I
The McGurk Building. A sheer wall, thirty blank stories of glass and
limestone, down in the pinched triangle whence New York rules a quarter
of the world.
Martin was not overwhelmed by his first hint of New York; after a year
in the Chicago Loop, Manhattan seemed leisurely. But when from the
elevated railroad he beheld the Woolworth Tower, he was exalted. To him
architecture had never existed; buildings were larger or smaller bulks
containing more or less interesting objects. His most impassioned
architectural comment had been, “There’s a cute bungalow; be nice place
to live.” Now he pondered, “Like to see that tower every day--clouds and
storms behind it and everything--so sort of satisfying.”
He came along Cedar Street, among thunderous trucks portly with wares
from all the world; came to the bronze doors of the McGurk Building and
a corridor of intemperately colored terra-cotta, with murals of Andean
Indians, pirates booming up the Spanish Main, guarded gold-trains, and
the stout walls of Cartagena. At the Cedar Street end of the corridor, a
private street, one block long, was the Bank of the Andes and Antilles
(Ross McGurk chairman of the board), in whose gold-crusted sanctity
red-headed Yankee exporters drew drafts on Quito, and clerks hurled
breathless Spanish at bulky women. A sign indicated, at the Liberty
Street end, “Passenger Offices, McGurk Line, weekly sailings for the
West Indies and South America.”
Born to the prairies, never far from the sight of the cornfields, Martin
was conveyed to blazing lands and portentous enterprises.
One of the row of bronze-barred elevators was labeled “Express to McGurk
Institute.” He entered it proudly, feeling himself already a part of the
godly association. They rose swiftly, and he had but half-second
glimpses of ground glass doors with the signs of mining companies,
lumber companies, Central American railroad companies.
The McGurk Institute is probably the only organization for scientific
research in the world which is housed in an office building. It has the
twenty-ninth and thirtieth stories of the McGurk Building, and the roof
is devoted to its animal house and to tiled walks along which (above a
world of stenographers and bookkeepers and earnest gentlemen who desire
to sell Better-bilt Garments to the golden dons of the Argentine)
saunter rapt scientists dreaming of osmosis in Spirogyra.
Later, Martin was to note that the reception-room of the Institute was
smaller, yet more forbiddingly polite, in its white paneling and
Chippendale chairs, than the lobby of the Rouncefield Clinic, but now he
was unconscious of the room, of the staccato girl attendant, of
everything except that he was about to see Max Gottlieb, for the first
time in five years.
At the door of the laboratory he stared hungrily.
Gottlieb was thin-cheeked and dark as ever, his hawk nose bony, his
fierce eyes demanding, but his hair had gone gray, the flesh round his
mouth was sunken, and Martin could have wept at the feebleness with
which he rose. The old man peered down at him, his hand on Martin’s
shoulder, but he said only:
“Ah! Dis is good.... Your laboratory is three doors down the hall....
But I object to one thing in the good paper you send me. You say, ‘The
regularity of the rate at which the streptolysin disappears suggests
that an equation may be found--’”
“But it can, sir!”
“Then why did you not make the equation?”
“Well-- I don’t know. I wasn’t enough of a mathematician.”
“Then you should not have published till you knew your math!”
“I-- Look, Dr. Gottlieb, do you really think I know enough to work here?
I want terribly to succeed.”
“Succeed? I have heard that word. It is English? Oh, yes, it is a word
that liddle schoolboys use at the University of Winnemac. It means
passing examinations. But there are no examinations to pass here....
Martin, let us be clear. You know something of laboratory technique; you
have heard about dese bacilli; you are not a good chemist, and
mathematics--pfui!--most terrible! But you have curiosity and you are
stubborn. You do not accept rules. Therefore I t’ink you will either
make a very good scientist or a very bad one, and if you are bad enough,
you will be popular with the rich ladies who rule this city, New York,
and you can gif lectures for a living or even become, if you get to be
plausible enough, a college president. So anyvay, it will be
interesting.”
