Probably a certain amount of hypocrisy is inevitable in us sinful human critters, but when a public official tries to pose as a saint while indulging in every vice, and tries to cover up his gross ignorance and incompetence by pulling political wires, and makes a holy show of himself by not even doing a first-class job of wire-pulling, then even the cussedest of us old scoundrels begins to holler for the meat-ax.
Probably a certain amount of hypocrisy is inevitable in us sinful human critters, but when a public official tries to pose as a saint while indulging in every vice, and tries to cover up his gross ignorance and incompetence by pulling political wires, and makes a holy show of himself by not even doing a first-class job of wire-pulling, then even the cussedest of us old scoundrels begins to holler for the meat-ax.
Pickerbaugh wrote to Martin from Washington:
I greatly regret to hear that you have resigned your post. I cannot tell you how disappointed I am, after all the pains I took in breaking you in and making you acquainted with my ideals. Bissex informs me that, because of crisis in city finances, he had to reduce your salary temporarily. Well personally I would rather work for the D.P.H. for nothing a year and earn my keep by being a night watchman than give up the fight for everything that is decent and constructive. I am sorry. I had a great liking for you, and your defection, your going back to private practise merely for commercial gain, your selling out for what I presume is a very high emolument, is one of the very greatest blows I have recently had to sustain.
I greatly regret to hear that you have resigned your post. I cannot tell you how disappointed I am, after all the pains I took in breaking you in and making you acquainted with my ideals. Bissex informs me that, because of crisis in city finances, he had to reduce your salary temporarily. Well personally I would rather work for the D.P.H. for nothing a year and earn my keep by being a night watchman than give up the fight for everything that is decent and constructive. I am sorry. I had a great liking for you, and your defection, your going back to private practise merely for commercial gain, your selling out for what I presume is a very high emolument, is one of the very greatest blows I have recently had to sustain.
As they rode up to Chicago Martin thought aloud:
“I never knew I could be so badly licked. I never want to see a laboratory or a public health office again. I’m done with everything but making money.
“I suppose this Rouncefield Clinic is probably nothing but a gilded boob-trap—scare the poor millionaire into having all the fancy kinds of examinations and treatments the traffic will bear. I hope it is! I expect to be a commercial-group doctor the rest of my life. I hope I have the sense to be!
“All wise men are bandits. They’re loyal to their friends, but they despise the rest. Why not, when the mass of people despise them if theyaren’tbandits? Angus Duer had the sense to see this from the beginning, way back in medic school. He’s probably a perfect technician as a surgeon, but he knows you get only what you grab. Think of the years it’s taken me to learn what he savvied all the time!
“Know what I’ll do? I’ll stick to the Rouncefield Clinic till I’m making maybe thirty thousand a year, and then I’ll get Ockford and start my own clinic, with myself as internist and head of the whole shooting-match, and collect every cent I can.
“All right, if what people want is a little healing and a lot of tapestry, they shall have it—and pay for it.
“I never thought I could be such a failure—to become a commercialist and not want to be anything else. And I don’t want to be anything else, believe me! I’m through!”
Thenfor a year with each day longer than a sleepless night, yet the whole year speeding without events or seasons or eagerness, Martin was a faithful mechanic in that most competent, most clean and brisk and visionless medical factory, the Rouncefield Clinic. He had nothing of which to complain. The clinic did, perhaps, give over-many roentgenological examinations to socially dislocated women who needed children and floor-scrubbing more than pretty little skiagraphs; they did, perhaps, view all tonsils with too sanguinary a gloom; but certainly no factory could have been better equipped or more gratifyingly expensive, and none could have routed its raw human material through so many processes so swiftly. The Martin Arrowsmith who had been supercilious toward Pickerbaughs and old Dr. Winters had for Rouncefield and Angus Duer and the other keen taut specialists of the clinic only the respect of the poor and uncertain for the rich and shrewd.
He admired Angus’s firmness of purpose and stability of habit.
Angus had a swim or a fencing lesson daily; he swam easily and fenced like a still-faced demon. He was in bed before eleven-thirty; he never took more than one drink a day; and he never read anything or said anything which would not contribute to his progress as a Brilliant Young Surgeon. His underlings knew that Dr. Duer would not fail to arrive precisely on time, precisely well dressed, absolutely sober, very cool, and appallingly unpleasant to any nurse who made a mistake or looked for a smile.
Martin would without fear have submitted to the gilded and ardent tonsil-snatcher of the clinic, would have submitted to Angus for abdominal surgery or to Rouncefield for any operation of the head or neck, providing he was himself quite sure the operation was necessary, but he was never able to rise to the clinic’s lyric faith that any portions of the bodywithout which people could conceivably get along should certainly be removed at once.
The real flaw in his year of Chicago was that through all his working day he did not live. With quick hands, and one-tenth of his brain, he made blood counts, did urinalyses and Wassermanns and infrequent necropsies, and all the while he was dead, in a white-tiled coffin. Amid the blattings of Pickerbaugh and the peepings of Wheatsylvania, he had lived, had fought his environment. Now there was nothing to fight.
After hours, he almost lived. Leora and he discovered the world of book-shops and print-shops and theaters and concerts. They read novels and history and travel; they talked, at dinners given by Rouncefield or Angus, to journalists, engineers, bankers, merchants. They saw a Russian play, and heard Mischa Elman, and read Gottlieb’s beloved Rabelais. Martin learned to flirt without childishness, and Leora went for the first time to a hair-dresser and to a manicure, and began her lessons in French. She had called Martin a “lie-hunter,” a “truth-seeker.” They decided now, talking it over in their tight little two-and-quarter room flat, that most people who called themselves “truth-seekers”—persons who scurry about chattering of Truth as though it were a tangible separable thing, like houses or salt or bread—did not so much desire to find Truth as to cure their mental itch. In novels, these truth-seekers quested the “secret of life” in laboratories which did not seem to be provided with Bunsen flames or reagents; or they went, at great expense and much discomfort from hot trains and undesirable snakes, to Himalayan monasteries, to learn from unaseptic sages that the Mind can do all sorts of edifying things if one will but spend thirty or forty years in eating rice and gazing on one’s navel.
To these high matters Martin responded, “Rot!” He insisted that there is no Truth but only many truths; that Truth is not a colored bird to be chased among the rocks and captured by its tail, but a skeptical attitude toward life. He insisted that no one could expect more than, by stubbornness or luck, to have the kind of work he enjoyed and an ability to become better acquainted with the facts of that work than the average job-holder.
His mechanistic philosophy did not persuade him that he was progressing adequately. When he tried to match himself with the experts of the clinic or with their professional friends,he was even more uncomfortable than he had been under the disconcerting scorn of Dr. Hesselink of Groningen. At clinic luncheons he met surgeons from London, New York, Boston; men with limousines and social positions and the offensive briskness of the man who has numerous engagements, or the yet more offensive quietness of the person who is amused by his inferiors; master technicians, readers of papers at medical congresses, executives and controllers, unafraid to operate before a hundred peering doctors, or to give well-bred and exceedingly final orders to subordinates; captain-generals of medicine, never doubting themselves; great priests and healers; men mature and wise and careful and blandly cordial.
In their winged presences, Max Gottlieb seemed an aged fusser, Gustaf Sondelius a mountebank, and the city of Nautilus unworthy of passionate warfare. As their suave courtesy smothered him, Martin felt like a footman.
