The Glory of the Conquered | Page 6

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.

CHAPTER IV
FACTS AND "HIGHER TRUTH"
"Mr. Beason," said Georgia McCormick, looking across the dinner table at the new student who had come to live with them--almost every one who lived around the university had "students"--"if you had a dear cousin who had married a dear friend, if said dear cousin and