Half an hour later they were arguing ferociously, Martin asserting that
the whole world ought to stop warring and trading and writing and get
straightway into laboratories to observe new phenomena; Gottlieb
insisting that there were already too many facile scientists, that the
one thing necessary was the mathematical analysis (and often the
destruction) of phenomena already observed.
It sounded bellicose, and all the while Martin was blissful with the
certainty that he had come home.
The laboratory in which they talked (Gottlieb pacing the floor, his long
arms fantastically knotted behind his thin back; Martin leaping on and
off tall stools) was not in the least remarkable--a sink, a bench with
racks of numbered test-tubes, a microscope, a few note-books and
hydrogen-ion charts, a grotesque series of bottles connected by glass
and rubber tubes on an ordinary kitchen table at the end of the
room--yet now and then during his tirades Martin looked about
reverently.
Gottlieb interrupted their debate: “What work do you want to do here?”
“Why, sir, I’d like to help you, if I can. I suppose you’re cleaning up
some things on the synthesis of antibodies.”
“Yes, I t’ink I can bring immunity reactions under the mass action law.
But you are not to help me. You are to do your own work. What do you
want to do? This is not a clinic, wit’ patients going through so neat in
a row!”
“I want to find a hemolysin for which there’s an antibody. There isn’t
any for streptolysin. I’d like to work with staphylolysin. Would you
mind?”
“I do not care what you do--if you just do not steal my staph cultures
out of the ice-box, and if you will look mysterious all the time, so Dr.
Tubbs, our Director, will t’ink you are up to something big. So! I haf
only one suggestion: when you get stuck in a problem, I have a fine
collection of detective stories in my office. But no. Should I be
serious--this once, when you are just come?
“Perhaps I am a crank, Martin. There are many who hate me. There are
plots against me--oh, you t’ink I imagine it, but you shall see! I make
many mistakes. But one thing I keep always pure: the religion of a
scientist.
“To be a scientist--it is not just a different job, so that a man should
choose between being a scientist and being an explorer or a
bond-salesman or a physician or a king or a farmer. It is a tangle of
ver-y obscure emotions, like mysticism, or wanting to write poetry; it
makes its victim all different from the good normal man. The normal man,
he does not care much what he does except that he should eat and sleep
and make love. But the scientist is intensely religious--he is so
religious that he will not accept quarter-truths, because they are an
insult to his faith.
“He wants that everything should be subject to inexorable laws. He is
equal opposed to the capitalists who t’ink their silly money-grabbing is
a system, and to liberals who t’ink man is not a fighting animal; he
takes both the American booster and the European aristocrat, and he
ignores all their blithering. Ignores it! All of it! He hates the
preachers who talk their fables, but he iss not too kindly to the
anthropologists and historians who can only make guesses, yet they have
the nerf to call themselves scientists! Oh, yes, he is a man that all
nice good-natured people should naturally hate!
“He speaks no meaner of the ridiculous faith-healers and chiropractors
than he does of the doctors that want to snatch our science before it is
tested and rush around hoping they heal people, and spoiling all the
clues with their footsteps; and worse than the men like hogs, worse than
the imbeciles who have not even heard of science, he hates
pseudo-scientists, guess-scientists--like these psycho-analysts; and
worse than those comic dream-scientists he hates the men that are
allowed in a clean kingdom like biology but know only one text-book and
how to lecture to nincompoops all so popular! He is the only real
revolutionary, the authentic scientist, because he alone knows how
liddle he knows.
“He must be heartless. He lives in a cold, clear light. Yet dis is a
funny t’ing: really, in private, he is not cold nor heartless--so much
less cold than the Professional Optimists. The world has always been
ruled by the Philanthropists: by the doctors that want to use
therapeutic methods they do not understand, by the soldiers that want
something to defend their country against, by the preachers that yearn
to make everybody listen to them, by the kind manufacturers that love
their workers, by the eloquent statesmen and soft-hearted authors--and
see once what a fine mess of hell they haf made of the world! Maybe now
it is time for the scientist, who works and searches and never goes
around howling how he loves everybody!
