“You will come! I know you’ll come and help me! I know. You’ll come! Martin! Sandy!Sandy!” she sobbed.
Then she slipped down into the kindly coma. There was no more pain, and all the shadowy house was quiet but for her hoarse and struggling breath.
Like Sondelius, Joyce Lanyon tried to persuade Martin to give the phage to everybody.
“I’m getting to be good and stern, with all you people after me. Regular Gottlieb. Nothing can make me do it, not if they tried to lynch me,” he boasted.
He had explained Leora to Joyce.
“I don’t know whether you two will like each other. You’re so darn’ different. You’re awfully articulate, and you like these ‘pretty people’ that you’re always talking about, but she doesn’t care a hang for ’em. She sits back—oh, she never misses anything, but she never says much. Still, she’s got the best instinct for honesty that I’ve ever known. I hope you two’ll get each other. I was afraid to let her come here—didn’t know what I’d find—but now I’m going to hustle to Penrith and bring her here to-day.”
He borrowed Twyford’s car and drove to Blackwater, up to Penrith, in excellent spirits. For all the plague, they could have a lively time in the evenings. One of the Twyford sons was not so solemn; he and Joyce, with Martin and Leora, could slip down to the lagoon for picnic suppers; they would sing—
He came up to Penrith Lodge bawling, “Lee! Leora! Come on!Herewe are!”
The veranda, as he ran up on it, was leaf-scattered and dusty, and the front door was banging. His voice echoed in a desperate silence. He was uneasy. He darted in, found no one in the living-room, the kitchen, then hastened into their bedroom.
On the bed, across the folds of the torn mosquito netting, was Leora’s body, very frail, quite still. He cried to her, he shook her, he stood weeping.
He talked to her, his voice a little insane, trying to make her understand that he had loved her, and had left her here only for her safety—
There was rum in the kitchen, and he went out to gulp down raw full glasses. They did not affect him.
By evening he strode to the garden, the high and windy garden looking toward the sea, and dug a deep pit. He lifted her light stiff body, kissed it, and laid it in the pit. All night he wandered. When he came back to the house and saw the row of her little dresses with the lines of her soft body in them, he was terrified.
Then he went to pieces.
He gave up Penrith Lodge, left Twyford’s, and moved into a room behind the Surgeon General’s office. Beside his cot there was always a bottle.
Because death had for the first time been brought to him, he raged, “Oh, damn experimentation!” and, despite Stokes’s dismay, he gave the phage to every one who asked.
Only in St. Swithin’s, since there his experiment was so excellently begun, did some remnant of honor keep him from distributing the phage universally; but the conduct of this experiment he turned over to Stokes.
Stokes saw that he was a little mad, but only once, when Martin snarled, “What do I care for your science?” did he try to hold Martin to his test.
Stokes himself, with Twyford, carried on the experiment and kept the notes Martin should have kept. By evening, after working fourteen or fifteen hours since dawn, Stokes would hasten to St. Swithin’s by motor-cycle—he hated the joggling and the lack of dignity and he found it somewhat dangerous to take curving hill-roads at sixty miles an hour, but this was the quickest way, and till midnight he conferred with Twyford, gave him orders for the next day, arranged his clumsy annotations, and marveled at his grim meekness.
Meantime, all day, Martin injected a line of frightened citizens, in the Surgeon General’s office in Blackwater. Stokes begged him at least to turn the work over to another doctor and take what interest he could in St. Swithin’s, but Martin had a bitter satisfaction in throwing away all his significance, in helping to wreck his own purposes.
With a nurse for assistant, he stood in the bare office. File on file of people, black, white, Hindu, stood in an agitated cue a block long, ten deep, waiting dumbly, as for death. They crept up to the nurse beside Martin and in embarrassment exposed their arms, which she scrubbed with soap and water and dabbled with alcohol before passing them on to him. He brusquely pinched up the skin of the upper arm and jabbed it with the needle of the syringe, cursing at them for jerking, never seeing their individual faces. As they left him they fluttered with gratitude—“Oh, may God bless you, Doctor!”—but he did not hear.
Sometimes Stokes was there, looking anxious, particularly when in the cue he saw plantation-hands from St. Swithin’s, who were supposed to remain in their parish under strict control, to test the value of the phage. Sometimes Sir Robert Fairlamb came down to beam and gurgle and offer his aid.... Lady Fairlamb had been injected first of all, and next to her a tattered kitchen wench, profuse with Hallelujah’s.
After a fortnight when he was tired of the drama, he had four doctors making the injections, while he manufactured phage.
But by night Martin sat alone, tousled, drinking steadily, living on whisky and hate, freeing his soul and dissolving his body by hatred as once hermits dissolved theirs by ecstasy. His life was as unreal as the nights of an old drunkard. He had an advantage over normal cautious humanity in not caring whether he lived or died, he who sat with the dead, talkingto Leora and Sondelius, to Ira Hinkley and Oliver Marchand, to Inchcape Jones and a shadowy horde of blackmen with lifted appealing hands.
After Leora’s death he had returned to Twyford’s but once, to fetch his baggage, and he had not seen Joyce Lanyon. He hated her. He swore that it was not her presence which had kept him from returning earlier to Leora, but he was aware that while he had been chattering with Joyce, Leora had been dying.
“Damn’ glib society climber! Thank God I’ll never seeheragain!”
He sat on the edge of his cot, in the constricted and airless room, his hair ruffled, his eyes blotched with red, a stray alley kitten, which he esteemed his only friend, asleep on his pillow. At a knock he muttered, “I can’t talk to Stokes now. Let him do his own experiments. Sick of experiments!”
Sulkily, “Oh, come in!”
The door opened on Joyce Lanyon, cool, trim, sure.
“What do you want?” he grunted.
She stared at him; she shut the door; silently she straightened the litter of food, papers, and instruments on his table. She coaxed the indignant kitten to a mat, patted the pillow, and sat by him on the frowsy cot. Then:
“Please! I know what’s happened. Cecil is in town for an hour and I wanted to bring— Won’t it comfort you a little if you know how fond we are of you? Won’t you let me offer you friendship?”
“I don’t want anybody’s friendship. I haven’t any friends!”
He sat dumb, her hand on his, but when she was gone he felt a shiver of new courage.
He could not get himself to give up his reliance on whisky, and he could see no way of discontinuing the phage-injection of all who came begging for it, but he turned both injection and manufacture over to others, and went back to the most rigid observation of his experiment in St. Swithin’s ... blotted as it now was by the unphaged portion of the parish going in to Blackwater to receive the phage.
He did not see Joyce. He lived at the almshouse, but most evenings now he was sober.
The gospel of rat-extermination had spread through the island; everybody from five-year-old to hobbling grandam was out shooting rats and ground squirrels. Whether from phage or rat-killing or Providence, the epidemic paused, and six months after Martin’s coming, when the West Indian May was broiling and the season of hurricanes was threatened, the plague had almost vanished and the quarantine was lifted.
St. Hubert felt safe in its kitchens and shops, and amid the roaring spring the island rejoiced as a sick man first delivered from pain rejoices at merely living and being at peace.
