The Glory of the Conquered Part 31

"No," he said, and he seemed to be speaking to something within himself rather than to her,--"I'm _not_!"

They had reached Jackson Park, and sat down for a little rest before they should wend their way on to the lake. "Oh, Ernestine," he said, taking it in in long breaths, feeling the dew upon his face, and hearing the murmur of many living things,--"_tell_ me about it, dear. I want to see it too!"

"Karl--every tree looks as though it were just as glad as we are! Can't you feel that the trees feel just as we do about things? The leaves haven't all come out yet, some of them are holding themselves within themselves in a coy little way they have--although intending all the time to come out just as fast as ever they can. And it's that glorious, unspoiled green--the kind nature uses to make painters feel foolish. Oh, nature's having much fun with the painters this morning. Right over there,"--pointing with his finger--"is such a beautiful tree. I like it because all of its branches did not go in the way they were expected to go. Several of them were very perverse children, who mother trunk thought at one time were going to ruin her life, but you know lives aren't so easily ruined after all. 'Now you go right up there at an angle of twenty-two degrees,' she said to her eldest child. 'Not at all,' said the firstborn, 'I intend to lean right over here at whatsoever angle will best express my individuality.' And though the mother grieved for a long time she knows now--Karl--how foolish we are! But listen. You hear that bird who is trying to get all of his soul into his throat at once? He's 'way up there on the top branch, higher than everything else, and so pleased and proud that he is, and he's singing to a little blue cloud straight above him, and I tell you I never saw such blue--such blue within blue. Its outside dress is a very filmy blue, but that's made over an under dress of deeper blue, and there's just a little part in it where you can see right into the heart, and that's a blue so deep and rich it makes you want to cry. And oh, Karl--the heart itself has opened a little now, and you can get a suggestion, just a very indefinite suggestion--but then all inner things are indefinite--that inside the heart of the cloud is its soul, and you are permitted one fleeting glimpse to tell you that the soul of the cloud is such a blue as never was dreamed of on land or on sea."

"I can see that cloud," he said,--"and the bird looking up at it, and the tree whose eldest child was so perverse and so--individual."

"And, Karl," she went on, in joyous eagerness, "can't you see how the earth heaved a sigh right here a couple of hundred centuries ago--now _don't_ tell me the park commissioners made them!--and that when it settled back from its sigh it never was quite the same again? It was a sigh of content--for the little slopes are so gentle. Gentle little hills are sighs of content, and bigger ones are determinations, and mountains--what are mountains, Karl?"

"Mountains are revolutionary instincts," he said, smiling at her fancifulness--Ernestine was always fanciful when she was happy.

"Yes, that's it. Sometimes I like the stormy upheavals which change the whole face of the earth, but this morning it's nice to have just the little sighs of content. And, dear--now turn around and look this way.

You can't really see the lake at all--but you can tell by looking down that way that it is there."

"How can you tell, liebchen?" he asked, just to hear her talk.

"Oh, I don't know _how_ you can. It's not scientific knowledge--it's--the other kind. The trees know that the lake is there."

"Let's walk down to the lake," he said. "I want to feel it on my face.

And oh, liebchen--it's good to have you tell about things like this."

As they walked she told him of all she saw: the people they met, and what she was sure the people were thinking about. Once she laughed aloud, and when he asked what she was laughing at, she said, "Oh, that chap we just pa.s.sed was amusing. His eyes were saying--'My allowance is all gone and I haven't a red sou--but isn't it a bully day?'"

"There's no reason why I should be shut out from the world, Ernestine,"

he said vigorously, "when you have eyes for two."

"Why, that's just what I think!" she said, quickly, her voice low, and her heart beating fast.

The shadows upon the gra.s.s, the nursemaids and the babies, the boys and girls playing tennis, or just strolling around happy to be alive--she could make Karl see them all. And as they came in sight of the lake she began telling him how it looked in the distance, how it seemed at first just a cloud dropped down from the sky, but how, upon coming nearer, it was not the stuff that clouds are made of, but a live thing, a great live thing pulsing with joy in the morning sunshine. She told him how some of it was blue and some of it was green, while some of it was blue wedded to green, and some of it too elusive to have anything to do with the spectrum. "And, dearie--it is flirting with the sunlight--flirting shamefully; I'm almost ashamed for the lake, only it's so happy in its flirtation that perhaps it is not bothered with moral consciousness. But it seems to want the sunlight to catch it, and then it seems to want to get away, and sometimes a sunbeam gets a little wave that stayed too long and kisses it right here in open day--and isn't it awful--but isn't it nice?"

In so many ways she told how the lake seemed to her--how it seemed to her eyes and how it seemed to her heart and how it seemed to her soul, how it looked, what it said, what it meant; what the clouds thought of it, and what the sunlight thought of it, what the wind thought of it, what the dear babies on the sh.o.r.e thought of it, and what it thought of itself.

She could not have talked that way to any one else, but it was so easy for her heart to talk to Karl's heart. One pair of eyes could do just as well as two when hearts were tuned like this!

And then, when she did not feel like talking any more, they stood there and learned many things from the voice of the lake itself. "Ernestine,"

he said, when they turned from it at last, "it seems to me I never saw Lake Michigan quite so well before."

CHAPTER x.x.xI

SCIENCE AND SUPER-SCIENCE

"Insubordinate children who play off from school in the morning must work in the afternoon," Karl said at luncheon, and they went to their work that afternoon with freshened spirit.