“But once again always remember that not all the men who work at science
are scientists. So few! The rest--secretaries, press-agents,
camp-followers! To be a scientist is like being a Goethe: it is born in
you. Sometimes I t’ink you have a liddle of it born in you. If you haf,
there is only one t’ing--no, there is two t’ings you must do: work twice
as hard as you can, and keep people from using you. I will try to
protect you from Success. It is all I can do. So ... I should wish,
Martin, that you will be very happy here. May Koch bless you!”
II
Five rapt minutes Martin spent in the laboratory which was to be
his--smallish but efficient, the bench exactly the right height, a
proper sink with pedal taps. When he had closed the door and let his
spirit flow out and fill that minute apartment with his own essence, he
felt secure.
No Pickerbaugh or Rouncefield could burst in here and drag him away to
be explanatory and plausible and public; he would be free to work,
instead of being summoned to the package-wrapping and dictation of
breezy letters which men call work.
He looked out of the broad window above his bench and saw that he did
have the coveted Woolworth Tower, to keep and gloat on. Shut in to a joy
of precision, he would nevertheless not be walled out from flowing life.
He had, to the north, not the Woolworth Tower alone but the Singer
Building, the arrogant magnificence of the City Investing Building. To
the west, tall ships were riding, tugs were bustling, all the world went
by. Below his Clif, the streets were feverish. Suddenly he loved
humanity as he loved the decent, clean rows of test-tubes, and he prayed
then the prayer of the scientist:
“God give me unclouded eyes and freedom from haste. God give me a quiet
and relentless anger against all pretense and all pretentious work and
all work left slack and unfinished. God give me a restlessness whereby
I may neither sleep nor accept praise till my observed results equal my
calculated results or in pious glee I discover and assault my error. God
give me strength not to trust to God!”
III
He walked all the way up to their inconsiderable hotel in the Thirties,
and all the way the crowds stared at him--this slim, pale, black-eyed,
beaming young man who thrust among them, half-running, seeing nothing
yet in a blur seeing everything: gallant buildings, filthy streets,
relentless traffic, soldiers of fortune, fools, pretty women, frivolous
shops, windy sky. His feet raced to the tune of “I’ve found my work,
I’ve found my work, I’ve found my work!”
Leora was awaiting him-- Leora whose fate it was ever to wait for him in
creaky rocking-chairs in cheapish rooms. As he galloped in she smiled,
and all her thin, sweet body was illumined. Before he spoke she cried:
“Oh, Sandy, I’m so glad!”
She interrupted his room-striding panegyrics on Max Gottlieb, on the
McGurk Institute, on New York, on the charms of staphylolysin, by a meek
“Dear, how much are they going to pay you?”
He stopped with a bump. “Gosh! I forgot to ask!”
“Oh!”
“Now you look here! This isn’t a Rouncefield Clinic! I hate these
buzzards that can’t see anything but making money--”
“I know, Sandy. Honestly, I don’t care. I was just wondering what kind
of a flat we’ll be able to afford, so I can begin looking for it. Go on.
Dr. Gottlieb said--”
It was three hours after, at eight, when they went to dinner.
IV
The city of magic was to become to Martin neither a city nor any sort of
magic but merely a route: their flat, the subway, the Institute, a
favorite inexpensive restaurant, a few streets of laundries and
delicatessens and movie theaters. But to-night it was a fog of wonder.
They dined at the Brevoort, of which Gustaf Sondelius had told him. This
was in 1916, before the country had become wholesome and sterile, and
the Brevoort was a tumult of French uniforms, caviar, Louis, dangling
neckties, Nuits St. Georges, illustrators, Grand Marnier, British
Intelligence officers, brokers, conversation, and Martell, V.O.