That chaffering should be abusive and loud in the public market, that lovers should stroll unconscious of all save themselves, that loafers should tell stories and drink long drinks at the Ice House, that old men should squat cacking in the shade of the mangoes, that congregations should sing together to the Lord—this was no longer ordinary to them nor stupid, but the bliss of paradise.
They made a festival of the first steamer’s leaving. White and black, Hindu and Chink and Caribbee, they crowded the wharf, shouting, waving scarfs, trying not to weep at the feeble piping of what was left of the Blackwater Gold Medal Band; and as the steamer, theSt. Iaof the McGurk Line, was warped out, with her captain at the rail of the bridge, very straight, saluting them with a flourish but his eyes so wet that he could not see the harbor, they felt that they were no longer jailed lepers but a part of the free world.
On that steamer Joyce Lanyon sailed. Martin said good-by to her at the wharf.
Strong of hand, almost as tall as he, she looked at him without flutter, and rejoiced, “You’ve come through. So have I. Both of us have been mad, trapped here the way we’ve been. I don’t suppose I helped you, but I did try. You see, I’d never been trained in reality. You trained me. Good-by.”
“Mayn’t I come to see you in New York?”
“If you’d really like to.”
She was gone, yet she had never been so much with him as through that tedious hour when the steamer was lost beyond the horizon, a line edged with silver wire. But that night, in panic, he fled up to Penrith Lodge and buried his cheek in the damp soil above the Leora with whom he had never had tofence and explain, to whom he had never needed to say, “Mayn’t I come to see you?”
But Leora, cold in her last bed, unsmiling, did not answer him nor comfort him.
Before Martin took leave he had to assemble the notes of his phage experiment; add the observation of Stokes and Twyford to his own first precise figures.
As the giver of phage to some thousands of frightened islanders, he had become a dignitary. He was called, in the first issue of theBlackwater Guardianafter the quarantine was raised, “the savior of all our lives.” He was the universal hero. If Sondelius had helped to cleanse them, had Sondelius not been his lieutenant? If it was the intervention of the Lord, as the earnest old negro who succeeded Ira Hinkley in the chapels of the Sanctification Brotherhood insisted, had not the Lord surely sent him?
No one heeded a wry Scotch doctor, diligent but undramatic through the epidemic, who hinted that plagues have been known to slacken and cease without phage.
When Martin was completing his notes he had a letter from the McGurk Institute, signed by Rippleton Holabird.
Holabird wrote that Gottlieb was “feeling seedy,” that he had resigned the Directorship, suspended his own experimentation, and was now at home, resting. Holabird himself had been appointed Acting Director of the Institute, and as such he chanted:
The reports of your work in the letters from Mr. McGurk’s agents which the quarantine authorities have permitted to get through to us apprize us far more than does your own modest report what a really sensational success you have had. You have done what few other men living could do, both established the value of bacteriophage in plague by tests on a large scale, and saved most of the unfortunate population. The Board of Trustees and I are properly appreciative of the glory which you have added, and still more will add when your report is published, to the name of McGurk Institute, and we are thinking, now that we may for some months be unable to have your titular chief, Dr. Gottlieb, working with us, of establishing a separate Department, with you as its head.
The reports of your work in the letters from Mr. McGurk’s agents which the quarantine authorities have permitted to get through to us apprize us far more than does your own modest report what a really sensational success you have had. You have done what few other men living could do, both established the value of bacteriophage in plague by tests on a large scale, and saved most of the unfortunate population. The Board of Trustees and I are properly appreciative of the glory which you have added, and still more will add when your report is published, to the name of McGurk Institute, and we are thinking, now that we may for some months be unable to have your titular chief, Dr. Gottlieb, working with us, of establishing a separate Department, with you as its head.
“Established the value—rats! I about half made the tests,” sighed Martin, and: “Department! I’ve given too manyorders here. Sick of authority. I want to get back to my lab and start all over again.”
It came to him that now he would probably have ten thousand a year.... Leora would have enjoyed small extravagant dinners.
Though he had watched Gottlieb declining, it was a shock that he could be so unwell as to drop his work even for a few months.
He forgot his own self as it came to him that in giving up his experiment, playing the savior, he had been a traitor to Gottlieb and all that Gottlieb represented. When he returned to New York he would have to call on the old man and admit to him, to those sunken relentless eyes, that he did not have complete proof of the value of the phage.
If he could have run to Leora with his ten thousand a year—
He left St. Hubert three weeks after Joyce Lanyon.
The evening before his sailing, a great dinner with Sir Robert Fairlamb in the chair was given to him and to Stokes. While Sir Robert ruddily blurted compliments and Kellett tried to explain things, and all of them drank to him, standing, after the toast to the King, Martin sat lonely, considering that to-morrow he would leave these trusting eyes and face the harsh demands of Gottlieb, of Terry Wickett.
The more they shouted his glory, the more he thought about what unknown, tight-minded scientists in distant laboratories would say of a man who had had his chance and cast it away. The more they called him the giver of life, the more he felt himself disgraced and a traitor; and as he looked at Stokes he saw in his regard a pity worse than condemnation.
Ithappened that Martin returned to New York, as he had come, on theSt. Buryan. The ship was haunted with the phantoms of Leora dreaming, of Sondelius shouting on the bridge.
And on theSt. Buryanwas the country-club Miss Gwilliam who had offended Sondelius.
She had spent the winter importantly making notes on native music in Trinidad and Caracas; at least in planning to make notes. She saw Martin come aboard at Blackwater, and pertly noted the friends who saw him off—two Englishmen, one puffy, one rangy, and a dry-looking Scotsman.
“Your friends all seem to be British,” she enlightened him, when she had claimed him as an old friend.
“Yes.”
“You’ve spent the winter here.”
“Yes.”
“Hard luck to be caught by the quarantine. But Itoldyou you were silly to go ashore! You must have managed to pick up quite a little money practising. But it must have been unpleasant, really.”
“Ye-es, I suppose it was.”
“Itoldyou it would be! You ought to have come on to Trinidad. Such a fascinating island! And tell me, how is the Roughneck?”
“Who?”
“Oh, you know—that funny Swede that used to dance and everything.”
“He is dead.”
“Oh, Iamsorry. You know, no matter what the others said, I never thought he was so bad. I’m sure he had quite a nice cultured mind, when he wasn’t carousing around. Your wife isn’t with you, is she?”
“No—she isn’t with me. I must go down and unpack now.”
Miss Gwilliam looked after him with an expression which said that the least people could do was to learn some manners.
With the heat and the threat of hurricanes, there were few first-class passengers on theSt. Buryan, and most of these did not count, because they were not jolly, decent Yankee tourists but merely South Americans. As tourists do when their minds have been broadened and enriched by travel, when they return to New Jersey or Wisconsin with the credit of having spent a whole six months in the West Indies and South America, the respectable remnant studied one another fastidiously, and noted the slim pale man who seemed so restless, who all day trudged round the deck, who after midnight was seen standing by himself at the rail.
