The Technologists

by Matthew Pearl

  “Good. Leave all that behind. Mr. Richards is obviously a devoted friend; he can collect your belongings for you. You may report directly to Temple Place to President Rogers. Immediately, Mr. Mansfield.”

  Marcus hesitated again, a bit stunned despite trying to take it stoically. As he took in his surroundings, everything seemed to come to a momentary stop. His eyes fell on the sign that read SMOKING IN THIS LABORATORY IS STRICTLY FORBIDDEN—with residue where students had repeatedly marked out SMOKING and painted in its place their revisions, SLEEPING, LAUGHING, FALLING IN LOVE. Beyond this, a shelf with extra burners and tubes, then a row of goggles for the protection of the eyes, which were rarely ever touched. Tilden grinned at Marcus under the thick bandage ornamenting his nose. Then there was Albert Hall, shaking his fat head with superior disapproval. Before Eliot could look back in his direction again, Marcus fled the laboratory.

  He stopped on the stairs for a moment to compose himself, when he heard a deep but feminine voice. “You are in my way and I would be obliged if you moved.”

  Marcus turned around to face Ellen Swallow, standing over him on the landing, a test tube in her hand. She wore her large apron over a severe black cotton dress that appeared to be homemade, from a simple pattern. Her home-sewn dark clothing made her look like a farmer’s widow instead of a twenty-five-year-old Boston woman.

  “I am sorry, Miss Swallow.”

  “And I haven’t any use for apologies either,” she said, then scanned him head to foot, one long eyebrow sharply arched, followed by two blinks. “You have had a mishap in your chemical manipulations class.”

  Marcus stared at her for a moment before replying. “You heard?”

  She tilted her head to the side in birdlike fashion. “You mistake me for someone with whom gossip is shared. I have heard nobody talk. But it is the hour for the seniors’ chemical manipulation class, yet here you are, distinctly in my way, wearing a despondent air. Observe, record, collate, conclude: That is what we are taught to do with facts.” She cleared her throat loudly. She was studying a transparent liquid in the test tube, tapping the glass, which caused a group of purple globules to rise and fall. “Whenever something goes wrong among the freshmen, I am reliably blamed and censured.”

  He detected a note of sympathy in her voice that he wished to return. “Freshman year can be trying indeed,” Marcus responded. “If you should ever need assistance, please do not hesitate to find me.”

  “Sir, I haven’t any use for assistance, either. If you insist on speaking with me in the future, I shall call for your reprimand from the faculty. I am not meant to mix more than necessary with men in our school, you know. Nor the boys. Good morning.” Before he could reply, she was away and down the stairs.

  It was a long walk across the Public Garden to the other side of the Boston Common and on to the president’s house, but he went by foot instead of waiting for the busy horsecars. He could not bear to look into the faces of any other human beings at the moment. He craved only solitude.

  He could not blame Bob. After all, Marcus had relished the stupid trick against the Harvard swells. Nor could he entertain too hard a grudge against Eliot, who perhaps had really believed Marcus had entered later than his companions. And what Eliot had said at the faculty meeting the day before about the bleak fates of a charity scholar haunted him, not out of anger but because he had thought the same things to himself so many times before.

  * * *

  HE WAS ADMITTED into the Rogers home by the same pretty chambermaid he had seen assisting Rogers at the public demonstration, but she showed no sign of recognition. As she led the way through the vestibule, he handed her his hat and his gray unfitted tweed overcoat with the increasingly shaggy fur collar, as though surrendering them were part of his punishment.

  “I have been sent to see President Rogers,” Marcus said to her sheepishly. “I am a student at Tech—the Institute.”

  “Wait here,” she said, without looking up at him.

  She disappeared up the stairs, leaving him standing awkwardly in the long vestibule, neatening the part in the middle of his hair. When it came to discipline, a student sent to Rogers for a private admonishment knew it would not be a scolding, but rather a conversation, one man to another. Because of this, by the end of the encounter, whatever the infraction, the student would have fervently vowed to himself never to disappoint his president again.

