From his window in the laboratory he saw her as she was coming across the campus, and waved. She waved back, and then wondered if it were proper to wave at learned professors who were looking from their windows. In one sense it was hard to comprehend that it was her Karl who was such an important man about this great university. Karl was so completely just her Karl, so human and dear, and a great scientist seemed a remote abstraction. She must tell that to Karl. He would enjoy himself as a remote abstraction.
She was still smiling about Karl's remoteness as she came into the building. He had come down to meet her. "You see I thought you might get lost," he explained.
"I might have," she responded, and then laughed, for when people are very happy it is not at all difficult to laugh.
"Do you know what you look like?" he said. "You look like a kind of spiritualised rainbow--or like the flowers after the rain."
"I dressed in five minutes," said Ernestine, smoothing down her gown with the complacency of a woman who knows she has nothing to fear from scrutiny.
"As if that had anything to do with it! You dress as the birds and flowers dress--by just being yourself."
She let that bit of masculine ignorance pass with a wise little smile.
They were in the laboratory now. "I came," said Ernestine severely, "to listen to an elucidation of the mysteries of science."
"Then you had no business to come looking like this," he responded promptly.
She was looking around the room. "And this is where all those great things are done?"
"Um--well this is where we make attempts at things."
He was not quite through, and Ernestine sat down by the window to wait for him. It seemed surprising, somehow, that it should be such a simple looking room. Karl was doing something with some tubes, writing something on a chart-like thing. Something in the expression of his face as he bent over the work carried her back to other days.
"Karl," she said abruptly, "why don't you and I have any quarrels about which is greater--science or art?"
He looked up at her in such absolute astonishment that she laughed.
"Liebchen," he said, "don't you think that would be going a long way out of our road to hunt a quarrel? Now I can think up much better subjects for a quarrel than that. For instance: Do I love you more than you love me, or do you love me more than I love you? Your subject makes me think of our old debating society. We used to get up and argue in thunderous tones something about which was worse--fire or water!"
"But Karl--it isn't logical that you and I should love each other this way!"
He pushed back his work and turned squarely around to her. He was smiling in his tenderly humorous way. "Well, sweetheart," he said, "would you rather be logical, or would you rather be happy?"
"Oh, I'm not insisting upon the logic. I'm just wondering about it."
"Isn't love greater than either a test tube or a paint brush?" Karl asked softly.
She nodded, smiling at him lovingly.
He sat there looking a long way ahead. She knew he was thinking something out. "Ernestine," he began, "do you ever think much about the
oneness of the world?"
"Why, yes--I do, but I didn't suppose you did."
"But, liebchen--who would be more apt to think about it than I? Doesn't my work teach oneness more than it teaches anything else? All the quarrelling comes through a failure to recognise the oneness. I often think of the different ways Goethe and Darwin got at evolution. Goethe had the poetic conception of it all right; Darwin worked it out step by step. Who's ahead? And which has any business scoffing at the other?"
He went back to his notes, and her thoughts returned to the battles she had heard fought in the name of science. She looked about the room, out at the great buildings all around, and then back to Karl, who seemed soul of it all. How different all this was! What would her father think to hear a man like Karl Hubers giving to a poet place in the developing of the theory of evolution? What
was the difference between Karl and her father? Was it that the school to which they belonged was itself changing, or was it just a difference in type? Or, perhaps, most of all, was it not a difference in degree? Her father had only seen a little way, and that down a narrow path bounded by high walls of bigotry. Karl had reached the heights from which he could see the oneness! And was it not love had helped him to those heights?
A little later, when Karl was seeking to explain what he evidently regarded as a very simple little thing, and just as a few glimmers of light were beginning to penetrate her darkness, she looked up and at the half open door saw a boy whose consternation at sight of her made it difficult for Ernestine to repress a smile.
"Come in, Beason," said Karl, who had just noticed him. "I want you to meet Mrs. Hubers." Ernestine looked at Karl suspiciously--something in his voice signified he was enjoying something.
