The Glory Of The Conquered

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THE GLORY OF THE CONQUERED

THE STORY OF A GREAT LOVE

BY

SUSAN GLASPELL

1909

To DR. A. L. HAGEBOECK,

Who Made This Book Possible

CONTENTS

PART ONE

I. ERNESTINE
II. THE LETTER
III. KARL
IV. JACK AND "HIGHER TRUTH"
V. THE HOME-COMING
VI. "GLORIA VICTIS"
VII. ERNESTINE IN HER STUDIO
VIII. SCIENCE, ART AND LOVE
IX. As THE SURGEON SAW IT
X. KARL IN HIS LABORATORY
XI. PICTURES IN THE EMBERS
XII. A WARNING AND A PREMONITION
XIII. AN UNCROSSED BRIDGE
XIV. "TO THE GREAT UNWHIMPERING!"
XV. THE VERDICT
XVI. "GOOD LUCK, BEASON!"
XVII. DISTANT STRAINS OF TRIUMPH
XVIII. TELLING ERNESTINE
XIX. INTO THE DARK

PART TWO

XX. MARRIAGE AND PAPER BAGS
XXI. FACTORY-MADE OPTIMISM
XXII. A BLIND MAN'S TWILIGHT
XXIII. HER VISION
XXIV. LOVE CHALLENGES FATE
XXV. DR. PARKMAN'S WAY
XXVI. OLD-FASHIONED LOVE
XXVII. LEARNING TO BE KARL'S EYES
XXVIII. WITH BROKEN SWORD
XXIX. UNPAINTED MASTERPIECES
XXX. EYES FOR TWO
XXXI. SCIENCE AND SUPER-SCIENCE
XXXII. THE DOCTOR HAS HIS WAY
XXXIII. LOVE'S OWN HOUR
XXXIV. ALMOST DAWN
XXXV. "OH, HURRY--HURRY!"
XXXVI. WITH THE OUTGOING TIDE

PART THREE

XXXVII. BENEATH DEAD LEAVES
XXXVIII. PATCHWORK QUILTS
XXXIX. ASH HEAP AND ROSE JAR
XL. "LET THERE BE LIGHT"
XLI. WHEN THE TIDE CAME IN
XLII. WORK, THE SAVIOUR
XLIII. "AND THERE WAS LIGHT"

THE GLORY OF THE CONQUERED

PART ONE

CHAPTER I

ERNESTINE

She had promised to marry a scientist! It was too overwhelming a thought
to entertain standing there by the window. She sought the room's most
comfortable chair and braced herself to the situation.

If, one month before, a gossiping daughter of Fate had come to her
with--"Shall I tell you something?--_You_ are going to marry a man of
science!"--she would have smiled serenely at Fate's amusing mistake and
responded--"My good friend, it is quite true that great uncertainty
attends this subject. So much to be expected is the unexpected, that I am
quite willing to admit I _may_ marry the hurdy-gurdy man who plays
beneath my window. I know life well enough to appreciate that I _may_
marry a pawnbroker or the Sultan of Turkey. I assert but one thing. I
shall _not_ marry a 'man of science.'"

And now, not only had she promised to marry a man of science, but she had
quite overlooked the fact of his being one! And the thing which stripped
her of the last shred of consistency was that she was to marry, not the
every-day, average "man of science," but one of the foremost scientists
of all the world! The powers in charge of things matrimonial must be
smiling a quiet little smile to-night.

But ah--here was the vindication! He had not _asked_ her to marry him. He
had simply come and told her she _was_ to marry him. And he was a great,
strong man--far more powerful than she. She had had positively nothing to
do with it! Was it _her_ fault that he chanced to be engaged in
scientific pursuits? And when he took her face so tenderly in his two
hands--looked so far down into her eyes--and told her in a voice she
would follow to the ends of the earth that he _loved_ her--was there any
time then to think of paltry non-essentials like art and science?

But she thought of them a little now. How could she get away from them
when each year of her past marched slowly in front of her, paused for an
instant that she might get a full view, and then passed grinningly back
to the abyss of things gone, from over the shoulder tossing straight into
her consciousness a jeering, deep sinking "_You too?_"

Ernestine Stanley--that was the name she read in one of her books open
beside her. Why her very _name_ stood for that quarrel which had rent all
the years!