  After what seemed to be an eternity, the petite girl returned and, still with eyes downcast, reported that Rogers would see him.

  “Follow me, please.” She could not have been much older than seventeen, and looked younger, but Marcus felt obliged by her commands.

  As he mounted the first flight of stairs, he heard the bell ring at the door below. He glanced over his shoulder as a second servant admitted Professor Runkle and Edward Tobey into the vestibule. Runkle was carrying various documents and a handful of ledgers, which Marcus recognized from the faculty meetings as containing Institute business.

  Marcus slowed his ascent.

  “Miss?”

  She had not noticed he had slowed down, or if she did, she did not care, and he had to catch up to her. “President Rogers may wish to see Professor Runkle first.”

  “If you please. My instructions were to bring you up, sir.”

  “What is your name, miss?”

  “Beg your pardon!” she said with surprise.

  “Pardon me,” he said, chastened, worried he might have insulted her by asking.

  “Aggie. I mean, Agnes,” she said after another half flight of stairs. “No caller has ever asked me that.”

  “Why not? You know the callers’ names.”

  “Yes,” she said, considering the argument with some amazement. Now she faced him squarely. “I always do.”

  “Miss Agnes, can you tell me how he has been lately?”

  She shook her head sadly. “Not very well, sir. Some days are better, but …” Her words trailed off. “He felt excited while taking breakfast, talking rapidly to Mrs. Rogers, and its ill effects came later—giddiness and a light head. He works too industriously for a man feeble of health. I heard from the upstairs girl he was up half the night at his desk among his papers. Mrs. Rogers says the doctors never will be able to diagnose his ailment, because only she knows what it is called.”

  “Is that so?”

  “She says he suffers from ‘Institute on the Brain.’ ”

  Marcus replied with a knowing laugh.

  “Is what you do there so consuming?” she ventured, appearing emboldened by his easy manner.

  “In some way, I suppose it must be. There was a time when the distance between a discovery and putting an invention to practical use was centuries, but President Rogers says seedtime and harvest can now happen in a single season. I believe the next ten years will change all of our lives as much as the hundred years preceding. He recognizes that a new kind of education is needed in order to be prepared. I shall always see him in his prime of health.”

  “I have been in his employ only three months. When he grew worse, Mrs. Rogers hired more of us to assist around the house. I never saw him before that.”

  “Commanding and dignified. That was President Rogers, before he had to cease his teaching duties, showing us a theory of physics or describing the formation of a mountain. Picture him entering up the aisle of the lecture hall like this, miss.” He passed her, taking two treads at a time, to demonstrate. “A strength of gait only a man who had crossed the Appalachian chain could possess.”

  “Imagine!” she said dreamily, dropping her guard further. “I’d die to see one of those classrooms in your building.”

  “At the sound of his voice, we would no longer be restless boys, but twenty or thirty future Rogerses. At the completion of every class, he would draw a free-hand circle on the blackboard without any tools to assist him, like this.” He moved his finger in the air to show her. “The circle would be perfect, without fail. Then we would all erupt in applause.”
>
  “I have heard something, sir, about a young woman entering the Institute this year. Is it so?”

  “Her name is Ellen Swallow. She is a freshman. A chemist.”

  “Then it’s true! She has not been here to call on the professor. I am wild to know how she wears her hair. What color is it?”

  “Black as night. Pinned up, I believe. Black bonnet, too, usually. She dresses, well, like a nun. But I shouldn’t really talk about her.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know. It’s a rule—an unwritten sort. Tech does not want to start an outcry about a girl learning such advanced forms of science. We must be very wary of criticism. Her name is not even included with the rest of them in our college catalog.”

  “How brave she must be inside that building full of young men. Do you know her well?”

  “Hardly at all. But it is said she is a genius. Supposedly, she mastered an entire year of Squirty—sorry—Professor Watson’s descriptive geometry class in three weeks.”

