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Title: Arrowsmith
Author: Sinclair Lewis
Release Date: May 28, 2023 [eBook #70875]
Language: English
Produced by: Emmanuel Ackerman, Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ARROWSMITH ***
NOVELS BY SINCLAIR LEWIS
OUR MR. WRENN
THE TRAIL OF THE HAWK
THE JOB
FREE AIR
MAIN STREET
BABBITT
ARROWSMITH
ARROWSMITH
_By_
SINCLAIR LEWIS
_Author of_ Main Street, Babbitt, _etc._
TORONTO
GEORGE J. McLEOD, LIMITED
PUBLISHERS
COPYRIGHT, 1925, BY
HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, INC.
Copyright, 1924, 1925, by
The Designer Publishing Company, Inc.
_The first edition of_ ARROWSMITH _consists of 500 copies on handmade
paper, numbered and signed by the author_.
Second printing [first trade edition], January, 1925
PRINTED IN THE U. S. A. BY
THE QUINN & BODEN COMPANY
RAHWAY, N. J.
_To Dr. Paul H. DeKruif I am indebted not only for most of the
bacteriological and medical material in this tale but equally for
his help in the planning of the fable itself--for his realization
of the characters as living people, for his philosophy as a
scientist. With this acknowledgment I want to record our months of
companionship while working on the book, in the United States, in
the West Indies, in Panama, in London and Fontainebleau. I wish I
could reproduce our talks along the way, and the laboratory
afternoons, the restaurants at night, and the deck at dawn as we
steamed into tropic ports._
SINCLAIR LEWIS
ARROWSMITH
CHAPTER I
I
The driver of the wagon swaying through forest and swamp of the Ohio
wilderness was a ragged girl of fourteen. Her mother they had buried
near the Monongahela--the girl herself had heaped with torn sods the
grave beside the river of the beautiful name. Her father lay shrinking
with fever on the floor of the wagon-box, and about him played her
brothers and sisters, dirty brats, tattered brats, hilarious brats.
She halted at the fork in the grassy road, and the sick man quavered,
“Emmy, ye better turn down towards Cincinnati. If we could find your
Uncle Ed, I guess he’d take us in.”
“Nobody ain’t going to take us in,” she said. “We’re going on jus’ long
as we can. Going West! They’s a whole lot of new things I aim to be
seeing!”
She cooked the supper, she put the children to bed, and sat by the fire,
alone.
That was the great-grandmother of Martin Arrowsmith.
II
Cross-legged in the examining-chair in Doc Vickerson’s office, a boy was
reading “Gray’s Anatomy.” His name was Martin Arrowsmith, of Elk Mills,
in the state of Winnemac.
There was a suspicion in Elk Mills--now, in 1897, a dowdy red-brick
village, smelling of apples--that this brown-leather adjustable seat
which Doc Vickerson used for minor operations, for the infrequent
pulling of teeth and for highly frequent naps, had begun life as a
barber’s chair. There was also a belief that its proprietor must once
have been called Doctor Vickerson, but for years he had been only The
Doc, and he was scurfier and much less adjustable than the chair.
Martin was the son of J. J. Arrowsmith, who conducted the New York
Clothing Bazaar. By sheer brass and obstinacy he had, at fourteen,
become the unofficial, also decidedly unpaid, assistant to the Doc, and
while the Doc was on a country call he took charge--though what there
was to take charge of, no one could ever make out. He was a slender boy,
not very tall; his hair and restless eyes were black, his skin unusually
white, and the contrast gave him an air of passionate variability. The
squareness of his head and a reasonable breadth of shoulders saved him
from any appearance of effeminacy or of that querulous timidity which
artistic young gentlemen call Sensitiveness. When he lifted his head to
listen, his right eyebrow, slightly higher than the left, rose and
quivered in his characteristic expression of energy, of independence,
and a hint that he could fight, a look of impertinent inquiry which had
been known to annoy his teachers and the Sunday School superintendent.
Martin was, like most inhabitants of Elk Mills before the Slavo-Italian
immigration, a Typical Pure-bred Anglo-Saxon American, which means that
he was a union of German, French, Scotch, Irish, perhaps a little
Spanish, conceivably a little of the strains lumped together as
“Jewish,” and a great deal of English, which is itself a combination of
Primitive Britain, Celt, Phœnician, Roman, German, Dane, and Swede.
It is not certain that, in attaching himself to Doc Vickerson, Martin
was entirely and edifyingly controlled by a desire to become a Great
Healer. He did awe his Gang by bandaging stone-bruises, dissecting
squirrels, and explaining the astounding and secret matters to be
discovered at the back of the physiology, but he was not completely free
from an ambition to command such glory among them as was enjoyed by the
son of the Episcopalian minister, who could smoke an entire cigar
without becoming sick. Yet this afternoon he read steadily at the
section on the lymphatic system, and he muttered the long and perfectly
incomprehensible words in a hum which made drowsier the dusty room.
It was the central room of the three occupied by Doc Vickerson, facing
on Main Street above the New York Clothing Bazaar. On one side of it was
the foul waiting-room, on the other, the Doc’s bedroom. He was an aged
widower; for what he called “female fixings” he cared nothing; and the
bedroom with its tottering bureau and its cot of frowsy blankets was
cleaned only by Martin, in not very frequent attacks of sanitation.
This central room was at once business office, consultation-room,
operating-theater, living-room, poker den, and warehouse for guns and
fishing-tackle. Against a brown plaster wall was a cabinet of zoölogical
collections and medical curiosities, and beside it the most dreadful and
fascinating object known to the boy-world of Elk Mills--a skeleton with
one gaunt gold tooth. On evenings when the Doc was away, Martin would
acquire prestige among the trembling Gang by leading them into the
unutterable darkness and scratching a sulfur match on the skeleton’s
jaw.
On the wall was a home-stuffed pickerel on a home-varnished board.
Beside the rusty stove, a sawdust-box cuspidor rested on a slimy
oilcloth worn through to the threads. On the senile table was a pile of
memoranda of debts which the Doc was always swearing he would “collect
from those dead-beats right now,” and which he would never, by any
chance, at any time, collect from any of them. A year or two--a decade
or two--a century or two--they were all the same to the plodding doctor
in the bee-murmuring town.
The most unsanitary corner was devoted to the cast-iron sink, which was
oftener used for washing eggy breakfast plates than for sterilizing
instruments. On its ledge were a broken test-tube, a broken fish-hook,
an unlabeled and forgotten bottle of pills, a nail-bristling heel, a
frayed cigar-butt, and a rusty lancet stuck in a potato.
The wild raggedness of the room was the soul and symbol of Doc
Vickerson; it was more exciting than the flat-faced stack of shoe-boxes
in the New York Bazaar: it was the lure to questioning and adventure for
Martin Arrowsmith.
III
The boy raised his head, cocked his inquisitive brow. On the stairway
was the cumbersome step of Doc Vickerson. The Doc was sober! Martin
would not have to help him into bed.
But it was a bad sign that the Doc should first go down the hall to his
bedroom. The boy listened sharply. He heard the Doc open the lower part
of the washstand, where he kept his bottle of Jamaica rum. After a long
gurgle the invisible Doc put away the bottle and decisively kicked the
doors shut. Still good. Only one drink. If he came into the
consultation-room at once, he would be safe. But he was still standing
in the bedroom. Martin sighed as the washstand doors were hastily opened
again, as he heard another gurgle and a third.
The Doc’s step was much livelier when he loomed into the office, a gray
mass of a man with a gray mass of mustache, a form vast and unreal and
undefined, like a cloud taking for the moment a likeness of humanity.
With the brisk attack of one who wishes to escape the discussion of his
guilt, the Doc rumbled while he waddled toward his desk-chair:
“What you doing here, young fella? What you doing here? I knew the cat
would drag in something if I left the door unlocked.” He gulped
slightly; he smiled to show that he was being humorous--people had been
known to misconstrue the Doc’s humor.
