“If I did, the world would know a doggone sight more’n I do! Nothing doing, Chief. Maybe we can publish in a year from now.”
“You’ll publish now or—”
“All right, Holy. The blessed moment has arrived. I quit! And I’m so gentlemanly that I do it without telling you what I think of you!”
Thus was Terry Wickett discharged from McGurk. He patented the process of synthesizing his quinine derivative and retired to Birdies’ Rest, to build a laboratory out of his smallsavings and spend a life of independent research supported by a restricted sale of sera and of his drug.
For Terry, wifeless and valetless, this was easy enough, but for Martin it was not simple.
Martin assumed that he would resign. He explained it to Joyce. How he was to combine a town house and a Greenwich castle with flannel-shirt collaboration at Birdies’ Rest he had not quite planned, but he was not going to be disloyal.
“Can you beat it! The Holy Wren fires Terry but doesn’t dare touch me! I waited simply because I wanted to watch Holabird figure out what I’d do. And now—”
He was elucidating it to her in their—in her—car, on the way home from a dinner at which he had been so gaily charming to an important dowager that Joyce had crooned, “What a fool Latham Ireland was to say he couldn’t be polite!”
“I’m free, by thunder at last I’m free, because I’ve worked up to something that’s worth being free for!” he exulted.
She laid her fine hand on his, and begged, “Wait! I want to think. Please! Do be quiet a moment.”
Then: “Mart, if you went on working with Mr. Wickett, you’d have to be leaving me constantly.”
“Well—”
“I really don’t think that would be quite nice— I mean especially now, because I fancy I’m going to have a baby.”
He made a sound of surprise.
“Oh, I’m not going to do the weeping mother. And I don’t know whether I’m glad or furious, though I do believe I’d like to have one baby. But it does complicate things, you know. And personally, I should be sorry if you left the Institute, which gives you a solid position, for a hole-and-corner existence. Dear, I have been fairly nice, haven’t I? I really do like you, you know! I don’t want you to desert me, and you would if you went off to this horrid Vermont place.”
“Couldn’t we get a little house near there, and spend part of the year?”
“Pos-sibly. But we ought to wait till this beastly job of bearing a Dear Little One is over, then think about it.”
Martin did not resign from the Institute, and Joyce did not think about taking a house near Birdies’ Rest to the extent of doing it.
WithTerry Wickett gone, Martin returned to phage. He made a false start and did the worst work of his life. He had lost his fierce serenity. He was too conscious of the ordeal of a professional social life, and he could never understand that esoteric phenomenon, the dinner-party—the painful entertainment of people whom one neither likes nor finds interesting.
So long as he had had a refuge in talking to Terry, he had not been too irritated by well-dressed nonentities, and for a time he had enjoyed the dramatic game of making Nice People accept him. Now he was disturbed by reason.
Clif Clawson showed him how tangled his life had grown.
When he had first come to New York, Martin had looked for Clif, whose boisterousness had been his comfort among Angus Duers and Irving Watterses in medical school. Clif was not to be found, neither at the motor agency for which he had once worked nor elsewhere on Automobile Row. For fourteen years Martin had not seen him.
Then to his laboratory at McGurk was brought a black-and-red card:
Clifford L. Clawson(Clif)Top Notch Guaranteed Oil Investments
Higham BlockButte
“Clif! Good old Clif! The best friend a man ever had! That time he lent me the money to get to Leora! Old Clif! By golly I need somebody like him, with Terry out of it and all these tea-hounds around me!” exulted Martin.
He dashed out and stopped abruptly, staring at a man who was, not softly, remarking to the girl reception-clerk:
“Well, sister, you scientific birds certainly do lay on the agony! Never struck a sweller layout than you got here, except in crook investment-offices—and I’ve never seen a nicer cutie than you anywhere. How ’bout lil dinner one of these beauteous evenings? I expect I’ll parley-vous with thou full often now— I’m a great friend of Doc Arrowsmith. Fact I’m a doc myself—honest—real sawbones—went to medic school and everything. Ah!Here’sthe boy!”
Martin had not allowed for the changes of fourteen years. He was dismayed.
Clif Clawson, at forty, was gross. His face was sweaty, and puffy with pale flesh; his voice was raw; he fancied checked Norfolk jackets, tight across his swollen shoulders and his beefy hips.
He bellowed, while he belabored Martin’s back:
“Well, well, well, well, well, well! Old Mart! Why, you old son of a gun! Why, you old son of a gun! Why, you damn’ old chicken-thief! Say, you skinny little runt, I’m a son of a gun if you look one day older’n when I saw you last in Zenith!”
Martin was aware of the bright leering of the once humble reception-clerk. He said, “Well, gosh, it certainly is good to see you,” and hastened to get Clif into the privacy of his office.
“You look fine,” he lied, when they were safe. “What you been doing with yourself? Leora and I did our best to look you up, when we first came to New York. Uh— Do you know about, uh, about her?”
“Yuh, I read about her passing away. Fierce luck. And about your swell work in the West Indies—where was it? I guess you’re a great man now—famous plague-chaser and all that stuff, and world-renowned skee-entist. I don’t suppose you remember your old friends now.”
“Oh, don’t be a chump! It’s—it’s—it’s fine to see you.”
“Well, I’m glad to observe you haven’t got thecapitus enlargatus, Mart. Golly, I says to meself says I, if I blew in and old Mart high-hatted me, I’d just about come nigh unto letting him hear the straight truth, after all the compliments he’s been getting from the sassiety dames. I’m glad you’ve kept your head. I thought about writing you from Butte—been selling some bum oil-stock there and kind of got out quick to save the inspectors the trouble of looking over my books. ‘Well,’ I thought, ‘I’ll just sit down and write the whey-faced runt a letter, and make him feel good by tellinghim how tickled I am over his nice work.’ But you know how it is—time kind of slips by. Well, this is excellentus! We’ll have a chance to see a whole lot of each other now. I’m going in with a fellow on an investment stunt here in New York. Great pickings, old kid! I’ll take you out and show you how to order a real feed, one of these days. Well, tell me what you been doing since you got back from the West Indies. I suppose you’re laying your plans to try and get in as the boss or president or whatever they call it of this gecelebrated Institute.”
