Often he knelt by his bed and let his mind run free. It was very much like prayer, though certainly there was no formal invocation, no consciousness of a Supreme Being—other than Max Gottlieb. This night, as he knelt, with the wrinkles softening in his drawn face, he meditated, “I was asinine that I should ever scold the commercialists! This salesman fellow, he has his feet on the ground. How much more aut’entic the worst counter-jumper than frightened professors! Fine dieners! Freedom! No teaching of imbeciles! Du Heiliger!”
But he had no contract with Dawson Hunziker.
III
In the medical periodicals the Dawson Hunziker Company published full-page advertisements, most starchy and refined in type, announcing that Professor Max Gottlieb, perhaps the most distinguished immunologist in the world, had joined their staff.
In his Chicago clinic, one Dr. Rouncefield chuckled, “That’s what becomes of these super-highbrows. Pardon me if I seem to grin.”
In the laboratories of Ehrlich and Roux, Bordet and Sir David Bruce, sorrowing men wailed, “How could old Max have gone over to that damned pill-pedler? Why didn’t he come to us? Oh, well, if he didn’t want to—Voila! He is dead.”
In the village of Wheatsylvania, in North Dakota, a young doctor protested to his wife, “Of all the people in the world! I wouldn’t have believed it! Max Gottlieb falling for those crooks!”
“I don’t care!” said his wife. “If he’s gone into business, he had some good reason for it. I told you, I’d leave you for—”
“Oh, well,” sighingly, “give and forgive. I learned a lot from Gottlieb and I’m grateful for— God, Leora, I wish he hadn’t gone wrong!”
And Max Gottlieb, with his three young and a pale, slow-moving wife, was arriving at the station in Pittsburgh, tugging a shabby wicker bag, an immigrant bundle, and a Bond Street dressing-case. From the train he had stared up at the valiant cliffs, down to the smoke-tinged splendor of the river, and his heart was young. Here was fiery enterprise, not the flat land and flat minds of Winnemac. At the station-entrance every dingy taxicab seemed radiant to him, and he marched forth a conqueror.