There seemed to be no division between his Junior and Senior years. Because of the time he had lost, he had to remain in Mohalis all summer. The year and a half from his marriage to his graduation was one whirling bewilderment, without seasons or dates.
When he had, as they put it, “cut out his nonsense and buckled down to work,” he had won the admiration of Dr. Silva and all the Good Students, especially Angus Duer and the Reverend Ira Hinkley. Martin had always announced that he did not care for their approbation, for the applause of commonplace drudges, but now that he had it, he prized it. However much he scoffed, he was gratified when he was treated as a peer by Angus, who spent the summer as extern in the Zenith General Hospital, and who already had the unapproachable dignity of a successful young surgeon.
Through that hot summer Martin and Leora labored, panting, and when they sat in her room, over their books and astout pot of beer, neither their costumes nor their language had the decorum which one ought to expect from a romantic pair devoted to science and high endeavor. They were not very modest. Leora came to use, in her casual way, such words, such ancient Anglo-Saxon monosyllables, as would have dismayed Angus or Bert Tozer. On their evenings off they went economically to an imitation Coney Island beside a scummy and stinking lake, and with grave pleasure they ate Hot Dogs, painstakingly they rode the scenic railway.
Their chief appetizer was Clif Clawson. Clif was never willingly alone or silent except when he was asleep. It is probable that his success in motor-salesmanship came entirely from his fondness for the enormous amounts of bright conversation which seem necessary in that occupation. How much of his attention to Martin and Leora was friendliness and how much of it was due to his fear of being alone cannot be determined, but certainly he entertained them and drew them out of themselves, and never seemed offended by the surly unwillingness with which Martin was sometimes guilty of greeting him.
He would come roaring up to the house in a motor, the muffler always cut out. He would shout at their window, “Come on, you guys! Come out of it! Shake a leg! Lez have a little drive and get cooled off, and then I’ll buy you a feed.”
That Martin had to work, Clif never comprehended. There was small excuse for Martin’s occasional brutality in showing his annoyance but, now that he was fulfilled in Leora and quite thoroughly and selfishly careless as to what hungry need others might have of himself, now that he was in a rut of industry and satisfied companionship, he was bored by Clif’s unchanging flood of heavy humor. It was Leora who was courteous. She had heard rather too often the seven jokes which, under varying guises, made up all of Clif’s humor and philosophy, but she could sit for hours looking amiable while Clif told how clever he was at selling, and she sturdily reminded Martin that they would never have a friend more loyal or generous.
But Clif went to New York, to a new motor agency, and Martin and Leora were more completely and happily dependent on each other than ever before.
Their last agitation was removed by the complacence ofMr. Tozer. He was cordial now in all his letters, however much he irritated them by the parental advice with which he penalized them for every check he sent.
None of the hectic activities of Senior year—neurology and pediatrics, practical work in obstetrics, taking of case-histories in the hospitals, attendance on operations, dressing wounds, learning not to look embarrassed when charity patients called one “Doctor”—was quite so important as the discussion of “What shall we do after graduation?”
Is it necessary to be an intern for more than a year? Shall we remain general practitioners all our lives, or work toward becoming specialists? Which specialties are the best—that is, the best paid? Shall we settle in the country or in the city? How about going West? What about the army medical corps; salutes, riding-boots, pretty women, travel?
This discussion they harried in the corridors of Main Medical, at the hospital, at lunch-rooms; and when Martin came home to Leora he went through it all again, very learnedly, very explanatorily. Almost every evening he “reached a decision” which was undecided again by morning.
Once when Dr. Loizeau, professor of surgery, had operated before a clinic which included several renowned visiting doctors—the small white figure of the surgeon below them, slashing between life and death, dramatic as a great actor taking his curtain-call— Martin came away certain that he was for surgery. He agreed then with Angus Duer, who had just won the Hugh Loizeau Medal in Experimental Surgery, that the operator was the lion, the eagle, the soldier among doctors. Angus was one of the few who knew without wavering precisely what he was going to do: after his internship he was to join the celebrated Chicago clinic headed by Dr. Rouncefield, the eminent abdominal surgeon. He would, he said briefly, be making twenty thousand a year as a surgeon within five years.
Martin explained it all to Leora. Surgery. Drama. Fearless nerves. Adoring assistants. Save lives. Science in devising new techniques. Make money—not be commercial, of course, but provide Leora with comforts. To Europe—they two together—gray London. Viennese cafés. Leora was useful to him during his oration. She blandly agreed; and the next evening, when he sought to prove that surgery was all rot and most surgeons merely good carpenters, she agreed more amiably than ever.
Next to Angus, and the future medical missionary, Ira Hinkley, Fatty Pfaff was the first to discover what his future was. He was going to be an obstetrician—or, as the medical students called it technically, a “baby-snatcher.” Fatty had the soul of a midwife; he sympathized with women in their gasping agony, sympathized honestly and almost tearfully, and he was magnificent at sitting still and drinking tea and waiting. During his first obstetrical case, when the student with him was merely nervous as they fidgeted by the bed in the hard desolation of the hospital room, Fatty was terrified, and he longed as he had never longed for anything in his flabby yet wistful life to comfort this gray-faced, straining, unknown woman, to take her pains on himself.
While the others drifted, often by chance, often through relatives, into their various classes, Martin remained doubtful. He admired Dean Silva’s insistence on the physician’s immediate service to mankind, but he could not forget the cool ascetic hours in the laboratory. Toward the end of Senior year, decision became necessary, and he was moved by a speech in which Dean Silva condemned too much specialization and pictured the fine old country doctor, priest and father of his people, sane under open skies, serene in self-conquest. On top of this came urgent letters from Mr. Tozer, begging Martin to settle in Wheatsylvania.
Tozer loved his daughter, apparently, and more or less liked Martin, and he wanted them near him. Wheatsylvania was a “good location,” he said: solid Scandinavian and Dutch and German and Bohemian farmers who paid their bills. The nearest doctor was Hesselink, at Groningen, nine and a half miles away, and Hesselink had more than he could do. If they would come, he would help Martin buy his equipment; he would even send him a check now and then during his two-year hospital internship. Martin’s capital was practically gone. Angus Duer and he had received appointments to Zenith General Hospital, where he would have an incomparable training, but Zenith General gave its interns, for the first year, nothing but board and room, and he had feared that he could not take the appointment. Tozer’s offer excited him. All night Leoraand he sat up working themselves into enthusiasm about the freedom of the West, about the kind hearts and friendly hands of the pioneers, about the heroism and usefulness of country doctors, and this time they reached a decision which remained decided.
They would settle in Wheatsylvania.
If he ached a little for research and Gottlieb’s divine curiosity—well, he would be such a country doctor as Robert Koch! He would not degenerate into a bridge-playing, duck-hunting drone. He would have a small laboratory of his own. So he came to the end of the year and graduated, looking rather flustered in his cap and gown. Angus stood first and Martin seventh in the class. He said good-by, with lamentations and considerable beer; he found a room for Leora nearer to the hospital; and he emerged as Martin L. Arrowsmith, M.D., house physician in the Zenith General Hospital.
