christianity. I can see submission and renunciation and other
objectionable virtues in every line of it."

"Go after it, Parkman," laughed Karl. "Ernestine and I all but came to
blows over it. I wanted her to buy a Napoleon instead. I tell her there
is no glory in defeat."

"I don't think of it as the glory of defeat," said Ernestine. "I think of
it as the glory of the conquered."

"But even so, Ernestine," said Georgia, who had been looking it over
carefully, "there's no real glory. When I fall down on an assignment, I
fall down, and that's all there is to it--at least my city editor thinks
so. If Dr. Parkman doesn't win a case, he loses it. His efforts may have
been very worthy--but gloria's surely not the word for them. Or take a
football game," she laughed. "Sometimes the defeated team really does
better work than the winners--but wouldn't we rather our fellows would
win on a fluke than go down to defeat putting up a good, steady fight?
The thing is to _get there!_"

"In football or in life," laughed Karl. "Defeat furnishes good material
to the poets and the artists, but none of us care to have the glory of
the conquered apply to _us._"

They were all looking at the bronze and Ernestine looked from one face to
another, trying to understand why it moved none of them as it had her.
Karl's face was very purposeful tonight, reflecting the stimulus of his
talk with his friend. Filled with enthusiasm for this fight he was
making, he had no eye in this hour for the triumph of the vanquished.

"Why I don't want to submit," he laughed just then. "I want to win!"

"An idea which has done a great deal of harm," observed Dr. Parkman.
"That 'you'll-get-your-reward-somewhere-else' doctrine is the worst
possible armour for life. The poets, of course, have always coddled the
weak, but I see more poetry in the to-hell-with-defeat spirit myself."

That too she could understand--a simple matter of the arrogance of the
successful.

And with Georgia it was that thing of "getting there"--the world's hard
and fast standards of success and failure.

She too turned to the statue. Were they right, and she wrong? Was it just
the art of it, the effectiveness, which moved her, and was the thought
back of it indeed weakening sentimentality?

"Defend it, Ernestine," laughed Karl; and then, affectionately, seeing
her seriousness, "Tell us what _you_ see in it."

Dr. Parkman turned from the statue to her. He never forgot her face as it
was then.

He had decided during the evening that her great charm was her exquisite
femininity; she seemed to have all those graces of both mind and body
which make for perfect loving. It was the world force of love, splendidly
manifest in gentleness, he had felt in her first. But now something new
flamed up within her. Here was power--power moving in the waves of
passion through the channel of understanding. Her face had grown fairly
stern in its insistence.

"But don't you _see_ The keynote of it is that stubborn grip on the
broken sword. I should think every fighter would love it for that. And it
is more than the glory of the good fight. It is the glory of the
unconquerable will. Look at the woman's face! The world calls him
beaten. _She_ knows that he has won. I see behind it the world's
battlefields--'way back from the first I see them all, and I see that the
thing which has shaped the world is not the success or failure of
individual battles one-half so much as it is this wresting of victory
from defeat by simply _breathing_ victory even after the sword
has been broken in the hand. What we call victory and defeat are
incidents--things individual and temporal. The thing universal and
eternal is this immortality of the spirit of victory. Why, every time I
look at that grip on the broken sword,"--laughing now, but eyes
shining--"I can feel the world take a bound ahead!"




CHAPTER VII


ERNESTINE IN HER STUDIO

The next morning she went to work. She had never wanted anything with
quite the eagerness that she wanted to work that morning.

"What I want to know is," Georgia had demanded the night before, "did
either of you do any work? I hear a great deal about quaint little
villages and festive cafes, but what did you actually do?"

Now if Georgia were only here to repeat the question, she could answer
jubilantly: "What did I do? Why, I got ready for this morning! Wasn't
that a fine year's work?"

It had seemed queer at first. "Why don't I work," she would ask Karl,
"now that I am here where I always wanted to be?" But Karl would only
laugh, and say that was too obvious to explain. Once he had talked a
little about it. "I wouldn't worry, liebchen. Isn't it possible that the
creative instinct is being all used up? It's your dream time, sweetheart.
It's your time to do nothing but love. After a while you'll turn to the
work, and you'll do things easily then that were hard to do before."

How had he known? For nothing had ever been more true than that. She knew
this morning that she could do things easily now which had been hard to
do before.

One of the very best things about this curious, old-fashioned house was
that it had an attic which had all the possibilities of a studio. Just a
little remodeling--and Paris itself could do no better.

To that attic she turned just as soon as Karl had gone over to the
university. Her things had been carried up; now for a fine morning of
sorting them out! But instead of attacking the unpacking and sorting and
arranging she got no farther than a book of her sketches. Sitting down on
the floor she spread them all around her.

Despite the fact that she had not at once settled down to serious work,
she made sketches everywhere, just rough, hasty little things--"bubbles
of joy" she called them to Karl. It seemed now that these were counting
for more than she had thought. Everything was counting for more than she
had thought!

Something of the joy of it carried her back to the days when she was a
little girl and had had such happy times with her blackboard. The thought
came that now, out of her great happiness, she must pay back to the
blackboard all that it had given her in those less happy days. Work was
but the overflow of love!

During the last five months, when Karl had been working in Paris, she had
studied with Laplace. He had taken her in at once, rejoiced in her and
scolded her. One day in an unguarded moment he said she knew something
about colour. No one remembered his ever having said a thing like that
before. And Ernestine had seen a teardrop on his face when he stood
before her picture of rain in the autumn woods. That teardrop was very
precious to her. It seemed she could work years on just the memory of it.

So there were many reasons why she felt like working this morning. All
the loving and the living and the dreaming and the thinking and the
working of a lifetime! Karl had understood. Her dream time! She loved
that way of putting it. Beautiful days to be cherished forever! How rich
she was in the things she had known! How unstinted love had been with
her! She wanted now to give with that same largeness, that same
overwhelming richness, with which she had received. Enthusiasm and desire
and joy settled to fixed purpose. She began upon actual work.

She kept at it until late in the afternoon. She had never had such a day,
and the great thing about it was that it seemed a mere beginning, just an
opening up. A new day had dawned; a day which meant, not the death of the
dream days, but their reincarnation into life. Those hours when she sat
idly beneath blue skies, looking dreamily out upon beautiful vistas it
seemed she should have been painting--how well, after all, they had done
their work! Dreams which she had not understood were making themselves
plain to her now. The love days were translating themselves in terms of
life and work. She wanted to glorify the world until it should be to all
eyes as the eyes of love had made it to her.

Laplace had said once it was too bad she had married. She thought of that
now, and smiled. She was sorry for any one who thought it too bad she had
married!

And then Karl telephoned. Would she come over to the university? He had
been wanting to show her around, and this would be a good time. She
dressed hurriedly, humming a little song they had heard often in Paris.




CHAPTER VIII


SCIENCE, ART, AND LOVE

From his window in the laboratory he saw her as she was coming across the
campus, and waved. She waved back, and then wondered if it were proper to
wave at learned professors who were looking from their windows. In one
sense it was hard to comprehend that it was her Karl who was such an
important man about this great university. Karl was so completely just
her Karl, so human and dear, and a great scientist seemed a remote
abstraction. She must tell that to Karl. He would enjoy himself as a
remote abstraction.

She was still smiling about Karl's remoteness as she came into the
building. He had come down to meet her. "You see I thought you might get
lost," he explained.

"I might have," she responded, and then laughed, for when people are very
happy it is not at all difficult to laugh.

"Do you know what you look like?" he said. "You look like a kind of
spiritualised rainbow--or like the flowers after the rain."

"I dressed in five minutes," said Ernestine, smoothing down her gown with
the complacency of a woman who knows she has nothing to fear from
scrutiny.

"As if that had anything to do with it! You dress as the birds and
flowers dress--by just being yourself."

She let that bit of masculine ignorance pass with a wise little smile.

They were in the laboratory now. "I came," said Ernestine severely, "to
listen to an elucidation of the mysteries of science."

"Then you had no business to come looking like this," he responded
promptly.

She was looking around the room. "And this is where all those great
things are done?"

"Um--well this is where we make attempts at things."

He was not quite through, and Ernestine sat down by the window to wait
for him. It seemed surprising, somehow, that it should be such a simple
looking room. Karl was doing something with some tubes, writing something
on a chart-like thing. Something in the expression of his face as he bent
over the work carried her back to other days.

"Karl," she said abruptly, "why don't you and I have any quarrels about
which is greater--science or art?"

He looked up at her in such absolute astonishment that she laughed.

"Liebchen," he said, "don't you think that would be going a long way out
of our road to hunt a quarrel? Now I can think up much better subjects
for a quarrel than that. For instance: Do I love you more than you love
me, or do you love me more than I love you? Your subject makes me think
of our old debating society. We used to get up and argue in thunderous
tones something about which was worse--fire or water!"

"But Karl--it isn't logical that you and I should love each other this
way!"

He pushed back his work and turned squarely around to her. He was smiling
in his tenderly humorous way. "Well, sweetheart," he said, "would you
rather be logical, or would you rather be happy?"

"Oh, I'm not insisting upon the logic. I'm just wondering about it."

"Isn't love greater than either a test tube or a paint brush?" Karl asked
softly.

She nodded, smiling at him lovingly.

He sat there looking a long way ahead. She knew he was thinking something
out. "Ernestine," he began, "do you ever think much about the _oneness_
of the world?"

"Why, yes--I do, but I didn't suppose you did."

"But, liebchen--who would be more apt to think about it than I? Doesn't
my work teach oneness more than it teaches anything else? All the
quarrelling comes through a failure to recognise the oneness. I often
think of the different ways Goethe and Darwin got at evolution. Goethe
had the poetic conception of it all right; Darwin worked it out step by
step. Who's ahead? And which has any business scoffing at the other?"

He went back to his notes, and her thoughts returned to the battles she
had heard fought in the name of science. She looked about the room, out
at the great buildings all around, and then back to Karl, who seemed soul
of it all. How different all this was! What would her father think to
hear a man like Karl Hubers giving to a poet place in the developing of
the theory of evolution? What _was_ the difference between Karl and her
father? Was it that the school to which they belonged was itself
changing, or was it just a difference in type? Or, perhaps, most of all,
was it not a difference in degree? Her father had only seen a little way,
and that down a narrow path bounded by high walls of bigotry. Karl had
reached the heights from which he could see the oneness! And was it not
love had helped him to those heights?

A little later, when Karl was seeking to explain what he evidently
regarded as a very simple little thing, and just as a few glimmers of
light were beginning to penetrate her darkness, she looked up and at the
half open door saw a boy whose consternation at sight of her made it
difficult for Ernestine to repress a smile.

"Come in, Beason," said Karl, who had just noticed him. "I want you to
meet Mrs. Hubers." Ernestine looked at Karl suspiciously--something in
his voice signified he was enjoying something.

But there was nothing about Mr. Beason which signified any kind of
enjoyment. He advanced to meet her sturdily, as one determined to do his
duty at any cost. The boy was rendered peculiar in appearance by an
abnormally long, heavy jaw, which gave his face a heavy, stolid
appearance which might or might not be characteristic. He had small,
sharp eyes, and Ernestine was quite sure from one look at his face that
he did not laugh often, or see many things to laugh about.

He was not impenetrable to graciousness, however, for within five minutes
he had told her that he was born in southern Indiana, that he lived in
Minneapolis now, and that he had come to Chicago to get some work with
Dr. Hubers. Upon hearing that Ernestine immediately noticed what a
remarkably intelligent face he had, and felt sure that that heavy jaw
gave him a phlegmatic look which was most misleading.

Karl laughed as the boy went away. "Funny fellow--Beason. He'll have to
cut away a lot of the trees before he gets a good look at the woods.
Never in his life has one gleam of humour penetrated him. In fact if a
few humour cells were to creep in by mistake, they'd be so alien as to
make a tremendous disturbance."

"He seems to think a great deal of you," said Ernestine, a little
reproachfully.

"Oh, yes; and I like him. I like the fellow first rate. He's a splendid
worker--conscientious, absolutely to be depended upon. 'Way ahead of lots
of these fellows around here who think they know it all. But he has those
uncompromising ideas about science; ready to fight for it at the drop of
the hat. Oh, Beason's all right. We need his sort. I'll tell you whom I
do want you to meet, Ernestine, and that's Hastings. You'll like him.
He's such a success as a human being. He's more like the old-time
professor of the small college, has a fatherly, benevolent feeling toward
all the students. You see we're so big here that we haven't many of the
small college characteristics about us. It's each fellow doing his own
work, and not that close comradeship that there is in the small school.
But Hastings is a connecting link. Then, on the other hand, there's Lane.
You must meet him too, for he's a rare specimen: pedantic, academic; I
don't know just why they have him, he doesn't represent the spirit of the
place at all. He's entirely too erudite to be of much use. But I'll let
Parkman tell you about Lane. Oh, but he hates him! They met here in the
laboratory one day and upon my soul I thought Parkman was going to pick
him up and throw him out the window."

As they were looking through the general laboratory they met Professor
Hastings, and she could see at once what Karl meant. He was apparently a
man of about sixty, and kindness was written large upon him. Ernestine
could fancy his looking after students who were ill, and trying to devise
some way of helping the poverty-stricken boy through another year in
college.

