I
Professor Max Gottlieb was about to assassinate a guinea pig with
anthrax germs, and the bacteriology class were nervous.
They had studied the forms of bacteria, they had handled Petri dishes
and platinum loops, they had proudly grown on potato slices the harmless
red cultures of _Bacillus prodigiosus_, and they had come now to
pathogenic germs and the inoculation of a living animal with swift
disease. These two beady-eyed guinea pigs, chittering in a battery jar,
would in two days be stiff and dead.
Martin had an excitement not free from anxiety. He laughed at it, he
remembered with professional scorn how foolish were the lay visitors to
the laboratory, who believed that sanguinary microbes would leap upon
them from the mysterious centrifuge, from the benches, from the air
itself. But he was conscious that in the cotton-plugged test-tube
between the instrument-bath and the bichloride jar on the demonstrator’s
desk were millions of fatal anthrax germs.
The class looked respectful and did not stand too close. With the flair
of technique, the sure rapidity which dignified the slightest movement
of his hands, Dr. Gottlieb clipped the hair on the belly of a guinea pig
held by the assistant. He soaped the belly with one flicker of a
hand-brush, he shaved it and painted it with iodine.
(And all the while Max Gottlieb was recalling the eagerness of his first
students, when he had just returned from working with Koch and Pasteur,
when he was fresh from enormous beer seidels and Korpsbrüder and
ferocious arguments. Passionate, beautiful days! _Die goldene Zeit!_ His
first classes in America, at Queen City College, had been awed by the
sensational discoveries in bacteriology; they had crowded about him
reverently; they had longed to know. Now the class was a mob. He looked
at them-- Fatty Pfaff in the front row, his face vacant as a doorknob;
the co-eds emotional and frightened; only Martin Arrowsmith and Angus
Duer visibly intelligent. His memory fumbled for a pale blue twilight in
Munich, a bridge and a waiting girl, and the sound of music.)
He dipped his hands in the bichloride solution and shook them--a quick
shake, fingers down, like the fingers of a pianist above the keys. He
took a hypodermic needle from the instrument-bath and lifted the
test-tube. His voice flowed indolently, with German vowels and blurred
W’s:
“This, gentlemen, iss a twenty-four-hour culture of _Bacillus
anthracis_. You will note, I am sure you will have noted already, that
in the bottom of the tumbler there was cotton to keep the tube from
being broken. I cannot advise breaking tubes of anthrax germs and
afterwards getting the hands into the culture. You _might_ merely get
anthrax boils--”
The class shuddered.
Gottlieb twitched out the cotton plug with his little finger, so neatly
that the medical students who had complained, “Bacteriology is junk;
urinalysis and blood tests are all the lab stuff we need to know,” now
gave him something of the respect they had for a man who could do card
tricks or remove an appendix in seven minutes. He agitated the mouth of
the tube in the Bunsen burner, droning, “Every time you take the plug
from a tube, flame the mouth of the tube. Make that a rule. It is a
necessity of the technique, and technique, gentlemen, is the beginning
of all science. It iss also the least-known thing in science.”
The class was impatient. Why didn’t he get on with it, on to the
entertainingly dreadful moment of inoculating the pig?
(And Max Gottlieb, glancing at the other guinea pig in the prison of its
battery jar, meditated, “Wretched innocent! Why should I murder him, to
teach _Dummköpfe_? It would be better to experiment on that fat young
man.”)
He thrust the syringe into the tube, he withdrew the piston dextrously
with his index finger, and lectured:
“Take one half c.c. of the culture. There are two kinds of M.D.’s--those
to whom c.c. means cubic centimeter and those to whom it means compound
cathartic. The second kind are more prosperous.”
(But one cannot convey the quality of it: the thin drawl, the sardonic
amiability, the hiss of the S’s, the D’s turned into blunt and
challenging T’s.)
The assistant held the guinea pig close; Gottlieb pinched up the skin
of the belly and punctured it with a quick down thrust of the hypodermic
needle. The pig gave a little jerk, a little squeak, and the co-eds
shuddered. Gottlieb’s wise fingers knew when the peritoneal wall was
reached. He pushed home the plunger of the syringe. He said quietly,
“This poor animal will now soon be dead as Moses.” The class glanced at
one another uneasily. “Some of you will think that it does not matter;
some of you will think, like Bernard Shaw, that I am an executioner and
the more monstrous because I am cool about it; and some of you will not
think at all. This difference in philosophy iss what makes life
interesting.”