TheBoardman Box Factory was afire. All South Zenith was agitated by the glare on the low-hung clouds, the smell of scorched timber, the infernal bells of charging fire-apparatus. Miles of small wooden houses west of the factory were threatened, and shawled women, tousled men in trousers over nightshirts, tumbled out of bed and came running with a thick mutter of footsteps in the night-chilled streets.
With professional calmness, firemen in helmets were stoking the dripping engines. Policemen tramped in front of the press of people, swinging their clubs, shouting, “Get back there, you!” The fire-line was sacred. Only the factory-owner and the reporters were admitted. A crazy-eyed factory-hand was stopped by a police sergeant.
“My tools are in there!” he shrieked.
“That don’t make no never-minds,” bawled the strutting sergeant. “Nobodycan’t get through here!”
But one got through. They heard the blang-blang-blang of a racing ambulance, incessant, furious, defiant. Without orders, the crowd opened, and through them, almost grazing them, slid the huge gray car. At the back, haughty in white uniform, nonchalant on a narrow seat, was The Doctor— Martin Arrowsmith.
The crowd admired him, the policemen sprang to receive him.
“Where’s the fireman got hurt?” he snapped.
“Over in that shed,” cried the police sergeant, running beside the ambulance.
“Drive over closer. Nev’ mind the smoke!” Martin barked at the driver.
A lieutenant of firemen led him to a pile of sawdust on which was huddled an unconscious youngster, his face bloodless and clammy.
“He got a bad dose of smoke from the green lumber and keeled over. Fine kid. Is he a goner?” the lieutenant begged.
Martin knelt by the man, felt his pulse, listened to hisbreathing. Brusquely opening a black bag, he gave him a hypodermic of strychnin and held a vial of ammonia to his nose. “He’ll come around. Here, you two, getum into the ambulance—hustle!”
The police sergeant and the newest probationer patrolman sprang together, and together they mumbled, “All right, Doc.”
To Martin came the chief reporter of theAdvocate-Times. In years he was only twenty-nine, but he was the oldest and perhaps the most cynical man in the world. He had interviewed senators; he had discovered graft in charity societies and even in prize-fights. There were fine wrinkles beside his eyes, he rolled Bull Durham cigarettes constantly, and his opinion of man’s honor and woman’s virtue was but low. Yet to Martin, or at least to The Doctor, he was polite.
“Will he pull through, Doc?” he twanged.
“Sure, I think so. Suffocation. Heart’s still going.”
Martin yelped the last words from the step at the back of the ambulance as it went bumping and rocking through the factory yard, through the bitter smoke, toward the shrinking crowd. He owned and commanded the city, he and the driver. They ignored traffic regulations, they disdained the people, returning from theaters and movies, who dotted the streets which unrolled before the flying gray hood. Let ’em get out of the way! The traffic officer at Chickasaw and Twentieth heard them coming, speeding like the Midnight Express—urrrrrr—blang-blang-blang-blang—and cleared the noisy corner. People were jammed against the curb, threatened by rearing horses and backing motors, and past them hurled the ambulance, blang-blang-blang-blang, with The Doctor holding a strap and swinging easily on his perilous seat.
At the hospital the hall-man cried, “Shooting case in the Arbor, Doc.”
“All right. Wait’ll I sneak in a drink,” said Martin placidly.
On the way to his room he passed the open door of the hospital laboratory, with its hacked bench, its lifeless rows of flasks and test-tubes.
“Huh! That stuff! Poking ’round labs! This is real sure-enough life,” he exulted, and he did not permit himself to see the vision of Max Gottlieb waiting there, so gaunt, so tired, so patient.
The six interns in Zenith General, including Martin and Angus Duer, lived in a long dark room with six camp beds, and six bureaus fantastic with photographs and ties and undarned socks. They spent hours sitting on their beds, arguing surgery versus internal medicine, planning the dinners which they hoped to enjoy on their nights off, and explaining to Martin, as the only married man, the virtues of the various nurses with whom, one by one, they fell in love.
Martin found the hospital routine slightly dull. Though he developed the Intern’s Walk, that quick corridor step with the stethoscope conspicuous in the pocket, he did not, he could not, develop the bedside manner. He was sorry for the bruised, yellowed, suffering patients, always changing as to individuals and never changing as a mass of drab pain, but when he had thrice dressed a wound, he had had enough; he wanted to go on to new experiences. Yet the ambulance work outside the hospital was endlessly stimulating to his pride.
The Doctor, and The Doctor alone, was safe by night in the slum called “the Arbor.” His black bag was a pass. Policemen saluted him, prostitutes bowed to him without mockery, saloon-keepers called out, “Evenin’, Doc,” and hold-up men stood back in doorways to let him pass. Martin had power, the first obvious power in his life. And he was led into incessant adventure.
He took a bank-president out of a dive; he helped the family conceal the disgrace; he irritably refused their bribe; and afterward, when he thought of how he might have dined with Leora, he was sorry he had refused it. He broke into hotel-rooms reeking with gas and revived would-be suicides. He drank Trinidad rum with a Congressman who advocated prohibition. He attended a policeman assaulted by strikers, and a striker assaulted by policemen. He assisted at an emergency abdominal operation at three o’clock in the morning. The operating-room—white tile walls and white tile floor and glittering frosted-glass skylight—seemed lined with fire-lit ice, and the large incandescents glared on the glass instrument cases, the cruel little knives. The surgeon, in long white gown, white turban, and pale orange rubber gloves, made his swift incision in the square of yellowish flesh exposed between towels, cutting deep into layers of fat, and Martin looked on unmoved as thefirst blood menacingly followed the cut. And a month after, during the Chaloosa River flood, he worked for seventy-six hours, with half-hours of sleep in the ambulance or on a police-station table.
He landed from a boat at what had been the second story of a tenement and delivered a baby on the top floor; he bound up heads and arms for a line of men; but what gave him glory was the perfectly foolhardy feat of swimming the flood to save five children marooned and terrified on a bobbing church pew. The newspapers gave him large headlines, and when he had returned to kiss Leora and sleep twelve hours, he lay and thought about research with salty self-defensive scorn.
“Gottlieb, the poor old impractical fusser! I’d like to see him swim that current!” jeered Dr. Arrowsmith to Martin.
But on night duty, alone, he had to face the self he had been afraid to uncover, and he was homesick for the laboratory, for the thrill of uncharted discoveries, the quest below the surface and beyond the moment, the search for fundamental laws which the scientist (however blasphemously and colloquially he may describe it) exalts above temporary healing as the religious exalts the nature and terrible glory of God above pleasant daily virtues. With this sadness there was envy that he should be left out of things, that others should go ahead of him, ever surer in technique, more widely aware of the phenomena of biological chemistry, more deeply daring to explain laws at which the pioneers had but fumbled and hinted.
