I
Dr. and Mrs. Rippleton Holabird had invited only Joyce and Martin to
dinner. Holabird was his most charming self. He admired Joyce’s pearls,
and when the squabs had been served he turned on Martin with friendly
intensity:
“Now will Joyce and you listen to me most particularly? Things are
happening, Martin, and I want you--no, Science wants you!--to take your
proper part in them. I needn’t, by the way, hint that this is absolutely
confidential. Dr. Tubbs and his League of Cultural Agencies are
beginning to accomplish marvels, and Colonel Minnigen has been
extraordinarily liberal.
“They’ve gone at the League with exactly the sort of thoroughness and
taking-it-slow that you and dear old Gottlieb have always insisted on.
For four years now they’ve stuck to making plans. I happen to know that
Dr. Tubbs and the council of the League have had the most wonderful
conferences with college-presidents and editors and clubwomen and
labor-leaders (the sound, sensible ones, of course) and
efficiency-experts and the more advanced advertising-men and ministers,
and all the other leaders of public thought.
“They’ve worked out elaborate charts classifying all intellectual
occupations and interests, with the methods and materials and tools, and
especially the goals--the aims, the ideals, the moral purposes--that are
suited to each of them. Really tremendous! Why, a musician or an
engineer, for example, could look at his chart and tell accurately
whether he was progressing fast enough, at his age, and if not, just
what his trouble was, and the remedy. With this basis, the League is
ready to go to work and encourage all brain-workers to affiliate.
“McGurk Institute simply must get in on this coördination, which I
regard as one of the greatest advances in thinking that has ever been
made. We are at last going to make all the erstwhile chaotic spiritual
activities of America really conform to the American ideal; we’re going
to make them as practical and supreme as the manufacture of
cash-registers! I have certain reasons for supposing I can bring Ross
McGurk and Minnigen together, now that the McGurk and Minnigen lumber
interests have stopped warring, and if so I shall probably quit the
Institute and help Tubbs guide the League of Cultural Agencies. Then
we’ll need a new Director of McGurk who will work with us and help us
bring Science out of the monastery to serve Mankind.”
By this time Martin understood everything about the League except what
the League was trying to do.
Holabird went on:
“Now I know, Martin, that you’ve always rather sneered at Practicalness,
but I have faith in you! I believe you’ve been too much under the
influence of Wickett, and now that he’s gone and you’ve seen more of
life and of Joyce’s set and mine, I believe I can coax you to take (oh!
without in any way neglecting the severities of your lab work!) a
broader view.
“I am authorized to appoint an Assistant Director, and I think I’m safe
in saying he would succeed me as full Director. Sholtheis wants the
place, and Dr. Smith and Yeo would leap at it, but I haven’t yet found
any of them that are quite Our Own Sort, and I offer it to you! I
daresay in a year or two, you will be Director of McGurk Institute!”
Holabird was uplifted, as one giving royal favor. Mrs. Holabird was
intense, as one present on an historical occasion, and Joyce was
ecstatic over the honor to her Man.
Martin stammered, “W-why, I’ll have to think it over. Sort of
unexpected--”
The rest of the evening Holabird so brimmingly enjoyed himself picturing
an era in which Tubbs and Martin and he would rule, coördinate,
standardize, and make useful the whole world of intelligence, from
trousers-designing to poetry, that he did not resent Martin’s silence.
At parting he chanted, “Talk it over with Joyce, and let me have your
decision to-morrow. By the way, I think we’ll get rid of Pearl Robbins;
she’s been useful but now she considers herself indispensable. But
that’s a detail.... Oh, I do have faith in you, Martin, dear old boy!
You’ve grown and calmed down, and you’ve widened your interests so much,
this past year!”
In their car, in that moving curtained room under the crystal
dome-light, Joyce beamed at him.
“Isn’t it too wonderful, Mart! And I do feel Rippleton can bring it off.
