I
Director Rippleton Holabird had also married money, and whenever his
colleagues hinted that since his first ardent work in physiology he had
done nothing but arrange a few nicely selected flowers on the tables
hewn out by other men, it was a satisfaction to him to observe that
these rotters came down to the Institute by subway, while he drove
elegantly in his coupé. But now Arrowsmith, once the poorest of them
all, came by limousine with a chauffeur who touched his hat, and
Holabird’s coffee was salted.
There was a simplicity in Martin, but it cannot be said that he did not
lick his lips when Holabird mooned at the chauffeur.
His triumph over Holabird was less than being able to entertain Angus
Duer and his wife, on from Chicago; to introduce them to Director
Holabird, to Salamon the king of surgeons, and to a medical baronet; and
to have Angus gush, “Mart, do you mind my saying we’re all awfully proud
of you? Rouncefield was speaking to me about it the other day. ‘It may
be presumptuous,’ he said, ‘but I really feel that perhaps the training
we tried to give Dr. Arrowsmith here in the Clinic did in some way
contribute to his magnificent work in the West Indies and at McGurk.’
What a lovely woman your wife is, old man! Do you suppose she’d mind
telling Mrs. Duer where she got that frock?”
Martin had heard about the superiority of poverty to luxury, but after
the lunch-wagons of Mohalis, after twelve years of helping Leora check
the laundry and worry about the price of steak, after a life of waiting
in the slush for trolleys, it was not at all dismaying to have a valet
who produced shirts automatically; not at all degrading to come to meals
which were always interesting, and, in the discretion of his car, to
lean an aching head against softness and think how clever he was.
“You see, by having other people do the vulgar things for you, it saves
your own energy for the things that only you can do,” said Joyce.
Martin agreed, then drove to Westchester for a lesson in golf.
A week after their return from Europe, Joyce went with him to see
Gottlieb. He fancied that Gottlieb came out of his brooding to smile on
them.
“After all,” Martin considered, “the old man did like beautiful things.
If he’d had the chance, he might’ve liked a big Establishment, too,
maybe.”
Terry was surprisingly complaisant.
“I’ll tell you, Slim--if you want to know. Personally I’d hate to have
to live up to servants. But I’m getting old and wise. I figure that
different folks like different things, and awful’ few of ’em have the
sense to come and ask me what they ought to like. But honest, Slim, I
don’t think I’ll come to dinner. I’ve gone and bought a
dress-suit--_bought_ it!--got it in my room--damn’ landlady keeps
filling it with moth-balls--but I don’t think I could stand listening to
Latham Ireland being clever.”
It was, however, Rippleton Holabird’s attitude which most concerned
Martin, for Holabird did not let him forget that unless he desired to
drift off and be merely a ghostly Rich Woman’s Husband, he would do well
to remember who was Director.
Along with the endearing manners which he preserved for Ross McGurk,
Holabird had developed the remoteness, the inhuman quiet courtesy, of
the Man of Affairs, and people who presumed on his old glad days he
courteously put in their places. He saw the need of repressing
insubordination, when Arrowsmith appeared in a limousine. He gave him
one week after his return to enjoy the limousine, then blandly called on
him in his laboratory.
“Martin,” he sighed, “I find that our friend Ross McGurk is just a bit
dissatisfied with the practical results that are coming out of the
Institute and, to convince him, I’m afraid I really must ask you to put
less emphasis on bacteriophage for the moment and take up influenza. The
Rockefeller Institute has the right idea. They’ve utilized their best
minds, and spent money magnificently, on such problems as pneumonia,
meningitis, cancer. They’ve already lessened the terrors of meningitis
and pneumonia, and yellow fever is on the verge of complete abolition
through Noguchi’s work, and I have no doubt that their hospital, with
its enormous resources and splendidly coöperating minds, will be the
first to find something to alleviate diabetes. Now, I understand,
they’re hot after the cause of influenza. They’re not going to permit
another great epidemic of it. Well, dear chap, it’s up to us to beat
them on the flu, and I’ve chosen you to represent us in the race.”