In his second year of internship, when the thrills of fires and floods and murder became as obvious a routine as bookkeeping, when he had seen the strangely few ways in which mankind can contrive to injure themselves and slaughter one another, when it was merely wearing to have to live up to the pretentiousness of being The Doctor, Martin tried to satisfy and perhaps kill his guilty scientific lust by voluntary scrabbling about the hospital laboratory, correlating the blood counts in pernicious anemia. His trifling with the drug of research was risky. Amid the bustle of operations he began to picture the rapt quietude of the laboratory. “I better cut this out,” he said to Leora, “if I’m going to settle down in Wheatsylvania and ’tend to business and make a living—and I by golly am!”
Dean Silva often came to the hospital on consultations. Hepassed through the lobby one evening when Leora, returned from the office where she was a stenographer, was meeting Martin for dinner. Martin introduced them, and the little man held her hand, purred at her, and squeaked, “Will you children give me the pleasure of taking you to dinner? My wife has deserted me. I am a lone and misanthropic man.”
He trotted between them, round and happy. Martin and he were not student and teacher, but two doctors together, for Dean Silva was one pedagogue who could still be interested in a man who no longer sat at his feet. He led the two starvelings to a chop-house and in a settle-walled booth he craftily stuffed them with roast goose and mugs of ale.
He concentrated on Leora, but his talk was of Martin:
“Your husband must be an Artist Healer, not a picker of trifles like these laboratory men.”
“But Gottlieb’s no picker of trifles,” insisted Martin.
“No-o. But with him— It’s a difference of one’s gods. Gottlieb’s gods are the cynics, the destroyers—crapehangers, the vulgar call ’em: Diderot and Voltaire and Elser; great men, wonder-workers, yet men that had more fun destroying other people’s theories than creating their own. But my gods now, they’re the men who took the discoveries of Gottlieb’s gods and turned them to the use of human beings—made them come alive!
“All credit to the men who invented paint and canvas, but there’s more credit, eh? to the Raphaels and Holbeins who used those discoveries! Laënnec and Osler, those are the men! It’s all very fine, this business of pure research: seeking the truth, unhampered by commercialism or fame-chasing. Getting to the bottom. Ignoring consequences and practical uses. But do you realize if you carry that idea far enough, a man could justify himself for doing nothing but count the cobblestones on Warehouse Avenue—yes, and justify himself for torturing people just to see how they screamed—and then sneer at a man who was making millions of people well and happy!
“No, no! Mrs. Arrowsmith, this lad Martin is a passionate fellow, not a drudge. He must be passionate on behalf of mankind. He’s chosen the highest calling in the world, but he’s a feckless, experimental devil. You must keep him at it, my dear, and not let the world lose the benefit of his passion.”
After this solemnity Dad Silva took them to a musical comedy and sat between them, patting Martin’s shoulder, patting Leora’s arm, choking with delight when the comedian stepped into the pail of whitewash. In midnight volubility Martin and Leora sputtered their affection for him, and saw their Wheatsylvania venture as glory and salvation.
But a few days before the end of Martin’s internship and their migration to North Dakota, they met Max Gottlieb on the street.
Martin had not seen him for more than a year; Leora never. He looked worried and ill. While Martin was agonizing as to whether to pass with a bow, Gottlieb stopped.
“How is everything, Martin?” he said cordially. But his eyes said, “Why have you never come back to me?”
The boy stammered something, nothing, and when Gottlieb had gone by, stooped and moving as in pain, he longed to run after him.
Leora was demanding, “Is that the Professor Gottlieb you’re always talking about?”
“Yes. Say! How does he strike you?”
“I don’t— Sandy, he’s the greatest man I’ve ever seen! I don’t know how I know, but he is! Dr. Silva is a darling, but that was agreatman! I wish— I wish we were going to see him again. There’s the first man I ever laid eyes on that I’d leave you for, if he wanted me. He’s so—oh, he’s like a sword—no, he’s like a brain walking. Oh, Sandy, he looked so wretched. I wanted to cry. I’d black his shoes!”
“God! So would I!”
But in the bustle of leaving Zenith, the excitement of the journey to Wheatsylvania, the scramble of his state examinations, the dignity of being a Practising Physician, he forgot Gottlieb, and on that Dakota prairie radiant in early June, with meadow larks on every fence post, he began his work.
Atthe moment when Martin met him on the street, Gottlieb was ruined.
Max Gottlieb was a German Jew, born in Saxony in 1850. Though he took his medical degree, at Heidelberg, he was never interested in practising medicine. He was a follower of Helmholtz, and youthful researches in the physics of sound convinced him of the need of the quantitative method in the medical sciences. Then Koch’s discoveries drew him into biology. Always an elaborately careful worker, a maker of long rows of figures, always realizing the presence of uncontrollable variables, always a vicious assailant of what he considered slackness or lie or pomposity, never too kindly to well-intentioned stupidity, he worked in the laboratories of Koch, of Pasteur, he followed the early statements of Pearson in biometrics, he drank beer and wrote vitriolic letters, he voyaged to Italy and England and Scandinavia, and casually, between two days, he married (as he might have bought a coat or hired a housekeeper) the patient and wordless daughter of a Gentile merchant.
Then began a series of experiments, very important, very undramatic-sounding, very long, and exceedingly unappreciated. Back in 1881 he was confirming Pasteur’s results in chicken cholera immunity and, for relief and pastime, trying to separate an enzyme from yeast. A few years later, living on the tiny inheritance from his father, a petty banker, and quite carelessly and cheerfully exhausting it, he was analyzing critically the ptomain theory of disease, and investigating the mechanism of the attenuation of virulence of microörganisms. He got thereby small fame. Perhaps he was over-cautious, and more than the devil or starvation he hated men who rushed into publication unprepared.
Though he meddled little in politics, considering them the most repetitious and least scientific of human activities, he was a sufficiently patriotic German to hate the Junkers. Asa youngster he had a fight or two with ruffling subalterns; once he spent a week in jail; often he was infuriated by discriminations against Jews: and at forty he went sadly off to the America which could never become militaristic or anti-Semitic—to the Hoagland Laboratory in Brooklyn, then to Queen City University as professor of bacteriology.
Here he made his first investigation of toxin-anti-toxin reactions. He announced that antibodies, excepting antitoxin, had no relation to the immune state of an animal, and while he himself was being ragingly denounced in the small but hectic world of scientists, he dealt calmly and most brutally with Yersin’s and Marmorek’s theories of sera.
His dearest dream, now and for years of racking research, was the artificial production of antitoxin—its productionin vitro. Once he was prepared to publish, but he found an error and rigidly suppressed his notes. All the while he was lonely. There was apparently no one in Queen City who regarded him as other than a cranky Jew catching microbes by their little tails and leering at them—no work for a tall man at a time when heroes were building bridges, experimenting with Horseless Carriages, writing the first of the poetic Compelling Ads, and selling miles of calico and cigars.
