He read the classics of physical science: Copernicus and Galileo, Lavoisier, Newton, LaPlace, Descartes, Faraday. He became completely bogged in Newton’s “Fluxions”; he spoke of Newton to Tubbs and found that the illustrious Director knew nothing about him. He cheerfully mentioned this to Terry, and was shockingly cursed for his conceit as a “nouveau cultured,” as a “typical enthusiastic convert,” and so returned to the work whose end is satisfying because there is never an end.
His life did not seem edifying nor in any degree amusing. When Tubbs peeped into his laboratory he found a humorless young man going about his tests of hemolytic toxins with no apparent flair for the Real Big Thing in Science, which was coöperation and being efficient. Tubbs tried to set him straight with “Are you quite sure you’re following a regular demarked line in your work?”
It was Leora who bore the real tedium.
She sat quiet (a frail child, only up to one’s shoulder, not nine minutes older than at marriage, nine years before), or she napped inoffensively, in the long living-room of their flat, while he worked over his dreary digit-infested books till one, till two, and she politely awoke to let him worry at her, “But look here now, I’ve got to keep up my research at the same time. God, I am so tired!”
She dragged him away for an illegal five-day walk on Cape Cod, in March. He sat between the Twin Lights at Chatham, and fumed, “I’m going back and tell Terry and Gottlieb they can go to the devil with their crazy physical chemistry. I’ve had enough, now I’ve done math,” and she commented, “Yes, I certainly would—though isn’t it funny how Dr. Gottlieb always seems to be right?”
He was so absorbed in staphylolysin and in calculus that he did not realize the world was about to be made safe for democracy. He was a little dazed when America entered the war.
Dr. Tubbs dashed to Washington to offer the services of the Institute to the War Department.
All the members of the staff, except Gottlieb and two others who declined to be so honored, were made officers and told to run out and buy nice uniforms.
Tubbs became a Colonel, Rippleton Holabird a Major, Martin and Wickett and Billy Smith were Captains. But the garçons had no military rank whatever, nor any military duties except the polishing of brown riding-boots and leather puttees, which the several warriors wore as pleased their fancies or their legs. And the most belligerent of all, Miss Pearl Robbins, she who at tea heroically slaughtered not only German men but all their women and viperine children, was wickedly unrecognized and had to make up a uniform for herself.
The only one of them who got nearer to the front than Liberty Street was Terry Wickett, who suddenly asked for leave, was transferred to the artillery, and sailed off to France.
He apologized to Martin: “I’m ashamed of chucking my work like this, and I certainly don’t want to kill Germans— I mean not any more’n I want to kill most people—but I never could resist getting into a big show. Say, Slim, keep an eye on Pa Gottlieb, will you? This has hit him bad. He’s got a bunch of nephews and so on in the German army, and the patriots like Big Foot Pearl will give an exhibit of idealism by persecuting him. So long, Slim, take care y’self.”
Martin had vaguely protested at being herded into the army. The war was to him chiefly another interruption to his work, like Pickerbaughism, like earning his living at Wheatsylvania. But when he had gone strutting forth in uniform, it was so enjoyable that for several weeks he was a standard patriot. He had never looked so well, so taut and erect, as in khaki. It was enchanting to be saluted by privates, quite as enchanting to return the salute in the dignified, patronizing, all-comrades-together splendor which Martin shared with the other doctors, professors, lawyers, brokers, authors, and former socialist intellectuals who were his fellow-officers.
But in a month the pleasures of being a hero became mechanical, and Martin longed for soft shirts, easy shoes, and clothes with reasonable pockets. His puttees were a nuisance to wear and an inferno to put on; his collar pinched his neck and jabbed his chin; and it was wearing on a man who sat up till three, on the perilous duty of studying calculus, to be snappy at every salute.
Under the martinet eye of Col. Director Dr. A. DeWittTubbs he had to wear his uniform, at least recognizable portions of it, at the Institute, but by evening he slipped into the habit of sneaking into citizen clothes, and when he went with Leora to the movies he had an agreeable feeling of being Absent Without Leave, of risking at every street corner arrest by the Military Police and execution at dawn.
Unfortunately no M.P. ever looked at him. But one evening when in an estimable and innocent manner he was looking at the remains of a gunman who had just been murdered by another gunman, he realized that Major Rippleton Holabird was standing by, glaring. For once the Major was unpleasant:
“Captain, does it seem to you that this is quite playing the game, to wear mufti? We, unfortunately, with our scientific work, haven’t the privilege of joining the Boys who are up against the real thing, but we are under orders just as if we were in the trenches—wheresomeof us would so much like to be again! Captain, I trust I shall never again see you breaking the order about being in uniform, or—uh—”
Martin blurted to Leora, later:
“I’m sick of hearing about his being wounded. Nothing that I can see to prevent his going back to the trenches. Wound’s all right now. I want to be patriotic, but my patriotism is chasing antitoxins, doing my job, not wearing a particular kind of pants and a particular set of ideas about the Germans. Mind you, I’m anti-German all right— I think they’re probably just as bad as we are. Oh, let’s go back and do some more calculus.... Darling, my working nights doesn’t bore you too much, does it?”
Leora had cunning. When she could not be enthusiastic, she could be unannoyingly silent.
At the Institute Martin perceived that he was not the only defender of his country who was not comfortable in the garb of heroes. The most dismal of the staff-members was Dr. Nicholas Yeo, the Yankee sandy-mustached head of the Department of Biology.
Yeo had put on Major’s uniform, but he never felt neighborly with it. (He knew he was a Major, because Col. Dr. Tubbs had told him he was, and he knew that this was a Major’s uniform, because the clothing salesman said so.) He walked out of the McGurk Building in a melancholy, deprecatory way, with one breeches leg bulging over his riding-boots;and however piously he tried, he never remembered to button his blouse over the violet-flowered shirts which, he often confided, you could buy ever so cheap on Eighth Avenue.
But Major Dr. Yeo had one military triumph. He hoarsely explained to Martin, as they were marching to the completely militarized dining-hall:
“Say, Arrowsmith, do you ever get balled up about this saluting? Darn it, I never can figure out what all these insignia mean. One time I took a Salvation Army Lieutenant for a Y.M.C.A. General, or maybe he was a Portygee. But I’ve got the idea now!” Yeo laid his finger beside his large nose, and produced wisdom: “Whenever I see any fellow in uniform that looks older than I am, I salute him—my nephew, Ted, has drilled me so I salute swell now—and if he don’t salute back, well, Lord, I just think about my work and don’t fuss. If you look at it scientifically, this military life isn’t so awful’ hard after all!”
