The Glory of the Conquered | Page 2

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