Читать книгу The Glory of the Conquered - Susan Glaspell - Страница 17

"We'll just put our Russian friend back here in the corner, where the shelf suppresses him," said Georgia, who seemed to have accepted the self-appointed position of head cataloguer. "Some of the students might happen to call."

"This," said Dr. Parkman, who was dusting Gibbon's Rome, "is the sort of thing that is called the backbone of a library."

"Consequently," replied Georgia glibly, "we will put it up here on the top shelf. Nobody wants a library's backbone. It's to be had, not read. Now the trimmings, like our friend Mr. Shaw here, must be given places of accessibility."

The host was picking his way around among the contents of a box which he had just emptied upon the floor. The hostess was yielding to the temptation of an interesting bit which had caught her eye in dusting "An Attic Philosopher in Paris."

"Now here," said Dr. Hubers, picking up a thick, green book, "is Walt Whitman and that means trouble. No one is going to know whether he is prose or poetry."

"When art weds science," observed Georgia, "the resulting library is difficult to manage. Mr. Haeckel and Mr. Maeterlinck may not like being bumped up here together."

"Then put Haeckel somewhere else," said Ernestine, looking up from her book.

"No, fire Maeterlinck," commanded Karl.

"See," said Georgia—"it's begun. Strife and dissension have set in."

"I'm neither a literary man nor a librarian," ventured Dr. Parkman, "but it seems a slight oversight to complete the list of poets and leave Shakespeare lying out there on the floor."

"Got my Goethe in?" asked Karl, after Shakespeare had been left immersed in Georgia's vituperations.

"I think Browning and Keats are over there under the Encyclopedia Britannica," said Ernestine, roused to the necessity of securing a favourable position for her friends.

"Observe," said Georgia, "how they have begun insisting on their favourite authors. This is one of the early stages."

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 Shore 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 shores, 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 apron of white and kindly presented her guest with a kitchen apron 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 associated 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 damned 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 encumbering the earth with the weak. If the medical profession would just quit its damn 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 "damn 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 analyse 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, buttering 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 associate 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 knobs 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 homogeneous 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 assignment, 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.