Always, in Paris or in Bonn, Max Gottlieb had looked to America as a land which, in its freedom from Royalist tradition, in its contact with the realities of cornfields and blizzards and town-meetings, had set its face against the puerile pride of war. He believed that he had ceased to be a German, now, and become a countryman of Lincoln.
The European War was the one thing, besides his discharge from Winnemac, which had ever broken his sardonic serenity. In the war he could see no splendor nor hope, but only crawling tragedy. He treasured his months of work and good talk in France, in England, in Italy; he loved his French and English and Italian friends as he loved his ancientKorpsbrüder, and very well indeed beneath his mocking did he love the Germans with whom he had drudged and drunk.
His sister’s sons—on home-craving vacations he had seen them, in babyhood, in boyhood, in ruffling youngmanhood—went out with the Kaiser’s colors in 1914; one of them became an Oberst, much decorated, one existed insignificantly, and one was dead and stinking in ten days. This he sadly endured, as later he endured his son Robert’s going out as an American lieutenant, to fight his own cousins. What struck down this man to whom abstractions and scientific laws were more thankindly flesh was the mania of hate which overcame the unmilitaristic America to which he had emigrated in protest against Junkerdom.
Incredulously he perceived women asserting that all Germans were baby-killers, universities barring the language of Heine, orchestras outlawing the music of Beethoven, professors in uniform bellowing at clerks, and the clerks never protesting.
It is uncertain whether the real hurt was to his love for America or to his egotism, that he should have guessed so grotesquely; it is curious that he who had so denounced the machine-made education of the land should yet have been surprised when it turned blithely to the old, old, mechanical mockeries of war.
When the Institute sanctified the war, he found himself regarded not as the great and impersonal immunologist but as a suspect German Jew.
True, the Terry who went off to the artillery did not look upon him dourly, but Major Rippleton Holabird became erect and stiff when they passed in the corridor. When Gottlieb insisted to Tubbs at lunch, “I am villing to admit every virtue of the French— I am very fond of that so individual people—but on the theory of probabilities I suggest that there must be some good Germans out of sixty millions,” then Col. Dr. Tubbs commanded, “In this time of world tragedy, it does not seem to me particularly becoming to try to be flippant, Dr. Gottlieb!”
In shops and on the elevated trains, little red-faced sweaty people when they heard his accent glared at him, and growled one to another, “There’s one of them damn’ barb’rous well-poisoning Huns!” and however contemptuous he might be, however much he strove for ignoring pride, their nibbling reduced him from arrogant scientist to an insecure, raw-nerved, shrinking old man.
And once a hostess who of old time had been proud to know him, a hostess whose maiden name was Straufnabel and who had married into the famous old Anglican family of Rosemont, when Gottlieb bade her “Auf Wiedersehen” cried out upon him, “Dr. Gottlieb, I’m very sorry, but the use of that disgusting language is not permitted in this house!”
He had almost recovered from the anxieties of Winnemac and the Hunziker factory; he had begun to expand, to entertain people—scientists, musicians, talkers. Now he was thrustback into himself. With Terry gone, he trusted only Miriam and Martin and Ross McGurk; and his deep-set wrinkle-lidded eyes looked ever on sadness.
But he could still be tart. He suggested that Capitola ought to have in the window of her house a Service Flag with a star for every person at the Institute who had put on uniform.
She took it quite seriously, and did it.
The military duties of the McGurk staff did not consist entirely in wearing uniforms, receiving salutes, and listening to Col. Dr. Tubbs’s luncheon lectures on “the part America will inevitably play in the reconstruction of a Democratic Europe.”
They prepared sera; the assistant in the Department of Bio-Physics was inventing electrified wire entanglements; Dr. Billy Smith, who six months before had been singingStudent Liederat Lüchow’s, was working on poison gas to be used against all singers ofLieder; and to Martin was assigned the manufacture of lipovaccine, a suspension of finely ground typhoid and paratyphoid organisms in oil. It was a greasy job, and dull. Martin was faithful enough about it, and gave to it almost every morning, but he blasphemed more than usual and he unholily welcomed scientific papers in which lipovaccines were condemned as inferior to ordinary salt solutions.
He was conscious of Gottlieb’s sorrowing and tried to comfort him.
It was Martin’s most pitiful fault that he was not very kind to shy people and lonely people and stupid old people; he was not cruel to them, he simply was unconscious of them or so impatient of their fumbling that he avoided them. Whenever Leora taxed him with it he grumbled:
“Well, but— I’m too much absorbed in my work, or in doping stuff out, to waste time on morons. And it’s a good thing. Most people above the grade of hog do so much chasing around after a lot of vague philanthropy that they never get anything done—and most of your confounded shy people get spiritually pauperized. Oh, it’s so much easier to be good-natured and purring and self-congratulatory and generally footless than it is to pound ahead and keep yourself strictly for your own work, the work that gets somewhere. Very few people have the courage to be decently selfish—not answerletters—and demand the right to work. If they had their way, these sentimentalists would’ve had a Newton—yes, or probably a Christ!—giving up everything they did for the world to address meetings and listen to the troubles of cranky old maids. Nothing takes so much courage as to keep hard and clear-headed.”
And he hadn’t even that courage.
When Leora had made complaint, he would be forcibly kind to all sorts of alarmed stray beggars for a day or two, then drift back into his absorption. There were but two people whose unhappiness could always pierce him: Leora and Gottlieb.
Though he was busier than he had known any one could ever be, with lipovaccines in the morning, physical chemistry in the evening and, at all sorts of intense hours between, the continuation of his staphylolysin research, he gave what time he could to seeking out Gottlieb and warming his vanity by reverent listening.
Then his research wiped out everything else, made him forget Gottlieb and Leora and all his briskness about studying, made him turn his war work over to others, and confounded night and day in one insane flaming blur as he realized that he had something not unworthy of a Gottlieb, something at the mysterious source of life.
Captain Martin Arrowsmith, M.R.C., came home to his good wife Leora, wailing, “I’m so rotten tired, and I feel kind of discouraged. I haven’t accomplished a darn’ thing in this whole year at McGurk. Sterile. No good. And I’m hanged if I’ll study calculus this evening. Let’s go to the movies. Won’t even change to regular human clothes. Too tired.”
“All right, honey,” said Leora. “But let’s have dinner here. I bought a wonderful ole fish this afternoon.”
Through the film Martin gave his opinion, as a captain and as a doctor, that it seemed improbable a mother should not know her daughter after an absence of ten years. He was restless and rational, which is not a mood in which to view the cinema. When they came blinking out of that darkness lit only from the shadowy screen, he snorted, “I’m going back to the lab. I’ll put you in a taxi.”
“Oh, let the beastly thing go for one night.”
“Now that’s unfair! I haven’t worked late for three or four nights now!”
