The Glory of the Conquered Part 17

At last he had finished the story. He had told it all; of sitting there afraid to look, of looking and seeing and comprehending. Oh how he had comprehended! It was as if his mind too, his mind trained to grasp things, had turned against him, was stabbing him with its relentless clearness of vision. He told her of the merciless comprehension with which he saw the giving up of his work, the changing of his life, the giving up--the eternal giving up. He told her of how it had seemed to mean the making over of his soul. For his soul had always cried for conquest, for victory, for doing things. How would he turn it now to submission, to surrender, to relinquishment? Everything had been tumbling about him, he said, when that knock came at the door as the call from life, the intrusion of those everyday things which would not let him alone, even in an hour like that. And then of the boy with his paltry trouble which seemed great--the hurts--the final rising up of the instinct to help, despite it all. Then of sitting there alone and seeing a faint light in the distance, wondering if, in all new and different ways, he could not keep his place in the world.

"Oh help me to do that, sweetheart! Help me to keep right! Don't let me lose out with those other things of life!"

Her arms about his neck! He would never forget how she clung to him.

There was a long silence when their souls reached one another as they had never done before. The quivering of her body, her breath upon his cheek--they told him all. But after that, the words did come to her; broken words struggling to tell of what her love would do to make it right; how she would be with him, so close, so unfailing, that the darkness would never find him alone.

His arms about her tightened. Thank G.o.d--oh yes, a million times thank G.o.d for Ernestine!

Then he felt her start; there came a sound as though she would say something, but choked it back.

"Yes, dear?" he said gently.

"Oh, Karl, I shouldn't ask it. It will hurt you. I shouldn't ask."

"I would rather you did, dear. Ask anything. We are holding nothing from one another now."

"I just happened to think--I wanted to know--oh Karl, it wasn't in your eye on my birthday, was it? It hadn't happened--wasn't happening--when we sat there by the fire, happier than we had ever been before?"

His impulse was to hold that back. Why should he put that upon her, too, to hurt her as it had him, shake her faith as it had tried to shake his?

But his moment of silence could not be redeemed. "Karl,"--her voice was strangely quiet--"it wasn't, was it?"

He groaned, and she had her answer.

She sprang away from him, standing straight. "Then," she cried--he would never have dreamed Ernestine's voice could have sounded like that--"I hate the world! I despise it! I will not have anything to do with it! It fooled us--cheated us--_made fun of us_! I'll despise it--fight it"--the words became incoherent, the sobs grew very wild, she sank to the floor, crouching there, her hands clenched, sobbing: "I hate it! Oh how I want to pay it back!"

He was long in quieting her, but at last she would listen to him.

"Ernestine," he said, his voice almost stern, "if you start out like that you cannot help me. It is to you I look. If you love me, Ernestine, help me not to hate the world. If we hate the world, we have given up.

Sweetheart,"--the voice changed on that word--"even yet--even yet in a different way, I want to win. I cannot do it alone. I cannot do it at all, if you hate the world. You are to be my eyes, Ernestine. You are to see the beautiful things for me. You are to make me love them more than I ever did before. You are to be the light--don't you see, sweetheart? And you cannot do it, don't you see you cannot, if your own heart is not right with the world?"

She did not answer, but she came back to his arms. Her quick breath told him how hard she was trying.

"See your statue up there, liebchen? Remember how you always liked it?

What you said about it that night? Oh, Ernestine"--crushing her to him--"help me to grip tight to my broken sword!"

CHAPTER XIX

INTO THE DARK

She was with him as he went then into the dark. She did not fail him in anything: the hand in his, the little strokes of genius in holding his mind, and when they went into the deeps where words were not fitted for utterance she did not fail him in those other things. He knew that as she clung to him with loving arms, so her spirit reached out to him in the demand that it be permitted to sustain.

Through the day and through the night she was with him now. There was no time when he could not reach out to find her, no bad dream from which he could not awaken to put his hand upon her and know that she was there.

And when, time after time, bitterness rose up to submerge his soul, he could always finally shake it off by thanking G.o.d for Ernestine.

For a time the pain in his eyes served as a kindly antidote. The light was going out with so intense a suffering as to mitigate the suffering in the consciousness of its going. It was the pain in his temples helped him hold off the pain of giving up his work. It was not a thing conquered; he knew that the deeper pain was waiting for him out there in the darkness when the pain of transition should have ceased, leaving only a blank, a darkness, no other thing to engage for him any part of his mind. There was blessedness in the temporary alleviation brought by the pain that was physical. There were many things for him to meet out there. They were willing to wait. Now his fighting powers were so well engaged as to take something from the reality of a future battlefield.

In many ways it was not as he would have imagined it had he known of such a thing. He would have thought of it as one long mood of despair, inflamed at times by the pa.s.sion of rebellion. There were, in truth, many moods. In hours when he was quiet they spoke of the things they had seen and loved, of Italy and the Alps they spoke often, struggling for the words to paint a picture. Sometimes she read a little to him--there would be much of that now. Through it all, they seized upon anything which would sustain each other. Once when he saw her faltering he told her that he thought after awhile he would write a book. He did not call it a text-book; did not speak of it as the kind of work to which a man sometimes turns when his creative work is done. He had always thought that when he was sixty or seventy he might write a few books. He would write them now at forty.

