Arrowsmith - Sinclair Lewis [204]
No one heeded a wry Scotch doctor, diligent but undramatic through the epidemic, who hinted that plagues have been known to slacken and cease without phage.
When Martin was completing his notes he had a letter from the McGurk Institute, signed by Rippleton Holabird.
Holabird wrote that Gottlieb was “feeling seedy,” that he had resigned the Directorship, suspended his own experimentation, and was now at home, resting. Holabird himself had been appointed Acting Director of the Institute, and as such he chanted:
The reports of your work in the letters from Mr. McGurk’s agents which the quarantine authorities have permitted to get through to us apprize us far more than does your own modest report what a really sensational success you have had. You have done what few other men living could do, both established the value of bacteriophage in plague by tests on a large scale, and saved most of the unfortunate population. The Board of Trustees and I are properly appreciative of the glory which you have added, and still more will add when your report is published, to the name of McGurk institute, and we are thinking, now that we may for some months be unable to have your titular chief, Dr. Gottlieb, working with us, of establishing a separate Department, with you as its head.
“Established the value — rats! I about half made the tests,” sighed Martin, and: “Department! I’ve given too many orders here. Sick of authority. I want to get back to my lab and start all over again.”
It came to him that now he would probably have ten thousand a year. . . . Leora would have enjoyed small extravagant dinners.
Though he had watched Gottlieb declining, it was a shock that he could be so unwell as to drop his work even for a few months.
He forgot his own self as it came to him that in giving up his experiment, playing the savior, he had been a traitor to Gottlieb and all that Gottlieb represented. When he returned to New York he would have to call on the old man and admit to him, to those sunken relentless eyes, that he did not have complete proof of the value of the phage.
If he could have run to Leora with his ten thousand a year —
VIII
He left St. Hubert three weeks after Joyce Lanyon.
The evening before his sailing, a great dinner with Sir Robert Fairlamb in the chair was given to him and to Stokes. While Sir Robert ruddily blurted compliments and Kellett tried to explain things, and all of them drank to him, standing, after the toast to the King, Martin sat lonely, considering that tomorrow he would leave these trusting eyes and face the harsh demands of Gottlieb, of Terry Wickett.
The more they shouted his glory, the more he thought about what unknown, tight-minded scientists in distant laboratories would say of a man who had had his chance and cast it away. The more they called him the giver of life, the more he felt himself disgraced and a traitor; and as he looked at Stokes he saw in his regard a pity worse than condemnation.
Last updated on Wed Jan 12 09:40:45 2011 for eBooks@Adelaide.
Arrowsmith, by Sinclair Lewis
CHAPTER 36
It happened that Martin returned to New York, as he had come, on the St. Buryan. The ship was haunted with the phantoms of Leora dreaming, of Sondelius shouting on the bridge.
And on the St. Buryan was the country-club Miss Gwilliam who had offended Sondelius.
She had spent the winter importantly making notes on native music in Trinidad and Caracas; at least in planning to make notes. She saw Martin come aboard at Blackwater, and pertly noted the friends who saw him off — two Englishmen, one