“Then take me along.”
“Nope. I have a hunch I may be working all night.”
Liberty Street, as he raced along it, was sleeping below its towers. It was McGurk’s order that the elevator to the Institute should run all night, and indeed three or four of the twenty staff-members did sometimes use it after respectable hours.
That morning Martin had isolated a new strain of staphylococcus bacteria from the gluteal carbuncle of a patient in the Lower Manhattan Hospital, a carbuncle which was healing with unusual rapidity. He had placed a bit of the pus in broth and incubated it. In eight hours a good growth of bacteria had appeared. Before going wearily home he had returned the flask to the incubator.
He was not particularly interested in it, and now, in hislaboratory, he removed his military blouse, looked down to the lights on the blue-black river, smoked a little, thought what a dog he was not to be gentler to Leora, and damned Bert Tozer and Pickerbaugh and Tubbs and anybody else who was handy to his memory before he absent-mindedly wavered to the incubator, and found that the flask, in which there should have been a perceptible cloudy growth, had no longer any signs of bacteria—of staphylococci.
“Now what the hell!” he cried. “Why, the broth’s as clear as when I seeded it! Now what the— Think of this fool accident coming up just when I was going to start something new!”
He hastened from the incubator, in a closet off the corridor, to his laboratory and, holding the flask under a strong light, made certain that he had seen aright. He fretfully prepared a slide from the flask contents and examined it under the microscope. He discovered nothing but shadows of what had been bacteria: thin outlines, the form still there but the cell substance gone; minute skeletons on an infinitesimal battlefield.
He raised his head from the microscope, rubbed his tired eyes, reflectively rubbed his neck—his blouse was off, his collar on the floor, his shirt open at the throat. He considered:
“Something funny here. This culture was growing all right, and now it’s committed suicide. Never heard of bugs doing that before. I’ve hit something! What caused it? Some chemical change? Something organic?”
Now in Martin Arrowsmith there were no decorative heroisms, no genius for amours, no exotic wit, no edifyingly borne misfortunes. He presented neither picturesque elegance nor a moral message. He was full of hasty faults and of perverse honesty; a young man often unkindly, often impolite. But he had one gift: a curiosity whereby he saw nothing as ordinary. Had he been an acceptable hero, like Major Rippleton Holabird, he would have chucked the contents of the flask into the sink, avowed with pretty modesty, “Silly! I’ve made some error!” and gone his ways. But Martin, being Martin, walked prosaically up and down his laboratory, snarling, “Now there was somecausefor that, and I’m going to find out what it was.”
He did have one romantic notion: he would telephone to Leora and tell her that splendor was happening, and she wasn’t to worry about him. He fumbled down the corridor, lighting matches, trying to find electric switches.
At night all halls are haunted. Even in the smirkingly new McGurk Building there had been a bookkeeper who committed suicide. As Martin groped he was shakily conscious of feet padding behind him, of shapes which leered from doorways and insolently vanished, of ancient bodiless horrors, and when he found the switch he rejoiced in the blessing and security of sudden light that recreated the world.
At the Institute telephone switchboard he plugged in wherever it seemed reasonable. Once he thought he was talking to Leora, but it proved to be a voice, sexless and intolerant, which said “Nummer pleeeeeze” with a taut alertness impossible to any one so indolent as Leora. Once it was a voice which slobbered, “Is this Sarah?” then, “I don’t wantyou! Ring off, will yuh!” Once a girl pleaded, “Honestly, Billy, I did try to get there but the boss came in at five and he said—”
As for the rest it was only a burring; the sound of seven million people hungry for sleep or love or money.
He observed, “Oh, rats, I guess Lee’ll have gone to bed by now,” and felt his way back to the laboratory.
A detective, hunting the murderer of bacteria, he stood with his head back, scratching his chin, scratching his memory for like cases of microörganisms committing suicide or being slain without perceptible cause. He rushed up-stairs to the library, consulted the American and English authorities and, laboriously, the French and German. He found nothing.
He worried lest there might, somehow, have been no living staphylococci in the pus which he had used for seeding the broth—none there to die. At a hectic run, not stopping for lights, bumping corners and sliding on the too perfect tile floor, he skidded down the stairs and galloped through the corridors to his room. He found the remains of the original pus, made a smear on a glass slide, and stained it with gentian-violet, nervously dribbling out one drop of the gorgeous dye. He sprang to the microscope. As he bent over the brass tube and focused the objective, into the gray-lavender circular field of vision rose to existence the grape-like clusters of staphylococcus germs, purple dots against the blank plane.
“Staph in it, all right!” he shouted.
Then he forgot Leora, war, night, weariness, success, everything as he charged into preparations for an experiment, hisfirst great experiment. He paced furiously, rather dizzy. He shook himself into calmness and settled down at a table, among rings and spirals of cigarette smoke, to list on small sheets of paper all the possible causes of suicide in the bacteria—all the questions he had to answer and the experiments which should answer them.
It might be that alkali in an improperly cleaned flask had caused the clearing of the culture. It might be some anti-staph substance existing in the pus, or something liberated by the staphylococci themselves. It might be some peculiarity of this particular broth.
Each of these had to be tested.
He pried open the door of the glass-storeroom, shattering the lock. He took new flasks, cleaned them, plugged them with cotton, and placed them in the hot-air oven to sterilize. He found other batches of broth—as a matter of fact he stole them, from Gottlieb’s private and highly sacred supply in the ice-box. He filtered some of the clarified culture through a sterile porcelain filter, and added it to his regular staphylococcus strains.
And, perhaps most important of all, he discovered that he was out of cigarettes.
Incredulously he slapped each of his pockets, and went the round and slapped them all over again. He looked into his discarded military blouse; had a cheering idea about having seen cigarettes in a drawer; did not find them; and brazenly marched into the room where hung the aprons and jackets of the technicians. Furiously he pilfered pockets, and found a dozen beautiful cigarettes in a wrinkled and flattened paper case.
To test each of the four possible causes of the flask’s clearing he prepared and seeded with bacteria a series of flasks under varying conditions, and set them away in the incubator at body temperature. Till the last flask was put away, his hand was steady, his worn face calm. He was above all nervousness, free from all uncertainty, a professional going about his business.
By this time it was six o’clock of a fine wide August morning, and as he ceased his swift work, as taut nerves slackened, he looked out of his lofty window and was conscious of the world below: bright roofs, jubilant towers, and a high-decked Sound steamer swaggering up the glossy river.
He was completely fagged; he was, like a surgeon after a battle, like a reporter during an earthquake, perhaps a little insane; but sleepy he was not. He cursed the delay involved in the growth of the bacteria, without which he could not discover the effect of the various sorts of broths and bacterial strains, but choked his impatience.
