I
His work began fumblingly. There were days when, for all the joy of it,
he dreaded lest Tubbs stride in and bellow, “What are you doing here?
You’re the wrong Arrowsmith! Get out!”
He had isolated twenty strains of staphylococcus germs and he was
testing them to discover which of them was most active in producing a
hemolytic, a blood-disintegrating toxin, so that he might produce an
antitoxin.
There were picturesque moments when, after centrifuging, the organisms
lay in coiling cloudy masses at the bottoms of the tubes; or when the
red corpuscles were completely dissolved and the opaque brick-red liquid
turned to the color of pale wine. But most of the processes were
incomparably tedious: removing samples of the culture every six hours,
making salt suspensions of corpuscles in small tubes, recording the
results.
He never knew they were tedious.
Tubbs came in now and then, found him busy, patted his shoulder, said
something which sounded like French and might even have been French, and
gave vague encouragement; while Gottlieb imperturbably told him to go
ahead, and now and then stirred him by showing his own note-books (they
were full of figures and abbreviations, stupid-seeming as invoices of
calico) or by speaking of his own work, in a vocabulary as heathenish as
Tibetan magic:
“Arrhenius and Madsen have made a contribution toward bringing immunity
reactions under the mass action law, but I hope to show that
antigen-antibody combinations occur in stoicheiometric proportions when
certain variables are held constant.”
“Oh, yes, I see,” said Martin; and to himself: “Well, I darn’ near a
quarter understand that! Oh, Lord, if they’ll only give me a little time
and not send me back to tacking up diphtheria posters!”
When he had obtained a satisfactory toxin, Martin began his effort to
find an antitoxin. He made vast experiments with no results. Sometimes
he was certain that he had something, but when he rechecked his
experiments he was bleakly certain that he hadn’t. Once he rushed into
Gottlieb’s laboratory with the announcement of the antitoxin, whereupon
with affection and several discomforting questions and the present of a
box of real Egyptian cigarettes, Gottlieb showed him that he had not
considered certain dilutions.
With all his amateurish fumbling, Martin had one characteristic without
which there can be no science: a wide-ranging, sniffing, snuffling,
undignified, unselfdramatizing curiosity, and it drove him on.
II
While he puttered his insignificant way through the early years of the
Great European War, the McGurk Institute had a lively existence under
its placid surface.
Martin may not have learned much in the matter of antibodies but he did
learn the secret of the Institute, and he saw that behind all its quiet
industriousness was Capitola McGurk, the Great White Uplifter.
Capitola, Mrs. Ross McGurk, had been opposed to woman suffrage--until
she learned that women were certain to get the vote--but she was a
complete controller of virtuous affairs. Ross McGurk had bought the
Institute not only to glorify himself but to divert Capitola and keep
her itching fingers out of his shipping and mining and lumber interests,
which would not too well have borne the investigations of a Great White
Uplifter.
Ross McGurk was at the time a man of fifty-four, second generation of
California railroad men; a graduate of Yale; big, suave, dignified,
cheerful, unscrupulous. Even in 1908, when he had founded the Institute,
he had had too many houses, too many servants, too much food, and no
children, because Capitola considered “that sort of thing detrimental to
women with large responsibilities.” In the Institute he found each year
more satisfaction, more excuse for having lived.
When Gottlieb arrived, McGurk went up to look him over. McGurk had
bullied Dr. Tubbs now and then; Tubbs was compelled to scurry to his
office as though he were a messenger boy; yet when he saw the saturnine
eyes of Gottlieb, McGurk looked interested; and the two men, the bulky,
clothes-conscious, powerful, reticent American and the cynical, simple,
power-despising European, became friends. McGurk would slip away from a
conference affecting the commerce of a whole West Indian island to sit
on a high stool, silent, and watch Gottlieb work.
“Some day when I quit hustling and wake up, I’m going to become your
garçon, Max,” said McGurk, and Gottlieb answered, “I don’t know--you haf
imagination, Ross, but I t’ink you are too late to get a training in
reality. Now if you do not mind eating at Childs’s, we will avoid your
very expostulatory Regal Hall, and I shall invite you to lunch.”