“It’s a fine crazy bunch,” said Martin. “Do you realize we can stop
being respectable now? Irving Watters isn’t watching us, or Angus! Would
we be too insane if we had a bottle of champagne?”
He awoke next day to fret that there must be a trick somewhere, as there
had been in Nautilus, in Chicago. But as he set to work he seemed to be
in a perfect world. The Institute deftly provided all the material and
facilities he could desire--animals, incubators, glassware, cultures,
media--and he had a thoroughly trained technician--“garçon” they called
him at the Institute. He really was let alone; he really was encouraged
to do individual work; he really was associated with men who thought not
in terms of poetic posters or of two-thousand-dollar operations but of
colloids and sporulation and electrons, and of the laws and energies
which governed them.
On his first day there came to greet him the head of the Department of
Physiology, Dr. Rippleton Holabird.
Holabird seemed, though Martin had found his name starred in
physiological journals, too young and too handsome to be the head of a
department: a tall, slim, easy man with a trim mustache. Martin had been
reared in the school of Clif Clawson; he had not realized, till he heard
Dr. Holabird’s quick greeting, that a man’s voice may be charming
without effeminacy.
Holabird guided him through the two floors of the Institute, and Martin
beheld all the wonders of which he had ever dreamed. If it was not so
large, McGurk ranked in equipment with Rockefeller, Pasteur, McCormick,
Lister. Martin saw rooms for sterilizing glass and preparing media, for
glass-blowing, for the polariscope and the spectroscope, and a
steel-and-cement-walled combustion-chamber. He saw a museum of pathology
and bacteriology to which he longed to add. There was a department of
publications, whence were issued the Institute reports, and the
_American Journal of Geographic Pathology_, edited by the Director, Dr.
Tubbs; there was a room for photography, a glorious library, an aquarium
for the Department of Marine Biology, and (Dr. Tubbs’s own idea) a row
of laboratories which visiting foreign scientists were invited to use as
their own. A Belgian biologist and a Portuguese bio-chemist were
occupying guest laboratories now, and once, Martin thrilled to learn,
Gustaf Sondelius had been here.
Then Martin saw the Berkeley-Saunders centrifuge.
The principle of the centrifuge is that of the cream-separator. It
collects as sediment the solids scattered through a liquid, such as
bacteria in a solution. Most centrifuges are hand-or water-power
contrivances the size of a large cocktail-shaker, but this noble
implement was four feet across, electrically driven, the central bowl
enclosed in armor plate fastened with levers like a submarine hatch, the
whole mounted on a cement pillar.
Holabird explained, “There’re only three of these in existence. They’re
made by Berkeley-Saunders in England. You know the normal speed, even
for a good centrifuge, is about four thousand revolutions a minute. This
does twenty thousand a minute--fastest in the world. Eh?”
“Jove, they do give you the stuff to work with!” gloated Martin. (He
really did, under Holabird’s handsome influence, say Jove, not Gosh.)
“Yes, McGurk and Tubbs are the most generous men in the scientific
world. I think you’ll find it very pleasant to be here, Doctor.”
“I know I will--shall. And Jove, it’s awfully nice of you to take me
around this way.”
“Can’t you see how much I’m enjoying my chance to display my knowledge?
There’s no form of egotism so agreeable and so safe as being a cicerone.
But we still have the real wonder of the Institute for to behold,
Doctor. Down this way.”
The real wonder of the Institute had nothing visible to do with science.
It was the Hall, in which lunched the staff, and in which occasional
scientific dinners were given, with Mrs. McGurk as hostess. Martin
gasped and his head went back as his glance ran from glistening floor to
black and gold ceiling. The Hall rose the full height of the two floors
of the Institute. Clinging to the soaring wall, above the dais on which
lunched the Director and the seven heads of departments, was a carved
musicians’-gallery. Against the oak paneling of the walls were
portraits of the pontiffs of science, in crimson robes, with a vast
mural by Maxfield Parrish, and above all was an electrolier of a hundred
globes.