Think of your being Director, head of that whole great Institute, when
just a few years ago you were only a cub there! But haven’t I perhaps
helped, just a little?”
Suddenly Martin hated the blue-and-gold velvet of the car, the cunningly
hid gold box of cigarettes, all this soft and smothering prison. He
wanted to be out beside the unseen chauffeur-- His Own Sort!--facing the
winter. He tried to look as though he were meditating, in an awed,
appreciative manner, but he was merely being cowardly, reluctant to
begin the slaughter. Slowly:
“Would you really like to see me Director?”
“Of course! All that-- Oh, you know; I don’t just mean the prominence
and respect, but the power to accomplish good.”
“Would you like to see me dictating letters, giving out interviews,
buying linoleum, having lunch with distinguished fools, advising men
about whose work I don’t know a blame’ thing?”
“Oh, don’t be so superior! Some one has to do these things. And that’d
be only a small part of it. Think of the opportunity of encouraging some
youngster who wanted a chance to do splendid science!”
“And give up my own chance?”
“Why need you? You’d be head of your own department just the same. And
even if you did give up-- You are so stubborn! It’s lack of imagination.
You think that because you’ve started in on one tiny branch of mental
activity, there’s nothing else in the world. It’s just as when I
persuaded you that if you got out of your stinking laboratory once a
week or so, and actually bent your powerful intellect to a game of golf,
the world of science wouldn’t immediately stop! No imagination! You’re
precisely like these business men you’re always cursing because they
can’t see anything in life beyond their soap-factories or their banks!”
“And you really would have me give up my work--”
He saw that with all her eager complaisances she had never understood
what he was up to, had not comprehended one word about the murderous
effect of the directorship on Gottlieb.
He was silent again, and before they reached home she said only, “You
know I’m the last person to speak of money, but really, it’s you who
have so often brought up the matter of hating to be dependent on me, and
you know as Director you would make so much more that-- Forgive me!”
She fled before him into her palace, into the automatic elevator.
He plodded up the stairs, grumbling, “Yes, it is the first chance I’ve
had to really contribute to the expenses here. Sure! Willing to take her
money, but not to do anything in return, and then call it ‘devotion to
science!’ Well, I’ve got to decide right now--”
He did not go through the turmoil of deciding; he leaped to decision
without it. He marched into Joyce’s room, irritated by its snobbishness
of discreet color. He was checked by the miserable way in which she sat
brooding on the edge of her day couch, but he flung:
“I’m not going to do it, even if I have to leave the Institute--and
Holabird will just about make me quit. I will not get buried in this
pompous fakery of giving orders and--”
“Mart! Listen! Don’t you want your son to be proud of you?”
“Um. Well--_No_, not if he’s to be proud of me for being a stuffed
shirt, a sideshow barker--”
“Please don’t be vulgar.”
“Why not? Matter of fact, I haven’t been vulgar enough lately. What I
ought to do is to go to Birdies’ Rest right now, and work with Terry.”
“I wish I had some way of showing you-- Oh, for a ‘scientist’ you do
have the most incredible blind-spots! I wish I could make you see just
how weak and futile that is. The wilds! The simple life! The old
argument. It’s just the absurd, cowardly sort of thing these tired
highbrows do that sneak off to some Esoteric Colony and think they’re
getting strength to conquer life, when they’re merely running away from
it.”
“No. Terry has his place in the country only because he can live cheaper
there. If we--if he could afford it, he’d probably be right here in
town, with garçons and everything, like McGurk, but with no Director
Holabird by God--and no Director Arrowsmith!”
“Merely a cursing, ill-bred, intensely selfish Director Terry Wickett!”
“Now by God let me tell you--”
“Martin, do you need to emphasize your arguments by a ‘by God’ in every
sentence, or have you a few other expressions in your highly scientific
vocabulary?”
“Well, I have enough vocabulary to express the idea that I’m thinking of
joining Terry.”
