The sureness to which Max Gottlieb seems to have been born came to Martin slowly, after many stumblings, but it came. He desired a perfection of technique in the quest for absolute and provable fact; he desired as greatly as any Pater to “burn with a hard gem-like flame,” and he desired not to have ease and repute in the market-place, but rather to keep free of those follies, lest they confuse him and make him soft.
Holabird was as much bewildered as Tubbs would have been by the ramifications of Martin’s work. What did he think he was anyway—a bacteriologist or a bio-physicist? But Holabird was won by the scientific world’s reception of Martin’s first important paper, on the effect of X-rays, gamma rays, and beta rays on the anti-Shiga phage. It was praised in Paris and Brussels and Cambridge as much as in New York, for its insight and for “the clarity and to perhaps be unscientifically enthusiastic, the sheer delight and style of its presentation,” as Professor Berkeley Wurtz put it; which may be indicated by quoting the first paragraph of the paper:
In a preliminary publication, I have reported a marked qualitative destructive effect of the radiations from radium emanations on Bacteriophage-anti-Shiga. In the present paper it is shown that X-rays, gamma rays, and beta rays produce identical inactivating effects on this bacteriophage. Furthermore, a quantitative relation is demonstrated to exist between this inactivation and the radiations that produce it. The results obtained from this quantitative study permit the statement that the percentage of inactivation, as measured by determining the units of bacteriophage remaining after irradiation by gamma and beta rays of a suspension of fixed virulence, is a function of the two variables, millicuries and hours. The following equation accounts quantitatively for the experimental results obtained:
| λ log e Uo/u | |
| K = | ———— |
| Eo (ε -- λr1) |
When Director Holabird saw the paper— Yeo was vicious enough to take it in and ask his opinion—he said, “Splendid, oh, I say, simply splendid! I’ve just had the chance to skim through it, old boy, but I shall certainly read it carefully, the first free moment I have.”
CHAPTER XXXVII
I
Martin did not see Joyce Lanyon for weeks after his return to New York. Once she invited him to dinner, but he could not come, and he did not hear from her again.
His absorption in osmotic pressure determinations did not content him when he sat in his prim hotel room and was reduced from Dr. Arrowsmith to a man who had no one to talk to. He remembered how they had sat by the lagoon in the tepid twilight; he telephoned asking whether he might come in for tea.