“No— I, uh, well, I shouldn’t much care to be Director. I prefer sticking to my lab. I— Perhaps you’d like to hear about my work on phage.”
Rejoicing to discover something of which he could talk, Martin sketched his experiments.
Clif spanked his forehead with a spongy hand, and shouted:
“Wait! Say, I’ve got an idea—and you can come right in on it. As I apperceive it, the dear old Gen. Public is just beginning to hear about this bac—what is it?—bacteriophage junk. Look here! Remember that old scoundrel Benoni Carr, that I introduced as a great pharmacologist at the medical banquet? Had din-din with him last eventide. He’s running a sanitarium out on Long Island—slick idea, too—practically he’s a bootlegger; gets a lot of high-rollers out there and let’s ’em have all the hooch they want, on prescriptions, absolutely legal and water-tight! The parties they throw at that joint, dames and everything! Believe me, Uncle Clif is sore stricken with tootelus bootelus and is going to the Carr Sanitarium for what ails him! But now look: Suppose we got him or somebody to rig up a new kind of cure—call it phageotherapy—oh, it takes Uncle Clif to invent the names that claw in the bounteous dollars! Patients sit in a steam cabinet and eat tablets made of phage, with just a little strychnin to jazz up their hearts! Bran-new! Million in it! What-cha-think?”
Martin was almost feeble. “No, I’m afraid I’m against it.”
“Why?”
“Well, I— Honestly, Clif, if you don’t understand it, I don’t know how I can explain the scientific attitude to you. You know—that’s what Gottlieb used to call it—scientific attitude. And as I’m a scientist—least I hope I am— I couldn’t— Well, to be associated with a thing like that—”
“But, you poor louse, don’t you suppose I understand thescientific attitude? Gosh, I’ve seen a dissecting-room myself! Why, you poor crab, of course I wouldn’t expect you to have your name associated with it! You’d keep in the background and slip us all the dope, and get a lot of publicity for phage in general so the Dee-ah People would fall easier, and we’d pull all the strong-arm work.”
“But— I hope you’re joking, Clif. If you weren’t joking, I’d tell you that if anybody tried to pull a thing like that, I’d expose ’em and get ’em sent to jail, no matter who they were!”
“Well, gosh, if you feel that way about it—!”
Clif was peering over the fatty pads beneath his eyes. He sounded doubtful:
“I suppose you have the right to keep other guys from grabbing your own stuff. Well, all right, Mart. Got to be teloddeling. Tell you what youmightdo, though, if that don’t hurt your tender conscience, too: you might invite old Clif up t’ the house for dinner, to meet the new lil wifey that I read about in the sassiety journals. You might happen to remember, old bean, that there have been times when you were glad enough to let poor fat old Clif slip you a feed and a place to sleep!”
“Oh, I know. You bet there have! Nobody was ever decenter to me; nobody. Look. Where you staying? I’ll find out from my wife what dates we have ahead, and telephone you to-morrow morning.”
“So you let the Old Woman keep the work-sheet for you, huh? Well, I never butt into anybody’s business. I’m staying at the Berrington Hotel, room 617—’member that, 617—and you might try and ’phone me before ten to-morrow. Say, that’s one grand sweet song of a cutie you got on the door here. What-cha-think? How’s chances on dragging her out to feed and shake a hoof with Uncle Clif?”
As primly as the oldest, most staid scientist in the Institute, Martin protested, “Oh, she belongs to a very nice family. I don’t think I should try it. Really, I’d rather you didn’t.”
Clif’s gaze was sharp, for all its fattiness.
With excessive cordiality, with excessive applause when Clif remarked, “You better go back to work and put some salt on a coupla bacteria’s tails,” Martin guided him to the reception-room, safely past the girl clerk, and to the elevator.
For a long time he sat in his office and was thoroughly wretched.
He had for years pictured Clif Clawson as another Terry Wickett. He saw that Clif was as different from Terry as from Rippleton Holabird. Terry was rough, he was surly, he was colloquial, he despised many fine and gracious things, he offended many fine and gracious people, but these acerbities made up the haircloth robe wherewith he defended a devotion to such holy work as no cowled monk ever knew. But Clif—
“I’d do the world a service by killing that man!” Martin fretted. “Phageotherapy at a yegg sanitarium! I stand him only because I’m too much of a coward to risk his going around saying that ‘in the days of my Success, I’ve gone back on my old friends.’ (Success! Puddling at work! Dinners! Talking to idiotic women! Being furious because you weren’t invited to the dinner to the Portuguese minister!) No. I’ll ’phone Clif we can’t have him at the house.”
Over him came remembrance of Clif’s loyalty in the old barren days, and Clif’s joy to share with him every pathetic gain.
“Whyshouldhe understand my feeling about phage? Was his scheme any worse than plenty of reputable drug-firms? How much was I righteously offended, and how much was I sore because he didn’t recognize the high social position of the rich Dr. Arrowsmith?”
He gave up the question, went home, explained almost frankly to Joyce what her probable opinion of Clif would be, and contrived that Clif should be invited to dinner with only the two of them.
“My dear Mart,” said Joyce, “why do you insult me by hinting that I’m such a snob that I’ll be offended by racy slang, and by business ethics very much like those of dear Roger’s grandpapa? Do you think I’ve never ventured out of the drawing-room? I thought you’d seen me outside it! I shall probably like your Clawson person very much indeed.”
The day after Martin had invited him to dinner, Clif telephoned to Joyce:
“This Mrs. Arrowsmith? Well, say, this is old Clif.”
“I’m afraid I didn’t quite catch it.”
“Clif! Old Clif!”
“I’m frightfully sorry but— Perhaps there’s a bad connection.”
“Why, it’s Mr.Clawson, that’s going to feed with you on—”
“Oh, of course. Iamso sorry.”
“Well, look: What I wanted to know is: Is this going to be just a homey grub-grabbing or a real soirée? In other words, honey, shall I dress natural or do I put on the soup-and-fish? Oh, I got ’em—swallow-tail and the whole darn’ outfit!”
“I— Do you mean— Oh. Shall you dress for dinner? I think perhaps I would.”