He mounted the noisy slate stairway to the lofty world of the roof. He listened at the door of the Institute’s animal house. The guinea pigs, awake and nibbling, were making a sound like that of a wet cloth rubbed on glass in window-cleaning. He stamped his foot, and in fright they broke out in their strange sound of fear, like the cooing of doves.
He marched violently up and down, refreshed by the soaring sky, till he was calmed to hunger. Again he went pillaging. He found chocolate belonging to an innocent technician; he even invaded the office of the Director and in the desk of the Diana-like Pearl Robbins unearthed tea and a kettle (as well as a lip-stick, and a love-letter beginning “My Little Ickles”). He made himself a profoundly bad cup of tea, then, his whole body dragging, returned to his table to set down elaborately, in a shabby, nearly-filled note-book, every step of his experiment.
After seven he worked out the operation of the telephone switchboard and called the Lower Manhattan Hospital. Could Dr. Arrowsmith have some more pus from the same carbuncle? What? It’d healed? Curse it! No more of that material.
He hesitated over waiting for Gottlieb’s arrival, to tell him of the discovery, but determined to keep silence till he should have determined whether it was an accident. Eyes wide, too wrought up to sleep in the subway, he fled uptown to tell Leora. He had to tell some one! Waves of fear, doubt, certainty, and fear again swept over him; his ears rang and his hands trembled.
He rushed up to the flat; he bawled “Lee! Lee!” before he had unlocked the door. And she was gone.
He gaped. The flat breathed emptiness. He searched it again. She had slept there, she had had a cup of coffee, but she had vanished.
He was at once worried lest there had been an accident, and furious that she should not have been here at the great hour. Sullenly he made breakfast for himself.... It is strange that excellent bacteriologists and chemists should scramble eggs sowaterily, should make such bitter coffee and be so casual about dirty spoons.... By the time he had finished the mess he was ready to believe that Leora had left him forever. He quavered, “I’ve neglected her a lot.” Sluggishly, an old man now, he started for the Institute, and at the entrance to the subway he met her.
She wailed, “I was so worried! I couldn’t get you on the ’phone. I went clear down to the Institute to see what’d happened to you.”
He kissed her, very competently, and raved, “God, woman, I’ve got it! The real big stuff! I’ve found something, not a chemical you put in I mean, that eats bugs—dissolves ’em—kills ’em. May be a big new step in therapeutics. Oh, no, rats, I don’t suppose it really is. Prob’ly just another of my bulls.”
She sought to reassure him but he did not wait. He dashed down to the subway, promising to telephone to her. By ten, he was peering into his incubator.
There was a cloudy appearance of bacteria in all the flasks except those in which he had used broth from the original alarming flask. In these, the mysterious murderer of germs had prevented the growth of the new bacteria which he had introduced.
“Great stuff,” he said.
He returned the flasks to the incubator, recorded his observations, went again to the library, and searched handbooks, bound proceedings of societies, periodicals in three languages. He had acquired a reasonable scientific French and German. It is doubtful whether he could have bought a drink or asked the way to the Kursaal in either language, but he understood the universal Hellenistic scientific jargon, and he pawed through the heavy books, rubbing his eyes, which were filled with salty fire.
He remembered that he was an army officer and had lipovaccine to make this morning. He went to work, but he was so twitchy that he ruined the batch, called his patient garçon a fool, and after this injustice sent him out for a pint of whisky.
He had to have a confidant. He telephoned to Leora, lunched with her expensively, and asserted, “It still looks as if there were something to it.” He was back in the Institute every hour that afternoon, glancing at his flasks, but betweenhe tramped the streets, creaking with weariness, drinking too much coffee.
Every five minutes it came to him, as a quite new and ecstatic idea, “Why don’t I go to sleep?” then remembered, and groaned, “No, I’ve got to keep going and watch every step. Can’t leave it, or I’ll have to begin all over again. But I’m so sleepy! Why don’t I go to sleep?”
He dug down, before six, into a new layer of strength, and at six his examination showed that the flasks containing the original broth still had no growth of bacteria, and the flasks which he had seeded with the original pus had, like the first eccentric flask, after beginning to display a good growth of bacteria cleared up again under the slowly developing attack of the unknown assassin.
He sat down, drooping with relief. He had it! He stated in the conclusions of his first notes:
“I have observed a principle, which I shall temporarily call the X Principle, in pus from a staphylococcus infection, which checks the growth of several strains of staphylococcus, and which dissolves the staphylococci from the pus in question.”
When he had finished, at seven, his head was on his note-book and he was asleep.
He awoke at ten, went home, ate like a savage, slept again, and was in the laboratory before dawn. His next rest was an hour that afternoon, sprawled on his laboratory table, with his garçon on guard; the next, a day and a half later, was eight hours in bed, from dawn till noon.
But in dreams he was constantly upsetting a rack of test-tubes or breaking a flask. He discovered an X Principle which dissolved chairs, tables, human beings. He went about smearing it on Bert Tozers and Dr. Bissexes and fiendishly watching them vanish, but accidentally he dropped it on Leora and saw her fading, and he woke screaming to find the real Leora’s arms about him, while he sobbed, “Oh, I couldn’t do anything without you! Don’t ever leave me! I do love you so, even if this damned work does keep me tied up. Stay with me!”
While she sat by him on the frowsy bed, gay in her gingham, he went to sleep, to wake up three hours later and start off for the Institute, his eyes blood-glaring and set. She was ready for him with strong coffee, waiting on him silently, looking at him proudly, while he waved his arms, babbling:
“Gottlieb better not talk any more about the importanceof new observations! The X Principle may not just apply to staph. Maybe you can sic it on any bug—cure any germ disease by it. Bug that lives on bugs! Or maybe it’s a chemical principle, an enzyme. Oh, I don’t know. But I will!”
As he bustled to the Institute he swelled with the certainty that after years of stumbling he had arrived. He had visions of his name in journals and textbooks; of scientific meetings cheering him. He had been an unknown among the experts of the Institute, and now he pitied all of them. But when he was back at his bench the grandiose aspirations faded and he was the sniffing, snuffling beagle, the impersonal worker. Before him, supreme joy of the investigator, new mountain-passes of work opened, and in him was new power.
For a week Martin’s life had all the regularity of an escaped soldier in the enemy’s country, with the same agitation and the same desire to prowl at night. He was always sterilizing flasks, preparing media of various hydrogen-ion concentrations, copying his old notes into a new book lovingly labeled “X Principle, Staph,” and adding to it further observations. He tried, elaborately, with many flasks and many reseedings, to determine whether the X Principle would perpetuate itself indefinitely, whether when it was transmitted from tube to new tube of bacteria it would reappear, whether, growing by cell-division automatically, it was veritably a germ, a sub-germ infecting germs.