He spoke more seriously, occasionally forgetting what he was talking
about:
“Reading old Gray? That’s right. Physician’s library just three books:
‘Gray’s Anatomy’ and Bible and Shakespeare. Study. You may become great
doctor. Locate in Zenith and make five thousand dollars year--much as
United States Senator! Set a high goal. Don’t let things slide. Get
training. Go college before go medical school. Study. Chemistry. Latin.
Knowledge! I’m plug doc--got chick nor child--nobody--old drunk. But
you--leadin’ physician. Make five thousand dollars year.
“Murray woman’s got endocarditis. Not thing I can do for her. Wants
somebody hold her hand. Road’s damn’ disgrace. Culvert’s out, beyond the
grove. ’Sgrace.
“Endocarditis and--
“Training, that’s what you got t’ get. Fundamentals. Know chemistry.
Biology. I nev’ did. Mrs. Reverend Jones thinks she’s got gastric ulcer.
Wants to go city for operation. Ulcer, hell! She and the Reverend both
eat too much.
“Why they don’t repair that culvert-- And don’t be a booze-hoister like
me, either. And get your basic science. I’ll splain.”
The boy, normal village youngster though he was, given to stoning cats
and to playing pom-pom-pullaway, gained something of the intoxication
of treasure-hunting as the Doc struggled to convey his vision of the
pride of learning, the universality of biology, the triumphant exactness
of chemistry. A fat old man and dirty and unvirtuous was the Doc; his
grammar was doubtful, his vocabulary alarming, and his references to his
rival, good Dr. Needham, were scandalous; yet he invoked in Martin a
vision of making chemicals explode with much noise and stink and of
seeing animalcules that no boy in Elk Mills had ever beheld.
The Doc’s voice was thickening; he was sunk in his chair, blurry of eye
and lax of mouth. Martin begged him to go to bed, but the Doc insisted:
“Don’t need nap. No. Now you lissen. You don’t appreciate but-- Old man
now. Giving you all I’ve learned. Show you collection. Only museum in
whole county. Scientif’ pioneer.”
A hundred times had Martin obediently looked at the specimens in the
brown, crackly-varnished bookcase: the beetles and chunks of mica; the
embryo of a two-headed calf, the gall-stones removed from a respectable
lady whom the Doc enthusiastically named to all visitors. The Doc stood
before the case, waving an enormous but shaky forefinger.
“Looka that butterfly. Name is _porthesia chrysorrhœa_. Doc Needham
couldn’t tell you that! He don’t know what butterflies are called! He
don’t care if you get trained. Remember that name now?” He turned on
Martin. “You payin’ attention? You interested? _Huh?_ Oh, the devil!
Nobody wants to know about my museum--not a person. Only one in county
but-- I’m an old failure.”
Martin asserted, “Honest, it’s slick!”
“Look here! Look here! See that? In the bottle? It’s an appendix. First
one ever took out ’round here. I did it! Old Doc Vickerson, he did the
first ’pendectomy in _this_ neck of the woods, you bet! And first
museum. It ain’t--so big--but it’s start. I haven’t put away money like
Doc Needham, but I started first c’lection-- I started it!”
He collapsed in a chair, groaning, “You’re right. Got to sleep. All in.”
But as Martin helped him to his feet he broke away, scrabbled about on
his desk, and looked back doubtfully. “Want to give you something--start
your training. And remember the old man. Will anybody remember the old
man?”
He was holding out the beloved magnifying glass which for years he had
used in botanizing. He watched Martin slip the lens into his pocket, he
sighed, he struggled for something else to say, and silently he lumbered
into his bedroom.
CHAPTER II
I
The state of Winnemac is bounded by Michigan, Ohio, Illinois, and
Indiana, and like them it is half Eastern, half Midwestern. There is a
feeling of New England in its brick and sycamore villages, its stable
industries, and a tradition which goes back to the Revolutionary War.
Zenith, the largest city in the state, was founded in 1792. But Winnemac
is Midwestern in its fields of corn and wheat, its red barns and silos,
and, despite the immense antiquity of Zenith, many counties were not
settled till 1860.
The University of Winnemac is at Mohalis, fifteen miles from Zenith.
There are twelve thousand students; beside this prodigy Oxford is a tiny
theological school and Harvard a select college for young gentlemen. The
University has a baseball field under glass; its buildings are measured
by the mile; it hires hundreds of young Doctors of Philosophy to give
rapid instruction in Sanskrit, navigation, accountancy,
spectacle-fitting, sanitary engineering, Provençal poetry, tariff
schedules, rutabaga-growing, motor-car designing, the history of
Voronezh, the style of Matthew Arnold, the diagnosis of _myohypertrophia
kymoparalytica_, and department-store advertising. Its president is the
best money-raiser and the best after-dinner speaker in the United
States; and Winnemac was the first school in the world to conduct its
extension courses by radio.
It is not a snobbish rich-man’s college, devoted to leisurely nonsense.
It is the property of the people of the state, and what they want--or
what they are told they want--is a mill to turn out men and women who
will lead moral lives, play bridge, drive good cars, be enterprising in
business, and occasionally mention books, though they are not expected
to have time to read them. It is a Ford Motor Factory, and if its
products rattle a little, they are beautifully standardized, with
perfectly interchangeable parts. Hourly the University of Winnemac grows
in numbers and influence, and by 1950 one may expect it to have created
an entirely new world-civilization, a civilization larger and brisker
and purer.
II
In 1904, when Martin Arrowsmith was an Arts and Science Junior preparing
for medical school, Winnemac had but five thousand students yet it was
already brisk.
Martin was twenty-one. He still seemed pale, in contrast to his black
smooth hair, but he was a respectable runner, a fair basket-ball center,
and a savage hockey-player. The co-eds murmured that he “looked so
romantic,” but as this was before the invention of sex and the era of
petting-parties, they merely talked about him at a distance, and he did
not know that he could have been a hero of amours. For all his
stubbornness he was shy. He was not entirely ignorant of caresses but he
did not make an occupation of them. He consorted with men whose virile
pride it was to smoke filthy corncob pipes and to wear filthy sweaters.
The University had become his world. For him Elk Mills did not exist.
Doc Vickerson was dead and buried and forgotten; Martin’s father and
mother were dead, leaving him only enough money for his arts and medical
courses. The purpose of life was chemistry and physics and the prospect
of biology next year.
His idol was Professor Edward Edwards, head of the department of
chemistry, who was universally known as “Encore.” Edwards’ knowledge of
the history of chemistry was immense. He could read Arabic, and he
infuriated his fellow chemists by asserting that the Arabs had
anticipated all their researches. Himself, Professor Edwards never did
researches. He sat before fires and stroked his collie and chuckled in
his beard.
This evening Encore was giving one of his small and popular At Home’s.
He lolled in a brown-corduroy Morris chair, being quietly humorous for
the benefit of Martin and half a dozen other fanatical young chemists,
and baiting Dr. Norman Brumfit, the instructor in English. The room was
full of heartiness and beer and Brumfit.
Every university faculty must have a Wild Man to provide thrills and to
shock crowded lecture-rooms. Even in so energetically virtuous an
institution as Winnemac there was one Wild Man, and he was Norman
Brumfit. He was permitted, without restriction, to speak of himself as
immoral, agnostic, and socialistic, so long as it was universally known
that he remained pure, Presbyterian, and Republican. Dr. Brumfit was in
form, to-night. He asserted that whenever a man showed genius, it could
be proved that he had Jewish blood. Like all discussions of Judaism at
Winnemac, this led to the mention of Max Gottlieb, professor of
bacteriology in the medical school.
Professor Gottlieb was the mystery of the university. It was known that
he was a Jew, born and educated in Germany, and that his work on
immunology had given him fame in the East and in Europe. He rarely left
his small brown weedy house except to return to his laboratory, and few
students outside of his classes had ever identified him, but every one
had heard of his tall, lean, dark aloofness. A thousand fables fluttered
about him. It was believed that he was the son of a German prince, that
he had immense wealth, that he lived as sparsely as the other professors
only because he was doing terrifying and costly experiments which
probably had something to do with human sacrifice. It was said that he
could create life in the laboratory, that he could talk to the monkeys
which he inoculated, that he had been driven out of Germany as a
devil-worshiper or an anarchist, and that he secretly drank real
champagne every evening at dinner.
