Arrowsmith - Sinclair Lewis [174]
When Sondelius perceived this grudgingness he tried to overcome it by being more noisy and complimentary and enthusiastic than ever. On Gottlieb’s birthday he gave him a shocking smoking-jacket of cherry and mauve velvet, and when he called at Gottlieb’s flat, which was often, Gottlieb had to put on the ghastly thing and sit humming while Sondelius assaulted him with roaring condemnations of mediocre soup and mediocre musicians. . . . That Sondelius gave up surprisingly decorative dinner-parties for these calls, Gottlieb never knew.
Martin turned to Sondelius for courage as he turned to Terry for concentration. Courage and concentration were needed, in these days of an Institute gone insane, if a man was to do his work.
And Martin was doing it.
V
After a consultation with Gottlieb and a worried conference with Leora about the danger of handling the germs, he had gone on to bubonic plague, to the possibilities of preventing it and curing it with phage.
To have heard him asking Sondelius about his experience in plague epidemics, one would have believed that Martin found the Black Death delightful. To have beheld him infecting lean snaky rats with the horror, all the while clucking to them and calling them pet names, one would have known him mad.
He found that rats fed with phage failed to come down with plague; that after phage-feeding, Bacillus pestis disappeared from carrier rats which, without themselves being killed thereby, harbored and spread chronic plague; and that, finally, he could cure the disease. He was as absorbed and happy and nervous as in the first days of the X Principle. He worked all night. . . . At the microscope, under a lone light, fishing out with a glass pipette drawn fine as a hair one single plague bacillus.
To protect himself from infection by the rat-fleas he wore, while he worked with the animals, rubber gloves, high leather boots, straps about his sleeves. These precautions thrilled him, and to the others at McGurk they had something of the esoteric magic of the alchemists. He became a bit of a hero and a good deal of a butt. No more than hearty business men in offices or fussy old men in villages are researchers free from the tedious vice of jovial commenting. The chemists and biologists called him “The Pest,” refused to come to his room, and pretended to avoid him in the corridors.
As he went fluently on from experiment to experiment, as the drama of science obsessed him, he thought very well of himself and found himself taken seriously by the others. He Published one cautious paper on phage in plague, which was mentioned in numerous scientific journals. Even the harassed Gottlieb was commendatory, though he could give but little attention and no help. But Terry Wickett remained altogether cool. He showed for Martin’s somewhat brilliant work only enough enthusiasm to indicate that he was not jealous; he kept poking in to ask whether, with his new experimentation, Martin was continuing his quest for the fundamental nature of all phage, and his study of physical chemistry.
Then Martin had such an assistant as has rarely been known, and that assistant was Gustaf Sondelius.
Sondelius was discouraged regarding his school of tropical medicine. He was looking for new trouble. He had been through several epidemics, and he viewed plague with affectionate hatred. When he understood Martin’s work he gloated, “Hey, Yesus! Maybe you got the t’ing that will be better than Yersin or Haffkine or anybody! Maybe you cure all the world of plague — the poor devils in India — millions of them. Let me in!”
He became Martin’s collaborator; unpaid, tireless, not very skillful, valuable in his buoyancy. As well as Martin he loved irregularity; by principle he never had his meals at the same hours two days in succession, and by choice he worked