I
At the moment when Martin met him on the street, Gottlieb was ruined.
Max Gottlieb was a German Jew, born in Saxony in 1850. Though he took
his medical degree, at Heidelberg, he was never interested in practising
medicine. He was a follower of Helmholtz, and youthful researches in the
physics of sound convinced him of the need of the quantitative method in
the medical sciences. Then Koch’s discoveries drew him into biology.
Always an elaborately careful worker, a maker of long rows of figures,
always realizing the presence of uncontrollable variables, always a
vicious assailant of what he considered slackness or lie or pomposity,
never too kindly to well-intentioned stupidity, he worked in the
laboratories of Koch, of Pasteur, he followed the early statements of
Pearson in biometrics, he drank beer and wrote vitriolic letters, he
voyaged to Italy and England and Scandinavia, and casually, between two
days, he married (as he might have bought a coat or hired a housekeeper)
the patient and wordless daughter of a Gentile merchant.
Then began a series of experiments, very important, very
undramatic-sounding, very long, and exceedingly unappreciated. Back in
1881 he was confirming Pasteur’s results in chicken cholera immunity
and, for relief and pastime, trying to separate an enzyme from yeast. A
few years later, living on the tiny inheritance from his father, a petty
banker, and quite carelessly and cheerfully exhausting it, he was
analyzing critically the ptomain theory of disease, and investigating
the mechanism of the attenuation of virulence of microörganisms. He got
thereby small fame. Perhaps he was over-cautious, and more than the
devil or starvation he hated men who rushed into publication unprepared.
Though he meddled little in politics, considering them the most
repetitious and least scientific of human activities, he was a
sufficiently patriotic German to hate the Junkers. As a youngster he
had a fight or two with ruffling subalterns; once he spent a week in
jail; often he was infuriated by discriminations against Jews: and at
forty he went sadly off to the America which could never become
militaristic or anti-Semitic--to the Hoagland Laboratory in Brooklyn,
then to Queen City University as professor of bacteriology.
Here he made his first investigation of toxin-anti-toxin reactions. He
announced that antibodies, excepting antitoxin, had no relation to the
immune state of an animal, and while he himself was being ragingly
denounced in the small but hectic world of scientists, he dealt calmly
and most brutally with Yersin’s and Marmorek’s theories of sera.
His dearest dream, now and for years of racking research, was the
artificial production of antitoxin--its production _in vitro_. Once he
was prepared to publish, but he found an error and rigidly suppressed
his notes. All the while he was lonely. There was apparently no one in
Queen City who regarded him as other than a cranky Jew catching microbes
by their little tails and leering at them--no work for a tall man at a
time when heroes were building bridges, experimenting with Horseless
Carriages, writing the first of the poetic Compelling Ads, and selling
miles of calico and cigars.
In 1899 he was called to the University of Winnemac, as professor of
bacteriology in the medical school, and here he drudged on for a dozen
years. Not once did he talk of results of the sort called “practical”;
not once did he cease warring on the _post hoc propter hoc_ conclusions
which still make up most medical lore; not once did he fail to be hated
by his colleagues, who were respectful to his face, uncomfortable in
feeling his ironic power, but privily joyous to call him Mephisto,
Diabolist, Killjoy, Pessimist, Destructive Critic, Flippant Cynic,
Scientific Bounder Lacking in Dignity and Seriousness, Intellectual
Snob, Pacifist, Anarchist, Atheist, Jew. They said, with reason, that he
was so devoted to Pure Science, to art for art’s sake, that he would
rather have people die by the right therapy than be cured by the wrong.
Having built a shrine for humanity, he wanted to kick out of it all mere
human beings.
The total number of his papers, in a brisk scientific realm where really
clever people published five times a year, was not more than twenty-five
in thirty years. They were all exquisitely finished, all easily
reduplicated and checked by the doubtfullest critics.
At Mohalis he was pleased by large facilities for work, by excellent
assistants, endless glassware, plenty of guinea pigs, enough monkeys;
but he was bored by the round of teaching, and melancholy again in a
lack of understanding friends. Always he sought some one to whom he
could talk without suspicion or caution. He was human enough, when he
meditated upon the exaltation of doctors bold through ignorance, of
inventors who were but tinkers magnified, to be irritated by his lack of
fame in America, even in Mohalis, and to complain not too nobly.
He had never dined with a duchess, never received a prize, never been
interviewed, never produced anything which the public could understand,
nor experienced anything since his schoolboy amours which nice people
could regard as romantic. He was, in fact, an authentic scientist.