It was the tradition that faculty-members did not discuss their
colleagues with students, but Max Gottlieb could not be regarded as
anybody’s colleague. He was impersonal as the chill northeast wind. Dr.
Brumfit rattled:
“I’m sufficiently liberal, I should assume, toward the claims of
science, but with a man like Gottlieb-- I’m prepared to believe that he
knows all about material forces, but what astounds me is that such a man
can be blind to the vital force that creates all others. He says that
knowledge is worthless unless it is proven by rows of figures. Well,
when one of you scientific sharks can take the genius of a Ben Jonson
and measure it with a yardstick, then I’ll admit that we literary chaps,
with our doubtless absurd belief in beauty and loyalty and the world o’
dreams, are off on the wrong track!”
Martin Arrowsmith was not exactly certain what this meant and he
enthusiastically did not care. He was relieved when Professor Edwards
from the midst of his beardedness and smokiness made a sound curiously
like “Oh, hell!” and took the conversation away from Brumfit.
Ordinarily Encore would have suggested, with amiable malice, that
Gottlieb was a “crapehanger” who wasted time destroying the theories of
other men instead of making new ones of his own. But to-night, in
detestation of such literary playboys as Brumfit, he exalted Gottlieb’s
long, lonely, failure-burdened effort to synthesize antitoxin, and his
diabolic pleasure in disproving his own contentions as he would those of
Ehrlich or Sir Almroth Wright. He spoke of Gottlieb’s great book,
“Immunology,” which had been read by seven-ninths of all the men in the
world who could possibly understand it--the number of these being nine.
The party ended with Mrs. Edwards’ celebrated doughnuts. Martin tramped
toward his boarding-house through a veiled spring night. The discussion
of Gottlieb had roused him to a reasonless excitement. He thought of
working in a laboratory at night, alone, absorbed, contemptuous of
academic success and of popular classes. Himself, he believed, he had
never seen the man, but he knew that Gottlieb’s laboratory was in the
Main Medical Building. He drifted toward the distant medical campus. The
few people whom he met were hurrying with midnight timidity. He entered
the shadow of the Anatomy Building, grim as a barracks, still as the
dead men lying up there in the dissecting-room. Beyond him was the
turreted bulk of the Main Medical Building, a harsh and blurry mass,
high up in its dark wall a single light. He started. The light had gone
out abruptly, as though an agitated watcher were trying to hide from
him.
On the stone steps of the Main Medical, two minutes after, appeared
beneath the arc-light a tall figure, ascetic, self-contained, apart. His
swart cheeks were gaunt, his nose high-bridged and thin. He did not
hurry, like the belated home-bodies. He was unconscious of the world. He
looked at Martin and through him; he moved away, muttering to himself,
his shoulders stooped, his long hands clasped behind him. He was lost in
the shadows, himself a shadow.
He had worn the threadbare top-coat of a poor professor yet Martin
remembered him as wrapped in a black velvet cape with a silver star
arrogant on his breast.
III
On his first day in medical school, Martin Arrowsmith was in a high
state of superiority. As a medic he was more picturesque than other
students, for medics are reputed to know secrets, horrors, exhilarating
wickednesses. Men from the other departments go to their rooms to peer
into their books. But also as an academic graduate, with a training in
the basic sciences, he felt superior to his fellow medics, most of whom
had but a high-school diploma, with perhaps one year in a ten-room
Lutheran college among the cornfields.
For all his pride, Martin was nervous. He thought of operating, of
making a murderous wrong incision; and with a more immediate, macabre
fear, he thought of the dissecting-room and the stony, steely Anatomy
Building. He had heard older medics mutter of its horrors: of corpses
hanging by hooks, like rows of ghastly fruit, in an abominable tank of
brine in the dark basement; of Henry the janitor, who was said to haul
the cadavers out of the brine, to inject red lead into their veins, and
to scold them as he stuffed them on the dumb-waiter.
There was prairie freshness in the autumn day but Martin did not heed.
He hurried into the slate-colored hall of the Main Medical, up the wide
stairs to the office of Max Gottlieb. He did not look at passing
students, and when he bumped into them he grunted in confused apology.
It was a portentous hour. He was going to specialize in bacteriology; he
was going to discover enchanting new germs; Professor Gottlieb was going
to recognize him as a genius, make him an assistant, predict for
him-- He halted in Gottlieb’s private laboratory, a small, tidy
apartment with racks of cotton-corked test-tubes on the bench, a place
unimpressive and unmagical save for the constant-temperature bath with
its tricky thermometer and electric bulbs. He waited till another
student, a stuttering gawk of a student, had finished talking to
Gottlieb, dark, lean, impassive at his desk in a cubbyhole of an office,
then he plunged.
If in the misty April night Gottlieb had been romantic as a cloaked
horseman, he was now testy and middle-aged. Near at hand, Martin could
see wrinkles beside the hawk eyes. Gottlieb had turned back to his desk,
which was heaped with shabby note-books, sheets of calculations, and a
marvelously precise chart with red and green curves descending to
vanish at zero. The calculations were delicate, minute, exquisitely
clear; and delicate were the scientist’s thin hands among the papers. He
looked up, spoke with a hint of German accent. His words were not so
much mispronounced as colored with a warm unfamiliar tint.
“Vell? Yes?”
“Oh, Professor Gottlieb, my name is Arrowsmith. I’m a medic freshman,
Winnemac B. A. I’d like awfully to take bacteriology this fall instead
of next year. I’ve had a lot of chemistry--”
“No. It is not time for you.”
“Honest, I know I could do it now.”
“There are two kinds of students that the gods give me. One kind they
dump on me like a bushel of potatoes. I do not like potatoes, and the
potatoes they do not ever seem to have great affection for me, but I
take them and teach them to kill patients. The other kind--they are very
few!--they seem for some reason that is not at all clear to me to wish a
liddle bit to become scientists, to work with bugs and make mistakes.
Those, ah, those, I seize them, I denounce them, I teach them right away
the ultimate lesson of science, which is to wait and doubt. Of the
potatoes, I demand nothing; of the foolish ones like you, who think I
could teach them something, I demand everything. No. You are too young.
Come back next year.”
“But honestly, with my chemistry--”
“Have you taken physical chemistry?”
“No, sir, but I did pretty well in organic.”
“Organic chemistry! Puzzle chemistry! Stink chemistry! Drug-store
chemistry! Physical chemistry is power, it is exactness, it is life. But
organic chemistry--that is a trade for pot-washers. No. You are too
young. Come back in a year.”
Gottlieb was absolute. His talon fingers waved Martin to the door, and
the boy hastened out, not daring to argue. He slunk off in misery. On
the campus he met that jovial historian of chemistry, Encore Edwards,
and begged, “Say, Professor, tell me, is there any value for a doctor in
organic chemistry?”
“Value? Why, it seeks the drugs that allay pain! It produces the paint
that slicks up your house, it dyes your sweetheart’s dress--and maybe,
in these degenerate days, her cherry lips! Who the dickens has been
talking scandal about my organic chemistry?”
“Nobody. I was just wondering,” Martin complained, and he drifted to the
College Inn where, in an injured and melancholy manner, he devoured an
enormous banana-split and a bar of almond chocolate, as he meditated:
“I want to take bacteriology. I want to get down to the bottom of this
disease stuff. I’ll learn some physical chemistry. I’ll show old
Gottlieb, damn him! Some day I’ll discover the germ of cancer or
something, and then he’ll look foolish in the face!... Oh, Lord, I hope
I won’t take sick, first time I go into the dissecting-room.... I want
to take bacteriology--now!”
He recalled Gottlieb’s sardonic face; he felt and feared his quality of
dynamic hatred. Then he remembered the wrinkles, and he saw Max Gottlieb
not as a genius but as a man who had headaches, who became agonizingly
tired, who could be loved.
“I wonder if Encore Edwards knows as much as I thought he did? What _is_
Truth?” he puzzled.
