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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.