Читать книгу The Glory of the Conquered - Susan Glaspell - Страница 13

"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.