During the week Gottlieb occasionally peered over his shoulder, but Martin was unwilling to report until he should have proof, and one good night’s sleep, and perhaps even a shave.
When he was sure that the X Principle did reproduce itself indefinitely, so that in the tenth tube it grew to have as much effect as in the first, then he solemnly called on Gottlieb and laid before him his results, with his plans for further investigation.
The old man tapped his thin fingers on the report, read it intently, looked up and, not wasting time in congratulations, vomited questions:
Have you done dis? Why have you not done dat? At what temperature is the activity of the Principle at its maximum? Is its activity manifested on agar-solid medium?
“This is my plan for new work. I think you’ll find it includes most of your suggestions.”
“Huh!” Gottlieb ran through it and snorted, “Why have you not planned to propagate it on dead staph? That is most important of all.”
“Why?”
Gottlieb flew instantly to the heart of the jungle in which Martin had struggled for many days: “Because that will show whether you are dealing with a living virus.”
Martin was humbled, but Gottlieb beamed:
“You haf a big thing. Now do not let the Director know about this and get enthusiastic too soon. I am glad, Martin!”
There was that in his voice which sent Martin swanking down the corridor, back to work—and to not sleeping.
What the X Principle was—chemical or germ—he could not determine, but certainly the original Principle flourished. It could be transmitted indefinitely; he determined the best temperature for it and found that it did not propagate on dead staphylococcus. When he added a drop containing the Principle to a growth of staphylococcus which was a gray film on the solid surface of agar, the drop was beautifully outlined by bare patches, as the enemy made its attack, so that the agar slant looked like moth-eaten beeswax. But within a fortnight one of the knots of which Gottlieb warned him appeared.
Wary of the hundreds of bacteriologists who would rise to slay him once his paper appeared, he sought to make sure that his results could be confirmed. At the hospital he obtained pus from many boils, of the arms, the legs, the back; he sought to reduplicate his results—and failed, complete. No X Principle appeared in any of the new boils, and sadly he went to Gottlieb.
The old man meditated, asked a question or two, sat hunched in his cushioned chair, and demanded:
“What kind of a carbuncle was the original one?”
“Gluteal.”
“Ah, den the X Principle may be present in the intestinal contents. Look for it, in people with boils and without.”
Martin dashed off. In a week he had obtained the Principle from intestinal contents and from other gluteal boils, finding an especial amount in boils which were “healing of themselves”; and he transplanted his new Principle, in a heaven oftriumph, of admiration for Gottlieb. He extended his investigation to the intestinal group of organisms and discovered an X Principle against the colon bacillus. At the same time he gave some of the original Principle to a doctor in the Lower Manhattan Hospital for the treatment of boils, and from him had excited reports of cures, more excited inquiries as to what this mystery might be.
With these new victories he went parading in to Gottlieb, and suddenly he was being trounced:
“Oh! So! Beautiful! You let a doctor try it before you finished your research? You want fake reports of cures to get into the newspapers, to be telegraphed about places, and have everybody in the world that has a pimple come tumbling in to be cured, so you will never be able to work? You want to be a miracle man, and not a scientist? You do not want to complete things? You wander off monkey-skipping and flap-doodeling with colon bacillus before you have finish with staph—before you haf really begun your work—before you have found what is thenatureof the X Principle? Get out of my office! You are a—a—a college president! Next I know you will be dining with Tubbs, and get your picture in the papers for a smart cure-vendor!”
Martin crept out, and when he met Billy Smith in the corridor and the little chemist twittered, “Up to something big? Haven’t seen you lately,” Martin answered in the tone of Doc Vickerson’s assistant in Elk Mills:
“Oh—no—gee— I’m just grubbing along, I guess.”
As sharply and quite as impersonally as he would have watched the crawling illness of an infected guinea pig, Martin watched himself, in the madness of overwork, drift toward neurasthenia. With considerable interest he looked up the symptoms of neurasthenia, saw one after another of them twitch at him, and casually took the risk.
From an irritability which made him a thoroughly impossible person to live with, he passed into a sick nervousness in which he missed things for which he reached, dropped test-tubes, gasped at sudden footsteps behind him. Dr. Yeo’s croaking voice became to him a fever, an insult, and he waited with his whole body clenched, muttering, “Shut up—shut up—oh, shutup!” when Yeo stopped to talk to some one outside his door.
Then he was obsessed by the desire to spell backward all the words which snatched at him from signs.
As he stood dragging out his shoulder on a subway strap, he pored over the posters, seeking new words to spell backward. Some of them were remarkably agreeable: No Smoking became a jaunty and agreeable “gnikoms on,” and Broadway was tolerable as “yawdaorb,” but he was displeased by his attempts on Punch, Health, Rough; while Strength, turning into “htgnerts” was abominable.
When he had to return to his laboratory three times before he was satisfied that he had closed the window, he sat down, coldly, informed himself that he was on the edge, and took council as to whether he dared go on. It was not very good council: he was so glorified by his unfolding work that his self could not be taken seriously.
At last Fear closed in on him.
It began with childhood’s terror of the darkness. He lay awake dreading burglars; footsteps in the hall were a creeping cutthroat; an unexplained scratching on the fire-escape was a murderer with an automatic in his fist. He beheld it so clearly that he had to spring from bed and look timorously out, and when in the street below he did actually see a man standing still, he was cold with panic.
Every sky glow was a fire. He was going to be trapped in his bed, be smothered, die writhing.
He knew absolutely that his fears were absurd, and that knowledge did not at all keep them from dominating him.
He was ashamed at first to acknowledge his seeming cowardice to Leora. Admit that he was crouching like a child? But when he had lain rigid, almost screaming, feeling the cord of an assassin squeezing his throat, till the safe dawn brought back a dependable world, he muttered of “insomnia” and after that, night on night, he crept into her arms and she shielded him from the horrors, protected him from garroters, kept away the fire.
He made a checking list of the favorite neurasthenic fears: agoraphobia, claustrophobia, pyrophobia, anthropophobia, and the rest, ending with what he asserted to be “the most fool, pretentious, witch-doctor term of the whole bloomin’ lot,” namely, siderodromophobia, the fear of a railway journey. Thefirst night, he was able to check against pyrophobia, for at the vaudeville with Leora, when on the stage a dancer lighted a brazier, he sat waiting for the theater to take fire. He looked cautiously along the row of seats (raging at himself the while for doing it), he estimated his chance of reaching an exit, and became easy only when he had escaped into the street.
