Page:Arrowsmith - Sinclair Lewis.pdf/326

 triumph, of admiration for Gottlieb. He extended his investigation to the intestinal group of organisms and discovered an X Principle against the colon bacillus. At the same time he gave some of the original Principle to a doctor in the Lower Manhattan Hospital for the treatment of boils, and from him had excited reports of cures, more excited inquiries as to what this mystery might be.

With these new victories he went parading in to Gottlieb, and suddenly he was being trounced:

"Oh! So! Beautiful! You let a doctor try it before you finished your research? You want fake reports of cures to get into the newspapers, to be telegraphed about places, and have everybody in the world that has a pimple come tumbling in to be cured, so you will never be able to work? You want to be a miracle man, and not a scientist? You do not want to complete things? You wander off monkey-skipping and flap-doodeling with colon bacillus before you have finish with staph—before you haf really begun your work—before you have found what is the nature of the X Principle? Get out of my office! You are a—a—a college president! Next I know you will be dining with Tubbs, and get your picture in the papers for a smart cure-vendor!"

Martin crept out, and when he met Billy Smith in the corridor and the little chemist twittered, "Up to something big? Haven't seen you lately," Martin answered in the tone of Doc Vickerson's assistant in Elk Mills:

"Oh—no—gee—I'm just grubbing along, I guess."

As sharply and quite as impersonally as he would have watched the crawling illness of an infected guinea pig, Martin watched himself, in the madness of overwork, drift toward neurasthenia. With considerable interest he looked up the symptoms of neurasthenia, saw one after another of them twitch at him, and casually took the risk.

From an irritability which made him a thoroughly impossible person to live with, he passed into a sick nervousness in which he missed things for which he reached, dropped test-tubes, gasped at sudden footsteps behind him. Dr. Yeo's croaking voice became to him a fever, an insult, and he waited with his whole body clenched, muttering, "Shut up—shut up