IV
Martin was jumpy on his first day of dissecting. He could not look at
the inhumanly stiff faces of the starveling gray men lying on the wooden
tables. But they were so impersonal, these lost old men, that in two
days he was, like the other medics, calling them “Billy” and “Ike” and
“the Parson,” and regarding them as he had regarded animals in biology.
The dissecting-room itself was impersonal: hard cement floor, walls of
hard plaster between wire-glass windows. Martin detested the reek of
formaldehyde; that and some dreadful subtle other odor seemed to cling
about him outside the dissecting-room; but he smoked cigarettes to
forget it, and in a week he was exploring arteries with youthful and
altogether unholy joy.
His dissecting partner was the Reverend Ira Hinkley, known to the class
by a similar but different name.
Ira was going to be a medical missionary. He was a man of twenty-nine, a
graduate of Pottsburg Christian College and of the Sanctification Bible
and Missions School. He had played football; he was as strong and nearly
as large as a steer, and no steer ever bellowed more enormously. He was
a bright and happy Christian, a romping optimist who laughed away sin
and doubt, a joyful Puritan who with annoying virility preached the
doctrine of his tiny sect, the Sanctification Brotherhood, that to have
a beautiful church was almost as damnable as the debaucheries of
card-playing.
Martin found himself viewing “Billy,” their cadaver--an undersized,
blotchy old man with a horrible little red beard on his petrified, vealy
face--as a machine, fascinating, complex, beautiful, but a machine. It
damaged his already feeble belief in man’s divinity and immortality. He
might have kept his doubts to himself, revolving them slowly as he
dissected out the nerves of the mangled upper arm, but Ira Hinkley would
not let him alone. Ira believed that he could bring even medical
students to bliss, which, to Ira, meant singing extraordinarily long and
unlovely hymns in a chapel of the Sanctification Brotherhood.
“Mart, my son,” he roared, “do you realize that in this, what some might
call a sordid task, we are learning things that will enable us to heal
the bodies and comfort the souls of countless lost unhappy folks?”
“Huh! Souls. I haven’t found one yet in old Billy. Honest, do you
believe that junk?”
Ira clenched his fist and scowled, then belched with laughter, slapped
Martin distressingly on the back, and clamored, “Brother, you’ve got to
do better than that to get Ira’s goat! You think you’ve got a lot of
these fancy Modern Doubts. You haven’t--you’ve only got indigestion.
What you need is exercise and faith. Come on over to the Y. M. C. A. and
I’ll take you for a swim and pray with you. Why, you poor skinny little
agnostic, here you have a chance to see the Almighty’s handiwork, and
all you grab out of it is a feeling that you’re real smart. Buck up,
young Arrowsmith. You don’t know how funny you are, to a fellow that’s
got a serene faith!”
To the delight of Clif Clawson, the class jester, who worked at the next
table, Ira chucked Martin in the ribs, patted him, very painfully, upon
the head, and amiably resumed work, while Martin danced with
irritation.
V
In college Martin had been a “barb”--he had not belonged to a Greek
Letter secret society. He had been “rushed,” but he had resented the
condescension of the aristocracy of men from the larger cities. Now that
most of his Arts classmates had departed to insurance offices, law
schools, and banks, he was lonely, and tempted by an invitation from
Digamma Pi, the chief medical fraternity.
Digamma Pi was a lively boarding-house with a billiard table and low
prices. Rough and amiable noises came from it at night, and a good deal
of singing about When I Die Don’t Bury Me at All; yet for three years
Digams had won the valedictory and the Hugh Loizeau Medal in
Experimental Surgery. This autumn the Digams elected Ira Hinkley,
because they had been gaining a reputation for dissipation--girls were
said to have been smuggled in late at night--and no company which
included the Reverend Mr. Hinkley could possibly be taken by the Dean as
immoral, which was an advantage if they were to continue comfortably
immoral.
Martin had prized the independence of his solitary room. In a
fraternity, all tennis rackets, trousers, and opinions are held in
common. When Ira found that Martin was hesitating, he insisted, “Oh,
come on in! Digam needs you. You do study hard-- I’ll say that for
you--and think what a chance you’ll have to influence The Fellows for
good.”
(On all occasions, Ira referred to his classmates as The Fellows, and
frequently he used the term in prayers at the Y. M. C. A.)
“I don’t want to influence anybody. I want to learn the doctor trade and
make six thousand dollars a year.”
“My boy, if you only knew how foolish you sound when you try to be
cynical! When you’re as old as I am, you’ll understand that the glory of
being a doctor is that you can teach folks high ideals while you soothe
their tortured bodies.”
“Suppose they don’t want my particular brand of high ideals?”
“Mart, have I got to stop and pray with you?”
“No! Quit! Honestly, Hinkley, of all the Christians I ever met you take
the rottenest advantages. You can lick anybody in the class, and when I
think of how you’re going to bully the poor heathen when you get to be a
missionary, and make the kids put on breeches, and marry off all the
happy lovers to the wrong people, I could bawl!”
The prospect of leaving his sheltered den for the patronage of the
Reverend Mr. Hinkley was intolerable. It was not till Angus Duer
accepted election to Digamma Pi that Martin himself came in.
Duer was one of the few among Martin’s classmates in the academic course
who had gone on with him to the Winnemac medical school. Duer had been
the valedictorian. He was a silent, sharp-faced, curly-headed, rather
handsome young man, and he never squandered an hour or a good impulse.
So brilliant was his work in biology and chemistry that a Chicago
surgeon had promised him a place in his clinic. Martin compared Angus
Duer to a razor blade on a January morning; he hated him, was
uncomfortable with him, and envied him. He knew that in biology Duer had
been too busy passing examinations to ponder, to get any concept of
biology as a whole. He knew that Duer was a tricky chemist, who neatly
and swiftly completed the experiments demanded by the course and never
ventured on original experiments which, leading him into a confused land
of wondering, might bring him to glory or disaster. He was sure that
Duer cultivated his manner of chill efficiency to impress instructors.
Yet the man stood out so bleakly from a mass of students who could
neither complete their experiments nor ponder nor do anything save smoke
pipes and watch football-practice that Martin loved him while he hated
him, and almost meekly he followed him into Digamma Pi.
Martin, Ira Hinkley, Angus Duer, Clif Clawson, the meaty class jester,
and one “Fatty” Pfaff were initiated into Digamma Pi together. It was a
noisy and rather painful performance, which included smelling asafetida.
Martin was bored, but Fatty Pfaff was in squeaking, billowing, gasping
terror.
Fatty was of all the new Freshmen candidates the most useful to Digamma
Pi. He was planned by nature to be a butt. He looked like a distended
hot-water bottle; he was magnificently imbecile; he believed everything,
he knew nothing, he could memorize nothing; and anxiously he forgave the
men who got through the vacant hours by playing jokes upon him.
They persuaded him that mustard plasters were excellent for
colds--solicitously they gathered about him, affixed an enormous plaster
to his back, and afterward fondly removed it. They concealed the ear of
a cadaver in his nice, clean, new pocket handkerchief when he went to
Sunday supper at the house of a girl cousin in Zenith.... At supper he
produced the handkerchief with a flourish.
Every night when Fatty retired he had to remove from his bed a
collection of objects which thoughtful house-mates had stuffed between
the sheets--soap, alarm clocks, fish. He was the perfect person to whom
to sell useless things. Clif Clawson, who combined a brisk huckstering
with his jokes, sold to Fatty for four dollars a History of Medicine
which he had bought, second-hand, for two, and while Fatty never read
it, never conceivably could read it, the possession of the fat red book
made him feel learned. But Fatty’s greatest beneficence to Digamma was
his belief in spiritualism. He went about in terror of spooks. He was
always seeing them emerging at night from the dissecting-room windows.
His classmates took care that he should behold a great many of them
flitting about the halls of the fraternity.
VI
Digamma Pi was housed in a residence built in the expansive days of
1885. The living-room suggested a recent cyclone. Knife-gashed tables,
broken Morris chairs, and torn rugs were flung about the room, and
covered with backless books, hockey shoes, caps, and cigarette stubs.
