The Glory of the Conquered | Page 6

not been done before. With the abandonment of his intense and
rugged nature, he yielded himself to the delights of the untravelled
path.
At the time of his falling in love, Dr. Karl Hubers was thirty-nine years
old. He had worked in European laboratories, notably the Pasteur
Institute of Paris, and among men of his kind was regarded as one to be
reckoned with. Within the profession his name already stood for vital
things, and 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