IV
It is possible that Max Gottlieb was a genius. Certainly he was mad as any genius. He did, during the period of Martin’s internship in Zenith General, a thing more preposterous than any of the superstitions at which he scoffed.
He tried to become an executive and a reformer! He, the cynic, the anarch, tried to found an Institution, and he went at it like a spinster organizing a league to keep small boys from learning naughty words.
He conceived that there might, in this world, be a medical school which should be altogether scientific, ruled by exact quantitative biology and chemistry, with spectacle-fitting and most of surgery ignored, and he further conceived that such an enterprise might be conducted at the University of Winnemac! He tried to be practical about it; oh, he was extremely practical and plausible!
“I admit we should not be able to turn out doctors to cure village bellyaches. And ordinary physicians are admirable and altogether necessary—perhaps. But there are too many of them already. And on the ‘practical’ side, you gif me twenty years of a school that is precise and cautious, and we shall cure diabetes, maybe tuberculosis and cancer, and all these arthritis things that the carpenters shake their heads at them and call them ‘rheumatism.’ So!”
He did not desire the control of such a school, nor any credit. He was too busy. But at a meeting of the American Academy of Sciences he met one Dr. Entwisle, a youngish physiologist from Harvard, who would make an excellent dean. Entwisle admired him, and sounded him on his willingness to be called to Harvard. When Gottlieb outlined his new sort of medical school, Entwisle was fervent. “Nothing I’d like so much as to have a chance at a place like that,” he fluttered, and Gottlieb went back to Mohalis triumphant. He was the more assured because (though he sardonically refused it) he was at this time offered the medical deanship of the University of West Chippewa.
So simple, or so insane, was he that he wrote to Dean Silva politely bidding him step down and hand over his school—his work, his life—to an unknown teacher in Harvard! A courteous old gentleman was Dad Silva, a fit disciple of Osler, but this incredible letter killed his patience. He replied that while he could see the value of basic research, the medical school belonged to the people of the state, and its task was to provide them with immediate and practical attention. For himself, he hinted, if he ever believed that the school would profit by his resignation he would go at once, but he needed a rather broader suggestion than a letter from one of his own subordinates!
Gottlieb retorted with spirit and indiscretion. He damned the People of the State of Winnemac. Were they, in their present condition of nincompoopery, worth any sort of attention? He unjustifiably took his demand over Silva’s head to that great orator and patriot, Dr. Horace Greeley Truscott, president of the University.
President Truscott said, “Really, I’m too engrossed to consider chimerical schemes, however ingenious they may be.”
“You are too busy to consider anything but selling honorary degrees to millionaires for gymnasiums,” remarked Gottlieb.
Next day he was summoned to a special meeting of the University Council. As head of the medical department of bacteriology, Gottlieb was a member of this all-ruling body, and when he entered the long Council Chamber, with its gilt ceiling, its heavy maroon curtains, its somber paintings of pioneers, he started for his usual seat, unconscious of the knot of whispering members, meditating on far-off absorbing things.
“Oh, uh, Professor Gottlieb, will you please sit down there at the far end of the table?” called President Truscott.
Then Gottlieb was aware of tensions. He saw that out of the seven members of the Board of Regents, the four who lived in or near Zenith were present. He saw that sitting beside Truscott was not the dean of the academic department but Dean Silva. He saw that however easily they talked, they were looking at him through the mist of their chatter.
President Truscott announced, “Gentlemen, this joint meeting of the Council and the regents is to consider charges against Professor Max Gottlieb preferred by his dean and by myself.”
Gottlieb suddenly looked old.
“These charges are: Disloyalty to his dean, his president, his regents and to the State of Winnemac. Disloyalty to recognized medical and scholastic ethics. Insane egotism. Atheism. Persistent failure to collaborate with his colleagues, and such inability to understand practical affairs as makes it dangerous to let him conduct the important laboratories and classes with which we have entrusted him. Gentlemen, I shall now prove each of these points, from Professor Gottlieb’s own letters to Dean Silva.”
He proved them.