And when there came times of its being utterly unbearable, they were either silent or trivial.

Bitter questionings filled Ernestine's heart in those days. How was she going to watch him suffer and not hate a universe permitting his sufferings? How care for a world of beauty he could not see? How watch his heart break for the work taken from him and keep her belief in an order of things under which that was enacted? How love a world that had turned upon him like that? That was what he asked her to do. It seemed to her, now, impossible.

With him, as the bearing of the physical pain grew mechanical and the other things grew nearer, the worst of it was wondering what he should do with the days that were ahead. His spirit would not go with his sight.

His desire to do was not to be crushed with his ability for doing. What then of the empty days to come? How smother the pa.s.sion for his work? And if he did smother it, what remained? While he lived, how deafen himself to the call of life? Through what channel could he hope to work out the things that were in him? And how remain himself if constantly denying to himself the things which were his? It was that tormented him more than the relinquishing of the specific thing he had believed would crown the work of his life. His fight now would be a fight for clinging to that in him which was fundamental. But with what weapon should he fight?

Many times he failed to bear it in conformity with his ideal of bearing it. There were hours of not bearing it at all; hours of cursing his fate and d.a.m.ning the world. Then it was her touch upon his hand, her tear upon his cheek, her broken word which could bring him again into the sphere of what he desired to be. His desire to help her in bearing it, his thankfulness in having her,--those the factors in his control.

There were two weeks of that: weeks in which two frightened, baffled souls fought for strength to accept and power to readjust. Their failures, the doubts, the rage, they sought to keep from each other; their hard won victories, their fought for courage they gave to the uttermost. A failure of one was a failure for one; but a victory of one was a victory for two. It was through that method courage succeeded in some measure in holding its own against bitter abandonment to despair.

His last looks were at her face. It was that he would take with him into the darkness. As a man setting sail for a far country seeks to the last the face upon the sh.o.r.e, so his last seeing gaze rested yearningly upon the dear face that was to pa.s.s forever from his vision. And when the end had come, when hungering eyes turned to the face they could not see, and he knew with the certainty of encountered reality that he would never again see the love lights in her eyes, that others would respond to the smile that was gone from him forever, others read in her face the things from which he was shut out, when he knew he would never again watch the laughter creep into her eyes and the firelight play upon her hair, it came upon him as immeasurably beyond all power to endure, and in that hour he broke down and in the refuge of her arms gave way to the utter anguish of his heart. And she, all of her soul roused in the pa.s.sion to comfort him, whispered hotly, the fierce tenderness of the defending mother in her voice:

"You shall not suffer! You shall not! I will make it up to you! I will make it right!"

PART TWO

CHAPTER XX

MARRIAGE AND PAPER BAGS

It was evident that peace did not sit enthroned in Georgia's soul. Her movements were not calm and self-contained as one by one she removed the paper bags from her typewriter. "So _silly!_"--she sputtered to herself.

What were the men in this office, anyway? College freshmen? Hanging paper bags all over her things every time she stepped out of the office--and just because one of her friends happened to be in the paper bag business!

She'd like to know--as she pounded out her opening sentence with vindictiveness--if it wasn't just as good a business as newspaper reporting?

It was not a good day for teasing Georgia. She did not like the story she had been working on that morning. "Go out to the university," the city editor had said, "and get a good first-day-of-school story. Make the feature of it the reorganisation of Dr. Hubers' department, and use some human interest stuff about his old laboratory--the more of that the better."

She hated it! Were they never going to let Karl alone? Was it decent to put his own cousin on the story? Georgia's chin quivered as she wrote that part about Karl's laboratory. "If my own mother were killed in the street," she told herself, trying to blink back the tears, "I suppose they'd make _me_ handle it because I know more about her than any one else in the office!"

Resentment grew with the turning of each sentence. They knew that Karl was her cousin, and almost as close to her as her own brother. She was sure they had seen the tear stains on some of that maudlin copy she had handed in about him. When she turned in her story she was unable to contain herself longer.

"Mr. Lewis," she said, voice quivering, "here is another one of those outrageous stories about my cousin, Dr. Hubers. When you ask me to write the next one, you may consider it an invitation for my resignation." And then, cheeks very red, she went back to her desk and began getting up some stuff for her column "Just Dogs," which they had been running on the editorial page.

When the city editor was pa.s.sing her desk about half an hour later he stopped and asked, very respectfully and meekly--Georgia was far too good to lose: "Miss McCormick, will you see Dr. Parkman some time before to-morrow, and ask him about this hospital story? You know, Miss McCormick, you're the only reporter in town he'll see."

"Very well," said Georgia, with dignity.

All summer long the papers had been printing stories about Karl. It made her loathe newspaper work every time she thought about it. To think of their hacking at him like that--and he so quiet and dignified and brave!

A picture printed the Sunday before, of Karl fumbling his way around, had made her more furious than she had ever been in all her life.