In long hours of increasing frankness and lucidity he discussed with Leora the question of “What is this Martin Arrowsmith and whither is he going?” and he admitted that the sight of the Famous Surgeons disturbed his ancient faith that he was somehow a superior person. It was Leora who consoled him:
“I’ve got a lovely description for your dratted Famous Surgeons. You know how polite and important they are, and they smile so carefully? Well, don’t you remember you once said that Professor Gottlieb called all such people like that ‘men of measured merriment’?”
He caught up the phrase; they sang it together; and they made of it a beating impish song:
“Men of measured merriment! Men of measured merriment! Damn the great executives, the men of measured merriment, damn the men with careful smiles, damn the men that run the shops, oh, damn their measured merriment, the men with measured merriment, oh, damn their measured merriment, and DAMN their careful smiles!”
While Martin developed in a jagged way from the boy of Wheatsylvania to mature man, his relations to Leora developed from loyal boy-and-girl adventurousness to lasting solidity. They had that understanding of each other known only tomarried people, a few married people, wherein for all their differences they were as much indissoluble parts of a whole as are the eye and hand. Their identification did not mean that they dwelt always in rosy bliss. Because he was so intimately fond of her and so sure of her, because anger and eager hot injustices are but ways of expressing trust, Martin was irritated by her and querulous with her as he would not have endured being with any other woman, any charming Orchid.
He stalked out now and then after a quarrel, disdaining to answer her, and for hours he left her alone, enjoying the knowledge that he was hurting her, that she was alone, waiting, perhaps weeping. Because he loved her and also was fond of her, he was annoyed when she was less sleek, less suave, than the women he encountered at Angus Duer’s.
Mrs. Rouncefield was a worthy old waddler—beside her, Leora was shining and exquisite. But Mrs. Duer was of amber and ice. She was a rich young woman, she dressed with distinction, she spoke with finishing-school mock-melodiousness, she was ambitious, and she was untroubled by the possession of a heart or a brain. She was, indeed, what Mrs. Irving Watters believed herself to be.
In the simple gorgeousness of the Nautilus Smart set, Mrs. Clay Tredgold had petted Leora and laughed at her if she lacked a shoe-buckle or split an infinitive, but the gold-slippered Mrs. Duer was accustomed to sneer at carelessness with the most courteous and unresentable and unmistakable sneers.
As they returned by taxicab from the Duers’, Martin flared:
“Don’t you ever learn anything? I remember once in Nautilus we stopped on a country road and talked till—oh, darn’ near dawn, and you were going to be so energetic, but here we are again to-night, with just the same thing— Good God, couldn’t you even take the trouble to notice that you had a spot of soot on your nose to-night? Mrs. Duer noticed it, all right! Why are you so sloppy? Why can’t you take a little care? And why can’t you make an effort, anyway, to have something to say? You just sit there at dinner—you just sit and look healthy! Don’t you want to help me? Mrs. Duer will probably help Angus to become president of the American Medical Association, in about twenty years, and by that time I suppose you’ll have me back in Dakota as assistant to Hesselink!”
Leora had been snuggling beside him in the unusual luxuryof a taxicab. She sat straight now, and when she spoke she had lost the casual independence with which she usually regarded life:
“Dear, I’m awfully sorry. I went out this afternoon, I went out and had a facial massage, so as to look nice for you, and then I knew you like conversation, so I got my little book about modern painting that I bought and I studied it terribly hard, but to-night I just couldn’t seem to get the conversation around to modern painting—”
He was sobbing, with her head on his shoulder, “Oh, you poor, scared, bullied kid, trying to be grown-up with these dollar-chasers!”
After the first daze of white tile and bustling cleverness at the Rouncefield Clinic, Martin had the desire to tie up a few loose knots of his streptolysin research.
When Angus Duer discovered it he hinted, “Look here, Martin, I’m glad you’re keeping on with your science, but if I were you I wouldn’t, I think, waste too much energy on mere curiosity. Dr. Rouncefield was speaking about it the other day. We’d be glad to have you do all the research you want, only we’d like it if you went at something practical. Take for instance: if you could make a tabulation of the blood-counts in a couple of hundred cases of appendicitis and publish it, that’d get somewhere, and you could sort of bring in a mention of the clinic, and we’d all receive a little credit—and incidentally maybe we could raise you to three thousand a year then.”
This generosity had the effect of extinguishing Martin’s desire to do any research whatever.
“Angus is right. What he means is: as a scientist I’m finished. I am. I’ll never try to do anything original again.”
It was at this time, when Martin had been with the clinic for a year, that his streptolysin paper was published in theJournal of Infectious Diseases. He gave reprints to Rouncefield and to Angus. They said extremely nice things which showed that they had not read the paper, and again they suggested his tabulating blood-counts.
He also sent a reprint to Max Gottlieb, at the McGurk Institute of Biology.
Gottlieb wrote to him, in that dead-black spider-web script:
Dear Martin:I have read your paper with great pleasure. The curves of the relation of hemolysin production to age of culture are illuminating. I have spoken about you to Tubbs. When are you coming to us—to me? Your laboratory and diener are waiting for you here. The last thing I want to be is a mystic, but I feel when I see your fine engraved letterhead of a clinic and a Rouncefield that you should be tired of trying to be a good citizen and ready to come back to work. We shall be glad, & Dr. Tubbs, if you can come.Truly yours,M. Gottlieb.
Dear Martin:
I have read your paper with great pleasure. The curves of the relation of hemolysin production to age of culture are illuminating. I have spoken about you to Tubbs. When are you coming to us—to me? Your laboratory and diener are waiting for you here. The last thing I want to be is a mystic, but I feel when I see your fine engraved letterhead of a clinic and a Rouncefield that you should be tired of trying to be a good citizen and ready to come back to work. We shall be glad, & Dr. Tubbs, if you can come.
Truly yours,
M. Gottlieb.
“I’m simply going to adore New York,” said Leora.
TheMcGurk Building. A sheer wall, thirty blank stories of glass and limestone, down in the pinched triangle whence New York rules a quarter of the world.
Martin was not overwhelmed by his first hint of New York; after a year in the Chicago Loop, Manhattan seemed leisurely. But when from the elevated railroad he beheld the Woolworth Tower, he was exalted. To him architecture had never existed; buildings were larger or smaller bulks containing more or less interesting objects. His most impassioned architectural comment had been, “There’s a cute bungalow; be nice place to live.” Now he pondered, “Like to see that tower every day—clouds and storms behind it and everything—so sort of satisfying.”
He came along Cedar Street, among thunderous trucks portly with wares from all the world; came to the bronze doors of the McGurk Building and a corridor of intemperately colored terra-cotta, with murals of Andean Indians, pirates booming up the Spanish Main, guarded gold-trains, and the stout walls of Cartagena. At the Cedar Street end of the corridor, a private street, one block long, was the Bank of the Andes and Antilles (Ross McGurk chairman of the board), in whose gold-crusted sanctity red-headed Yankee exporters drew drafts on Quito, and clerks hurled breathless Spanish at bulky women. A sign indicated, at the Liberty Street end, “Passenger Offices, McGurk Line, weekly sailings for the West Indies and South America.”
