marshal or a hospital orderly or something in the British Army?"
"He did not! He didn't mention the war!"
"He will! Well, Brer Arrowsmith, I look forward to many happy, happy years together, playing at the feet of Pa Gottlieb. So long. My lab is right next to yours."
"Fool!" Martin decided, and, "Well, I can stand him as long as I can fall back on Gottlieb and Holabird. But— The conceited idiot! Gosh, so Holabird was in the war! Invalided out, I guess. I certainly got back at Wickett on that! 'Did he tell you about his being a jolly old hero in the blinkin' war?' he said, and I came right back at him, 'I'm sorry to displease you,' I said, 'but Dr. Holabird did not mention the war.' The idiot! Well, I won't let him worry me."
And indeed, as Martin met the staff at lunch, Wickett was the only one whom he did not find courteous, however brief their greetings. He did not distinguish among them; for days most of the twenty researchers remained a blur. He confused Dr. Yeo, head of the Department of Biology, with the carpenter who had come to put up shelves.
The staff sat in Hall at two long tables, one on the dais, one below: tiny insect groups under the massy ceiling. They were not particularly noble of aspect, these possible Darwins and Huxleys and Pasteurs. None of them were wide-browed Platos. Except for Rippleton Holabird and Max Gottlieb and perhaps Martin himself, they looked like lunching grocers: brisk featureless young men; thick mustached elders; and wimpish little men with spectacles, men whose collars did not meet. But there was a steady calm about them; there was, Martin believed, no anxiety over money in their voices nor any restlessness of envy and scandalous gossip. They talked gravely or frivolously of their work, the one sort of work that, since it becomes part of the chain of discovered fact, is eternal, however forgotten the worker's name.
As Martin listened to Terry Wickett (rude and slangy as ever, referring to himself as "the boy chemist," speaking of "this gaudy Institute" and "our trusting new lil brother, Arrowsmith") debating with a slight thin-bearded man—Dr. William T. Smith, assistant in bio-chemistry—the possibility of increasing the effects of all enzymes by doses of X-rays, as he heard one associate-member vituperate another for his notions of cell-chemistry and denounce Ehrlich as "the Edison
