He had been thinking about that very seriously of late. Ernestine was at least in position now to show the possibilities of the situation, and working with Karl would do more for her in a month than working along this way would do in five. Why not? No matter how long they waited it was going to be hard at first. The deep lines in Karl's face furnished the strongest argument against further waiting.

"What have we here?" he asked, picking up one of the embossed books lying open on the table near Karl.

"I presume that's my Bible," Karl replied.

"Has it come to this?" the doctor asked dryly.

"Didn't we ever tell you the story of my Bible?"

"No. You never did. I never suspected you had one."

"Oh yes; the Bible was the first book of this sort I had. It was sent to me by some home missionary society, some woman's organization--"

"Fools!" broke in Parkman.

"They saw in the paper about my eyes and so they said to themselves--'Now here is a good chance to convert one of those unG.o.dly scientists.' So they sent the Bible along with a nice little note saying that now I would have time to read it, and perhaps all of this was the hand of G.o.d leading me--you can construct the rest. Well." he paused with a laugh--"Ernestine was mad."

"I should hope so!" growled Parkman.

"She was so divinely angry that in having fun with her I overlooked being enraged myself. Oh, if I could only give you any idea of how incensed she was! I think she intended notifying the Chicago police. Really I don't know to what lengths she would have gone had it not been for my restraining influence. And then she constructed a letter. It was a masterpiece--I can tell you that. She compared me to them--greatly to their disadvantage. She spoke of the various kinds of religious manifestation--again greatly to their disadvantage."

"Did she send it?" laughed the doctor.

"No. I persuaded her that well-intentioned people should receive the same kindly tolerance we extend to the mentally defective. The writing of the letter in itself half way contented her--it was such a splendid expression of her emotions. Poor old girl," he added musingly, "she was feeling pretty sore about things just then."

"But the sequel is the queer part," he went on. "I began to read their Bible, and I like it. It's part of the irony of fate that I haven't gotten from it the things they intended I should; but I tell you part of this Old Testament is immense reading. You know, Parkman, I suppose we're prejudiced ourselves. We don't see the Bible as it is itself. We see it in relation to a lot of people who surround it. And because we don't care for some of them we think we shouldn't care for it. Whereas the thing in itself," he concluded cheerfully, "is just what we'd like."

"And how go your own books?" Dr. Parkman asked him.

Karl shrugged one shoulder in a nervous little way he had acquired.

"Oh--so, so. Pretty fair, I guess." His face settled into a gloom then, but almost immediately he roused himself from it to say, in a voice more cheerful than spontaneous: "They'll be finished in a couple of weeks. I'm both glad and sorry. Don't know just what I'll go at then."

Again he seemed to settle into the gloom which the doctor could see was ever there waiting to receive him. But again he roused himself almost immediately. Was it this way with the man all the time? A continuous fight against surrendering? "But I'm mighty thankful I've had the books,"

he said. "They've pulled me through the winter, and they've enabled me to make a living. Lord, but a man would hate not to make a living!" he concluded, straightening up a trifle, more like the Karl of old.

The sheer pathos of it had never come home to the doctor as it did with that. A man who should have stood upon the very mountain peaks of fame now proudly claiming that he was able to make a living! But if it brought home the pathos of the situation it also brought new sense of the manhood of Karl Hubers. It was great--Parkman told himself--great! A man who felt within himself all the forces which make for greatness could force himself into the place of the average man, and thank the Lord that he was able to make a living!

"Here's a little scheme I've worked out," Karl said, and opening one of the drawers of the library table, pulled out the model for the idea he had worked out for reading and writing in Braille.

It was the first Dr. Parkman had heard of it; he wanted to know all about it, and Karl explained how it had seemed to him as soon as he learned how the blind read and wrote that the thing could be simplified and vastly improved. So he had worked this out; he explained its points of difference, and wanted to know what Parkman thought of it.

"Why, man," exclaimed the doctor, "it strikes me you've revolutionized the whole business. But--why, Karl--n.o.body ever thought of this before?"

"The usual speech," laughed Karl.

"But in this case it seems so confoundedly true."

"Well I believe it will help some, and I'll be glad of that," he added simply. "Oh I have some more schemes. If I've got to be blind I'm going to make blindness a better business."

"Our old friend the devil didn't do so well then after all," said Dr.