“Attaboy! I’ll be there, dolled up like a new saloon. I’ll show you folks the cutest lil line of jeweled studs you ever laid eyes on. Well, it’s been a great pleezhure to meet Mart’s Missus, and we will now close with singing ‘Till We Meet Again’ or ‘Au Reservoir.’”
When Martin came home, Joyce faced him with, “Sweet, I can’t do it! The man must be mad. Really, dear, you just take care of him and let me go to bed. Besides: you two won’t want me—you’ll want to talk over old times, and I’d only interfere. And with baby coming in two months now, I ought to go to bed early.”
“Oh, Joy, Clif’d be awfully offended, and he’s always been so decent to me and— And you’ve often asked me about my cub days. Don’t youwant,” plaintively, “to hear about ’em?”
“Very well, dear. I’ll try to be a little sunbeam to him, but I warn you I sha’n’t be a success.”
They worked themselves up to a belief that Clif would be raucous, would drink too much, and slap Joyce on the back. But when he appeared for dinner he was agonizingly polite and flowery—till he became slightly drunk. When Martin said “damn,” Clif reproved him with, “Of course I’m only a hick, but I don’t think a lady like the Princess here would like you to cuss.”
And, “Well, I never expected a rube like young Mart to marry the real bon-ton article.”
And, “Oh, maybe it didn’t cost something to furnish this dining-room, oh, not a-tall!”
And, “Champagne, heh? Well, you’re certainly doing poor old Clif proud. Your Majesty, just tell your High Dingbat to tell his valay to tell my secretary the address of your bootlegger, will you?”
In his cups, though he severely retained his moral and elegant vocabulary, Clif chronicled the jest of selling oil-wells unprovided with oil and of escaping before the law closed in; the cleverness of joining churches for the purpose of selling stock to the members; and the edifying experience of assistingDr. Benoni Carr to capture a rich and senile widow for his sanitarium by promising to provide medical consultation from the spirit-world.
Joyce was silent through it all, and so superbly polite that every one was wretched.
Martin struggled to make a liaison between them, and he had no elevating remarks about the strangeness of a man’s boasting of his own crookedness, but he was coldly furious when Clif blundered:
“You said old Gottlieb was sort of down on his luck now.”
“Yes, he’s not very well.”
“Poor old coot. But I guess you’ve realized by now how foolish you were when you used to fall for him like seven and a half brick. Honestly, Lady Arrowsmith, this kid used to think Pa Gottlieb was the cat’s pajamas—begging your pardon for the slanguageness.”
“What do you mean?” said Martin.
“Oh, I’m onto Gottlieb! Of course you know as well as I do that he always was a self-advertiser, getting himself talked about by confidin’ to the wholeops terrarawhat a strict scientist he was, and putting on a lot of dog and emitting these wise cracks about philosophy and what fierce guys the regular docs were. But what’s worse than— Out in San Diego I ran onto a fellow that used to be an instructor in botany in Winnemac, and he told me that with all this antibody stuff of his, Gottlieb never gave any credit to—well, he was some Russian that did most of it before and Pa Gottlieb stole all his stuff.”
That in this charge against Gottlieb there was a hint of truth, that he knew the great god to have been at times ungenerous, merely increased the rage which was clenching Martin’s fist in his lap.
Three years before, he would have thrown something, but he was an adaptable person. He had yielded to Joyce’s training in being quietly instead of noisily disagreeable; and his only comment was “No, I think you’re wrong, Clif. Gottlieb has carried the antibody work ’way beyond all the others.”
Before the coffee and liqueurs had come into the drawing-room, Joyce begged, at her prettiest, “Mr. Clawson, do you mind awfully if I slip up to bed? I’m so frightfully glad to have had the opportunity of meeting one of my husband’s oldest friends, but I’m not feeling very well, and I do think I’d be wise to have some rest.”
“Madam the Princess, I noticed you were looking peeked.”
“Oh! Well— Good night!”
Martin and Clif settled in large chairs in the drawing-room, and tried to play at being old friends happy in meeting. They did not look at each other.
After Clif had cursed a little and told three sound smutty stories, to show that he had not been spoiled and that he had been elegant only to delight Joyce, he flung:
“Huh! So that is that, as the Englishers remark. Well, I could see your Old Lady didn’t cotton to me. She was just as chummy as an iceberg. But gosh, I don’t mind. She’s going to have a kid, and of course women, all of ’em, get cranky when they’re that way. But—”
He hiccuped, looked sage, and bolted his fifth cognac.
“But what I never could figure out— Mind you, I’m not criticizing the Old Lady. She’s as swell as they make ’em. But what I can’t understand is how after living with Leora, who was the real thing, you can stand a hoity-toity skirt like Joycey!”
Then Martin broke.
The misery of not being able to work, these months since Terry had gone, had gnawed at him.
“Look here, Clif. I won’t have you discuss my wife. I’m sorry she doesn’t please you, but I’m afraid that in this particular matter—”
Clif had risen, not too steadily, though his voice and his eyes were resolute.
“All right. I figured out you were going to high-hat me. Of course I haven’t got a rich wife to slip me money. I’m just a plain old hobo. I don’t belong in a place like this. Not smooth enough to be a butler. You are. All right. I wish you luck. And meanwhile you can go plumb to hell, my young friend!”
Martin did not pursue him into the hall.
As he sat alone he groaned, “Thank Heaven, that operation’s over!”
He told himself that Clif was a crook, a fool, and a fat waster; he told himself that Clif was a cynic without wisdom, a drunkard without charm, and a philanthropist who was generous only because it larded his vanity. But these admirable truths did not keep the operation from hurting any more than it would have eased the removal of an appendix to be toldthat it was a bad appendix, an appendix without delicacy or value.
He had loved Clif—did love him and always would. But he would never see him again. Never!
The impertinence of that flabby blackguard to sneer at Gottlieb! His boorishness! Life was too short for—
“But hang it—yes, Clif is a tough, but so am I. He’s a crook, but wasn’t I a crook to fake my plague figures in St. Hubert—and the worse crook because I got praise for it?”
He bobbed up to Joyce’s room. She was lying in her immense four-poster, reading “Peter Whiffle.”
“Darling, it was all rather dreadful, wasn’t it!” she said. “He’s gone?”
