The Glory of the Conquered. Susan Glaspell
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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