The chairman of the Board of Regents suggested, “Gottlieb, I think it would simplify things if you just handed us your resignation and permitted us to part in good feeling, instead of having the unpleasant—”
“I’m damned if I will resign!” Gottlieb was on his feet, a lean fury. “Because you all haf schoolboy minds, golf-links minds, you are twisting my expression, and perfectly accurate expression, of a sound revolutionary ideal, which would personally to me be of no value or advantage whatefer, into a desire to steal promotions. That fools should judge honor—!” His long forefinger was a fishhook, reaching for President Truscott’s soul. “No! I will not resign! You can cast me out!”
“I’m afraid, then, we must ask you to leave the room while we vote.” The president was very suave, for so large and strong and hearty a man.
Gottlieb rode his wavering bicycle to the laboratory. It was by telephone message from a brusque girl clerk in the president’s office that he was informed that “his resignation had been accepted.”
He agonized, “Discharge me? They couldn’t! I’m the chief glory, the only glory, of this shopkeepers’ school!” When he comprehended that apparently they very much had discharged him, he was shamed that he should have given them a chance to kick him. But the really dismaying thing was that he should by an effort to be a politician have interrupted the sacred work.
He required peace and a laboratory, at once.
They’d see what fools they were when they heard that Harvard had called him!
He was eager for the mellower ways of Cambridge and Boston. Why had he remained so long in raw Mohalis? He wrote to Dr. Entwisle, hinting that he was willing to hear an offer. He expected a telegram. He waited a week, then had a long letter from Entwisle admitting that he had been premature in speaking for the Harvard faculty. Entwisle presented the faculty’s compliments and their hope that some time they might have the honor of his presence, but as things were now—
Gottlieb wrote to the University of West Chippewa that, after all, he was willing to think about their medical deanship … and had answer that the place was filled, that they had not greatly liked the tone of his former letter, and they did not “care to go into the matter further.”
At sixty-one, Gottlieb had saved but a few hundred dollars—literally a few hundred. Like any bricklayer out of work, he had to have a job or go hungry. He was no longer a genius impatient of interrupted creation but a shabby schoolmaster in disgrace.
He prowled through his little brown house, fingering papers, staring at his wife, staring at old pictures, staring at nothing. He still had a month of teaching—they had dated ahead the resignation which they had written for him—but he was too dispirited to go to the laboratory. He felt unwanted, almost unsafe. His ancient sureness was broken into self-pity. He waited from delivery to delivery for the mail. Surely there would be aid from somebody who knew what he was, what he meant. There were many friendly letters about research, but the sort of men with whom he corresponded did not listen to intercollegiate faculty tattle nor know of his need.
He could not, after the Harvard mischance and the West Chippewa rebuke, approach the universities or the scientific institutes, and he was too proud to write begging letters to the men who revered him. No, he would be businesslike! He applied to a Chicago teachers’ agency, and received a stilted answer promising to look about and inquiring whether he would care to take the position of teacher of physics and chemistry in a suburban high school.
Before he had sufficiently recovered from his fury to be able to reply, his household was overwhelmed by his wife’s sudden agony.
She had been unwell for months. He had wanted her to see a physician, but she had refused, and all the while she was stolidly terrified by the fear that she had cancer of the stomach. Now when she began to vomit blood, she cried to him for help. The Gottlieb who scoffed at medical credos, at “carpenters” and “pill mongers,” had forgotten what he knew of diagnosis, and when he was ill, or his family, he called for the doctor as desperately as any backwoods layman to whom illness was the black malignity of unknown devils.
In unbelievable simplicity he considered that, as his quarrel with Silva was not personal, he could still summon him, and this time he was justified. Silva came, full of excessive benignity, chuckling to himself, “When he’s got something the matter, he doesn’t run for Arrhenius or Jacques Loeb, but for me!” Into the meager cottage the little man brought strength, and Gottlieb gazed down on him trustingly.
