I
The McGurk Building. A sheer wall, thirty blank stories of glass and limestone, down in the pinched triangle whence New York rules a quarter of the world.
Martin was not overwhelmed by his first hint of New York; after a year in the Chicago Loop, Manhattan seemed leisurely. But when from the elevated railroad he beheld the Woolworth Tower, he was exalted. To him architecture had never existed; buildings were larger or smaller bulks containing more or less interesting objects. His most impassioned architectural comment had been, “There’s a cute bungalow; be nice place to live.” Now he pondered, “Like to see that tower every day—clouds and storms behind it and everything—so sort of satisfying.”
He came along Cedar Street, among thunderous trucks portly with wares from all the world; came to the bronze doors of the McGurk Building and a corridor of intemperately colored terracotta, with murals of Andean Indians, pirates booming up the Spanish Main, guarded gold-trains, and the stout walls of Cartagena. At the Cedar Street end of the corridor, a private street, one block long, was the Bank of the Andes and Antilles (Ross McGurk, chairman of the board), in whose gold-crusted sanctity redheaded Yankee exporters drew drafts on Quito, and clerks hurled breathless Spanish at bulky women. A sign indicated, at the Liberty Street end, “Passenger Offices, McGurk Line, weekly sailings for the West Indies and South America.”
Born to the prairies, never far from the sight of the cornfields, Martin was conveyed to blazing lands and portentous enterprises.
One of the row of bronze-barred elevators was labeled “Express to McGurk Institute.” He entered it proudly, feeling himself already a part of the godly association. They rose swiftly, and he had but half-second glimpses of ground glass doors with the signs of mining companies, lumber companies, Central American railroad companies.
The McGurk Institute is probably the only organization for scientific research in the world which is housed in an office building. It has the twenty-ninth and thirtieth stories of the McGurk Building, and the roof is devoted to its animal house and to tiled walks along which (above a world of stenographers and bookkeepers and earnest gentlemen who desire to sell Better-Bilt Garments to the golden dons of the Argentine) saunter rapt scientists dreaming of osmosis in Spirogyra.
Later, Martin was to note that the reception-room of the Institute was smaller, yet more forbiddingly polite, in its white paneling and Chippendale chairs, than the lobby of the Rouncefield Clinic, but now he was unconscious of the room, of the staccato girl attendant, of everything except that he was about to see Max Gottlieb, for the first time in five years.
At the door of the laboratory he stared hungrily.
Gottlieb was thin-cheeked and dark as ever, his hawk nose bony, his fierce eyes demanding, but his hair had gone gray, the flesh round his mouth was sunken, and Martin could have wept at the feebleness with which he rose. The old man peered down at him, his hand on Martin’s shoulder, but he said only:
“Ah! Dis is good … Your laboratory is three doors down the hall … But I object to one thing in the good paper you send me. You say, ‘The regularity of the rate at which the streptolysin disappears suggests that an equation may be found—’ ”
“But it can, sir!”
“Then why did you not make the equation?”
“Well—I don’t know. I wasn’t enough of a mathematician.”
“Then you should not have published till you knew your math!”
“I—Look, Dr. Gottlieb, do you really think I know enough to work here? I want terribly to succeed.”
“Succeed? I have heard that word. It is English? Oh, yes, it is a word that liddle schoolboys use at the University of Winnemac. It means passing examinations. But there are no examinations to pass here … Martin, let us be clear. You know something of laboratory technique; you have heard about dese bacilli; you are not a good chemist, and mathematics—pfui!—most terrible! But you have curiosity and you are stubborn. You do not accept rules. Therefore I t’ink you will either make a very good scientist or a very bad one, and if you are bad enough, you will be popular with the rich ladies who rule this city, New York, and you can gif lectures for a living or even become, if you get to be plausible enough, a college president. So anyvay, it will be interesting.”
Half an hour later they were arguing ferociously, Martin asserting that the whole world ought to stop warring and trading and writing and get straightway into laboratories to observe new phenomena; Gottlieb insisting that there were already too many facile scientists, that the one thing necessary was the mathematical analysis (and often the destruction) of phenomena already observed.
