The Glory of the Conquered: The Story of a Great Love

by Susan Glaspell

Beason pondered that a minute. "They're entirely distinct," was his conclusion.

"So it seems to you; but I'm a year or two older than you are, Mr. Beason, and the longer I live the more firmly I believe that there is such a thing as an intuitive sense of truth. If there isn't, why is Dr. Hubers a greater man than I am?"—and with that he left him, smiling a little at how it had never occurred to Beason to say anything polite.

Beason was in truth much perturbed. It was not pleasing to have the greatness of his idol explained on unscientific principles. He did not like that idea of the jumps. Jumping sounded unscientific, and what could be worse than to say of a man that he was not scientific? Preposterous to say the greatest things of science were achieved by unscientific methods!

To-day Dr. Hubers had been all afternoon alone in his laboratory. Some one had brought him in some luncheon at noon, but since one o'clock the door had not opened, and now it was almost five. What was going on in there? Even Beason had the imagination to wonder.

Could he have seen he would not have been much enlightened. The man was sitting before a table, his arms reaching out in front of him—some tubes, his microscope, other things he had been working with within reach, but unheeded now. For he was not seeing now the detail, the immediate. This was not one of those moments of advancing step by step. The light in those eyes of wonderful sight was the light from a farther distance. A way had opened ahead; far out across dim places he could see it now. The afternoon had been a momentous one. He had taken a step leading to a greater height, and with the greater height came a wider vision. A few of those minutes such as he was living now fires a man for months—yes, years, of work. Ahead were days when the fires of inspiration would be in abeyance, when the work would be only a working of step by step—detail, some would call it drudgery. But it is in these moments of inspiration man qualifies for the fight. In the hours of working onward toward the light he may grow very weary, but he can never forget that one day, for just a moment, the light opened to him. Moments such as Karl Hubers was living now mark the great man from the small.

And his glowing moment was more than a promise; it was also a reward. It was spring now, and all through the winter he had worked hard. He had come back in the fall determining in the gratitude of his great happiness to do the best work of his life. He pulled his microscope over in front of him and looked over it after the manner of one dreaming. How many days he had come to it eager to note the slightest significance in its variations of colour, for the staining of the slides made colour count in his work almost as it did in Ernestine's, only to be met with the non-essential, more of the husk and no sight of the kernel. He smiled a little to think what a bulky and stupid volume it would make were he to write down all he had done. If each hope, each possibility, each experiment and verification were to be put down, he could quite rival in bulk a government report. And if added to that should be a report of the cases he had watched, the operations he had attended, the attempts at getting living matter and of working with dead, how large and how useless that volume would be were it to contain it all! He had done days and days of useless work to get the slightest thing that was significant.

Only the week before Ernestine had laughingly read him an article one of the popular magazines printed on cancer research. The whole thing is becoming a farce—so said the popular magazine. Every once in a while some man issues a report saying the germ is in sight. Then another man appears with a still more learned report saying it is not a germ at all. All doing different things, and all sure they are on the right track! Meanwhile the disease is on the increase, surgery cannot meet it satisfactorily, and while laboratories pursue the peaceful tenor of their way, men and women are dying hard deaths which no one seems able to stay. Truly, the man behind the microscope is a very slow man the article had concluded.

No doubt that seemed true. He could see the writer's point of view well enough. The things the man behind the microscope did accomplish sounded so very easy that the on-looker could give only indolence and stupidity as the reason for not accomplishing a great deal more.

And even from his own point of view, with his own knowledge of all the facts in the case, he had no doubt that once done it would sound so easy that he would stand amazed to think it had not been done before. Let the unknown become the known, and even the trained worker cannot look upon it as other than a matter of course. It was so easy now to meet diphtheria. Strange they had let so many children die of it! It was so very easy now to give a man an anesthetic. Fearful how they had let a man suffer through every stroke of the knife, or die for need of it! Should he blame the man outside for looking at it that way when even to him things accomplished took on that matter of course aspect?

He began putting away his things. It was Ernestine's birthday, and he had promised to be home early, for they were going to the theatre. "It will be like all the rest," he mused. "Once done, it will seem so easy that we will wonder why it was not done long before." Again the fire leaped high within him. To do it! Perhaps after all he did see it too complexly. He must not let the husk dull his eye to the kernel. A man building a beautiful tower must erect a scaffold. But the scaffolding should not make him forget the tower! Some way in this last hour his mind had seemed to clear. His immense amount of useless work was not hanging about his neck like a millstone. Something had cut that away. He was free from it all. He could feel within himself that his approach to his problem was better than it had been before. Perhaps he had made the mistake of the others of looking at it as something fearfully complex, something it would be the hardest thing in all the world for any man to do. It all looked more simple now. It was as if muscles strained to the point of tenseness had relaxed, and in an easy and natural way he foresaw victory as a logical part of his work.