III
For science Joyce had great respect and no understanding. Often she asked Martin to explain his work, but when he was glowing, making diagrams with his thumbnail on the tablecloth, she would interrupt him with a gracious “Darling—do you mind—just a second—Plinder, isn’t there any more of the sherry?”
When she turned back to him, though her eyes were kind his enthusiasm was gone.
She came to his laboratory, asked to see his flasks and tubes, and begged him to bully her into understanding, but she never sat back watching for silent hours.
Suddenly, in his bogged floundering in the laboratory, he touched solid earth. He blundered into the effect of phage on the mutation of bacterial species—very beautiful, very delicate—and after plodding months when he had been a sane citizen, an almost good husband, an excellent bridge-player, and a rotten workman, he knew again the happiness of high taut insanity.
He wanted to work nights, every night. During his uninspired fumbling, there had been nothing to hold him at the Institute after five, and Joyce had become used to having him flee to her. Now he showed an inconvenient ability to ignore engagements, to snap at delightful guests who asked him to explain all about science, to forget even her and the baby.
“I’ve got to work evenings!” he said. “I can’t be regular and easy about it when I’m caught by a big experiment, any more than you could be regular and easy and polite when you were gestating the baby.”
“I know but—Darling, you get so nervous when you’re working like this. Heavens, I don’t care how much you offend people by missing engagements—well, after all, I wish you wouldn’t, but I do know it may be unavoidable. But when you make yourself so drawn and trembly, are you gaining time in the long run? It’s just for your own sake. Oh, I have it! Wait! You’ll see what a scientist I am! No, I won’t explain—not yet!”
Joyce had wealth and energy. A week later, flushed, slim, gallant, joyous, she said to him after dinner, “I’ve got a surprise for you!”
She led him to the unoccupied rooms over the garage, behind their house. In that week, using a score of workmen from the most immaculate and elaborate scientific supply-house in the country, she had created for him the best bacteriological laboratory he had ever seen—white-tile floor and enameled brick walls, icebox and incubator, glassware and stains and microscope, a perfect constant-temperature bath—and a technician, trained in Lister and Rockefeller, who had his bedroom behind the laboratory and who announced his readiness to serve Dr. Arrowsmith day or night.
“There!” sang Joyce. “Now when you simply must work evenings, you won’t have to go clear down to Liberty Street. You can duplicate your cultures or whatever you call ’em. If you’re bored at dinner—all right! You can slip out here afterward and work as late as ever you want. Is—Sweet, is it all right? Have I done it right? I tried so hard—I got the best men I could—”
While his lips were against hers he brooded, “To have done this for me! And to be so humble! … And now, curse it, I’ll never be able to get away by myself!”
She so joyfully demanded his finding some fault that, to give her the novel pleasure of being meek, he suggested that the centrifuge was inadequate.
“You wait, my man!” she crowed.
Two evenings after, when they had returned from the opera, she led him to the cement-floored garage beneath his new laboratory, and in a corner, ready to be set up, was a secondhand but adequate centrifuge, a most adequate centrifuge, the masterpiece of the great firm of Berkeley-Saunders—in fact none other than Gladys, whose dismissal from McGurk for her sluttish ways had stirred Martin and Terry to go out and get bountifully drunk.
It was less easy for him, this time, to be grateful, but he worked at it.