The Tyranny of the Dark

by Hamlin Garland

I[ToC]

THE MODERNISTS

The Bacteriologic Department of the Corlear Medical School stood at this time on one of the cross-streets of the old East Side, not far from Corlear Park. It was a large, old-fashioned brick building, worn of threshold, and as ugly in line as a livery barn. Its entrance was merely a gap in the wall, its windows rectangular openings to let in the light. Not one touch of color or grace, not one dignified line could be detected throughout its whole exterior. It was constructed for use, not ornament.

Interiorly it was quite as utilitarian. Its halls, bare and cheerless, echoed to the tread and were repellent as those of a barracks. The visitor felt chilled, disappointed, as if he had been met by the insolent servant of an indifferent hostess. It seemed the home of the mathematical, the mechanical, the material; but this was a mistake. It was a house of dreams. The right knock at one of those ugly doors would permit one to step into the presence of the most cheery, the most learned, the most imaginative of individuals—the man of germs, poet, dreamer, and experimentalist, absorbed in the pursuit of the unattainable, concerned with the ultimate structure of organic life, baffled, yet toiling on for love of his work, while the sick of the world believe in him as an angel of altruism.

The far-away rivers of the world have all been traversed and mapped, but the streams of blood in the arteries of man are filled with the unknown. The habits of the Esquimaux, the customs of the dwarfs of Central Africa, the ways of the baboons of Sumatra are minutely set to book, but the wars of the phagocytes remain indeterminate, unexplained. With microscope to his eye the bacteriologist is now examining the constituent parts of the blood, isolating, breeding, and minutely studying the germs of fevers, the growths of tumors, and other elemental forms of human parasites, in order to discover their antagonisms, their likings; for in these jungles of the flesh the war of races proceeds quite as in the Amazonian forests—the white cells against the red, devouring, destroying.

The men behind these bald, bleak doors are tireless workers as well as seers and sages. They toil (at ridiculously low salaries) in the avowed hope of eradicating diseases. They do not pause in dismay of the insoluble. They—or such as they—discovered the cure for small-pox, for hydrophobia, diphtheria, and for yellow-fever. They and their like brought chloroform to the woman in travail, and ether to the wounded soldier. They have enormously reduced the number of those who die on the battle-field by their antiseptic dressings, and by one discovery after another have made infantile diseases less destructive. They already control yellow-fever and are about to eradicate typhoid—yet they say "our work is but begun."

Here one comes upon their dreams. Calm and contained as their words are, their hearts are aflame with passion for the undiscovered. They are akin to those who seek the theoretic poles of the earth, undaunted by endless defeats. With quickening breath they watch the electrons flame and fall, seeing the ultimate constitution of matter almost within their grasp, and yet they do not permit their dreams to blind or weaken them in their wearisome, hopeless quest.

They have their heroism for humanity, too. They meet death face to face, as they pry close into the cause of decay, the secret of morbid growth. There is more danger in certain germs than in lions. Blood-poisoning is to the surgeon a more constant menace than hunger to an Arctic explorer. These students never know what destroyer they may unwittingly unloose. Cross-section of abnormal tissue is more entrancing than a rose-leaf, a cluster of bacilli more beautiful than a snowflake. They have gone past all creeds, these calm young men, but they bow before the unspeakable majesty of the unknown. To them the Hebrew Scriptures are but the tales of minstrels in the childhood of the race, Mohammed a dreamer of baseless visions, and Christ but incarnate love in an age of war. The Creator they conceive is too profound to admit of any attribute. He neither thinks nor feels, and the life that pulses at the base of the first faint cell is a part of the same power that binds the stars to their circling suns.

Notwithstanding their daily contact with the most appalling cases of disease and death, they come and go briskly with jocular greetings on the stair-ways. They return to their homes each night to read, to smoke their pipes, deporting themselves like commonplace fathers and brothers and husbands. They even make love like other men; but, nevertheless, they may be overtaken in muse like alchemists, subject to fear and hope like children. To the business-man their ways are ways of silence and sorcery. Their deep-hid convictions are at variance with all theories of Christian redemption, and the realities of their realm more startling than any romance of war or peace. To them matter is as insoluble as the transforming forces which emanate from it. They play with nerves, laying bare the beating heart of life, forever finding, yet forever failing.