He was of the great benefactors of humanity. There will never, in any
age, be an effort to end the great epidemics or the petty infections
which will not have been influenced by Max Gottlieb’s researches, for he
was not one who tagged and prettily classified bacteria and protozoa. He
sought their chemistry, the laws of their existence and destruction,
basic laws for the most part unknown after a generation of busy
biologists. Yet they were right who called him “pessimist,” for this man
who, as much as any other, will have been the cause of reducing
infectious diseases to almost-zero often doubted the value of reducing
infectious diseases at all.
He reflected (it was an international debate in which he was joined by a
few and damned by many) that half a dozen generations nearly free from
epidemics would produce a race so low in natural immunity that when a
great plague, suddenly springing from almost-zero to a world-smothering
cloud, appeared again, it might wipe out the world entire, so that the
measures to save lives to which he lent his genius might in the end be
the destruction of all human life.
He meditated that if science and public hygiene did remove tuberculosis
and the other major plagues, the world was grimly certain to become so
overcrowded, to become such a universal slave-packed shambles, that all
beauty and ease and wisdom would disappear in a famine-driven scamper
for existence. Yet these speculations never checked his work. If the
future became overcrowded, the future must by birth-control or otherwise
look to itself. Perhaps it would, he reflected. But even this drop of
wholesome optimism was lacking in his final doubts. For he doubted all
progress of the intellect and the emotions, and he doubted, most of all,
the superiority of divine mankind to the cheerful dogs, the infallibly
graceful cats, the unmoral and unagitated and irreligious horses, the
superbly adventuring sea-gulls.
While medical quacks, manufacturers of patent medicines, chewing-gum
salesmen, and high priests of advertising lived in large houses,
attended by servants, and took their sacred persons abroad
in limousines, Max Gottlieb dwelt in a cramped cottage whose
paint was peeling, and rode to his laboratory on an ancient and
squeaky bicycle. Gottlieb himself protested rarely. He was not so
unreasonable--usually--as to demand both freedom and the fruits of
popular slavery. “Why,” he once said to Martin, “should the world pay
me for doing what I want and what they do not want?”
If in his house there was but one comfortable chair, on his desk were
letters, long, intimate, and respectful, from the great ones of France
and Germany, Italy and Denmark, and from scientists whom Great Britain
so much valued that she gave them titles almost as high as those with
which she rewarded distillers, cigarette-manufacturers, and the owners
of obscene newspapers.
But poverty kept him from fulfilment of his summer longing to sit
beneath the poplars by the Rhine or the tranquil Seine, at a table on
whose checkered cloth were bread and cheese and wine and dusky cherries,
those ancient and holy simplicities of all the world.
II
Max Gottlieb’s wife was thick and slow-moving and mute; at sixty she had
not learned to speak easy English; and her German was of the small-town
bourgeois, who pay their debts and over-eat and grow red. If he was not
confidential with her, if at table he forgot her in long reflections,
neither was he unkind or impatient, and he depended on her housekeeping,
her warming of his old-fashioned nightgown. She had not been well of
late. She had nausea and indigestion, but she kept on with her work.
Always you heard her old slippers slapping about the house.
They had three children, all born when Gottlieb was over thirty-eight:
Miriam, the youngest, an ardent child who had a touch at the piano, an
instinct about Beethoven, and hatred for the “ragtime” popular in
America; an older sister who was nothing in particular; and their boy
Robert-- Robert Koch Gottlieb. He was a wild thing and a distress. They
sent him, with anxiety over the cost, to a smart school near Zenith,
where he met the sons of manufacturers and discovered a taste for fast
motors and eccentric clothes, and no taste whatever for studying. At
home he clamored that his father was a “tightwad.” When Gottlieb sought
to make it clear that he was a poor man, the boy answered that out of
his poverty he was always sneakingly spending money on his
researches--he had no right to do that and shame his son--let the
confounded University provide him with material!
III
There were few of Gottlieb’s students who saw him and his learning as
anything but hurdles to be leaped as quickly as possible. One of the few
was Martin Arrowsmith.
