Page:Arrowsmith - Sinclair Lewis.pdf/318

 laboratory, he removed his military blouse, looked down to the lights on the blue-black river, smoked a little, thought what a dog he was not to be gentler to Leora, and damned Bert Tozer and Pickerbaugh and Tubbs and anybody else who was handy to his memory before he absent-mindedly wavered to the incubator, and found that the flask, in which there should have been a perceptible cloudy growth, had no longer any signs of bacteria—of staphylococci.

"Now what the hell!" he cried. "Why, the broth's as clear as when I seeded it! Now what the— Think of this fool accident coming up just when I was going to start something new!"

He hastened from the incubator, in a closet off the corridor, to his laboratory and, holding the flask under a strong light, made certain that he had seen aright. He fretfully prepared a slide from the flask contents and examined it under the microscope. He discovered nothing but shadows of what had been bacteria: thin outlines, the form still there but the cell substance gone; minute skeletons on an infinitesimal battlefield.

He raised his head from the microscope, rubbed his tired eyes, reflectively rubbed his neck—his blouse was off, his collar on the floor, his shirt open at the throat. He considered:

"Something funny here. This culture was growing all right, and now it's committed suicide. Never heard of bugs doing that before. I've hit something! What caused it? Some chemical change? Something organic?"

Now in Martin Arrowsmith there were no decorative heroisms, no genius for amours, no exotic wit, no edifyingly borne misfortunes. He presented neither picturesque elegance nor a moral message. He was full of hasty faults and of perverse honesty; a young man often unkindly, often impolite. But he had one gift: a curiosity whereby he saw nothing as ordinary. Had he been an acceptable hero, like Major Rippleton Holabird, he would have chucked the contents of the flask into the sink, avowed with pretty modesty, "Silly! I've made some error!" and gone his ways. But Martin, being Martin, walked prosaically up and down his laboratory, snarling, "Now there was some cause for that, and I'm going to find out what it was."

He did have one romantic notion: he would telephone to Leora and tell her that splendor was happening, and she wasn't