SCIENCE, ART, AND LOVE
From his window in the laboratory he saw her as she was coming across the
campus, and waved. She waved back, and then wondered if it were proper to
wave at learned professors who were looking from their windows. In one
sense it was hard to comprehend that it was her Karl who was such an
important man about this great university. Karl was so completely just
her Karl, so human and dear, and a great scientist seemed a remote
abstraction. She must tell that to Karl. He would enjoy himself as a
remote abstraction.
She was still smiling about Karl's remoteness as she came into the
building. He had come down to meet her. "You see I thought you might get
lost," he explained.
"I might have," she responded, and then laughed, for when people are very
happy it is not at all difficult to laugh.
"Do you know what you look like?" he said. "You look like a kind of
spiritualised rainbow--or like the flowers after the rain."
"I dressed in five minutes," said Ernestine, smoothing down her gown with
the complacency of a woman who knows she has nothing to fear from
scrutiny.
"As if that had anything to do with it! You dress as the birds and
flowers dress--by just being yourself."
She let that bit of masculine ignorance pass with a wise little smile.
They were in the laboratory now. "I came," said Ernestine severely, "to
listen to an elucidation of the mysteries of science."
"Then you had no business to come looking like this," he responded
promptly.
She was looking around the room. "And this is where all those great
things are done?"
"Um--well this is where we make attempts at things."
He was not quite through, and Ernestine sat down by the window to wait
for him. It seemed surprising, somehow, that it should be such a simple
looking room. Karl was doing something with some tubes, writing something
on a chart-like thing. Something in the expression of his face as he bent
over the work carried her back to other days.
"Karl," she said abruptly, "why don't you and I have any quarrels about
which is greater--science or art?"
He looked up at her in such absolute astonishment that she laughed.
"Liebchen," he said, "don't you think that would be going a long way out
of our road to hunt a quarrel? Now I can think up much better subjects
for a quarrel than that. For instance: Do I love you more than you love
me, or do you love me more than I love you? Your subject makes me think
of our old debating society. We used to get up and argue in thunderous
tones something about which was worse--fire or water!"
"But Karl--it isn't logical that you and I should love each other this
way!"
He pushed back his work and turned squarely around to her. He was smiling
in his tenderly humorous way. "Well, sweetheart," he said, "would you
rather be logical, or would you rather be happy?"
"Oh, I'm not insisting upon the logic. I'm just wondering about it."
"Isn't love greater than either a test tube or a paint brush?" Karl asked
softly.
She nodded, smiling at him lovingly.
He sat there looking a long way ahead. She knew he was thinking something
out. "Ernestine," he began, "do you ever think much about the _oneness_
of the world?"
"Why, yes--I do, but I didn't suppose you did."
"But, liebchen--who would be more apt to think about it than I? Doesn't
my work teach oneness more than it teaches anything else? All the
quarrelling comes through a failure to recognise the oneness. I often
think of the different ways Goethe and Darwin got at evolution. Goethe
had the poetic conception of it all right; Darwin worked it out step by
step. Who's ahead? And which has any business scoffing at the other?"
He went back to his notes, and her thoughts returned to the battles she
had heard fought in the name of science. She looked about the room, out
at the great buildings all around, and then back to Karl, who seemed soul
of it all. How different all this was! What would her father think to
hear a man like Karl Hubers giving to a poet place in the developing of
the theory of evolution? What _was_ the difference between Karl and her
father? Was it that the school to which they belonged was itself
changing, or was it just a difference in type? Or, perhaps, most of all,
was it not a difference in degree? Her father had only seen a little way,
and that down a narrow path bounded by high walls of bigotry. Karl had
reached the heights from which he could see the oneness! And was it not
love had helped him to those heights?
A little later, when Karl was seeking to explain what he evidently
regarded as a very simple little thing, and just as a few glimmers of
light were beginning to penetrate her darkness, she looked up and at the
half open door saw a boy whose consternation at sight of her made it
difficult for Ernestine to repress a smile.
"Come in, Beason," said Karl, who had just noticed him. "I want you to
meet Mrs. Hubers." Ernestine looked at Karl suspiciously--something in
his voice signified he was enjoying something.