However harshly he may have pointed out Martin’s errors, however loftily
he may have seemed to ignore his devotion, Gottlieb was as aware of
Martin as Martin of him. He planned vast things. If Martin really
desired his help (Gottlieb could be as modest personally as he was
egotistic and swaggering in competitive science), he would make the
boy’s career his own. During Martin’s minute original research, Gottlieb
rejoiced in his willingness to abandon conventional--and
convenient--theories of immunology and in the exasperated carefulness
with which he checked results. When Martin for unknown reasons became
careless, when he was obviously drinking too much, obviously mixed up in
some absurd personal affair, it was tragic hunger for friends and
flaming respect for excellent work which drove Gottlieb to snarl at him.
Of the apologies demanded by Silva he had no notion. He would have
raged--
He waited for Martin to return. He blamed himself: “Fool! There was a
fine spirit. You should have known one does not use a platinum loop for
shoveling coal.” As long as he could (while Martin was dish-washing and
wandering on improbable trains between impossible towns), he put off
the appointment of a new assistant. Then all his wistfulness chilled to
anger. He considered Martin a traitor, and put him out of his mind.
IV
It is possible that Max Gottlieb was a genius. Certainly he was mad as
any genius. He did, during the period of Martin’s internship in Zenith
General, a thing more preposterous than any of the superstitions at
which he scoffed.
He tried to become an executive and a reformer! He, the cynic, the
anarch, tried to found an Institution, and he went at it like a spinster
organizing a league to keep small boys from learning naughty words.
He conceived that there might, in this world, be a medical school which
should be altogether scientific, ruled by exact quantitative biology and
chemistry, with spectacle-fitting and most of surgery ignored, and he
further conceived that such an enterprise might be conducted at the
University of Winnemac! He tried to be practical about it; oh, he was
extremely practical and plausible!
“I admit we should not be able to turn out doctors to cure village
bellyaches. And ordinary physicians are admirable and altogether
necessary--perhaps. But there are too many of them already. And on the
‘practical’ side, you gif me twenty years of a school that is precise
and cautious, and we shall cure diabetes, maybe tuberculosis and cancer,
and all these arthritis things that the carpenters shake their heads at
them and call them ‘rheumatism.’ So!”
He did not desire the control of such a school, nor any credit. He was
too busy. But at a meeting of the American Academy of Sciences he met
one Dr. Entwisle, a youngish physiologist from Harvard, who would make
an excellent dean. Entwisle admired him, and sounded him on his
willingness to be called to Harvard. When Gottlieb outlined his new sort
of medical school, Entwisle was fervent. “Nothing I’d like so much as to
have a chance at a place like that,” he fluttered, and Gottlieb went
back to Mohalis triumphant. He was the more assured because (though he
sardonically refused it) he was at this time offered the medical
deanship of the University of West Chippewa.
So simple, or so insane, was he that he wrote to Dean Silva politely
bidding him step down and hand over his school--his work, his life--to
an unknown teacher in Harvard! A courteous old gentleman was Dad Silva,
a fit disciple of Osler, but this incredible letter killed his patience.
He replied that while he could see the value of basic research, the
medical school belonged to the people of the state, and its task was to
provide them with immediate and practical attention. For himself, he
hinted, if he ever believed that the school would profit by his
resignation he would go at once, but he needed a rather broader
suggestion than a letter from one of his own subordinates!
Gottlieb retorted with spirit and indiscretion. He damned the People of
the State of Winnemac. Were they, in their present condition of
nincompoopery, worth any sort of attention? He unjustifiably took his
demand over Silva’s head to that great orator and patriot, Dr. Horace
Greeley Truscott, president of the University.
President Truscott said, “Really, I’m too engrossed to consider
chimerical schemes, however ingenious they may be.”
“You are too busy to consider anything but selling honorary degrees to
millionaires for gymnasiums,” remarked Gottlieb.
Next day he was summoned to a special meeting of the University Council.
As head of the medical department of bacteriology, Gottlieb was a member
of this all-ruling body, and when he entered the long Council Chamber,
with its gilt ceiling, its heavy maroon curtains, its somber paintings
of pioneers, he started for his usual seat, unconscious of the knot of
whispering members, meditating on far-off absorbing things.
“Oh, uh, Professor Gottlieb, will you please sit down there at the far
end of the table?” called President Truscott.
Then Gottlieb was aware of tensions. He saw that out of the seven
members of the Board of Regents, the four who lived in or near Zenith
were present. He saw that sitting beside Truscott was not the dean of
the academic department but Dean Silva. He saw that however easily they
talked, they were looking at him through the mist of their chatter.
President Truscott announced, “Gentlemen, this joint meeting of the
Council and the regents is to consider charges against Professor Max
Gottlieb preferred by his dean and by myself.”