“That guy looks awful’ restless to me!” said Mr. S. Sanborn Hibble of Detroit to the charming Mrs. Dawson of Memphis, and she answered, with the wit which made her so popular wherever she went, “Yes, don’t he. I reckon he must be in love!”
“Oh, I know him!” said Miss Gwilliam. “He and his wife were on theSt. Buryanwhen I came down. She’s in New York now. He’s some kind of a doctor—not awful’ successful I don’t believe. Just between ourselves, I don’t think much of him or of her either. They sat and looked stupid all the way down.”
Martin was itching to get his fingers on his test-tubes. He knew, as once he had guessed, that he hated administration and Large Affairs.
As he tramped the deck, his head cleared and he was himself. Angrily he pictured the critics who would soon be pecking at whatever final report he might make. For a time he hated the criticism of his fellow laboratory-grinds as he had hated their competition; he hated the need of forever looking over his shoulder at pursuers. But on a night when he stood at the rail for hours, he admitted that he was afraid of their criticism, and afraid because his experiment had so many loopholes. He hurled overboard all the polemics with which he hadprotected himself: “Men who never have had the experience of trying, in the midst of an epidemic, to remain calm and keep experimental conditions, do not realize in the security of their laboratories what one has to contend with.”
Constant criticism was good, if only it was not spiteful, jealous, petty—
No, even then it might be good! Some men had to be what easy-going workers called “spiteful.” To them the joyous spite of crushing the almost-good was more natural than creation. Why should a great house-wrecker, who could clear the cumbered ground, be set at trying to lay brick?
“All right!” he rejoiced. “Let ’em come! Maybe I’ll anticipate ’em and publish a roast of my own work. I have got something, from the St. Swithin test, even if I did let things slide for a while. I’ll take my tables to a biometrician. He may rip ’em up. Good! What’s left, I’ll publish.”
He went to bed feeling that he could face the eyes of Gottlieb and Terry, and for the first time in weeks he slept without terror.
At the pier in Brooklyn, to the astonishment and slight indignation of Miss Gwilliam, Mr. S. Sanborn Hibble, and Mrs. Dawson, Martin was greeted by reporters who agreeably though vaguely desired to know what were these remarkable things he had been doing to some disease or other, in some island some place.
He was rescued from them by Rippleton Holabird, who burst through them with his hands out, crying, “Oh, my dear fellow! We know all that’s happened. We grieve for you so, and we’re so glad you were spared to come back to us.”
Whatever Martin might, under the shadow of Max Gottlieb, have said about Holabird, now he wrung his hands and muttered, “It’s good to be home.”
Holabird (he was wearing a blue shirt with a starched blue collar, like an actor) could not wait till Martin’s baggage had gone through the customs. He had to return to his duties as Acting Director of the Institute. He delayed only to hint that the Board of Trustees were going to make him full Director, and that certainly, my dear fellow, he would see that Martin had the credit and the reward he deserved.
When Holabird was gone, driving away in his neat coupé (he often explained that his wife and he could afford a chauffeur, but they preferred to spend the money on other things), Martin was conscious of Terry Wickett, leaning against a gnawed wooden pillar of the wharf-house, as though he had been there for hours.
Terry strolled up and snorted, “Hello, Slim. All O.K.? Lez shoot the stuff through the customs. Great pleasure to see the Director and you kissing.”
As they drove through the summer-walled streets of Brooklyn, Martin inquired, “How’s Holabird working out as Director? And how is Gottlieb?”
“Oh, the Holy Wren is no worse than Tubbs; he’s even politer and more ignorant.... Me, you watch me! One of these days I’m going off to the woods—got a shack in Vermont—going to work there without having to produce results for the Director! They’ve stuck me in the Department of Biochemistry. And Gottlieb—” Terry’s voice became anxious. “I guess he’s pretty shaky— They’ve pensioned him off. Now look, Slim: I hear you’re going to be a gilded department-head, and I’ll never be anything but an associate member. Are you going on with me, or are you going to be one of the Holy Wren’s pets—hero-scientist?”
“I’m with you, Terry, you old grouch.” Martin dropped the cynicism which had always seemed proper between him and Terry. “I haven’t got anybody else. Leora and Gustaf are gone and now maybe Gottlieb. You and I have got to stick together!”
“It’s a go!”
They shook hands, they coughed gruffly, and talked of straw hats.
When Martin entered the Institute, his colleagues galloped up to shake hands and to exclaim, and if their praise was flustering, there is no time at which one can stomach so much of it as at home-coming.
Sir Robert Fairlamb had written to the Institute a letter glorifying him. The letter arrived on the same boat with Martin, and next day Holabird gave it out to the press.
The reporters, who had been only a little interested at hislanding, came around for interviews, and while Martin was sulky and jerky Holabird took them in hand, so that the papers were able to announce that America, which was always rescuing the world from something or other, had gone and done it again. It was spread in the prints that Dr. Martin Arrowsmith was not only a powerful witch-doctor and possibly something of a laboratory-hand, but also a ferocious rat-killer, village-burner, Special Board addresser, and snatcher from death. There was at the time, in certain places, a doubt as to how benevolent the United States had been to its Little Brothers— Mexico, Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua—and the editors and politicians were grateful to Martin for this proof of their sacrifice and tender watchfulness.
He had letters from the Public Health service; from an enterprising Midwestern college which desired to make him a Doctor of Civil Law; from medical schools and societies which begged him to address them. Editorials on his work appeared in the medical journals and the newspapers; and Congressman Almus Pickerbaugh telegraphed him from Washington, in what the Congressman may conceivably have regarded as verse: “They got to go some to get ahead of fellows that come from old Nautilus.” And he was again invited to dinner at the McGurks’, not by Capitola but by Ross McGurk, whose name had never had such a whitewashing.
He refused all invitations to speak, and the urgent organizations which had invited him responded with meekness that they understood how intimidatingly busy Dr. Arrowsmith was, and if he evercouldfind the time, they would be most highly honored—
Rippleton Holabird was elected full Director now, in succession to Gottlieb, and he sought to use Martin as the prize exhibit of the Institute. He brought all the visiting dignitaries, all the foreign Men of Measured Merriment, in to see him, and they looked pleased and tried to think up questions. Then Martin was made head of the new Department of Microbiology at twice his old salary.
He never did learn what was the difference between microbiology and bacteriology. But none of his glorification could he resist. He was still too dazed—he was the more dazed when he had seen Max Gottlieb.
The morning after his return he had telephoned to Gottlieb’s flat, had spoken to Miriam and received permission to call in the late afternoon.
All the way up-town he could hear Gottlieb saying, “You were my son! I gave you eferyt’ing I knew of truth and honor, and you haf betrayed me. Get out of my sight!”
Miriam met him in the hall, fretting, “I don’t know if I should have let you come at all, Doctor.”
“Why? Isn’t he well enough to see people?”