“Gosh--_Jove!_” said Martin. “I never knew there was such a room!”
Holabird was generous. He did not smile. “Oh, perhaps it’s almost too
gorgeous. It’s Capitola’s pet creation-- Capitola is Mrs. Ross McGurk,
wife of the founder; she’s really an awfully nice woman but she does
love Movements and Associations. Terry Wickett, one of the chemists
here, calls this ‘Bonanza Hall.’ Yet it does inspire you when you come
in to lunch all tired and grubby. Now let’s go call on the Director. He
told me to bring you in.”
After the Babylonian splendor of the Hall, Martin expected to find the
office of Dr. A. DeWitt Tubbs fashioned like a Roman bath, but it was,
except for a laboratory bench at one end, the most rigidly business-like
apartment he had ever seen.
Dr. Tubbs was an earnest man, whiskered like a terrier, very scholarly,
and perhaps the most powerful American exponent of coöperation in
science, but he was also a man of the world, fastidious of boots and
waistcoats. He had graduated from Harvard, studied on the Continent,
been professor of pathology in the University of Minnesota, president of
Hartford University, minister to Venezuela, editor of the _Weekly
Statesman_ and president of the Sanity League, finally Director of
McGurk.
He was a member both of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and of
the Academy of Sciences. Bishops, generals, liberal rabbis, and musical
bankers dined with him. He was one of the Distinguished Men to whom the
newspapers turned for authoritative interviews on all subjects.
You realized before he had talked to you for ten minutes that here was
one of the few leaders of mankind who could discourse on any branch of
knowledge, yet could control practical affairs and drive stumbling
mankind on to sane and reasonable ideals. Though a Max Gottlieb might in
his research show a certain talent, yet his narrowness, his sour and
antic humor, kept him from developing the broad view of education,
politics, commerce, and all other noble matters which marked Dr. A.
DeWitt Tubbs.
But the Director was as cordial to the insignificant Martin Arrowsmith
as though Martin were a visiting senator. He shook his hand warmly; he
unbent in a smile; his baritone was mellow.
“Dr. Arrowsmith, I trust we shall do more than merely say you are
welcome here; I trust we shall show you how welcome you are! Dr.
Gottlieb tells me that you have a natural aptitude for cloistered
investigation but that you have been looking over the fields of medical
practise and public health before you settled down to the laboratory. I
can’t tell you how wise I consider you to have made that broad
preliminary survey. Too many would-be scientists lack the tutored vision
which comes from coördinating all mental domains.”
Martin was dazed to discover that he had been making a broad survey.
“Now you’ll doubtless wish to take some time, perhaps a year or more, in
getting into your stride, Dr. Arrowsmith. I shan’t ask you for any
reports. So long as Dr. Gottlieb feels that you yourself are satisfied
with your progress, I shall be content. Only if there is anything in
which I can advise you, from a perhaps somewhat longer career in
science, please believe that I shall be delighted to be of aid, and I am
quite sure the same obtains with Dr. Holabird here, though he really
ought to be jealous, because he is one of our youngest workers--in fact
I call him my _enfant terrible_--but you, I believe, are only
thirty-three, and you quite put the poor fellow’s nose out!”
Holabird merrily suggested, “Oh, no, Doctor, it’s been put out long ago.
You forget Terry Wickett. He’s under forty.”
“Oh. _Him!_” murmured Dr. Tubbs.
Martin had never heard a man disposed of so poisonously with such
politeness. He saw that in Terry Wickett there might be a serpent even
in this paradise.
“Now,” said Dr. Tubbs, “perhaps you might like to glance around my place
here. I pride myself on keeping our card-indices and letter-files as
unimaginatively as though I were an insurance agent. But there is a
certain exotic touch in these charts.” He trotted across the room to
show a nest of narrow drawers filled with scientific blue-prints.
Just what they were charts of, he did not say, nor did Martin ever
learn.