Gottlieb suddenly looked old.
“These charges are: Disloyalty to his dean, his president, his regents,
and to the State of Winnemac. Disloyalty to recognized medical and
scholastic ethics. Insane egotism. Atheism. Persistent failure to
collaborate with his colleagues, and such inability to understand
practical affairs as makes it dangerous to let him conduct the important
laboratories and classes with which we have entrusted him. Gentlemen, I
shall now prove each of these points, from Professor Gottlieb’s own
letters to Dean Silva.”
He proved them.
The chairman of the Board of Regents suggested, “Gottlieb, I think it
would simplify things if you just handed us your resignation and
permitted us to part in good feeling, instead of having the
unpleasant--”
“I’m damned if I will resign!” Gottlieb was on his feet, a lean fury.
“Because you all haf schoolboy minds, golf-links minds, you are twisting
my expression, and perfectly accurate expression, of a sound
revolutionary ideal, which would personally to me be of no value or
advantage whatefer, into a desire to steal promotions. That fools should
judge honor--!” His long forefinger was a fish-hook, reaching for
President Truscott’s soul. “No! I will not resign! You can cast me out!”
“I’m afraid, then, we must ask you to leave the room while we vote.” The
president was very suave, for so large and strong and hearty a man.
Gottlieb rode his wavering bicycle to the laboratory. It was by
telephone message from a brusque girl clerk in the president’s office
that he was informed that “his resignation had been accepted.”
He agonized, “Discharge me? They couldn’t! I’m the chief glory, the only
glory, of this shopkeepers’ school!” When he comprehended that
apparently they very much had discharged him, he was shamed that he
should have given them a chance to kick him. But the really dismaying
thing was that he should by an effort to be a politician have
interrupted the sacred work.
He required peace and a laboratory, at once.
They’d see what fools they were when they heard that Harvard had called
him!
He was eager for the mellower ways of Cambridge and Boston. Why had he
remained so long in raw Mohalis? He wrote to Dr. Entwisle, hinting that
he was willing to hear an offer. He expected a telegram. He waited a
week, then had a long letter from Entwisle admitting that he had been
premature in speaking for the Harvard faculty. Entwisle presented the
faculty’s compliments and their hope that some time they might have the
honor of his presence, but as things were now--
Gottlieb wrote to the University of West Chippewa that, after all, he
was willing to think about their medical deanship ... and had answer
that the place was filled, that they had not greatly liked the tone of
his former letter, and they did not “care to go into the matter
further.”
At sixty-one, Gottlieb had saved but a few hundred dollars--literally a
few hundred. Like any bricklayer out of work, he had to have a job or go
hungry. He was no longer a genius impatient of interrupted creation but
a shabby schoolmaster in disgrace.
He prowled through his little brown house, fingering papers, staring at
his wife, staring at old pictures, staring at nothing. He still had a
month of teaching--they had dated ahead the resignation which they had
written for him--but he was too dispirited to go to the laboratory. He
felt unwanted, almost unsafe. His ancient sureness was broken into
self-pity. He waited from delivery to delivery for the mail. Surely
there would be aid from somebody who knew what he was, what he meant.
There were many friendly letters about research, but the sort of men
with whom he corresponded did not listen to intercollegiate faculty
tattle nor know of his need.
He could not, after the Harvard mischance and the West Chippewa rebuke,
approach the universities or the scientific institutes, and he was too
proud to write begging letters to the men who revered him. No, he would
be business-like! He applied to a Chicago teachers’ agency, and received
a stilted answer promising to look about and inquiring whether he would
care to take the position of teacher of physics and chemistry in a
suburban high school.
Before he had sufficiently recovered from his fury to be able to reply,
his household was overwhelmed by his wife’s sudden agony.
She had been unwell for months. He had wanted her to see a physician,
but she had refused, and all the while she was stolidly terrified by the
fear that she had cancer of the stomach. Now when she began to vomit
blood, she cried to him for help. The Gottlieb who scoffed at medical
credos, at “carpenters” and “pill mongers,” had forgotten what he knew
of diagnosis, and when he was ill, or his family, he called for the
doctor as desperately as any backwoods layman to whom illness was the
black malignity of unknown devils.
In unbelievable simplicity he considered that, as his quarrel with Silva
was not personal, he could still summon him, and this time he was
justified. Silva came, full of excessive benignity, chuckling to
himself, “When he’s got something the matter, he doesn’t run for
Arrhenhius or Jacques Loeb, but for me!” Into the meager cottage the
little man brought strength, and Gottlieb gazed down on him trustingly.
