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.
His assistants had to do a great deal of reminding after he came back
that week, and they never knew until afterwards that his abstraction was
caused by something quite different from germs. They thought--unknowing
assistants--that he was on a new trail, and judged from the expression of
his face that it was going to prove most productive.