But Capitola did not join their communion.
Gottlieb’s arrogance had returned, and with Capitola McGurk he needed
it. She had such interesting little problems for her husband’s
pensioners to attack. Once, in excitement, she visited Gottlieb’s
laboratory to tell him that large numbers of persons die of cancer, and
why didn’t he drop this anti-whatever-it-was and find a cure for cancer,
which would be ever so nice for all of them.
But her real grievance arose when, after Rippleton Holabird had agreed
to give midnight supper on the roof of the Institute to one of her most
intellectual dinner-parties, she telephoned to Gottlieb, merely asking,
“Would it be too much trouble for you to go down and open your lab, so
we can all enjoy just a tiny peep at it?” and he answered:
“It would! Good night!”
Capitola protested to her husband. He listened--at least he seemed to
listen--and remarked:
“Cap, I don’t mind your playing the fool with the footmen. They’ve got
to stand it. But if you get funny with Max, I’ll simply shut up the
whole Institute, and then you won’t have anything to talk about at the
Colony Club. And it certainly does beat the deuce that a man worth
thirty million dollars--at least a fellow that’s got that much--can’t
find a clean pair of pajamas. No, I _won’t_ have a valet! Oh, please
now, Capitola, please quit being high-minded and let me go to sleep,
will you!”
But Capitola was uncontrollable, especially in the matter of the monthly
dinners which she gave at the Institute.
III
The first of the McGurk Scientific Dinners which Martin and Leora
witnessed was a particularly important and explanatory dinner, because
the guest of honor was Major-General Sir Isaac Mallard, the London
surgeon, who was in America with a British War Mission. He had already
beautifully let himself be shown through the Institute; he had been Sir
Isaac’d by Dr. Tubbs and every researcher except Terry Wickett; he
remembered meeting Rippleton Holabird in London, or said he remembered;
and he admired Gladys the Centrifuge.
The dinner began with one misfortune in that Terry Wickett, who hitherto
could be depended upon to stay decently away, now appeared, volunteering
to the wife of an ex-ambassador, “I simply couldn’t duck this spread,
with dear Sir Isaac coming. Say, if I hadn’t told you, you wouldn’t
hardly think my dress-suit was rented, would you! Have you noticed that
Sir Isaac is getting so he doesn’t tear the carpet with his spurs any
more? I wonder if he still kills all his mastoid patients?”
There was vast music, vaster food; there were uncomfortable scientists
explaining to golden cooing ladies, in a few words, just what they were
up to and what in the next twenty years they hoped to be up to; there
were the cooing ladies themselves, observing in tones of pretty rebuke,
“But I’m afraid you haven’t yet made it as clear as you might.” There
were the cooing ladies’ husbands--college graduates, manipulators of oil
stocks or of corporation law--who sat ready to give to anybody who
desired it their opinion that while antitoxins might be racy, what we
really needed was a good substitute for rubber.
There was Rippleton Holabird, being charming.
And in the pause of the music, there suddenly was Terry Wickett, saying
to quite an important woman, one of Capitola’s most useful friends,
“Yes, his name is spelled G-o-t-t-l-i-e-b but it’s pronounced Gottdamn.”
But such outsiders as Wickett and such silent riders as Martin and Leora
and such totally absent members as Max Gottlieb were few, and the dinner
waxed magnificently to a love-feast when Dr. Tubbs and Sir Isaac Mallard
paid compliments to each other, to Capitola, to the sacred soil of
France, to brave little Belgium, to American hospitality, to British
love of privacy, and to the extremely interesting things a young man
with a sense of coöperation might do in modern science.
The guests were conducted through the Institute. They inspected the
marine biology aquarium, the pathological museum, and the animal house,
at sight of which one sprightly lady demanded of Wickett, “Oh, the poor
little guinea pigs and darling rabbicks! Now honestly, Doctor, don’t you
think it would be ever so much nicer if you let them go free, and just
worked with your test-tubes?”
A popular physician, whose practise was among rich women, none of them
west of Fifth Avenue, said to the sprightly lady, “I think you’re
absolutely right. I never have to kill any poor wee little beasties to
get my knowledge!”
