Arrowsmith - Sinclair Lewis [154]
The embarrassed barbarian grumbled, “Well, for Pete’s sake, Slim, don’t worry. The old man and I were just egging you on. Fact is, he’s tickled to death about the careful way you’re starting in. About the math — probably you’re better off than the Holy Wren and Tubbs right now; you’ve forgotten all the math you ever knew, and they never knew any. Gosh all fishhooks! Science is supposed to mean Knowledge — from the Greek, a handsome language spoken by the good old booze-hoisting Hellenes — and the way most of the science boys resent having to stop writing little jeweled papers or giving teas and sweat at getting some knowledge certainly does make me a grand booster for the human race. My own math isn’t any too good, Slim, but if you’d like to have me come around evenings and tutor you — Free, I mean!”
Thus began the friendship between Martin and Terry Wickett; thus began a change in Martin’s life whereby he gave up three or four hours of wholesome sleep each night to grind over matters which everyone is assumed to know, and almost everyone does not know.
He took up algebra; found that he had forgotten most of it; cursed over the competition of the indefatigable A and the indolent B who walk from Y to Z; hired a Columbia tutor; and finished the subject, with a spurt of something like interest in regard to quadratic equations, in six weeks . . . while Leora listened, watched, waited, made sandwiches, and laughed at the tutor’s jokes.
By the end of his first nine months at McGurk, Martin had reviewed trigonometry and analytic geometry and he was finding differential calculus romantic. But he made the mistake of telling Terry Wickett how much he knew.
Terry croaked, “Don’t trust math too much, son,” and he so confused him with references to the thermo-dynamical derivation of the mass action law, and to the oxidation reduction potential, that he stumbled again into raging humility, again saw himself an impostor and a tenth-rater.
He read the classics of physical science: Copernicus and Galileo, Lavoisier, Newton, LaPlace, Descartes, Faraday. He became completely bogged in Newton’s “Fluxions”; he spoke of Newton to Tubbs and found that the illustrious Director knew nothing about him. He cheerfully mentioned this to Terry, and was shockingly cursed for his conceit as a “nouveau cultured,” as a “typical enthusiastic convert,” and so returned to the work whose end is satisfying because there is never an end.
His life did not seem edifying nor in any degree amusing. When Tubbs peeped into his laboratory he found a humorless young man going about his tests of hemolytic toxins with no apparent flair for the Real Big Thing in Science, which was co-operation and being efficient. Tubbs tried to set him straight with “Are you quite sure you’re following a regular demarked line in your work?”
It was Leora who bore the real tedium.
She sat quiet (a frail child, only up to one’s shoulder, not nine minutes older than at marriage, nine years before), or she napped inoffensively, in the long living-room of their flat, while he worked over his dreary digit-infested books till one, till two, and she politely awoke to let him worry at her, “But look here now, I’ve got to keep up my research at the same time. God, I am so tired!”
She dragged him away for an illegal five-day walk on Cape Cod, in March. He sat between the Twin Lights at Chatham, and fumed, “I’m going back and tell Terry and Gottlieb they can go to the devil with their crazy physical chemistry. I’ve had enough, now I’ve done math,” and she commented, “Yes, I certainly would — though isn’t it funny how Dr. Gottlieb always seems to be right?”
He was so absorbed in staphylolysin and in calculus that he did not realize the world was about to be made safe for democracy. He was a little dazed when America entered the war.
VI
Dr. Tubbs dashed to Washington to offer the services of the Institute to the War Department.
All the members of the staff, except Gottlieb and two others who