The Glory of the Conquered. Susan Glaspell
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