They left the building and sauntered slowly across the campus. Almost in
the centre of the quadrangle Ernestine stopped and looked all around. She
was beginning to feel what it was for which the University of Chicago
stood. It was not "college life," all those things vital to the
undergraduate heart, which this university suggested. She fancied there
might be things the undergraduate would miss here; she was even a little
glad her own college days had been spent at the smaller school. As she
stood looking about at building upon building she had visions, not of
boys and girls singing their college songs, but of men and women working
their way toward truth. She looked from one red roof to another, and each
building seemed to her a separate channel through which men were working
ahead to the light. It was a place for research, for striving for new
knowledge, for clearing the way. She turned her face for the moment to
the north; there was great Chicago, where men fought for wealth and
power, Chicago, with all the enthusiasm of youth, and the arrogance of
youthful success, with all the strength of youthful muscle, all the power
and possibility of young brain and heart. This seemed far away from the
Board of Trade, from State Street and Michigan Avenue. But was not the
spirit of it all one? This, too, was Chicago, the Chicago which had
fought its way through criticism, indifference and jeers to a place in
the world of scholarship. People who knew what they were talking about
did not laugh at the University of Chicago any more. It had too much to
its credit to be passed over lightly. Men were doing things here; she
felt all about her the ideas here in embryo. How would they develop?
Where would they strike? What things now slumbering here would step,
robust and mighty, into the next generation?

And greatest of all these was Karl! She turned to him with flushed,
glowing face. He had been watching her, following much of her thought.
"I like this place," she said--her eyes telling all the rest. "I was not
sure I was going to, but I do."




CHAPTER IX


AS THE SURGEON SAW IT

"But, Karl, you _must!_"

"I tell you, my dear, I can't!"

"Well, I think it's just--"

"Now, Ernestine,"--in tones maddeningly calm and conciliatory--"you go on
down to Parkman's office and I'll come just as soon as I can. Now be
sensible--there's a good girl."

"Well, I call it _mean!_"--this after hanging up the receiver. "I don't
care,"--still talking into the telephone, as if there were satisfaction
in having something understand--"it's not _nice_ of Karl."

They had an engagement with Dr. Parkman for dinner at his club, to meet
some people he wanted her to know, and now Karl had telephoned from the
laboratory at the last minute that he was not ready to leave and for her
to go on down alone.

"And he'll come late--and not dressed--and they'll think,"--she went over
and sat down by the window to enjoy the mournful luxury of contemplating
just what they would think.

Couldn't he go over to the laboratory a little earlier in the morning and
finish up this terribly important thing? Was it nice of a man to have
people being _sorry_ for his wife? Was it considerate of Karl to ask her
to put on this pearl-coloured dress and then let her go down in the train
all alone?

She would telephone Dr. Parkman that they could not come. Then Karl would
be sorry! But no--severely and with dignity--she would show that one
member of the family had some sense of the conventions. Oh, yes--this in
long-suffering vein--she would do _her_ part, and would also do her best
to make up for Karl. No doubt she might as well become accustomed to that
first as last.

Going down in the train she had a very clear picture of herself as the
poor, neglected wife of the man absorbed in his work. She saw so many
reasons for being unhappy. Was it kind the way Karl had told her in that
first letter about some other woman in his life, and then had never so
much as revealed to her that other woman's name? Where did this woman
live? When had Karl known her? How _well_ had he known her? And all the
while her sense of humour was striving to make attacks upon her and the
consciousness in her inmost heart that all this was absurd and most
unworthy only made her the more persistently forlorn.

She had never been to Dr. Parkman's office, and she was not very familiar
with Chicago--had it never occurred to Karl she might get lost and have
some unfortunate experience? But fate did not favour her mood, and she
reached the office in safety. Dr. Parkman did not seem at all surprised
at seeing her alone, which flamed the fire anew.

"He hasn't backed out?" he demanded, laughing a little.

She explained with considerable dignity that her husband had been
detained at the laboratory, that he regretted it exceedingly, but would
be with them just as soon as circumstances permitted.

He took her into his private office, and Ernestine was too sincere a
lover of beautiful things to be wholly miserable in a room like that.

"Why, this doesn't look like an office," she exclaimed. "It's more like a
pet room in a beautiful home."

He laughed, not mirthfully.

"I hardly think you could call it that, but this is where I spend a good
deal of my time, so I tried to make it livable."

He was busy at his desk, and she watched his hands. She was thinking that
she would like to paint a picture and call it "The Surgeon." She would
leave the man's face and figure in shadow, concentrating the light upon
those hands, letting them tell their own story.

The whole man stood for force. She was sure that he always had his way
about things, that he simply took for granted having his own way. Yet
there was something in which he had not had his way. Karl had told her a
little about that; she must ask him more about it. It seemed suddenly
that there was something pathetic about this beautiful room. Did it not
reflect a man trying to make up to himself for the things he did not
have? It was a room which suggested pleasant hours and fine, quiet
enjoyment. The deep, leather chairs seemed made for long, intimate
conversations. The dark red tapestry, the oak panelling, this richly
toned rug, the few real pictures, the little odds and ends suggestive of
remote corners of the world--it seemed a setting for some beautiful
companionship, some close sympathy, a place where one would like to sit
for hours and be just one's self. But was not Dr. Parkman's life lacking
in the very things of which this bespoke an appreciation? There was a
subtle pathos in a beautiful room which breathed loneliness. She thought
of their own library at home, quick to sense the difference.

The doctor went into an adjoining room, and her thoughts were broken by
the low murmur of voices. Then the inner door opened; he was showing a
man through to the outer office. The man stumbled over the rug, and at
his exclamation Ernestine looked up. Her own face paled; she half rose
from her chair;--the native impulse to do something. She looked at Dr.
Parkman. His face was entirely masked. The man passed into the outer
room, leaving behind him something which caused Ernestine's heart to beat
fast.

The doctor walked slowly over to his chair and sat down. He seemed
unconscious of her for a moment, and then he looked at her and saw that
she had seen and that she wanted to know.

"You'd think a man would get used to it," he said in his short, gruff
way. "You'd think it would become a matter of course, but it doesn't.
That man's wife is dying of cancer. It's not an operable case. I told him
that to-day. He asked for the truth and I gave it. I even gave my
estimate of the time." He swung his chair around and looked out at the
roof of the building below, and then turned sharply back to her. "You
said a while ago that this looked like a home. Well, it's not. It's like
a good many other things--empty show. Where that man lives, it's not much
for looks, but it _is_ a home, and this means--breaking it up. In there a
minute ago, I told him he had to lose the only thing in life he cares
anything about. He--oh, well!" and with one of his abrupt changes, he
turned away.

But Ernestine was leaning forward in her chair. Her lips were parted. Her
eyes were very dark.

"Cancer--you say, doctor?"--her voice was so low he could barely catch
it. "Cancer?"

He nodded, looking at her intently.

"But that's what Karl's working on! That's what Karl's doing this very
minute!"

"Yes, and do you ever think of it like that? Do you ever think of the
lives and homes he is going to save; the tragedies and heartbreaks he is
going to avert; the children he is going to keep from being motherless or
fatherless if he does do this thing?--and I believe with all my heart
he will! I tell you, Mrs. Hubers, you want to help him! I'm not sorry
you saw that little thing just now. It will show you the other side of
it--the human side. And there wasn't anything unusual in it. All over the
world, physicians are doing this same thing every day--telling people
it's hopeless, admitting there's nothing to be done. Then think of the
tremendousness of this work Karl Hubers is doing!--where it strikes--the
hearts breaking for it--the thousands praying for it! Is it any wonder
we're watching it? Interested? I tell you _we_ know what it means."

She was unconscious of the tear on her cheek, of the quivering of her
face.

"And Karl is doing that? _That_ is what Karl's work means?"

"Karl's work simply means giving into our hands the power to save more
lives. Now we're doing the best we can with what we have--but God knows
we're short on power! We're groping around in the dark. Karl's work means
letting in the light."

His voice had grown warm. Something had fallen from him--leaving him
himself. In his eyes was a wealth of unspeakable feeling.

"Doctor, I want to thank you!"--but it was her face thanked him most
eloquently.

She was glad when he left her for a minute before they finally went away.
Her heart was very full. This was Karl! This the real meaning of Karl's
work! To think she had looked at it in that small, paltry way--that even
in her thoughts she had put the slightest stumbling block in his path.
This very afternoon had come new inspiration and she had resented it, had
said small, mean things in her heart because he stayed to work out his
precious thoughts. Why, it would have been fairly criminal for Karl to
run away from that call of his work!

She wanted to tell him all about it; she yearned to "make it up to him,"
make him more happy than he had ever been before. She dwelt upon it all
until, when Dr. Parkman came in for her, he was startled at the light
shining from her face.




CHAPTER X


KARL IN HIS LABORATORY

One of their favourite speculations, as the days went on, was as to
whether any one had ever been so happy before. They argued it from all
sides, in a purely unprejudiced and dispassionate manner, and always
arrived at the conclusion that of course no one ever had. "Because,"
Ernestine would say, "no one ever had so many reasons for being happy."
"And if they had," he would respond, "they would have said something
about it."

Ernestine worked that winter as she had never worked before. That first
day had not been a deceptive one. She had done some of the things which
something within her heart assured her that day she could do. The best
thing she had done she sent to Laplace, as he had asked her to. "It's
considered rather superior to disdain the Salon," she said to Karl, the
day they packed the canvas, "but Paris seems the only way of proving to
Americans that good can come out of America."

She had heard from Laplace that the picture would be hung. His brief
comment had been that America could not be so bad as was sometimes said.
She was eager now to hear more about it. She would surely have a letter
very soon. And she and Karl were so happy! It had been such a glorious,
wholesome, splendidly worth while winter.

It was one afternoon in early spring that over in the laboratory John
Beason and Professor Hastings were talking of Dr. Hubers. "But that isn't
all of it," said Professor Hastings in the midst of a discussion. "This
fanaticism for veracity Huxley talks about isn't all of it by any means.
Any of us can get together a lot of facts. It takes the big man to know
what the facts mean."

"Somebody said that truth was the soul of facts," said Beason, in the
uncertain way he talked of anything outside tabulated knowledge. "But I
suppose that's just one of those things people say."

"Yes--but is it? Isn't it true? Why is Hubers greater than the rest of
us? It isn't that he works harder. We all work. It isn't that he's more
exact. We're all exact. Isn't it that very thing of having a genius
for getting the soul out of his facts? That man looks a long way
ahead--smells truth away off, as it were. I tell you, Mr. Beason,
scientific training kills many men for research work. They're afraid to
move more than inch by inch. They won't take any jumps. Now Dr. Hubers
jumps; I've seen him do it. Of course, after he's made his jump he goes
back and sees that there aren't any ditches in between, but he's not
afraid of a leap in the dark. That's his own peculiar gift. Most of us
are not made for jumping."

"But that doesn't sound like the scientific method," said Beason, brows
knitted.

"I'll admit it wouldn't do for general practice," replied the older man,
a twinkle in his eye. "The spirit has to move you, or you wouldn't gain
anything but a broken neck."

"Yes, but that thing of a spirit moving you," said Beason, more sure of
himself here, "that does not belong in science at all; that is a part of
religion."

"And to a man like Dr. Hubers"--very quietly and firmly--"science is
religion."

Beason pondered that a minute. "They're entirely distinct," was his
conclusion.

"So it seems to you; but I'm a year or two older than you are, Mr.
Beason, and the longer I live the more firmly I believe that there is
such a thing as an intuitive sense of truth. If there isn't, why is Dr.
Hubers a greater man than I am?"--and with that he left him, smiling a
little at how it had never occurred to Beason to say anything polite.

Beason was in truth much perturbed. It was not pleasing to have the
greatness of his idol explained on unscientific principles. He did not
like that idea of the jumps. Jumping sounded unscientific, and what could
be worse than to say of a man that he was not scientific? Preposterous to
say the greatest things of science were achieved by unscientific methods!

To-day Dr. Hubers had been all afternoon alone in his laboratory. Some
one had brought him in some luncheon at noon, but since one o'clock the
door had not opened, and now it was almost five. What was going on in
there? Even Beason had the imagination to wonder.

Could he have seen he would not have been much enlightened. The man was
sitting before a table, his arms reaching out in front of him--some
tubes, his microscope, other things he had been working with within
reach, but unheeded now. For he was not seeing now the detail, the
immediate. This was not one of those moments of advancing step by step.
The light in those eyes of wonderful sight was the light from a farther
distance. A way had opened ahead; far out across dim places he could see
it now. The afternoon had been a momentous one. He had taken a step
leading to a greater height, and with the greater height came a wider
vision. A few of those minutes such as he was living now fires a man for
months--yes, years, of work. Ahead were days when the fires of
inspiration would be in abeyance, when the work would be only a working
of step by step--detail, some would call it drudgery. But it is in these
moments of inspiration man qualifies for the fight. In the hours of
working onward toward the light he may grow very weary, but he can never
forget that one day, for just a moment, the light opened to him. Moments
such as Karl Hubers was living now mark the great man from the small.

And his glowing moment was more than a promise; it was also a reward. It
was spring now, and all through the winter he had worked hard. He had
come back in the fall determining in the gratitude of his great happiness
to do the best work of his life. He pulled his microscope over in front
of him and looked over it after the manner of one dreaming. How many days
he had come to it eager to note the slightest significance in its
variations of colour, for the staining of the slides made colour count in
his work almost as it did in Ernestine's, only to be met with the
non-essential, more of the husk and no sight of the kernel. He smiled a
little to think what a bulky and stupid volume it would make were he to
write down all he had done. If each hope, each possibility, each
experiment and verification were to be put down, he could quite rival in
bulk a government report. And if added to that should be a report of the
cases he had watched, the operations he had attended, the attempts at
getting living matter and of working with dead, how large and how useless
that volume would be were it to contain it all! He had done days and days
of useless work to get the slightest thing that was significant.

Only the week before Ernestine had laughingly read him an article one of
the popular magazines printed on cancer research. The whole thing is
becoming a farce--so said the popular magazine. Every once in a while
some man issues a report saying the germ is in sight. Then another man
appears with a still more learned report saying it is not a germ at all.
All doing different things, and all sure they are on the right track!
Meanwhile the disease is on the increase, surgery cannot meet it
satisfactorily, and while laboratories pursue the peaceful tenor of their
way, men and women are dying hard deaths which no one seems able to stay.
Truly, the man behind the microscope is a very slow man the article had
concluded.