Until she was ten years old she had been nameless. She had been You--and
Baby--and Dear--and Mother's Girl--and Father's Girl, but her mother and
father had been unable to agree upon a name for her. Each discussion
served to send them a little farther apart. Finally they spoke of
Ernestine and reached the point of agreement through separate channels.
Her father approved it for what it meant in the dictionary;--her mother
for the music of its sound. That told the whole story; their attitudes
toward her name spoke for the things of themselves bestowed upon her.

Her father had been a disciple of exact science,--a professor of biology.
He believed only in that which could be reduced to a formula. The
knowable was to him the only real. He viewed life microscopically and
spent his portion of emotion in an aggressive hatred of all those things
which he consigned to the rubbish heap labeled non-scientific.

And her mother--she never thought of her mother without that sad little
shake of her head--was a dreamer, a lover of things beautiful, a hater of
all she felt to be at war with her gods. Ernestine's loyalty did not
permit the analysis to go further, except to deplore her mother's
unhappiness as unnecessary. Even when a very little girl she wondered
why her father could not have his bottles and things, and her mother have
her poems and the things she liked, and just let each other alone about
it. She wondered that long before she appreciated its significance.

As she grew a little older she used to wonder if something inside her
would not some day be pulled in two. It seemed the desire of each of her
parents to guide her from what they saw as the rocks surrounding her.
Elementary science was all mixed up with Keats and Heine and Byron.
Another one of her early speculations was as to whether or not poetry and
science really meant to make so much trouble.

Of course from the very first there had been the blackboard--the
blackboard and all its logical successors. As perversity would have it,
it was her father bought her that blackboard. It was to help turn her in
the way she should go, for upon this blackboard she was to do her sums.
But the sums executed thereon were all performed when some one was
standing at her shoulder, while many were the hours spent in the drawing
of cats and dogs and fish and birds, of lakes and trees and other little
girls and boys. She never had that being-pulled-in-two feeling when she
and the blackboard were alone together. The blackboard seemed the only
thing which made her all one, and she often wished her father and mother
loved their things as she did hers, for if they were only _sure_, as she
was, then what some one else said would not matter at all.

They lived in a university town, her father being a professor in the
school. In the later years of her college life he forced her into the
scientific courses which she hated. She sighed even now at the memory of
those weary hours in the laboratory, though while hating the detail of
it, she responded, as her father had never done, to the glimpses she
caught of the thing as a whole. It was ironical enough that the only
thing she seemed to get from her scientific studies was an enthusiasm for
the poetry of science. In those days many thoughts beat hard against the
door of Ernestine's loyalty. Why did not her mother see all this--and
make her father see it? Was there not a point at which they could have
met--and did they not fail in meeting because neither of them went far
enough?

It was when she was in her senior year that her father died. She finished
out her laboratory work with lavish conscientiousness, feeling a new
tenderness of him in the consciousness that his ideas for her had failed.
That hour before his funeral, when she sat beside him alone, stood out as
among the very vivid moments of her life. The tragedy of his life seemed
that he had failed in impressing himself. His keenness of mind had not
made for bigness. Life had left an aggressiveness, a certain sullenness
in the lines of his face. His mind and his soul had never found one
another--was it because his heart had closed the channel between the two?

And then they went to New York and Ernestine began her study of art.

A great light seemed turned back over it all tonight. She understood much
now which she had lived through wonderingly. She seemed now really to
know that girl who went to New York with all the dreams of all her years
calling upon her for fulfillment. She knew what that girl had dreamed
when she dreamed she knew not what; knew what she thought when she thought
the undefined. She smiled understandingly, tenderly, at thought of it
all--the bounding joy and the stubborn determination, the fearing and the
demanding and the resolving with which she began her work. She was a
great deal like a child on the long-promised holiday, and much like the
pilgrim at the shrine. Somewhere between those two was Ernestine that
first winter in New York.

It was after the second year, after that strange mixture of things within
her had unified to fixed purpose, and after it had become quite certain
her dreams had not played her false, that the other big change had come.
Her mother slipped away from the life which had never held her in the big
grip of reality. She had been so long a longing looker-on from the outer
circle that the slipping away was the less hard. Ernestine stopped work
in order to care for her, reproaching herself with never having been able
to give to her mother with the unrestraint and bounteousness she had
given to her work. During those last weeks she often found her mother's
eyes--sombre, brooding eyes--following her about the room like the spirit
of unrest.