While the assistant tagged the pig with a tin disk in its ear and
restored it to the battery jar, Gottlieb set down its weight in a
note-book, with the time of inoculation and the age of the bacterial
culture. These notes he reproduced on the blackboard, in his fastidious
script, murmuring, “Gentlemen, the most important part of living is not
the living but pondering upon it. And the most important part of
experimentation is not doing the experiment but making notes, ve-ry
accurate _quantitative_ notes--in ink. I am told that a great many
clever people feel they can keep notes in their heads. I have often
observed with pleasure that such persons do not have heads in which to
keep their notes. This iss very good, because thus the world never sees
their results and science is not encumbered with them. I shall now
inoculate the second guinea pig, and the class will be dismissed. Before
the next lab hour I shall be glad if you will read Pater’s ‘Marius the
Epicurean,’ to derife from it the calmness which is the secret of
laboratory skill.”
II
As they bustled down the hall, Angus Duer observed to a brother Digam,
“Gottlieb is an old laboratory plug; he hasn’t got any imagination; he
sticks here instead of getting out into the world and enjoying the
fight. But he certainly is handy. Awfully good technique. He might have
been a first-rate surgeon, and made fifty thousand dollars a year. As it
is, I don’t suppose he gets a cent over four thousand!”
Ira Hinkley walked alone, worrying. He was an extraordinarily kindly
man, this huge and bumbling parson. He reverently accepted everything,
no matter how contradictory to everything else, that his medical
instructors told him, but this killing of animals--he hated it. By a
connection not evident to him he remembered that the Sunday before, in
the slummy chapel where he preached during his medical course, he had
exalted the sacrifice of the martyrs and they had sung of the blood of
the lamb, the fountain filled with blood drawn from Emmanuel’s veins,
but this meditation he lost, and he lumbered toward Digamma Pi in a fog
of pondering pity.
Clif Clawson, walking with Fatty Pfaff, shouted, “Gosh, ole pig
certainly did jerk when Pa Gottlieb rammed that needle home!” and Fatty
begged, “Don’t! Please!”
But Martin Arrowsmith saw himself doing the same experiment and, as he
remembered Gottlieb’s unerring fingers, his hands curved in imitation.
III
The guinea pigs grew drowsier and drowsier. In two days they rolled
over, kicked convulsively, and died. Full of dramatic expectation, the
class reassembled for the necropsy. On the demonstrator’s table was a
wooden tray, scarred from the tacks which for years had pinned down the
corpses. The guinea pigs were in a glass jar, rigid, their hair ruffled.
The class tried to remember how nibbling and alive they had been. The
assistant stretched out one of them with thumb-tacks. Gottlieb swabbed
its belly with a cotton wad soaked in lysol, slit it from belly to neck,
and cauterized the heart with a red-hot spatula--the class quivered as
they heard the searing of the flesh. Like a priest of diabolic
mysteries, he drew out the blackened blood with a pipette. With the
distended lungs, the spleen and kidneys and liver, the assistant made
wavy smears on glass slides which were stained and given to the class
for examination. The students who had learned to look through the
microscope without having to close one eye were proud and professional,
and all of them talked of the beauty of identifying the bacillus, as
they twiddled the brass thumbscrews to the right focus and the cells
rose from cloudiness to sharp distinctness on the slides before them.
But they were uneasy, for Gottlieb remained with them that day, stalking
behind them, saying nothing, watching them always, watching the disposal
of the remains of the guinea pigs, and along the benches ran nervous
rumors about a bygone student who had died from anthrax infection in the
laboratory.
IV
There was for Martin in these days a quality of satisfying delight; the
zest of a fast hockey game, the serenity of the prairie, the
bewilderment of great music, and a feeling of creation. He woke early
and thought contentedly of the day; he hurried to his work, devout,
unseeing.
The confusion of the bacteriological laboratory was ecstasy to him--the
students in shirt-sleeves, filtering nutrient gelatine, their fingers
gummed from the crinkly gelatine leaves; or heating media in an
autoclave like a silver howitzer. The roaring Bunsen flames beneath the
hot-air ovens, the steam from the Arnold sterilizers rolling to the
rafters, clouding the windows, were to Martin lovely with activity, and
to him the most radiant things in the world were rows of test-tubes
filled with watery serum and plugged with cotton singed to a coffee
brown, a fine platinum loop leaning in a shiny test-glass, a fantastic
hedge of tall glass tubes mysteriously connecting jars, or a bottle rich
with gentian violet stain.
He had begun, perhaps in youthful imitation of Gottlieb, to work by
himself in the laboratory at night.... The long room was dark, thick
dark, but for the gas-mantle behind his microscope. The cone of light
cast a gloss on the bright brass tube, a sheen on his black hair, as he
bent over the eyepiece. He was studying trypanosomes from a rat--an
eight-branched rosette stained with polychrome methylene blue; a cluster
of organisms delicate as a narcissus, with their purple nuclei, their
light blue cells, and the thin lines of the flagella. He was excited and
a little proud; he had stained the germs perfectly, and it is not easy
to stain a rosette without breaking the petal shape. In the darkness, a
step, the weary step of Max Gottlieb, and a hand on Martin’s shoulder.