“Yes.... He’s gone.... I’ve driven out the best friend I ever had—practically. I let him go, let him go off feeling that he was a rotter and a failure. It would have been decenter to have killed him. Oh, why couldn’t you have been simple and jolly with him? You were so confoundedly polite! He was uneasy and unnatural, and showed up worse than he really is. He’s no tougher than—he’s a lot better than the financiers who cover up their stuff by being suave.... Poor devil! I’ll bet right now Clif’s tramping in the rain, saying, ‘The one man I ever loved and tried to do things for has turned against me, now he’s—now he has a lovely wife. What’s the use of ever being decent?’ he’s saying.... Why couldn’t you be simple, and chuck your highfalutin’ manners for once?”
“See here! You disliked him quite as much as I did, and I will not have you blame it on me! You’ve grown beyond him. You that are always blaring about Facts—can’t you face the fact? For once, at least, it’s not my fault. You may perhaps remember, my king of men, that I had the good sense to suggest that I shouldn’t appear to-night; not meet him at all.”
“Oh—well—yes—gosh—but— Oh, I suppose so. Well, anyway— It’s over, and that’s all there is to it.”
“Darling, I do understand how you feel. But isn’t it good it is over! Kiss me good-night.”
“But”— Martin said to himself, as he sat feeling naked and lost and homeless, in the dressing-gown of gold dragon-flies on black silk which she had bought for him in Paris—“but if it’d been Leora instead of Joyce— Leora would’ve known Clif was a crook, and she’d’ve accepted it as a fact. (Talkabout your facing facts!) She wouldn’t’ve insisted on sitting as a judge. She wouldn’t’ve said, ‘This is different from me, so it’s wrong.’ She’d’ve said, ‘This is different from me, so it’s interesting.’ Leora—”
He had a sharp, terrifying vision of her, lying there coffinless, below the mold in a garden on the Penrith Hills.
He came out of it to growl, “What was it Clif said? ‘You’re not her husband—you’re her butler—you’re too smooth.’ He was right! The whole point is: I’m not allowed to see who I want to. I’ve been so clever that I’ve made myself the slave of Joyce and Holy Holabird.”
He was always going to, but he never did see Clif Clawson again.
It happened that both Joyce’s and Martin’s paternal grandfathers had been named John, and John Arrowsmith they called their son. They did not know it, but a certain John Arrowsmith, mariner of Devonport, had died in the matter of the Spanish Armada, taking with him five valorous Dons.
Joyce suffered horribly, and renewed all of Martin’s love for her (he did love pitifully this slim, brilliant girl).
“Death’s a better game than bridge—you have no partner to help you!” she said, when she was grotesquely stretched on a chair of torture and indignity; when before they would give her the anesthetic, her face was green with agony.
John Arrowsmith was straight of back and straight of limb—ten good pounds he weighed at birth—and he was gay of eye when he had ceased to be a raw wrinkled grub and become a man-child. Joyce worshiped him, and Martin was afraid of him, because he saw that this miniscule aristocrat, this child born to the self-approval of riches, would some day condescend to him.
Three months after child-bearing, Joyce was more brisk than ever about putting and back-hand service and hats and Russian emigrés.
For science Joyce had great respect and no understanding. Often she asked Martin to explain his work, but when he wasglowing, making diagrams with his thumb-nail on the tablecloth, she would interrupt him with a gracious “Darling—do you mind—just a second— Plinder, isn’t there any more of the sherry?”
When she turned back to him, though her eyes were kind his enthusiasm was gone.
She came to his laboratory, asked to see his flasks and tubes, and begged him to bully her into understanding, but she never sat back watching for silent hours.
Suddenly, in his bogged floundering in the laboratory, he touched solid earth. He blundered into the effect of phage on the mutation of bacterial species—very beautiful, very delicate—and after plodding months when he had been a sane citizen, an almost good husband, an excellent bridge-player, and a rotten workman, he knew again the happiness of high taut insanity.
He wanted to work nights, every night. During his uninspired fumbling, there had been nothing to hold him at the Institute after five, and Joyce had become used to having him flee to her. Now he showed an inconvenient ability to ignore engagements, to snap at delightful guests who asked him to explain all about science, to forget even her and the baby.
“I’vegotto work evenings!” he said. “I can’t be regular and easy about it when I’m caught by a big experiment, any more than you could be regular and easy and polite when you were gestating the baby.”
“I know but— Darling, you get so nervous when you’re working like this. Heavens, I don’t care how much you offend people by missing engagements—well, after all, I wish you wouldn’t, but I do know it may be unavoidable. But when you make yourself so drawn and trembly, are you gaining time in the long run? It’s just for your own sake. Oh, I have it! Wait! You’ll see what a scientist I am! No, I won’t explain—not yet!”
Joyce had wealth and energy. A week later, flushed, slim, gallant, joyous, she said to him after dinner, “I’ve got a surprise for you!”
She led him to the unoccupied rooms over the garage, behind their house. In that week, using a score of workmen from the most immaculate and elaborate scientific supply-house in the country, she had created for him the best bacteriologicallaboratory he had ever seen—white-tile floor and enameled brick walls, ice-box and incubator, glassware and stains and microscope, a perfect constant-temperature bath—and a technician, trained in Lister and Rockefeller, who had his bedroom behind the laboratory and who announced his readiness to serve Dr. Arrowsmith day or night.
“There!” sang Joyce. “Now when you simply must work evenings, you won’t have to go clear down to Liberty Street. You can duplicate your cultures, or whatever you call ’em. If you’re bored at dinner—all right! You can slip out here afterward, and work as late as ever you want. Is— Sweet, is it all right? Have I done it right? I tried so hard— I got the best men I could—”
While his lips were against hers he brooded, “To have done this for me! And to be so humble!... And now, curse it, I’llneverbe able to get away by myself!”
She so joyfully demanded his finding some fault that, to give her the novel pleasure of being meek, he suggested that the centrifuge was inadequate.
“You wait, my man!” she crowed.
Two evenings after, when they had returned from the opera, she led him to the cement-floored garage beneath his new laboratory, and in a corner, ready to be set up, was a second-hand but adequate centrifuge, a most adequate centrifuge, the masterpiece of the great firm of Berkeley-Saunders—in fact none other than Gladys, whose dismissal from McGurk for her sluttish ways had stirred Martin and Terry to go out and get bountifully drunk.