"Try to be happy, Ernestine," she said, when about to leave the house in
which she had ever been a stranger. "Life is so awful if you are not
happy."

She took her back to the little town and put her away beside the man with
whom her soul had never been at peace. That first night she awakened in
the dark hours and fancied she heard them quarreling. The hideous fancy
would not let her go to sleep, though she told herself over and over that
surely death would bring them the peace life had so long withheld.

She went back to her work then with a new steadiness; loneliness feeding
the fire of consecration. Often when alone in her room at night she felt
those disappointed eyes following her about, heard again that plaintive:
"Try to be happy, Ernestine. Life is so awful if you are not happy." She
had many times opened the book in which her mother copied the poems
written at intervals during the years, but always would come the feeling
of their holding something at which it would be hard to look. To-night,
with her new understanding, this wondrous new touchstone, she took them
from her trunk with eagerness. She longed now to know the secret of her
mother's life; she would know why happiness had passed her by.

There was tragedy in those little poems--a soul's long tragedy in their
halting lines, in the faltering breath with which they were sung. Indeed
they were not the songs of a poet at all; they were but the helpless
reaching out of an unsatisfied, unanchored soul. The blackboard had never
given back what it should; the crayon would not write. Was it true there
were countless souls who went away like this--leaving unsaid a word they
had craved to say?

"For our souls were not in tune"--was a line she found in one of the
verses and which she sat a long time pondering. Was not the secret of it
here? This the rock which held the wreckage of their lives?

She left her room and went out of doors. The night was very still.
A tender peace brooded over the world. She lifted her eyes to the
stars--her soul to the great Wonder. Enveloping her was Life--drawing her
straight to the heart of things was Love. Doubts and speculations and
ominous memories seemed blown away by the breath of the night. The years
had no lesson to teach save this--One must love! All that was wrong in
the world came through too little loving. All that was great and
beautiful sprang from love which knew not doubts nor fears. What was a
"point of view" when one throbbed with the memory of his good-bye kiss!

There was a force which moved the world. She was in the grip of that
force to-night. All else was but the tiny whirlpool against the mighty
current. And she was not afraid. Love would deal kindly with her own.
She lifted her soul to the great Mother and Father of the world. "Oh take
me and teach me!"--was her passionate prayer.

CHAPTER II

THE LETTER

What was that story the old Greeks told about love being the union--or
reunion--of the two halves of an originally perfect whole? The envious
gods--who were a very bad lot--cut the original perfect being in two.
Then love is a finding of one's own--also, a getting ahead of the gods. I
have more respect for the old Greeks to-night than I ever had before! But
you cannot know just how it is. You are younger than I, and I do not
believe the fear of life passing you by ever entered and chilled your
heart. You were always sure it was coming some time, weren't you, my
new-found little one? You could not have had that calm, sweet look in
those big eyes of yours had you feared the best of life might be withheld
from you. But can you fancy what it would mean to have felt for many
years that somewhere there was a cool, sweet spring of eternal joy, and
to become fearful your footsteps might never lead you to those blessed
waters? And then can you fancy the profound thankfulness that would fill
one's being, when after long wandering, after several mistakes and
disappointments, the music of those waters was borne to the ear? And
when, almost fearful to believe, and yet very, very sure, one stepped a
little nearer, can you fancy the joy in finding the cooling breeze from
that eternal spring upon one's face, of seeing it there as one had ever
dreamed of it, knowing that beside it one could drink deep--long and very
deep--of those life-giving, soul-satisfying waters? Can you fancy the
all-pervading thankfulness, almost unbelievable joy, in that first hour
of standing beside the long-desired, the half-despaired of water of life?

"Thank God I was not weak enough to resign the whole for the half! There
was once a voice said to me: 'This is a pretty good spring. There is
not much chance of your finding the other. Why not take this?' But
something--your voice from a far distance?--called me on.

"A strange enough letter for a man to be writing the girl who has just
promised to marry him! Conventionally, I suppose, I should say to you:
'I never knew anything like this before.' And instead I am saying: 'There
was something once of somewhat similar exterior. But I was mistaken. I
was disappointed.' But doesn't this make you see--dear new love--dear
_real_ love--how happy I am, and why?