He pointed to the bench at the end of the room, and laughingly
admitted:
“You can see there what an inefficient fellow I really am. I keep
asserting that I have given up all the idyllic delights of pathological
research for the less fascinating but so very important and fatiguing
cares of the directorship. Yet such is the weakness of _genus homo_ that
sometimes, when I ought to be attending to practical details, I become
obsessed by some probably absurd pathological concept, and so ridiculous
am I that I can’t wait to hasten down the hall to my regular
laboratory-- I must always have a bench at hand and an experiment going
on. Oh, I’m afraid I’m not the moral man that I pose as being in public!
Here I am married to executive procedure, and still I hanker for my
first love, Milady Science!”
“I think it’s fine you still have an itch for it,” Martin ventured.
He was wondering just what experiments Dr. Tubbs had been doing lately.
The bench seemed rather unused.
“And now, Doctor, I want you to meet the real Director of the
Institute--my secretary, Miss Pearl Robbins.”
Martin had already noticed Miss Robbins. You could not help noticing
Miss Robbins. She was thirty-five and stately, a creamy goddess. She
rose to shake hands--a firm, competent grasp--and to cry in her glorious
contralto, “Dr. Tubbs is so complimentary only because he knows that
otherwise I wouldn’t give him his afternoon tea. We’ve heard so much
about your cleverness from Dr. Gottlieb that I’m almost afraid to
welcome you, Dr. Arrowsmith, but I do want to.”
Then, in a glow, Martin stood in his laboratory looking at the Woolworth
Tower. He was dizzy with these wonders--his own wonders, now! In
Rippleton Holabird, so gaily elegant yet so distinguished, he hoped to
have a friend. He found Dr. Tubbs somewhat sentimental, but he was moved
by his kindness and by Miss Robbins’s recognition. He was in a haze of
future glory when his door was banged open by a hard-faced, red-headed,
soft-shirted man of thirty-six or-eight.
“Arrowsmith?” the intruder growled. “My name is Wickett, Terry Wickett.
I’m a chemist. I’m with Gottlieb. Well, I noticed the Holy Wren was
showing you the menagerie.”
“Dr. Holabird?”
“Him.... Well, you must be more or less intelligent, if Pa Gottlieb let
you in. How’s it starting? Which kind are you going to be? One of the
polite birds that uses the Institute for social climbing and catches
him a rich wife, or one of the roughnecks like me and Gottlieb?”
Terry Wickett’s croak was as irritating a sound as Martin had ever
heard. He answered in a voice curiously like that of Rippleton Holabird:
“I don’t think you need to worry. I happen to be married already!”
“Oh, don’t let that fret you, Arrowsmith. Divorces are cheap, in this
man’s town. Well, did the Holy Wren show you Gladys the Tart?”
“Huh?”
“Gladys the Tart, or the Galloping Centrifuge.”
“Oh. You mean the Berkeley-Saunders?”
“I do, soul of my soul. Whajuh think of it?”
“It’s the finest centrifuge I’ve ever seen. Dr. Holabird said--”
“Hell, he ought to say something! He went and got old Tubbs to buy it.
He just loves it, Holy Wren does.”
“Why not? It’s the fastest--”
“Sure. Speediest centrifuge in the whole _Vereinigen_, and made of the
best toothpick steel. The only trouble is, it always blows out fuses,
and it spatters the bugs so that you need a gas-mask if you’re going to
use it.... And did you love dear old Tubbsy and the peerless Pearl?”
“I did!”
“Fine. Of course Tubbs is an illiterate jackass but still, at that, he
hasn’t got persecution-mania, like Gottlieb.”
“Look here, Wickett--is it Dr. Wickett?”
“Uh-huh.... M.D., Ph.D., but a first-rate chemist just the same.”
“Well, Dr. Wickett, it seems to me a shame that a man of your talents
should have to associate with idiots like Gottlieb and Tubbs and
Holabird. I’ve just left a Chicago clinic where everybody is nice and
sensible. I’d be glad to recommend you for a job there!”
