Page:Arrowsmith - Sinclair Lewis.pdf/334

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324
ARROWSMITH

three professors of science in various universities, should meet and give approval, would Martin be a department-head. Meantime Tubbs demanded:

"Now, Martin, you must hasten and publish your results. Get right to it. In fact you should have done it before this. Throw your material together as rapidly as possible and send a note in to the Society for Experimental Biology and Medicine, to be published in their next proceedings."

"But I'm not ready to publish! I want to have every loophole plugged up before I announce anything whatever!"

"Nonsense! That attitude is old-fashioned. This is no longer an age of parochialism but of competition, in art and science just as much as in commerce—coöperation with your own group, but with those outside it, competition to the death! Plug up the holes thoroughly, later, but we can't have somebody else stealing a march on us. Remember you have your name to make. The way to make it is by working with me—toward the greatest good for the greatest number."

As Martin began his paper, thinking of resigning but giving it up because Tubbs seemed to him at least better than the Pickerbaughs, he had a vision of a world of little scientists, each busy in a roofless cell. Perched on a cloud, watching them, was the divine Tubbs, a glory of whiskers, ready to blast any of the little men who stopped being earnest and wasted time on speculation about anything which he had not assigned to them. Back of their welter of coops, unseen by the tutelary Tubbs, the lean giant figure of Gottlieb stood sardonic on a stormy horizon.

Literary expression was not easy to Martin. He delayed with his paper, while Tubbs became irritable and whipped him on. The experiments had ceased; there was misery and pen-scratching and much tearing of manuscript paper in Martin's particular roofless cell.

For once he had no refuge in Leora. She cried:

"Why not? Ten thousand a year would be awfully nice, Sandy. Gee! We've always been so poor, and you do like nice flats and things. And to boss your own department—And you could consult Dr. Gottlieb just the same. He's a department-head, isn't he, and yet he keeps independent of Dr. Tubbs. Oh, I'm for it!"

And slowly, under the considerable increase in respect given to him at Institute lunches, Martin himself was "for it."