“Look here, Mart. You feel so virtuous about wanting to go off and wear
a flannel shirt, and be peculiar and very, very pure. Suppose everybody
argued that way. Suppose every father deserted his children whenever his
nice little soul ached? Just what would become of the world? Suppose I
were poor, and you left me, and I had to support John by taking in
washing--”
“It’d probably be fine for you but fierce on the washing! No! I beg your
pardon. That was an obvious answer. But-- I imagine it’s just that
argument that’s kept almost everybody, all these centuries, from being
anything but a machine for digestion and propagation and obedience. The
answer is that very few ever do, under any condition, willingly leave a
soft bed for a shanty bunk in order to be pure, as you very properly
call it, and those of us that are pioneers-- Oh, this debate could go on
forever! We could prove that I’m a hero or a fool or a deserter or
anything you like, but the fact is I’ve suddenly seen I must go! I want
my freedom to work, and I herewith quit whining about it and grab it.
You’ve been generous to me. I’m grateful. But you’ve never been mine.
Good-by.”
“Darling, darling-- We’ll talk it over again in the morning, when you
aren’t so excited.... And an hour ago I was so proud of you!”
“All right. Good-night.”
But before morning, taking two suit-cases and a bag of his roughest
clothes, leaving for her a tender note which was the hardest thing he
had ever written, kissing his son and muttering, “Come to me when you
grow up, old man,” he went to a cheap side-street hotel. As he stretched
on the rickety iron bed, he grieved for their love. Before noon he had
gone to the Institute, resigned, taken certain of his own apparatus and
notes and books and materials, refused to answer a telephone call from
Joyce, and caught a train for Vermont.
Cramped on the red-plush seat of the day-coach (he who of late had
ridden in silken private cars), he grinned with the joy of no longer
having to toil at dinner-parties.
He drove up to Birdies’ Rest in a bob-sled. Terry was chopping wood, in
a mess of chip-littered snow.
“Hello, Terry. Come for keeps.”
“Fine, Slim. Say, there’s a lot of dishes in the shack need washing.”
II
He had become soft. To dress in the cold shanty and to wash in icy water
was agony; to tramp for three hours through fluffy snow exhausted him.
But the rapture of being allowed to work twenty-four hours a day without
leaving an experiment at its juiciest moment to creep home for dinner,
of plunging with Terry into arguments as cryptic as theology and furious
as the indignation of a drunken man, carried him along, and he felt
himself growing sinewy. Often he meditated on yielding to Joyce so far
as to allow her to build a better laboratory for them, and more
civilized quarters.
With only one servant, though, or two at the very most, and just a
simple decent bathroom--
She had written, “You have been thoroughly beastly, and any attempt at
reconciliation, if that is possible now, which I rather doubt, must come
from you.”
He answered, describing the ringing winter woods and not mentioning the
platform word Reconciliation.
III
They wanted to study further the exact mechanism of the action of their
quinine derivatives. This was difficult with the mice which Terry had
contrived to use instead of monkeys, because of their size. Martin had
brought with him strains of _Bacillus lepisepticus_, which causes a
pleuro-pneumonia in rabbits, and their first labor was to discover
whether their original compound was effective against this bacillus as
well as against pneumococcus. Profanely they found that it was not;
profanely and patiently they trudged into an infinitely complicated
search for a compound that should be.
They earned their living by preparing sera which rather grudgingly they
sold to physicians of whose honesty they were certain, abruptly refusing
the popular drug-vendors. They thus received surprisingly large sums,
and among all clever people it was believed that they were too coyly
shrewd to be sincere.
Martin worried as much over what he considered his treachery to Clif
Clawson as over his desertion of Joyce and John, but this worrying he
did only when he could not sleep. Regularly, at three in the morning, he
brought both Joyce and honest Clif to Birdies’ Rest; and regularly, at
six, when he was frying bacon, he forgot them.
