Arrowsmith, Sinclair Lewis [children's ebooks free online .TXT] 📗

epidemic at Marseilles. His reserve slipped from him and he talked of himself and of his family as though Martin were a contemporary.

The cousin who was a colonel in Uruguay and the cousin, a rabbi, who was tortured in a pogrom in Moscow. His sick wife⁠—it might be cancer. The three children⁠—the youngest girl, Miriam, she was a good musician, but the boy, the fourteen-year-old, he was a worry; he was saucy, he would not study. Himself, he had worked for years on the synthesis of antibodies; he was at present in a blind alley, and at Mohalis there was no one who was interested, no one to stir him, but he was having an agreeable time massacring the opsonin theory, and that cheered him.

“No, I have done nothing except be unpleasant to people that claim too much, but I have dreams of real discoveries some day. And⁠—No. Not five times in five years do I have students who understand craftsmanship and precision and maybe some big imagination in hypotheses. I t’ink perhaps you may have them. If I can help you⁠—So!

“I do not t’ink you will be a good doctor. Good doctors are fine⁠—often they are artists⁠—but their trade, it is not for us lonely ones that work in labs. Once, I took an M.D. label. In Heidelberg that was⁠—Herr Gott, back in 1875! I could not get much interested in bandaging legs and looking at tongues. I was a follower of Helmholtz⁠—what a wild blithering young fellow! I tried to make researches in the physics of sound⁠—I was bad, most unbelievable, but I learned that in this wale of tears there is nothing certain but the quantitative method. And I was a chemist⁠—a fine stink-maker was I. And so into biology and much trouble. It has been good. I have found one or two things. And if sometimes I feel an exile, cold⁠—I had to get out of Germany one time for refusing to sing ‘Die Wacht am Rhein’ and trying to kill a cavalry captain⁠—he was a stout fellow⁠—I had to choke him⁠—you see I am boasting, but I was a lifely Kerl thirty years ago! Ah! So!

“There is but one trouble of a philosophical bacteriologist. Why should we destroy these amiable pathogenic germs? Are we too sure, when we regard these oh, most unbeautiful young students attending Y.M.C.A.s and singing dinkle-songs and wearing hats with initials burned into them⁠—iss it worth while to protect them from the so elegantly functioning Bacillus typhosus with its lovely flagella? You know, once I asked Dean Silva would it not be better to let loose the pathogenic germs on the world, and so solve all economic questions. But he did not care for my met’od. Oh, well, he is older than I am; he also gives, I hear, some dinner parties with bishops and judges present, all in nice clothes. He would know more than a German Jew who loves Father Nietzsche and Father Schopenhauer (but damn him, he was teleological-minded!) and Father Koch and Father Pasteur and Brother Jacques Loeb and Brother Arrhenius. Ja! I talk foolishness. Let us go look at your slides and so good night.”

When he had left Gottlieb at his stupid brown little house, his face as reticent as though the midnight supper and all the rambling talk had never happened, Martin ran home altogether drunk.

V I

Though bacteriology was all of Martin’s life now, it was the theory of the University that he was also studying pathology, hygiene, surgical anatomy, and enough other subjects to swamp a genius.

Clif Clawson and he lived in a large room with flowered wallpaper, piles of filthy clothes, iron beds, and cuspidors. They made their own breakfasts; they dined on hash at the Pilgrim Lunch Wagon or the Dew Drop Inn. Clif was occasionally irritating; he hated open windows; he talked of dirty socks; he sang “Some die of Diabetes” when Martin was studying; and he was altogether unable to say anything directly. He had to be humorous. He remarked, “Is it your combobulatory concept that we might now feed the old faces?” or “How about ingurgitating a few calories?” But he had for Martin a charm that could not be accounted for by cheerfulness, his shrewdness, his vague courage. The whole of Clif was more than the sum of his various parts.

In the joy of his laboratory work Martin thought rarely of his recent associates in Digamma Pi. He occasionally protested that the Reverend Ira Hinkley was a village policeman and Irving Watters a plumber, that Angus Duer would walk to success over his grandmother’s head, and that for an idiot like Fatty Pfaff to practice on helpless human beings was criminal, but mostly he ignored them and ceased to be a pest. And when he had passed his first triumphs in bacteriology and discovered how remarkably much he did not know, he was curiously humble.

If he was less annoying in regard to his classmates, he was more so in his classrooms. He had learned from Gottlieb the trick of using the word “control” in reference to the person or animal or chemical left untreated during an experiment, as a standard for comparison; and there is no trick more infuriating. When a physician boasted of his success with this drug or that electric cabinet, Gottlieb always snorted, “Where was your control? How many cases did you have under identical conditions, and how many of them did not get the treatment?” Now Martin began to mouth it⁠—control, control, control, where’s your control? where’s your control?⁠—till most of his fellows and a few of his instructors desired to lynch him.

He was particularly tedious in materia medica.

The professor of materia medica, Dr. Lloyd Davidson, would have been an illustrious shopkeeper. He was very popular. From him a future physician could learn that most important of all things: the proper drugs to give a patient, particularly