The Glory of the Conquered Part 4

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 Sh.o.r.e 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 sh.o.r.es, 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 ap.r.o.n of white and kindly presented her guest with a kitchen ap.r.o.n 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 a.s.sociated 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 d.a.m.ned 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 enc.u.mbering the earth with the weak. If the medical profession would just quit its d.a.m.n 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 "d.a.m.n 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 a.n.a.lyse 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, b.u.t.tering 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 a.s.sociate 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 k.n.o.bs 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 h.o.m.ogeneous 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 a.s.signment, 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-h.e.l.l-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 pa.s.sion 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?"