Above, there were four men to a bedroom, and the beds were iron
double-deckers, like a steerage.
For ash-trays the Digams used sawed skulls, and on the bedroom walls
were anatomical charts, to be studied while dressing. In Martin’s room
was a complete skeleton. He and his roommates had trustingly bought it
from a salesman who came out from a Zenith surgical supply house. He was
such a genial and sympathetic salesman; he gave them cigars and told G.
U. stories and explained what prosperous doctors they were all going to
be. They bought the skeleton gratefully, on the instalment plan....
Later the salesman was less genial.
Martin roomed with Clif Clawson, Fatty Pfaff, and an earnest second-year
medic named Irving Watters.
Any psychologist desiring a perfectly normal man for use in
demonstrations could not have done better than to have engaged Irving
Watters. He was always and carefully dull; smilingly, easily,
dependably dull. If there was any cliché which he did not use, it was
because he had not yet heard it. He believed in morality--except on
Saturday evenings; he believed in the Episcopal Church--but not the High
Church; he believed in the Constitution, Darwinism, systematic exercise
in the gymnasium, and the genius of the president of the university.
Among them, Martin most liked Clif Clawson. Clif was the clown of the
fraternity-house, he was given to raucous laughter, he clogged and sang
meaningless songs, he even practised on the cornet, yet he was somehow a
good fellow and solid, and Martin, in his detestation of Ira Hinkley,
his fear of Angus Duer, his pity for Fatty Pfaff, his distaste for the
amiable dullness of Irving Watters, turned to the roaring Clif as to
something living and experimenting. At least Clif had reality; the
reality of a plowed field, of a steaming manure-pile. It was Clif who
would box with him; Clif who--though he loved to sit for hours smoking,
grunting, magnificently loafing--could be persuaded to go for a
five-mile walk.
And it was Clif who risked death by throwing baked beans at the Reverend
Ira Hinkley at supper, when Ira was bulkily and sweetly corrective.
In the dissecting-room Ira was maddening enough with his merriment at
such of Martin’s ideas as had not been accepted in Pottsburg Christian
College, but in the fraternity-house he was a moral pest. He never
ceased trying to stop their profanity. After three years on a backwoods
football team he still believed with unflinching optimism that he could
sterilize young men by administering reproofs, with the nickering of a
lady Sunday School teacher and the delicacy of a charging elephant.
Ira also had statistics about Clean Living.
He was full of statistics. Where he got them did not matter to him;
figures in the daily papers, in the census report, or in the Miscellany
Column of the _Sanctification Herald_ were equally valid. He announced
at supper table, “Clif, it’s a wonder to me how as bright a fella as you
can go on sucking that dirty old pipe. D’you realize that 67.9 per cent.
of all women who go to the operating table have husbands who smoke
tobacco?”
“What the devil would they smoke?” demanded Clif.
“Where’d you get those figures?” from Martin.
“They came out at a medical convention in Philadelphia in 1902,” Ira
condescended. “Of course I don’t suppose it’ll make any difference to a
bunch of wise galoots like you that some day you’ll marry a nice bright
little woman and ruin her life with your vices. Sure, keep right
on--fine brave virile bunch! A poor weakling preacher like me wouldn’t
dare do anything so brave as smoke a pipe!”
He left them triumphantly, and Martin groaned, “Ira makes me want to get
out of medicine and be an honest harness-maker.”
“Aw, gee now, Mart,” Fatty Pfaff complained, “you oughtn’t to cuss Ira
out. He’s awful sincere.”
“Sincere? Hell! So is a cockroach!”
Thus they jabbered, while Angus Duer watched them in a superior silence
that made Martin nervous. In the study of the profession to which he had
looked forward all his life he found irritation and vacuity as well as
serene wisdom; he saw no one clear path to Truth but a thousand paths to
a thousand truths far-off and doubtful.
CHAPTER III
I
John A. Robertshaw, John Aldington Robertshaw, professor of physiology
in the medical school, was rather deaf, and he was the only teacher in
the University of Winnemac who still wore mutton-chop whiskers. He came
from Back Bay; he was proud of it and let you know about it. With three
other Brahmins he formed in Mohalis a Boston colony which stood for
sturdy sweetness and decorously shaded light. On all occasions he
remarked, “When I was studying with Ludwig in Germany--” He was too
absorbed in his own correctness to heed individual students, and Clif
Clawson and the other young men technically known as “hell-raisers”
looked forward to his lectures on physiology.
They were held in an amphitheater whose seats curved so far around that
the lecturer could not see both ends at once, and while Dr. Robertshaw,
continuing to drone about blood circulation, was peering to the right to
find out who was making that outrageous sound like a motor horn, far
over on the left Clif Clawson would rise and imitate him, with sawing
arm and stroking of imaginary whiskers. Once Clif produced the
masterpiece of throwing a brick into the sink beside the platform, just
when Dr. Robertshaw was working up to his annual climax about the effect
of brass bands on the intensity of the knee-jerk.
Martin had been reading Max Gottlieb’s scientific papers--as much of
them as he could read, with their morass of mathematical symbols--and
from them he had a conviction that experiments should be something
dealing with the foundations of life and death, with the nature of
bacterial infection, with the chemistry of bodily reactions. When
Robertshaw chirped about fussy little experiments, standard experiments,
maiden-aunt experiments, Martin was restless. In college he had felt
that prosody and Latin Composition were futile, and he had looked
forward to the study of medicine as illumination. Now, in melancholy
worry about his own unreasonableness, he found that he was developing
the same contempt for Robertshaw’s rules of the thumb--and for most of
the work in anatomy.
The professor of anatomy, Dr. Oliver O. Stout, was himself an anatomy, a
dissection-chart, a thinly covered knot of nerves and blood vessels and
bones. Stout had precise and enormous knowledge; in his dry voice he
could repeat more facts about the left little toe than you would have
thought anybody would care to learn regarding the left little toe.
No discussion at the Digamma Pi supper table was more violent than the
incessant debate over the value to a doctor, a decent normal doctor who
made a good living and did not worry about reading papers at medical
associations, of remembering anatomical terms. But no matter what they
thought, they all ground at learning the lists of names which enable a
man to crawl through examinations and become an Educated Person, with a
market value of five dollars an hour. Unknown sages had invented rimes
which enabled them to memorize. At supper--the thirty piratical Digams
sitting at a long and spotty table, devouring clam chowder and beans and
codfish balls and banana layer-cake--the Freshmen earnestly repeated
after a senior:
On old Olympus’ topmost top
A fat-eared German viewed a hop.
Thus by association with the initial letters they mastered the twelve
cranial nerves: olfactory, optic, oculomotor, trochlear, and the rest.
To the Digams it was the world’s noblest poem, and they remembered it
for years after they had become practising physicians and altogether
forgotten the names of the nerves themselves.
II
In Dr. Stout’s anatomy lectures there were no disturbances, but in his
dissecting-room were many pleasantries. The mildest of them was the
insertion of a fire-cracker in the cadaver on which the two virginal and
unhappy co-eds worked. The real excitement during Freshman year was the
incident of Clif Clawson and the pancreas.
Clif had been elected class president, for the year, because he was so
full of greetings. He never met a classmate in the hall of Main Medical
without shouting, “How’s your vermiform appendix functioning this
morning?” or “I bid thee a lofty greeting, old pediculosis.” With
booming decorum he presided at class meetings (indignant meetings to
denounce the proposal to let the “aggies” use the North Side Tennis
Courts), but in private life he was less decorous.
The terrible thing happened when the Board of Regents were being shown
through the campus. The Regents were the supreme rulers of the
University; they were bankers and manufacturers and pastors of large
churches; to them even the president was humble. Nothing gave them more
interesting thrills than the dissecting-room of the medical school. The
preachers spoke morally of the effect of alcohol on paupers, and the
bankers of the disrespect for savings-accounts which is always to be
seen in the kind of men who insist on becoming cadavers. In the midst of
the tour, led by Dr. Stout and the umbrella-carrying secretary of the
University, the plumpest and most educational of all the bankers stopped
near Clif Clawson’s dissecting-table, with his derby hat reverently held
behind him, and into that hat Clif dropped a pancreas.