In 1899 he was called to the University of Winnemac, as professor of bacteriology in the medical school, and here he drudged on for a dozen years. Not once did he talk of results of the sort called “practical”; not once did he cease warring on thepost hoc propter hocconclusions which still make up most medical lore; not once did he fail to be hated by his colleagues, who were respectful to his face, uncomfortable in feeling his ironic power, but privily joyous to call him Mephisto, Diabolist, Killjoy, Pessimist, Destructive Critic, Flippant Cynic, Scientific Bounder Lacking in Dignity and Seriousness, Intellectual Snob, Pacifist, Anarchist, Atheist, Jew. They said, with reason, that he was so devoted to Pure Science, to art for art’s sake, that he would rather have people die by the right therapy than be cured by the wrong. Having built a shrine for humanity, he wanted to kick out of it all mere human beings.
The total number of his papers, in a brisk scientific realm where really clever people published five times a year, was not more than twenty-five in thirty years. They were all exquisitely finished, all easily reduplicated and checked by the doubtfullest critics.
At Mohalis he was pleased by large facilities for work, by excellent assistants, endless glassware, plenty of guinea pigs, enough monkeys; but he was bored by the round of teaching, and melancholy again in a lack of understanding friends. Always he sought some one to whom he could talk without suspicion or caution. He was human enough, when he meditated upon the exaltation of doctors bold through ignorance, of inventors who were but tinkers magnified, to be irritated by his lack of fame in America, even in Mohalis, and to complain not too nobly.
He had never dined with a duchess, never received a prize, never been interviewed, never produced anything which the public could understand, nor experienced anything since his schoolboy amours which nice people could regard as romantic. He was, in fact, an authentic scientist.
He was of the great benefactors of humanity. There will never, in any age, be an effort to end the great epidemics or the petty infections which will not have been influenced by Max Gottlieb’s researches, for he was not one who tagged and prettily classified bacteria and protozoa. He sought their chemistry, the laws of their existence and destruction, basic laws for the most part unknown after a generation of busy biologists. Yet they were right who called him “pessimist,” for this man who, as much as any other, will have been the cause of reducing infectious diseases to almost-zero often doubted the value of reducing infectious diseases at all.
He reflected (it was an international debate in which he was joined by a few and damned by many) that half a dozen generations nearly free from epidemics would produce a race so low in natural immunity that when a great plague, suddenly springing from almost-zero to a world-smothering cloud, appeared again, it might wipe out the world entire, so that the measures to save lives to which he lent his genius might in the end be the destruction of all human life.
He meditated that if science and public hygiene did remove tuberculosis and the other major plagues, the world was grimly certain to become so overcrowded, to become such a universal slave-packed shambles, that all beauty and ease and wisdom would disappear in a famine-driven scamper for existence. Yet these speculations never checked his work. If the future became overcrowded, the future must by birth-control or otherwise look to itself. Perhaps it would, he reflected. But eventhis drop of wholesome optimism was lacking in his final doubts. For he doubted all progress of the intellect and the emotions, and he doubted, most of all, the superiority of divine mankind to the cheerful dogs, the infallibly graceful cats, the unmoral and unagitated and irreligious horses, the superbly adventuring sea-gulls.
While medical quacks, manufacturers of patent medicines, chewing-gum salesmen, and high priests of advertising lived in large houses, attended by servants, and took their sacred persons abroad in limousines, Max Gottlieb dwelt in a cramped cottage whose paint was peeling, and rode to his laboratory on an ancient and squeaky bicycle. Gottlieb himself protested rarely. He was not so unreasonable—usually—as to demand both freedom and the fruits of popular slavery. “Why,” he once said to Martin, “should the world pay me for doing what I want and what they do not want?”
If in his house there was but one comfortable chair, on his desk were letters, long, intimate, and respectful, from the great ones of France and Germany, Italy and Denmark, and from scientists whom Great Britain so much valued that she gave them titles almost as high as those with which she rewarded distillers, cigarette-manufacturers, and the owners of obscene newspapers.
But poverty kept him from fulfilment of his summer longing to sit beneath the poplars by the Rhine or the tranquil Seine, at a table on whose checkered cloth were bread and cheese and wine and dusky cherries, those ancient and holy simplicities of all the world.
Max Gottlieb’s wife was thick and slow-moving and mute; at sixty she had not learned to speak easy English; and her German was of the small-town bourgeois, who pay their debts and over-eat and grow red. If he was not confidential with her, if at table he forgot her in long reflections, neither was he unkind or impatient, and he depended on her housekeeping, her warming of his old-fashioned nightgown. She had not been well of late. She had nausea and indigestion, but she kept on with her work. Always you heard her old slippers slapping about the house.
They had three children, all born when Gottlieb was over thirty-eight: Miriam, the youngest, an ardent child who had a touch at the piano, an instinct about Beethoven, and hatred for the “ragtime” popular in America; an older sister who was nothing in particular; and their boy Robert— Robert Koch Gottlieb. He was a wild thing and a distress. They sent him, with anxiety over the cost, to a smart school near Zenith, where he met the sons of manufacturers and discovered a taste for fast motors and eccentric clothes, and no taste whatever for studying. At home he clamored that his father was a “tightwad.” When Gottlieb sought to make it clear that he was a poor man, the boy answered that out of his poverty he was always sneakingly spending money on his researches—he had no right to do that and shame his son—let the confounded University provide him with material!
There were few of Gottlieb’s students who saw him and his learning as anything but hurdles to be leaped as quickly as possible. One of the few was Martin Arrowsmith.
However harshly he may have pointed out Martin’s errors, however loftily he may have seemed to ignore his devotion, Gottlieb was as aware of Martin as Martin of him. He planned vast things. If Martin really desired his help (Gottlieb could be as modest personally as he was egotistic and swaggering in competitive science), he would make the boy’s career his own. During Martin’s minute original research, Gottlieb rejoiced in his willingness to abandon conventional—and convenient—theories of immunology and in the exasperated carefulness with which he checked results. When Martin for unknown reasons became careless, when he was obviously drinking too much, obviously mixed up in some absurd personal affair, it was tragic hunger for friends and flaming respect for excellent work which drove Gottlieb to snarl at him. Of the apologies demanded by Silva he had no notion. He would have raged—
He waited for Martin to return. He blamed himself: “Fool! There was a fine spirit. You should have known one does not use a platinum loop for shoveling coal.” As long as he could (while Martin was dish-washing and wandering on improbabletrains between impossible towns), he put off the appointment of a new assistant. Then all his wistfulness chilled to anger. He considered Martin a traitor, and put him out of his mind.
It is possible that Max Gottlieb was a genius. Certainly he was mad as any genius. He did, during the period of Martin’s internship in Zenith General, a thing more preposterous than any of the superstitions at which he scoffed.
He tried to become an executive and a reformer! He, the cynic, the anarch, tried to found an Institution, and he went at it like a spinster organizing a league to keep small boys from learning naughty words.