“It isn’t that. He doesn’t really seem ill, except that he’s feeble, but he doesn’t know any one. The doctors say it’s senile dementia. His memory is gone. And he’s just suddenly forgotten all his English. He can only speak German, and I can’t speak it, hardly at all. If I’d only studied it, instead of music! But perhaps it may do him good to have you here. He was always so fond of you. You don’t know how he talked of you and the splendid experiment you’ve been doing in St. Hubert.”
“Well, I—” He could find nothing to say.
Miriam led him into a room whose walls were dark with books. Gottlieb was sunk in a worn chair, his thin hand lax on the arm.
“Doctor, it’s Arrowsmith, just got back!” Martin mumbled.
The old man looked as though he half understood; he peered at him, then shook his head and whimpered, “Versteh’ nicht.” His arrogant eyes were clouded with ungovernable slow tears.
Martin understood that never could he be punished now and cleansed. Gottlieb had sunk into his darkness still trusting him.
Martin closed his flat—their flat—with a cold swift fury, lest he yield to his misery in finding among Leora’s possessions a thousand fragments which brought her back: the frock she had bought for Capitola McGurk’s dinner, a petrified chocolate she had hidden away to munch illegally by night, a memorandum, “Get almonds for Sandy.” He took a grimly impersonal room in a hotel, and sunk himself in work. There was nothing for him but work and the harsh friendship of Terry Wickett.
His first task was to check the statistics of his St. Swithin treatments and the new figures still coming in from Stokes. Some of them were shaky, some suggested that the value of phage certainly had been confirmed, but there was nothing final. He took his figures to Raymond Pearl the biometrician, who thought less of them than did Martin himself.
He had already made a report of his work to the Director and the Trustees of the Institute, with no conclusion except “the results await statistical analysis and should have this before they are published.” But Holabird had run wild, the newspapers had reported wonders, and in on Martin poured demands that he send out phage; inquiries as to whether he did not have a phage for tuberculosis, for syphilis; offers that he take charge of this epidemic and that.
Pearl had pointed out that his agreeable results in first phaging the whole of Carib village must be questioned, because it was possible that when he began the curve of the disease had already passed its peak. With this and the other complications, viewing his hot work in St. Hubert as coldly as though it were the pretense of a man whom he had never seen, Martin decided that he had no adequate proof, and strode in to see the Director.
Holabird was gentle and pretty, but he sighed that if this conclusion were published, he would have to take back all the things he had said about the magnificence which, presumably, he had inspired his subordinate to accomplish. He was gentle and pretty, but firm; Martin was to suppress (Holabird did not say “suppress”—he said “leave to me for further consideration”) the real statistical results, and issue the report with an ambiguous summary.
Martin was furious, Holabird delicately relentless. Martin hastened to Terry, declaring that he would resign—would denounce—would expose— Yes! He would! He no longer had to support Leora. He’d work as a drug-clerk. He’d go back right now and tell the Holy Wren—
“Hey! Slim! Wait a minute! Hold your horses!” observed Terry. “Just get along with Holy for a while, and we’ll work out something we can do together, and be independent. Meanwhile you have got your lab here, and you still have some physical chemistry to learn! And, uh— Slim, I haven’t said anything about your St. Hubert stuff, but you know and I know you bunged it up badly. Can you come into court with cleanhands, if you’re going to indict the Holy One? Though I do agree that aside from being a dirty, lying, social-climbing, sneaking, power-grabbing hypocrite, he’s all right. Hold on. We’ll fix up something. Why, son, we’ve just been learning our science; we’re just beginning to work.”
Then Holabird published officially, under the Institute’s seal, Martin’s original report to the Trustees, with such quaint revisions as a change of “the results should have analysis” to “while statistical analysis would seem desirable, it is evident that this new treatment has accomplished all that had been hoped.”
Again Martin went mad, again Terry calmed him; and with a hard fury unlike his eagerness of the days when he had known that Leora was waiting for him he resumed his physical chemistry.
He learned the involved mysteries of freezing-point determinations, osmotic pressure determinations, and tried to apply Northrop’s generalizations on enzymes to the study of phage.
He became absorbed in mathematical laws which strangely predicted natural phenomena; his world was cold, exact, austerely materialistic, bitter to those who founded their logic on impressions. He was daily more scornful toward the counters of paving stones, the renamers of species, the compilers of irrelevant data. In his absorption the pleasant seasons passed unseen.
Once he raised his head in astonishment to perceive that it was spring; once Terry and he tramped two hundred miles through the Pennsylvania hills, by summer roads; but it seemed only a day later when it was Christmas, and Holabird was being ever so jolly and yuley about the Institute.
The absence of Gottlieb may have been good for Martin, since he no longer turned to the master for solutions in tough queries. When he took up diffusion problems, he began to develop his own apparatus, and whether it was from inborn ingenuity or merely from a fury of labor, he was so competent that he won from Terry the almost overwhelming praise: “Why, that’s not so darn’ bad, Slim!”
The sureness to which Max Gottlieb seems to have been born came to Martin slowly, after many stumblings, but it came. He desired a perfection of technique in the quest for absolute and provable fact; he desired as greatly as any Pater to “burn with a hard gem-like flame,” and he desired not to have ease andrepute in the market-place, but rather to keep free of those follies, lest they confuse him and make him soft.
Holabird was as much bewildered as Tubbs would have been by the ramifications of Martin’s work. What did he think he was anyway—a bacteriologist or a bio-physicist? But Holabird was won by the scientific world’s reception of Martin’s first important paper, on the effect of X-rays, gamma rays, and beta rays on the anti-Shiga phage. It was praised in Paris and Brussels and Cambridge as much as in New York, for its insight and for “the clarity and to perhaps be unscientifically enthusiastic, the sheer delight and style of its presentation,” as Professor Berkeley Wurtz put it; which may be indicated by quoting the first paragraph of the paper:
In a preliminary publication, I have reported a marked qualitative destructive effect of the radiations from radium emanations on Bacteriophage-anti-Shiga. In the present paper it is shown that X-rays, gamma rays, and beta rays produce identical inactivating effects on this bacteriophage. Furthermore, a quantitative relation is demonstrated to exist between this inactivation and the radiations that produce it. The results obtained from this quantitative study permit the statement that the percentage of inactivation, as measured by determining the units of bacteriophage remaining after irradiation by gamma and beta rays of a suspension of fixed virulence, is a function of the two variables, millicuries and hours. The following equation accounts quantitatively for the experimental results obtained:λ log e Uo/uK =————Eo(ε -- λr1)
In a preliminary publication, I have reported a marked qualitative destructive effect of the radiations from radium emanations on Bacteriophage-anti-Shiga. In the present paper it is shown that X-rays, gamma rays, and beta rays produce identical inactivating effects on this bacteriophage. Furthermore, a quantitative relation is demonstrated to exist between this inactivation and the radiations that produce it. The results obtained from this quantitative study permit the statement that the percentage of inactivation, as measured by determining the units of bacteriophage remaining after irradiation by gamma and beta rays of a suspension of fixed virulence, is a function of the two variables, millicuries and hours. The following equation accounts quantitatively for the experimental results obtained:
When Director Holabird saw the paper— Yeo was vicious enough to take it in and ask his opinion—he said, “Splendid, oh, I say, simply splendid! I’ve just had the chance to skim through it, old boy, but I shall certainly read it carefully, the first free moment I have.”