It was less easy for him, this time, to be grateful, but he worked at it.
Through both the economico-literary and the Rolls-Royce sections of Joyce’s set the rumor panted that there was a new diversion in an exhausted world—going out to Martin’s laboratory and watching him work, and being ever so silent and reverent, except perhaps when Joyce murmured, “Isn’t he adorable the way he teaches his darling bacteria to say ‘Pretty Polly’!” or when Latham Ireland convulsed them by arguing that scientists had no sense of humor, or Sammy de Lembre burst out in his marvelous burlesque of jazz:
Oh, Mistah Back-sil-lil-us, don’t you gri-in at me;You mi-cro-bi-o-log-ic cuss, I’m o-on-to thee.When Mr. Dr. Arrowsmith’s done looked at de clues,You’ll sit in jail a-singin’ dem Bac-ter-i-uh Blues.
Oh, Mistah Back-sil-lil-us, don’t you gri-in at me;You mi-cro-bi-o-log-ic cuss, I’m o-on-to thee.When Mr. Dr. Arrowsmith’s done looked at de clues,You’ll sit in jail a-singin’ dem Bac-ter-i-uh Blues.
Oh, Mistah Back-sil-lil-us, don’t you gri-in at me;You mi-cro-bi-o-log-ic cuss, I’m o-on-to thee.When Mr. Dr. Arrowsmith’s done looked at de clues,You’ll sit in jail a-singin’ dem Bac-ter-i-uh Blues.
Joyce’s cousin from Georgia sparkled, “Mart is so cute with all those lil vases of his. But Ah can always get him so mad by tellin’ him the trouble withhimis, he don’t go to church often enough!”
While Martin sought to concentrate.
They flocked from the house to his laboratory only once a week, which was certainly not enough to disturb a resolute man—merely enough to keep him constantly waiting for them.
When he sedately tried to explain this and that to Joyce, she said, “Did we bother you this evening? But they do admire you so.”
He remarked, “Well,” and went to bed.
R. A. Hopburn, the eminent patent-lawyer, as he drove away from the Arrowsmith-Lanyon mansion grunted at his wife:
“I don’t mind a host throwing the port at you, if he thinks you’re a chump, but I do mind his being bored at your daring to express any opinion whatever.... Didn’t he look silly, out in his idiotic laboratory!... How the deuce do you suppose Joyce ever came to marry him?”
“I can’t imagine.”
“I can only think of one reason. Of course she may—”
“Now please don’t be filthy!”
“Well, anyway— She who might have picked any number of well-bred, agreeable, intelligent chaps—and Imeanintelligent, because this Arrowsmith person may know all about germs, but he doesn’t know a symphony from a savory.... I don’t think I’m too fussy, but I don’t quite see why we should go to a house where the host apparently enjoys flatly contradicting you.... Poor devil, I’m really sorry for him; probably he doesn’t even know when he’s being rude.”
“No. Perhaps. What hurts is to think of old Roger—so gay, so strong, real Skull and Bones—and to have this abrupt Outsider from the tall grass sitting in his chair, failing to appreciate his Pol Roger— What Joyce ever saw in him!Though he does have nice eyes and such funny strong hands—”
Joyce’s busyness was on his nerves. Why she was so busy it was hard to ascertain; she had an excellent housekeeper, a noble butler, and two nurses for the baby. But she often said that she was never allowed to attain her one ambition: to sit and read.
Terry had once called her The Arranger, and though Martin resented it, when he heard the telephone bell he groaned, “Oh, Lord, there’s The Arranger—wants me to come to tea with some high-minded hen.”
When he sought to explain that he must be free from entanglements, she suggested, “Are you such a weak, irresolute,littleman that the only way you can keep concentrated is by running away? Are you afraid of the big men who can do big work, and still stop and play?”
He was likely to turn abusive, particularly as to her definition of Big Men, and when he became hot and vulgar, she turnedgrande dame, so that he felt like an impertinent servant and was the more vulgar.
He was afraid of her then. He imagined fleeing to Leora, and the two of them, frightened little people, comforting each other and hiding from her in snug corners.
But often enough Joyce was his companion, seeking new amusements as surprises for him, and in their son they had a binding pride. He sat watching little John, rejoicing in his strength.
It was in early winter, after she had royally taken the baby South for a fortnight, that Martin escaped for a week with Terry at Birdies’ Rest.
He found Terry tired and a little surly, after months of working absolutely alone. He had constructed beside the home cabin a shanty for laboratory, and a rough stable for the horses which he used in the preparation of his sera. Terry did not, as once he would have, flare into the details of his research, and not till evening, when they smoked before the rough fireplace of the cabin, loafing in chairs made of barrels cushioned with elk skin, could Martin coax him into confidences.
He had been compelled to give up much of his time tomere housework and the production of the sera which paid his expenses. “If you’d only been with me, I could have accomplished something.” But his quinine derivative research had gone on solidly, and he did not regret leaving McGurk. He had found it impossible to work with monkeys; they were too expensive, and too fragile to stand the Vermont winter; but he had contrived a method of using mice infected with pneumococcus and—
“Oh, what’s the use of my telling you this, Slim? You’re not interested, or you’d have been up here at work with me, months ago. You’ve chosen between Joyce and me. All right, but you can’t have both.”
Martin snarled, “I’m very sorry I intruded on you, Wickett,” and slammed out of the cabin. Stumbling through the snow, blundering in darkness against stumps, he knew the agony of his last hour, the hour of failure.
“I’ve lost Terry, now (though I won’t stand his impertinence!). I’ve lost everybody, and I’ve never really had Joyce. I’m completely alone. And I can only half work! I’m through! They’ll never let me get to work again!”
Suddenly, without arguing it out, he knew that he was not going to give up.
He floundered back to the cabin and burst in, crying, “You old grouch, we got to stick together!”
Terry was as much moved as he; neither of them was far from tears; and as they roughly patted each other’s shoulders they growled, “Fine pair of fools, scrapping just because we’re tired!”
“I will come and work with you, somehow!” Martin swore. “I’ll get a six-months’ leave from the Institute, and have Joyce stay at some hotel near here, or dosomething. Gee! Back to real work....Work!... Now tell me: When I come up here, what d’you say we—”
They talked till dawn.