No doubt that seemed true. He could see the writer's point of view well
enough. The things the man behind the microscope did accomplish sounded
so very easy that the on-looker could give only indolence and stupidity
as the reason for not accomplishing a great deal more.

And even from his own point of view, with his own knowledge of all the
facts in the case, he had no doubt that once done it would sound so easy
that he would stand amazed to think it had not been done before. Let the
unknown become the known, and even the trained worker cannot look upon it
as other than a matter of course. It was so easy now to meet diphtheria.
Strange they had let so many children die of it! It was so very easy now
to give a man an anesthetic. Fearful how they had let a man suffer
through every stroke of the knife, or die for need of it! Should he blame
the man outside for looking at it that way when even to him things
accomplished took on that matter of course aspect?

He began putting away his things. It was Ernestine's birthday, and he had
promised to be home early, for they were going to the theatre. "It will
be like all the rest," he mused. "Once done, it will seem so easy that we
will wonder why it was not done long before." Again the fire leaped high
within him. To do it! Perhaps after all he did see it too complexly. He
must not let the husk dull his eye to the kernel. A man building a
beautiful tower must erect a scaffold. But the scaffolding should not
make him forget the tower! Some way in this last hour his mind had seemed
to clear. His immense amount of useless work was not hanging about his
neck like a millstone. Something had cut that away. He was free from it
all. He could feel within himself that his approach to his problem was
better than it had been before. Perhaps he had made the mistake of the
others of looking at it as something fearfully complex, something it
would be the hardest thing in all the world for any man to do. It all
looked more simple now. It was as if muscles strained to the point of
tenseness had relaxed, and in an easy and natural way he foresaw victory
as a logical part of his work.

He was happy to-night, light-hearted. The windows of the laboratory were
open to the soft air of that glorious day of early spring, and his spirit
was open too, open to the soul of the world, taking unto itself the sweet
and simple spirit of the men who have done the greatest things. From his
window he could see one of the tennis courts. Some of the students were
playing. "Good!" he exclaimed enthusiastically to himself, as he watched
a return that had looked impossible. He was glad they were playing
tennis. Why shouldn't they?

Professor Hastings heard him whistling softly to himself--a German love
song--as he walked through the big laboratory, and catching a glimpse of
the younger man's face, he nodded his head and smiled. It had been a
good afternoon--that was plain. Now let there be more afternoons like
this--and then--to think it should be done right here under his very
eyes! Was not that joy enough for any man?

On the steps of the building Karl stopped suddenly, put his hand in his
inner pocket and drew out a small box. Yes, it was there all right, and a
girl passing up the steps just then was amazed and much fluttered to
think Dr. Hubers should be smiling so beautifully at her. In fact,
Dr. Hubers did not know that the girl was passing. She had simply been in
the direction of his smile; and he was smiling because it was Ernestine's
birthday, and because he had so beautiful a present for her. He walked
along very fast. He could scarcely wait to see her face when he gave it
to her. Too bad he had kept her waiting so long!




CHAPTER XI


PICTURES IN THE EMBERS

They were back home now.

"Why, Mary has intuitions," laughed Ernestine, when she saw that a fire
had been lighted in the library, and was in just the proper state for
seeing pictures. "A girl who knew we would want a fire has either been in
love or ought to be. At any rate, she knows we are."

"This is the kind of a night when a fire serves artistic purposes only.
You don't need it, so you have to enjoy it all the more."

"Still, these spring evenings are damp," she insisted, defending the
fire. "It doesn't feel at all uncomfortable."

"And looks immense," he added, turning down the gas and pulling up a seat
just right for sitting before the fire.

She leaned over, holding her hand so close to the flame that he wondered
at first what she was doing.

"See!" she cried, "see my ruby in the firelight, Karl! It's just a piece
of it right up here on my hand!"

"And I suppose,"--seeming to be injured--"that during the remainder of my
life, I may play second fiddle to that ring. Oh, Ernestine--you're a
woman! I was mortified to death at the theatre. You didn't look at the
play at all. You just sat and looked down at that ring. Oh, I saw through
that thing of not being able to fasten your glove!"

She was twisting her hand about to show off the stone--any woman of any
land who has ever owned a ring knows just how to do it.

"See, dear!" she laughed exultantly, "it _is_ fire! You can see things in
it just as you can in the coals."

But he was not looking at the ring. There were things to be seen in her
face and he was looking at them. He loved this child in her. Was it in
all women when they love, he wondered, as many other men have wondered of
other women, or was it just Ernestine?

"It was a dreadful thing for you to get it," she scolded,--these
affectionate scoldings were a great joy to him. "It's a ridiculous thing
for a poor college professor--that's you--to buy a ruby ring. Why, rubies
exist just to show millionaires how rich they are! And it's a scandalous
thing for a poor man's wife--that's I--to be wearing a real ruby!" Then
her other hand went over the ring, and clasping both to her breast she
laughed gleefully: "But it's mine! They'll not get it now!"

"Who wants it, foolish child?" he asked, pressing her head to his
shoulder and holding the ring hand in his.

She moved a little nearer to him.

"See some pictures for me in the fire," she commanded. "See something
nice."

"I see a beautiful lady wearing a beautiful ring. See?--right under that
top piece of coal. The ring is growing larger and larger and larger. Now
it is so large you can't see the lady at all, just nothing but the ring."

She laughed. "Now see one that isn't silly. See a beautiful one."

"Liebchen, I see two people who are growing old. See?--right down here.
One of them must be sixty now, and one about seventy, but they're smiling
just as they did when they were young. And they're whispering that they
love each other a great deal better now than they did in those days of
long ago; that it has grown and grown until it is a bigger thing than the
love of youth ever dreamed of."

"That _is_ nice," she murmured happily. "That would be a nice picture to
paint." They were silent for a time, perhaps both seeing pictures of
their own. "It's growing late," said Ernestine, a little drowsily, "but
then, I'll never have this birthday again."

"And it was happy?" he asked tenderly. "Just as happy as you wanted it to
be?"

"So happy that I hate to see it go. It was--just right."

"Weren't any of the others happy, dear?"--he was stroking her hair,
thinking that it too had caught little touches of the fire-light.

"None of the others were perfect. Of course, last year was our first one
together, and"--a shudder ran through her.

"I know, dear," he hastened; "I know that wasn't a perfect day."

"Before that," she went on, after a minute of looking a long way into the
fire, "something always happened. My birthday seemed ill-fated. That was
why I wanted a happy one so much--to make up for all the others. This day
began right by the work going so splendidly. Is there anything much more
satisfying than the feeling which comes at the close of a good day's
work? It puts you on such good terms with yourself, convinces you that
you have a perfect right to be alive. Then this afternoon I read some
things which I had read long ago and didn't understand then as I do now.
You see, there was a great deal I didn't know before I loved you, Karl;
and books are just human enough to want to be met half way."

"Like men," he commented, meeting her then a trifle more than half way.

"Yes, they have to be petted and fussed over, just like men. Now, Karl,
are you listening or are you not?"

He assured her that he was listening.

"Then, this afternoon, Georgia came out and we went for a row on the
lagoon in Jackson Park. Did you happen to look out and see how beautiful
it was this afternoon, Karl? I wish you would do that once in a while.
Germs and cells and things aren't so very aesthetic, you know, and I
don't like to have you miss things. I was thinking about you as we passed
the university. It seemed such a big, wonderful place, and I love to
think of what it is your work really means. I _am_ so proud of you,
Karl!"

"And was it nice down there?" he asked, just to bring her back to her
story of the day.

"So beautiful! You and I must go often now that the spring evenings have
come. There is one place where you come out from a bridge, and can see
the German building, left from the World's Fair, across a great sweep of
lights and shadows. People who want to go to Europe and can't, should go
down there and look at that. It's so old-worldish.

"Then Georgia and I had a fine talk,"--after another warm, happy silence.
"Georgia never was so nice. She was telling me all about a man. I
shouldn't wonder; but I mustn't tell even you--not yet. Then I came home
and here were the beautiful flowers from Dr. Parkman. Karl--you _did_
tell him! Honest now--you did--and it was awful. Why didn't you put it in
the university paper so that all the students could send me things? That
nice boy, Harry Wyman, wrote a poem about me--'To the Lovely Lady'--now
you needn't laugh! And oh, I don't know, but it all seemed so beautiful
and right when I came home this afternoon. I love our house more and
more. I love those funny knobs on the doors, and this library seems just
_us_! I was so happy I couldn't keep from singing, and you know I can't
sing at all. Then _you_ came home! You had the box out in your hand--I
saw it clear across the street. You were smiling just like a boy. I shall
never forget how you looked as you gave me the ring. I think, after all,
that look was my _real_ birthday gift.--Now, Karl, don't you _know_ you
shouldn't have bought such a ring? But, oh!--I, _am_ so happy,
sweetheart."

He kissed her. His heart was very full. There was nothing he could say,
so he kissed her again and laid his cheek upon her hair.

He knew she was growing sleepy. Sleep was coming to her as it does to the
child who has had its long, happy day. But like the child, she would not
give up until the last. It was true, he was sure, that she was loath to
let the day go.

"The play to-night was very nice," she said, rousing a little, "but so
short-sighted."

"Short-sighted, liebchen? How?"

"So many things in literature stop short when the people are married. I
think that's such an immature point of view--just as if that were the end
of the story. And when they write stories about married people they
usually have them terribly unhappy about having to live together, and
wishing they could live with some one else. It seems to me they leave out
the best part."

"The best part, I suppose, meaning us?"

"Yes!"

"But, dear, if you and I were written up, just as we are, we'd be called
two idiots."

"Would we?"--her head was caressing his coat.

"Have you ever thought how a stenographic or phonographic report of some
of our conversations would sound?"

"Beautiful," she murmured.

"Crazy!" he insisted.

"Perhaps the world didn't mean people to be so happy as we are,"--her
words stumbled drowsily.

"The world isn't as good to many people as it is to us. Oh,
sweetheart--why,"--he held her closely but very tenderly, for he knew she
was going to sleep--"why are we so happy?"

"Because I'm the--lovely--lady,"--it came from just outside the land of
dreams.

It was sweet to have her go to sleep in his arms like this. He trembled
with the joy of holding her, looking at her face with eyes of tenderest
love, rejoicing in her, worshipping her. He went over the things she had
said, his whole being mellowed, divinely exultant, at thought of her
going to sleep just because she was tired from her day of happiness. Long
ago his mother had taught him to pray, and he prayed now that he might
keep her always as she was to-day, that he might guard her ever as she
had that sense now of being guarded, that her only weariness might come
as this had come, because she was so happy. How beautiful she was as she
slept! The Lovely Lady--that boy had said it right, after all. And she
was his!--his treasure--his joy--his sweetest thing in life! He had heard
a discussion over at the university a few days before about the equality
of man and woman. How foolish that seemed in this divine moment! God in
His great far-sightedness had given to the world a masculine and a
feminine soul. How insane to talk of their being alike, when the highest
happiness in life came through their being so entirely different! And she
was his! Other men could send her flowers--write poems about her
loveliness--but she was his, all his. His to love and cherish and
protect--to work for--live for!

He kissed her, and her eyes opened. "Poor little girl's so tired; but
she'll have to wake up enough to go to bed."

She smiled, murmured something that sounded like "Happy day," and went to
sleep again.

The fire had died low. He sat there a minute longer dreaming before it,
thanking God for a home, for work and love and happiness. Then he picked
Ernestine up in his arms as one would pick up the little child too tired
to walk to bed. "Oh, liebchen," he breathed in tender passion, as she
nestled close to him,--"ich liebe dich!"




CHAPTER XII


A WARNING AND A PREMONITION

It put him very much out of patience to have his eyes bothering him just
when he was so anxious to work. What in the world was the matter with
them, he wondered, as he directed a couple of students on some work they
were helping him with. It seemed that yesterday afternoon he had taken a
new start; now he was eager to work things out while he felt like this.
This was a very inopportune time for a cold, or whatever it was, to
settle in his eyes. Perhaps the lights at the theatre last night, and
then the wind coming home--but he smiled an intimate little smile with
himself at thought of last night and forgot all about that sandy feeling
in his eyes.

During the morning it almost passed away. When he thought of it at all,
it was only to be thankful it was not amounting to anything, for he was
anxious to do a good day's work. He would hate it if anything were to
happen to his eyes and he had to wear glasses! He had never had the
slightest trouble with them; in fact they had served him so well that he
never gave them any thought. The idea came now of how impossible it would
be to do anything without them. His work depended entirely on seeing
things right; it was the appearance of things in their different stages
which told the story.

Dr. Hubers had a queer little trick with his eyes; the students who
worked with him had often noticed it. He had a way of resting his finger
in the corner of his eye when thinking. Sometimes it would rest in one
eye for awhile, and then if he became a little restless, moved under a
new thought, he would slip his finger meditatively over his nose to the
corner of the other eye. It did not signify anything in particular,
merely an unconscious mannerism. Some men pull their hair, others gnaw
their under lip, and with him it was a queer little way of rubbing his
finger in his eye.

It was Saturday, and that was always a good day for him as he could give
all of his time to the laboratory. He was especially anxious to have
things go well this morning, as he wanted to stop at two o'clock and go
down to one of Dr. Parkman's operations. That end of it was very
important and this was to be an especially good operation.

He was thinking about Dr. Parkman on the way down;--of the man's splendid
surgery. It was a real joy to see him work. He did big things so very
easily and quietly; not at all as though they were overwhelming him. Poor
Parkman--things should have gone differently with him. If it had been
almost any other man, it would have mattered less, but it seemed a matter
of a lifetime with Parkman. He could understand that better now than he
once had. To have found Ernestine and then--then to have found she was
_not_ Ernestine! But of course in the case of Ernestine that could not
be. Now if Parkman had only found an Ernestine--but then he couldn't very
well, for there was only one! Since the first of time, there had been
only one--and she was his! He fell to dreaming of how she had looked last
night in the fire-light, and almost forgot the station at which he was to
get off.