"But you poor little girl--how I've cheated you! Why, liebchen--God bless
the Germans for inventing that name for you--you were entitled to weeks
and weeks of beautiful, delicate courtship. Will you forgive me for
jumping right over those days when I should have sent you roses and nice
pretty notes, and prepared you in proper and approved way for all of
this? But I had been waiting for you so long that when I found you, I
just couldn't wait a minute longer.

"And it was Georgia--my red-headed, freckled, foolish cousin Georgia
did this! Why, liebchen, I'll take my oath right this minute Georgia
hasn't a freckle! I'm even willing--(oh Lord, _am_ I?--Yes, by the gods I
_am_)--to read every abominable line she writes for that abominable
paper. Am I an ingrate? Didn't Georgia bring me to _you?_--and is
anything too much, even to the reading of her stuff--yes, by Jove, and
_liking_ it?

"Now prepare yourself to receive the sympathy of every one you know when
you tell them you are going to marry me. Some kind of divine
hallucination is upon you, acting for my good, and you do not see how
profoundly you are to be pitied. But other people will see, and will tell
you about it, only you will think _they_ are under a hallucination, which
is one of the phases of _yours_. The truth is I am a grubbing old
scientist. I prowl around in laboratories and don't know much of anything
else, and more than half the time my hands are stained with unaesthetic
colours you won't like at all. And they tell me I have a foolish way of
sitting and thinking about one thing, and that sometimes I don't do
things I say I am going to--meet my appointments and things like that,
although of course that won't apply to you. And here you might have
married some artist chap, or society fellow who would know all about the
proper thing!

"But never mind, poor little girl--I'll make it up to you. You may miss
some of the lesser, but you'll have the greater. You'll have the
love that enfolds one's whole being--the love that is eternal. Yes,
dear--eternal. The mariner has his compass, the astronomer his stars, the
Swiss peasant has his Alps--and we have our love. It must mean all those
eternal things to us. Don't you feel that it will?

"This train is rushing along jostling my hand so I can scarcely write.
But then my heart is rushing on jostling my brain so I can scarcely
think, so perhaps my handwriting matches my thoughts.

"And we'll work! We'll work to prove how much we love--is there better
reason for working than that? I can work now as I never did before, for
don't I want to prove to this old world that I appreciate its bringing me
to you? And you'll teach me about this art of yours, won't you, my little
girl with the long, serious name? I'm ignorant, sweetheart, I don't know
much about pictures, but don't you think that I can learn? Why, liebchen,
I'm learning already! I never knew what they meant by lights and shadows
until I saw your face.

"But tell me, how does it happen your hair grows back from your temples
that way? Why, no one else's hair does that. And where did you learn
about tilting your chin forward like that and looking straight out of
your eyes at one? It is so strange--no one else does any of those things.
I've often thought of the many things in science I do not understand and
never will, but they are the very simplest things imaginable in
comparison with that puzzling way you smile, the wonderful way your face
lights up when you are happy.

"Are you looking up at the stars? I think you are. And in the heavens do
you see one newly discovered, unvanishable star? That is the star of our
love, dear,--the star which has changed heaven and earth. Are you
dreaming about it all?--Oh but I know you are. I will fulfill those
dreams, dear girl. I have waited for you too long, I prize you too
inestimably not to consecrate my life to the fulfilling of those dreams."

CHAPTER III

KARL

He was one of the men who go before. Out in the great field of
knowledge's unsurveyed territory he worked--a blazer of the trail, a
voice crying from the wilderness: "I have opened up another few feet.
You can come now a little farther." Then they would come in and take
possession, soon to become accustomed to the ground, forgetting that
only a little while before it had been impassable, scarcely thinking of
the little body of men who had opened the way for them, and now were out
farther, where again the way was blocked, trying to beat down a few more
of the barriers, open up a little more of that untrodden territory. And
only the little band itself would ever know how stony that path, how deep
the ditches, how thick and thorny the underbrush. "Why this couldn't have
been so bad," the crowd said, after it had flocked in--"strange it should
have taken so long!"

Not that the little band sought popular acclaim, or desired it.
"Heavens!" he had once exclaimed to a laboratory assistant, after a
reporter had been vainly trying to persuade him to "tell the whole story
of his work in popular vein,"--"you don't suppose medical research is
going to become a drawing-room lap dog!"

