Arrowsmith - Sinclair Lewis [150]
Even Terry Wickett became more tolerable. Martin perceived that Wickett’s snarls were partly a Clif Clawson misconception of humor, but partly a resentment, as great as Gottlieb’s, of the morphological scientists who ticket things with the nicest little tickets, who name things and rename them and never analyze them. Wickett often worked all night; he was to be seen in shirt-sleeves, his sulky red hair rumpled, sitting with a stop-watch before a constant temperature bath for hours. Now and then it was a relief to have the surly intentness of Wickett instead of the elegance of Rippleton Holabird, which demanded from Martin so much painful elegance in turn, at a time when he was sunk beyond sounding in his experimentation.
Last updated on Wed Jan 12 09:40:45 2011 for eBooks@Adelaide.
Arrowsmith, by Sinclair Lewis
CHAPTER 27
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, unself-dramatizing 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