Parkman quietly. "He closed up one channel, but he didn't figure on your burrowing another."

Karl laughed. "Oh this won't worry him much; it came so easily I can't think it amounts to a great deal. But as long as I was used to scheming things out it--amused me, exercised a few cells that were in pretty bad need of a job. And I have other ideas," he repeated.

Parkman asked what Karl intended to do with his model, offering some suggestions. The doctor was more than interested and pleased; he was deeply stirred. "Why, confound the fellow," he was saying to himself,--"they _can't_ knock him out! They knock him down in one place, and he bobs up in another!" The ideas of this brain were as difficult to suppress as certain other things in nature. Dam up one place--they find another.

They smoked their cigars and talked intermittently then; they were close enough together to be silent when they chose. And all the while the undercurrent of Dr. Parkman's thought flowed steadily on.

He was thinking that after all there were better things to do with fate than d.a.m.n it. If ever a man would seem justified in spending his soul in the d.a.m.ning of fate, that man, it seemed to him, was the friend beside him. And while he had done some of it, perhaps a great deal more than any one knew, it had not been his master-pa.s.sion. His master-pa.s.sion had been to press on--press on to be knew not what--there was the glory of it! It was easy enough to work toward a goal sighted ahead; but it took a Karl Hubers to work on through the darkness.

And ah, there was a good time coming! The doctor's sombre face relaxed to a smile. His own life seemed almost worth living now just because he had been able to take a hand--yes, and play a few good cards--in this little game. Those things Karl had shown him today made it seem there was all the finer joy in bringing him back to the things which were his own. He had been thrust from out the gates, but he had not sat whimpering outside the wall. He had gone on and sought to find a place in that outer world in which he found himself. And now he should come back to his own through gates of glory.

Karl asked him about Ernestine then. How was she looking; was she thin--pale? Her face felt pale to him, he said. He had urged her to work, because he knew she would be happier so, but Parkman must see to it she did not overwork. Had he seen the picture on which she was working so hard? He asked that wistfully; and the doctor's face was soft, and a gentleness crept into his voice as he said he believed he was to see the great picture very soon now. And then, after a silence, Karl said, softly, very tenderly--"Bless her gamey little heart!"

CHAPTER x.x.xII

THE DOCTOR HAS HIS WAY

It was in response to the doctor's telephone message that Ernestine went down to his office one afternoon a few days later. Dr. Parkman had been detained at the hospital, they told her, but would be there very soon, and so she sat down in the waiting room, which was already well filled.

Were there always people there waiting for him--and did they not sometimes grow impatient and want to find a doctor who would not keep them waiting so long?

The woman sitting near her looked friendly, and so she asked: "Don't you get very tired waiting for Dr. Parkman?"

"Oh, yes," sighed the woman, "very tired."

"Then why don't you go to some doctor who would attend to you more quickly?" she pursued, moved chiefly by the desire to see what would happen.

The woman stared, grew red, and replied frigidly: "Because I do not wish to."

All the other patients were staring at Ernestine, too. "Why don't you do that yourself?" asked a large woman with a sick-looking small boy.

"I guess if there was anything much the matter with you, you'd be willing to wait," said a pale woman with a weary voice.

And then a man--she was sure that man was a victim of cancer--said loftily: "A doctor you never have to wait for isn't the doctor you want."

"The only thing seems queer to me," said a meek looking woman, taking advantage of the outbreak, "is that he don't look at your tongue. Down in Indiana, where I come from, they always look at your tongue. There's a lot of questions he don't ask," she ventured, looking around for either a.s.sent or information.

"He asks all there's any need of," the first woman a.s.sured her. "I guess _you_ aren't very sick," turning, witheringly, to Ernestine.

And then they went back to their waiting; those who had rocking chairs rocking, those who had magazines reading, or turning leaves at least, some just sitting there and looking into s.p.a.ce. It must take away all sense of freedom to feel that people like this, sick people for whom everything was hard, were always waiting for one.

She would tell the doctor how she had been well-nigh mobbed by loyal patients. They were like a great family; she knew well enough they did considerable grumbling, but her remark put her without the fold, and from her as an alien, criticism was not to be brooked. By the glare with which the first woman still regarded her she was sure she was suspected of being an agent sent there by some inferior doctor to try and get Dr.

Parkman's patients away from him.