Martindid not see Joyce Lanyon for weeks after his return to New York. Once she invited him to dinner, but he could not come, and he did not hear from her again.
His absorption in osmotic pressure determinations did not content him when he sat in his prim hotel room and was reduced from Dr. Arrowsmith to a man who had no one to talk to. He remembered how they had sat by the lagoon in the tepid twilight; he telephoned asking whether he might come in for tea.
He knew in an unformulated way that Joyce was rich, but after seeing her in gingham, cooking in the kitchen of St. Swithin’s almshouse, he did not grasp her position; and he was uncomfortable when, feeling dusty from the laboratory, he came to her great house and found her the soft-voiced mistress of many servants. Hers was a palace, and palaces, whether they are such very little ones as Joyce’s, with its eighteen rooms, or Buckingham or vast Fontainebleau, are all alike; they are choked with the superfluities of pride, they are so complete that one does not remember small endearing charms, they are indistinguishable in their common feeling of polite and uneasy grandeur, they are therefore altogether tedious.
But amid the pretentious splendor which Roger Lanyon had accumulated, Joyce was not tedious. It is to be suspected that she enjoyed showing Martin what she really was, by producing footmen and too many kinds of sandwiches, and by boasting, “Oh, I never do know what they’re going to give me for tea.”
But she had welcomed him, crying, “You look so much better. I’m frightfully glad. Are you still my brother? I was a good cook at the almshouse, wasn’t I!”
Had he been suave then and witty, she would not have been greatly interested. She knew too many men who were witty and well-bred, ivory smooth and competent to help her spend the four or five million dollars with which she was burdened. But Martin was at once a scholar who made osmotic pressuredeterminations almost interesting, a taut swift man whom she could fancy running or making love, and a lonely youngster who naïvely believed that here in her soft security she was still the girl who had sat with him by the lagoon, still the courageous woman who had come to him in a drunken room at Blackwater.
Joyce Lanyon knew how to make men talk. Thanks more to her than to his own articulateness, he made living the Institute, the members, their feuds, and the drama of coursing on the trail of a discovery.
Her easy life here had seemed tasteless after the risks of St. Hubert, and in his contempt for ease and rewards she found exhilaration.
He came now and then to tea, to dinner; he learned the ways of her house, her servants, the more nearly intelligent of her friends. He liked—and possibly he was liked by—some of them. With one friend of hers Martin had a state of undeclared war. This was Latham Ireland, an achingly well-dressed man of fifty, a competent lawyer who was fond of standing in front of fireplaces and being quietly clever. He fascinated Joyce by telling her that she was subtle, then telling her what she was being subtle about.
Martin hated him.
In midsummer Martin was invited for a week-end at Joyce’s vast blossom-hid country house at Greenwich. She was half apologetic for its luxury; he was altogether unhappy.
The strain of considering clothes, of galloping out to buy white trousers when he wanted to watch the test-tubes in the constant-temperature bath, of trying to look easy in the limousine which met him at the station, and of deciding which servants to tip and how much and when, was dismaying to a simple man. He felt rustic when, after he had blurted, “Just a minute till I go up and unpack my suit-case,” she said gently, “Oh, that will have been done for you.”
He discovered that a valet had laid out for him to put on, that first evening, all the small store of underclothes he had brought, and had squeezed out on his brush a ribbon of tooth-paste.
He sat on the edge of his bed, groaning, “This is too rich for my blood!”
He hated and feared that valet, who kept stealing his clothes, putting them in places where they could not be found, thenpopping in menacingly when Martin was sneaking about the enormous room looking for them.
But his chief unhappiness was that there was nothing to do. He had no sport but tennis, at which he was too rusty to play with these chattering unidentified people who filled the house and, apparently with perfect willingness, worked at golf and bridge. He had met but few of the friends of whom they talked. They said, “You know dear old R. G.,” and he said, “Oh,yes,” but he never did know dear old R. G.
Joyce was as busily amiable as when they were alone at tea, and she found for him a weedy flapper whose tennis was worse than his own, but she had twenty guests—forty at Sunday lunch—and he gave up certain agreeable notions of walking with her in fresh lanes and, after excitedly saying this and that, perhaps kissing her. He had one moment with her. As he was going, she ordered, “Come here, Martin,” and led him apart.
“You haven’t really enjoyed it.”
“Why, sure, course I—”
“Of course you haven’t! And you despise us, rather, and perhaps you’re partly right. I do like pretty people and gracious manners and good games, but I suppose they seem piffling after nights in a laboratory.”
“No, I like ’em too. In a way. I like to look at beautiful women—at you! But— Oh, darn it, Joyce, I’m not up to it. I’ve always been poor, and horribly busy. I haven’t learned your games.”
“But, Martin, you could, with the intensity you put into everything.”
“Even getting drunk in Blackwater!”
“And I hope in New York, too! Dear Roger, he did have such an innocent, satisfying time getting drunk at class-dinners! But I mean: if you went at it, you could play bridge and golf—and talking—better than any of them. If you only knew how frightfully recent most of the ducal class in America are! And Martin: wouldn’t it be good for you? Wouldn’t you work all the better if you got away from your logarithmic tables now and then? And are you going to admit there’s anything you can’t conquer?”
“No, I—”
“Will you come to dinner on Tuesday week, just us two, and we’ll fight it out?”
“Be glad to.”
For a number of hours, on the train to Terry Wickett’s vacation place in the Vermont hills, Martin was convinced that he loved Joyce Lanyon, and that he was going to attack the art of being amusing as he had attacked physical chemistry. Ardently, and quite humorlessly, as he sat stiffly in a stale Pullman chair-car with his feet up on his suit-case, he pictured himself wearing a club-tie (presumably first acquiring the tie and the club), playing golf in plus-fours, and being entertaining about dear old R. G. and incredibly witty about dear old Latham Ireland’s aged Rolls-Royce.
But these ambitions he forgot as he came to Terry’s proud proprietary shanty, by a lake among oaks and maples, and heard Terry’s real theories of the decomposition of quinine derivatives.
Being perhaps the least sentimental of human beings, Terry had named his place “Birdies’ Rest.” He owned five acres of woodland, two miles from a railroad station. His shanty was a two-room affair of logs, with bunks for beds and oilcloth for table-linen.
“Here’s the layout, Slim,” said Terry. “Some day I’m going to figure out a way of making a lab here pay, by manufacturing sera or something, and I’ll put up a couple more buildings on the flat by the lake, and have one absolutely independent place for science—two hours a day on the commercial end, and say about six for sleeping and a couple for feeding and telling dirty stories. That leaves—two and six and two make ten, if I’m any authority on higher math—that leaves fourteen hours a day for research (except when you got something special on), with no Director and no Society patrons and no Trustees that you’ve got to satisfy by making fool reports. Of course there won’t be any scientific dinners with ladies in candy-box dresses, but I figure we’ll be able to afford plenty of salt pork and corncob pipes, and your bed will be made perfectly—if you make it yourself. Huh? Lez go and have a swim.”