Martin was at the moment hovering over a method of reproducing phage on
dead bacteria, but he could not refuse, he could not risk being
discharged. He was too rich! Martin the renegade medical student could
flounder off and be a soda-clerk, but if the husband of Joyce Lanyon
should indulge in such insanity, he would be followed by reporters and
photographed at the soda handles. Still less could he chance becoming
merely her supported husband--a butler of the boudoir.
He assented, not very pleasantly.
He began to work on the cause of influenza with a half-heartedness
almost magnificent. In the hospitals he secured cultures from cases
which might be influenza and might be bad colds--no one was certain just
what the influenza symptoms were; nothing was clean cut. He left most of
the work to his assistants, occasionally giving them sardonic directions
to “put on another hundred tubes of the A medium--hell, make it another
thousand!” and when he found that they were doing as they pleased, he
was not righteous nor rebuking. If he did not guiltily turn his hand
from the plow it was only because he never touched the plow. Once his
own small laboratory had been as fussily neat as a New Hampshire
kitchen. Now the several rooms under his charge were a disgrace, with
long racks of abandoned test-tubes, many half-filled with mold, none of
them properly labeled.
Then he had his idea. He began firmly to believe that the Rockefeller
investigators had found the cause of flu. He gushed in to Holabird and
told him so. As for himself, he was going back to his search for the
real nature of phage.
Holabird argued that Martin must be wrong. If Holabird wanted the McGurk
Institute--and the Director of McGurk Institute--to have the credit for
capturing influenza, then it simply could not be possible that
Rockefeller was ahead of them. He also said weighty things about phage.
Its essential nature, he pointed out, was an academic question.
But Martin was by now too much of a scientific dialectician for
Holabird, who gave up and retired to his den (or so Martin gloomily
believed) to devise new ways of plaguing him. For a time Martin was
again left free to wallow in work.
He found a means of reproducing phage on dead bacteria by a very
complicated, very delicate use of partial oxygen-carbon dioxide
tension--as exquisite as cameo-carving, as improbable as weighing the
stars. His report stirred the laboratory world, and here and there (in
Tokio, in Amsterdam, in Winnemac) enthusiasts believed he had proven
that phage was a living organism; and other enthusiasts said, in
esoteric language with mathematical formulæ, that he was a liar and six
kinds of a fool.
It was at this time, when he might have become a Great Man, that he
pitched over most of his own work and some of the duties of being
Joyce’s husband to follow Terry Wickett, which showed that he lacked
common sense, because Terry was still an assistant while he himself was
head of a department.
Terry had discovered that certain quinine derivatives when introduced
into the animal body slowly decompose into products which are highly
toxic to bacteria but only mildly toxic to the body. There was hinted
here a whole new world of therapy. Terry explained it to Martin, and
invited him to collaborate. Buoyant with great things they got leave
from Holabird--and from Joyce--and though it was winter they went off to
Birdies’ Rest, in the Vermont hills. While they snowshoed and shot
rabbits, and all the long dark evenings while they lay on their bellies
before the fire, they ranted and planned.
Martin had not been so long silk-wrapped that he could not enjoy
gobbling salt pork after the northwest wind and the snow. It was not
unpleasant to be free of thinking up new compliments for Joyce.
They had, they saw, to answer an interesting question: Do the quinine
derivatives act by attaching themselves to the bacteria, or by changing
the body fluids? It was a simple, clear, definite question which
required for answer only the inmost knowledge of chemistry and biology,
a few hundred animals on which to experiment, and perhaps ten or twenty
or a million years of trying and failing.
They decided to work with the pneumococcus, and with the animal which
should most nearly reproduce human pneumonia. This meant the monkey,
and to murder monkeys is expensive and rather grim. Holabird, as
Director, could supply them, but if they took him into confidence he
would demand immediate results.