Born to the prairies, never far from the sight of the cornfields, Martin was conveyed to blazing lands and portentous enterprises.
One of the row of bronze-barred elevators was labeled “Express to McGurk Institute.” He entered it proudly, feeling himself already a part of the godly association. They rose swiftly, and he had but half-second glimpses of ground glassdoors with the signs of mining companies, lumber companies, Central American railroad companies.
The McGurk Institute is probably the only organization for scientific research in the world which is housed in an office building. It has the twenty-ninth and thirtieth stories of the McGurk Building, and the roof is devoted to its animal house and to tiled walks along which (above a world of stenographers and bookkeepers and earnest gentlemen who desire to sell Better-bilt Garments to the golden dons of the Argentine) saunter rapt scientists dreaming of osmosis in Spirogyra.
Later, Martin was to note that the reception-room of the Institute was smaller, yet more forbiddingly polite, in its white paneling and Chippendale chairs, than the lobby of the Rouncefield Clinic, but now he was unconscious of the room, of the staccato girl attendant, of everything except that he was about to see Max Gottlieb, for the first time in five years.
At the door of the laboratory he stared hungrily.
Gottlieb was thin-cheeked and dark as ever, his hawk nose bony, his fierce eyes demanding, but his hair had gone gray, the flesh round his mouth was sunken, and Martin could have wept at the feebleness with which he rose. The old man peered down at him, his hand on Martin’s shoulder, but he said only:
“Ah! Dis is good.... Your laboratory is three doors down the hall.... But I object to one thing in the good paper you send me. You say, ‘The regularity of the rate at which the streptolysin disappears suggests that an equation may be found—’”
“But it can, sir!”
“Then why did you not make the equation?”
“Well— I don’t know. I wasn’t enough of a mathematician.”
“Then you should not have published till you knew your math!”
“I— Look, Dr. Gottlieb, do you really think I know enough to work here? I want terribly to succeed.”
“Succeed? I have heard that word. It is English? Oh, yes, it is a word that liddle schoolboys use at the University of Winnemac. It means passing examinations. But there are no examinations to pass here.... Martin, let us be clear. You know something of laboratory technique; you have heard about dese bacilli; you are not a good chemist, and mathematics—pfui!—most terrible! But you have curiosity and you are stubborn. You do not accept rules. Therefore I t’ink you will either make a very good scientist or a very bad one, and if you are bad enough, you will be popular with the rich ladies who rule this city, New York, and you can gif lectures for a living or even become, if you get to be plausible enough, a college president. So anyvay, it will be interesting.”
Half an hour later they were arguing ferociously, Martin asserting that the whole world ought to stop warring and trading and writing and get straightway into laboratories to observe new phenomena; Gottlieb insisting that there were already too many facile scientists, that the one thing necessary was the mathematical analysis (and often the destruction) of phenomena already observed.
It sounded bellicose, and all the while Martin was blissful with the certainty that he had come home.
The laboratory in which they talked (Gottlieb pacing the floor, his long arms fantastically knotted behind his thin back; Martin leaping on and off tall stools) was not in the least remarkable—a sink, a bench with racks of numbered test-tubes, a microscope, a few note-books and hydrogen-ion charts, a grotesque series of bottles connected by glass and rubber tubes on an ordinary kitchen table at the end of the room—yet now and then during his tirades Martin looked about reverently.
Gottlieb interrupted their debate: “What work do you want to do here?”
“Why, sir, I’d like to help you, if I can. I suppose you’re cleaning up some things on the synthesis of antibodies.”
“Yes, I t’ink I can bring immunity reactions under the mass action law. But you are not to help me. You are to do your own work. What do you want to do? This is not a clinic, wit’ patients going through so neat in a row!”
“I want to find a hemolysin for which there’s an antibody. There isn’t any for streptolysin. I’d like to work with staphylolysin. Would you mind?”
“I do not care what you do—if you just do not steal my staph cultures out of the ice-box, and if you will look mysterious all the time, so Dr. Tubbs, our Director, will t’ink you are up to something big. So! I haf only one suggestion: when you get stuck in a problem, I have a fine collection of detective stories in my office. But no. Should I be serious—this once, when you are just come?
“Perhaps I am a crank, Martin. There are many who hate me. There are plots against me—oh, you t’ink I imagine it, but you shall see! I make many mistakes. But one thing I keep always pure: the religion of a scientist.
“To be a scientist—it is not just a different job, so that a man should choose between being a scientist and being an explorer or a bond-salesman or a physician or a king or a farmer. It is a tangle of ver-y obscure emotions, like mysticism, or wanting to write poetry; it makes its victim all different from the good normal man. The normal man, he does not care much what he does except that he should eat and sleep and make love. But the scientist is intensely religious—he is so religious that he will not accept quarter-truths, because they are an insult to his faith.
“He wants that everything should be subject to inexorable laws. He is equal opposed to the capitalists who t’ink their silly money-grabbing is a system, and to liberals who t’ink man is not a fighting animal; he takes both the American booster and the European aristocrat, and he ignores all their blithering. Ignores it! All of it! He hates the preachers who talk their fables, but he iss not too kindly to the anthropologists and historians who can only make guesses, yet they have the nerf to call themselves scientists! Oh, yes, he is a man that all nice good-natured people should naturally hate!
“He speaks no meaner of the ridiculous faith-healers and chiropractors than he does of the doctors that want to snatch our science before it is tested and rush around hoping they heal people, and spoiling all the clues with their footsteps; and worse than the men like hogs, worse than the imbeciles who have not even heard of science, he hates pseudo-scientists, guess-scientists—like these psycho-analysts; and worse than those comic dream-scientists he hates the men that are allowed in a clean kingdom like biology but know only one text-book and how to lecture to nincompoops all so popular! He is the only real revolutionary, the authentic scientist, because he alone knows how liddle he knows.
“He must be heartless. He lives in a cold, clear light. Yet dis is a funny t’ing: really, in private, he is not cold nor heartless—so much less cold than the Professional Optimists. The world has always been ruled by the Philanthropists: by the doctors that want to use therapeutic methods they do not understand, by the soldiers that want something to defend theircountry against, by the preachers that yearn to make everybody listen to them, by the kind manufacturers that love their workers, by the eloquent statesmen and soft-hearted authors—and see once what a fine mess of hell they haf made of the world! Maybe now it is time for the scientist, who works and searches and never goes around howling how he loves everybody!
“But once again always remember that not all the men who work at science are scientists. So few! The rest—secretaries, press-agents, camp-followers! To be a scientist is like being a Goethe: it is born in you. Sometimes I t’ink you have a liddle of it born in you. If you haf, there is only one t’ing—no, there is two t’ings you must do: work twice as hard as you can, and keep people from using you. I will try to protect you from Success. It is all I can do. So ... I should wish, Martin, that you will be very happy here. May Koch bless you!”
Five rapt minutes Martin spent in the laboratory which was to be his—smallish but efficient, the bench exactly the right height, a proper sink with pedal taps. When he had closed the door and let his spirit flow out and fill that minute apartment with his own essence, he felt secure.
No Pickerbaugh or Rouncefield could burst in here and drag him away to be explanatory and plausible and public; he would be free to work, instead of being summoned to the package-wrapping and dictation of breezy letters which men call work.