It was when anthropophobia set in, when he was made uneasy by people who walked too close to him, that, sagely viewing his list and seeing how many phobias were now checked, he permitted himself to rest.
He fled to the Vermont hills for a four-day tramp—alone, that he might pound on the faster. He went at night, by sleeper, and was able to make the most interesting observations of siderodromophobia.
He lay in a lower berth, the little pillow wadded into a lump. He was annoyed by the waving of his clothes as they trailed from the hanger beside him, at the opening of the green curtains. The window-shade was up six inches; it left a milky blur across which streaked yellow lights, emphatic in the noisy darkness of his little cell. He was shivering with anxiety. Whenever he tried to relax, he was ironed back into apprehension. When the train stopped between stations and from the engine came a questioning, fretful whistle, he was aghast with certainty that something had gone wrong—a bridge was out, a train was ahead of them; perhaps another was coming just behind them, about to smash into them at sixty miles an hour—
He imagined being wrecked, and he suffered more than from the actual occurrence, for he pictured not one wreck but half a dozen, with assorted miseries.... The flat wheel just beneath him—surely it shouldn’t pound like that—why hadn’t the confounded man with the hammer detected it at the last big station?—the flat wheel cracking; the car lurching, falling, being dragged on its side.... A collision, a crash, the car instantly a crumpled, horrible heap, himself pinned in the telescoped berth, caught between seat and seat. Shrieks, death groans, the creeping flames.... The car turning, falling, plumping into a river on its side; himself trying to crawl through a window as the water seeped about his body.... Himself standing by the wrenched car, deciding whether to keep away and protect his sacred work or go back, rescue people, and be killed.
So real were the visions that he could not endure lying here, waiting. He reached for the berth light, and could not find the button. In agitation he tore a match-box from his coat pocket, scratched a match, snapped on the light. He saw himself, under the sheets, reflected in the polished wooden ceiling of his berth like a corpse in a coffin. Hastily he crawled out, with trousers and coat over his undergarments (he had somehow feared to show so much trust in the train as to put on pajamas), and with bare disgusted feet he paddled up to the smoking compartment.
The porter was squatting on a stool, polishing an amazing pile of shoes.
Martin longed for his encouraging companionship, and ventured, “Warm night.”
“Uh-huh,” said the porter.
Martin curled on the chill leather seat of the smoking compartment, profoundly studying a brass wash-bowl. He was conscious that the porter was disapproving, but he had comfort in calculating that the man must make this run thrice a week, tens of thousand of miles yearly, apparently without being killed, and there might be a chance of their lasting till morning.
He smoked till his tongue was raw and till, fortified by the calmness of the porter, he laughed at the imaginary catastrophes. He staggered sleepily to his berth.
Instantly he was tense again, and he lay awake till dawn.
For four days he tramped, swam in cold brooks, slept under trees or in straw stacks, and came back (but by day) with enough reserve of energy to support him till his experiment should have turned from overwhelming glory into sane and entertaining routine.
Whenthe work on the X Principle had gone on for six weeks, the Institute staff suspected that something was occurring, and they hinted to Martin that he needed their several assistances. He avoided them. He did not desire to be caught in any of the log-rolling factions, though for Terry Wickett, still in France, and for Terry’s rough compulsion to honesty he was sometimes lonely.
How the Director first heard that Martin was finding gold is not known.
Dr. Tubbs was tired of being a Colonel—there were too many Generals in New York—and for two weeks he had not had an Idea which would revolutionize even a small part of the world. One morning he burst in, whiskers alive, and reproached Martin:
“What is this mysterious discovery you’re making, Arrowsmith? I’ve asked Dr. Gottlieb, but he evades me; he says you want to be sure, first. I must know about it, not only because I take a very friendly interest in your work but because I am, after all, your Director!”
Martin felt that his one ewe lamb was being snatched from him but he could see no way to refuse. He brought out his note-books, and the agar slants with their dissolved patches of bacilli. Tubbs gasped, assaulted his whiskers, did a moment of impressive thinking, and clamored:
“Do you mean to say you think you’ve discovered an infectious disease of bacteria, and you haven’t told me about it? My dear boy, I don’t believe you quite realize that you may have hit on the supreme way to kill pathogenic bacteria.... And you didn’t tell me!”
“Well, sir, I wanted to make certain—”
“I admire your caution, but you must understand, Martin, that the basic aim of this Institution is the conquest of disease, not making pretty scientific notes! Youmayhave hit on one of the discoveries of a generation; the sort of thing that Mr. McGurk and I are looking for.... If your results are confirmed.... I shall ask Dr. Gottlieb’s opinion.”
He shook Martin’s hand five or six times and bustled out. Next day he called Martin to his office, shook his hand some more, told Pearl Robbins that they were honored to know him, then led him to a mountain top and showed him all the kingdoms of the world:
“Martin, I have some plans for you. You have been working brilliantly, but without a complete vision of broader humanity. Now the Institute is organized on the most flexible lines. There are no set departments, but only units formed about exceptional men like our good friend Gottlieb. If any new man has the real right thing, we’ll provide him with every facility, instead of letting him merely plug along doing individual work. I have given your results the most careful consideration, Martin; I have talked them over with Dr. Gottlieb—though I must say he does not altogether share my enthusiasm about immediate practical results. And I have decided to submit to the Board of Trustees a plan for a Department of Microbic Pathology, with you as head! You will have an assistant—a real trained Ph.D.—and more room and technicians, and you will report to me directly, talk things over with me daily, instead of with Gottlieb. You will be relieved of all war work, by my order—though you can retain your uniform and everything. And your salary will be, I should think, if Mr. McGurk and the other Trustees confirm me, ten thousand a year instead of five.
“Yes, the best room for you would be that big one on the upper floor, to the right of the elevators. That’s vacant now. And your office across the hall.
“And all the assistance you require. Why, my boy, you won’t need to sit up nights using your hands in this wasteful way, but just think things out and take up possible extensions of the work—cover all the possible fields. We’ll extend this to everything! We’ll have scores of physicians in hospitals helping us and confirming our results and widening our efforts.... We might have a weekly council of all these doctors and assistants, with you and me jointly presiding.... If men like Koch and Pasteur had only had such a system, how much morescopetheir work might have had! Efficient universalcoöperation—that’s the thing in science to-day—the time of this silly, jealous, fumbling individual research has gone by.
“My boy, we may have found the real thing—another salvarsan! We’ll publish together! We’ll have the whole worldtalking! Why, I lay awake last night thinking of our magnificent opportunity! In a few months we may be curing not only staph infections but typhoid, dysentery! Martin, as your colleague, I do not for a moment wish to detract from the great credit which is yours, but I must say that if you had been more closely allied with Me you would have extended your work to practical proofs and results long before this.”
