"Perhaps, but—"
"Karl never was one to get much satisfaction out of telling his troubles," Georgia finished for him.
"Hastings," said the doctor, jerkily, and he seemed almost like one speaking against his will—"what do you make out of it? Don't you think it—pretty wasteful?"
"Yes—wasteful!" he went on, in response to the inquiring look. "I mean just that. There are a lot of people," he spoke passionately now, "who seem to think there is some sort of great design in the world. What in heaven's name would they say about this? Do you see anything high and fine and harmonious about it?"
That last with a sneer, and he stopped with an ugly laugh. "They make me tired—those people who have so much to say about the world being so right and lovely. They might travel with me on my rounds for a day or two. One day would finish a good deal of this factory-made optimism."
"Does Dr. Hubers feel—as you do?" Hastings asked, not quite concealing the anxiety in the question.
"How in God's name could he feel any other way?—though it's hard making him out,"—turning to Georgia, who nodded understandingly. "Just when he's ready to let himself go he'll pull himself together and say it's so nice to have plenty of time for reading, that Ernestine has been reading a lot of great things to him this summer, and he believes now he is really going to begin to get an education. But does that make you feel any better about it? God!—I was out there the other day, and when I saw the grey hairs in his head, the lines this summer has put in his face, when I saw he was digging his finger nails down into his hands to keep himself together while he talked to me about turning his cancer work over to some other man—I tell you it went just a little beyond my power to endure, and I turned in then and there and expressed my opinion of a God who would permit such things to happen! And then what did he do? Got a little white around the lips for a minute, looked for just a second as though he were going to turn in with me, and then he smiled a little and said in a quiet, rather humorous way that made me feel about ten years old: 'Oh, leave God out of it, Parkman. I don't think he had much of a hand in this piece of work. If you must damn something, damn my own carelessness.'"
"He said that? He can see it like that?"—there was no mistaking the approval in Professor Hastings' eager voice.
"Huh!"—the doctor was feeling too deeply to be conscious of the rudeness in the scoff. "So you figure it out like that—do you? And you get some satisfaction out of that way of looking at it? The scheme of things is very fine, but he must pay the penalty of his own oversight, weakness—carelessness—whatever you choose to call it. Well, I don't think I care much about a system that fixes its penalties in that particular way. When I see men every day who violate every natural law and don't pay any heavier penalty than an inconvenience, when I see useless pieces of flesh and bone slapping nature in the face and not getting more than a mild little slap in return, and then when I see the biggest, most useful man I have ever known paying as a penalty his life's work—oh Lord—that's rot! I have some hymn singing ancestors myself, and they left me a tendency to want to believe in something or other, so I had fine notions about the economy of nature—poetry of science. But this makes rather a joke of that, too—don't you think?" He paused, and Georgia could see the hot beating in his temples and his throat. And then he added, with a quiet more unanswerable than the passion had been: "So the beautiful thing about having no gods at all is that you're so fixed you have no gods to lose."
The telephone rang then, and there was a sharp fire of questions ending with, "Yes—I'll see her before nine to-night." He hung up the receiver and sat there a minute in deep thought, seeming to concentrate his whole being upon this patient now commanding him. And then he turned to Hastings with something about the boy out at the university, telling him at the last not to worry about the financial end of it, that he liked to do things for students who amounted to something.