He looked out of the broad window above his bench and saw that he did have the coveted Woolworth Tower, to keep and gloat on. Shut in to a joy of precision, he would nevertheless not be walled out from flowing life. He had, to the north, not the Woolworth Tower alone but the Singer Building, the arrogant magnificence of the City Investing Building. To the west, tall ships were riding, tugs were bustling, all the world went by. Below his cliff, the streets were feverish. Suddenly he loved humanity as he loved the decent, clean rows of test-tubes, and he prayed then the prayer of the scientist:
“God give me unclouded eyes and freedom from haste. God give me a quiet and relentless anger against all pretense and all pretentious work and all work left slack and unfinished.God give me a restlessness whereby I may neither sleep nor accept praise till my observed results equal my calculated results or in pious glee I discover and assault my error. God give me strength not to trust to God!”
He walked all the way up to their inconsiderable hotel in the Thirties, and all the way the crowds stared at him—this slim, pale, black-eyed, beaming young man who thrust among them, half-running, seeing nothing yet in a blur seeing everything: gallant buildings, filthy streets, relentless traffic, soldiers of fortune, fools, pretty women, frivolous shops, windy sky. His feet raced to the tune of “I’ve found my work, I’ve found my work, I’ve found my work!”
Leora was awaiting him— Leora whose fate it was ever to wait for him in creaky rocking-chairs in cheapish rooms. As he galloped in she smiled, and all her thin, sweet body was illumined. Before he spoke she cried:
“Oh, Sandy, I’m so glad!”
She interrupted his room-striding panegyrics on Max Gottlieb, on the McGurk Institute, on New York, on the charms of staphylolysin, by a meek “Dear, how much are they going to pay you?”
He stopped with a bump. “Gosh! I forgot to ask!”
“Oh!”
“Now you look here! This isn’t a Rouncefield Clinic! I hate these buzzards that can’t see anything but making money—”
“I know, Sandy. Honestly, I don’t care. I was just wondering what kind of a flat we’ll be able to afford, so I can begin looking for it. Go on. Dr. Gottlieb said—”
It was three hours after, at eight, when they went to dinner.
The city of magic was to become to Martin neither a city nor any sort of magic but merely a route: their flat, the subway, the Institute, a favorite inexpensive restaurant, a few streets of laundries and delicatessens and movie theaters. But to-night it was a fog of wonder. They dined at the Brevoort, of which Gustaf Sondelius had told him. This was in 1916,before the country had become wholesome and sterile, and the Brevoort was a tumult of French uniforms, caviar, Louis, dangling neckties, Nuits St. Georges, illustrators, Grand Marnier, British Intelligence officers, brokers, conversation, and Martell, V.O.
“It’s a fine crazy bunch,” said Martin. “Do you realize we can stop being respectable now? Irving Watters isn’t watching us, or Angus! Would we be too insane if we had a bottle of champagne?”
He awoke next day to fret that there must be a trick somewhere, as there had been in Nautilus, in Chicago. But as he set to work he seemed to be in a perfect world. The Institute deftly provided all the material and facilities he could desire—animals, incubators, glassware, cultures, media—and he had a thoroughly trained technician—“garçon” they called him at the Institute. He really was let alone; he really was encouraged to do individual work; he really was associated with men who thought not in terms of poetic posters or of two-thousand-dollar operations but of colloids and sporulation and electrons, and of the laws and energies which governed them.
On his first day there came to greet him the head of the Department of Physiology, Dr. Rippleton Holabird.
Holabird seemed, though Martin had found his name starred in physiological journals, too young and too handsome to be the head of a department: a tall, slim, easy man with a trim mustache. Martin had been reared in the school of Clif Clawson; he had not realized, till he heard Dr. Holabird’s quick greeting, that a man’s voice may be charming without effeminacy.
Holabird guided him through the two floors of the Institute, and Martin beheld all the wonders of which he had ever dreamed. If it was not so large, McGurk ranked in equipment with Rockefeller, Pasteur, McCormick, Lister. Martin saw rooms for sterilizing glass and preparing media, for glass-blowing, for the polariscope and the spectroscope, and a steel-and-cement-walled combustion-chamber. He saw a museum of pathology and bacteriology to which he longed to add. There was a department of publications, whence were issued the Institute reports, and theAmerican Journal of Geographic Pathology, edited by the Director, Dr. Tubbs; there was a room for photography, a glorious library, an aquarium for theDepartment of Marine Biology, and (Dr. Tubbs’s own idea) a row of laboratories which visiting foreign scientists were invited to use as their own. A Belgian biologist and a Portuguese bio-chemist were occupying guest laboratories now, and once, Martin thrilled to learn, Gustaf Sondelius had been here.
Then Martin saw the Berkeley-Saunders centrifuge.
The principle of the centrifuge is that of the cream-separator. It collects as sediment the solids scattered through a liquid, such as bacteria in a solution. Most centrifuges are hand-or water-power contrivances the size of a large cocktail-shaker, but this noble implement was four feet across, electrically driven, the central bowl enclosed in armor plate fastened with levers like a submarine hatch, the whole mounted on a cement pillar.
Holabird explained, “There’re only three of these in existence. They’re made by Berkeley-Saunders in England. You know the normal speed, even for a good centrifuge, is about four thousand revolutions a minute. This does twenty thousand a minute—fastest in the world. Eh?”
“Jove, they do give you the stuff to work with!” gloated Martin. (He really did, under Holabird’s handsome influence, say Jove, not Gosh.)
“Yes, McGurk and Tubbs are the most generous men in the scientific world. I think you’ll find it very pleasant to be here, Doctor.”
“I know I will—shall. And Jove, it’s awfully nice of you to take me around this way.”
“Can’t you see how much I’m enjoying my chance to display my knowledge? There’s no form of egotism so agreeable and so safe as being a cicerone. But we still have the real wonder of the Institute for to behold, Doctor. Down this way.”
The real wonder of the Institute had nothing visible to do with science. It was the Hall, in which lunched the staff, and in which occasional scientific dinners were given, with Mrs. McGurk as hostess. Martin gasped and his head went back as his glance ran from glistening floor to black and gold ceiling. The Hall rose the full height of the two floors of the Institute. Clinging to the soaring wall, above the dais on which lunched the Director and the seven heads of departments, was a carved musicians’-gallery. Against the oak paneling of the walls were portraits of the pontiffs of science, in crimson robes, with a vast mural by Maxfield Parrish, and above all was an electrolier of a hundred globes.
“Gosh—Jove!” said Martin. “I never knew there was such a room!”
Holabird was generous. He did not smile. “Oh, perhaps it’s almost too gorgeous. It’s Capitola’s pet creation— Capitola is Mrs. Ross McGurk, wife of the founder; she’s really an awfully nice woman but she does love Movements and Associations. Terry Wickett, one of the chemists here, calls this ‘Bonanza Hall.’ Yet it does inspire you when you come in to lunch all tired and grubby. Now let’s go call on the Director. He told me to bring you in.”
After the Babylonian splendor of the Hall, Martin expected to find the office of Dr. A. DeWitt Tubbs fashioned like a Roman bath, but it was, except for a laboratory bench at one end, the most rigidly business-like apartment he had ever seen.