With astounding suddenness Wickett took his hat and went away.
The sprightly lady said, “You see, he didn’t dare stand up to a real
argument. Oh, Dr. Arrowsmith, of course I know how wonderful Ross McGurk
and Dr. Tubbs and all of you are, but I must say I’m disappointed in
your laboratories. I’d expected there’d be such larky retorts and
electric furnaces and everything but, honestly, I don’t see a single
thing that’s interesting, and I do think all you clever people ought to
do _something_ for us, now that you’ve coaxed us all the way down here.
Can’t you or somebody create life out of turtle eggs, or whatever it is?
Oh, please do! Pretty please! Or at least, do put on one of these
cunnin’ dentist coats that you wear.”
Then Martin also went rapidly away, accompanied by a furious Leora, who
in the taxicab announced that she had desired to taste the champagne-cup
which she had observed on the buffet, and that her husband was little
short of a fool.
IV
Thus, however satisfying his work, Martin began to wonder about the
perfection of his sanctuary; to wonder why Gottlieb should be so
insulting at lunch to neat Dr. Sholtheis, the industrious head of the
Department of Epidemiology, and why Dr. Sholtheis should endure the
insults; to wonder why Dr. Tubbs, when he wandered into one’s
laboratory, should gurgle, “The one thing for you to keep in view in all
your work is the ideal of coöperation”; to wonder why so ardent a
physiologist as Rippleton Holabird should all day long be heard
conferring with Tubbs instead of sweating at his bench.
Holabird had, five years before, done one bit of research which had
taken his name into scientific journals throughout the world: he had
studied the effect of the extirpation of the anterior lobes of a dog’s
brain on its ability to find its way through the laboratory. Martin had
read of that research before he had thought of going to McGurk; on his
arrival he was thrilled to have it chronicled by the master himself; but
when he had heard Holabird refer to it a dozen times he was considerably
less thrilled, and he speculated whether all his life Holabird would go
on being “the man--_you_ remember--the chap that did the big stunt,
whatever it was, with locomotion in dogs or something.”
Martin speculated still more as he perceived that all his colleagues
were secretly grouped in factions.
Tubbs, Holabird, and perhaps Tubbs’s secretary, Pearl Robbins, were the
ruling caste. It was murmured that Holabird hoped some day to be made
Assistant Director, an office which was to be created for him. Gottlieb,
Terry Wickett, and Dr. Nicholas Yeo, that long-mustached and rustic
biologist whom Martin had first taken for a carpenter, formed an
independent faction of their own, and however much he disliked the
boisterous Wickett, Martin was dragged into it.
Dr. William Smith, with his little beard and a notion of mushrooms
formed in Paris, kept to himself. Dr. Sholtheis, who had been born to a
synagogue in Russia but who was now the most zealous high-church
Episcopalian in Yonkers, was constantly in his polite small way trying
to have his scientific work commended by Gottlieb. In the Department of
Bio-Physics, the good-natured chief was reviled and envied by his own
assistant. And in the whole Institute there was not one man who would,
in all states of liquor, assert that the work of any other scientist
anywhere was completely sound, or that there was a single one of his
rivals who had not stolen ideas from him. No rocking-chair clique on a
summer-hotel porch, no knot of actors, ever whispered more scandal or
hinted more warmly of complete idiocy in their confrères than did these
uplifted scientists.
But these discoveries Martin could shut out by closing his door, and he
had that to do now which deafened him to the mutters of intrigue.
V
For once Gottlieb did not amble into his laboratory but curtly summoned
him. In a corner of Gottlieb’s office, a den opening from his
laboratory, was Terry Wickett, rolling a cigarette and looking sardonic.
Gottlieb observed, “Martin, I haf taken the privilege of talking you
over with Terry, and we concluded that you haf done well enough now so
it is time you stop puttering and go to work.”
“I thought I was working, sir!”
All the wide placidness of his halcyon days was gone; he saw himself
driven back to Pickerbaughism.
Wickett intruded, “No, you haven’t. You’ve just been showing that you’re
a bright boy who might work if he only knew something.”
