I
Dr. and Mrs. Rippleton Holabird had invited only Joyce and Martin to dinner. Holabird was his most charming self. He admired Joyce’s pearls, and when the squabs had been served he turned on Martin with friendly intensity:
“Now will Joyce and you listen to me most particularly? Things are happening, Martin, and I want you—no, Science wants you!—to take your proper part in them. I needn’t, by the way, hint that this is absolutely confidential. Dr. Tubbs and his League of Cultural Agencies are beginning to accomplish marvels, and Colonel Minnigen has been extraordinarily liberal.
“They’ve gone at the League with exactly the sort of thoroughness and taking-it-slow that you and dear old Gottlieb have always insisted on. For four years now they’ve stuck to making plans. I happen to know that Dr. Tubbs and the council of the League have had the most wonderful conferences with college-presidents and editors and clubwomen and labor-leaders (the sound, sensible ones, of course) and efficiency-experts and the more advanced advertising-men and ministers, and all the other leaders of public thought.
“They’ve worked out elaborate charts classifying all intellectual occupations and interests, with the methods and materials and tools, and especially the goals—the aims, the ideals, the moral purposes—that are suited to each of them. Really tremendous! Why, a musician or an engineer, for example, could look at his chart and tell accurately whether he was progressing fast enough, at his age, and if not, just what his trouble was, and the remedy. With this basis, the League is ready to go to work and encourage all brain-workers to affiliate.
“McGurk Institute simply must get in on this coordination, which I regard as one of the greatest advances in thinking that has ever been made. We are at last going to make all the erstwhile chaotic spiritual activities of America really conform to the American ideal; we’re going to make them as practical and supreme as the manufacture of cash-registers! I have certain reasons for supposing I can bring Ross McGurk and Minnigen together, now that the McGurk and Minnigen lumber interests have stopped warring, and if so I shall probably quit the Institute and help Tubbs guide the League of Cultural Agencies. Then we’ll need a new Director of McGurk who will work with us and help bring Science out of the monastery to serve Mankind.”
By this time Martin understood everything about the League except what the League was trying to do.
Holabird went on:
“Now I know, Martin, that you’ve always rather sneered at Practicalness, but I have faith in you! I believe you’ve been too much under the influence of Wickett, and now that he’s gone and you’ve seen more of life and of Joyce’s set and mine, I believe I can coax you to take (oh! without in any way neglecting the severities of your lab work!) a broader view.
“I am authorized to appoint an Assistant Director, and I think I’m safe in saying he would succeed me as full Director. Sholtheis wants the place, and Dr. Smith and Yeo would leap at it, but I haven’t yet found any of them that are quite Our Own Sort, and I offer it to you! I daresay in a year or two, you will be Director of McGurk Institute!”
Holabird was uplifted, as one giving royal favor. Mrs. Holabird was intense, as one present on an historical occasion and Joyce was ecstatic over the honor to her Man.
Martin stammered, “W-why, I’ll have to think it over. Sort of unexpected—”
The rest of the evening Holabird so brimmingly enjoyed himself picturing an era in which Tubbs and Martin and he would rule, coordinate, standardize, and make useful the whole world of intelligence, from trousers-designing to poetry, that he did not resent Martin’s silence. At parting he chanted, “Talk it over with Joyce, and let me have your decision tomorrow. By the way, I think we’ll get rid of Pearl Robbins; she’s been useful but now she considers herself indispensable. But that’s a detail … Oh, I do have faith in you, Martin, dear old boy! You’ve grown and calmed down, and you’ve widened your interests so much, this past year!”
In their car, in that moving curtained room under the crystal dome-light, Joyce beamed at him.
“Isn’t it too wonderful, Mart! And I do feel Rippleton can bring it off. Think of your being Director, head of that whole great Institute, when just a few years ago you were only a cub there! But haven’t I perhaps helped, just a little?”
Suddenly Martin hated the blue-and-gold velvet of the car, the cunningly hid gold box of cigarettes, all this soft and smothering prison. He wanted to be out beside the unseen chauffeur—His Own Sort!—facing the winter. He tried to look as though he were meditating, in an awed, appreciative manner, but he was merely being cowardly, reluctant to begin the slaughter. Slowly:
“Would you really like to see me Director?”
“Of course! All that—Oh, you know; I don’t just mean the prominence and respect, but the power to accomplish good.”
“Would you like to see me dictating letters, giving out interviews, buying linoleum, having lunch with distinguished fools, advising men about whose work I don’t know a blame thing?”
“Oh, don’t be so superior! Someone has to do these things. And that’d be only a small part of it. Think of the opportunity of encouraging some youngster who wanted a chance to do splendid science!”
“And give up my own chance?”