Dr. Tubbs was an earnest man, whiskered like a terrier, very scholarly, and perhaps the most powerful American exponent of coöperation in science, but he was also a man of the world, fastidious of boots and waistcoats. He had graduated from Harvard, studied on the Continent, been professor of pathology in the University of Minnesota, president of Hartford University, minister to Venezuela, editor of theWeekly Statesmanand president of the Sanity League, finally Director of McGurk.
He was a member both of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and of the Academy of Sciences. Bishops, generals, liberal rabbis, and musical bankers dined with him. He was one of the Distinguished Men to whom the newspapers turned for authoritative interviews on all subjects.
You realized before he had talked to you for ten minutes that here was one of the few leaders of mankind who could discourse on any branch of knowledge, yet could control practical affairs and drive stumbling mankind on to sane and reasonable ideals. Though a Max Gottlieb might in his research show a certain talent, yet his narrowness, his sour and antic humor, kept him from developing the broad view of education, politics, commerce, and all other noble matters which marked Dr. A. DeWitt Tubbs.
But the Director was as cordial to the insignificant MartinArrowsmith as though Martin were a visiting senator. He shook his hand warmly; he unbent in a smile; his baritone was mellow.
“Dr. Arrowsmith, I trust we shall do more than merely say you are welcome here; I trust we shall show you how welcome you are! Dr. Gottlieb tells me that you have a natural aptitude for cloistered investigation but that you have been looking over the fields of medical practise and public health before you settled down to the laboratory. I can’t tell you how wise I consider you to have made that broad preliminary survey. Too many would-be scientists lack the tutored vision which comes from coördinating all mental domains.”
Martin was dazed to discover that he had been making a broad survey.
“Now you’ll doubtless wish to take some time, perhaps a year or more, in getting into your stride, Dr. Arrowsmith. I shan’t ask you for any reports. So long as Dr. Gottlieb feels that you yourself are satisfied with your progress, I shall be content. Only if there is anything in which I can advise you, from a perhaps somewhat longer career in science, please believe that I shall be delighted to be of aid, and I am quite sure the same obtains with Dr. Holabird here, though he really ought to be jealous, because he is one of our youngest workers—in fact I call him myenfant terrible—but you, I believe, are only thirty-three, and you quite put the poor fellow’s nose out!”
Holabird merrily suggested, “Oh, no, Doctor, it’s been put out long ago. You forget Terry Wickett. He’s under forty.”
“Oh.Him!” murmured Dr. Tubbs.
Martin had never heard a man disposed of so poisonously with such politeness. He saw that in Terry Wickett there might be a serpent even in this paradise.
“Now,” said Dr. Tubbs, “perhaps you might like to glance around my place here. I pride myself on keeping our card-indices and letter-files as unimaginatively as though I were an insurance agent. But there is a certain exotic touch in these charts.” He trotted across the room to show a nest of narrow drawers filled with scientific blue-prints.
Just what they were charts of, he did not say, nor did Martin ever learn.
He pointed to the bench at the end of the room, and laughingly admitted:
“You can see there what an inefficient fellow I really am. I keep asserting that I have given up all the idyllic delights of pathological research for the less fascinating but so very important and fatiguing cares of the directorship. Yet such is the weakness ofgenus homothat sometimes, when I ought to be attending to practical details, I become obsessed by some probably absurd pathological concept, and so ridiculous am I that I can’t wait to hasten down the hall to my regular laboratory— I must always have a bench at hand and an experiment going on. Oh, I’m afraid I’m not the moral man that I pose as being in public! Here I am married to executive procedure, and still I hanker for my first love, Milady Science!”
“I think it’s fine you still have an itch for it,” Martin ventured.
He was wondering just what experiments Dr. Tubbs had been doing lately. The bench seemed rather unused.
“And now, Doctor, I want you to meet the real Director of the Institute—my secretary, Miss Pearl Robbins.”
Martin had already noticed Miss Robbins. You could not help noticing Miss Robbins. She was thirty-five and stately, a creamy goddess. She rose to shake hands—a firm, competent grasp—and to cry in her glorious contralto, “Dr. Tubbs is so complimentary only because he knows that otherwise I wouldn’t give him his afternoon tea. We’ve heard so much about your cleverness from Dr. Gottlieb that I’m almost afraid to welcome you, Dr. Arrowsmith, but I do want to.”
Then, in a glow, Martin stood in his laboratory looking at the Woolworth Tower. He was dizzy with these wonders—his own wonders, now! In Rippleton Holabird, so gaily elegant yet so distinguished, he hoped to have a friend. He found Dr. Tubbs somewhat sentimental, but he was moved by his kindness and by Miss Robbins’s recognition. He was in a haze of future glory when his door was banged open by a hard-faced, red-headed, soft-shirted man of thirty-six or-eight.
“Arrowsmith?” the intruder growled. “My name is Wickett, Terry Wickett. I’m a chemist. I’m with Gottlieb. Well, I noticed the Holy Wren was showing you the menagerie.”
“Dr. Holabird?”
“Him.... Well, you must be more or less intelligent, if Pa Gottlieb let you in. How’s it starting? Which kind are you going to be? One of the polite birds that uses the Institute for social climbing and catches him a rich wife, or one of the roughnecks like me and Gottlieb?”
Terry Wickett’s croak was as irritating a sound as Martin had ever heard. He answered in a voice curiously like that of Rippleton Holabird:
“I don’t think you need to worry. I happen to be married already!”
“Oh, don’t let that fret you, Arrowsmith. Divorces are cheap, in this man’s town. Well, did the Holy Wren show you Gladys the Tart?”
“Huh?”
“Gladys the Tart, or the Galloping Centrifuge.”
“Oh. You mean the Berkeley-Saunders?”
“I do, soul of my soul. Whajuh think of it?”
“It’s the finest centrifuge I’ve ever seen. Dr. Holabird said—”
“Hell, he ought to say something! He went and got old Tubbs to buy it. He just loves it, Holy Wren does.”
“Why not? It’s the fastest—”
“Sure. Speediest centrifuge in the wholeVereinigen, and made of the best toothpick steel. The only trouble is, it always blows out fuses, and it spatters the bugs so that you need a gas-mask if you’re going to use it.... And did you love dear old Tubbsy and the peerless Pearl?”
“I did!”
“Fine. Of course Tubbs is an illiterate jackass but still, at that, he hasn’t got persecution-mania, like Gottlieb.”
“Look here, Wickett—is it Dr. Wickett?”
“Uh-huh.... M.D., Ph.D., but a first-rate chemist just the same.”
“Well, Dr. Wickett, it seems to me a shame that a man of your talents should have to associate with idiots like Gottlieb and Tubbs and Holabird. I’ve just left a Chicago clinic where everybody is nice and sensible. I’d be glad to recommend you for a job there!”
“Wouldn’t be so bad. At least I’d avoid all the gassing at lunch in Bonanza Hall. Well, sorry I got your goat, Arrowsmith, but you look all right to me.”
“Thanks!”
Wickett grinned obscenely—red-headed, rough-faced, wiry—and snorted, “By the way, did Holabird tell you about being wounded in the first month of the war, when he was a fieldmarshal or a hospital orderly or something in the British Army?”
“He did not! He didn’t mention the war!”
“He will! Well, Brer Arrowsmith, I look forward to many happy, happy years together, playing at the feet of Pa Gottlieb. So long. My lab is right next to yours.”