While Martin turned on Wickett with a “Who the devil are you?”
expression, Gottlieb went on:
“The fact is, Martin, you can do nothing till you know a little
mathematics. If you are not going to be a cook-book bacteriologist, like
most of them, you must be able to handle some of the fundamentals of
science. All living things are physico-chemical machines. Then how can
you make progress if you do not know physical chemistry, and how can you
know physical chemistry without much mathematics?”
“Yuh,” said Wickett, “you’re lawn-mowing and daisy-picking, not
digging.”
Martin faced them. “But rats, Wickett, a man can’t know everything. I’m
a bacteriologist, not a physicist. Strikes me a fellow ought to use his
insight, not just a chest of tools, to make discoveries. A good sailor
could find his way at sea even if he didn’t have instruments, and a
whole _Lusitania_-ful of junk wouldn’t make a good sailor out of a dub.
Man ought to develop his brain, not depend on tools.”
“Ye-uh, but if there were charts and quadrants in existence, a sailor
that cruised off without ’em would be a chump!”
For half an hour Martin defended himself, not too politely, before the
gem-like Gottlieb, the granite Wickett. All the while he knew that he
was sickeningly ignorant.
They ceased to take interest. Gottlieb was looking at his note-books,
Wickett was clumping off to work. Martin glared at Gottlieb. The man
meant so much that he could be furious with him as he would have been
with Leora, with his own self.
“I’m sorry you think I don’t know anything,” he raged, and departed with
the finest dramatic violence. He slammed into his own laboratory, felt
freed, then wretched. Without volition, like a drunken man, he stormed
to Wickett’s room, protesting, “I suppose you’re right. My physical
chemistry is nix, and my math rotten. What am I going to do--what am I
going to do?”
The embarrassed barbarian grumbled, “Well, for Pete’s sake, Slim, don’t
worry. The old man and I were just egging you on. Fact is, he’s tickled
to death about the careful way you’re starting in. About the
math--probably you’re better off than the Holy Wren and Tubbs right now;
you’ve forgotten all the math you ever knew, and they never knew any.
Gosh all fish-hooks! Science is supposed to mean Knowledge--from the
Greek, a handsome language spoken by the good old booze-hoisting
Helleens--and the way most of the science boys resent having to stop
writing little jeweled papers or giving teas and sweat at getting some
knowledge certainly does make me a grand booster for the human race. My
own math isn’t any too good, Slim, but if you’d like to have me come
around evenings and tutor you-- Free, I mean!”
Thus began the friendship between Martin and Terry Wickett; thus began a
change in Martin’s life whereby he gave up three or four hours of
wholesome sleep each night to grind over matters which every one is
assumed to know, and almost every one does not know.
He took up algebra; found that he had forgotten most of it; cursed over
the competition of the indefatigable A and the indolent B who walk from
Y to Z; hired a Columbia tutor; and finished the subject, with a spurt
of something like interest in regard to quadratic equations, in six
weeks ... while Leora listened, watched, waited, made sandwiches, and
laughed at the tutor’s jokes.
By the end of his first nine months at McGurk, Martin had reviewed
trigonometry and analytic geometry and he was finding differential
calculus romantic. But he made the mistake of telling Terry Wickett how
much he knew.
Terry croaked, “Don’t trust math too much, son,” and he so confused him
with references to the thermo-dynamical derivation of the mass action
law, and to the oxidation reduction potential, that he stumbled again
into raging humility, again saw himself an impostor and a tenth-rater.
He read the classics of physical science: Copernicus and Galileo,
Lavoisier, Newton, LaPlace, Descartes, Faraday. He became completely
bogged in Newton’s “Fluxions”; he spoke of Newton to Tubbs and found
that the illustrious Director knew nothing about him. He cheerfully
mentioned this to Terry, and was shockingly cursed for his conceit as a
“nouveau cultured,” as a “typical enthusiastic convert,” and so returned
to the work whose end is satisfying because there is never an end.
His life did not seem edifying nor in any degree amusing. When Tubbs
peeped into his laboratory he found a humorless young man going about
his tests of hemolytic toxins with no apparent flair for the Real Big
Thing in Science, which was coöperation and being efficient. Tubbs tried
to set him straight with “Are you quite sure you’re following a regular
demarked line in your work?”