He was in very jubilant mood when they went down to Dr. Parkman's office
after the operation. It had verified some of his own conclusions; seemed
fairly to stand as an endorsement of what he held. He had never felt more
sure of himself, had never seen his way more clearly. It was a great
thing to have facts bear one out, to see made real what one had believed
to be true. He went over it all with Parkman, putting his case clearly,
convincingly, his points standing out true and unassailable; throwing
away all the irrelevant, picking out unerringly, the little kernel of
truth;--a big mind this, a mind qualified to cope with big problems. Dr.
Parkman had never seen so clearly as he did to-day how absolutely his
friend possessed those peculiar qualities the work demanded. He had never
felt more sure of Karl's power; and power did not cover it--not quite.

"Something in your eye?" he asked when, just as Karl was about to leave,
he seemed to be bothered with his eye, and was rubbing it a little.

"I don't know. It's felt off and on all day as though something was the
matter with them both."

"Want me to take a look at them?"

"Oh no--no, it's nothing."

"By the way, you have a bad trick with your eyes. I've noticed it several
times lately and intended to tell you about it. You have a way of rubbing
them;--not rubbing them exactly, but pressing your finger in them. I'd
quit that if I were you. If you must put your finger somewhere, put it on
your nose. A man dealing with the stuff you do can't be too careful."

"Why, what do you mean?"

"Simply what I say. One drop of some of those things you have out there
would be--a drop too much."

"Now, look here, you don't think I'm any such a bungler as that, do you?"

"Hum! You ought to know your medical history well enough to know that all
the victims haven't been bunglers, by a long sight."

Karl's hand was on the knob. "Well, don't worry about me; I'm not built
for a victim. I may be run over by an automobile--anybody is liable to be
run over by yours, the way you run that thing--but I'm not liable to be
killed by my own sword. That's not the way I work."

"Just the same, you'd better keep your hands out of your eyes!"

"All right," he agreed laughingly. "It does sound like a fool's trick.
It's new to me;--didn't know that I did it."

When he was making some calls late that evening, Dr. Parkman passed the
university and for some reason recalled what Karl had said that afternoon
about his eyes bothering him. Why hadn't he examined them; or better
still, one of the best oculists in the city was right there in the
building--why hadn't he made Karl go in to see him? It was criminal for a
man like that to neglect his eyes! He was near the Hubers now; he had an
impulse to run over and make sure that everything was all right. He
slowed up the machine and looked at his watch. No, it was almost eleven;
he would not go now. After all he was silly to be attaching any weight to
such a thing as a man's rubbing his eyes. He smiled a little as he
thought of it that way. Karl wasn't bothering about it; so why should he?

But he had it on his mind, thinking of it frequently until he went to
bed. And the thing which worried him most was that he was worrying a
great deal more than the facts in the case warranted. He was not given to
taking notions, and that was just what this seemed. One would suppose
that a man like Hubers would be able to look out for himself,--"but for a
fool, give me a great man!" was the thought with which the doctor went to
sleep.




CHAPTER XIII


AN UNCROSSED BRIDGE

Karl awoke next morning with the sense of something wrong. Something was
making him uncomfortable, but he was not wide enough awake at first to
locate the trouble. He lay there dozing for a few minutes and when he
roused again he knew that his eyes were hurting badly. He awakened
instantly then. His eyes? Why, they had bothered him a little all day
yesterday. Was there something the matter with them?

He got up, raised the shade and looked in the glass. They looked badly
irritated, both of them. They felt wretchedly; he could scarcely keep
looking into the glass. Then leaning over the dressing table, he looked
more closely. He thought he saw something he did not like. He took a hand
mirror and went to the window. He could see better now, and the better
light verified the other one. It was true that in the corner of one eye
there was a drop of pus. In the other there was a suggestion of the same
thing.

He began to dress, proceeding slowly, his brows knitted, evidently
thinking about something, and worried. Then he opened a drawer, took out
a handkerchief, got the drop of pus from his eye and arranged the
handkerchief for preserving it.

He would find out about that, and the sooner the better! He did not like
it. He would see an oculist, too, this morning. It was plain he was going
to have some trouble with his eyes.

Ernestine noticed them at once. What made them so red?--she wanted to
know. Did they hurt? And wasn't there something he could put in them? He
told her he was going to look after them at once. He could not afford to
lose any time, and of course he could do nothing without his eyes.

Immediately after breakfast he started over to the laboratory.

It was Sunday morning and there would be no one there, which was so much
the better. He wanted to get this straightened out.

He had his head down all the way over to the university, partly because
his eyes bothered him and partly because he was thinking hard. The
trouble had evidently been coming on yesterday. He stopped short. That
trick Parkman told him about! But of course--moving on a little--that
could not have anything to do with this. He had no recollection--he was
very sure--then he walked faster, and the lines of his mouth told that he
was troubled.

When he reached the laboratory he began immediately upon the microscopic
examination. He hoped he could get at it through that, for the culture
process meant a long wait. But after fifteen minutes of careful work the
"smear" proved negative. There remained then only the longer route of the
culture.

He did not begin upon that immediately. He sat there trying to think back
to just what it was he had been doing Friday afternoon. The latter part
of the afternoon he had been sitting here by this table. That was the
time he was so buoyed up--getting so fine a light on the thing. It was
the cancer problem then--but in the nature of things nothing could have
happened with that. But there were always other things--all those things
known to the pathological laboratory.

He turned around toward the culture oven, opened the outer door and
through the inner door of glass looked in at the row of tubes. He was
trying to recall what it was he had been working with the earlier part of
Friday afternoon.

He knew now; one of the tubes had brought it to him. Yes, he knew now,
and within him there was a pause, and a stillness. Right over there was
where he sat preparing some cultures. There were two things with which he
had been working;--again a pause, and a stillness. One of them could not
make any serious difference; he went that far firmly, and then his heart
seemed to stand quite still, waiting for his thought to go on. But he did
not go on; there was a little convulsive clutching of his consciousness,
and a return, with acclaim, to the fact that _that_ could not make any
serious difference. He clung there; he would not leave that; doggedly,
defiantly, insistently, all-embracingly he affirmed that _that_ could not
make any serious difference. It was without opening his thought to
anything further that he got out his things and began preparing the
culture.

He was so accustomed to this that it went very mechanically and quickly.
He took one of the test tubes arranged for the process in the culture
oven and with the small wire instrument he had there, lifted the drop of
pus on the handkerchief into the bullion of the tube. He did it all very
carefully, very exactly, just as he always did. Then he put the tuft of
cotton over the top and placed the tube in that strange-looking box
commonly called a culture oven. In twenty-four hours he would know the
truth. He adjusted the gas with a firm hand, arranging with his usual
precision this thing which outwardly was like any of his experiments and
which in reality--but he would not go into that.

Now for an oculist. His eyes were hurting badly; it was time to do
whatever there was to be done. After all he was rather jumping at
conclusions. There was a big chance that this was just something
characteristic to eyes and had no relation to the things of his work. He
seized upon that, ridiculing himself for having looked right over the
most simple and natural explanation of all. Did not a great many people
have trouble with their eyes?

That nerved him up all the way down town. He was almost ready to think it
a great joke, the way he had hurried over to the laboratory and had gone
at it in that life-and-death fashion.

He knew that the oculist in Dr. Parkman's building was a good one, and so
he went there. It was a little disconcerting when he stepped into the
elevator to meet Dr. Parkman himself. He had not thought of trying
especially to avoid the doctor, but he had wanted to see the oculist
first and get the thing straightened out. He was counting a great deal
now on the oculist.

"Hello!" said the doctor, seeming startled at first, and then after one
sharp glance: "Going up to see me?"

"Well, yes, after a little. Fact of the matter is I thought I'd run in
and let this eye fellow take a look at me."

"Eyes bothering you?"

"Somewhat." He said it shortly, almost curtly.

When they reached the fifth floor, Dr. Parkman stepped out with him,
although he himself belonged farther up.

"I know him pretty well," he explained, "I'll go with you."

He could not very well say: "I would rather you would not," although for
some reason he felt that way.

It was soon clear to their initiated minds that the oculist did not know
the exact nature of the trouble. He admitted that the case perplexed him.
He, too, must make an examination of the pus. He treated Karl's eyes, and
advised that they begin upon an immediate and aggressive course of
treatment. Dr. Parkman, observing Karl's growing irritability, said that
he would look after all that, see that the right thing was done.

As he walked out of that office Karl was a little dizzy. His avenue of
hope had grown narrower. It was not, then, some affection characteristic
of eyes. It was, after all, something from without. It was, in all
probability, one of two things,--it was either--but again he did not go
beyond the first, telling himself with nervous buoyancy that _that_ would
not make any serious difference.

They stepped into an elevator and went up. He knew Parkman would ask him
questions now, but it seemed he could not get away from the doctor if he
tried. He felt just at present as though he had not strength to resist
any one. That oculist, he admitted to himself, had taken a good deal of
starch out of him.

When they reached the office, Dr. Parkman offered him a drink; that
irritated him considerably.

"Why no," he said, fretfully, "No--I don't want a drink. Why should I
take a drink? Did you think I was all shot to pieces about something?"

The doctor was looking over his mail, fingering it a great deal, but not
seeming to accomplish much of anything with it. At last he wheeled around
toward him.

"What's the matter with your eyes?" he asked with disconcerting
directness.

"How should I know?" retorted Karl, heatedly, almost angrily. "What do I
know about it? If an oculist can't tell--you say he is a good one--why
should you expect me to?" And then he added with a touch of eagerness, as
if seizing upon a possibility: "I don't believe that fellow amounts to
much. I think I'll go out now and hunt up somebody who knows something."

"The man's all right," said Dr. Parkman shortly. His own foot was tapping
the floor nervously. "You ought to have some idea," he added, with what
he felt to be brutal insistence, "as to whether or not you got anything
in your eyes."

"Well, I haven't! I don't know anything about it."

But he was breathing hard. His whole manner told of fears and
possibilities he was not willing to state. He would tell what he thought
now in just a minute; the doctor knew that.

He began with insisting, elaborately, that he never got things on his
hands--that was not his way; and even if he did get something on his
hands, he wouldn't get it in his eyes; even if he did rub his eyes
sometimes--he didn't admit it--but even if he did, would he be such a
fool as to rub them when he had something on his hands? But if, in spite
of all those impossibilities, just admitting for the sake of argument,
and because Parkman insisted on being ominous, that it was something like
that, there were two things it might be. It might be--he named the first
with emphasis, and Dr. Parkman, after a minute's thought, heaved a big
sigh of unmistakable relief.

"Now you see that couldn't make any vital difference," Karl added, with a
debonair manner, a thin veneer of aggressiveness.

The doctor was leaning forward in his chair. He was beginning to grow
fearful of the emphasis put upon this thing which could make no vital
difference.

Karl stopped as though he had reached the end of his story. But the
silence was wearing on him. His eyes had a hunted look.

"Why, you can see for yourself," he said--and this was the note of
appeal--"that that could not make any vital difference."

Dr. Parkman was looking at him narrowly. His own breath was coming hard.
He saw at last that he would have to ask.

"The--other?" he said, succeeding fairly well in gaining a tone of
indifference.

"Heavens--how you fellows nag for details! How you drag at a man! Well,
the other--if you're so anxious to know"--the doctor's heart sank before
the defiance of that--"the other is"--he looked all about him as one
hunted, desperate, and then snapped it out and turned away, and instantly
the room grew frightfully still.

It struck Dr. Parkman like a blow from which one must have time to
recover. Steeled though he was to the hearing of tragic facts, he was
helpless for the minute before this. And then, refusing to let it close
in upon him, it was he who turned recklessly assertive, defiantly
insistent.

"Any fool would know it's not that," he said, his gruff voice touched
with bravado.

There was one of those strange changes then. Karl turned and faced him.

"How do you know?" he asked, with a calm not to be thrust aside. "How do
you know it's not that? You can't be sure," he pursued, and there was
fairly cunning in forcing his friend upon it, cutting off all escape,
"but there are just fifty chances out of a hundred that it _is_ that. And
if it is," with a cold, impersonal sort of smile--"would you give very
much for my chances of sight?"

"You're talking like a fool!"--but beads of perspiration were on the
doctor's forehead. And then, the professional man getting himself in
hand: "You're overworked, Karl. You're nervous. Why I can fix this up for
you. I'll just--" but before that steady, understanding gaze he could not
go on.

"Not on me, Parkman--," slowly and very quietly--"not on me. I know the
ropes. Don't try those little tricks on me. I don't need professional
coddling, and I don't need professional lies. You see I happen to know
just a little about the action of germs. We'll do the usual things, of
course--that's mere scientific decency, but if this thing has really
gotten in its work--oh I've studied these things a little too long, old
man, I've watched them too many times, to be able to fool myself now."

"Well you will at least admit," said Parkman--brusque because he was
afraid to let himself be anything else--"that there are fifty chances
out of a hundred in your favour?"

Karl nodded; he had leaned back in his chair; he seemed terribly tired.

"Come now, old chap--it isn't like you to surrender before the battle.
We'll prepare to meet the foe--though I give you my word of honour I
don't expect the enemy to show up. This isn't in the cards. I _know_ it."

Karl roused a little. There was a bracing note in that vehemence. "Well,
don't ask me to do any crossing of a bridge before I come to it. I think
our friend down stairs is thinking of hospitals and nurses and all kinds
of quirks that would drive me crazy. Tell him I know what I'm about. Tell
him to let me alone!"

"All right," laughed the doctor, knowing Karl too well to press the
matter further just then, "though, of course, common-sense demands quiet
and a dark room."

