V
For once Gottlieb did not amble into his laboratory but curtly summoned him. In a corner of Gottlieb’s office, a den opening from his laboratory, was Terry Wickett, rolling a cigarette and looking sardonic.
Gottlieb observed, “Martin, I haf taken the privilege of talking you over with Terry, and we concluded that you haf done well enough now so it is time you stop puttering and go to work.”
“I thought I was working, sir!”
All the wide placidness of his halcyon days was gone; he saw himself driven back to Pickerbaughism.
Wickett intruded, “No, you haven’t. You’ve just been showing that you’re a bright boy who might work if he only knew something.”
While Martin turned on Wickett with a “Who the devil are you?” expression, Gottlieb went on:
“The fact is, Martin, you can do nothing till you know a little mathematics. If you are not going to be a cookbook bacteriologist, like most of them, you must be able to handle some of the fundamentals of science. All living things are physicochemical machines. Then how can you make progress if you do not know physical chemistry, and how can you know physical chemistry without much mathematics?”
“Yuh,” said Wickett, “you’re lawn-mowing and daisy-picking, not digging.”
Martin faced them. “But rats, Wickett, a man can’t know everything. I’m a bacteriologist, not a physicist. Strikes me a fellow ought to use his insight, not just a chest of tools, to make discoveries. A good sailor could find his way at sea even if he didn’t have instruments, and a whole Lusitania-ful of junk wouldn’t make a good sailor out of a dub. Man ought to develop his brain, not depend on tools.”
“Ye-uh, but if there were charts and quadrants in existence, a sailor that cruised off without ’em would be a chump!”
For half an hour Martin defended himself, not too politely, before the gem-like Gottlieb, the granite Wickett. All the while he knew that he was sickeningly ignorant.
They ceased to take interest. Gottlieb was looking at his notebooks, Wickett was clumping off to work. Martin glared at Gottlieb. The man meant so much that he could be furious with him as he would have been with Leora, with his own self.
“I’m sorry you think I don’t know anything,” he raged, and departed with the finest dramatic violence. He slammed into his own laboratory, felt freed, then wretched. Without volition, like a drunken man, he stormed to Wickett’s room, protesting, “I suppose you’re right. My physical chemistry is nix, and my math rotten. What am I going to do—what am I going to do?”
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 thermodynamical 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 cooperation 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.