“Wouldn’t be so bad. At least I’d avoid all the gassing at lunch in
Bonanza Hall. Well, sorry I got your goat, Arrowsmith, but you look all
right to me.”
“Thanks!”
Wickett grinned obscenely--red-headed, rough-faced, wiry--and snorted,
“By the way, did Holabird tell you about being wounded in the first
month of the war, when he was a field marshal or a hospital orderly or
something in the British Army?”
“He did not! He didn’t mention the war!”
“He will! Well, Brer Arrowsmith, I look forward to many happy, happy
years together, playing at the feet of Pa Gottlieb. So long. My lab is
right next to yours.”
“Fool!” Martin decided, and, “Well, I can stand him as long as I can
fall back on Gottlieb and Holabird. But-- The conceited idiot! Gosh, so
Holabird was in the war! Invalided out, I guess. I certainly got back at
Wickett on that! ‘Did he tell you about his being a jolly old hero in
the blinkin’ war?’ he said, and I came right back at him, ‘I’m sorry to
displease you,’ I said, ‘but Dr. Holabird did not mention the war.’ The
idiot! Well, I won’t let him worry me.”
And indeed, as Martin met the staff at lunch, Wickett was the only one
whom he did not find courteous, however brief their greetings. He did
not distinguish among them; for days most of the twenty researchers
remained a blur. He confused Dr. Yeo, head of the Department of Biology,
with the carpenter who had come to put up shelves.
The staff sat in Hall at two long tables, one on the dais, one below:
tiny insect groups under the massy ceiling. They were not particularly
noble of aspect, these possible Darwins and Huxleys and Pasteurs. None
of them were wide-browed Platos. Except for Rippleton Holabird and Max
Gottlieb and perhaps Martin himself, they looked like lunching grocers:
brisk featureless young men; thick mustached elders; and wimpish little
men with spectacles, men whose collars did not meet. But there was a
steady calm about them; there was, Martin believed, no anxiety over
money in their voices nor any restlessness of envy and scandalous
gossip. They talked gravely or frivolously of their work, the one sort
of work that, since it becomes part of the chain of discovered fact, is
eternal, however forgotten the worker’s name.
As Martin listened to Terry Wickett (rude and slangy as ever, referring
to himself as “the boy chemist,” speaking of “this gaudy Institute” and
“our trusting new lil brother, Arrowsmith”) debating with a slight
thin-bearded man-- Dr. William T. Smith, assistant in bio-chemistry--the
possibility of increasing the effects of all enzymes by doses of X-rays,
as he heard one associate-member vituperate another for his notions of
cell-chemistry and denounce Ehrlich as “the Edison of medical science,”
Martin perceived new avenues of exciting research; he stood on a
mountain, and unknown valleys, craggy tantalizing paths, were open to
his feet.
V
Dr. and Mrs. Rippleton Holabird invited them to dinner, a week after
their coming.
As Holabird’s tweeds made Clay Tredgold’s smartness seem hard and
pretentious, so his dinner revealed Angus Duer’s affairs in Chicago as
mechanical and joyless and a little anxious. Every one whom Martin met
at the Holabirds’ flat was a Somebody, though perhaps a minor Somebody:
a goodish editor or a rising ethnologist; and all of them had Holabird’s
graceful casualness.
The provincial Arrowsmiths arrived on time, therefore fifteen minutes
early. Before the cocktails appeared, in old Venetian glass, Martin
demanded, “Doctor, what problems are you getting after now in your
physiology?”
Holabird was transformed into an ardent boy. With a deprecatory “Would
you really like to hear about ’em--you needn’t be polite, you know!” he
dashed into an exposition of his experiments, drawing sketches on the
blank spaces in newspaper advertisements, on the back of a wedding
invitation, on the fly-leaf of a presentation novel, looking at Martin
apologetically, learned yet gay.
“We’re working on the localization of brain functions. I think we’ve
gone beyond Bolton and Flechsig. Oh, it’s jolly exciting, exploring the
brain. Look here!”