He conceived that there might, in this world, be a medical school which should be altogether scientific, ruled by exact quantitative biology and chemistry, with spectacle-fitting and most of surgery ignored, and he further conceived that such an enterprise might be conducted at the University of Winnemac! He tried to be practical about it; oh, he was extremely practical and plausible!
“I admit we should not be able to turn out doctors to cure village bellyaches. And ordinary physicians are admirable and altogether necessary—perhaps. But there are too many of them already. And on the ‘practical’ side, you gif me twenty years of a school that is precise and cautious, and we shall cure diabetes, maybe tuberculosis and cancer, and all these arthritis things that the carpenters shake their heads at them and call them ‘rheumatism.’ So!”
He did not desire the control of such a school, nor any credit. He was too busy. But at a meeting of the American Academy of Sciences he met one Dr. Entwisle, a youngish physiologist from Harvard, who would make an excellent dean. Entwisle admired him, and sounded him on his willingness to be called to Harvard. When Gottlieb outlined his new sort of medical school, Entwisle was fervent. “Nothing I’d like so much as to have a chance at a place like that,” he fluttered, and Gottlieb went back to Mohalis triumphant. He was the more assured because (though he sardonically refused it) he was at this time offered the medical deanship of the University of West Chippewa.
So simple, or so insane, was he that he wrote to Dean Silvapolitely bidding him step down and hand over his school—his work, his life—to an unknown teacher in Harvard! A courteous old gentleman was Dad Silva, a fit disciple of Osler, but this incredible letter killed his patience. He replied that while he could see the value of basic research, the medical school belonged to the people of the state, and its task was to provide them with immediate and practical attention. For himself, he hinted, if he ever believed that the school would profit by his resignation he would go at once, but he needed a rather broader suggestion than a letter from one of his own subordinates!
Gottlieb retorted with spirit and indiscretion. He damned the People of the State of Winnemac. Were they, in their present condition of nincompoopery, worth any sort of attention? He unjustifiably took his demand over Silva’s head to that great orator and patriot, Dr. Horace Greeley Truscott, president of the University.
President Truscott said, “Really, I’m too engrossed to consider chimerical schemes, however ingenious they may be.”
“You are too busy to consider anything but selling honorary degrees to millionaires for gymnasiums,” remarked Gottlieb.
Next day he was summoned to a special meeting of the University Council. As head of the medical department of bacteriology, Gottlieb was a member of this all-ruling body, and when he entered the long Council Chamber, with its gilt ceiling, its heavy maroon curtains, its somber paintings of pioneers, he started for his usual seat, unconscious of the knot of whispering members, meditating on far-off absorbing things.
“Oh, uh, Professor Gottlieb, will you please sit down there at the far end of the table?” called President Truscott.
Then Gottlieb was aware of tensions. He saw that out of the seven members of the Board of Regents, the four who lived in or near Zenith were present. He saw that sitting beside Truscott was not the dean of the academic department but Dean Silva. He saw that however easily they talked, they were looking at him through the mist of their chatter.
President Truscott announced, “Gentlemen, this joint meeting of the Council and the regents is to consider charges against Professor Max Gottlieb preferred by his dean and by myself.”
Gottlieb suddenly looked old.
“These charges are: Disloyalty to his dean, his president,his regents, and to the State of Winnemac. Disloyalty to recognized medical and scholastic ethics. Insane egotism. Atheism. Persistent failure to collaborate with his colleagues, and such inability to understand practical affairs as makes it dangerous to let him conduct the important laboratories and classes with which we have entrusted him. Gentlemen, I shall now prove each of these points, from Professor Gottlieb’s own letters to Dean Silva.”
He proved them.
The chairman of the Board of Regents suggested, “Gottlieb, I think it would simplify things if you just handed us your resignation and permitted us to part in good feeling, instead of having the unpleasant—”
“I’m damned if I will resign!” Gottlieb was on his feet, a lean fury. “Because you all haf schoolboy minds, golf-links minds, you are twisting my expression, and perfectly accurate expression, of a sound revolutionary ideal, which would personally to me be of no value or advantage whatefer, into a desire to steal promotions. That fools should judge honor—!” His long forefinger was a fish-hook, reaching for President Truscott’s soul. “No! I will not resign! You can cast me out!”
“I’m afraid, then, we must ask you to leave the room while we vote.” The president was very suave, for so large and strong and hearty a man.
Gottlieb rode his wavering bicycle to the laboratory. It was by telephone message from a brusque girl clerk in the president’s office that he was informed that “his resignation had been accepted.”
He agonized, “Discharge me? They couldn’t! I’m the chief glory, the only glory, of this shopkeepers’ school!” When he comprehended that apparently they very much had discharged him, he was shamed that he should have given them a chance to kick him. But the really dismaying thing was that he should by an effort to be a politician have interrupted the sacred work.
He required peace and a laboratory, at once.
They’d see what fools they were when they heard that Harvard had called him!
He was eager for the mellower ways of Cambridge and Boston. Why had he remained so long in raw Mohalis? He wrote to Dr. Entwisle, hinting that he was willing to hear anoffer. He expected a telegram. He waited a week, then had a long letter from Entwisle admitting that he had been premature in speaking for the Harvard faculty. Entwisle presented the faculty’s compliments and their hope that some time they might have the honor of his presence, but as things were now—
Gottlieb wrote to the University of West Chippewa that, after all, he was willing to think about their medical deanship ... and had answer that the place was filled, that they had not greatly liked the tone of his former letter, and they did not “care to go into the matter further.”
At sixty-one, Gottlieb had saved but a few hundred dollars—literally a few hundred. Like any bricklayer out of work, he had to have a job or go hungry. He was no longer a genius impatient of interrupted creation but a shabby schoolmaster in disgrace.
He prowled through his little brown house, fingering papers, staring at his wife, staring at old pictures, staring at nothing. He still had a month of teaching—they had dated ahead the resignation which they had written for him—but he was too dispirited to go to the laboratory. He felt unwanted, almost unsafe. His ancient sureness was broken into self-pity. He waited from delivery to delivery for the mail. Surely there would be aid from somebody who knew what he was, what he meant. There were many friendly letters about research, but the sort of men with whom he corresponded did not listen to intercollegiate faculty tattle nor know of his need.
He could not, after the Harvard mischance and the West Chippewa rebuke, approach the universities or the scientific institutes, and he was too proud to write begging letters to the men who revered him. No, he would be business-like! He applied to a Chicago teachers’ agency, and received a stilted answer promising to look about and inquiring whether he would care to take the position of teacher of physics and chemistry in a suburban high school.
Before he had sufficiently recovered from his fury to be able to reply, his household was overwhelmed by his wife’s sudden agony.
She had been unwell for months. He had wanted her to see a physician, but she had refused, and all the while she was stolidly terrified by the fear that she had cancer of the stomach. Now when she began to vomit blood, she cried to him for help. The Gottlieb who scoffed at medical credos, at“carpenters” and “pill mongers,” had forgotten what he knew of diagnosis, and when he was ill, or his family, he called for the doctor as desperately as any backwoods layman to whom illness was the black malignity of unknown devils.