But there was nothing about Mr. Beason which signified any kind of
enjoyment. He advanced to meet her sturdily, as one determined to do his
duty at any cost. The boy was rendered peculiar in appearance by an
abnormally long, heavy jaw, which gave his face a heavy, stolid
appearance which might or might not be characteristic. He had small,
sharp eyes, and Ernestine was quite sure from one look at his face that
he did not laugh often, or see many things to laugh about.
He was not impenetrable to graciousness, however, for within five minutes
he had told her that he was born in southern Indiana, that he lived in
Minneapolis now, and that he had come to Chicago to get some work with
Dr. Hubers. Upon hearing that Ernestine immediately noticed what a
remarkably intelligent face he had, and felt sure that that heavy jaw
gave him a phlegmatic look which was most misleading.
Karl laughed as the boy went away. "Funny fellow--Beason. He'll have to
cut away a lot of the trees before he gets a good look at the woods.
Never in his life has one gleam of humour penetrated him. In fact if a
few humour cells were to creep in by mistake, they'd be so alien as to
make a tremendous disturbance."
"He seems to think a great deal of you," said Ernestine, a little
reproachfully.
"Oh, yes; and I like him. I like the fellow first rate. He's a splendid
worker--conscientious, absolutely to be depended upon. 'Way ahead of lots
of these fellows around here who think they know it all. But he has those
uncompromising ideas about science; ready to fight for it at the drop of
the hat. Oh, Beason's all right. We need his sort. I'll tell you whom I
do want you to meet, Ernestine, and that's Hastings. You'll like him.
He's such a success as a human being. He's more like the old-time
professor of the small college, has a fatherly, benevolent feeling toward
all the students. You see we're so big here that we haven't many of the
small college characteristics about us. It's each fellow doing his own
work, and not that close comradeship that there is in the small school.
But Hastings is a connecting link. Then, on the other hand, there's Lane.
You must meet him too, for he's a rare specimen: pedantic, academic; I
don't know just why they have him, he doesn't represent the spirit of the
place at all. He's entirely too erudite to be of much use. But I'll let
Parkman tell you about Lane. Oh, but he hates him! They met here in the
laboratory one day and upon my soul I thought Parkman was going to pick
him up and throw him out the window."
As they were looking through the general laboratory they met Professor
Hastings, and she could see at once what Karl meant. He was apparently a
man of about sixty, and kindness was written large upon him. Ernestine
could fancy his looking after students who were ill, and trying to devise
some way of helping the poverty-stricken boy through another year in
college.
They left the building and sauntered slowly across the campus. Almost in
the centre of the quadrangle Ernestine stopped and looked all around. She
was beginning to feel what it was for which the University of Chicago
stood. It was not "college life," all those things vital to the
undergraduate heart, which this university suggested. She fancied there
might be things the undergraduate would miss here; she was even a little
glad her own college days had been spent at the smaller school. As she
stood looking about at building upon building she had visions, not of
boys and girls singing their college songs, but of men and women working
their way toward truth. She looked from one red roof to another, and each
building seemed to her a separate channel through which men were working
ahead to the light. It was a place for research, for striving for new
knowledge, for clearing the way. She turned her face for the moment to
the north; there was great Chicago, where men fought for wealth and
power, Chicago, with all the enthusiasm of youth, and the arrogance of
youthful success, with all the strength of youthful muscle, all the power
and possibility of young brain and heart. This seemed far away from the
Board of Trade, from State Street and Michigan Avenue. But was not the
spirit of it all one? This, too, was Chicago, the Chicago which had
fought its way through criticism, indifference and jeers to a place in
the world of scholarship. People who knew what they were talking about
did not laugh at the University of Chicago any more. It had too much to
its credit to be passed over lightly. Men were doing things here; she
felt all about her the ideas here in embryo. How would they develop?
Where would they strike? What things now slumbering here would step,
robust and mighty, into the next generation?
And greatest of all these was Karl! She turned to him with flushed,
glowing face. He had been watching her, following much of her thought.
"I like this place," she said--her eyes telling all the rest. "I was not
sure I was going to, but I do."