"Ernestine will darken our rooms at home," said Karl stubbornly.

It was strange how quickly they could turn to the refuge of everyday
phrases, could hide their innermost selves within their average selves as
the only shelter which opened to them. There was something Dr. Parkman
wanted to do for him, and they went into the treatment room. In there
they spoke about meeting for dinner,--Ernestine had asked the doctor to
come out. Georgia and her mother were coming too, Karl told him, and the
interview closed with some light word about not being late for dinner.




CHAPTER XIV


"TO THE GREAT UNWHIMPERING!"

"Tell me some good stories about doctors," said Georgia; "I want to use
them in something I'm going to write."

"Isn't it dreadful?" said Mrs. McCormick, turning to Dr. Parkman, "she
even interviews people while they eat!" Mrs. McCormick had that manner of
some mothers of seeming to be constantly disapproving, while not in the
least concealing her unqualified admiration.

"I'm not interviewing them, Mother. Skillful interviewers never
interview. They just get people to talk."

"But what is it you're going to write," asked the doctor, "a eulogy or
denunciation?"

"Both; something characteristic."

"Meaning that something characteristic about doctors would include both
good and bad?"

"Well, they're pretty human, aren't they?" laughed Georgia.

"And think how grateful we should be," ventured Karl, "for the inference
of something good."

Dr. Parkman looked over at him with a hearty: "That's right," relieved
that his friend could enter into things at all.

In the library before they came in, things had gone badly. Mrs. McCormick
held persistently to the topic of Karl's eyes, putting forth all sorts of
"home remedies" which would cure them in a night. He had grown nervous
and irritable under it, and Mrs. Hubers several times had come to the
rescue with her graciousness. She was worried herself; the doctor could
see that in the way she looked from her husband to him, scenting
something not on the surface. He was just beginning to fear the dinner
was going to be miserable for them all, when Miss McCormick broke the
tension by asking for stories.

"Tell us what you're going to write, Georgia," said Ernestine, she too
seizing at it gratefully, "and then our doctors will have a better idea
of what you want."

"Well, I was talking to Judge Lee the other day, and he told me some good
stories about lawyers--characteristic stories, you know. So I thought I
would work up a little series--lawyers, doctors, ministers and so on,
and see how nearly I could reach the characteristics of the professions
through the stories I tell of them; not much of an idea, perhaps--but I
know a man who will buy the stuff."

Ernestine was smiling in a knowing little way. "Do you want to begin with
something really characteristic?" she asked.

"That's it. Something to strike the nail on the head, first blow."

"Then lead off with the story of Pasteur's forgetting to go to his own
wedding. There's the most characteristic doctor story I know of."

"That's a direct insult," laughed Karl.

"Why, not at all, Karl," protested Mrs. McCormick, "every one knows you
were on hand for _your_ wedding."

"Yes, and a good thing he was," declared Ernestine. "I don't think I
should have been as meek and gentle about it as the bride of Pasteur. I
fancy I would have said: 'Oh, really now--if it's so much trouble, we'll
just let it go.'"

"No, Ernestine," said Mrs. McCormick, seriously, after the laugh, "I
don't believe you would have said that,"--and then they laughed again.

"Well, it's a good story," she insisted; "and characteristic. I believe
after all that Pasteur was a chemist and not a doctor, but the doctors
have appropriated him, so the story will be all right."

"If you want to tell some stories about Pasteur," said Karl, "tell about
his refusing the royal decoration. He told the Emperor that the honour
and pleasure of doing such work as his was its own reward, and that no
decoration was needed. That story made a great hit in the scientific
world."

"But is it characteristic?" asked Georgia, slyly.

"Well," he laughed, "it ought to be."

"Another one of the independent kind," said Parkman, "is on Bilroth. He
was summoned to appear at a certain hour before the Emperor of Austria.
Bilroth was with a very sick patient until the eleventh hour and arrived
a little late in business clothes. The scandalised chamberlain protested,
telling him he could not go in like that. Whereupon Bilroth blustered
out: 'I have no time to spare. Tell His Majesty if he wishes to see me,
I am here. If he wants my dress suit, I will have a boy bring it
around.'"

"Did he get in?" asked Mrs. McCormick, anxiously.

"I think he did, although undoubtedly Miss McCormick will be too modern
to say so."

"There was a story I always liked about a Vienna doctor," he continued;
he was anxious to guide the stories, for Karl had seemed suddenly to sink
within himself. He understood why--he might have foreseen where this
would lead. For there were other stories of medical men, stories which
fitted a little too closely just now; he was especially sorry he had
mentioned Bilroth. "This shows another side of the doctor," he went on,
after a minute, "and as you are going to give good as well as bad, this
may help out on the good side--there's where you will be short. A woman
came to see this doctor regarding her consumptive son. He told her there
was nothing he could do for him, adding: 'If you want him to live, you
must take him to Italy.' The woman broke down and told him she could not
do that, that she had no money. The doctor sat there thinking a moment,
and then sent over to the bank and got her a letter of credit covering
the amount involved. Another doctor, who happened to be near, asked why
he did that. 'You can't possibly support all your needy patients,' he
said; 'why did you choose this particular case? Of course,' he added, 'it
was very good of you.' 'No,' said the doctor, 'it was not good of me.
There was nothing good about it. But I was guilty of proposing to her
something I knew she could not do. After opening up that possibility it
was my obligation to see that she could fulfill it. I suggested what I
knew to be the impossible; after I suggested it, it was my business to
make it possible.' Don't you think that a pretty good sense of justice?"
he asked of Ernestine.

"What might be called an inner squareness," said Georgia, as Ernestine
responded only with the fine lights the story had brought to her eyes.

Karl did not seem to have heard the story. Ernestine looked toward him
anxiously.

"Now I'm going to tell a story," she said, with a gaiety thrown out for
rousing him, "a very fine story;--every one must listen." He looked over
at her and smiled at that, listening for her story.

"This man's name can't be printed, because he lives in Chicago and it
might embarrass him,"--Karl and Dr. Parkman exchanged glances with a
smile. "This is a characteristic story, as it shows a doctor's tyranny.
There was a boy taken ill at a little town near Chicago. The country
doctor telephoned up to the boy's father, and the father telephoned the
family physician who, from the meagre facts, scented appendicitis. I
don't know how he knew it was bad, but I believe a good doctor is a
pretty good guesser. At any rate he suspected this was serious, and told
the father they would have to go down there at once. The father said
there was no Sunday train. 'Then get a special,' said the doctor. 'We'll
probably have to bring him up to the hospital to operate, and can't do it
in the automobile.' The father protested against the special, saying it
would be very expensive and that he did not think it necessary. The
doctor said he did think it necessary or he would not have suggested it.
The father demurred still more and the doctor rang off. Then you called
up the railroad office, yourself--wasn't that it?" turning to Dr.
Parkman, who grew red and looked genuinely embarrassed. "Oh dear,"--in
mock dismay--"now I've mixed it up, haven't I? Well, this doctor--I'm not
saying anything about who he is--called up the railroad office and calmly
ordered the special. I must not forget to say that the man who did not
want to spend the money had an abundance of money to spend. Then he
called the boy's father and said, 'Be at the station in twenty minutes.
The special will be waiting. You will have nothing to do but sign the
check.'"

"Well," said Mrs. McCormick, when Ernestine stopped as though through,
"would the father pay for it, and did the boy have to have an operation,
and did he get well?"

"Mother doesn't like this new way of telling a story," said Georgia; "she
likes to hear the got-married-and-lived-happily-ever-after part."

"I'm sure no one said anything about getting married in this," said Mrs.
McCormick, serenely.

"But don't you think that a fine doctor story?" Ernestine asked smilingly
of Dr. Parkman.

"A very bad story to tell. Miss McCormick's general reader will
say--: 'Oh yes, of course, he was just bound to have an operation.'"

"Georgia,"--this was from the man at the head of the table, and there was
something in his voice to arrest them all--"if you are in earnest about
wanting stories of doctors, why don't you tell some of the big ones? Some
of the stories medical men have a right to be proud of?"

"What are they?" she asked, promptly. "Tell me some of them."

Dr. Parkman's eyes were on his plate. He was handling his fork a little
nervously.

"If I were going to tell any stories about medical men," Karl went on,
and in his quiet voice there was still that compelling note, "it seems to
me I should want to say something about the doctors who died game--just a
little something about the men who took their medicine and said nothing;
men with the nerve to face even their own understanding--cut off, you
see, from the refuge of fooling themselves. Ask Dr. Parkman about the
surgeons who lost their hands or their lives through infection. Those are
the stories he knows that are worth while. He's only giving you the
surface of it, Georgia. Tell him you'd like a little of the real thing.
Ask him about the men who died slow deaths, looking a fatal future in the
face from a long way off. He mentioned Bilroth just now, telling a funny
story about him. There's a better story than that to tell about Bilroth.
You know he was the man who knew so much about the heart; he probably
understood the heart better than any other man. And by one of those
leering tricks of fate, he had heart disease himself. He watched his own
case and made notes on it, that his profession might profit by his
destruction. There you have something worth writing about! In his last
letter home, he said he had ten days to live--and he missed it by just
one; he lived eleven. If you're going to tell any stories about Bilroth,
tell that one, Georgia. And then a story or two showing that while many
men take chances, it's the doctor who takes them most understandingly.
Why medical science is full of an almost grotesque courage! Don't you
begin to see how the doctor's been trifling with you, Georgia?"

He paused, but no one felt the impulse to speak. His eyes were hidden by
the dark glasses he was wearing because of that cold, or whatever it was,
in his eyes, but his face told the story of an alert mind, a heart
responsive to the things of which he spoke. Then he went on and talked a
little, quietly enough, but with a passionateness, a high note of
understanding, of the men who had had the nerve--eyes open--to face the
things fate handed them. It was as if he were looking back over the whole
sweep of the world and picking from many times and many places the men
whose souls had not flinched to the death. And at the last he said,
smiling--the kind of smile one meets with a tear--"Let's have a little
toast." He raised his glass of claret and for a minute looked at it in
silence. And then he said slowly, his very quiet voice and that little
smile tempering the words:

"Here's to all those fellows who went down without the banners or
the trumpets!--To the boys who took the starch out of their own
tragedies!--To those first class sports who made no fuss about their own
funerals! Here's to the Great Unwhimpering!"

Dr. Parkman choked a little over his wine, the tightening in Ernestine's
throat made it hard for her with hers, Georgia's cheeks were burning with
enthusiasm for the story she saw now she could write, and even Mrs.
McCormick had no questions as to just what men had died that way. Then it
was Karl himself who abruptly turned the conversation to the more shallow
channels of dinner talk.

After that he was not unlike a man who had had a little too much
champagne. He startled them with the nimbleness of his wit, the light
play of his fancy. It was as though he had a new vocabulary, a lighter
one than was commonly his. There was a sort of delicate frolicsomeness in
his thought.

For a reason unknown to her, it troubled Ernestine. She looked from Karl
to Dr. Parkman, but the doctor had that impenetrable look of his. What
was the matter with him? He had talked so freely during the early part of
the dinner, and now he seemed to have dropped out of it entirely. She
caught him looking at Karl once; the keen, narrow gaze of physician to
patient. Then she saw, distinctly, that his face darkened, and after
that, when he smiled at the things which were being tossed back and forth
between Karl and Georgia, it was what she called to herself a "made-up
smile"; and once or twice when Karl said something especially funny, she
was quite sure she saw Dr. Parkman wince.

A lump rose in Ernestine's throat; Karl seemed to have slipped away from
her. This was a mood to which she could not respond and it seemed he did
not expect her to. Almost all of his talk was directed to Georgia, who,
with her quick wit and inherent high spirits, was enjoying the pace he
set her. It seemed to resolve itself into a duel of quick, easy play of
thought and words between those two. But the things they said did not
make Ernestine laugh. She smiled, as Dr. Parkman did, a "made-up" smile.

She had always enjoyed Karl's humour immensely, but now, though she had
never seen him as brilliant, something about him pulled at her heart. She
could not restrain a resentfulness at Georgia for encouraging him. For
she could not get away from the feeling that all of this was not grounded
on the thing which was Karl himself. It was like nothing in the world so
much as the breeziness of a mind which had let itself go. She was glad
when at last she could rise from the table.

In the library it was as though he were holding on to Georgia, determined
not to let her out of the mood into which he had brought her. The things
of which he talked were things having no bearing whatever upon himself.
If she had not been there, had simply heard of the things said, she
would not have recognised Karl at all. For the first time since they had
known one another, Ernestine felt left out,--alone.

Mrs. McCormick said that they must go, but Karl protested. "We're having
such a good time," he said, "don't think of going."

But Georgia had an engagement. She insisted at last that they must go.
Dr. Parkman had remained too, although Ernestine was satisfied he was not
enjoying things.

"Why, what in the world have you done to Karl?" laughed Georgia, pinning
on her hat. "I haven't had such good fun for months. I had no idea he was
such a gem of a dinner man."

"I do not think Karl is very well," said Ernestine, a little coolly.

"_Well_? Why, bless you, I never saw him in such exuberant mood."

"Didn't they make the words fly?" laughed Mrs. McCormick. "My dear, you
and the doctor and I were quite left behind."

"It seemed that way," said Ernestine, trying to keep her chin from
quivering.

When she returned to the library, Dr. Parkman and Karl were evidently
just closing a discussion for Karl was saying, heatedly: "Now just let me
manage things in my own way!"

The doctor seemed reluctant to leave. Ernestine was alone with him for a
minute in the hall, and she was sure he started to say something once and
then changed it to something else. But when he did leave, it was with
merely the conventional goodbye.

She walked slowly back to the library. Karl was sitting in the Morris
chair, his elbow upon one arm of it, his hand to his forehead. His whole
bearing had changed; it was as though he had let down. Again it seemed as
though in the last hour he had been intoxicated, and this the depression
to follow that kind of exuberance. But he looked up as he heard her, and
smiled a little, a wan, tired smile. She was beside him in an instant.