Dr. and Mrs. Rippleton Holabirdhad invited only Joyce and Martin to dinner. Holabird was his most charming self. He admired Joyce’s pearls, and when the squabs had been served he turned on Martin with friendly intensity:
“Now will Joyce and you listen to me most particularly? Things are happening, Martin, and I want you—no, Science wants you!—to take your proper part in them. I needn’t, by the way, hint that this is absolutely confidential. Dr. Tubbs and his League of Cultural Agencies are beginning to accomplish marvels, and Colonel Minnigen has been extraordinarily liberal.
“They’ve gone at the League with exactly the sort of thoroughness and taking-it-slow that you and dear old Gottlieb have always insisted on. For four years now they’ve stuck to making plans. I happen to know that Dr. Tubbs and the council of the League have had the most wonderful conferences with college-presidents and editors and clubwomen and labor-leaders (the sound, sensible ones, of course) and efficiency-experts and the more advanced advertising-men and ministers, and all the other leaders of public thought.
“They’ve worked out elaborate charts classifying all intellectual occupations and interests, with the methods and materials and tools, and especially the goals—the aims, the ideals, the moral purposes—that are suited to each of them. Really tremendous! Why, a musician or an engineer, for example, could look at his chart and tell accurately whether he was progressing fast enough, at his age, and if not, just what his trouble was, and the remedy. With this basis, the League is ready to go to work and encourage all brain-workers to affiliate.
“McGurk Institute simply must get in on this coördination, which I regard as one of the greatest advances in thinking that has ever been made. We are at last going to make all the erstwhile chaotic spiritual activities of America really conform to the American ideal; we’re going to make them as practicaland supreme as the manufacture of cash-registers! I have certain reasons for supposing I can bring Ross McGurk and Minnigen together, now that the McGurk and Minnigen lumber interests have stopped warring, and if so I shall probably quit the Institute and help Tubbs guide the League of Cultural Agencies. Then we’ll need a new Director of McGurk who will work with us and help us bring Science out of the monastery to serve Mankind.”
By this time Martin understood everything about the League except what the League was trying to do.
Holabird went on:
“Now I know, Martin, that you’ve always rather sneered at Practicalness, but I have faith in you! I believe you’ve been too much under the influence of Wickett, and now that he’s gone and you’ve seen more of life and of Joyce’s set and mine, I believe I can coax you to take (oh! without in any way neglecting the severities of your lab work!) a broader view.
“I am authorized to appoint an Assistant Director, and I think I’m safe in saying he would succeed me as full Director. Sholtheis wants the place, and Dr. Smith and Yeo would leap at it, but I haven’t yet found any of them that are quite Our Own Sort, and I offer it to you! I daresay in a year or two, you will be Director of McGurk Institute!”
Holabird was uplifted, as one giving royal favor. Mrs. Holabird was intense, as one present on an historical occasion, and Joyce was ecstatic over the honor to her Man.
Martin stammered, “W-why, I’ll have to think it over. Sort of unexpected—”
The rest of the evening Holabird so brimmingly enjoyed himself picturing an era in which Tubbs and Martin and he would rule, coördinate, standardize, and make useful the whole world of intelligence, from trousers-designing to poetry, that he did not resent Martin’s silence. At parting he chanted, “Talk it over with Joyce, and let me have your decision to-morrow. By the way, I think we’ll get rid of Pearl Robbins; she’s been useful but now she considers herself indispensable. But that’s a detail.... Oh, I do have faith in you, Martin, dear old boy! You’ve grown and calmed down, and you’ve widened your interests so much, this past year!”
In their car, in that moving curtained room under the crystal dome-light, Joyce beamed at him.
“Isn’t it too wonderful, Mart! And I do feel Rippleton can bring it off. Think of your being Director, head of that whole great Institute, when just a few years ago you were only a cub there! But haven’t I perhaps helped, just a little?”
Suddenly Martin hated the blue-and-gold velvet of the car, the cunningly hid gold box of cigarettes, all this soft and smothering prison. He wanted to be out beside the unseen chauffeur— His Own Sort!—facing the winter. He tried to look as though he were meditating, in an awed, appreciative manner, but he was merely being cowardly, reluctant to begin the slaughter. Slowly:
“Would you really like to see me Director?”
“Of course! All that— Oh, you know; I don’t just mean the prominence and respect, but the power to accomplish good.”
“Would you like to see me dictating letters, giving out interviews, buying linoleum, having lunch with distinguished fools, advising men about whose work I don’t know a blame’ thing?”
“Oh, don’t be so superior! Some one has to do these things. And that’d be only a small part of it. Think of the opportunity of encouraging some youngster who wanted a chance to do splendid science!”
“And give up my own chance?”
“Why need you? You’d be head of your own department just the same. And even if you did give up— You are so stubborn! It’s lack of imagination. You think that because you’ve started in on one tiny branch of mental activity, there’s nothing else in the world. It’s just as when I persuaded you that if you got out of your stinking laboratory once a week or so, and actually bent your powerful intellect to a game of golf, the world of science wouldn’t immediately stop! No imagination! You’re precisely like these business men you’re always cursing because they can’t see anything in life beyond their soap-factories or their banks!”
“And you really would have me give up my work—”
He saw that with all her eager complaisances she had never understood what he was up to, had not comprehended one word about the murderous effect of the directorship on Gottlieb.
He was silent again, and before they reached home she said only, “You know I’m the last person to speak of money, butreally, it’s you who have so often brought up the matter of hating to be dependent on me, and you know as Director you would make so much more that— Forgive me!”
She fled before him into her palace, into the automatic elevator.
He plodded up the stairs, grumbling, “Yes, it is the first chance I’ve had to really contribute to the expenses here. Sure! Willing to take her money, but not to do anything in return, and then call it ‘devotion to science!’ Well, I’ve got to decide right now—”
He did not go through the turmoil of deciding; he leaped to decision without it. He marched into Joyce’s room, irritated by its snobbishness of discreet color. He was checked by the miserable way in which she sat brooding on the edge of her day couch, but he flung:
“I’m not going to do it, even if I have to leave the Institute—and Holabird will just about make me quit. I will not get buried in this pompous fakery of giving orders and—”
“Mart! Listen! Don’t you want your son to be proud of you?”