Martin returned to New York with the not very compatible plans of being the best-dressed golfer in Greenwich and of cooking beef-stew with Terry at Birdies’ Rest.
But the first of these was the more novel to him.
Joyce Lanyon was enjoying a conversion. Her St. Hubert experiences and her natural variability had caused her to be dissatisfied with Roger’s fast-motoring set.
She let the lady Mæcenases of her acquaintance beguile her into several of their Causes, and she enjoyed them as she had enjoyed her active and entirely purposeless war work in 1917, for Joyce Lanyon was to some degree an Arranger, which was an epithet invented by Terry Wickett for Capitola McGurk.
An Arranger and even an Improver was Joyce, but she was not a Capitola; she neither waved a feathered fan and spoke spaciously, nor did she take out her sex-passion in talking. She was fine and occasionally gorgeous, with tiger in her, though she was as far from perfumed-boudoir and black-lingerie passion as she was from Capitola’s cooing staleness. Hers was sheer straight white silk and cherished skin.
Behind all her reasons for valuing Martin was the fact that the only time in her life when she had felt useful and independent was when she had been an almshouse cook.
She might have drifted on, in her world of drifters, but for the interposition of Latham Ireland, the lawyer-dilettante-lover.
“Joy,” he observed, “there seems to be an astounding quantity of that Dr. Arrowsmith person about the place. As your benign uncle—”
“Latham, my sweet, I quite agree that Martin is too aggressive, thoroughly unlicked, very selfish, rather a prig, absolutely a pedant, and his shirts are atrocious. And I rather think I shall marry him. I almost think I love him!”
“Wouldn’t cyanide be a neater way of doing suicide?” said Latham Ireland.
What Martin felt for Joyce was what any widowed man of thirty-eight would feel for a young and pretty and well-spoken woman who was attentive to his wisdom. As to her wealth, there was no problem at all. He was no poor man marrying money! Why, he was making ten thousand a year, which was eight thousand more than he needed to live on!
Occasionally he was suspicious of her dependence on luxury. With tremendous craft he demanded that instead of their dining in her Jacobean hall of state, she come with him on his own sort of party. She came, with enthusiasm. They went to abysmal Greenwich Village restaurants with candles, artistic waiters, and no food; or to Chinatown dives with food and nothing else. He even insisted on their taking the subway—though after dinner he usually forgot that he was being Spartan, and ordered a taxicab. She accepted it all without either wincing or too much gurgling.
She played tennis with him in the court on her roof; she taught him bridge, which, with his concentration and his memory, he soon played better than she and enjoyed astonishingly; she persuaded him that he had a leg and would look well in golf clothes.
He came to take her to dinner, on a serene autumn evening. He had a taxi waiting.
“Why don’t we stick to the subway?” she said.
They were standing on her doorstep, in a blankly expensive and quite unromantic street off Fifth Avenue.
“Oh, I hate the rotten subway as much as you do! Elbows in my stomach never did help me much to plan experiments. I expect when we’re married I’ll enjoy your limousine.”
“Is this a proposal? I’m not at all sure I’m going to marry you. Really, I’mnot! You have no sense of ease!”
They were married the following January, in St. George’s Church, and Martin suffered almost as much over the flowers, the bishop, the relatives with high-pitched voices, and the top hat which Joyce had commanded, as he did over having Rippleton Holabird wring his hand with a look of, “At last, dear boy, you have come out of barbarism and become One of Us.”
Martin had asked Terry to be his best man. Terry had refused, and asserted that only with pain would he come to the wedding at all. The best man was Dr. William Smith, with his beard trimmed for the occasion, and distressing morning clothes and a topper which he had bought in London eleven years before, but both of them were safe in charge of a cousin of Joyce who was guaranteed to have extra handkerchiefs and to recognize the Wedding March. He had understood that Martin was Groton and Harvard, and when he discovered that he was Winnemac and nothing at all, he became suspicious.
In their stateroom on the steamer Joyce murmured, “Dear,you were brave! I didn’t know what a damn’ fool that cousin of mine was. Kiss me!”
Thenceforth ... except for a dreadful second when Leora floated between them, eyes closed and hands crossed on her pale cold breast ... they were happy and in each other found adventurous new ways.
For three months they wandered in Europe.
On the first day Joyce had said, “Let’s have this beastly money thing over. I should think you are the least mercenary of men. I’ve put ten thousand dollars to your credit in London—oh, yes, and fifty thousand in New York—and if you’d like, when you have to do things for me, I’d be glad if you’d draw on it. No! Wait! Can’t you see how easy and decent I want to make it all? You won’t hurt me to save your own self-respect?”
They really had, it seemed, to stay with the Principessa del Oltraggio (formerly Miss Lucy Deemy Bessy of Dayton), Madame des Basses Loges (Miss Brown of San Francisco), and the Countess of Marazion (who had been Mrs. Arthur Snaipe of Albany, and several things before that), but Joyce did go with him to see the great laboratories in London, Paris, Copenhagen. She swelled to perceive how Nobel-prize winners received Her Husband, knew of him, desired to be violent with him about phage, and showed him their work of years. Some of them were hasty and graceless, she thought. Her Man was prettier than any of them, and if she would but be patient with him, she could make him master polo and clothes and conversation ... but of course go on with his science ... a pity he could not have a knighthood, like one or two of the British scientists they met. But even in America there were honorary degrees....
While she discovered and digested Science, Martin discovered Women.
Aware only of Madeline Fox and Orchid Pickerbaugh, who were Nice American Girls, of soon-forgotten ladies of the night, and of Leora who, in her indolence, her indifference to decoration and good fame, was neither woman nor wife but only her own self, Martin knew nothing whatever about Women. He had expected Leora to wait for him, to obey his wishes, to understand without his saying them all the flattering things he had planned to say. He was spoiled, and Joyce was not timorous about telling him so.
It was not for her to sit beaming and wordless while he and his fellow-researchers arranged the world. With many jolts he perceived that even outside the bedroom he had to consider the fluctuations and variables of his wife, as A Woman, and sometimes as A Rich Woman.
It was confusing to find that where Leora had acidly claimed sex-loyalty but had hummingly not cared in what manner he might say Good Morning, Joyce was indifferent as to how many women he might have fondled (so long as he did not insult her by making love to them in her presence) but did require him to say Good Morning as though he meant it. It was confusing to find how starkly she discriminated between his caresses when he was absorbed in her and his hasty interest when he wanted to go to sleep. She could, she said, kill a man who considered her merely convenient furniture, and she uncomfortably emphasized the “kill.”
She expected him to remember her birthday, her taste in wine, her liking for flowers, and her objection to viewing the process of shaving. She wanted a room to herself; she insisted that he knock before entering; and she demanded that he admire her hats.
When he was so interested in the work at Pasteur Institute that he had a clerk telephone that he would not be able to meet her for dinner, she was tight-lipped with rage.