When the McCormicks gave up their flat at Christmas time, Beason had come to live with the Hubers. Ernestine prided herself upon some cleverness in having rented two rooms without Karl's suspecting it was a matter of renting the rooms. When he engaged Ross as his secretary in the fall she said it would be more convenient for them all for Mr. Ross to have his room there. They had an extra room, so why not? She did not put it the other way--that she felt the house more expensive than they should have now. Of course Karl would make money in his books--that had been settled in advance, but things had changed for them, and Ernestine felt the need of caution. Then as to Beason, she said there was that little room he could have, and it would do the boy good to be there. "You like John,"

she said to Karl, "and as he has not yet been graduated into philosophy, he may be more companionable than Mr. Ross." And Karl said by all means to have Beason if it wouldn't bother her to have him around.

She was glad of that for more reasons than a reduced rent; Beason had become a great help to Ernestine. After he came there to live they fitted up some things for her in her studio, and she managed to get in a number of extra hours when Karl thought she was busy with her pictures.

In her glow of spirit this afternoon--that walk in the park had meant so much as holding promise for the future--Ernestine was even willing to admit, looking back upon it, that the winter had not been nearly so bad as one would suppose. Mr. Beason and Mr. Ross were both, in their differing ways, alert and interesting, and there had been some good wrangles around the evening fire. Other people had found them out, and they had drawn to them an interesting group of friends. So the days had flowed steadily on, a brave struggle to meet life in good part, keep that good-fellowship of the spirit.

One of the hardest things of all had been deceiving Karl. Her reason justified it, but it hurt her heart. They had been able to do it, however, better than she would have believed possible. Mr. Ross was with him most of the time when she was not, and had frequently been forced to intercept some caller who was close to an innocent remark about Mrs.

Hubers being over at the university. Several times Karl had caught the odour of the laboratory about her, and she had been forced to explain it as the odour of the studio; and more than once, in the midst of a discussion, her interest had beguiled her into some surprisingly intelligent remark, and she had been obliged to invent laughing reasons for knowing anything about it. It hurt her deeply to take advantage of Karl's blindness in keeping things from him, even though the motive was all love for Karl, and determination to help. She would be so glad when all that was over, and she thought as she worked along very hard that afternoon that perhaps it would not be many days now until Karl should know.

That would be for Dr. Parkman to say; so many vital things seemed left to Dr. Parkman. "Did you ever think," she said, turning to Mr. Beason, who was busy at the table beside her, "what the doctor really counts for in this world?"

"Yes--in a way," said Beason, adjusting his microscope, "but then I never was sick much."

"Well, I didn't mean just taking one's pulse," she laughed. "It seems to me they mean more than prescriptions. For one thing, I think it's rather amusing the way they all practice Christian Science."

"Why--what do you mean?" he demanded, aroused now, and shocked.

"Oh, I've come to the conclusion that a modern, first-cla.s.s doctor is a Christian Scientist who preserves his sanity"--she paused, laughing a little at Beason's bewildered face, and at the thought of how little her formula would be appreciated in either camp. "I've noticed it down at Dr.

Parkman's office," she went on. "It's quite a study to listen to him at the telephone. He will wrangle around all sorts of corners to get patients to admit something is in better shape than it was yesterday, and though they called up to say they were worse, they end in admitting they are much better. He just forces them into saying something is better, and then he says, triumphantly, 'Oh--that's fine!'--and the patient rings off immensely cheered up."

"That's a kind of trickery, though," said Beason.

"Pretty good kind of trickery, if it helps people get well."

"Well I shouldn't care to be a practicing physician," Beason declared, "just for that reason. That sort of business would be very distasteful to me."

Ernestine was about to say something, and then relegated it to the things better left unsaid; but she permitted herself a wise little smile.

"I don't think it's such an awfully high grade of work," he went on. "In a way it is--of course. But there's so much repet.i.tion and routine; so much that doesn't count scientifically at all--doesn't count for anything but the patient."

"But what is science for?" she demanded, aggravated now. "Has medical science any value save in its relation to human beings?"

"Oh yes, I know--in the end," he admitted vaguely.

"All this laboratory work is simply to throw more power into the hands of the general pract.i.tioner. It's to give him more light. It's just because his work _is_ so important that this work has any reason for being. Dr.

Hubers saw it that way," she concluded, with the air of delivering the unanswerable.

"But even that wasn't just what I meant," she went on, after they had worked silently for a few minutes. "What I was thinking about was the superdoctor."

Beason simply stared.

"No, not entirely crazy," she laughed. "For instance: what can a man do for nervous indigestion without infusing a little hope? Think of what doctors know--not only about people's bodies, but about their lives.

Cause and effect overlap--don't they? Half the time a run down body means a broken spirit, or a twisted life. How can you set part of a thing right when the whole of it's wrong? How _can_ a doctor be just a doctor--if he's a good one?"

But nothing "super" could be expected of Beason. His very blank face recalled her to the absurdity of getting out of focus with one's audience.

She herself felt it strongly. It seemed to her that Dr. Parkman's real gift was his endowment in intuition. When all was going well she heard nothing from him; but let things begin to drag, and the doctor appeared, rich in resources. He seemed to have in reserve a wide variety of stimulants.

He looked in upon them often. Whenever in their neighbourhood he stopped, and though frequently he could not so much as take time to sit down, the day always went a little better for his coming. "If the end of the world were upon us, Dr. Parkman could avert the calamity for a day or two--couldn't he, Karl?" Ernestine had laughed after one of his visits.

This proved to be one of the days of his stopping in, and he arrived just as Karl was dictating a few final sentences to Mr. Ross. While they were finishing--he said he was not in a hurry today--he took a keen look at Karl's face. His colour was not good--the doctor thought; in fact several things were not to his liking. "Too many hard times with himself," he summed it up.--"Droopy. Needs a bracer. Needs to get back in the harness--that's the only medicine for him."