“Um. Well—No, not if he’s to be proud of me for being a stuffed shirt, a sideshow barker—”
“Please don’t be vulgar.”
“Why not? Matter of fact, I haven’t been vulgar enough lately. What I ought to do is to go to Birdies’ Rest right now, and work with Terry.”
“I wish I had some way of showing you— Oh, for a ‘scientist’ you do have the most incredible blind-spots! I wish I could make you see just how weak and futile that is. The wilds! The simple life! The old argument. It’s just the absurd, cowardly sort of thing these tired highbrows do that sneak off to some Esoteric Colony and think they’re getting strength to conquer life, when they’re merely running away from it.”
“No. Terry has his place in the country only because he can live cheaper there. If we—if he could afford it, he’d probably be right here in town, with garçons and everything, like McGurk, but with no Director Holabird by God—and no Director Arrowsmith!”
“Merely a cursing, ill-bred, intensely selfish Director Terry Wickett!”
“Now by God let me tell you—”
“Martin, do you need to emphasize your arguments by a ‘by God’ in every sentence, or have you a few other expressions in your highly scientific vocabulary?”
“Well, I have enough vocabulary to express the idea that I’m thinking of joining Terry.”
“Look here, Mart. You feel so virtuous about wanting to go off and wear a flannel shirt, and be peculiar and very, very pure. Suppose everybody argued that way. Suppose every father deserted his children whenever his nice little soul ached? Just what would become of the world? Suppose I were poor, and you left me, and I had to support John by taking in washing—”
“It’d probably be fine for you but fierce on the washing! No! I beg your pardon. That was an obvious answer. But— I imagine it’s just that argument that’s kept almost everybody, all these centuries, from being anything but a machine for digestion and propagation and obedience. The answer is that very few ever do, under any condition, willingly leave a soft bed for a shanty bunk in order to be pure, as you very properly call it, and those of us that are pioneers— Oh, this debate could go on forever! We could prove that I’m a hero or a fool or a deserter or anything you like, but the fact is I’ve suddenly seen I must go! I want my freedom to work, and I herewith quit whining about it and grab it. You’ve been generous to me. I’m grateful. But you’ve never been mine. Good-by.”
“Darling, darling— We’ll talk it over again in the morning, when you aren’t so excited.... And an hour ago I was so proud of you!”
“All right. Good-night.”
But before morning, taking two suit-cases and a bag of his roughest clothes, leaving for her a tender note which was the hardest thing he had ever written, kissing his son and muttering, “Come to me when you grow up, old man,” he went to a cheap side-street hotel. As he stretched on the rickety iron bed, he grieved for their love. Before noon he had gone to the Institute, resigned, taken certain of his own apparatus and notes and books and materials, refused to answer a telephone call from Joyce, and caught a train for Vermont.
Cramped on the red-plush seat of the day-coach (he who of late had ridden in silken private cars), he grinned with the joy of no longer having to toil at dinner-parties.
He drove up to Birdies’ Rest in a bob-sled. Terry was chopping wood, in a mess of chip-littered snow.
“Hello, Terry. Come for keeps.”
“Fine, Slim. Say, there’s a lot of dishes in the shack need washing.”
He had become soft. To dress in the cold shanty and to wash in icy water was agony; to tramp for three hours through fluffy snow exhausted him. But the rapture of being allowed to work twenty-four hours a day without leaving an experiment at its juiciest moment to creep home for dinner, of plunging with Terry into arguments as cryptic as theology and furious as the indignation of a drunken man, carried him along, and he felt himself growing sinewy. Often he meditated on yielding to Joyce so far as to allow her to build a better laboratory for them, and more civilized quarters.
With only one servant, though, or two at the very most, and just a simple decent bathroom—
She had written, “You have been thoroughly beastly, and any attempt at reconciliation, if that is possible now, which I rather doubt, must come from you.”
He answered, describing the ringing winter woods and not mentioning the platform word Reconciliation.
They wanted to study further the exact mechanism of the action of their quinine derivatives. This was difficult with the mice which Terry had contrived to use instead of monkeys, because of their size. Martin had brought with him strains ofBacillus lepisepticus, which causes a pleuro-pneumonia in rabbits, and their first labor was to discover whether their original compound was effective against this bacillus as well as against pneumococcus. Profanely they found that it was not; profanely and patiently they trudged into an infinitely complicated search for a compound that should be.
They earned their living by preparing sera which rather grudgingly they sold to physicians of whose honesty they were certain, abruptly refusing the popular drug-vendors. They thus received surprisingly large sums, and among all cleverpeople it was believed that they were too coyly shrewd to be sincere.
Martin worried as much over what he considered his treachery to Clif Clawson as over his desertion of Joyce and John, but this worrying he did only when he could not sleep. Regularly, at three in the morning, he brought both Joyce and honest Clif to Birdies’ Rest; and regularly, at six, when he was frying bacon, he forgot them.
Terry the barbarian, once he was free of the tittering and success-pawing of Holabird, was an easy campmate. Upper berth or lower was the same to him, and till Martin was hardened to cold and fatigue, Terry did more than his share of wood-cutting and supply-toting, and with great melody and skill he washed their clothes.
He had the genius to see that they two alone, shut up together season on season, would quarrel. He planned with Martin that the laboratory scheme should be extended to include eight (but never more!) maverick and undomestic researchers like themselves, who should contribute to the expenses of the camp by manufacturing sera, but otherwise do their own independent work—whether it should be the structure of the atom, or a disproof of the results of Drs. Wickett and Arrowsmith. Two rebels, a chemist now caught in a drug-firm and a university professor, were coming next autumn.
“It’s kind of a mis’able return to monasteries,” grumbled Terry, “except that we’re not trying to solve anything for anybody but our own fool selves. Mind you! When this place becomes a shrine, and a lot of cranks begin to creep in here, then you and I got to beat it, Slim. We’ll move farther back in the woods, or if we feel too old for that, we’ll take another shot at professorships or Dawson Hunziker or even the Rev. Dr. Holabird.”
For the first time Martin’s work began definitely to draw ahead of Terry’s.