“Oh, you got to expect that,” he reflected, feeling that he was being tactful and patient and penetrating.
It annoyed him, sometimes, that she would never impulsively start off on a walk with him. No matter how brief the jaunt, she must first go to her room for white gloves—placidly stand there drawing them on.... And inLondon she made him buy spats ... and even wear them.
Joyce was not only an Arranger—she was a Loyalist. Like most American cosmopolites she revered the English peerage, adopted all their standards and beliefs—or what she considered their standards and beliefs—and treasured her encounters with them. Three and a half years after the War of 1914-18, she still said that she loathed all Germans, and the one complete quarrel between her and Martin occurred when he desired to see the laboratories in Berlin and Vienna.
But for all their differences it was a romantic pilgrimage. They loved fearlessly; they tramped through the mountains and came back to revel in vast bathrooms and ingenious dinners; they idled before cafés, and save when he fell silent as he remembered how much Leora had wanted to sit before cafés in France, they showed each other all the eagernesses of their minds.
Europe, her Europe, which she had always known and loved, Joyce offered to him on generous hands, and he who had ever been sensitive to warm colors and fine gestures—when he was not frenzied with work—was grateful to her and boyish with wonder. He believed that he was learning to take life easily and beautifully; he criticized Terry Wickett (but only to himself) for provincialism; and so in a golden leisure they came back to America and prohibition and politicians charging to protect the Steel Trust from the communists, to conversation about bridge and motors and to osmotic pressure determinations.
Director Rippleton Holabirdhad also married money, and whenever his colleagues hinted that since his first ardent work in physiology he had done nothing but arrange a few nicely selected flowers on the tables hewn out by other men, it was a satisfaction to him to observe that these rotters came down to the Institute by subway, while he drove elegantly in his coupé. But now Arrowsmith, once the poorest of them all, came by limousine with a chauffeur who touched his hat, and Holabird’s coffee was salted.
There was a simplicity in Martin, but it cannot be said that he did not lick his lips when Holabird mooned at the chauffeur.
His triumph over Holabird was less than being able to entertain Angus Duer and his wife, on from Chicago; to introduce them to Director Holabird, to Salamon the king of surgeons, and to a medical baronet; and to have Angus gush, “Mart, do you mind my saying we’re all awfully proud of you? Rouncefield was speaking to me about it the other day. ‘It may be presumptuous,’ he said, ‘but I really feel that perhaps the training we tried to give Dr. Arrowsmith here in the Clinic did in some way contribute to his magnificent work in the West Indies and at McGurk.’ What a lovely woman your wife is, old man! Do you suppose she’d mind telling Mrs. Duer where she got that frock?”
Martin had heard about the superiority of poverty to luxury, but after the lunch-wagons of Mohalis, after twelve years of helping Leora check the laundry and worry about the price of steak, after a life of waiting in the slush for trolleys, it was not at all dismaying to have a valet who produced shirts automatically; not at all degrading to come to meals which were always interesting, and, in the discretion of his car, to lean an aching head against softness and think how clever he was.
“You see, by having other people do the vulgar things foryou, it saves your own energy for the things that only you can do,” said Joyce.
Martin agreed, then drove to Westchester for a lesson in golf.
A week after their return from Europe, Joyce went with him to see Gottlieb. He fancied that Gottlieb came out of his brooding to smile on them.
“After all,” Martin considered, “the old man did like beautiful things. If he’d had the chance, he might’ve liked a big Establishment, too, maybe.”
Terry was surprisingly complaisant.
“I’ll tell you, Slim—if you want to know. Personally I’d hate to have to live up to servants. But I’m getting old and wise. I figure that different folks like different things, and awful’ few of ’em have the sense to come and ask me what they ought to like. But honest, Slim, I don’t think I’ll come to dinner. I’ve gone and bought a dress-suit—boughtit!—got it in my room—damn’ landlady keeps filling it with moth-balls—but I don’t think I could stand listening to Latham Ireland being clever.”
It was, however, Rippleton Holabird’s attitude which most concerned Martin, for Holabird did not let him forget that unless he desired to drift off and be merely a ghostly Rich Woman’s Husband, he would do well to remember who was Director.
Along with the endearing manners which he preserved for Ross McGurk, Holabird had developed the remoteness, the inhuman quiet courtesy, of the Man of Affairs, and people who presumed on his old glad days he courteously put in their places. He saw the need of repressing insubordination, when Arrowsmith appeared in a limousine. He gave him one week after his return to enjoy the limousine, then blandly called on him in his laboratory.
“Martin,” he sighed, “I find that our friend Ross McGurk is just a bit dissatisfied with the practical results that are coming out of the Institute and, to convince him, I’m afraid I really must ask you to put less emphasis on bacteriophage for the moment and take up influenza. The Rockefeller Institute has the right idea. They’ve utilized their best minds, and spent money magnificently, on such problems as pneumonia, meningitis, cancer. They’ve already lessened the terrors of meningitis and pneumonia, and yellow fever is on the verge ofcomplete abolition through Noguchi’s work, and I have no doubt that their hospital, with its enormous resources and splendidly coöperating minds, will be the first to find something to alleviate diabetes. Now, I understand, they’re hot after the cause of influenza. They’re not going to permit another great epidemic of it. Well, dear chap, it’s up to us to beat them on the flu, and I’ve chosen you to represent us in the race.”
Martin was at the moment hovering over a method of reproducing phage on dead bacteria, but he could not refuse, he could not risk being discharged. He was too rich! Martin the renegade medical student could flounder off and be a soda-clerk, but if the husband of Joyce Lanyon should indulge in such insanity, he would be followed by reporters and photographed at the soda handles. Still less could he chance becoming merely her supported husband—a butler of the boudoir.
He assented, not very pleasantly.
He began to work on the cause of influenza with a half-heartedness almost magnificent. In the hospitals he secured cultures from cases which might be influenza and might be bad colds—no one was certain just what the influenza symptoms were; nothing was clean cut. He left most of the work to his assistants, occasionally giving them sardonic directions to “put on another hundred tubes of the A medium—hell, make it another thousand!” and when he found that they were doing as they pleased, he was not righteous nor rebuking. If he did not guiltily turn his hand from the plow it was only because he never touched the plow. Once his own small laboratory had been as fussily neat as a New Hampshire kitchen. Now the several rooms under his charge were a disgrace, with long racks of abandoned test-tubes, many half-filled with mold, none of them properly labeled.
Then he had his idea. He began firmly to believe that the Rockefeller investigators had found the cause of flu. He gushed in to Holabird and told him so. As for himself, he was going back to his search for the real nature of phage.
Holabird argued that Martin must be wrong. If Holabird wanted the McGurk Institute—and the Director of McGurk Institute—to have the credit for capturing influenza, then it simply could not be possible that Rockefeller was ahead of them. He also said weighty things about phage. Its essential nature, he pointed out, was an academic question.
But Martin was by now too much of a scientific dialecticianfor Holabird, who gave up and retired to his den (or so Martin gloomily believed) to devise new ways of plaguing him. For a time Martin was again left free to wallow in work.