In unbelievable simplicity he considered that, as his quarrel with Silva was not personal, he could still summon him, and this time he was justified. Silva came, full of excessive benignity, chuckling to himself, “When he’s got something the matter, he doesn’t run for Arrhenhius or Jacques Loeb, but for me!” Into the meager cottage the little man brought strength, and Gottlieb gazed down on him trustingly.
Mrs. Gottlieb was suffering. Silva gave her morphine. Not without satisfaction he learned that Gottlieb did not even know the dose. He examined her—his pudgy hands had the sensitiveness if not the precision of Gottlieb’s skeleton fingers. He peered about the airless bedroom: the dark green curtains, the crucifix on the dumpy bureau, the color-print of a virtuously voluptuous maiden. He was bothered by an impression of having recently been in the room. He remembered. It was the twin of the doleful chamber of a German grocer whom he had seen during a consultation a month ago.
He spoke to Gottlieb not as to a colleague or an enemy but as a patient, to be cheered.
“Don’t think there’s any tumorous mass. As of course you know, Doctor, you can tell such a lot by the differences in the shape of the lower border of the ribs, and by the surface of the belly during deep breathing.”
“Oh, yesss.”
“I don’t think you need to worry in the least. We’d better hustle her off to the University Hospital, and we’ll give her a test meal and get her X-rayed and take a look for Boas-Oppler bugs.”
She was taken away, heavy, inert, carried down the cottage steps. Gottlieb was with her. Whether or not he loved her, whether he was capable of ordinary domestic affection, could not be discovered. The need of turning to Dean Silva had damaged his opinion of his own wisdom. It was the final affront, more subtle and more enervating than the offer to teach chemistry to children. As he sat by her bed, his dark face was blank, and the wrinkles which deepened across that mask may have been sorrow, may have been fear.... Nor is it known how, through the secure and uninvaded years, hehad regarded his wife’s crucifix, which Silva had spied on their bureau—a gaudy plaster crucifix on a box set with gilded shells.
Silva diagnosed it as probable gastric ulcer, and placed her on treatment, with light and frequent meals. She improved, but she remained in the hospital for four weeks, and Gottlieb wondered: Are these doctors deceiving us? Is it really cancer, which by Their mystic craft They are concealing from me who know naught?
Robbed of her silent assuring presence on which night by weary night he had depended, he fretted over his daughters, despaired at their noisy piano-practice, their inability to manage the slattern maid. When they had gone to bed he sat alone in the pale lamplight, unmoving, not reading. He was bewildered. His haughty self was like a robber baron fallen into the hands of rebellious slaves, stooped under a filthy load, the proud eye rheumy and patient with despair, the sword hand chopped off, obscene flies crawling across the gnawed wrist.
It was at this time that he encountered Martin and Leora on the street in Zenith.
He did not look back when they had passed him, but all that afternoon he brooded on them. “That girl, maybe it was she that stole Martin from me—from science! No! He was right. One sees what happens to the fools like me!”
On the day after Martin and Leora had started for Wheatsylvania, singing, Gottlieb went to Chicago to see the teachers’ agency.
The firm was controlled by a Live Wire who had once been a county superintendent of schools. He was not much interested. Gottlieb lost his temper: “Do you make an endeavor to find positions for teachers, or do you merely send out circulars to amuse yourself? Haf you looked up my record? Do you know who I am?”
The agent roared, “Oh, we know about you, all right, all right! I didn’t when I first wrote you, but— You seem to have a good record as a laboratory man, though I don’t see that you’ve produced anything of the slightest use in medicine. We had hoped to give you a chance such as you nor nobody else ever had. John Edtooth, the Oklahoma oil magnate, has decided to found a university that for plant and endowment and individuality will beat anything that’s ever been pulled off in education—biggest gymnasium in the world, withan ex-New York Giant for baseball coach! We thought maybe we might work you in on the bacteriology or the physiology— I guess you could manage to teach that, too, if you boned up on it. But we’ve been making some inquiries. From some good friends of ours, down Winnemac way. And we find that you’re not to be trusted with a position of real responsibility. Why, they fired you for general incompetence! But now that you’ve had your lesson— Do you think you’d be competent to teach Practical Hygiene in Edtooth University?”
Gottlieb was so angry that he forgot to speak English, and as all his cursing was in student German, in a creaky dry voice, the whole scene was very funny indeed to the cackling bookkeeper and the girl stenographers. When he went from that place Max Gottlieb walked slowly, without purpose, and in his eyes were senile tears.
Noone in the medical world had ever damned more heartily than Gottlieb the commercialism of certain large pharmaceutical firms, particularly Dawson T. Hunziker & Co., Inc., of Pittsburgh. The Hunziker Company was an old and ethical house which dealt only with reputable doctors—or practically only with reputable doctors. It furnished excellent antitoxins for diphtheria and tetanus, as well as the purest of official preparations, with the plainest and most official-looking labels on the swaggeringly modest brown bottles. Gottlieb had asserted that they produced doubtful vaccines, yet he returned from Chicago to write to Dawson Hunziker that he was no longer interested in teaching, and he would be willing to work for them on half time if he might use their laboratories, on possibly important research, for the rest of the day.
When the letter had gone he sat mumbling. He was certainly not altogether sane. “Education! Biggest gymnasium in the world! Incapable of responsibility. Teaching I can do no more. But Hunziker will laugh at me. I haf told the truth about him and I shall haf to— Dear Gott, what shall I do?”
Into this still frenzy, while his frightened daughters peered at him from doorways, hope glided.
The telephone rang. He did not answer it. On the third irascible burring he took up the receiver and grumbled, “Yes, yes, vot iss it?”
A twanging nonchalant voice: “This M. C. Gottlieb?”
“This is Dr. Gottlieb!”
“Well, I guess you’re the party. Hola wire. Long distance wants yuh.”
Then, “Professor Gottlieb? This is Dawson Hunziker speaking. From Pittsburgh. My dear fellow, we should be delighted to have you join our staff.”
“I— But—”
“I believe you have criticized the pharmaceutical houses—oh, we read the newspaper clippings very efficiently!—but wefeel that when you come to us and understand the Spirit of the Old Firm better, you’ll be enthusiastic. I hope, by the way, I’m not interrupting something.”
Thus, over certain hundreds of miles, from the gold and blue drawing-room of his Sewickley home, Hunziker spoke to Max Gottlieb sitting in his patched easy chair, and Gottlieb grated, with a forlorn effort at dignity:
“No, it iss all right.”
“Well—we shall be glad to offer you five thousand dollars a year, for a starter, and we shan’t worry about the half-time arrangement. We’ll give you all the space and technicians and material you need, and you just go ahead and ignore us, and work out whatever seems important to you. Our only request is that if you do find any serums which are of real value to the world, we shall have the privilege of manufacturing them, and if we lose money on ’em, it doesn’t matter. We like to make money, if we can do it honestly, but our chief purpose is to serve mankind. Of course if the serums pay, we shall be only too delighted to give you a generous commission. Now about practical details—”
Gottlieb, the placidly virulent hater of religious rites, had a religious-seeming custom.