Silently Martin raised his head, pushed the microscope toward him.
Bending down, a cigarette stub in his mouth--the smoke would have stung
the eyes of any human being-- Gottlieb peered at the preparation.
He adjusted the gas light a quarter inch, and mused, “Splendid! You have
craftsmanship. Oh, there is an art in science--for a few. You Americans,
so many of you--all full with ideas, but you are impatient with the
beautiful dullness of long labors. I see already--and I watch you in the
lab before--perhaps you may try the trypanosomes of sleeping sickness.
They are very, very interesting, and very, very tickelish to handle. It
is quite a nice disease. In some villages in Africa, fifty per cent. of
the people have it, and it is invariably fatal. Yes, I think you might
work on the bugs.”
Which, to Martin, was getting his brigade in battle.
“I shall have,” said Gottlieb, “a little sandwich in my room at
midnight. If you should happen to work so late, I should be very pleast
if you would come to have a bite.”
Diffidently, Martin crossed the hall to Gottlieb’s immaculate laboratory
at midnight. On the bench were coffee and sandwiches, curiously small
and excellent sandwiches, foreign to Martin’s lunch-room taste.
Gottlieb talked till Clif had faded from existence and Angus Duer seemed
but an absurd climber. He summoned forth London laboratories, dinners on
frosty evenings in Stockholm, walks on the Pincio with sunset behind the
dome of San Pietro, extreme danger and overpowering disgust from
excreta-smeared garments in an epidemic at Marseilles. His reserve
slipped from him and he talked of himself and of his family as though
Martin were a contemporary.
The cousin who was a colonel in Uruguay and the cousin, a rabbi, who was
tortured in a pogrom in Moscow. His sick wife--it might be cancer. The
three children--the youngest girl, Miriam, she was a good musician, but
the boy, the fourteen-year-old, he was a worry; he was saucy, he would
not study. Himself, he had worked for years on the synthesis of
antibodies; he was at present in a blind alley, and at Mohalis there was
no one who was interested, no one to stir him, but he was having an
agreeable time massacring the opsonin theory, and that cheered him.
“No, I have done nothing except be unpleasant to people that claim too
much, but I have dreams of real discoveries some day. And-- No. Not five
times in five years do I have students who understand craftsmanship and
precision and maybe some big imagination in hypotheses. I t’ink perhaps
you may have them. If I can help you-- So!
“I do not t’ink you will be a good doctor. Good doctors are fine--often
they are artists--but their trade, it is not for us lonely ones that
work in labs. Once, I took an M.D. label. In Heidelberg that was-- Herr
Gott, back in 1875! I could not get much interested in bandaging legs
and looking at tongues. I was a follower of Helmholtz--what a wild
blithering young fellow! I tried to make researches into the physics of
sound-- I was bad, most unbelievable, but I learned that in this wale of
tears there is nothing certain but the quantitative method. And I was a
chemist--a fine stink-maker was I. And so into biology and much trouble.
It has been good. I have found one or two things. And if sometimes I
feel an exile, cold-- I had to get out of Germany one time for refusing
to sing _Die Wacht am Rhein_ and trying to kill a cavalry captain--he
was a stout fellow-- I had to choke him--you see I am boasting, but I
was a lifely _Kerl_ thirty years ago! Ah! So!
“There is but one trouble of a philosophical bacteriologist. Why should
we destroy these amiable pathogenic germs? Are we too sure, when we
regard these oh, most unbeautiful young students attending Y. M. C. A.’s
and singing dinkle-songs and wearing hats with initials burned into
them--iss it worth while to protect them from the so elegantly
functioning _Bacillus typhosus_ with its lovely flagella? You know, once
I asked Dean Silva would it not be better to let loose the pathogenic
germs on the world, and so solve all economic questions. But he did not
care for my met’od. Oh, well, he is older than I am; he also gives, I
hear, some dinner parties with bishops and judges present, all in nice
clothes. He would know more than a German Jew who loves Father Nietzsche
and Father Schopenhauer (but damn him, he was teleological-minded!) and
Father Koch and Father Pasteur and Brother Jacques Loeb and Brother
Arrhenius. Ja! I talk foolishness. Let us go look at your slides and so
good-night.”
When he had left Gottlieb at his stupid brown little house, his face as
reticent as though the midnight supper and all the rambling talk had
never happened, Martin ran home, altogether drunk.