His swift pencil was sketching the cerebrum; the brain lived and beat
under his fingers.
He threw down the paper. “I say, it’s a shame to inflict my hobbies on
you. Besides, the others are coming. Tell me, how is your work going?
Are you comfortable at the Institute? Do you find you like people?”
“Everybody except-- To be frank, I’m jarred by Wickett.”
Generously, “I know. His manner is slightly aggressive. But you mustn’t
mind him; he’s really an extraordinarily gifted bio-chemist. He’s a
bachelor--gives up everything for his work. And he doesn’t really mean
half the rude things he says. He detests me, among others. Has he
mentioned me?”
“Why, not especially--”
“I have a feeling he goes around saying that I talk about my experiences
in the war, which really isn’t quite altogether true.”
“Yes,” in a burst, “he did say that.”
“I do rather wish he wouldn’t. So sorry to have offended him by going
and getting wounded. I’ll remember and not do it again! Such a fuss for
a war record as insignificant as mine! What happened was: when the war
broke out in ’14 I was in England, studying under Sherrington. I
pretended to be a Canadian and joined up with the medical corps and got
mine within three weeks and got hoofed out, and that was the end of my
magnificent career! Here’s somebody arriving.”
His easy gallantry won Martin complete. Leora was equally captivated by
Mrs. Holabird, and they went home from the dinner in new enchantment.
So began for them a white light of happiness. Martin was scarce more
blissful in his undisturbed work than in his life outside the
laboratory.
All the first week he forgot to ask what his salary was to be. Then it
became a game to wait till the end of the month. Evenings, in little
restaurants, Leora and he would speculate about it.
The Institute would surely not pay him less than the twenty-five hundred
dollars a year he had received at the Rouncefield Clinic, but on
evenings when he was tired it dropped to fifteen hundred, and one
evening when they had Burgundy he raised it to thirty-five hundred.
When his first monthly check came, neat in a little sealed envelope, he
dared not look at it. He took it home to Leora. In their hotel room they
stared at the envelope as though it was likely to contain poison. Martin
opened it shakily; he stared, and whispered, “Oh, those decent people!
They’re paying me--this is for four hundred and twenty dollars--they’re
paying me five thousand a year!”
Mrs. Holabird, a white kitten of a woman, helped Leora find a three-room
flat with a spacious living-room, in an old house near Gramercy Park,
and helped her furnish it with good bits, second-hand. When Martin was
permitted to look he cried, “I hope we stay here for fifty years!”
This was the Grecian isle where they found peace. Presently they had
friends: the Holabirds, Dr. Billy Smith--the thin-bearded bio-chemist,
who had an intelligent taste in music and German beer--an anatomist whom
Martin met at a Winnemac alumni dinner, and always Max Gottlieb.
Gottlieb had found his own serenity. In the Seventies he had a brown
small flat, smelling of tobacco and leather books. His son Robert had
graduated from City College and gone bustlingly into business. Miriam
kept up her music while she guarded her father--a dumpling of a girl,
holy fire behind the deceptive flesh. After an evening of Gottlieb’s
acrid doubting, Martin was inspired to hasten to the laboratory and
attempt a thousand new queries into the laws of microörganisms, a task
which usually began with blasphemously destroying all the work he had
recently done.
Even Terry Wickett became more tolerable. Martin perceived that
Wickett’s snarls were partly a Clif Clawson misconception of humor, but
partly a resentment, as great as Gottlieb’s, of the morphological
scientists who ticket things with the nicest little tickets, who name
things and rename them and never analyze them. Wickett often worked all
night; he was to be seen in shirt-sleeves, his sulky red hair rumpled,
sitting with a stop-watch before a constant temperature bath for hours.
Now and then it was a relief to have the surly intentness of Wickett
instead of the elegance of Rippleton Holabird, which demanded from
Martin so much painful elegance in turn, at a time when he was sunk
beyond sounding in his experimentation.