It was Leora who bore the real tedium.
She sat quiet (a frail child, only up to one’s shoulder, not nine
minutes older than at marriage, nine years before), or she napped
inoffensively, in the long living-room of their flat, while he worked
over his dreary digit-infested books till one, till two, and she
politely awoke to let him worry at her, “But look here now, I’ve got to
keep up my research at the same time. God, I am so tired!”
She dragged him away for an illegal five-day walk on Cape Cod, in March.
He sat between the Twin Lights at Chatham, and fumed, “I’m going back
and tell Terry and Gottlieb they can go to the devil with their crazy
physical chemistry. I’ve had enough, now I’ve done math,” and she
commented, “Yes, I certainly would--though isn’t it funny how Dr.
Gottlieb always seems to be right?”
He was so absorbed in staphylolysin and in calculus that he did not
realize the world was about to be made safe for democracy. He was a
little dazed when America entered the war.
VI
Dr. Tubbs dashed to Washington to offer the services of the Institute to
the War Department.
All the members of the staff, except Gottlieb and two others who
declined to be so honored, were made officers and told to run out and
buy nice uniforms.
Tubbs became a Colonel, Rippleton Holabird a Major, Martin and Wickett
and Billy Smith were Captains. But the garçons had no military rank
whatever, nor any military duties except the polishing of brown
riding-boots and leather puttees, which the several warriors wore as
pleased their fancies or their legs. And the most belligerent of all,
Miss Pearl Robbins, she who at tea heroically slaughtered not only
German men but all their women and viperine children, was wickedly
unrecognized and had to make up a uniform for herself.
The only one of them who got nearer to the front than Liberty Street was
Terry Wickett, who suddenly asked for leave, was transferred to the
artillery, and sailed off to France.
He apologized to Martin: “I’m ashamed of chucking my work like this, and
I certainly don’t want to kill Germans-- I mean not any more’n I want to
kill most people--but I never could resist getting into a big show. Say,
Slim, keep an eye on Pa Gottlieb, will you? This has hit him bad. He’s
got a bunch of nephews and so on in the German army, and the patriots
like Big Foot Pearl will give an exhibit of idealism by persecuting him.
So long, Slim, take care y’self.”
Martin had vaguely protested at being herded into the army. The war was
to him chiefly another interruption to his work, like Pickerbaughism,
like earning his living at Wheatsylvania. But when he had gone
strutting forth in uniform, it was so enjoyable that for several weeks
he was a standard patriot. He had never looked so well, so taut and
erect, as in khaki. It was enchanting to be saluted by privates, quite
as enchanting to return the salute in the dignified, patronizing,
all-comrades-together splendor which Martin shared with the other
doctors, professors, lawyers, brokers, authors, and former socialist
intellectuals who were his fellow-officers.
But in a month the pleasures of being a hero became mechanical, and
Martin longed for soft shirts, easy shoes, and clothes with reasonable
pockets. His puttees were a nuisance to wear and an inferno to put on;
his collar pinched his neck and jabbed his chin; and it was wearing on a
man who sat up till three, on the perilous duty of studying calculus, to
be snappy at every salute.
Under the martinet eye of Col. Director Dr. A. DeWitt Tubbs he had to
wear his uniform, at least recognizable portions of it, at the
Institute, but by evening he slipped into the habit of sneaking into
citizen clothes, and when he went with Leora to the movies he had an
agreeable feeling of being Absent Without Leave, of risking at every
street corner arrest by the Military Police and execution at dawn.
Unfortunately no M.P. ever looked at him. But one evening when in an
estimable and innocent manner he was looking at the remains of a gunman
who had just been murdered by another gunman, he realized that Major
Rippleton Holabird was standing by, glaring. For once the Major was
unpleasant:
“Captain, does it seem to you that this is quite playing the game, to
wear mufti? We, unfortunately, with our scientific work, haven’t the
privilege of joining the Boys who are up against the real thing, but we
are under orders just as if we were in the trenches--where _some_ of us
would so much like to be again! Captain, I trust I shall never again see
you breaking the order about being in uniform, or--uh--”
Martin blurted to Leora, later:
“I’m sick of hearing about his being wounded. Nothing that I can see to
prevent his going back to the trenches. Wound’s all right now. I want to
be patriotic, but my patriotism is chasing antitoxins, doing my job, not
wearing a particular kind of pants and a particular set of ideas about
the Germans. Mind you, I’m anti-German all right-- I think they’re
probably just as bad as we are. Oh, let’s go back and do some more
calculus.... Darling, my working nights doesn’t bore you too much, does
it?”