"You seemed so happy this afternoon, dear," she said, stroking his hair,
"and now you seem so tired. Aren't you well, Karl?" she asked, a little
timidly.

His face then mirrored a dissatisfaction, a sort of resentment.

"I talked like a fool this afternoon!" he said gruffly.

"Why, no, dear, only--not quite like yourself."

"Well, the fact of the matter is"--this after a minute's thought--"I have
a frightful headache. I suppose it comes from this trouble with my eyes.
I thought I wasn't going to be able to keep up, and in my efforts to do
it, I"--he paused and then laughed rather harshly--"overdid it."

He seemed anxious for her reply to that.

"I knew it was something like that," she said simply. Then, after a
minute: "Is there anything I can do for the head?"

He told her no, but that he believed he would turn the chair around with
his back to the light.

"And I won't talk, dear," he said gently; "I'll just rest a little."

She helped him with the chair and for a minute sat there on a low seat
beside him.

"You know, sweetheart," resting her cheek upon his hand, "I don't like
those dark glasses at all. I'll be so glad when you don't have to wear
them."

"Why?" he asked, his voice a little muffled.

"Because they shut me out. I always seem closer to you when I can look
into your eyes.--Oh--does it pain so?" as he drew sharply away.

"That did hurt," he admitted, his voice low. "I--I'd better not talk for
a little, dear."

So she said if there was nothing she could do for his head, she would
leave him while she wrote a couple of letters.

For a long time he sat there without moving. It was the exhaustion which
follows intoxication, for he had indeed intoxicated himself that
afternoon, and with an idea. It had come about so strangely. After they
sat down to dinner, he had been on the point a half a dozen times, of
excusing himself on the plea of a bad headache. Then when they began to
talk about doctors, those other things had come to him, and it was as
though the spirit of all those men who had gone down that way entered
into him, came so close, possessed him so completely, that he could not
hold back those words about them. A spirit quite beyond his control had
moved him to that little toast. After that, something--perhaps a spark
from the nerve of those men of whom he had spoken--brought his mind
firmly into possession of the feeling that everything was all right. It
was not that he argued himself out of his fears, but rather that
something brought the assurance of its being all right, and after that
there came a number of arguments sustaining the conviction. Just before
dinner he had gone over to the laboratory and looked at the culture. It
had not shown anything at all. At the time he accepted that as a matter
of course--it was not time for it to show anything. But looking back on
it after this conviction came to him, he took the very fact of its not
showing anything as proof that there was nothing there to show. His mind
only grasped one side of it--that it showed nothing at all. Brightening
under that he began to talk lightly, to joke with Georgia, and talking
that way seemed to enable him to keep hold of the conviction that
everything was all right. The more he talked, the more sure he was of it,
the gayer he felt, the more disposed to let his mind run wild. He was a
little afraid if he stopped talking, this beautiful conviction of its
being all right would leave him. So he made Georgia keep at it, Georgia
was the one could play that sort of game.

As he talked, new arguments came to him. The oculist! At first he had
thought it a bad thing that the oculist could not tell what was the
matter. Now he seized upon that as proving there was nothing the matter
at all. And Dr. Parkman had said, at the last, that it did not amount to
anything. At the time that had been a mere conventional phrase, but now,
in his exhilaration, he seized upon it as indisputable truth. But always
there was the feeling that he must keep on feeling this way, or the
conviction, and all that it meant, would go. That was why he clung to
Georgia. Finally he reached the point where he could distinctly remember
getting the other stuff--the stuff which did not make any difference--on
his hands. He could fairly see it on his hands, could remember distinctly
getting it in his eye. And then Georgia had said something about going,
and he had begged her not to go. But she insisted, and he began to feel
then that the exhilaration was wearing off, that he was coming back to
face things; to the doubt, the uncertainty, the suffering. And now that
he had come back to things as they were, he felt inexpressibly tired.

He went over it again and again, trying to gain something now, not from
any form of excitement, but from things as they were. Suddenly his face
brightened. He sat there in deep thought, and then at last he smiled a
little. Whatever happened must have occurred Friday afternoon. But he had
never in all his life felt as happy about his work as he did before he
left the laboratory Friday afternoon. Could a man feel like that, would
it be in the heart of things to let a man feel that way, if he had
already entered upon the road of his destruction? It had been more than a
happiness of the mind; it was a happiness of the soul, and would not a
man's soul send out some note of warning? And then that same evening when
he and Ernestine sat before the fire! If already this grim fate had
entered into their lives, would not their love, would not _her_ love, all
intuition, deep-seeing, feeling that which it could not understand, have
felt in that moment of supreme happiness, some token of what was ahead?
It could not be that the world jeered at men like that. Their love would
have told them something was wrong.

Ernestine came in just then and he called her to him.

"Liebchen," he said, "I've been thinking about that evening of your
birthday, about how beautiful it was. Weren't you happy, dear, as we sat
there before the fire?"

"So happy, Karl," she murmured, warmly glad to have her own Karl again.
"Everything seemed so beautiful; everything seemed so perfectly right."

He drew her to him with a passion she did not understand. His Ernestine!
His wife! She who communed with love, whose harmony with the great soul
of things was perfect--they could not have deceived her like that!
Ernestine and love dwelt too closely together. She would have received
some sign.

For a time that calmed and sustained him; he believed in it; it was his
weapon to use against the doubts and terrors which preyed upon him. But
the gloom of his soul seemed to thicken with the deepening of the night.
His heart grew cold with the coming of the shadows. The passing of day
inspired in him fears not to be reasoned away.

He grew very nervous during the evening and finally said he must go over
to the laboratory and arrange some things for morning. Ernestine
protested against it--and if he must go would he not let her go with him?
But he told her he believed it would be better for his head if he walked
alone for just a little while. He did not have a headache more than once
in five years, he assured her, laughing a little, and when he did, it was
apt to upset him.

When he came back at last--it seemed to her a very long time--she saw,
watching from the window, that he was walking very slowly, almost as if
exhausted She could not hold back her alarm at his white, worn face.
Something in it gripped at her heart.

"Is it worse, dear?" she asked anxiously.

"It's a little bad--just now. I'll go to bed. It will be better then." He
spoke slowly, as though very tired.

"Won't you take something for it, Karl?" she persisted. "Won't you?"

"I do not know of anything to take that would do any good,
Ernestine,"--and he could not quite keep the quiver out of those words.

"But other people take things. There _are_ things. Let me go out and get
you something."

He shook his head.

"Doctors don't take much stock in medicine," he said, with a touch of his
usual humour.

She wanted to stay with him until he went to sleep. She wanted to put
cold cloths on his head. It was hard to avoid Ernestine's tenderness.

"It did not show anything," he assured himself, pleadingly, when alone.
"It only showed that it was going to show in the morning. I knew that. I
knew all the time I was going to know in the morning. I'll not go to
pieces. I'll not be a fool about it," he kept repeating.

But a little later Ernestine was sure she heard him groan. She could not
keep away from that.

"Oh, sweetheart," she murmured, kneeling by his bed, "I can't bear it not
to help you. Let me do just some little thing," she pleaded.

He put his hand over in hers. "Hold it, dear; if you aren't too tired. I
don't want to talk,--but hold on to my hand."

His grip grew very tight after a minute. She was sure his head must be
paining terribly. If only he would take something for it!

In a little while he grew very quiet. Soon she was sure that he was
asleep. But after she had at last stolen away he turned and buried his
face in his arms.




CHAPTER XV


THE VERDICT

It was Monday morning now. The hours of that night had been hours of
torture. Sleep had come once or twice, but sleep meant only the surrender
of his mind to the horrors which preyed upon it. He could, in some
measure, exert a mastery when awake, but no man is master of his dreams.
His dreams put before him all those things his thoughts fought away. In
his dreams, there was a fearful thing pursuing him, reaching out for him,
gaining upon him with each step. Or sometimes, it stalked beside him, not
retreating, not advancing, but waiting, standing there beside him with
grim, inexorable smile. It was after waking from such dreams that he
breathed his prayer that this night pass. No matter what be ahead, he
asked that this night pass away.

After he was up he found himself able to go on in much the usual way.
When Ernestine came in and asked about his head, he told her it was
better; when she wanted to know about his eyes, he said they were not any
better yet, but that that was something which would simply have to run
its course. She begged him not to go over to the university, but he told
her it was especially important to go this morning. He added that he
might not be there very long.

He ate his usual breakfast. A truth that would shake the foundations of
his life might be waiting for him just ahead, and yet he could make his
usual laughing plea for a second cup of coffee. Undoubtedly it was so
with many men; beneath a mail of conventions and pleasantries they lived
through their fears and sorrows alone.

Something clutched at his heart as he kissed Ernestine good-bye and there
was a momentary temptation. Could he face it alone, if he had to face it?
To have her with him! But he put that aside; not alone for her sake, but
because he felt that after all there were things through which one must
pass alone. But after he had reached the door, he came back and kissed
her again. What if he were to go down into a place too deep for his voice
to reach her?

There was some solace, assurance, in the naturalness of things about him.
Everything else was just the same; it did not seem that it could be part
of natural law then for his own life to be entirely overturned.

And the world was so beautiful! It was a buoyant spring morning. There
was assurance in the song of the birds, in the perfume of flowers and
trees. The air upon his face was soft and reassuring. This seemed far
away from the hideous phantoms of the night. Why the world did not _feel_
like tragedy this morning!

He had a lecture at eight o'clock, and he made up his mind he would give
it. In the night he had thought of going first of all to the laboratory.
The truth would be waiting for him there. But it was his business to give
the lecture and he could not be sure of giving it if he went to the
laboratory first. A man had no right to let his own affairs interfere
with his work. Oh yes--by all means, he would give the lecture. In spite
of his prayer that the uncertainty should end, he reached out for another
hour of holding it off.

He knew as the hour advanced that he had never done better work in the
lecture room. He pinned his mind to it with a rigidity which prompted him
to put the subject as though it were the most vital thing in all the
world. He threw the whole force of his will to filling his mind with the
things of which he spoke that he might not yield so much as an inch to
the things which waited just outside.

He talked until the last minute; in fact, he went so much over his time
that another class was waiting at the door. He clung to those last
moments with the desperation of the drowning man to the splintered piece
of board. After it was over, just as he was yielding the desk to the man
who followed him, one of his students approached him with a question and
the thankfulness, the appeal, almost, in the smile with which he received
him, mystified the student until he stammered out his question
bewilderedly.

He could wait no longer now. That room belonged to others. The next
period was his usual hour in the laboratory. It was an hour which on
Monday morning he could, if he wished, spend alone.

His temples were beating, thundering. His hands were so cold that they
seemed things apart from him. But his mouth--how parched it was!--was set
very hard, and his steps, though slow, was firm.

In the outer laboratory, Professor Hastings stopped him, remonstrating
against his working when he was having trouble with his eyes. He assured
him, elaborately, that he was taking care of them, that probably he would
not be in there long.

He opened the door of his laboratory and passed in. He closed it behind
him, and stood there leaning against it. He was all alone now. There was
nothing in the room but himself and the truth which was waiting for him.

He put his book down upon the table. He walked over and sat down before
the culture oven. He must get this over with! He was getting sick. He
could not stand much more.

With firm, quick hand he wrenched open the doors. He put his hand upon
what he knew to be the tube. He pulled it out, turned around to the light
and held it up between him and the window. For one moment he looked
away;--how parched his mouth was! And then, a mighty will turning his
eyes upon it, in one long gaze he read the plain, unmistakable,
unalterable truth. He had never seen a better culture. Science would
perhaps commit itself no further than to say his eyes had become
inoculated with the most virulent germ known to pathology. But out beyond
the efforts which would be made to save him, he read--written large--the
truth.

He was going blind.




CHAPTER XVI


"GOOD LUCK, BEASON!"

Minutes passed and nothing happened. There was no sound of splintering
glass. The tube did not fall from his hands. Not so much as gasp or groan
broke the stillness of the laboratory. He did not seem to have moved even
the muscle of a finger.

He faced it. He understood it. He faced it and understood it as he had no
other truth in all his life. No merciful, mitigating force caused his
mind to totter. With fairly cosmic regularity, cosmic inevitability,
comprehension struck blow after blow.

He was going blind. He had spent his life studying the action of such
forces as this. _He knew them!_ A man who knew less would have hoped
more. Some idle dreamer might attempt to push one star closer to another.
An astronomer would not do that.

He was going blind. He could no more do his work without his eyes than
the daylight could come without the sun. Fate jeered at him: "Your eyes
are gone, but your life will remain." It was like saying to the sun: "You
are not to give any more light, but you are to go on shining just the
same."

He was going blind. The world which had just opened to him--the world of
sunsets and forests and mountains and seas gulped to black nothingness!

Blind! Swept under by a trick he would not have believed possible from
his most careless student! Mastered by the things he had believed he
controlled! Meeting his life's destruction from the things which were to
bring his life's triumph! In that moment of understanding's throwing wide
her gates to torture, fate stood out as the master dramatist. Making him
do it himself! Working it out of a mere fool's trick!

Blind?--_Blind?_ But his eyes fitted his brain so perfectly it was
through them all knowledge came to him. They were the world's great
channel to his mind. It was through his eyes he knew his fellow beings.
The lifting of an eyebrow, a queer twist to a smile--those things always
told him more than words. And--but here he staggered. The mind could get
this, as it had all else, but on this the heart broke. _Ernestine!_--that
smile--the love lights in her eyes--the glints of her dear, dear
hair--The tube fell from his hand. His head sank to the table. He was
buried now under an agony beyond all power to lift.

Whether it was minutes or hours which passed then, he never knew in the
days which followed. Time is not measured by common reckoning on the hill
of Calvary.

