Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis (learn to read books txt) 📕

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 Biophysics was inventing electrified wire entanglements; Dr. Billy Smith, who six months before had been singing Studentenlieder at Luchow’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 clearheaded.”

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 anyone 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.

XXVIII I

Captain Martin Arrowsmith, M.R.C., came home to his good wife Leora, wailing, “I’m so rotten tired, and I feel kind of discouraged. I haven’t accomplished a darn thing in this whole year at McGurk. Sterile. No good. And I’m hanged if I’ll study calculus this evening. Let’s go to the movies. Won’t even change to regular human clothes. Too tired.”

“All right, honey,” said Leora. “But let’s have dinner here. I bought a wonderful ole fish this afternoon.”

Through the film Martin gave his opinion, as a captain and as a doctor, that it seemed improbable a mother should not know her daughter after an absence of ten years. He was restless and rational, which is not a mood in which to view the cinema. When they came blinking out of that darkness lit only from the shadowy screen, he snorted, “I’m going back to the lab. I’ll put you in a taxi.”

“Oh, let the beastly thing go for one night.”

“Now that’s unfair! I haven’t worked late for three or four nights now!”

“Then take me along.”

“Nope. I have a hunch I may be working all night.”

Liberty Street, as he raced along it, was sleeping below its towers. It was McGurk’s order that the elevator to the Institute should run all night, and indeed three or four of the twenty staff-members did sometimes use it after respectable hours.

That morning Martin had isolated a new strain of staphylococcus bacteria from the gluteal carbuncle of a patient in the Lower Manhattan Hospital, a carbuncle which was healing with unusual rapidity. He had placed a bit of the pus in broth and incubated it. In eight hours a good growth of bacteria had appeared. Before going wearily home he had returned the flask to the incubator.

He was not particularly interested in it, and now, in his laboratory, he removed his military blouse, looked down to the lights on the blue-black river, smoked a little, thought what a dog he was not to be gentler to Leora, and damned Bert Tozer and Pickerbaugh and Tubbs and anybody else who was handy to his memory before he absentmindedly wavered to the incubator, and found that the flask, in which there should have been a perceptible cloudy growth, had no longer any signs of bacteria⁠—of staphylococci.

“Now what the hell!” he cried. “Why, the broth’s as clear as when I seeded it! Now what the⁠—Think of this fool accident coming up just when I was going to start something new!”

He hastened from