His mathematics and physical chemistry were now as sound as Terry’s, his indifference to publicity and to flowery hangings as great, his industry as fanatical, his ingenuity in devising new apparatus at least comparable, and his imagination far more swift. He had less ease but more passion. He hurled out hypotheses like sparks. He began, incredulously, to comprehend his freedom. He would yet determine the essential nature of phage; and as he became stronger and surer—andno doubt less human—he saw ahead of him innumerous inquiries into chemotherapy and immunity; enough adventures to keep him busy for decades.
It seemed to him that this was the first spring he had ever seen and tasted. He learned to dive into the lake, though the first plunge was an agony of fiery cold. They fished before breakfast, they supped at a table under the oaks, they tramped twenty miles on end, they had bluejays and squirrels for interested neighbors; and when they had worked all night, they came out to find serene dawn lifting across the sleeping lake.
Martin felt sun-soaked and deep of chest, and always he hummed.
And one day he peeped out, beneath his new horn-rimmed almost-middle-aged glasses, to see a gigantic motor crawling up their woods road. From the car, jolly and competent in tweeds, stepped Joyce.
He wanted to flee through the back door of the laboratory shanty. Reluctantly he edged out to meet her.
“It’s a sweet place, really!” she said, and amiably kissed him. “Let’s walk down by the lake.”
In a stilly place of ripples and birch boughs, he was moved to grip her shoulders.
She cried, “Darling, Ihavemissed you! You’re wrong about lots of things, but you’re right about this—you must work, and not be disturbed by a lot of silly people. Do you like my tweeds? Don’t they look wildernessy? You see, I’ve come to stay! I’ll build a house near here; perhaps right across the lake. Yes. That will make a sweet place, over there on that sort of little plateau, if I can get the land—probably some horrid tight-fisted old farmer owns it. Can’t you justseeit: a wide low house, with enormous verandas and red awnings—”
“And visitors coming?”
“I suppose so. Sometimes. Why?”
Desperately, “Joyce, I do love you. I want awfully, just now, to kiss you properly. But I will not have you bringing a lot of people—and there’d probably be a rotten noisy motor launch. Make our lab a joke. Roadhouse. New sensation. Why, Terry would go crazy! Youarelovely! But you want a playmate, and I want to work. I’m afraid you can’t stay. No.”
“And our son is to be left without your care?”
“He— Would he have my care if I died?... He is a nice kid, too! I hope he won’t be a Rich Man!... Perhaps ten years from now he’ll come to me here.”
“And live likethis?”
“Sure—unless I’m broke. Then he won’t live so well. We have meat practically every day now!”
“I see. And suppose your Terry Wickett should marry some waitress or some incredibly stupid rustic? From what you’ve told me, he rather fancies that sort of girl!”
“Well, either he and I would beat her, together, or it would be the one thing that could break me.”
“Martin, aren’t you perhaps a little insane?”
“Oh, absolutely! And how I enjoy it! Though you— You look here now, Joy! We’re insane but we’re not cranks! Yesterday an ‘esoteric healer’ came here because he thought this was a free colony, and Terry walked him twenty miles, and then I think he threw him in the lake. No. Gosh. Let me think.” He scratched his chin. “I don’t believe we’re insane. We’re farmers.”
“Martin, it’s too infinitely diverting to find you becoming a fanatic, and all the while trying to wriggle out of being a fanatic. You’ve left common sense. Iamcommon sense. I believe in bathing! Good-by!”
“Now you look here. By golly—”
She was gone, reasonable and triumphant.
As the chauffeur manœuvered among the stumps of the clearing, for a moment Joyce looked out from her car, and they stared at each other, through tears. They had never been so frank, so pitiful, as in this one unarmored look which recalled every jest, every tenderness, every twilight they had known together. But the car rolled on unhalted, and he remembered that he had been doing an experiment—
On a certain evening of May, Congressman Almus Pickerbaugh was dining with the President of the United States.
“When the campaign is over, Doctor,” said the President, “I hope we shall see you a cabinet-member—the first Secretary of Health and Eugenics in the country!”
That evening, Dr. Rippleton Holabird was addressing a meeting of celebrated thinkers, assembled by the League ofCultural Agencies. Among the men of measured merriment on the platform were Dr. Aaron Sholtheis, the new Director of McGurk Institute, and Dr. Angus Duer, head of the Duer Clinic and professor of surgery in Fort Dearborn Medical College.
Dr. Holabird’s epochal address was being broadcast by radio to a million ardently listening lovers of science.
That evening, Bert Tozer of Wheatsylvania, North Dakota, was attending mid-week prayer-meeting. His new Buick sedan awaited him outside, and with modest satisfaction he heard the minister gloat:
“The righteous, even the Children of Light, they shall be rewarded with a great reward and their feet shall walk in gladness, saith the Lord of Hosts; but the mockers, the Sons of Belial, they shall be slain betimes and cast down into darkness and failure, and in the busy marts shall they be forgot.”
That evening, Max Gottlieb sat unmoving and alone, in a dark small room above the banging city street. Only his eyes were alive.
That evening, the hot breeze languished along the palm-waving ridge where the ashes of Gustaf Sondelius were lost among cinders, and a depression in a garden marked the grave of Leora.
That evening, after an unusually gay dinner with Latham Ireland, Joyce admitted, “Yes, if I do divorce him, I may marry you. I know! He’s never going to see how egotistical it is to think he’s the only man living who’s always right!”
That evening, Martin Arrowsmith and Terry Wickett lolled in a clumsy boat, an extraordinarily uncomfortable boat, far out on the water.
“I feel as if I were really beginning to work now,” said Martin. “This new quinine stuff may prove pretty good. We’ll plug along on it for two or three years, and maybe we’ll get something permanent—and probably we’ll fail!”
THE END
your interneship=> your internship {pg 100}
Old Andew Jackson cried=> Old Andrew Jackson cried {pg 109}
obxiously mixed up=> obviously mixed up {pg 127}
for Arrenhius or Jacques Loeb=> for Arrhenhius or Jacques Loeb {pg 132}
a few shooks hands=> a few shook hands {pg 182}
agree that Martin is too agressive=> agree that Martin is too aggressive {pg 411}