The thing which brought him from under the blow at last was a blinding
rage. He wanted to take a revolver and blow his brains out, then and
there. He--a man supposed to have a mind! _He_--counted a master of those
very things! And now, what? Manhood, power, _himself_ gone. Stumbling
through his days! Useless!--a curse to himself and everyone else. Groping
about in the dark--a thing to be pitied and treated well for pity's sake!
Cared for--looked after--_helped!_ That beat down the bounds of control.
He did things then which he never remembered and would not have believed.

It all rushed upon him--the birthday night--the crafty, insidious mockery
through every bit of it, until everything to which he had held tottered
about him, and goaded beyond all power to bear there came a slow,
comprehending, soul-deep curse on the world and all that the world had
done. And then, out of the darkness, through the blackened, dizzying,
tottering mass--a voice, a face, a smile, a touch, a kiss, and the curses
gave way to a sob and things steadied a little. No, not the world and
everything it had done, for it was a world which held Ernestine, a world
which had given Ernestine to him for his.

He fought for it then: for his faith in the world, his belief in the
things of love. It was the fight of his life, the fight for his own soul.
Come what might in the future, it was this hour which held the decisive
battle. For if he could not master those things which were surging upon
him, then the things which made him himself were gone for all time. And
when sense of the underlying cunning of the blow brought the surrendering
laugh close to his parched lips it was held back, held under, by that
ever recurring memory of a touch, a voice, a face. It was Ernestine,
their love, fighting against the powers of damnation for the rescue of
his soul.

Even in the battle's heat, he had full grasp of the battle's
significance, knew that all the future hung upon making it right this
hour with his own soul. His face grew grey and old, he concentrated days
of force into minutes, but little by little, through a strength greater
than that strength with which men conquer worlds, a force greater than
the force with which the mind's big battles are won, by a force not given
many since the first of time, he held away, beat back, the black tides
ready to carry him over into that sea of bitterness from which lost souls
send out their curses and their jeers and their unmeetable silences.

He tried to see a way. He tried to reach out to something which should
help him. Standing there amid the wreck of his life, he tried to think,
even while the ruins were still falling about him, of some plan of
reconstruction. It was like rebuilding a great city destroyed by fire;
the brave heart begins before the smoke has cleared away. But that task
is a simple one. The city destroyed by fire may be rebuilded as before.
But with him the master builder was gone. Out of those poor, scarred,
ungeneraled forces which remained, could he hope to bring anything to
which the world would care to give place?

He could see no way yet. All was chaos. And just then there came a knock
at the door.

He paid no heed at first. What right had the world to come knocking at
his door? What could he do for any one now?

The knock was repeated. But he would not go. If it were some student,
what could he do for him? He could only say: "I can do nothing for you.
Go to some one else." And should it be one of his fellow professors, come
to counsel with him, he could only say to him: "I have dropped out. Go on
without me. I wish you good luck."

That message he had thought to give!--and now--

Again the knock, timidly this time, fearing a too great persistency, but
reluctant to go away. He would go in just a minute now. There would not
come another knock. Well, let him go. When all the powers of fate had
gathered round to mock and jeer was it too much to ask that there be no
other spectators? Was not a man entitled to one hour alone among the
ruins of his life?

He who would gain entrance was starting, very slowly, to walk away. He
listened to him take a few steps, and then suddenly rose and hurried to
the door. He was not used to turning away his students unanswered.

It was Beason who turned eagerly around at sound of the opening door.
Beason--of all people--that boy who never in the world would understand!

He was accustomed to reading faces quickly and even through his dark
glasses his worried eyes read that Beason was in trouble, moved by
something from the path in which he was wont to go.

"I'm sorry to interrupt you," stammered the boy, as he motioned him to a
chair.

"Oh--that's all right; I wasn't doing anything, very important.
Just--finishing up something," he added, glad, when he heard his own
voice, that it was only Beason.

"I'm in trouble," blurted out Beason, "and I--I wanted to see you."

The man was sitting close to a table, and he rested his elbow upon it,
and shaded his eyes with his hand.

"Trouble?" his voice was kind, though a little unsteady. "Why, what's the
trouble?"

"I've got to stop school! I've got to give up my work for a whole year!"

The hand still shaded his darkened eyes. His mouth was twitching a
little.

"A year, Beason?" he said--any one else would have been struck with the
note in it--"You say--a year?"

"Yes," said Beason, "a whole year. My father has had some hard luck and
can't keep me here. I'd try to get work in Chicago, and stay on, but I
not only have to make my own way, but I must help my mother and sister.
Next year another deal my father's in will probably straighten things
out, and then I suppose I can come back."

The man very slowly nodded his head. "I see," he said, his voice coming
from 'way off somewhere, "I see."

"It's tough!" exclaimed Beason bitterly--"pretty tough!"

Dr. Hubers had turned his chair away from Beason, and with closed eyes
was facing the light from without. There was a long pause. Beason waited
patiently, supposing the man to be thinking what to say about so great a
difficulty.

"As I understand it," he said, turning around at last, "it's like this.
You are to give up your work at the university for a year--just one short
little year--and do something else; something not so much in your line,
perhaps, but something which will be helping those you care for--making
it easier for some one else. It's to be your privilege, as I understand
it, to fill a man's place. That's about it, isn't it?"

"But that's not the point! I thought,"--in an injured, almost tearful
voice--"that you would understand."

"Oh, I do. I see the other point. You hate to stop work for,"--he cleared
his throat--"for a year."

"A year," said Beason dismally, "is such a long time to lose."

The man had nothing to say to that. His head sank a little. He seemed to
be thinking.

Finally he came out of his reverie; seemed to come from a long way off.
"And where are you going, my boy?" he asked kindly. "What are you going
to do?"

"I'm going clear out West," said Beason gloomily. "Father has something
for me with a company in the Northwest."

"Out there!"--an eager voice rang out, a voice which rested on a
smothered sob. "Great heavens, man, you're going out there? Out there to
the mountains and the forests? Out there where you can see the sun come
up and go down, can see--can see--" but his voice trailed off to a
strange silence.

"I never cared much for scenery," said Beason bluntly, "and I care a lot
for--all this I'm leaving."

"We don't really leave a thing," said the man--his voice was low and
tired--"when we're coming back to it. The only real leave-takings are the
final ones."

Beason shifted in his chair. Some of these things were not just what he
had expected.

"Beason,"--something in his voice now made the boy move a little
nearer--"I'm sorry for your disappointment, but I wish I could make you
see how much you have to live for. Get in the habit of looking at the
sunsets, Beason. Take a good many long looks at the mountains and the
rivers. It's not unscientific. You know,"--with a little whimsical toss
of his head--"we only have so many looks to take in this world, and when
we're about through we'd hate to think they'd all been into microscopes
and culture ovens. And don't worry too much, Beason, about things running
into your plans and knocking them over. You know what that wise old Omar
had to say about it all." He paused, and then quoted, very slowly, each
word seeming to stand for many things:


  And fear not lest Existence closing your
  Account, and mine, shall know the like no more;
  The Eternal Saki from that Bowl has pour'd
  Millions of Bubbles like us, and will pour.


"And--will--pour,"--he repeated the three words. And then his head
drooped, his hands fell laxly at his sides. It seemed it was not of
Beason he had been thinking as he looked Fate in the face with that taunt
of the old Persian poet.

But he looked at him after a moment, came back to him. He saw that the
boy was disappointed. The gloom with which he had come had not lifted
from his face. That would not do. He was not going to fail his student
like that.

"Why, look here, Beason," he said in a new tone, all enthusiasm now,
"maybe you'll shoot a bear. I have a presentiment, Beason, that you will,
and when you're eighty-five and have your great grandchild on your knee,
you'll think a great deal more about that bear than you will about the
year you missed here at school. Now brace up! Hard knocks wake a fellow
up. You'll come back here and do better work for your year of roughing
it--take my word for it, you will."

Beason had brightened. "And you think,"--he grew a little red--"that when
I come back I can have my old place here with you?"

The man drew in his breath, drew it in rather hard; something had taken
the enthusiasm away.

"I'll do my little part, Beason," he said, exceedingly quietly, "to see
that you are not overlooked when you come back."

The boy rose to go. "I do feel better," he said clumsily, but with
heartiness.

He looked around the room. "I hate to leave it. I've had some good times
here, and I'm--fond of it." The man was leaning against the wall. He did
not say anything at all.

Then Beason held out his hand. "Good-bye," he said, "and--thank you."

For a minute there was no reply, nothing save the very cold hand given in
response to Beason's. But that was only for the instant. And then the man
in him, those things which made him more than a great scientist, things
more than mind, not even to be comprehended under soul, those fundamental
things which made him a man, rose up and conquered. He straightened up,
smiled a little, and then heartily, quite sunnily, came the words: "Take
a brace, Beason--take a good brace. And good luck to you, boy--good
luck."

The door had closed. At last he was alone again. Dizzy with the strain he
staggered to a chair. For a long time he sat there, many emotions
struggling in his face. He could not see it yet--not quite. It was all
very new, and uncertain. But 'way out there in the darkness it seemed
there was perhaps something waiting for him to grasp. He would never give
that other message, but it might be, if he worked hard enough, and never
faltered, he could learn to say to the world which had given him this,
say heartily, quite sunnily: "Good luck to you. Good luck."




CHAPTER XVII


DISTANT STRAINS OF TRIUMPH

It worried Ernestine when she saw Dr. Parkman's motor car stopping before
the house early Tuesday morning. He had been there the afternoon before,
and then again late in the evening, bringing another doctor with him. He
said that they simply came to help keep Karl amused; but surely he would
not be coming again this morning if there were not something more serious
than she knew. Karl had come home from the university about noon the day
before, saying that his head was bad and he was going to consider himself
"all in" for the day. Something about him had frightened her, but he
insisted that it only showed what a headache could do to a fellow who was
not accustomed to it. He had remained in his darkened room all day, not
even turning his face from the wall when she came in to do things for
him. That worried her, and even the doctor's assurance that he was not
going to be ill had not sufficed. In fact, she thought Dr. Parkman
was acting strangely himself.

"I was out in this part of town and thought I'd drop in," he told her, as
she opened the door for him.

"You're not worried about Karl?" she demanded.

He was hanging up his cap. "You see, I don't want him to get up and go
over to the university," he said, after a minute's pause, in which she
thought he had not heard her question. "That wouldn't be good for his
eyes."

"Well, doctor, what is it about his eyes? Is it just--something that must
run its course?"

"Oh, yes," he answered, and she was a little hurt by the short way he
said it. Was it not the most natural thing in the world she should want
to know? Really, doctors might be a little more satisfactory, she
thought, as she told him he would find Karl in his room.

She herself went into the library. Down in the next block she saw the
postman, and thought she would wait for him. She felt all unnerved this
morning. Things were happening which she did not understand, and then
she felt so "left out of things." She wanted to do things for Karl; she
would love to hover over him while he was not well, but he seemed to
prefer being let alone; and as for Dr. Parkman, there was no sense in his
adopting so short and professional a manner with her.

But as she stood there by the window, the bright morning sunlight fell
upon her ruby, and she smiled. She loved her ring so! It was so dear of
Karl to get it for her. The warm, deep lights in it seemed to symbolise
their love, and it would always be associated with that first night she
had worn it, that beautiful hour when they sat together before the fire.
That had been its baptism in love.

The postman was at the door now, and she hurried to meet him. She was
much interested in the mail these days, for surely she would hear any
time now regarding her picture in Paris.

It had come! The topmost letter had a foreign stamp, and she recognised
the writing of Laplace.

Heart beating very fast, she started up to her studio. She wanted to be
up there, all by herself, when she read this letter. As she passed Karl's
door she heard Dr. Parkman telling about having punctured a tire on his
machine the night before. Of course then everything really was all right,
or he would not have talked about trivial things like that.

Her fingers fumbled so that she could scarcely open the envelope. And
then she tried to laugh herself out of that, prepare for disappointment.
Why, what in the world did she expect?

As she read the letter her face went very white, her fingers trembled
more and more. Then she had to go back and read it sentence by sentence.
It was too much to take in all at once.

It was not so much that it had been awarded a medal; not so much that a
great London collector--Laplace said he was the most discriminating
collector he knew--wanted to buy it. The overwhelming thing was that the
critics of Paris treated it as something entitled to their very best
consideration. The medal and the sale might have come by chance, but
something about these clippings he had enclosed seemed to stand for
achievement. They said that "The Hidden Waterfall," by a young American
artist, was one of the most live and individual things of the exhibition.
They mentioned things in her work which were poor--but not one of them
passed her over lightly!

She grew very quiet as she sat there thinking about it. The
consciousness of it surged through and through her, but she sat quite
motionless. It seemed too big a thing for mere rejoicing. For what it
meant Was that the years had not played her false. It meant the
justification--exaltation--of something her inmost self.

And it meant that the future was hers to take! She leaned forward as if
looking into the coming years, eyes shining with aspiration, cheeks
flushed with triumph. She quivered with desire--the desire to express
what she knew was within her.

It was while lost to her joy and her dreaming that she heard a step upon
the stairs. She started up--instantly broken from the magic of the
moment. Perhaps Karl needed her. And then before she reached the door she
knew that it was Karl himself. How very strange!

"Oh, Karl!"--not able to contain it a minute--"I want to tell you--" and
then, startled as he stumbled a little, and going down a few steps to
meet him--"but isn't there too much light up here? Shouldn't you stay
down in the dark?"

"I don't want to stay down in the dark!"--he said it with a low intensity
which startled her, and then she laughed.

"I've always heard there was nothing so perverse as a sick man. I'll tell
you what's the matter with you. You're lonesome. You're tired of getting
along without me--now aren't you? But we'll go down to the library, and
down there I'll tell you--oh, _what_ I'll tell you! I thought Dr. Parkman
was going to stay with you a while,"--as he did not speak--"or I
shouldn't have come away."