Leora had cunning. When she could not be enthusiastic, she could be
unannoyingly silent.
At the Institute Martin perceived that he was not the only defender of
his country who was not comfortable in the garb of heroes. The most
dismal of the staff-members was Dr. Nicholas Yeo, the Yankee
sandy-mustached head of the Department of Biology.
Yeo had put on Major’s uniform, but he never felt neighborly with it.
(He knew he was a Major, because Col. Dr. Tubbs had told him he was, and
he knew that this was a Major’s uniform, because the clothing salesman
said so.) He walked out of the McGurk Building in a melancholy,
deprecatory way, with one breeches leg bulging over his riding-boots;
and however piously he tried, he never remembered to button his blouse
over the violet-flowered shirts which, he often confided, you could buy
ever so cheap on Eighth Avenue.
But Major Dr. Yeo had one military triumph. He hoarsely explained to
Martin, as they were marching to the completely militarized dining-hall:
“Say, Arrowsmith, do you ever get balled up about this saluting? Darn
it, I never can figure out what all these insignia mean. One time I took
a Salvation Army Lieutenant for a Y.M.C.A. General, or maybe he was a
Portygee. But I’ve got the idea now!” Yeo laid his finger beside his
large nose, and produced wisdom: “Whenever I see any fellow in uniform
that looks older than I am, I salute him--my nephew, Ted, has drilled me
so I salute swell now--and if he don’t salute back, well, Lord, I just
think about my work and don’t fuss. If you look at it scientifically,
this military life isn’t so awful’ hard after all!”
VII
Always, in Paris or in Bonn, Max Gottlieb had looked to America as a
land which, in its freedom from Royalist tradition, in its contact with
the realities of cornfields and blizzards and town-meetings, had set its
face against the puerile pride of war. He believed that he had ceased to
be a German, now, and become a countryman of Lincoln.
The European War was the one thing, besides his discharge from Winnemac,
which had ever broken his sardonic serenity. In the war he could see no
splendor nor hope, but only crawling tragedy. He treasured his months of
work and good talk in France, in England, in Italy; he loved his French
and English and Italian friends as he loved his ancient _Korpsbrüder_,
and very well indeed beneath his mocking did he love the Germans with
whom he had drudged and drunk.
His sister’s sons--on home-craving vacations he had seen them, in
babyhood, in boyhood, in ruffling youngmanhood--went out with the
Kaiser’s colors in 1914; one of them became an Oberst, much decorated,
one existed insignificantly, and one was dead and stinking in ten days.
This he sadly endured, as later he endured his son Robert’s going out as
an American lieutenant, to fight his own cousins. What struck down this
man to whom abstractions and scientific laws were more than kindly
flesh was the mania of hate which overcame the unmilitaristic America to
which he had emigrated in protest against Junkerdom.
Incredulously he perceived women asserting that all Germans were
baby-killers, universities barring the language of Heine, orchestras
outlawing the music of Beethoven, professors in uniform bellowing at
clerks, and the clerks never protesting.
It is uncertain whether the real hurt was to his love for America or to
his egotism, that he should have guessed so grotesquely; it is curious
that he who had so denounced the machine-made education of the land
should yet have been surprised when it turned blithely to the old, old,
mechanical mockeries of war.
When the Institute sanctified the war, he found himself regarded not as
the great and impersonal immunologist but as a suspect German Jew.
True, the Terry who went off to the artillery did not look upon him
dourly, but Major Rippleton Holabird became erect and stiff when they
passed in the corridor. When Gottlieb insisted to Tubbs at lunch, “I am
villing to admit every virtue of the French-- I am very fond of that so
individual people--but on the theory of probabilities I suggest that
there must be some good Germans out of sixty millions,” then Col. Dr.
