With all his amateurish fumbling, Martin had one characteristic without which there can be no science: a wide-ranging, sniffing, snuffling, undignified, unselfdramatizing curiosity, and it drove him on.
II
While he puttered his insignificant way through the early years of the Great European War, the McGurk Institute had a lively existence under its placid surface.
Martin may not have learned much in the matter of antibodies but he did learn the secret of the Institute, and he saw that behind all its quiet industriousness was Capitola McGurk, the Great White Uplifter.
Capitola, Mrs. Ross McGurk, had been opposed to woman suffrage—until she learned that women were certain to get the vote—but she was a complete controller of virtuous affairs. Ross McGurk had bought the Institute not only to glorify himself but to divert Capitola and keep her itching fingers out of his shipping and mining and lumber interests, which would not too well have borne the investigations of a Great White Uplifter.
Ross McGurk was at the time a man of fifty-four, second generation of California railroad men; a graduate of Yale; big, suave, dignified, cheerful, unscrupulous. Even in 1908, when he had founded the Institute, he had had too many houses, too many servants, too much food, and no children, because Capitola considered “that sort of thing detrimental to women with large responsibilities.” In the Institute he found each year more satisfaction, more excuse for having lived.
When Gottlieb arrived, McGurk went up to look him over. McGurk had bullied Dr. Tubbs now and then; Tubbs was compelled to scurry to his office as though he were a messenger boy; yet when he saw the saturnine eyes of Gottlieb, McGurk looked interested; and the two men, the bulky, clothes-conscious, powerful, reticent American and the cynical, simple, power-despising European, became friends. McGurk would slip away from a conference affecting the commerce of a whole West Indian island to sit on a high stool, silent, and watch Gottlieb work.
“Some day when I quit hustling and wake up, I’m going to become your garçon, Max,” said McGurk, and Gottlieb answered, “I don’t know—you haf imagination, Ross, but I t’ink you are too late to get a training in reality. Now if you do not mind eating at Childs’s, we will avoid your very expostulatory Regal Hall, and I shall invite you to lunch.”
But Capitola did not join their communion.
Gottlieb’s arrogance had returned, and with Capitola McGurk he needed it. She had such interesting little problems for her husband’s pensioners to attack. Once, in excitement, she visited Gottlieb’s laboratory to tell him that large numbers of persons die of cancer, and why didn’t he drop this anti-whatever-it-was and find a cure for cancer, which would be ever so nice for all of them.