Mrs. Gottlieb was suffering. Silva gave her morphine. Not without
satisfaction he learned that Gottlieb did not even know the dose. He
examined her--his pudgy hands had the sensitiveness if not the precision
of Gottlieb’s skeleton fingers. He peered about the airless bedroom: the
dark green curtains, the crucifix on the dumpy bureau, the color-print
of a virtuously voluptuous maiden. He was bothered by an impression of
having recently been in the room. He remembered. It was the twin of the
doleful chamber of a German grocer whom he had seen during a
consultation a month ago.
He spoke to Gottlieb not as to a colleague or an enemy but as a patient,
to be cheered.
“Don’t think there’s any tumorous mass. As of course you know, Doctor,
you can tell such a lot by the differences in the shape of the lower
border of the ribs, and by the surface of the belly during deep
breathing.”
“Oh, yesss.”
“I don’t think you need to worry in the least. We’d better hustle her
off to the University Hospital, and we’ll give her a test meal and get
her X-rayed and take a look for Boas-Oppler bugs.”
She was taken away, heavy, inert, carried down the cottage steps.
Gottlieb was with her. Whether or not he loved her, whether he was
capable of ordinary domestic affection, could not be discovered. The
need of turning to Dean Silva had damaged his opinion of his own wisdom.
It was the final affront, more subtle and more enervating than the offer
to teach chemistry to children. As he sat by her bed, his dark face was
blank, and the wrinkles which deepened across that mask may have been
sorrow, may have been fear.... Nor is it known how, through the secure
and uninvaded years, he had regarded his wife’s crucifix, which Silva
had spied on their bureau--a gaudy plaster crucifix on a box set with
gilded shells.
Silva diagnosed it as probable gastric ulcer, and placed her on
treatment, with light and frequent meals. She improved, but she remained
in the hospital for four weeks, and Gottlieb wondered: Are these doctors
deceiving us? Is it really cancer, which by Their mystic craft They are
concealing from me who know naught?
Robbed of her silent assuring presence on which night by weary night he
had depended, he fretted over his daughters, despaired at their noisy
piano-practice, their inability to manage the slattern maid. When they
had gone to bed he sat alone in the pale lamplight, unmoving, not
reading. He was bewildered. His haughty self was like a robber baron
fallen into the hands of rebellious slaves, stooped under a filthy load,
the proud eye rheumy and patient with despair, the sword hand chopped
off, obscene flies crawling across the gnawed wrist.
It was at this time that he encountered Martin and Leora on the street
in Zenith.
He did not look back when they had passed him, but all that afternoon he
brooded on them. “That girl, maybe it was she that stole Martin from
me--from science! No! He was right. One sees what happens to the fools
like me!”
On the day after Martin and Leora had started for Wheatsylvania,
singing, Gottlieb went to Chicago to see the teachers’ agency.
The firm was controlled by a Live Wire who had once been a county
superintendent of schools. He was not much interested. Gottlieb lost his
temper: “Do you make an endeavor to find positions for teachers, or do
you merely send out circulars to amuse yourself? Haf you looked up my
record? Do you know who I am?”
The agent roared, “Oh, we know about you, all right, all right! I didn’t
when I first wrote you, but-- You seem to have a good record as a
laboratory man, though I don’t see that you’ve produced anything of the
slightest use in medicine. We had hoped to give you a chance such as you
nor nobody else ever had. John Edtooth, the Oklahoma oil magnate, has
decided to found a university that for plant and endowment and
individuality will beat anything that’s ever been pulled off in
education--biggest gymnasium in the world, with an ex-New York Giant
for baseball coach! We thought maybe we might work you in on the
bacteriology or the physiology-- I guess you could manage to teach that,
too, if you boned up on it. But we’ve been making some inquiries. From
some good friends of ours, down Winnemac way. And we find that you’re
not to be trusted with a position of real responsibility. Why, they
fired you for general incompetence! But now that you’ve had your
lesson-- Do you think you’d be competent to teach Practical Hygiene in
Edtooth University?”
Gottlieb was so angry that he forgot to speak English, and as all his
cursing was in student German, in a creaky dry voice, the whole scene
was very funny indeed to the cackling bookkeeper and the girl
stenographers. When he went from that place Max Gottlieb walked slowly,
without purpose, and in his eyes were senile tears.