Now a pancreas is a damp and disgusting thing to find in your new hat,
and when the banker did so find one, he threw down the hat and said that
the students of Winnemac had gone to the devil. Dr. Stout and the
secretary comforted him; they cleaned the derby and assured him that
vengeance should be done on the man who could put a pancreas in a
banker’s hat.
Dr. Stout summoned Clif, as president of the Freshmen. Clif was pained.
He assembled the class, he lamented that any Winnemac Man could place a
pancreas in a banker’s hat, and he demanded that the criminal be manly
enough to stand up and confess.
Unfortunately the Reverend Ira Hinkley, who sat between Martin and Angus
Duer, had seen Clif drop the pancreas. He growled, “This is outrageous!
I’m going to expose Clawson, even if he is a frat-brother of mine.”
Martin protested, “Cut it out. You don’t want to get him fired?”
“He ought to be!”
Angus Duer turned in his seat, looked at Ira, and suggested, “Will you
kindly shut up?” and, as Ira subsided, Angus became to Martin more
admirable and more hateful than ever.
III
When he was depressed by a wonder as to why he was here, listening to a
Professor Robertshaw, repeating verses about fat-eared Germans, learning
the trade of medicine like Fatty Pfaff or Irving Watters, then Martin
had relief in what he considered debauches. Actually they were extremely
small debauches; they rarely went beyond too much lager in the adjacent
city of Zenith, or the smiles of a factory girl parading the sordid back
avenues, but to Martin, with his pride in taut strength, his joy in a
clear brain, they afterward seemed tragic.
His safest companion was Clif Clawson. No matter how much bad beer he
drank, Clif was never much more intoxicated than in his normal state.
Martin sank or rose to Clif’s buoyancy, while Clif rose or sank to
Martin’s speculativeness. As they sat in a back-room, at a table
glistening with beer-glass rings, Clif shook his finger and babbled,
“You’re only one ’at gets me, Mart. You know with all the hell-raising,
and all the talk about bein’ c’mmercial that I pull on these high boys
like Ira Stinkley, I’m jus’ sick o’ c’mmerialism an’ bunk as you are.”
“Sure. You bet,” Martin agreed with alcoholic fondness. “You’re jus’
like me. My God, do you get it--dough-face like Irving Watters or
heartless climber like Angus Duer, and then old Gottlieb! Ideal of
research! Never bein’ content with what _seems_ true! Alone, not carin’
a damn, square-toed as a captain on the bridge, working all night,
getting to the bottom of things!”
“Thash stuff. That’s my idee, too. Lez have ’nother beer. Shake you for
it!” observed Clif Clawson.
Zenith, with its saloons, was fifteen miles from Mohalis and the
University of Winnemac; half an hour by the huge, roaring, steel
interurban trolleys, and to Zenith the medical students went for their
forays. To say that one had “gone into town last night” was a matter for
winks and leers. But with Angus Duer, Martin discovered a new Zenith.
At supper Duer said abruptly, “Come into town with me and hear a
concert.”
For all his fancied superiority to the class, Martin was illimitably
ignorant of literature, of painting, of music. That the bloodless and
acquisitive Angus Duer should waste time listening to fiddlers was
astounding to him. He discovered that Duer had enthusiasm for two
composers, called Bach and Beethoven, presumably Germans, and that he
himself did not yet comprehend all the ways of the world. On the
interurban, Duer’s gravity loosened, and he cried, “Boy, if I hadn’t
been born to carve up innards, I’d have been a great musician! To-night
I’m going to lead you right into Heaven!”
Martin found himself in a confusion of little chairs and vast gilded
arches, of polite but disapproving ladies with programs in their laps,
unromantic musicians making unpleasant noises below and, at last,
incomprehensible beauty, which made for him pictures of hills and deep
forests, then suddenly became achingly long-winded. He exulted, “I’m
going to have ’em all--the fame of Max Gottlieb-- I mean his
ability--and the lovely music and lovely women-- Golly! I’m going to do
big things. And see the world.... Will this piece never quit?”
IV
It was a week after the concert that he rediscovered Madeline Fox.
Madeline was a handsome, high-colored, high-spirited, opinionated girl
whom Martin had known in college. She was staying on, ostensibly to take
a graduate course in English, actually to avoid going back home. She
considered herself a superb tennis player; she played it with energy and
voluble swoopings and large lack of direction. She believed herself to
be a connoisseur of literature; the fortunates to whom she gave her
approval were Hardy, Meredith, Howells, and Thackeray, none of whom she
had read for five years. She had often reproved Martin for his
inappreciation of Howells, for wearing flannel shirts, and for his
failure to hand her down from street-cars in the manner of a fiction
hero. In college, they had gone to dances together, though as a dancer
Martin was more spirited than accurate, and his partners sometimes had
difficulty in deciding just what he was trying to dance. He liked
Madeline’s tall comeliness and her vigor; he felt that with her
energetic culture she was somehow “good for him.” During this year, he
had scarcely seen her. He thought of her late in the evenings, and
planned to telephone to her, and did not telephone. But as he became
doubtful about medicine he longed for her sympathy, and on a Sunday
afternoon of spring he took her for a walk along the Chaloosa River.
From the river bluffs the prairie stretches in exuberant rolling hills.
In the long barley fields, the rough pastures, the stunted oaks and
brilliant birches, there is the adventurousness of the frontier, and
like young plainsmen they tramped the bluffs and told each other they
were going to conquer the world.
He complained, “These damn’ medics--”
“Oh, Martin, do you think ‘damn’ is a nice word?” said Madeline.
He did think it was a very nice word indeed, and constantly useful to a
busy worker, but her smile was desirable.
“Well--these darn’ studes, they aren’t trying to learn science; they’re
simply learning a trade. They just want to get the knowledge that’ll
enable them to cash in. They don’t talk about saving lives but about
‘losing cases’--losing dollars! And they wouldn’t even mind losing cases
if it was a sensational operation that’d advertise ’em! They make me
sick! How many of ’em do you find that’re interested in the work Ehrlich
is doing in Germany--yes, or that Max Gottlieb is doing right here and
now! Gottlieb’s just taken an awful fall out of Wright’s opsonin
theory.”
“Has he, really?”
“_Has_ he! I should say he had! And do you get any of the medics stirred
up about it? You do not! They say, ‘Oh, sure, science is all right in
its way; helps a doc to treat his patients,’ and then they begin to
argue about whether they can make more money if they locate in a big
city or a town, and is it better for a young doc to play the good-fellow
and lodge game, or join the church and look earnest. You ought to hear
Irve Watters. He’s just got one idea: the fellow that gets ahead in
medicine, is he the lad that knows his pathology? Oh, no; the bird that
succeeds is the one that gets an office on a northeast corner, near a
trolley car junction, with a ’phone number that’ll be easy for patients
to remember! Honest! He said so! I swear, when I graduate I believe I’ll
be a ship’s doctor. You see the world that way, and at least you aren’t
racing up and down the boat trying to drag patients away from some
rival doc that has an office on another deck!”
“Yes, I know; it’s dreadful the way people don’t have ideals about their
work. So many of the English grad students just want to make money
teaching, instead of enjoying scholarship the way I do.”
It was disconcerting to Martin that she should seem to think that she
was a superior person quite as much as himself, but he was even more
disconcerted when she bubbled:
“At the same time, Martin, one does have to be practical, doesn’t one!
Think how much more money--no, I mean how much more social position and
power for doing good a successful doctor has than one of these
scientists that just putter, and don’t know what’s going on in the
world. Look at a surgeon like Dr. Loizeau, riding up to the hospital in
a lovely car with a chauffeur in uniform, and all his patients simply
worshiping him, and then your Max Gottlieb--somebody pointed him out to
me the other day, and he had on a dreadful old suit, and I certainly
thought he could stand a hair-cut.”