Terry the barbarian, once he was free of the tittering and
success-pawing of Holabird, was an easy campmate. Upper berth or lower
was the same to him, and till Martin was hardened to cold and fatigue,
Terry did more than his share of wood-cutting and supply-toting, and
with great melody and skill he washed their clothes.
He had the genius to see that they two alone, shut up together season on
season, would quarrel. He planned with Martin that the laboratory scheme
should be extended to include eight (but never more!) maverick and
undomestic researchers like themselves, who should contribute to the
expenses of the camp by manufacturing sera, but otherwise do their own
independent work--whether it should be the structure of the atom, or a
disproof of the results of Drs. Wickett and Arrowsmith. Two rebels, a
chemist now caught in a drug-firm and a university professor, were
coming next autumn.
“It’s kind of a mis’able return to monasteries,” grumbled Terry, “except
that we’re not trying to solve anything for anybody but our own fool
selves. Mind you! When this place becomes a shrine, and a lot of cranks
begin to creep in here, then you and I got to beat it, Slim. We’ll move
farther back in the woods, or if we feel too old for that, we’ll take
another shot at professorships or Dawson Hunziker or even the Rev. Dr.
Holabird.”
For the first time Martin’s work began definitely to draw ahead of
Terry’s.
His mathematics and physical chemistry were now as sound as Terry’s, his
indifference to publicity and to flowery hangings as great, his industry
as fanatical, his ingenuity in devising new apparatus at least
comparable, and his imagination far more swift. He had less ease but
more passion. He hurled out hypotheses like sparks. He began,
incredulously, to comprehend his freedom. He would yet determine the
essential nature of phage; and as he became stronger and surer--and no
doubt less human--he saw ahead of him innumerous inquiries into
chemotherapy and immunity; enough adventures to keep him busy for
decades.
It seemed to him that this was the first spring he had ever seen and
tasted. He learned to dive into the lake, though the first plunge was an
agony of fiery cold. They fished before breakfast, they supped at a
table under the oaks, they tramped twenty miles on end, they had
bluejays and squirrels for interested neighbors; and when they had
worked all night, they came out to find serene dawn lifting across the
sleeping lake.
Martin felt sun-soaked and deep of chest, and always he hummed.
And one day he peeped out, beneath his new horn-rimmed
almost-middle-aged glasses, to see a gigantic motor crawling up their
woods road. From the car, jolly and competent in tweeds, stepped Joyce.
He wanted to flee through the back door of the laboratory shanty.
Reluctantly he edged out to meet her.
“It’s a sweet place, really!” she said, and amiably kissed him. “Let’s
walk down by the lake.”
In a stilly place of ripples and birch boughs, he was moved to grip her
shoulders.
She cried, “Darling, I _have_ missed you! You’re wrong about lots of
things, but you’re right about this--you must work, and not be disturbed
by a lot of silly people. Do you like my tweeds? Don’t they look
wildernessy? You see, I’ve come to stay! I’ll build a house near here;
perhaps right across the lake. Yes. That will make a sweet place, over
there on that sort of little plateau, if I can get the land--probably
some horrid tight-fisted old farmer owns it. Can’t you just _see_ it: a
wide low house, with enormous verandas and red awnings--”
“And visitors coming?”
“I suppose so. Sometimes. Why?”
Desperately, “Joyce, I do love you. I want awfully, just now, to kiss
you properly. But I will not have you bringing a lot of people--and
there’d probably be a rotten noisy motor launch. Make our lab a joke.
Roadhouse. New sensation. Why, Terry would go crazy! You _are_ lovely!
But you want a playmate, and I want to work. I’m afraid you can’t stay.
No.”
“And our son is to be left without your care?”
“He-- Would he have my care if I died?... He is a nice kid, too! I hope
he won’t be a Rich Man!... Perhaps ten years from now he’ll come to me
here.”