Martin wavered back to his room, dazzled by the view of a department of his own, assistants, a cheering world—and ten thousand a year. But his work seemed to have been taken from him, his own self had been taken from him; he was no longer to be Martin, and Gottlieb’s disciple, but a Man of Measured Merriment, Dr. Arrowsmith, Head of the Department of Microbic Pathology, who would wear severe collars and make addresses and never curse.
Doubts enfeebled him. Perhaps the X Principle would develop only in the test-tube; perhaps it had no large value for human healing. He wanted to know—toknow.
Then Rippleton Holabird burst in on him:
“Martin, my dear boy, the Director has just been telling me about your discovery and his splendid plans for you. I want to congratulate you with all my heart, and to welcome you as a fellow department-head—and you so young—only thirty-four, isn’t it? What a magnificent future! Think, Martin”— Major Holabird discarded his dignity, sat astride a chair—“think of all you have ahead! If this work really pans out, there’s no limit to the honors that’ll come to you, you lucky young dog! Acclaim by scientific societies, any professorship you might happen to want, prizes, the biggest men begging to consult you, a ripping place in society!
“Now listen, old boy: Perhaps you know how close I am to Dr. Tubbs, and I see no reason why you shouldn’t come in with us, and we three run things here to suit ourselves. Wasn’t it simply too decent of the Director to be so eager to recognize and help you in every way! So cordial—and so helpful. Now you really understand him. And the three of us— Some day we might be able to erect a superstructure of coöperative science which would control not only McGurk but every institute and every university scientific department in the country, and so produce really efficient research. When Dr. Tubbs retires, I have— I’m speaking with the most complete confidence— I have some reason to suppose that the Board of Trusteeswill consider me as his successor. Then, old boy, if this work succeeds, you and I can do things together!
“To be ever so frank, there are very few men in our world (think of poor old Yeo!) who combine presentable personalities with first-rate achievement, and if you’ll just get over some of your abruptness and your unwillingness to appreciate big executives and charming women (because, thank God, you do wear your clothes well—when you take the trouble!) why, you and I can become the dictators of science throughout the whole country!”
Martin did not think of an answer till Holabird had gone.
He perceived the horror of the shrieking bawdy thing called Success, with its demand that he give up quiet work and parade forth to be pawed by every blind devotee and mud-spattered by every blind enemy.
He fled to Gottlieb as to the wise and tender father, and begged to be saved from Success and Holabirds and A. DeWitt Tubbses and their hordes of address-making scientists, degree-hunting authors, pulpit orators, popular surgeons, valeted journalists, sentimental merchant princes, literary politicians, titled sportsmen, statesmenlike generals, interviewed senators, sententious bishops.
Gottlieb was worried:
“I knew Tubbs was up to something idealistic and nasty when he came purring to me, but I did not t’ink he would try to turn you into a megaphone all so soon in one day! I will gird up my loins and go oud to battle with the forces of publicity!”
He was defeated.
“I have let you alone, Dr. Gottlieb,” said Tubbs, “but hang it, I am the Director! And I must say that, perhaps owing to my signal stupidity, I fail to see the horrors of enabling Arrowsmith to cure thousands of suffering persons and to become a man of weight and esteem!”
Gottlieb took it to Ross McGurk.
“Max, I love you like a brother, but Tubbs is the Director, and if he feels he needs this Arrowsmith (is he the thin young fellow I see around your lab?) then I have no right to stop him. I’ve got to back him up the same as I would the master of one of our ships,” said McGurk.
Not till the Board of Trustees, which consisted of McGurk himself, the president of the University of Wilmington, andthree professors of science in various universities, should meet and give approval, would Martin be a department-head. Meantime Tubbs demanded:
“Now, Martin, you must hasten and publish your results. Get right to it. In fact you should have done it before this. Throw your material together as rapidly as possible and send a note in to the Society for Experimental Biology and Medicine, to be published in their next proceedings.”
“But I’m not ready to publish! I want to have every loophole plugged up before I announce anything whatever!”
“Nonsense! That attitude is old-fashioned. This is no longer an age of parochialism but of competition, in art and science just as much as in commerce—coöperation with your own group, but with those outside it, competition to the death! Plug up the holes thoroughly, later, but we can’t have somebody else stealing a march on us. Remember you have your name to make. The way to make it is by working with me—toward the greatest good for the greatest number.”
As Martin began his paper, thinking of resigning but giving it up because Tubbs seemed to him at least better than the Pickerbaughs, he had a vision of a world of little scientists, each busy in a roofless cell. Perched on a cloud, watching them, was the divine Tubbs, a glory of whiskers, ready to blast any of the little men who stopped being earnest and wasted time on speculation about anything which he had not assigned to them. Back of their welter of coops, unseen by the tutelary Tubbs, the lean giant figure of Gottlieb stood sardonic on a stormy horizon.
Literary expression was not easy to Martin. He delayed with his paper, while Tubbs became irritable and whipped him on. The experiments had ceased; there was misery and pen-scratching and much tearing of manuscript paper in Martin’s particular roofless cell.
For once he had no refuge in Leora. She cried:
“Why not? Ten thousand a year would be awfully nice, Sandy. Gee! We’ve always been so poor, and you do like nice flats and things. And to boss your own department— And you could consult Dr. Gottlieb just the same. He’s a department-head, isn’t he, and yet he keeps independent of Dr. Tubbs. Oh, I’m for it!”
And slowly, under the considerable increase in respect given to him at Institute lunches, Martin himself was “for it.”
“We could get one of those new apartments on Park Avenue. Don’t suppose they cost more than three thousand a year,” he meditated. “Wouldn’t be so bad to be able to entertain people there. Not that I’d let it interfere with my work.... Kind of nice.”
It was still more kind of nice, however agonizing in the taking, to be recognized socially.
Capitola McGurk, who hitherto had not perceived him except as an object less interesting than Gladys the Centrifuge, telephoned: “ ... Dr. Tubbs so enthusiastic and Ross and I are so pleased. Be delighted if Mrs. Arrowsmith and you could dine with us next Thursday at eight-thirty.”
Martin accepted the royal command.
It was his conviction that after glimpses of Angus Duer and Rippleton Holabird he had seen luxury, and understood smart dinner parties. Leora and he went without too much agitation to the house of Ross McGurk, in the East Seventies, near Fifth Avenue. The house did, from the street, seem to have an unusual quantity of graystone gargoyles and carven lintels and bronze grills, but it did not seem large.
Inside, the vaulted stone hallway opened up like a cathedral. They were embarrassed by the footmen, awed by the automatic elevator, oppressed by a hallway full of vellum folios and Italian chests and a drawing-room full of water-colors, and reduced to rusticity by Capitola’s queenly white satin and pearls.