  “Well, I think you all must be geniuses at the Institute.”

  “I would hate to undeceive your ideas by trying to prove that.”

  “Since it would be wicked for someone to think so about themselves, you oughtn’t. Is that what you called Professor Watson? Squirty?”

  “Pardon me, miss. You see, the fellows started calling him that because of the energetic motion of his hands when squirting the chemical-wash bottle on the blackboard.”

  She looked down with a blank expression.

  “It is one of those jokes peculiar to college that is funny even though the fellows don’t really understand why.”

  “I see!” she exclaimed, grateful to be offered an explanation.

  “He is the most teased of the faculty, maybe because of his dandyish dress. They fill his beaver hat with water, or pay the old Italian organ grinder who wanders the streets with his monkey to play at the window during class. Squirty hates organs and really hates monkeys.”

  She laughed playfully at the college gossip.

  Marcus wished there were another flight of stairs, though he did not know whether the desire came from the reluctance to disappoint Rogers or the wish to continue his talk with this maid. All of a sudden, he also felt rotten blaming Rogers for his decision at the faculty meeting. He could not begin to imagine the struggles to keep the Institute going in the face of soaring expenses and hostile critics.

  Agnes opened the double doors into the library, which stretched out into a long, spacious chamber, the combination of dim lighting and thick curtains casting its rich array of scientific relics and books in deep shadows. She leaned in closer to the nervous caller and whispered, “You will do good.”

  Marcus braced himself. “Thank you.”

  She closed the doors behind him. Rogers was sitting at his table by the window, leaning over a mountain of papers.

  It was a long walk across the room. His head downcast, Marcus’s eyes traced the intricate patterns of the plush carpet that sank under each step of his boots.

  “President Rogers, I apologize for being sent here. I know how occupied you are, and that you are in need of no disruptions. I arrived late to chemical manipulations class this morning, and Professor Eliot asked that I see you.”

  Rogers said something low and unintelligible. Marcus considered apologizing one more time and then turning to leave the president in peace, until he realized with another step into the light that Rogers did not look right. He was leaning rigidly to one side of the chair, which his hand was gripping tightly, while only his eyes, glassy and distant, moved. Marcus could now make out the words he was repeating as he struggled to speak from one side of his mouth: “Help me, Mansfield.”

  * * *

  “SEND FOR A DOCTOR! QUICKLY!” Marcus rushed from the stairwell back into the library. Rogers was now slumped farther to one side and slipping out of the chair. He caught him by the shoulders and eased him down onto the floor. The professor’s head was jerking back and forth, moisture gathering at the side of his mouth.

  “Help is on the way,” Marcus reassured him.

  Agnes came running through the door, clutching the sides of her dress to keep from tripping.

  “Did you fetch a doctor?” he asked.

  “Professor Runkle has gone for Dr. Putnam! Mrs. Rogers is out for at least another hour.”

  “We must lift him to the sofa.”

  “I don’t think we should move him,” said Agnes. “I will bring a pillow and a blanket.”

  As she did, he scanned the room for water. There was a glass where Rogers had been sitting and his eye fell for a moment onto the table.

  A glance was all he needed to take it in. Diagrams of compasses. Cuttings from multiple Boston newspapers on the disasters, annotated minutely in almost every blank space in Rogers’s increasingly shaky hand. Maps, hand-drawn, annotated with measurements and distances, of the harbor and the business district. Scraps of notebook paper covered in formulas, lists of questions, sketches.

  There was thumping up and down the stairs and sounds of commotion through the house. Agnes returned clutching two pillows and a narrow wool blanket.

  “Last time, the doctor made certain he got more air at once,” she said. She nervously bent in and loosened her master’s silk cravat with a gentle touch. His breathing was labored. His eyes were closed and he had fallen into a state of unconsciousness.

  “I need something,” Marcus said, searching around the table.

  “What?”