Terry meditated, “’Member there was one of these Nobel-prize winners,
Slim, one of these plumb fanatics that instead of blowing in the prize
spent the whole thing on chimps and other apes, and he got together with
another of those whiskery old birds, and they ducked up alleys and kept
the anti-viv folks from prosecuting them, and settled the problem of the
transfer of syphilis to lower animals? But we haven’t got any Nobel
Prize, I grieve to tell you, and it doesn’t look to me--”
“Terry, I’ll do it, if necessary! I’ve never sponged on Joyce yet, but I
will now, if the Holy Wren holds out on us.”
II
They faced Holabird in his office, sulkily, rather childishly, and they
demanded the expenditure of at least ten thousand dollars for monkeys.
They wished to start a research which might take two years without
apparent results--possibly without any results. Terry was to be
transferred to Martin’s department as co-head, their combined salaries
shared equally.
Then they prepared to fight.
Holabird stared, assembled his mustache, departed from his Diligent
Director manner, and spoke:
“Wait a minute, if you don’t mind. As I gather it, you are explaining to
me that occasionally it’s necessary to take some time to elaborate an
experiment. I really must tell you that I was formerly a researcher in
an Institute called McGurk, and learned several of these things all by
myself! Hell, Terry, and you, Mart, don’t be so egotistic! You’re not
the only scientists who like to work undisturbed! If you poor fish only
knew how I long to get away from signing letters and get my fingers on a
kymograph drum again! Those beautiful long hours of search for truth!
And if you knew how I’ve fought the Trustees for the chance to keep you
fellows free! All right. You shall have your monkeys. Fix up the joint
department to suit yourselves. And work ahead as seems best. I doubt if
in the whole scientific world there’s two people that can be trusted as
much as you two surly birds!”
Holabird rose, straight and handsome and cordial, his hand out. They
sheepishly shook it and sneaked away, Terry grumbling, “He’s spoiled my
whole day! I haven’t got a single thing to kick about! Slim, where’s the
catch? You can bet there is one--there always is!”
In a year of divine work, the catch did not appear. They had their
monkeys, their laboratories and garçons, and their unbroken leisure;
they began the most exciting work they had ever known, and decidedly the
most nerve-jabbing. Monkeys are unreasonable animals; they delight in
developing tuberculosis on no provocation whatever; in captivity they
have a liking for epidemics; and they make scenes by cursing at their
masters in seven dialects.
“They’re so up-and-coming,” sighed Terry. “I feel like lettin’ ’em go
and retiring to Birdies’ Rest to grow potatoes. Why should we murder
live-wires like them to save pasty-faced, big-bellied humans from
pneumonia?”
Their first task was to determine with accuracy the tolerated dose of
the quinine derivative, and to study its effects on the hearing and
vision, and on the kidneys, as shown by endless determinations of blood
sugar and blood urea. While Martin did the injections and observed the
effect on the monkeys and lost himself in chemistry, Terry toiled (all
night, all next day, then a drink and a frowsy nap and all night again)
on new methods of synthesizing the quinine derivative.
This was the most difficult period of Martin’s life. To work, staggering
sleepy, all night, to drowse on a bare table at dawn and to breakfast at
a greasy lunch-counter, these were natural and amusing, but to explain
to Joyce why he had missed her dinner to a lady sculptor and a lawyer
whose grandfather had been a Confederate General, this was impossible.
He won a brief tolerance by explaining that he really had longed to kiss
her good-night, that he did appreciate the basket of sandwiches which
she had sent, and that he was about to remove pneumonia from the human
race, a statement which he healthily doubted.
But when he had missed four dinners in succession; when she had raged,
“Can you imagine how awful it was for Mrs. Thorn to be short a man at
the last moment?” when she had wailed, “I didn’t so much mind your
rudeness on the other nights, but this evening when I had nothing to do
and sat home alone and waited for you”--then he writhed.