Martin turned on her with fury, statistics, vituperation, religious
zeal, and confused metaphors. They sat on a crooked old-fashioned
rail-fence where over the sun-soaked bright plantains the first insects
of spring were humming. In the storm of his fanaticism she lost her airy
Culture and squeaked, “Yes, I see now, I see,” without stating what it
was she saw. “Oh, you do have a fine mind and such fine--such
integrity.”
“Honest? Do you think I have?”
“Oh, indeed I do, and I’m sure you’re going to have a wonderful future.
And I’m so glad you aren’t commercial, like the others. Don’t mind what
they say!”
He noted that Madeline was not only a rare and understanding spirit but
also an extraordinarily desirable woman--fresh color, tender eyes,
adorable slope from shoulder to side. As they walked back, he perceived
that she was incredibly the right mate for him. Under his training she
would learn the distinction between vague “ideals” and the hard sureness
of science. They paused on the bluff, looking down at the muddy
Chaloosa, a springtime Western river wild with floating branches. He
yearned for her; he regretted the casual affairs of a student and
determined to be a pure and extremely industrious young man, to be, in
fact, “worthy of her.”
“Oh, Madeline,” he mourned, “you’re so darn’ lovely!”
She glanced at him, timidly.
He caught her hand; in a desperate burst he tried to kiss her. It was
very badly done. He managed only to kiss the point of her jaw, while she
struggled and begged, “Oh, don’t!” They did not acknowledge, as they
ambled back into Mohalis, that the incident had occurred, but there was
softness in their voices and without impatience now she heard his
denunciation of Professor Robertshaw as a phonograph, and he listened to
her remarks on the shallowness and vulgarity of Dr. Norman Brumfit, that
sprightly English instructor. At her boarding-house she sighed, “I wish
I could ask you to come in, but it’s almost suppertime and-- Will you
call me up some day?”
“You bet I will!” said Martin, according to the rules for amorous
discourse in the University of Winnemac.
He raced home in adoration. As he lay in his narrow upper bunk at
midnight, he saw her eyes, now impertinent, now reproving, now warm with
trust in him. “I love her! I _love_ her! I’ll phone her-- Wonder if I
dare call her up as early as eight in the morning?”
But at eight he was too busy studying the lacrimal apparatus to think of
ladies’ eyes. He saw Madeline only once, and in the publicity of her
boarding-house porch, crowded with co-eds, red cushions, and
marshmallows, before he was hurled into hectic studying for the year’s
final examinations.
V
At examination-time, Digamma Pi fraternity showed its value to urgent
seekers after wisdom. Generations of Digams had collected test-papers
and preserved them in the sacred Quiz Book; geniuses for detail had
labored through the volume and marked with red pencil the problems most
often set in the course of years. The Freshmen crouched in a ring about
Ira Hinkley in the Digam living-room, while he read out the questions
they were most likely to get. They writhed, clawed their hair, scratched
their chins, bit their fingers, and beat their temples in the endeavor
to give the right answer before Angus Duer should read it to them out of
the textbook.
In the midst of their sufferings they had to labor with Fatty Pfaff.
Fatty had failed in the mid-year anatomical, and he had to pass a
special quiz before he could take the finals. There was a certain
fondness for him in Digamma Pi; Fatty was soft, Fatty was superstitious,
Fatty was an imbecile, yet they had for him the annoyed affection they
might have had for a second-hand motor or a muddy dog. All of them
worked on him; they tried to lift him and thrust him through the
examination as through a trap-door. They panted and grunted and moaned
at the labor, and Fatty panted and moaned with them.
The night before his special examination they kept him at it till two,
with wet towels, black coffee, prayer, and profanity. They repeated
lists--lists--lists to him; they shook their fists in his mournful red
round face and howled, “Damn you, _will_ you remember that the bicuspid
valve is the SAME as the mitral valve and NOT another one?” They ran
about the room, holding up their hands and wailing, “Won’t he never
remember nothing about nothing?” and charged back to purr with fictive
calm, “Now no use getting fussed, Fatty. Take it easy. Just listen to
this, quietly, will yuh, and try,” coaxingly, “do try to remember _one_
thing, anyway!”
They led him carefully to bed. He was so filled with facts that the
slightest jostling would have spilled them.
When he awoke at seven, with red eyes and trembling lips, he had
forgotten everything he had learned.
“There’s nothing for it,” said the president of Digamma Pi. “He’s got to
have a crib, and take his chance on getting caught with it. I thought
so. I made one out for him yesterday. It’s a lulu. It’ll cover enough of
the questions so he’ll get through.”
Even the Reverend Ira Hinkley, since he had witnessed the horrors of the
midnight before, went his ways ignoring the crime. It was Fatty himself
who protested: “Gee, I don’t like to cheat. I don’t think a fellow that
can’t get through an examination had hardly ought to be allowed to
practise medicine. That’s what my Dad said.”
They poured more coffee into him and (on the advice of Clif Clawson, who
wasn’t exactly sure what the effect might be but who was willing to
learn) they fed him a potassium bromide tablet. The president of
Digamma, seizing Fatty with some firmness, growled, “I’m going to stick
this crib in your pocket--look, here in your breast pocket, behind your
handkerchief.”
“I won’t use it. I don’t care if I fail,” whimpered Fatty.
“That’s all right, but you keep it there. Maybe you can absorb a little
information from it through your lungs, for God knows--” The president
clenched his hair. His voice rose, and in it was all the tragedy of
night watches and black draughts and hopeless retreats. “-- God knows
you can’t take it in through your head!”
They dusted Fatty, they stood him right side up, and pushed him through
the door, on his way to Anatomy Building. They watched him go: a balloon
on legs, a sausage in corduroy trousers.
“Is it possible he’s going to be honest?” marveled Clif Clawson.
“Well, if he is, we better go up and begin packing his trunk. And this
ole frat’ll never have another goat like Fatty,” grieved the president.
They saw Fatty stop, remove his handkerchief, mournfully blow his
nose--and discover a long thin slip of paper. They saw him frown at it,
tap it on his knuckles, begin to read it, stuff it back into his pocket,
and go on with a more resolute step.
They danced hand in hand about the living-room of the fraternity,
piously assuring one another, “He’ll use it--it’s all right--he’ll get
through or get hanged!”
He got through.
VI
Digamma Pi was more annoyed by Martin’s restless doubtings than by
Fatty’s idiocy, Clif Clawson’s raucousness, Angus Duer’s rasping, or the
Reverend Ira Hinkley’s nagging.
During the strain of study for examinations Martin was peculiarly vexing
in regard to “laying in the best quality medical terms like the best
quality sterilizers--not for use but to impress your patients.” As one,
the Digams suggested, “Say, if you don’t like the way we study medicine,
we’ll be tickled to death to take up a collection and send you back to
Elk Mills, where you won’t be disturbed by all us lowbrows and
commercialists. Look here! We don’t tell you how you ought to work.
Where do you get the idea you got to tell us? Oh, turn it off, will
you!”
Angus Duer observed, with sour sweetness, “We’ll admit we’re simply
carpenters, and you’re a great investigator. But there’s several things
you might turn to when you finish science. What do you know about
architecture? How’s your French verbs? How many big novels have you ever
read? Who’s the premier of Austro-Hungary?”
Martin struggled, “I don’t pretend to know anything--except I do know
what a man like Max Gottlieb means. He’s got the right method, and all
these other hams of profs, they’re simply witch doctors. You think
Gottlieb isn’t religious, Hinkley. Why, his just being in a lab is a
prayer. Don’t you idiots realize what it means to have a man like that
here, making new concepts of life? Don’t you--”
Clif Clawson, with a chasm of yawning, speculated, “Praying in the lab!
I’ll bet I get the pants took off me, when I take bacteriology, if Pa
Gottlieb catches me praying during experiment hours!”
“Damn it, listen!” Martin wailed. “I tell you, you fellows are the kind
that keep medicine nothing but guess-work diagnosis, and here you have a
man--”
So they argued for hours, after their sweaty fact-grinding.