Often he knelt by his bed and let his mind run free. It was very much like prayer, though certainly there was no formal invocation, no consciousness of a Supreme Being—other than Max Gottlieb. This night, as he knelt, with the wrinkles softening in his drawn face, he meditated, “I was asinine that I should ever scold the commercialists! This salesman fellow, he has his feet on the ground. How much more aut’entic the worst counter-jumper than frightened professors! Fine dieners! Freedom! No teaching of imbeciles!Du Heiliger!”
But he had no contract with Dawson Hunziker.
In the medical periodicals the Dawson Hunziker Company published full-page advertisements, most starchy and refined in type, announcing that Professor Max Gottlieb, perhaps themost distinguished immunologist in the world, had joined their staff.
In his Chicago clinic, one Dr. Rouncefield chuckled, “That’s what becomes of these super-highbrows. Pardon me if I seem to grin.”
In the laboratories of Ehrlich and Roux, Bordet and Sir David Bruce, sorrowing men wailed, “How could old Max have gone over to that damned pill-pedler? Why didn’t he come to us? Oh, well, if he didn’t want to—Voila!He is dead.”
In the village of Wheatsylvania, in North Dakota, a young doctor protested to his wife, “Of all the people in the world! I wouldn’t have believed it! Max Gottlieb falling for those crooks!”
“I don’t care!” said his wife. “If he’s gone into business, he had some good reason for it. I told you, I’d leave you for—”
“Oh, well,” sighingly, “give and forgive. I learned a lot from Gottlieb and I’m grateful for— God, Leora, I wishhehadn’t gone wrong!”
And Max Gottlieb, with his three young and a pale, slow-moving wife, was arriving at the station in Pittsburgh, tugging a shabby wicker bag, an immigrant bundle, and a Bond Street dressing-case. From the train he had stared up at the valiant cliffs, down to the smoke-tinged splendor of the river, and his heart was young. Here was fiery enterprise, not the flat land and flat minds of Winnemac. At the station-entrance every dingy taxicab seemed radiant to him, and he marched forth a conqueror.
In the Dawson Hunziker building, Gottlieb found such laboratories as he had never planned, and instead of student assistants he had an expert who himself had taught bacteriology, as well as three swift technicians, one of them German-trained. He was received with acclaim in the private office of Hunziker, which was remarkably like a minor cathedral. Hunziker was bald and business-like as to skull but tortoise-spectacled and sentimental of eye. He stood up at his Jacobean desk, gave Gottlieb a Havana cigar, and told him that they had awaited him pantingly.
In the enormous staff dining-room Gottlieb found scores of competent young chemists and biologists who treated him with reverence. He liked them. If they talked too much of money—of how much this new tincture of cinchona ought to sell, and how soon their salaries would be increased—yet they were free of the careful pomposities of college instructors. As a youngster, the cap-tilted young Max had been a laughing man, and now in gusty arguments his laughter came back.
His wife seemed better; his daughter Miriam found an excellent piano teacher; the boy Robert entered college that autumn; they had a spacious though decrepit house; the relief from the droning and the annually repeated, inevitable routine of the classroom was exhilarating; and Gottlieb had never in his life worked so well. He was unconscious of everything outside of his laboratory and a few theaters and concert-halls.
Six months passed before he realized that the young technical experts resented what he considered his jolly thrusts at their commercialism. They were tired of his mathematical enthusiasms and some of them viewed him as an old bore, muttered of him as a Jew. He was hurt, for he liked to be merry with fellow workers. He began to ask questions and to explore the Hunziker building. He had seen nothing of it save his laboratory, a corridor or two, the dining-room, and Hunziker’s office.
However abstracted and impractical, Gottlieb would have made an excellent Sherlock Holmes—if anybody who would have made an excellent Sherlock Holmes would have been willing to be a detective. His mind burned through appearances to actuality. He discovered now that the Dawson Hunziker Company was quite all he had asserted in earlier days. They did make excellent antitoxins and ethical preparations, but they were also producing a new “cancer remedy” manufactured from the orchid, pontifically recommended and possessing all the value of mud. And to various billboard-advertising beauty companies they sold millions of bottles of a complexion-cream guaranteed to turn a Canadian Indian guide as lily-fair as the angels. This treasure cost six cents a bottle to make and a dollar over the counter, and the name of Dawson Hunziker was never connected with it.
It was at this time that Gottlieb succeeded in his masterwork after twenty years of seeking. He produced antitoxin in the test-tube, which meant that it would be possible to immunize against certain diseases without tediously making sera by the inoculation of animals. It was a revolution, the revolution, in immunology ... if he was right.
He revealed it at a dinner for which Hunziker had captured a general, a college president, and a pioneer aviator. It was an expansive dinner, with admirable hock, the first decent German wine Gottlieb had drunk in years. He twirled the slender green glass affectionately; he came out of his dreams and became excited, gay, demanding. They applauded him and for an hour he was a Great Scientist. Of them all, Hunziker was most generous in his praise. Gottlieb wondered if some one had not tricked this good bald man into intrigues with the beautifiers.
Hunziker summoned him to the office next day. Hunziker did his summoning very well indeed (unless it happened to be merely a stenographer). He sent a glossy morning-coated male secretary, who presented Mr. Hunziker’s compliments to the much less glossy Dr. Gottlieb, and hinted with the delicacy of a lilac bud that if it was quite altogether convenient, if it would not in the least interfere with Dr. Gottlieb’s experiments, Mr. Hunziker would be flattered to see him in the office at a quarter after three.
When Gottlieb rambled in, Hunziker motioned the secretary out of existence and drew up a tall Spanish chair.
“I lay awake half the night thinking about your discovery, Dr. Gottlieb. I’ve been talking to the technical director and sales-manager and we feel it’s the time to strike. We’ll patent your method of synthesizing antibodies and immediately put them on the market in large quantities, with a great big advertising campaign—you know—not circus it, of course—strictly high-class ethical advertising. We’ll start with anti-diphtheria serum. By the way, when you receive your next check you’ll find we’ve raised your honorarium to seven thousand a year.” Hunziker was a large purring pussy, now, and Gottlieb death-still. “Need I say, my dear fellow, that if there’s the demand I anticipate, you will have exceedingly large commissions coming!”
Hunziker leaned back with a manner of “How’s that for glory, my boy?”
Gottlieb spoke nervously: “I do not approve of patenting serological processes. They should be open to all laboratories. And I am strongly against premature production or even announcement. I think I am right, but I must check my technique, perhaps improve it—besure. Then, I should think, there should be no objection to market production, but in ve-ry small quantities and in fair competition with others, not under patents, as if this was a dinglebat toy for the Christmas tradings!”