Tubbs commanded, “In this time of world tragedy, it does not seem to me
particularly becoming to try to be flippant, Dr. Gottlieb!”
In shops and on the elevated trains, little red-faced sweaty people when
they heard his accent glared at him, and growled one to another,
“There’s one of them damn’ barb’rous well-poisoning Huns!” and however
contemptuous he might be, however much he strove for ignoring pride,
their nibbling reduced him from arrogant scientist to an insecure,
raw-nerved, shrinking old man.
And once a hostess who of old time had been proud to know him, a hostess
whose maiden name was Straufnabel and who had married into the famous
old Anglican family of Rosemont, when Gottlieb bade her “_Auf
Wiedersehen_” cried out upon him, “Dr. Gottlieb, I’m very sorry, but the
use of that disgusting language is not permitted in this house!”
He had almost recovered from the anxieties of Winnemac and the Hunziker
factory; he had begun to expand, to entertain people--scientists,
musicians, talkers. Now he was thrust back into himself. With Terry
gone, he trusted only Miriam and Martin and Ross McGurk; and his
deep-set wrinkle-lidded eyes looked ever on sadness.
But he could still be tart. He suggested that Capitola ought to have in
the window of her house a Service Flag with a star for every person at
the Institute who had put on uniform.
She took it quite seriously, and did it.
VIII
The military duties of the McGurk staff did not consist entirely in
wearing uniforms, receiving salutes, and listening to Col. Dr. Tubbs’s
luncheon lectures on “the part America will inevitably play in the
reconstruction of a Democratic Europe.”
They prepared sera; the assistant in the Department of Bio-Physics was
inventing electrified wire entanglements; Dr. Billy Smith, who six
months before had been singing _Student Lieder_ at Lüchow’s, was working
on poison gas to be used against all singers of _Lieder_; and to Martin
was assigned the manufacture of lipovaccine, a suspension of finely
ground typhoid and paratyphoid organisms in oil. It was a greasy job,
and dull. Martin was faithful enough about it, and gave to it almost
every morning, but he blasphemed more than usual and he unholily
welcomed scientific papers in which lipovaccines were condemned as
inferior to ordinary salt solutions.
He was conscious of Gottlieb’s sorrowing and tried to comfort him.
It was Martin’s most pitiful fault that he was not very kind to shy
people and lonely people and stupid old people; he was not cruel to
them, he simply was unconscious of them or so impatient of their
fumbling that he avoided them. Whenever Leora taxed him with it he
grumbled:
“Well, but-- I’m too much absorbed in my work, or in doping stuff out,
to waste time on morons. And it’s a good thing. Most people above the
grade of hog do so much chasing around after a lot of vague philanthropy
that they never get anything done--and most of your confounded shy
people get spiritually pauperized. Oh, it’s so much easier to be
good-natured and purring and self-congratulatory and generally footless
than it is to pound ahead and keep yourself strictly for your own work,
the work that gets somewhere. Very few people have the courage to be
decently selfish--not answer letters--and demand the right to work. If
they had their way, these sentimentalists would’ve had a Newton--yes, or
probably a Christ!--giving up everything they did for the world to
address meetings and listen to the troubles of cranky old maids. Nothing
takes so much courage as to keep hard and clear-headed.”
And he hadn’t even that courage.
When Leora had made complaint, he would be forcibly kind to all sorts of
alarmed stray beggars for a day or two, then drift back into his
absorption. There were but two people whose unhappiness could always
pierce him: Leora and Gottlieb.
Though he was busier than he had known any one could ever be, with
lipovaccines in the morning, physical chemistry in the evening and, at
all sorts of intense hours between, the continuation of his
staphylolysin research, he gave what time he could to seeking out
Gottlieb and warming his vanity by reverent listening.
Then his research wiped out everything else, made him forget Gottlieb
and Leora and all his briskness about studying, made him turn his war
work over to others, and confounded night and day in one insane flaming
blur as he realized that he had something not unworthy of a Gottlieb,
something at the mysterious source of life.