“And live like _this_?”
“Sure--unless I’m broke. Then he won’t live so well. We have meat
practically every day now!”
“I see. And suppose your Terry Wickett should marry some waitress or
some incredibly stupid rustic? From what you’ve told me, he rather
fancies that sort of girl!”
“Well, either he and I would beat her, together, or it would be the one
thing that could break me.”
“Martin, aren’t you perhaps a little insane?”
“Oh, absolutely! And how I enjoy it! Though you-- You look here now,
Joy! We’re insane but we’re not cranks! Yesterday an ‘esoteric healer’
came here because he thought this was a free colony, and Terry walked
him twenty miles, and then I think he threw him in the lake. No. Gosh.
Let me think.” He scratched his chin. “I don’t believe we’re insane.
We’re farmers.”
“Martin, it’s too infinitely diverting to find you becoming a fanatic,
and all the while trying to wriggle out of being a fanatic. You’ve left
common sense. I _am_ common sense. I believe in bathing! Good-by!”
“Now you look here. By golly--”
She was gone, reasonable and triumphant.
As the chauffeur manœuvered among the stumps of the clearing, for a
moment Joyce looked out from her car, and they stared at each other,
through tears. They had never been so frank, so pitiful, as in this one
unarmored look which recalled every jest, every tenderness, every
twilight they had known together. But the car rolled on unhalted, and he
remembered that he had been doing an experiment--
IV
On a certain evening of May, Congressman Almus Pickerbaugh was dining
with the President of the United States.
“When the campaign is over, Doctor,” said the President, “I hope we
shall see you a cabinet-member--the first Secretary of Health and
Eugenics in the country!”
That evening, Dr. Rippleton Holabird was addressing a meeting of
celebrated thinkers, assembled by the League of Cultural Agencies.
Among the men of measured merriment on the platform were Dr. Aaron
Sholtheis, the new Director of McGurk Institute, and Dr. Angus Duer,
head of the Duer Clinic and professor of surgery in Fort Dearborn
Medical College.
Dr. Holabird’s epochal address was being broadcast by radio to a million
ardently listening lovers of science.
That evening, Bert Tozer of Wheatsylvania, North Dakota, was attending
mid-week prayer-meeting. His new Buick sedan awaited him outside, and
with modest satisfaction he heard the minister gloat:
“The righteous, even the Children of Light, they shall be rewarded with
a great reward and their feet shall walk in gladness, saith the Lord of
Hosts; but the mockers, the Sons of Belial, they shall be slain betimes
and cast down into darkness and failure, and in the busy marts shall
they be forgot.”
That evening, Max Gottlieb sat unmoving and alone, in a dark small room
above the banging city street. Only his eyes were alive.
That evening, the hot breeze languished along the palm-waving ridge
where the ashes of Gustaf Sondelius were lost among cinders, and a
depression in a garden marked the grave of Leora.
That evening, after an unusually gay dinner with Latham Ireland, Joyce
admitted, “Yes, if I do divorce him, I may marry you. I know! He’s never
going to see how egotistical it is to think he’s the only man living
who’s always right!”
That evening, Martin Arrowsmith and Terry Wickett lolled in a clumsy
boat, an extraordinarily uncomfortable boat, far out on the water.
“I feel as if I were really beginning to work now,” said Martin. “This
new quinine stuff may prove pretty good. We’ll plug along on it for two
or three years, and maybe we’ll get something permanent--and probably
we’ll fail!”
THE END
Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber:
your interneship=> your internship {pg 100}
Old Andew Jackson cried=> Old Andrew Jackson cried {pg 109}
obxiously mixed up=> obviously mixed up {pg 127}
for Arrenhius or Jacques Loeb=> for Arrhenhius or Jacques Loeb {pg 132}
a few shooks hands=> a few shook hands {pg 182}
agree that Martin is too agressive=> agree that Martin is too aggressive
{pg 411}