“My dear fellow, I quite sympathize. Personally I should like nothing so much as to spend my whole life in just producing one priceless scientific discovery, without consideration of mere profit. But we have our duty toward the stockholders of the Dawson Hunziker Company to make money for them. Do you realize that they have—and many of them are poor widows and orphans—invested their Little All in our stock, and that we must keep faith? I am helpless; I am but their Humble Servant. And on the other side: I think we’ve treated you rather well, Dr. Gottlieb, and we’ve given you complete freedom. And we intend to go on treating you well! Why, man, you’ll be rich; you’ll be one of us! I don’t like to make any demands, but on this point it’s my duty to insist, and I shall expect you at the earliest possible moment to start manufacturing—”
Gottlieb was sixty-two. The defeat at Winnemac had done something to his courage.... And he had no contract with Hunziker.
He protested shakily, but as he crawled back to his laboratory it seemed impossible for him to leave this sanctuary and face the murderous brawling world, and quite as impossible to tolerate a cheapened and ineffective imitation of his antitoxin. He began, that hour, a sordid strategy which his old proud self would have called inconceivable; he began to equivocate, to put off announcement and production till he should have “cleared up a few points,” while week on week Hunziker became more threatening. Meantime he prepared for disaster. He moved his family to a smaller house, and gave up every luxury, even smoking.
Among his economies was the reduction of his son’s allowance.
Robert was a square-rigged, swart, tempestuous boy, arrogant where there seemed to be no reason for arrogance, longed for by the anemic, milky sort of girls, yet ever supercilious to them. While his father was alternately proud and amiably sardonic about his own Jewish blood, the boy conveyed to hisclassmates in college that he was from pure and probably noble German stock. He was welcomed, or half welcomed, in a motoring, poker-playing, country-club set, and he had to have more money. Gottlieb missed twenty dollars from his desk. He who ridiculed conventional honor had the honor, as he had the pride, of a savage old squire. A new misery stained his incessant bitterness at having to deceive Hunziker. He faced Robert with, “My boy, did you take the money from my desk?”
Few youngsters could have faced that jut of his hawk nose, the red-veined rage of his sunken eyes. Robert spluttered, then shouted:
“Yes, I did! And I’ve got to have some more! I’ve got to get some clothes and stuff. It’s your fault. You bring me up to train with a lot of fellows that have all the cash in the world, and then you expect me to dress like a hobo!”
“Stealing—”
“Rats! What’s stealing! You’re always making fun of these preachers that talk about Sin and Truth and Honesty and all those words that’ve been used so much they don’t mean a darn’ thing and— I don’t care! Daws Hunziker, the old man’s son, he told me his dad said you could be a millionaire, and then you keep us strapped like this, and Mom sick— Let me tell you, back in Mohalis Mom used to slip me a couple of dollars almost every week and— I’m tired of it! If you’re going to keep me in rags, I’m going to cut out college!”
Gottlieb stormed, but there was no force in it. He did not know, all the next fortnight, what his son was going to do, what himself was going to do.
Then, so quietly that not till they had returned from the cemetery did they realize her passing, his wife died, and the next week his oldest daughter ran off with a worthless laughing fellow who lived by gambling.
Gottlieb sat alone. Over and over he read the Book of Job. “Truly the Lord hath smitten me and my house,” he whispered. When Robert came in, mumbling that he would be good, the old man lifted to him a blind face, unhearing. But as he repeated the fables of his fathers it did not occur to him to believe them, or to stoop in fear before their God of Wrath—or to gain ease by permitting Hunziker to defile his discovery.
He arose, in time, and went silently to his laboratory. His experiments were as careful as ever, and his assistants saw nochange save that he did not lunch in hall. He walked blocks away, to a vile restaurant at which he could save thirty cents a day.
Out of the dimness which obscured the people about him, Miriam emerged.
She was eighteen, the youngest of his brood, squat, and in no way comely save for her tender mouth. She had always been proud of her father, understanding the mysterious and unreasoning compulsions of his science, but she had been in awe till now, when he walked heavily and spoke rarely. She dropped her piano lessons, discharged the maid, studied the cook-book, and prepared for him the fat crisp dishes that he loved. Her regret was that she had never learned German, for he dropped now and then into the speech of his boyhood.
He eyed her, and at length: “So! One is with me. Could you endure the poverty if I went away—to teach chemistry in a high school?”
“Yes. Of course. Maybe I could play the piano in a movie theater.”
He might not have done it without her loyalty, but when Dawson Hunziker next paraded into the laboratory, demanding, “Now look here. We’ve fussed long enough. We got to put your stuff on the market,” then Gottlieb answered, “No. If you wait till I have done all I can—maybe one year, probably three—you shall have it. But not till I am sure. No.”
Hunziker went off huffily, and Gottlieb prepared for sentence.
Then the card of Dr. A. DeWitt Tubbs, Director of the McGurk Institute of Biology, of New York, was brought to him.
Gottlieb knew of Tubbs. He had never visited McGurk but he considered it, next to Rockefeller and McCormick, the soundest and freest organization for pure scientific research in the country, and if he had pictured a Heavenly laboratory in which good scientists might spend eternity in happy and thoroughly impractical research, he would have devised it in the likeness of McGurk. He was mildly pleased that its director should have called on him.
Dr. A. DeWitt Tubbs was tremendously whiskered on all visible spots save his nose and temples and the palms of hishands, short but passionately whiskered, like a Scotch terrier. Yet they were not comic whiskers; they were the whiskers of dignity; and his eyes were serious, his step an earnest trot, his voice a piping solemnity.
“Dr. Gottlieb, this is a great pleasure. I have heard your papers at the Academy of Sciences but, to my own loss, I have hitherto failed to have an introduction to you.”
Gottlieb tried not to sound embarrassed.
Tubbs looked at the assistants, like a plotter in a political play, and hinted, “May we have a talk—”
Gottlieb led him to his office, overlooking a vast bustle of sidetracks, of curving rails and brown freight-cars, and Tubbs urged:
“It has come to our attention, by a curious chance, that you are on the eve of your most significant discovery. We all wondered, when you left academic work, at your decision to enter the commercial field. We wished that you had cared to come to us.”
“You would have taken me in? I needn’t at all have come here?”
“Naturally! Now from what we hear, you are not giving your attention to the commercial side of things, and that tempts us to wonder whether you could be persuaded to join us at McGurk. So I just sprang on a train and ran down here. We should be delighted to have you become a member of the institute, and chief of the Department of Bacteriology and Immunology. Mr. McGurk and I desire nothing but the advancement of science. You would, of course, have absolute freedom as to what researches you thought it best to pursue, and I think we could provide as good assistance and material as would be obtainable anywhere in the world. In regard to salary—permit me to be business-like and perhaps blunt, as my train leaves in one hour— I don’t suppose we could equal the doubtless large emolument which the Hunziker people are able to pay you, but we can go to ten thousand dollars a year—”
“Oh, my God, do not talk of the money! I shall be wit’ you in New York one week from to-day. You see,” said Gottlieb, “I haf no contract here!”