He had seated himself, and was rubbing his head, as though it pained him.
His eyes were hidden, but his face, in this bright light, made her want
to cry, it told so plainly of his suffering. He reached out his hand for
hers. "I didn't want him any longer, liebchen,"--he said it much like a
little child--"I want--you."

"Of course you do,"--tenderly--"and I'm the one for you to have. But not
up here. The light is too bright up here."

She pulled at his hand as if to induce him to rise. But he made no
movement to do so, and he did not seem to have heard what she said.
"Ernestine," he said, in a low voice--there was something not just
natural in Karl's voice, a tiredness, a something gone from it--"will you
do something for me?"

She sat down on the arm of his chair, her arm about him with her warm
impulsiveness. "Why Karl, dear"--a light kiss upon his hair--"you know I
would do anything in the world for you."

"I want you to show me your pictures,"--he said it abruptly, shortly. "I
want to look at them this morning;--all of them."

"But--but Karl," she gasped, rising in her astonishment--"not _now_!"

"Yes--now. You promised. You said you'd do anything in the world for me."

"But not something that will hurt you!"

"It won't hurt me,"--still abruptly, shortly.

"But I know better than that! Why any one knows that eyes in bad
condition mustn't be used. And looking at pictures--up here in this
bright light--so needless--so crazy,"--she laughed, though she was
puzzled and worried.

He was silent, and something in his bearing went to her heart. His head,
his shoulders, his whole being seemed bowed. It was so far from Karl's
real self. "Any other time, dear," she said, very gently. "You know I
would love to do it, but some time when you are better able to look at
them."

"I'm just as able to look at them now as I will ever be," he said,
slowly. "Ernestine--please."

"But Karl,"--her voice quivering--"I just can't bear to do a thing that
will do you harm."

"It won't do me harm. I give you my word of honour it won't make any
serious difference."

"But Dr. Parkman said--"

"I give you my word of honour," he repeated, a little sharply.

"All right, then," she relented, reluctantly, and darkened the room a
little.

"Dear,"--sitting on a stool beside him--"you're perfectly sure this
trouble with your eyes isn't any more serious than you think?"

"Yes," he answered, firmly enough, but something in his voice sounded
queer, "I'm perfectly sure of that."

"Show me your pictures, Ernestine," laying his hand upon her hair; "I've
taken a particular notion that I want to see them."

"But first"--carried back to it--"I want to tell you something." She
laughed, excitedly. "I was coming down to tell you as soon as the doctor
left. Oh Karl--my picture in Paris--I heard from it this morning, and its
success has been--tremendous!" She laughed happily over the word and did
not think why it was Karl's hand gripped her shoulder in that quick,
tight way. "Shall I read you all about it, dear? And then will you
promise to cheer right up?"

Still that tight grip upon her shoulder! It hurt a little, but she did
not mind--it just showed how much Karl cared. The hand was still there
as she read the letter, and then the clippings which told of the
rare quality of her work, predicted the great things she was sure to
do,--sometimes it tightened a little, and sometimes it relaxed, and once,
with a quick movement he stooped down and turned her ring around, turning
the stone to the inside of her hand.

When she had finished he was quite still for a long minute. He was
breathing hard;--Karl was excited about it too! And then he stooped over
and kissed her forehead, and it startled her to feel that his lips were
very cold.

"Liebchen," he said, his voice trembling a bit--Karl did care so
much!--"I am glad." For a minute he was very still again, and then he
added, seeming to mean a different thing by it--"I am very glad."

"It's gone to my head a little, Karl! Oh I'm perfectly willing to admit
it has. I don't think I should appreciate the Gloria Victis very much
myself this morning," she laughed, happily.

She was too absorbed to notice the quick little drawing in of his breath,
or his silence. "After all, it would be a sorry thing if I didn't
succeed," she pursued, gayly, "for you stand so for success that we
couldn't be so close together--could we, dear--if I were a dismal
failure?"

"You think not?" he asked--and she wondered if he had taken a little
cold; his voice sounded that way.

"Oh I don't mean that too literally. But I like the idea of our going
through the same experiences--both succeeding. It seems to me I can
understand you better this morning than I ever did before. I read a
little poem last night, and at the time I liked it so much. It is about
success, or rather about not succeeding. But I'm afraid it wouldn't
appeal to me very much just now,"--again she laughed, happily, and it was
well for the happiness that she was not looking at him then.

"What was it?" he asked, as he saw she was going to turn around to him.
"Say it."

"Part of it was like this":


 'Not one of all the purple host
 Who took the flag to-day
 Can tell the definition
 So clear, of victory,

 As he, defeated, dying,
 On whose forbidden ear
 The distant strains of triumph
 Break agonized and clear.'


"Say that last verse again," he said, his voice thick and low;--Karl was
so different when he was sick!


 "As he, defeated, dying,
 On whose forbidden ear
 The distant strains of triumph
 Break agonized and clear."


"It is beautiful, isn't it?" she said, as he did not speak.

"Beautiful? I don't know. I suppose it is. I was thinking that quite
likely it is true."

"But I didn't suppose you would care about it, Karl. I supposed you would
feel about it as you did about the statue."

"I wonder," he began, slowly, not seeming sure of what he wanted to
say--"how much the comprehension, the understanding of things, that the
loss would bring, would make up for the success taken away? I wonder just
what the defeated fellow could work out of that?"

"But dearie, _is_ it true? Why can failure comprehend success any more
than success can comprehend failure?"

"It's different," he said, shortly.

"How do you know?" she asked banteringly. "What do you know about it? You
don't even know how to spell the word failure!"

He started to say something, but stopped, and then he stooped over and
rested his head for a minute upon her hair. "Tell me about your picture,
Ernestine," he said, quietly, after that. "Tell me just what it is."

"The Hidden Waterfall? Why you know it, Karl."

"Yes, but I want to hear you talk about it. I want to hear you tell just
what it means."

"Well, you remember it is a child standing in a beautiful part of the
woods. It is spring-time, as it seems best it should be when you are
painting a child in the woods. I tried to make the picture breathe
spring, and you know one of the writers said that the delicious thing
about it was the way you got the smell of the woods;--that pleased me.
Behind the child, visible in the picture, but invisible to the child, is
a waterfall. The most vital thing in the universe to me was to have that
waterfall make a sound. I think it does, or the picture wouldn't mean
anything at all. And then of course the heart of the picture is in the
child's face--the puzzled surprise, the glad wonder, and then deeper than
that the response to something which cannot be understood. It might
have been called 'Wondering,' or even 'Mystery,' but I liked the simpler
title better. And I like that idea of painting, not just nature, but
what nature means to man. I want to get at the response--the thing
awakened--the things given back. Don't you see how that translates the
spirit there is between nature and man--stands for the oneness?"

He nodded, seeming to be thinking. "I see," he said at last. "I wonder if
you know all that means?"

"Why, yes, I think I do. My next picture will get at it in a--um--a more
mature way."

"Tell me about it."

"I don't know that I can, very well. It's hard to put pictures into
words. I fear it will sound very conventional as I tell it, but of course
it is what one puts into it that makes for individuality. It is in the
woods, too. You know, Karl, how I love the woods. And I _know_ them! It
is not spring now, but middle summer; no suggestion of fall, but mature
summer. A girl--just about such a girl as I was before you came that day
and changed everything--had gone into the woods with a couple of books.
She had been sitting under a tree, reading. But in the picture she is
standing up very straight, leaning against the tree, the books overturned
and forgotten at her feet--drawn into the bigger book--see? It is not
that she has consciously yielded herself. It is not that she is
consciously doing anything. She is listening--oh how she listens and
longs! For what, none of us know--she least of all. Perhaps to the far
off call of life and love speaking through the tender spirit of the
woods. Oh how I love that girl!--and believe in her--and hope for her. In
her eyes are the dreams of centuries. And don't you see that it is the
same idea--the oneness--the openness of nature to the soul open to it?"

"And you are going to make the woods very beautiful?" he asked, after a
little thought. "More than just the beauty of trees and grass and
colour?"

"Yes, the beauty that calls to one.

"Then," he said this a little timidly--"might it not be striking to
have your girl, not really seeing it with the eyes at all? Have her
eyes--closed, perhaps, but she feeling it, knowing it, in the higher
sense really seeing it, just the same?"

She thought about that a minute. "N--o, Karl; I think not. It seems to me
she must be open to it in every way to make it stand for life, in the
sense I want it to."

"Perhaps," he said, his voice drooping a little. And then, abruptly:
"Have you done any of that?"

"Oh, just some little sketches."

"Show me the little sketches," he begged. "I want to see them all."

"Oh, but Karl, they wouldn't convey the idea at all. Wait until it is
farther along."

"No, please show them this morning,"--softly, persuasively.

She was puzzled, and reluctant, but she got them out, and with them other
things to show him. He asked many questions. In the sketches she was
going to develop he would know just how she was going to elaborate them.
He asked her to tell just how they would look when worked out. "I'm a
sick boy home from school," he said, "and I must be amused." And then he
looked at her finished pictures; she protested against the intentness
with which he looked at some of them, insisting they were not worth the
strain she could see it was on his eyes. "It's queer about finished
pictures," she laughed; "they're not half so great and satisfying as the
pictures you are going to do next." It went through her with a sharp pain
to see Karl hurting his eyes as she knew he was hurting them. She could
not understand his insistence; it was not like him to be so unreasonable.
And he looked so terribly--so worn and ill; if only he would go to bed
and let her take care of him! But he seemed intent on knowing all there
was to know about the pictures. A strange whim for him to cling to this
way! As he looked he wanted her to talk about them--tell just what this
and that meant, insisting upon getting the full significance of it all.

He had never before appreciated her firm grasp. Her work in these
different stages of evolution gave him a clearer idea of how much she had
worked and studied, how seriously and intelligently she had set out for
the mastery of her craft. He had always known that the poetic impulses
were there, the desire to express, the ideas, the delight in colour, but
he saw now the other things; this was letting him into the workman's side
of her work.

He spoke of that, and she laughed. "Yes, this is what they don't see.
This is what they never know. Poetic impulses don't paint pictures, Karl.
That's the incentive; the thing that keeps one at it, but you can't do it
without these tricks of the trade which mean just downright work. I've
never worked on a picture yet in which I wasn't almost fatally
handicapped by this thing of not knowing enough. The bigger your idea,
the more skill, cunning, fairly, you must have to force it into life."

She told him at last that they were through. They had even looked at rude
little sketches she had made of places they had cared for in Europe.
Indeed he looked very long at some of those little sketches of places
they had loved.

"One thing more," he said; "you told me once you had some water colour
daubs you did when a little girl. Let me look at them. I just want to
see," he laughed, "how they compare."

And so she got them out, and they looked them over, laughing at them.
"You've gone a long way," he said, pushing them aside, as if suddenly
tired.

He leaned back in his chair, his hand above his eyes, as she began
gathering up the things. "And so here I am," she said, waving her hand to
include the things about her, "surrounded by the things I've done. Not a
vast array, and some of it not amounting to much, but it's I, dear. It
reflects me all through these years."

"I know," he said--"that's just it,"--and at the way he said it she
looked up quickly. "You're tired, Karl. It's been too much. We'll go down
stairs now, and rest."

He watched her as she gathered the things together. It seemed he had
never really known this Ernestine before. Here was indeed the atmosphere
of work, the joy of working, all the earnestness and enthusiasm of the
real worker. And then, with masterful effort, he roused himself. He had
not yet touched what he had come to know.

"I have been thinking," he began, "a little about the psychology of all
this. You'll think I'm developing a wonderful interest in art, but you
see I'm laid up and can't do my own work, so I'm entitled to some
thoughts about art. Now these things you paint grow out of a mental
image--don't they, dear? The things you paint the mind sees first, so
that the mental image is the true one, and then you--approximate. I
should think then that it might help you to _tell_ about pictures. For
instance, if in painting a picture you had to tell about it to some one
who did not look at it, wouldn't that make your own mental image more
clear, and so help make it more real to you?'

"Why, Karl, I never thought of it, but,"--meditatively--"yes, I believe
it would."

He turned away that she might not see the gladness in his face. "And it
would be interesting--wouldn't it--to see just how good a conception you
could give of the picture through words?"

"Yes," she said, interested now--"it would be a way of feeling one's own
grip on it."

"Of course," he continued, "that couldn't be done except in a case, like
yours and mine, where people were close together."

"Yes," she assented, "and that in itself would show that they were close
together."

At that he laid a quick hand upon her hair, caressing it.

"Oh, after all, dear,"--gathering up the last of the sketches--"the
greatest thing in the world is to do one's work--isn't it?"

"Yes," he said, and his voice was low and tired, "unless the greatest
thing in the world is to submit to the inevitable."

She looked up quickly. "That doesn't sound like you."

"Doesn't it? Oh, well,"--with a little laugh--"you know a scientist is
supposed to be capable of a good deal of change in the point of view."

He had risen, and was at the door. "It's been good of you to do all this,
Ernestine."

"Why it has been a delight to me, dear; if only it hasn't hurt you. But
it is time now to go down where it is dark."

"Yes," he assented wearily; "it is time now to go down where it is dark."




CHAPTER XVIII


TELLING ERNESTINE

He had thought to tell her on Tuesday, but after their talk, when he took
his last look at her pictures--it had tortured both eyes and heart to do
that, but he knew in the days ahead that he would be unsatisfied with
having passed it by--he could not bring himself then to do it. He could
not keep it from her long now, but she was so happy that day in her
triumph about the picture. He was going to darken all of her days to
come; he would leave her this one more unclouded. But it was hard for him
to go through with it. He longed for her so! He must have her help. He
had asked for the pictures before telling her just because he knew it
would be unbearable for them both, if she did know. It would need to be
done in that casual way or not at all. It was strange how he felt he must
see them. It was his lo

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