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

was heard saying bravely, “Of course with me, I wouldn’t give my research up for any administrative job.” And Pearl Robbins informed Terry, “Yes, it’s true⁠—Mr. McGurk himself just told me⁠—the Board has elected Dr. Gottlieb the new Director.”

“Then they’re fools,” said Terry. “He’ll refuse it, with wilence. ‘Dot dey should ask me to go monkey-skipping mit committee meetings!’ Fat chance!”

When the Board had gone, Martin and Terry flooded into Gottlieb’s laboratory and found the old man standing by his bench, more erect than they had seen him for years.

“Is it true⁠—they want you to be Director?” panted Martin.

“Yes, they have asked me.”

“But you’ll refuse? You won’t let ’em gum up your work!”

“Vell⁠ ⁠… I said my real work must go on. They consent I should appoint an Assistant Director to do the detail. You see⁠—Of course nothing must interfere with my immunology, but dis gives me the chance to do big t’ings and make a free scientific institute for all you boys. And those fools at Winnemac that laughed at my idea of a real medical school, now maybe they will see⁠—Do you know who was my rival for Director⁠—do you know who it was, Martin? It was that man Silva! Ha!”

In the corridor Terry groaned, “Requiescat in pace.”

III

To the dinner in Gottlieb’s honor (the only dinner that ever was given in Gottlieb’s honor) there came not only the men of impressive but easy affairs who attend all dinners of honor, but the few scientists whom Gottlieb admired.

He appeared late, rather shaky, escorted by Martin. When he reached the speakers’ table, the guests rose to him, shouting. He peered at them, he tried to speak, he held out his long arms as if to take them all in, and sank down sobbing.

There were cables from Europe; ardent letters from Tubbs and Dean Silva bewailing their inability to be present; telegrams from college presidents; and all of these were read to admiring applause.

But Capitola murmured, “Just the same, we shall miss dear Dr. Tubbs. He was so forward-looking. Don’t play with your fork, Ross.”

So Max Gottlieb took charge of the McGurk Institute of Biology, and in a month that Institute became a shambles.

IV

Gottlieb planned to give only an hour a day to business. As Assistant Director he appointed Dr. Aaron Sholtheis, the epidemiologist, the Yonkers churchman and dahlia-fancier. Gottlieb explained to Martin that, though of course Sholtheis was a fool, yet he was the only man in sight who combined at least a little scientific ability with a willingness to endure the routine and pomposity and compromises of executive work.

By continuing his ancient sneers at all bustling managers, Gottlieb obviously felt that he excused himself for having become a manager.

He could not confine his official work to an hour a day. There were too many conferences, too many distinguished callers, too many papers which needed his signature. He was dragged into dinner-parties; and the long, vague, palavering luncheons to which a Director has to go, and the telephoning to straighten out the dates of these tortures, took nervous hours. Each day his executive duties crawled into two hours or three or four, and he raged, he became muddled by complications of personnel and economy, he was ever more autocratic, more testy; and the loving colleagues of the Institute, who had been soothed or bullied into surface peace by Tubbs, now jangled openly.

While he was supposed to radiate benevolence from the office recently occupied by Dr. A. DeWitt Tubbs, Gottlieb clung to his own laboratory and to his narrow office as a cat clings to its cushion under a table. Once or twice he tried to sit and look impressive in the office of the Director, but fled from that large clean vacuity and from Miss Robbins’s snapping typewriter to his own den that smelled not of forward-looking virtue but only of cigarettes and old papers.

To McGurk, as to every scientific institution, came hundreds of farmers and practical nurses and suburban butchers who had paid large fares from Oklahoma or Oregon to get recognition for the unquestionable cures which they had discovered: oil of Mississippi catfish which saved every case of tuberculosis, arsenic pastes guaranteed to cure all cancers. They came with letters and photographs amid the frayed clean linen in their shabby suitcases⁠—at any opportunity they would stoop over their bags and hopefully bring out testimonials from their Pastors; they begged for a chance to heal humanity, and for themselves only enough money to send The Girl to musical conservatory. So certain, so black-crapely beseeching were they that no reception-clerk could be trained to keep them all out.

Gottlieb found them seeping into his office. He was sorry for them. They did take his working hours, they did scratch his belief that he was hardhearted, but they implored him with such wretched timorousness that he could not get rid of them without making promises, and admitting afterward that to have been more cruel would have been less cruel.

It was the Important People to whom he was rude.

The Directorship devoured enough time and peace to prevent Gottlieb from going on with the ever more recondite problems of his inquiry into the nature of specificity, and his inquiry prevented him from giving enough attention to the Institute to keep it from falling to pieces. He depended on Sholtheis, passed decisions on to him, but Sholtheis, since in any case Gottlieb would get all the credit for a successful Directorship, kept up his own scientific work and passed the decisions to Miss Pearl Robbins, so that the actual Director was the handsome and jealous Pearl.

There was no craftier or crookeder Director in the habitable world. Pearl enjoyed it. She so warmly and modestly assured Ross McGurk of the merits of Gottlieb and of her timorous devotion to him, she so purred to the flattery of Rippleton Holabird, she so blandly answered the hoarse hostility of Terry Wickett by keeping him from getting materials for his work, that the Institute