A Surrender
by
Morgan Russell and I were lolling one day on the beach at Rock Ledge watching the bathers. We had played three sets of tennis, followed by a dip in the ocean, and were waiting for the luncheon hour. Though Russell was my junior by four years, we were old friends, and had prearranged our vacation to renew our intimacy, which the force of circumstances had interrupted since we were students together at Harvard. Russell had been a Freshman when I was a Senior, but as we happened to room in the same entry, this propinquity had resulted in warm mutual liking. I had been out of college for eight years, had studied law, and was the managing clerk of a large law firm, and in receipt of what I then thought a tremendous salary. Russell was still at Cambridge. He had elected at graduation to pursue post-graduate courses in chemistry and physics, and had recently accepted a tutorship. He had not discovered until the beginning of the Junior year his strong predilection for scientific investigation, but he had given himself up to it with an ardor which dwarfed everything else on the horizon of his fancy. It was of his future we were talking, for he wished to take his old chum into his confidence and to make plain his ambition. “I recognize of course,” he told me, “that I’ve an uphill fight ahead of me, but my heart is in it. My heart wouldn’t be in it if I felt that the best years of my life were to be eaten up by mere teaching. Nowadays a man who’s hired to teach is expected to teach until his daily supply of gray matter has run out, and his original work has to wait until after he’s dead. There’s where I’m more fortunate than some. The fifteen hundred dollars–a veritable godsend–which I receive annually under the will of my aunt, will keep the wolf at a respectful distance and enable me to play the investigator to my heart’s content. I’m determined to be thorough, George. There is no excuse for superficiality in science. But in the end I intend to find out something new. See if I don’t, old man.”
“I haven’t a doubt you will, Morgan,” I replied. “I don’t mind letting on that I ran across Professor Drayson last winter, and he told me you were the most promising enthusiast he had seen for a long time; that you were patient and level-headed as well as eager. Drayson doesn’t scatter compliments lightly. But fifteen hundred dollars isn’t a very impressive income.”
“It was very good of the old fellow to speak so well of me.”
“Suppose you marry?”
“Marry?” Russell looked up from the sea-shells with which he had been playing, and smiled brightly. He had a thin, slightly delicate face with an expression which was both animated and amiable, and keen, strong gray eyes. “I’ve thought of that. I’m not what is called contemplating matrimony at the moment; but I’ve considered the possibility, and it doesn’t appall me.”
“On fifteen hundred a year?”
“And why not, George?” he responded a little fiercely. “Think of the host of teachers, clerks, small tradesmen, and innumerable other reputable human beings who marry and bring up families on that or less. Which do you think I would prefer, to amass a fortune in business and have my town and country house and steam yacht, or to exist on a pittance and discover before I die something to benefit the race of man?”
“Knowing you as I do, there’s only one answer to that conundrum,” said I. “And you’re right, too, theoretically, Morgan. My ancestors in Westford would have thought fifteen hundred downright comfort, and in admitting to you that five thousand in New York is genteel poverty, I merely reveal what greater comforts the ambitious American demands. I agree with you that from the point of view of real necessity one-half the increase is sheer materialism. But who’s the girl?”