“Fool!” Martin decided, and, “Well, I can stand him as long as I can fall back on Gottlieb and Holabird. But— The conceited idiot! Gosh, so Holabird was in the war! Invalided out, I guess. I certainly got back at Wickett on that! ‘Did he tell you about his being a jolly old hero in the blinkin’ war?’ he said, and I came right back at him, ‘I’m sorry to displease you,’ I said, ‘but Dr. Holabird did not mention the war.’ The idiot! Well, I won’t let him worry me.”
And indeed, as Martin met the staff at lunch, Wickett was the only one whom he did not find courteous, however brief their greetings. He did not distinguish among them; for days most of the twenty researchers remained a blur. He confused Dr. Yeo, head of the Department of Biology, with the carpenter who had come to put up shelves.
The staff sat in Hall at two long tables, one on the dais, one below: tiny insect groups under the massy ceiling. They were not particularly noble of aspect, these possible Darwins and Huxleys and Pasteurs. None of them were wide-browed Platos. Except for Rippleton Holabird and Max Gottlieb and perhaps Martin himself, they looked like lunching grocers: brisk featureless young men; thick mustached elders; and wimpish little men with spectacles, men whose collars did not meet. But there was a steady calm about them; there was, Martin believed, no anxiety over money in their voices nor any restlessness of envy and scandalous gossip. They talked gravely or frivolously of their work, the one sort of work that, since it becomes part of the chain of discovered fact, is eternal, however forgotten the worker’s name.
As Martin listened to Terry Wickett (rude and slangy as ever, referring to himself as “the boy chemist,” speaking of “this gaudy Institute” and “our trusting new lil brother, Arrowsmith”) debating with a slight thin-bearded man— Dr. William T. Smith, assistant in bio-chemistry—the possibility of increasing the effects of all enzymes by doses of X-rays, as he heard one associate-member vituperate another for his notions of cell-chemistry and denounce Ehrlich as “the Edisonof medical science,” Martin perceived new avenues of exciting research; he stood on a mountain, and unknown valleys, craggy tantalizing paths, were open to his feet.
Dr. and Mrs. Rippleton Holabird invited them to dinner, a week after their coming.
As Holabird’s tweeds made Clay Tredgold’s smartness seem hard and pretentious, so his dinner revealed Angus Duer’s affairs in Chicago as mechanical and joyless and a little anxious. Every one whom Martin met at the Holabirds’ flat was a Somebody, though perhaps a minor Somebody: a goodish editor or a rising ethnologist; and all of them had Holabird’s graceful casualness.
The provincial Arrowsmiths arrived on time, therefore fifteen minutes early. Before the cocktails appeared, in old Venetian glass, Martin demanded, “Doctor, what problems are you getting after now in your physiology?”
Holabird was transformed into an ardent boy. With a deprecatory “Would you really like to hear about ’em—you needn’t be polite, you know!” he dashed into an exposition of his experiments, drawing sketches on the blank spaces in newspaper advertisements, on the back of a wedding invitation, on the fly-leaf of a presentation novel, looking at Martin apologetically, learned yet gay.
“We’re working on the localization of brain functions. I think we’ve gone beyond Bolton and Flechsig. Oh, it’s jolly exciting, exploring the brain. Look here!”
His swift pencil was sketching the cerebrum; the brain lived and beat under his fingers.
He threw down the paper. “I say, it’s a shame to inflict my hobbies on you. Besides, the others are coming. Tell me, how is your work going? Are you comfortable at the Institute? Do you find you like people?”
“Everybody except— To be frank, I’m jarred by Wickett.”
Generously, “I know. His manner is slightly aggressive. But you mustn’t mind him; he’s really an extraordinarily gifted bio-chemist. He’s a bachelor—gives up everything for his work. And he doesn’t really mean half the rude things he says. He detests me, among others. Has he mentioned me?”
“Why, not especially—”
“I have a feeling he goes around saying that I talk about my experiences in the war, which really isn’t quite altogether true.”
“Yes,” in a burst, “he did say that.”
“I do rather wish he wouldn’t. So sorry to have offended him by going and getting wounded. I’ll remember and not do it again! Such a fuss for a war record as insignificant as mine! What happened was: when the war broke out in ’14 I was in England, studying under Sherrington. I pretended to be a Canadian and joined up with the medical corps and got mine within three weeks and got hoofed out, and that was the end of my magnificent career! Here’s somebody arriving.”
His easy gallantry won Martin complete. Leora was equally captivated by Mrs. Holabird, and they went home from the dinner in new enchantment.
So began for them a white light of happiness. Martin was scarce more blissful in his undisturbed work than in his life outside the laboratory.
All the first week he forgot to ask what his salary was to be. Then it became a game to wait till the end of the month. Evenings, in little restaurants, Leora and he would speculate about it.
The Institute would surely not pay him less than the twenty-five hundred dollars a year he had received at the Rouncefield Clinic, but on evenings when he was tired it dropped to fifteen hundred, and one evening when they had Burgundy he raised it to thirty-five hundred.
When his first monthly check came, neat in a little sealed envelope, he dared not look at it. He took it home to Leora. In their hotel room they stared at the envelope as though it was likely to contain poison. Martin opened it shakily; he stared, and whispered, “Oh, those decent people! They’re paying me—this is for four hundred and twenty dollars—they’re paying me five thousand a year!”
Mrs. Holabird, a white kitten of a woman, helped Leora find a three-room flat with a spacious living-room, in an old house near Gramercy Park, and helped her furnish it with good bits, second-hand. When Martin was permitted to look he cried, “I hope we stay here for fifty years!”
This was the Grecian isle where they found peace. Presently they had friends: the Holabirds, Dr. Billy Smith—thethin-bearded bio-chemist, who had an intelligent taste in music and German beer—an anatomist whom Martin met at a Winnemac alumni dinner, and always Max Gottlieb.
Gottlieb had found his own serenity. In the Seventies he had a brown small flat, smelling of tobacco and leather books. His son Robert had graduated from City College and gone bustlingly into business. Miriam kept up her music while she guarded her father—a dumpling of a girl, holy fire behind the deceptive flesh. After an evening of Gottlieb’s acrid doubting, Martin was inspired to hasten to the laboratory and attempt a thousand new queries into the laws of microörganisms, a task which usually began with blasphemously destroying all the work he had recently done.
Even Terry Wickett became more tolerable. Martin perceived that Wickett’s snarls were partly a Clif Clawson misconception of humor, but partly a resentment, as great as Gottlieb’s, of the morphological scientists who ticket things with the nicest little tickets, who name things and rename them and never analyze them. Wickett often worked all night; he was to be seen in shirt-sleeves, his sulky red hair rumpled, sitting with a stop-watch before a constant temperature bath for hours. Now and then it was a relief to have the surly intentness of Wickett instead of the elegance of Rippleton Holabird, which demanded from Martin so much painful elegance in turn, at a time when he was sunk beyond sounding in his experimentation.
Hiswork began fumblingly. There were days when, for all the joy of it, he dreaded lest Tubbs stride in and bellow, “What are you doing here? You’re the wrong Arrowsmith! Get out!”
He had isolated twenty strains of staphylococcus germs and he was testing them to discover which of them was most active in producing a hemolytic, a blood-disintegrating toxin, so that he might produce an antitoxin.