But he need not have feared. A capricious fancy might rest upon them for
the minute, but the big world which followed along behind would never
come into any complete understanding of such as they. In an age of each
man seeking what he himself can gain, how could there be understanding of
the manner of man who would perhaps work all of his lifetime only to put
up at the end the sign-board: "Do not take this road. I have gone over it
and found it profitless." Failure is not the name they give to that. They
say his wanderings astray brought others that much nearer to the goal.

In his last year at the medical school one of his professors had put it
to him like this: "You must make your choice. It is certain you can not
do both. You will become a general practitioner, or you will go into the
research work for which you have shown aptitude here. I am confident you
would succeed as a surgeon. In that you would make more money, and, in
all probability, a bigger name. That is certain. In this other, you take
your chances. But if I were you, I would do whichever I cared for more."

That settled it, for he had long before heard the cry from the unknown:
"Come out and take us! We are here--if only you know how to get us."
There was in his blood that which thrilled to the thought of doing what
had not been done before. With the abandonment of his intense and rugged
nature, he yielded himself to the delights of the untravelled path.

At the time of his falling in love, Dr. Karl Hubers was thirty-nine years
old. He had worked in European laboratories, notably the Pasteur
Institute of Paris, and among men of his kind was regarded as one to be
reckoned with. Within the profession his name already stood for vital
things, and it was associated now with one of the big problems, the
solving of which it was believed this generation would have to its
credit. The scientific and medical journals were watching him, believing
that when the great victory was won, his would be the name to reach round
the world.

Three years before, the president of a great university, but newly sprung
up by the side of a great lake, sitting in his high watch tower and with
mammoth spy-glass looking around for men of initiative in the
intellectual domain, had spied Karl Hubers, working away over there in
Europe. This man of the watch tower had a genius for perceiving when a
man stood on the verge of great celebrity, and so he cried out now: "Come
over and do some teaching for us! We will give you just as good a
laboratory as you have there and plenty of time for your own work." Now,
while he would be glad enough to have Dr. Hubers do the teaching, what he
wanted most of all was to possess him, so that in the day of victory that
young giant of a university would rise up with the peon: "See! _We_ have
done it!" And Dr. Hubers, lured by the promise of time and facility for
his own work, liking what he knew of the young university, had come over
and established himself in Chicago.

In those three years he had not been disappointing. He had contributed
steadily to the sum of the profession's knowledge, for he worked in
little by-paths as well as on his central thing, and he himself felt,
though he said but little, that he was coming nearer and nearer the goal
he had set for himself.

His place in the university was an enviable one. The enthusiasm of the
students for him quite reached the borderland of reverence. To get some
work in Dr. Hubers' laboratory was regarded, among the scientific
students, as the triumph of a whole university career. And it was those
students who worked as his assistants who came to know the fine fibre of
the man. They could tell best the real story of his work. They it was who
told him when he must go to his classes and when he must go to his meals,
who kept him, in times of complete surrender to his idea, in so much of
touch with the world about him as they felt a necessity. Their hearts
beat with his heart when a little of the way was cleared; their spirits
sank in disappointment as they lived with him through the days of
depression. And as they came day by day to know of the honesty of his
mind, the steadfastness of his purpose, to feel that flame which glowed
within him, they fairly spoke his name in different voice from that used
for other things, and when they told their stories of his eccentricities,
it was with a tenderness in their humour, never as though blurring his
greatness, but rather as if his very little weaknesses and foibles set
him apart from and above every one else.

Generations before, his ancestors up there in North Europe had swept
things before them with a mighty hand. With defeat and renunciation they
did not reckon. If they loved a woman, they picked her up and took her
away. And civilisation has not quite washed the blood of those men from
the earth. Germany gave to Karl Hubers something more than a scholar's
mind. At any rate, he did a very unapproved and most uncivilised thing.
When he fell in love and decided he wanted to marry Ernestine Stanley,
and that he wanted to take her right over to Europe and show her the
things he loved there, he asked for his year's leave of absence before he
went to find out whether Miss Stanley was kindly disposed to the idea of
marrying him. Now why he did that, it is not possible to state, but the
thing proving him quite hopeless as a civilised product is that it never
struck him there was anything so very peculiar in his order of procedure.

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