“Why need you? You’d be head of your own department just the same. And even if you did give up—You are so stubborn! It’s lack of imagination. You think that because you’ve started in on one tiny branch of mental activity, there’s nothing else in the world. It’s just as when I persuaded you that if you got out of your stinking laboratory once a week or so, and actually bent your powerful intellect to a game of golf, the world of science wouldn’t immediately stop! No imagination! You’re precisely like these businessmen you’re always cursing because they can’t see anything in life beyond their soap-factories or their banks!”
“And you really would have me give up my work—”
He saw that with all her eager complaisances she had never understood what he was up to, had not comprehended one word about the murderous effect of the directorship on Gottlieb.
He was silent again, and before they reached home she said only, “You know I’m the last person to speak of money, but really, it’s you who have so often brought up the matter of hating to be dependent on me, and you know as Director you would make so much more that—Forgive me!”
She fled before him into her palace, into the automatic elevator.
He plodded up the stairs, grumbling, “Yes, it is the first chance I’ve had to really contribute to the expenses here. Sure! Willing to take her money, but not to do anything in return, and then call it ‘devotion to science!’ Well, I’ve got to decide right now—”
He did not go through the turmoil of deciding; he leaped to decision without it. He marched into Joyce’s room, irritated by its snobbishness of discreet color. He was checked by the miserable way in which she sat brooding on the edge of her day couch, but he flung:
“I’m not going to do it, even if I have to leave the Institute—and Holabird will just about make me quit. I will not get buried in this pompous fakery of giving orders and—”
“Mart! Listen! Don’t you want your son to be proud of you?”
“Um. Well—no, not if he’s to be proud of me for being a stuffed shirt, a sideshow barker—”
“Please don’t be vulgar.”
“Why not? Matter of fact, I haven’t been vulgar enough lately. What I ought to do is to go to Birdies’ Rest right now, and work with Terry.”
“I wish I had some way of showing you—Oh, for a ‘scientist’ you do have the most incredible blind-spots! I wish I could make you see just how weak and futile that is. The wilds! The simple life! The old argument. It’s just the absurd, cowardly sort of thing these tired highbrows do that sneak off to some Esoteric Colony and think they’re getting strength to conquer life, when they’re merely running away from it.”
“No. Terry has his place in the country only because he can live cheaper there. If we—if he could afford it, he’d probably be right here, in town, with garçons and everything, like McGurk, but with no Director Holabird, by God—and no Director Arrowsmith!”
“Merely a cursing, ill-bred, intensely selfish Director Terry Wickett!”
“Now, by God, let me tell you—”
“Martin, do you need to emphasize your arguments by a ‘by God’ in every sentence, or have you a few other expressions in your highly scientific vocabulary?”
“Well, I have enough vocabulary to express the idea that I’m thinking of joining Terry.”
“Look here, Mart. You feel so virtuous about wanting to go off and wear a flannel shirt and be peculiar and very, very pure. Suppose everybody argued that way. Suppose every father deserted his children whenever his nice little soul ached? Just what would become of the world? Suppose I were poor, and you left me, and I had to support John by taking in washing—”
“It’d probably be fine for you but fierce on the washing! No! I beg your pardon. That was an obvious answer. But—I imagine it’s just that argument that’s kept almost everybody, all these centuries, from being anything but a machine for digestion and propagation and obedience. The answer is that very few ever do, under any condition, willingly leave a soft bed for a shanty bunk in order to be pure, as you very properly call it, and those of us that are pioneers—Oh, this debate could go on forever! We could prove that I’m a hero or a fool or a deserter or anything you like, but the fact is I’ve suddenly seen I must go! I want my freedom to work, and I herewith quit whining about it and grab it. You’ve been generous to me. I’m grateful. But you’ve never been mine. Goodbye.”
“Darling, darling—We’ll talk it over again in the morning, when you aren’t so excited … And an hour ago I was so proud of you!”
“All right. Good night.”
But before morning, taking two suitcases and a bag of his roughest clothes, leaving for her a tender note which was the hardest thing he had ever written, kissing his son and muttering, “Come to me when you grow up, old man,” he went to a cheap side-street hotel. As he stretched on the rickety iron bed, he grieved for their love. Before noon he had gone to the Institute, resigned, taken certain of his own apparatus and notes and books and materials, refused to answer a telephone call from Joyce, and caught a train for Vermont.
Cramped on the red-plush seat of the day-coach (he who of late had ridden in silken private cars), he grinned with the joy of no longer having to toil at dinner-parties.
He drove up to Birdies’ Rest in a bobsled. Terry was chopping wood, in a mess of chip-littered snow.
“Hello, Terry. Come for keeps.”
“Fine, Slim. Say, there’s a lot of dishes in the shack need washing.”