  “A bag, or a portfolio, something to carry all this in unseen—”

  “What in heaven’s name!” she exclaimed, appalled, as he began to bundle the materials on the table. “The professor is stricken and you are stealing his things!”

  He leaned his head out the window. The view was wide—the Boston Common all the way to the Frog Pond, carriage-and-horse-lined Beacon Street, the shimmering dome of the State House. Runkle and Tobey were running, leading a man holding a chamois-leather bag up the redbrick mall back toward the Rogers house.

  He passed his hand over the table. “Agnes, Professor Runkle and Mr. Tobey must not see any of this.”

  “I don’t understand you!”

  Marcus held up a handful of the papers. “This is what President Rogers has been up all night working on. This is important to him—it is far bigger than any of us, bigger than the Institute.” She continued to stare, unmoved. He took her hand. “Please, Aggie, you must believe me. They must not be found here.”

  “What will you do?” she demanded. Having jumped at the touch of his hand, she now pulled hers away.

  “Keep all of it safe so he can resume his work once he recovers.”

  They both looked at the man on the floor with concern and some doubt at the prospect.

  “Does it have to do with the disasters?”

  “How did you know?” he asked.

  Thumping along the stairs again. Marcus looked back out the window. There was no sight of Runkle, Tobey, or the doctor now.

  “They’re in the house!” he said, turning around, but Agnes was gone.

  A moment later, she reappeared holding a red leather portfolio. He unclasped it and hastily swept the whole pile of papers into it. The doctor with the medical bag ran inside a moment later, followed by Runkle, Tobey, and more house servants. After a brief examination and a few whispers traded with Runkle, the doctor instructed the servants to help him bring Rogers to bed.

  “Mr. Mansfield.”

  Marcus had taken a few steps back toward the door when Runkle called him.

  “Sir?” He twisted his body slightly so the portfolio would not be as visible.

  “Thank heavens you are here. Return to the Institute at once, and tell them President Rogers has suffered another attack of apoplexy. What will we do without him …? May Providence watch over our future!”

  Marcus whispered to the maid on his way out of the room, “Thank you, Miss Agnes.”

  She gave the Tech student an implorin
g look he could not quite interpret, then joined the other servants at the side of their fallen master.

  XIII

  Man-field

  WHEN MARCUS ARRIVED at Bob’s rooms that night, he expected questions. After all, he had mostly avoided speaking to Bob—and all his friends and classmates—for the rest of the day after returning from Temple Place with the awful tidings.

  “There he is! M-M! M-squared himself!” Bob shouted a little too raucously, a drunken hoarseness to his voice. “Where have you been half the night?”

  “Just ambling by myself,” Marcus said as he stored his coat in the closet. He had climbed the two flights up to Bob’s rooms. The redbrick boardinghouse managed by Mrs. Page was situated in the center of the city, and with all the lights and activity on the streets he found it hard to keep a sense of the time. “It’s President Rogers. I keep thinking of how dire things were when I left him this morning.” He turned to face Bob and was caught by surprise. “I’m sorry.”

  “Why, that’s downright morose, Mansfield, walking the night alone.”

  “Morose!” giggled the girl with long blond hair and a flaming bright dress sitting beside him on the sofa. “Highly morose! Morose Man-field!” She broke into a fit of laughter.

  “I should walk awhile longer,” said Marcus, giving his friend a small grin and reaching for his coat again.

  “Have a drink with us!”

  “Thank you, Bob, but I feel out of spirits.”

  “Exactly the fittest time to drink.” He followed Marcus back to the front door.

  “You’ll excuse me, miss,” said Marcus.

  “Farewell, Man-field,” she said, waving her handkerchief as if he were going to sea.

  “You wouldn’t believe this tigress,” Bob said in a confidential voice. “I happened to start a conversation with her over at the theater, and was telling her about the Institute, which she simply didn’t believe existed, and laboratories, which the poor ignorant girl had never heard of, and the lass, on top of it all, has never been to the Back Bay! I have been regaling her with stories of our freshman year. Remember the ancient bell?”