Mrs. Gottlieb was suffering. Silva gave her morphine. Not without satisfaction he learned that Gottlieb did not even know the dose. He examined her—his pudgy hands had the sensitiveness if not the precision of Gottlieb’s skeleton fingers. He peered about the airless bedroom: the dark green curtains, the crucifix on the dumpy bureau, the color-print of a virtuously voluptuous maiden. He was bothered by an impression of having recently been in the room. He remembered. It was the twin of the doleful chamber of a German grocer whom he had seen during a consultation a month ago.
He spoke to Gottlieb not as to a colleague or an enemy but as a patient, to be cheered.
“Don’t think there’s any tumorous mass. As of course you know, Doctor, you can tell such a lot by the differences in the shape of the lower border of the ribs, and by the surface of the belly during deep breathing.”
“Oh, yesss.”
“I don’t think you need to worry in the least. We’d better hustle her off to the University Hospital, and we’ll give her a test meal and get her X-rayed and take a look for Boas-Oppler bugs.”
She was taken away, heavy, inert, carried down the cottage steps. Gottlieb was with her. Whether or not he loved her, whether he was capable of ordinary domestic affection, could not be discovered. The need of turning to Dean Silva had damaged his opinion of his own wisdom. It was the final affront, more subtle and more enervating than the offer to teach chemistry to children. As he sat by her bed, his dark face was blank, and the wrinkles which deepened across that mask may have been sorrow, may have been fear … Nor is it known how, through the secure and uninvaded years, he had regarded his wife’s crucifix, which Silva had spied on their bureau—a gaudy plaster crucifix on a box set with gilded shells.
Silva diagnosed it as probable gastric ulcer, and placed her on treatment, with light and frequent meals. She improved, but she remained in the hospital for four weeks, and Gottlieb wondered: Are these doctors deceiving us? Is it really cancer, which by Their mystic craft They are concealing from me who know naught?
Robbed of her silent assuring presence on which night by weary night he had depended, he fretted over his daughters, despaired at their noisy piano-practice, their inability to manage the slattern maid. When they had gone to bed he sat alone in the pale lamplight, unmoving, not reading. He was bewildered. His haughty self was like a robber baron fallen into the hands of rebellious slaves, stooped under a filthy load, the proud eye rheumy and patient with despair, the sword hand chopped off, obscene flies crawling across the gnawed wrist.
It was at this time that he encountered Martin and Leora on the street in Zenith.
He did not look back when they had passed him, but all that afternoon he brooded on them. “That girl, maybe it was she that stole Martin from me—from science! No! He was right. One sees what happens to the fools like me!”
On the day after Martin and Leora had started for Wheatsylvania, singing, Gottlieb went to Chicago to see the teachers’ agency.
The firm was controlled by a Live Wire who had once been a county superintendent of schools. He was not much interested. Gottlieb lost his temper: “Do you make an endeavor to find positions for teachers, or do you merely send out circulars to amuse yourself? Haf you looked up my record? Do you know who I am?”
The agent roared, “Oh, we know about you, all right, all right! I didn’t when I first wrote you, but—You seem to have a good record as a laboratory man, though I don’t see that you’ve produced anything of the slightest use in medicine. We had hoped to give you a chance such as you nor nobody else ever had. John Edtooth, the Oklahoma oil magnate, has decided to found a university that for plant and endowment and individuality will beat anything that’s ever been pulled off in education—biggest gymnasium in the world, with an ex-New York Giant for baseball coach! We thought maybe we might work you in on the bacteriology or the physiology—I guess you could manage to teach that, too, if you boned up on it. But we’ve been making some inquiries. From some good friends of ours, down Winnemac way. And we find that you’re not to be trusted with a position of real responsibility. Why, they fired you for general incompetence! But now that you’ve had your lesson—Do you think you’d be competent to teach Practical Hygiene in Edtooth University?”
Gottlieb was so angry that he forgot to speak English, and as all his cursing was in student German, in a creaky dry voice, the whole scene was very funny indeed to the cackling bookkeeper and the girl stenographers. When he went from that place Max Gottlieb walked slowly, without purpose, and in his eyes were senile tears.