There were picturesque moments when, after centrifuging, the organisms lay in coiling cloudy masses at the bottoms of the tubes; or when the red corpuscles were completely dissolved and the opaque brick-red liquid turned to the color of pale wine. But most of the processes were incomparably tedious: removing samples of the culture every six hours, making salt suspensions of corpuscles in small tubes, recording the results.
He never knew they were tedious.
Tubbs came in now and then, found him busy, patted his shoulder, said something which sounded like French and might even have been French, and gave vague encouragement; while Gottlieb imperturbably told him to go ahead, and now and then stirred him by showing his own note-books (they were full of figures and abbreviations, stupid-seeming as invoices of calico) or by speaking of his own work, in a vocabulary as heathenish as Tibetan magic:
“Arrhenius and Madsen have made a contribution toward bringing immunity reactions under the mass action law, but I hope to show that antigen-antibody combinations occur in stoicheiometric proportions when certain variables are held constant.”
“Oh, yes, I see,” said Martin; and to himself: “Well, I darn’ near a quarter understand that! Oh, Lord, if they’ll only give me a little time and not send me back to tacking up diphtheria posters!”
When he had obtained a satisfactory toxin, Martin began hiseffort to find an antitoxin. He made vast experiments with no results. Sometimes he was certain that he had something, but when he rechecked his experiments he was bleakly certain that he hadn’t. Once he rushed into Gottlieb’s laboratory with the announcement of the antitoxin, whereupon with affection and several discomforting questions and the present of a box of real Egyptian cigarettes, Gottlieb showed him that he had not considered certain dilutions.
With all his amateurish fumbling, Martin had one characteristic without which there can be no science: a wide-ranging, sniffing, snuffling, undignified, unselfdramatizing curiosity, and it drove him on.
While he puttered his insignificant way through the early years of the Great European War, the McGurk Institute had a lively existence under its placid surface.
Martin may not have learned much in the matter of antibodies but he did learn the secret of the Institute, and he saw that behind all its quiet industriousness was Capitola McGurk, the Great White Uplifter.
Capitola, Mrs. Ross McGurk, had been opposed to woman suffrage—until she learned that women were certain to get the vote—but she was a complete controller of virtuous affairs. Ross McGurk had bought the Institute not only to glorify himself but to divert Capitola and keep her itching fingers out of his shipping and mining and lumber interests, which would not too well have borne the investigations of a Great White Uplifter.
Ross McGurk was at the time a man of fifty-four, second generation of California railroad men; a graduate of Yale; big, suave, dignified, cheerful, unscrupulous. Even in 1908, when he had founded the Institute, he had had too many houses, too many servants, too much food, and no children, because Capitola considered “that sort of thing detrimental to women with large responsibilities.” In the Institute he found each year more satisfaction, more excuse for having lived.
When Gottlieb arrived, McGurk went up to look him over. McGurk had bullied Dr. Tubbs now and then; Tubbs was compelled to scurry to his office as though he were a messenger boy; yet when he saw the saturnine eyes of Gottlieb, McGurklooked interested; and the two men, the bulky, clothes-conscious, powerful, reticent American and the cynical, simple, power-despising European, became friends. McGurk would slip away from a conference affecting the commerce of a whole West Indian island to sit on a high stool, silent, and watch Gottlieb work.
“Some day when I quit hustling and wake up, I’m going to become your garçon, Max,” said McGurk, and Gottlieb answered, “I don’t know—you haf imagination, Ross, but I t’ink you are too late to get a training in reality. Now if you do not mind eating at Childs’s, we will avoid your very expostulatory Regal Hall, and I shall invite you to lunch.”
But Capitola did not join their communion.
Gottlieb’s arrogance had returned, and with Capitola McGurk he needed it. She had such interesting little problems for her husband’s pensioners to attack. Once, in excitement, she visited Gottlieb’s laboratory to tell him that large numbers of persons die of cancer, and why didn’t he drop this anti-whatever-it-was and find a cure for cancer, which would be ever so nice for all of them.
But her real grievance arose when, after Rippleton Holabird had agreed to give midnight supper on the roof of the Institute to one of her most intellectual dinner-parties, she telephoned to Gottlieb, merely asking, “Would it be too much trouble for you to go down and open your lab, so we can all enjoy just a tiny peep at it?” and he answered:
“It would! Good night!”
Capitola protested to her husband. He listened—at least he seemed to listen—and remarked:
“Cap, I don’t mind your playing the fool with the footmen. They’ve got to stand it. But if you get funny with Max, I’ll simply shut up the whole Institute, and then you won’t have anything to talk about at the Colony Club. And it certainly does beat the deuce that a man worth thirty million dollars—at least a fellow that’s got that much—can’t find a clean pair of pajamas. No, Iwon’thave a valet! Oh, please now, Capitola, please quit being high-minded and let me go to sleep, will you!”
But Capitola was uncontrollable, especially in the matter of the monthly dinners which she gave at the Institute.
The first of the McGurk Scientific Dinners which Martin and Leora witnessed was a particularly important and explanatory dinner, because the guest of honor was Major-General Sir Isaac Mallard, the London surgeon, who was in America with a British War Mission. He had already beautifully let himself be shown through the Institute; he had been Sir Isaac’d by Dr. Tubbs and every researcher except Terry Wickett; he remembered meeting Rippleton Holabird in London, or said he remembered; and he admired Gladys the Centrifuge.
The dinner began with one misfortune in that Terry Wickett, who hitherto could be depended upon to stay decently away, now appeared, volunteering to the wife of an ex-ambassador, “I simply couldn’t duck this spread, with dear Sir Isaac coming. Say, if I hadn’t told you, you wouldn’t hardly think my dress-suit was rented, would you! Have you noticed that Sir Isaac is getting so he doesn’t tear the carpet with his spurs any more? I wonder if he still kills all his mastoid patients?”
There was vast music, vaster food; there were uncomfortable scientists explaining to golden cooing ladies, in a few words, just what they were up to and what in the next twenty years they hoped to be up to; there were the cooing ladies themselves, observing in tones of pretty rebuke, “But I’m afraid you haven’t yet made it as clear as you might.” There were the cooing ladies’ husbands—college graduates, manipulators of oil stocks or of corporation law—who sat ready to give to anybody who desired it their opinion that while antitoxins might be racy, what we really needed was a good substitute for rubber.
There was Rippleton Holabird, being charming.
And in the pause of the music, there suddenly was Terry Wickett, saying to quite an important woman, one of Capitola’s most useful friends, “Yes, his name is spelled G-o-t-t-l-i-e-b but it’s pronounced Gottdamn.”
But such outsiders as Wickett and such silent riders as Martin and Leora and such totally absent members as Max Gottlieb were few, and the dinner waxed magnificently to a love-feast when Dr. Tubbs and Sir Isaac Mallard paid compliments to each other, to Capitola, to the sacred soil of France, to brave little Belgium, to American hospitality, to British loveof privacy, and to the extremely interesting things a young man with a sense of coöperation might do in modern science.
The guests were conducted through the Institute. They inspected the marine biology aquarium, the pathological museum, and the animal house, at sight of which one sprightly lady demanded of Wickett, “Oh, the poor little guinea pigs and darling rabbicks! Now honestly, Doctor, don’t you think it would be ever so much nicer if you let them go free, and just worked with your test-tubes?”