But there was nothing about Mr. Beason which signified any kind of enjoyment. He advanced to meet her sturdily, as one determined to do his duty at any cost. The boy was rendered peculiar in appearance by an abnormally long, heavy jaw, which gave his face a heavy, stolid appearance which might or might not be characteristic. He had small, sharp eyes, and Ernestine was quite sure from one look at his face that he did not laugh often, or see many things to laugh about.
He was not impenetrable to graciousness, however, for within five minutes he had told her that he was born in southern Indiana, that he lived in Minneapolis now, and that he had come to Chicago to get some work with Dr. Hubers. Upon hearing that Ernestine immediately noticed what a remarkably intelligent face he had, and felt sure that that heavy jaw gave him a phlegmatic look which was most misleading.
Karl laughed as the boy went away. "Funny fellow--Beason. He'll have to cut away a lot of the trees before he gets a good look at the woods. Never in his life has one gleam of humour penetrated him. In fact if a few humour cells were to creep in by mistake, they'd be so alien as to make a tremendous disturbance."
"He seems to think a great deal of you," said Ernestine, a little reproachfully.
"Oh, yes; and I like him. I like the fellow first rate. He's a splendid worker--conscientious, absolutely to be depended upon. 'Way ahead of lots of these fellows around here who think they know it all. But he has those uncompromising ideas about science; ready to fight for it at the drop of the hat. Oh, Beason's all right. We need his sort. I'll tell you whom I do want you to meet, Ernestine, and that's Hastings. You'll like him. He's such a success as a human being. He's more like the old-time professor of the small college, has a fatherly, benevolent feeling toward all the students. You see we're so big here that we haven't many of the small college characteristics about us. It's each fellow doing his own work, and not that close comradeship that there is in the small school. But Hastings is a connecting link. Then, on the other hand, there's Lane. You must meet him too, for he's a rare specimen: pedantic, academic; I don't know just why they have him, he doesn't represent the spirit of the place at all. He's entirely too erudite to be of much use. But I'll let Parkman tell you about Lane. Oh, but he hates him! They met here in the laboratory one day and upon my soul I thought Parkman was going to pick him up and throw him out the window."
As they were looking through the general laboratory they met Professor Hastings, and she could see at once what Karl meant. He was apparently a man of about sixty, and kindness was written large upon him. Ernestine could fancy his looking after students who were ill, and trying to devise some way of helping the poverty-stricken boy through another year in college.
They left the building and sauntered slowly across the campus. Almost in the centre of the quadrangle Ernestine stopped and looked all around. She was beginning to feel what it was for which the University of Chicago stood. It was not "college life," all those things vital to the undergraduate heart, which this university suggested. She fancied there might be things the undergraduate would miss here; she was even a little glad her own college days had been spent at the smaller school. As she stood looking about at building upon building she had visions, not of boys and girls singing their college songs, but of men and women working their way toward truth. She looked from one red roof to another, and each building seemed to her a separate channel through which men were working ahead to the light. It was a place for research, for striving for new knowledge, for clearing the way. She turned her face for the moment to the north; there was great Chicago, where men fought for wealth and power, Chicago, with all the enthusiasm of youth, and the arrogance of youthful success, with all the strength of youthful muscle, all the power and possibility of young brain and heart. This seemed far away from the Board of Trade, from State Street and Michigan Avenue. But was not the spirit of it all one? This, too, was Chicago, the Chicago which had fought its way through criticism, indifference and jeers to a place in the world of scholarship. People who knew what they were talking about did not laugh at the University of Chicago any more. It had too much to its credit to be passed over lightly. Men were doing things here; she felt all about her the ideas here in embryo. How would they develop? Where would they strike? What things now slumbering here would step, robust and mighty, into the next generation?
And greatest of all these was Karl! She turned to him with flushed, glowing face. He had been watching her, following much of her thought. "I like this place," she said--her eyes telling all the rest. "I was not sure I was going to, but I do."