There were eight or ten Persons of Importance, male and female, looking insignificant but bearing names as familiar as Ivory Soap.
Did one give his arm to some unknown lady and “take her in,” Martin wondered. He rejoiced to find that one merely straggled into the dining-room under McGurk’s amiable basso herding.
The dining-room was gorgeous and very hideous, in stamped leather and hysterias of gold, with collections of servants watching one’s use of asparagus forks. Martin was seated (it is doubtful if he ever knew that he was the guest of honor) between Capitola McGurk and a woman of whom he could learn only that she was the sister of a countess.
Capitola leaned toward him in her great white splendor.
“Now, Dr. Arrowsmith, just what is this you are discovering?”
“Why, it’s—uh— I’m trying to figure—”
“Dr. Tubbs tells us that you have found such wonderful new ways of controlling disease.” Her L’s were a melody of summer rivers, her R’s the trill of birds in the brake. “Oh, what—whatcould be more beau-tiful than relieving this sad old world of its burden of illness! But just precisely whatisit that you’re doing?”
“Why, it’s awfully early to be sure but— You see, it’s like this. You take certain bugs like staph—”
“Oh, how interesting science is, but how frightfully difficult for simple people like me to grasp! But we’re all so humble. We’re just waiting for scientists like you to make the world secure for friendship—”
Then Capitola gave all her attention to her other man. Martin looked straight ahead and ate and suffered. The sister of the countess, a sallow and stringy woman, was glowing at him. He turned with unhappy meekness (noting that she had one more fork than he, and wondering where he had got lost).
She blared, “You are a scientist, I am told.”
“Ye-es.”
“The trouble with scientists is that they do not understand beauty. They are so cold.”
Rippleton Holabird would have made pretty mirth, but Martin could only quaver, “No, I don’t think that’s true,” and consider whether he dared drink another glass of champagne.
When they had been herded back to the drawing-room, after masculine but achingly elaborate passings of the port, Capitola swooped on him with white devouring wings:
“Dear Dr. Arrowsmith, I really didn’t get a chance at dinner to ask you just exactlywhatyou are doing.... Oh! Have you seen my dear little children at the Charles Street settlement? I’m sure ever so many of them will become the most fascinating scientists. You must come lecture to them.”
That night he fretted to Leora, “Going to be hard to keep up this twittering. But I suppose I’ve got to learn to enjoy it. Oh, well, think how nice it’ll be to give some dinners of our own, with real people, Gottlieb and everybody, when I’m a department-head.”
Next morning Gottlieb came slowly into Martin’s room. He stood by the window; he seemed to be avoiding Martin’s eyes. He sighed, “Something sort of bad—perhaps not altogether bad—has happened.”
“What is it, sir? Anything I can do?”
“It does not apply to me. To you.”
Irritably Martin thought, “Is he going into all this danger-of-rapid-success stuff again? I’m getting tired of it!”
Gottlieb ambled toward him. “It iss a pity, Martin, but you are not the discoverer of the X Principle.”
“Wh-what—”
“Some one else has done it.”
“They have not! I’ve searched all the literature, and except for Twort, not one person has even hinted at anticipating— Why, good Lord, Dr. Gottlieb, it would mean that all I’ve done, all these weeks, has just been waste, and I’m a fool—”
“Vell. Anyvay. D’Hérelle of the Pasteur Institute has just now published in theComptes Rendus, Académie des Sciences, a report—it is your X Principle, absolute. Only he calls it ‘bacteriophage.’ So.”
“Then I’m—”
In his mind Martin finished it, “Then I’m not going to be a department-head or famous or anything else. I’m back in the gutter.” All strength went out of him and all purpose, and the light of creation faded to dirty gray.
“Now of course,” said Gottlieb, “you could claim to be codiscoverer and spend the rest of your life fighting to get recognized. Or you could forget it, and write a nice letter congratulating D’Hérelle, and go back to work.”
Martin mourned, “Oh, I’ll go back to work. Nothing else to do. I guess Tubbs’ll chuck the new department now. I’ll have time to really finish my research—maybe I’ve got some points that D’Hérelle hasn’t hit on—and I’ll publish it to corroborate him.... Damn him!... Where is his report?... I suppose you’re glad that I’m saved from being a Holabird.”
“I ought to be. It is a sin against my religion that I am not. But I am getting old. And you are my friend. I am sorry you are not to have the fun of being pretentious and successful—for a while.... Martin, it iss nice that you will corroborate D’Hérelle. That is science: to work and not to care—too much—if somebody else gets the credit.... Shall I tell Tubbs about D’Hérelle’s priority, or will you?”
Gottlieb straggled away, looking back a little sadly.
Tubbs came in to wail, “If you had only published earlier, as I told you, Dr. Arrowsmith! You have really put me in amost embarrassing position before the Board of Trustees. Of course there can be no question now of a new department.”
“Yes,” said Martin vacantly.
He carefully filed away the beginnings of his paper and turned to his bench. He stared at a shining flask till it fascinated him like a crystal ball. He pondered:
“Wouldn’t have been so bad if Tubbs had let me alone. Damn these old men, damn these Men of Measured Merriment, these Important Men that come and offer you honors. Money. Decorations. Titles. Want to make you windy with authority. Honors! If you get ’em, you become pompous, and then when you’re used to ’em, if you lose ’em you feel foolish.
“So I’m not going to be rich. Leora, poor kid, she won’t have her new dresses and flat and everything. We— Won’t be so much fun in the lil old flat, now. Oh, quit whining!
“I wish Terry were here.
“I love that man Gottlieb. He might have gloated—
“Bacteriophage, the Frenchman calls it. Too long. Better just call itphage. Even got to take his name for it, for my own X Principle! Well, I had a lot of fun, working all those nights. Working—”
He was coming out of his trance. He imagined the flask filled with staph-clouded broth. He plodded into Gottlieb’s office to secure the journal containing D’Hérelle’s report, and read it minutely, enthusiastically.
“There’s a man, there’s a scientist!” he chuckled.
On his way home he was planning to experiment on the Shiga dysentery bacillus with phage (as henceforth he called the X Principle), planning to volley questions and criticisms at D’Hérelle, hoping that Tubbs would not discharge him for a while, and expanding with relief that he would not have to do his absurd premature paper on phage, that he could be lewd and soft-collared and easy, not judicious and spied-on and weighty.
He grinned, “Gosh, I’ll bet Tubbs was disappointed! He’d figured on signing all my papers with me and getting the credit. Now for this Shiga experiment— Poor Lee, she’ll have to get used to my working nights, I guess.”
Leora kept to herself what she felt about it—or at least most of what she felt.