Martin and Terry began to produce pneumonia in their monkeys and to
treat them, and they had success which caused them to waltz solemnly
down the corridor. They could save the monkeys from pneumonia
invariably, when the infection had gone but one day, and most of them on
the second day and the third.
Their results were complicated by the fact that a certain number of the
monkeys recovered by themselves, and this they allowed for by
simple-looking figures which took days of stiff, shoulder-aching sitting
over papers ... one wild-haired collarless man at a table, while the
other walked among stinking cages of monkeys, clucking to them, calling
them Bess and Rover, and grunting placidly, “Oh, you would bite me,
would you, sweetheart!” and all the while, kindly but merciless as the
gods, injecting them with the deadly pneumonia.
They came into a high upland where the air was thin with failures. They
studied in the test-tube the break-down products of pneumococci--and
failed. They constructed artificial body fluids (carefully, painfully,
inadequately), they tried the effect of the derivative on germs in this
artificial blood--and failed.
Then Holabird heard of their previous success, and came down on them
with laurels and fury.
He understood, he said, that they had a cure for pneumonia. Very well!
The Institute could do with the credit for curing that undesirable
disease, and Terry and Martin would kindly publish their findings
(mentioning McGurk) at once.
“We will not! Look here, Holabird!” snarled Terry, “I thought you were
going to let us alone.”
“I have! Nearly a year! Till you should complete your research. And now
you’ve completed it. It’s time to let the world know what you’re doing.”
“If I did, the world would know a doggone sight more’n I do! Nothing
doing, Chief. Maybe we can publish in a year from now.”
“You’ll publish now or--”
“All right, Holy. The blessed moment has arrived. I quit! And I’m so
gentlemanly that I do it without telling you what I think of you!”
Thus was Terry Wickett discharged from McGurk. He patented the process
of synthesizing his quinine derivative and retired to Birdies’ Rest, to
build a laboratory out of his small savings and spend a life of
independent research supported by a restricted sale of sera and of his
drug.
For Terry, wifeless and valetless, this was easy enough, but for Martin
it was not simple.
III
Martin assumed that he would resign. He explained it to Joyce. How he
was to combine a town house and a Greenwich castle with flannel-shirt
collaboration at Birdies’ Rest he had not quite planned, but he was not
going to be disloyal.
“Can you beat it! The Holy Wren fires Terry but doesn’t dare touch me! I
waited simply because I wanted to watch Holabird figure out what I’d do.
And now--”
He was elucidating it to her in their--in her--car, on the way home from
a dinner at which he had been so gaily charming to an important dowager
that Joyce had crooned, “What a fool Latham Ireland was to say he
couldn’t be polite!”
“I’m free, by thunder at last I’m free, because I’ve worked up to
something that’s worth being free for!” he exulted.
She laid her fine hand on his, and begged, “Wait! I want to think.
Please! Do be quiet a moment.”
Then: “Mart, if you went on working with Mr. Wickett, you’d have to be
leaving me constantly.”
“Well--”
“I really don’t think that would be quite nice-- I mean especially now,
because I fancy I’m going to have a baby.”
He made a sound of surprise.
“Oh, I’m not going to do the weeping mother. And I don’t know whether
I’m glad or furious, though I do believe I’d like to have one baby. But
it does complicate things, you know. And personally, I should be sorry
if you left the Institute, which gives you a solid position, for a
hole-and-corner existence. Dear, I have been fairly nice, haven’t I? I
really do like you, you know! I don’t want you to desert me, and you
would if you went off to this horrid Vermont place.”
“Couldn’t we get a little house near there, and spend part of the year?”
“Pos-sibly. But we ought to wait till this beastly job of bearing a Dear
Little One is over, then think about it.”
Martin did not resign from the Institute, and Joyce did not think about
taking a house near Birdies’ Rest to the extent of doing it.