The Glory of the Conquered. Susan Glaspell

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СКАЧАТЬ 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

       Table of Contents

      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 СКАЧАТЬ