It sounded bellicose, and all the while Martin was blissful with the certainty that he had come home.
The laboratory in which they talked (Gottlieb pacing the floor, his long arms fantastically knotted behind his thin back; Martin leaping on and off tall stools) was not in the least remarkable—a sink, a bench with racks of numbered test-tubes, a microscope, a few notebooks and hydrogen-ion charts, a grotesque series of bottles connected by glass and rubber tubes on an ordinary kitchen table at the end of the room—yet now and then during his tirades Martin looked about reverently.
Gottlieb interrupted their debate: “What work do you want to do here?”
“Why, sir, I’d like to help you, if I can. I suppose you’re cleaning up some things on the synthesis of antibodies.”
“Yes, I t’ink I can bring immunity reactions under the mass action law. But you are not to help me. You are to do your own work. What do you want to do? This is not a clinic; wit’ patients going through so neat in a row!”
“I want to find a hemolysin for which there’s an antibody. There isn’t any for streptolysin. I’d like to work with staphylolysin. Would you mind?”
“I do not care what you do—if you just do not steal my staph cultures out of the icebox, and if you will look mysterious all the time, so Dr. Tubbs, our Director, will t’ink you are up to something big. So! I haf only one suggestion: when you get stuck in a problem, I have a fine collection of detective stories in my office. But no. Should I be serious—this once, when you are just come?
“Perhaps I am a crank, Martin. There are many who hate me. There are plots against me—oh, you t’ink I imagine it, but you shall see! I make many mistakes. But one thing I keep always pure: the religion of a scientist.
“To be a scientist—it is not just a different job, so that a man should choose between being a scientist and being an explorer or a bond-salesman or a physician or a king or a farmer. It is a tangle of ve‑ry obscure emotions, like mysticism, or wanting to write poetry; it makes its victim all different from the good normal man. The normal man, he does not care much what he does except that he should eat and sleep and make love. But the scientist is intensely religious—he is so religious that he will not accept quarter-truths, because they are an insult to his faith.
“He wants that everything should be subject to inexorable laws. He is equal opposed to the capitalists who t’ink their silly money-grabbing is a system, and to liberals who t’ink man is not a fighting animal; he takes both the American booster and the European aristocrat, and he ignores all their blithering. Ignores it! All of it! He hates the preachers who talk their fables, but he iss not too kindly to the anthropologists and historians who can only make guesses, yet they have the nerf to call themselves scientists! Oh, yes, he is a man that all nice good-natured people should naturally hate!
“He speaks no meaner of the ridiculous faith-healers and chiropractors than he does of the doctors that want to snatch our science before it is tested and rush around hoping they heal people, and spoiling all the clues with their footsteps; and worse than the men like hogs, worse than the imbeciles who have not even heard of science, he hates pseudo-scientists, guess-scientists—like these psychoanalysts; and worse than those comic dream-scientists he hates the men that are allowed in a clean kingdom like biology but know only one textbook and how to lecture to nincompoops all so popular! He is the only real revolutionary, the authentic scientist, because he alone knows how liddle he knows.
“He must be heartless. He lives in a cold, clear light. Yet dis is a funny t’ing: really, in private, he is not cold nor heartless—so much less cold than the Professional Optimists. The world has always been ruled by the Philanthropists: by the doctors that want to use therapeutic methods they do not understand, by the soldiers that want something to defend their country against, by the preachers that yearn to make everybody listen to them, by the kind manufacturers that love their workers, by the eloquent statesmen and softhearted authors—and see once what a fine mess of hell they haf made of the world! Maybe now it is time for the scientist, who works and searches and never goes around howling how he loves everybody!
“But once again always remember that not all the men who work at science are scientists. So few! The rest—secretaries, press-agents, camp-followers! To be a scientist is like being a Goethe: it is born in you. Sometimes I t’ink you have a liddle of it born in you. If you haf, there is only one t’ing—no, there is two t’ings you must do: work twice as hard as you can, and keep people from using you. I will try to protect you from Success. It is all I can do. So … I should wish, Martin, that you will be very happy here. May Koch bless you!”