“I do rather wish he wouldn’t. So sorry to have offended him by going and getting wounded. I’ll remember and not do it again! Such a fuss for a war record as insignificant as mine! What happened was: when the war broke out in ’14 I was in England, studying under Sherrington. I pretended to be a Canadian and joined up with the medical corps and got mine within three weeks and got hoofed out, and that was the end of my magnificent career! Here’s somebody arriving.”
His easy gallantry won Martin complete. Leora was equally captivated by Mrs. Holabird, and they went home from the dinner in new enchantment.
So began for them a white light of happiness. Martin was scarce more blissful in his undisturbed work than in his life outside the laboratory.
All the first week he forgot to ask what his salary was to be. Then it became a game to wait till the end of the month. Evenings, in little restaurants, Leora and he would speculate about it.
The Institute would surely not pay him less than the twenty-five hundred dollars a year he had received at the Rouncefield Clinic, but on evenings when he was tired it dropped to fifteen hundred, and one evening when they had Burgundy he raised it to thirty-five hundred.
When his first monthly check came, neat in a little sealed envelope, he dared not look at it. He took it home to Leora. In their hotel room they stared at the envelope as though it was likely to contain poison. Martin opened it shakily; he stared, and whispered, “Oh, those decent people! They’re paying me—this is for four hundred and twenty dollars—they’re paying me five thousand a year!”
Mrs. Holabird, a white kitten of a woman, helped Leora find a three-room flat with a spacious living-room, in an old house near Gramercy Park, and helped her furnish it with good bits, second-hand. When Martin was permitted to look he cried, “I hope we stay here for fifty years!”
This was the Grecian isle where they found peace. Presently they had friends: the Holabirds, Dr. Billy Smith—the thin-bearded bio-chemist, who had an intelligent taste in music and German beer—an anatomist whom Martin met at a Winnemac alumni dinner, and always Max Gottlieb.
Gottlieb had found his own serenity. In the Seventies he had a brown small flat, smelling of tobacco and leather books. His son Robert had graduated from City College and gone bustlingly into business. Miriam kept up her music while she guarded her father—a dumpling of a girl, holy fire behind the deceptive flesh. After an evening of Gottlieb’s acrid doubting, Martin was inspired to hasten to the laboratory and attempt a thousand new queries into the laws of microörganisms, a task which usually began with blasphemously destroying all the work he had recently done.
Even Terry Wickett became more tolerable. Martin perceived that Wickett’s snarls were partly a Clif Clawson misconception of humor, but partly a resentment, as great as Gottlieb’s, of the morphological scientists who ticket things with the nicest little tickets, who name things and rename them and never analyze them. Wickett often worked all night; he was to be seen in shirt-sleeves, his sulky red hair rumpled, sitting with a stop-watch before a constant temperature bath for hours. Now and then it was a relief to have the surly intentness of Wickett instead of the elegance of Rippleton Holabird, which demanded from Martin so much painful elegance in turn, at a time when he was sunk beyond sounding in his experimentation.