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

got a single thing to kick about! Slim, where’s the catch? You can bet there is one⁠—there always is!”

In a year of divine work, the catch did not appear. They had their monkeys, their laboratories and garçons, and their unbroken leisure; they began the most exciting work they had ever known, and decidedly the most nerve-jabbing. Monkeys are unreasonable animals; they delight in developing tuberculosis on no provocation whatever; in captivity they have a liking for epidemics; and they make scenes by cursing at their masters in seven dialects.

“They’re so up-and-coming,” sighed Terry. “I feel like lettin’ ’em go and retiring to Birdies’ Rest to grow potatoes. Why should we murder live-wires like them to save pasty-faced, big-bellied humans from pneumonia?”

Their first task was to determine with accuracy the tolerated dose of the quinine derivative, and to study its effects on the hearing and vision, and on the kidneys, as shown by endless determinations of blood sugar and blood urea. While Martin did the injections and observed the effect on the monkeys and lost himself in chemistry, Terry toiled (all night, all next day, then a drink and a frowsy nap and all night again) on new methods of synthesizing the quinine derivative.

This was the most difficult period of Martin’s life. To work, staggering sleepy, all night, to drowse on a bare table at dawn and to breakfast at a greasy lunch-counter, these were natural and amusing, but to explain to Joyce why he had missed her dinner to a lady sculptor and a lawyer whose grandfather had been a Confederate General, this was impossible. He won a brief tolerance by explaining that he really had longed to kiss her good night, that he did appreciate the basket of sandwiches which she had sent, and that he was about to remove pneumonia from the human race, a statement which he healthily doubted.

But when he had missed four dinners in succession; when she had raged, “Can you imagine how awful it was for Mrs. Thorn to be short a man at the last moment?” when she had wailed, “I didn’t so much mind your rudeness on the other nights, but this evening, when I had nothing to do and sat home alone and waited for you”⁠—then he writhed.

Martin and Terry began to produce pneumonia in their monkeys and to treat them, and they had success which caused them to waltz solemnly down the corridor. They could save the monkeys from pneumonia invariably, when the infection had gone but one day, and most of them on the second day and the third.

Their results were complicated by the fact that a certain number of monkeys recovered by themselves, and this they allowed for by simple-looking figures which took days of stiff, shoulder-aching sitting over papers⁠ ⁠… one wild-haired collarless man at a table, while the other walked among stinking cages of monkeys, clucking to them, calling them Bess and Rover, and grunting placidly, “Oh, you would bite me, would you, sweetheart!” and all the while, kindly but merciless as the gods, injecting them with the deadly pneumonia.

They came into a high upland where the air was thin with failures. They studied in the test-tube the breakdown products of pneumococci⁠—and failed. They constructed artificial body fluids (carefully, painfully, inadequately), they tried the effect of the derivative on germs in this artificial blood⁠—and failed.

Then Holabird heard of their previous success, and came down on them with laurels and fury.

He understood, he said, that they had a cure for pneumonia. Very well! The Institute could do with the credit for curing that undesirable disease, and Terry and Martin would kindly publish their findings (mentioning McGurk) at once.

“We will not! Look here, Holabird!” snarled Terry, “I thought you were going to let us alone!”

“I have! Nearly a year! Till you should complete your research. And now you’ve completed it. It’s time to let the world know what you’re doing.”

“If I did, the world would know a doggone sight more’n I do! Nothing doing, Chief. Maybe we can publish, in a year from now.”

“You’ll publish now or⁠—”

“All right, Holy. The blessed moment has arrived. I quit! And I’m so gentlemanly that I do it without telling you what I think of you!”

Thus was Terry Wickett discharged from McGurk. He patented the process of synthesizing his quinine derivative and retired to Birdies’ Rest, to build a laboratory out of his small savings and spend a life of independent research supported by a restricted sale of sera and of his drug.

For Terry, wifeless and valetless, this was easy enough, but for Martin it was not simple.

III

Martin assumed that he would resign. He explained it to Joyce. How he was to combine a town house and a Greenwich castle with flannel-shirt collaboration at Birdies’ Rest he had not quite planned, but he was not going to be disloyal.

“Can you beat it! The Holy Wren fires Terry but doesn’t dare touch me! I waited simply because I wanted to watch Holabird figure out what I’d do. And now⁠—”

He was elucidating it to her in their⁠—in her⁠—car, on the way home from a dinner at which he had been so gaily charming to an important dowager that Joyce had crooned, “What a fool Latham Ireland was to say he couldn’t be polite!”

“I’m free, by thunder at last I’m free, because I’ve worked up to something that’s worth being free for!” he exulted.

She laid her fine hand on his, and begged, “Wait! I want to think. Please! Do be quiet for a moment.”

Then: “Mart, if you went on working with Mr. Wickett, you’d have to be leaving me constantly.”

“Well⁠—”

“I really don’t think that would be quite nice⁠—I mean especially now, because I fancy I’m going to have a baby.”

He made a sound of surprise.

“Oh, I’m not going to do the weeping mother. And I don’t know whether I’m glad or furious, though I do believe I’d like to have one baby. But it does complicate things, you know. And personally, I should be