VII
Martin closed his flat—their flat—with a cold swift fury, lest he yield to his misery in finding among Leora’s possessions a thousand fragments which brought her back: the frock she had bought for Capitola McGurk’s dinner, a petrified chocolate she had hidden away to munch illegally by night, a memorandum, “Get almonds for Sandy.” He took a grimly impersonal room in a hotel, and sunk himself in work. There was nothing for him but work and the harsh friendship of Terry Wickett.
His first task was to check the statistics of his St. Swithin treatments and the new figures still coming in from Stokes. Some of them were shaky, some suggested that the value of phage certainly had been confirmed, but there was nothing final. He took his figures to Raymond Pearl the biometrician, who thought less of them than did Martin himself.
He had already made a report of his work to the Director and the Trustees of the Institute, with no conclusion except “the results await statistical analysis and should have this before they are published.” But Holabird had run wild, the newspapers had reported wonders, and in on Martin poured demands that he send out phage; inquiries as to whether he did not have a phage for tuberculosis, for syphilis; offers that he take charge of this epidemic and that.
Pearl had pointed out that his agreeable results in first phaging the whole of Carib village must be questioned, because it was possible that when he began, the curve of the disease had already passed its peak. With this and the other complications, viewing his hot work in St. Hubert as coldly as though it were the pretense of a man whom he had never seen, Martin decided that he had no adequate proof, and strode in to see the Director.
Holabird was gentle and pretty, but he sighed that if this conclusion were published, he would have to take back all the things he had said about the magnificence which, presumably, he had inspired his subordinate to accomplish. He was gentle and pretty, but firm; Martin was to suppress (Holabird did not say “suppress”—he said “leave to me for further consideration”) the real statistical results, and issue the report with an ambiguous summary.
Martin was furious, Holabird delicately relentless. Martin hastened to Terry, declaring that he would resign—would denounce—would expose—Yes! He would! He no longer had to support Leora. He’d work as a drug-clerk. He’d go back right now and tell the Holy Wren—
“Hey! Slim! Wait a minute! Hold your horses!” observed Terry. “Just get along with Holy for a while, and we’ll work out something we can do together and be independent. Meanwhile you have got your lab here, and you still have some physical chemistry to learn! And, uh—Slim, I haven’t said anything about your St. Hubert stuff, but you know and I know you bunged it up badly. Can you come into court with clean hands, if you’re going to indict the Holy One? Though I do agree that aside from being a dirty, lying, social-climbing, sneaking, power-grabbing hypocrite, he’s all right. Hold on. We’ll fix up something. Why, son, we’ve just been learning our science; we’re just beginning to work.”
Then Holabird published officially, under the Institute’s seal, Martin’s original report to the Trustees, with such quaint revisions as a change of “the results should have analysis” to “while statistical analysis would seem desirable, it is evident that this new treatment has accomplished all that had been hoped.”
Again Martin went mad, again Terry calmed him; and with a hard fury unlike his eagerness of the days when he had known that Leora was waiting for him he resumed his physical chemistry.
He learned the involved mysteries of freezing-point determinations, osmotic pressure determinations, and tried to apply Northrop’s generalizations on enzymes to the study of phage.
He became absorbed in mathematical laws which strangely predicted natural phenomena; his world was cold, exact, austerely materialistic, bitter to those who founded their logic on impressions. He was daily more scornful toward the counters of paving stones, the renamers of species, the compilers of irrelevant data. In his absorption the pleasant seasons passed unseen.
Once he raised his head in astonishment to perceive that it was spring; once Terry and he tramped two hundred miles through the Pennsylvania hills, by summer roads; but it seemed only a day later when it was Christmas, and Holabird was being ever so jolly and yuley about the Institute.
The absence of Gottlieb may have been good for Martin, since he no longer turned to the master for solutions in tough queries. When he took up diffusion problems, he began to develop his own apparatus, and whether it was from inborn ingenuity or merely from a fury of labor, he was so competent that he won from Terry the almost overwhelming praise: “Why, that’s not so darn bad, Slim!”
The sureness to which Max Gottlieb seems to have been born came to Martin slowly, after many stumblings, but it came. He desired a perfection of technique in the quest for absolute and provable fact; he desired as greatly as any Pater to “burn with a hard gem-like flame,” and he desired not to have ease and repute in the marketplace, but rather to keep free of those follies, lest they confuse him and make him soft.
Holabird was as much bewildered as Tubbs would have been by the ramifications of Martin’s work. What did he think he was anyway—a bacteriologist or a biophysicist? But Holabird was won by the scientific world’s reception of Martin’s first important paper, on the effect of X-rays, gamma rays, and beta rays on the anti-Shiga phage. It was praised in Paris and Brussels and Cambridge as much as in New York, for its insight and for “the clarity and to perhaps be unscientifically enthusiastic, the sheer delight and style of its presentation,” as Professor Berkeley Wurtz put it; which may be indicated by quoting the first paragraph of the paper:
In a preliminary publication, I have reported a marked qualitative destructive effect of the radiations from radium emanations on Bacteriophage-anti-Shiga. In the present paper it is shown that X-rays, gamma rays, and beta rays produce identical inactivating effects on this bacteriophage. Furthermore, a quantitative relation is demonstrated to exist between this inactivation and the radiations that produce it. The results obtained from this quantitative study permit the statement that the percentage of inactivation, as measured by determining the units of bacteriophage remaining after irradiation by gamma and beta rays of a suspension of fixed virulence, is a function of the two variables, millicuries and hours. The following equation accounts quantitatively for the experimental results obtained:
K
=
λ
log
e
u
0
u
E
0
(
ε
−
λ
t
1
)
K
λ
u
0
u
E
0
ε
λ
t
1
When Director Holabird saw the paper—Yeo was vicious enough to take it in and ask his opinion—he said, “Splendid, oh, I say, simply splendid! I’ve just had the chance to skim through it, old boy, but I shall certainly read it carefully, the first free moment I have.”