He found a means of reproducing phage on dead bacteria by a very complicated, very delicate use of partial oxygen-carbon dioxide tension—as exquisite as cameo-carving, as improbable as weighing the stars. His report stirred the laboratory world, and here and there (in Tokio, in Amsterdam, in Winnemac) enthusiasts believed he had proven that phage was a living organism; and other enthusiasts said, in esoteric language with mathematical formulæ, that he was a liar and six kinds of a fool.
It was at this time, when he might have become a Great Man, that he pitched over most of his own work and some of the duties of being Joyce’s husband to follow Terry Wickett, which showed that he lacked common sense, because Terry was still an assistant while he himself was head of a department.
Terry had discovered that certain quinine derivatives when introduced into the animal body slowly decompose into products which are highly toxic to bacteria but only mildly toxic to the body. There was hinted here a whole new world of therapy. Terry explained it to Martin, and invited him to collaborate. Buoyant with great things they got leave from Holabird—and from Joyce—and though it was winter they went off to Birdies’ Rest, in the Vermont hills. While they snowshoed and shot rabbits, and all the long dark evenings while they lay on their bellies before the fire, they ranted and planned.
Martin had not been so long silk-wrapped that he could not enjoy gobbling salt pork after the northwest wind and the snow. It was not unpleasant to be free of thinking up new compliments for Joyce.
They had, they saw, to answer an interesting question: Do the quinine derivatives act by attaching themselves to the bacteria, or by changing the body fluids? It was a simple, clear, definite question which required for answer only the inmost knowledge of chemistry and biology, a few hundred animals on which to experiment, and perhaps ten or twenty or a million years of trying and failing.
They decided to work with the pneumococcus, and with the animal which should most nearly reproduce human pneumonia.This meant the monkey, and to murder monkeys is expensive and rather grim. Holabird, as Director, could supply them, but if they took him into confidence he would demand immediate results.
Terry meditated, “’Member there was one of these Nobel-prize winners, Slim, one of these plumb fanatics that instead of blowing in the prize spent the whole thing on chimps and other apes, and he got together with another of those whiskery old birds, and they ducked up alleys and kept the anti-viv folks from prosecuting them, and settled the problem of the transfer of syphilis to lower animals? But we haven’t got any Nobel Prize, I grieve to tell you, and it doesn’t look to me—”
“Terry, I’ll do it, if necessary! I’ve never sponged on Joyce yet, but I will now, if the Holy Wren holds out on us.”
They faced Holabird in his office, sulkily, rather childishly, and they demanded the expenditure of at least ten thousand dollars for monkeys. They wished to start a research which might take two years without apparent results—possibly without any results. Terry was to be transferred to Martin’s department as co-head, their combined salaries shared equally.
Then they prepared to fight.
Holabird stared, assembled his mustache, departed from his Diligent Director manner, and spoke:
“Wait a minute, if you don’t mind. As I gather it, you are explaining to me that occasionally it’s necessary to take some time to elaborate an experiment. I really must tell you that I was formerly a researcher in an Institute called McGurk, and learned several of these things all by myself! Hell, Terry, and you, Mart, don’t be so egotistic! You’re not the only scientists who like to work undisturbed! If you poor fish only knew how I long to get away from signing letters and get my fingers on a kymograph drum again! Those beautiful long hours of search for truth! And if you knew how I’ve fought the Trustees for the chance to keep you fellows free! All right. You shall have your monkeys. Fix up the joint department to suit yourselves. And work ahead as seems best. I doubt if in the whole scientific world there’s two people that can be trusted as much as you two surly birds!”
Holabird rose, straight and handsome and cordial, his hand out. They sheepishly shook it and sneaked away, Terry grumbling, “He’s spoiled my whole day! I haven’t got a single thing to kick about! Slim, where’s the catch? You can bet there is one—there always is!”
In a year of divine work, the catch did not appear. They had their monkeys, their laboratories and garçons, and their unbroken leisure; they began the most exciting work they had ever known, and decidedly the most nerve-jabbing. Monkeys are unreasonable animals; they delight in developing tuberculosis on no provocation whatever; in captivity they have a liking for epidemics; and they make scenes by cursing at their masters in seven dialects.
“They’re so up-and-coming,” sighed Terry. “I feel like lettin’ ’em go and retiring to Birdies’ Rest to grow potatoes. Why should we murder live-wires like them to save pasty-faced, big-bellied humans from pneumonia?”
Their first task was to determine with accuracy the tolerated dose of the quinine derivative, and to study its effects on the hearing and vision, and on the kidneys, as shown by endless determinations of blood sugar and blood urea. While Martin did the injections and observed the effect on the monkeys and lost himself in chemistry, Terry toiled (all night, all next day, then a drink and a frowsy nap and all night again) on new methods of synthesizing the quinine derivative.
This was the most difficult period of Martin’s life. To work, staggering sleepy, all night, to drowse on a bare table at dawn and to breakfast at a greasy lunch-counter, these were natural and amusing, but to explain to Joyce why he had missed her dinner to a lady sculptor and a lawyer whose grandfather had been a Confederate General, this was impossible. He won a brief tolerance by explaining that he really had longed to kiss her good-night, that he did appreciate the basket of sandwiches which she had sent, and that he was about to remove pneumonia from the human race, a statement which he healthily doubted.
But when he had missed four dinners in succession; when she had raged, “Can you imagine how awful it was for Mrs. Thorn to be short a man at the last moment?” when she had wailed, “I didn’t so much mind your rudeness on the other nights, but this evening when I had nothing to do and sat home alone and waited for you”—then he writhed.
Martin and Terry began to produce pneumonia in their monkeys and to treat them, and they had success which caused them to waltz solemnly down the corridor. They could save the monkeys from pneumonia invariably, when the infection had gone but one day, and most of them on the second day and the third.
Their results were complicated by the fact that a certain number of the monkeys recovered by themselves, and this they allowed for by simple-looking figures which took days of stiff, shoulder-aching sitting over papers ... one wild-haired collarless man at a table, while the other walked among stinking cages of monkeys, clucking to them, calling them Bess and Rover, and grunting placidly, “Oh, you would bite me, would you, sweetheart!” and all the while, kindly but merciless as the gods, injecting them with the deadly pneumonia.
They came into a high upland where the air was thin with failures. They studied in the test-tube the break-down products of pneumococci—and failed. They constructed artificial body fluids (carefully, painfully, inadequately), they tried the effect of the derivative on germs in this artificial blood—and failed.
Then Holabird heard of their previous success, and came down on them with laurels and fury.
He understood, he said, that they had a cure for pneumonia. Very well! The Institute could do with the credit for curing that undesirable disease, and Terry and Martin would kindly publish their findings (mentioning McGurk) at once.
“We will not! Look here, Holabird!” snarled Terry, “I thought you were going to let us alone.”
“I have! Nearly a year! Till you should complete your research. And now you’ve completed it. It’s time to let the world know what you’re doing.”