A popular physician, whose practise was among rich women, none of them west of Fifth Avenue, said to the sprightly lady, “I think you’re absolutely right. I never have to kill any poor wee little beasties to get my knowledge!”
With astounding suddenness Wickett took his hat and went away.
The sprightly lady said, “You see, he didn’t dare stand up to a real argument. Oh, Dr. Arrowsmith, of course I know how wonderful Ross McGurk and Dr. Tubbs and all of you are, but I must say I’m disappointed in your laboratories. I’d expected there’d be such larky retorts and electric furnaces and everything but, honestly, I don’t see a single thing that’s interesting, and I do think all you clever people ought to dosomethingfor us, now that you’ve coaxed us all the way down here. Can’t you or somebody create life out of turtle eggs, or whatever it is? Oh, please do! Pretty please! Or at least, do put on one of these cunnin’ dentist coats that you wear.”
Then Martin also went rapidly away, accompanied by a furious Leora, who in the taxicab announced that she had desired to taste the champagne-cup which she had observed on the buffet, and that her husband was little short of a fool.
Thus, however satisfying his work, Martin began to wonder about the perfection of his sanctuary; to wonder why Gottlieb should be so insulting at lunch to neat Dr. Sholtheis, the industrious head of the Department of Epidemiology, and why Dr. Sholtheis should endure the insults; to wonder why Dr. Tubbs, when he wandered into one’s laboratory, should gurgle, “The one thing for you to keep in view in all your work is the ideal of coöperation”; to wonder why so ardent a physiologist as Rippleton Holabird should all day long be heard conferring with Tubbs instead of sweating at his bench.
Holabird had, five years before, done one bit of research which had taken his name into scientific journals throughout the world: he had studied the effect of the extirpation of the anterior lobes of a dog’s brain on its ability to find its way through the laboratory. Martin had read of that research before he had thought of going to McGurk; on his arrival he was thrilled to have it chronicled by the master himself; but when he had heard Holabird refer to it a dozen times he was considerably less thrilled, and he speculated whether all his life Holabird would go on being “the man—youremember—the chap that did the big stunt, whatever it was, with locomotion in dogs or something.”
Martin speculated still more as he perceived that all his colleagues were secretly grouped in factions.
Tubbs, Holabird, and perhaps Tubbs’s secretary, Pearl Robbins, were the ruling caste. It was murmured that Holabird hoped some day to be made Assistant Director, an office which was to be created for him. Gottlieb, Terry Wickett, and Dr. Nicholas Yeo, that long-mustached and rustic biologist whom Martin had first taken for a carpenter, formed an independent faction of their own, and however much he disliked the boisterous Wickett, Martin was dragged into it.
Dr. William Smith, with his little beard and a notion of mushrooms formed in Paris, kept to himself. Dr. Sholtheis, who had been born to a synagogue in Russia but who was now the most zealous high-church Episcopalian in Yonkers, was constantly in his polite small way trying to have his scientific work commended by Gottlieb. In the Department of Bio-Physics, the good-natured chief was reviled and envied by his own assistant. And in the whole Institute there was not one man who would, in all states of liquor, assert that the work of any other scientist anywhere was completely sound, or that there was a single one of his rivals who had not stolen ideas from him. No rocking-chair clique on a summer-hotel porch, no knot of actors, ever whispered more scandal or hinted more warmly of complete idiocy in their confrères than did these uplifted scientists.
But these discoveries Martin could shut out by closing his door, and he had that to do now which deafened him to the mutters of intrigue.
For once Gottlieb did not amble into his laboratory but curtly summoned him. In a corner of Gottlieb’s office, a den opening from his laboratory, was Terry Wickett, rolling a cigarette and looking sardonic.
Gottlieb observed, “Martin, I haf taken the privilege of talking you over with Terry, and we concluded that you haf done well enough now so it is time you stop puttering and go to work.”
“I thought I was working, sir!”
All the wide placidness of his halcyon days was gone; he saw himself driven back to Pickerbaughism.
Wickett intruded, “No, you haven’t. You’ve just been showing that you’re a bright boy who might work if he only knew something.”
While Martin turned on Wickett with a “Who the devil are you?” expression, Gottlieb went on:
“The fact is, Martin, you can do nothing till you know a little mathematics. If you are not going to be a cook-book bacteriologist, like most of them, you must be able to handle some of the fundamentals of science. All living things are physico-chemical machines. Then how can you make progress if you do not know physical chemistry, and how can you know physical chemistry without much mathematics?”
“Yuh,” said Wickett, “you’re lawn-mowing and daisy-picking, not digging.”
Martin faced them. “But rats, Wickett, a man can’t know everything. I’m a bacteriologist, not a physicist. Strikes me a fellow ought to use his insight, not just a chest of tools, to make discoveries. A good sailor could find his way at sea even if he didn’t have instruments, and a wholeLusitania-ful of junk wouldn’t make a good sailor out of a dub. Man ought to develop his brain, not depend on tools.”
“Ye-uh, but if there were charts and quadrants in existence, a sailor that cruised off without ’em would be a chump!”
For half an hour Martin defended himself, not too politely, before the gem-like Gottlieb, the granite Wickett. All the while he knew that he was sickeningly ignorant.
They ceased to take interest. Gottlieb was looking at his note-books, Wickett was clumping off to work. Martin glared at Gottlieb. The man meant so much that he could be furiouswith him as he would have been with Leora, with his own self.
“I’m sorry you think I don’t know anything,” he raged, and departed with the finest dramatic violence. He slammed into his own laboratory, felt freed, then wretched. Without volition, like a drunken man, he stormed to Wickett’s room, protesting, “I suppose you’re right. My physical chemistry is nix, and my math rotten. What am I going to do—what am I going to do?”
The embarrassed barbarian grumbled, “Well, for Pete’s sake, Slim, don’t worry. The old man and I were just egging you on. Fact is, he’s tickled to death about the careful way you’re starting in. About the math—probably you’re better off than the Holy Wren and Tubbs right now; you’ve forgotten all the math you ever knew, and they never knew any. Gosh all fish-hooks! Science is supposed to mean Knowledge—from the Greek, a handsome language spoken by the good old booze-hoisting Helleens—and the way most of the science boys resent having to stop writing little jeweled papers or giving teas and sweat at getting some knowledge certainly does make me a grand booster for the human race. My own math isn’t any too good, Slim, but if you’d like to have me come around evenings and tutor you— Free, I mean!”
Thus began the friendship between Martin and Terry Wickett; thus began a change in Martin’s life whereby he gave up three or four hours of wholesome sleep each night to grind over matters which every one is assumed to know, and almost every one does not know.
He took up algebra; found that he had forgotten most of it; cursed over the competition of the indefatigable A and the indolent B who walk from Y to Z; hired a Columbia tutor; and finished the subject, with a spurt of something like interest in regard to quadratic equations, in six weeks ... while Leora listened, watched, waited, made sandwiches, and laughed at the tutor’s jokes.
By the end of his first nine months at McGurk, Martin had reviewed trigonometry and analytic geometry and he was finding differential calculus romantic. But he made the mistake of telling Terry Wickett how much he knew.
Terry croaked, “Don’t trust math too much, son,” and he so confused him with references to the thermo-dynamical derivation of the mass action law, and to the oxidation reductionpotential, that he stumbled again into raging humility, again saw himself an impostor and a tenth-rater.