When the others had gone to bed, when the room was a muck-heap of flung
clothing and weary young men snoring in iron bunks, Martin sat at the
splintery long pine study-table, worrying. Angus Duer glided in,
demanding, “Look here, old son. We’re all sick of your crabbing. If you
think medicine is rot, the way we study it, and if you’re so
confoundedly honest, why don’t you get out?”
He left Martin to agonize, “He’s right. I’ve got to shut up or get out.
Do I really mean it? What _do_ I want? What _am_ I going to do?”
VII
Angus Duer’s studiousness and his reverence for correct manners were
alike offended by Clif’s bawdy singing, Clif’s howling conversation,
Clif’s fondness for dropping things in people’s soup, and Clif’s
melancholy inability to keep his hands washed. For all his appearance of
nerveless steadiness, during the tension of examination-time Duer was as
nervous as Martin, and one evening at supper, when Clif was bellowing,
Duer snapped, “Will you kindly not make so much racket?”
“I’ll make all the damn’ racket I damn’ please!” Clif asserted, and a
feud was on.
Clif was so noisy thereafter that he almost became tired of his own
noise. He was noisy in the living-room, he was noisy in the bath, and
with some sacrifice he lay awake pretending to snore. If Duer was quiet
and book-wrapped, he was not in the least timid; he faced Clif with the
eye of a magistrate, and cowed him. Privily Clif complained to Martin,
“Darn him, he acts like I was a worm. Either he or me has got to get out
of Digam, that’s a cinch, and it won’t be me!”
He was ferocious and very noisy about it, and it was he who got out. He
said that the Digams were a “bunch of bum sports; don’t even have a
decent game of poker,” but he was fleeing from the hard eyes of Angus
Duer. And Martin resigned from the fraternity with him, planned to room
with him the coming autumn.
Clif’s blustering rubbed Martin as it did Duer. Clif had no reticences;
when he was not telling slimy stories he was demanding, “How much chuh
pay for those shoes--must think you’re a Vanderbilt!” or “D’I see you
walking with that Madeline Fox femme--what chuh tryin’ to do?” But
Martin was alienated from the civilized, industrious, nice young men of
Digamma Pi, in whose faces he could already see prescriptions, glossy
white sterilizers, smart enclosed motors, and glass office-signs in the
best gilt lettering. He preferred a barbarian loneliness, for next year
he would be working with Max Gottlieb, and he could not be bothered.
That summer he spent with a crew installing telephones in Montana.
He was a lineman in the wire-gang. It was his job to climb the poles,
digging the spurs of his leg-irons into the soft and silvery pine, to
carry up the wire, lash it to the glass insulators, then down and to
another pole.
They made perhaps five miles a day; at night they drove into little
rickety wooden towns. Their retiring was simple--they removed their
shoes and rolled up in a horse-blanket. Martin wore overalls and a
flannel shirt. He looked like a farm-hand. Climbing all day long, he
breathed deep, his eyes cleared of worry, and one day he experienced a
miracle.
He was atop a pole and suddenly, for no clear cause, his eyes opened
and he saw; as though he had just awakened he saw that the prairie was
vast, that the sun was kindly on rough pasture and ripening wheat, on
the old horses, the easy, broad-beamed, friendly horses, and on his
red-faced jocose companions; he saw that the meadow larks were jubilant,
and blackbirds shining by little pools, and with the living sun all life
was living. Suppose the Angus Duers and Irving Watterses were tight
tradesmen. What of it? “I’m _here_!” he gloated.
The wire-gang were as healthy and as simple as the west wind; they had
no pretentiousness; though they handled electrical equipment they did
not, like medics, learn a confusion of scientific terms and pretend to
the farmers that they were scientists. They laughed easily and were
content to be themselves, and with them Martin was content to forget how
noble he was. He had for them an affection such as he had for no one at
the University save Max Gottlieb.
He carried in his bag one book, Gottlieb’s “Immunology.” He could often
get through half a page of it before he bogged down in chemical formulæ.
Occasionally, on Sundays or rainy days, he tried to read it, and longed
for the laboratory; occasionally he thought of Madeline Fox, and became
certain that he was devastatingly lonely for her. But week slipped into
careless and robust week, and when he awoke in a stable, smelling the
sweet hay and the horses and the lark-ringing prairie that crept near to
the heart of these shanty towns, he cared only for the day’s work, the
day’s hiking, westward toward the sunset.
So they straggled through the Montana wheatland, whole duchies of wheat
in one shining field, through the cattle-country and the sagebrush
desert, and suddenly, staring at a persistent cloud, Martin realized
that he beheld the mountains.
Then he was on a train; the wire-gang were already forgotten; and he was
thinking only of Madeline Fox, Clif Clawson, Angus Duer, and Max
Gottlieb.
CHAPTER IV
I
Professor Max Gottlieb was about to assassinate a guinea pig with
anthrax germs, and the bacteriology class were nervous.
They had studied the forms of bacteria, they had handled Petri dishes
and platinum loops, they had proudly grown on potato slices the harmless
red cultures of _Bacillus prodigiosus_, and they had come now to
pathogenic germs and the inoculation of a living animal with swift
disease. These two beady-eyed guinea pigs, chittering in a battery jar,
would in two days be stiff and dead.
Martin had an excitement not free from anxiety. He laughed at it, he
remembered with professional scorn how foolish were the lay visitors to
the laboratory, who believed that sanguinary microbes would leap upon
them from the mysterious centrifuge, from the benches, from the air
itself. But he was conscious that in the cotton-plugged test-tube
between the instrument-bath and the bichloride jar on the demonstrator’s
desk were millions of fatal anthrax germs.
The class looked respectful and did not stand too close. With the flair
of technique, the sure rapidity which dignified the slightest movement
of his hands, Dr. Gottlieb clipped the hair on the belly of a guinea pig
held by the assistant. He soaped the belly with one flicker of a
hand-brush, he shaved it and painted it with iodine.
(And all the while Max Gottlieb was recalling the eagerness of his first
students, when he had just returned from working with Koch and Pasteur,
when he was fresh from enormous beer seidels and Korpsbrüder and
ferocious arguments. Passionate, beautiful days! _Die goldene Zeit!_ His
first classes in America, at Queen City College, had been awed by the
sensational discoveries in bacteriology; they had crowded about him
reverently; they had longed to know. Now the class was a mob. He looked
at them-- Fatty Pfaff in the front row, his face vacant as a doorknob;
the co-eds emotional and frightened; only Martin Arrowsmith and Angus
Duer visibly intelligent. His memory fumbled for a pale blue twilight in
Munich, a bridge and a waiting girl, and the sound of music.)
He dipped his hands in the bichloride solution and shook them--a quick
shake, fingers down, like the fingers of a pianist above the keys. He
took a hypodermic needle from the instrument-bath and lifted the
test-tube. His voice flowed indolently, with German vowels and blurred
W’s:
“This, gentlemen, iss a twenty-four-hour culture of _Bacillus
anthracis_. You will note, I am sure you will have noted already, that
in the bottom of the tumbler there was cotton to keep the tube from
being broken. I cannot advise breaking tubes of anthrax germs and
afterwards getting the hands into the culture. You _might_ merely get
anthrax boils--”
The class shuddered.
Gottlieb twitched out the cotton plug with his little finger, so neatly
that the medical students who had complained, “Bacteriology is junk;
urinalysis and blood tests are all the lab stuff we need to know,” now
gave him something of the respect they had for a man who could do card
tricks or remove an appendix in seven minutes. He agitated the mouth of
the tube in the Bunsen burner, droning, “Every time you take the plug
from a tube, flame the mouth of the tube. Make that a rule. It is a
necessity of the technique, and technique, gentlemen, is the beginning
of all science. It iss also the least-known thing in science.”
The class was impatient. Why didn’t he get on with it, on to the
entertainingly dreadful moment of inoculating the pig?
(And Max Gottlieb, glancing at the other guinea pig in the prison of its
battery jar, meditated, “Wretched innocent! Why should I murder him, to
teach _Dummköpfe_? It would be better to experiment on that fat young
man.”)
He thrust the syringe into the tube, he withdrew the piston dextrously
with his index finger, and lectured:
“Take one half c.c. of the culture. There are two kinds of M.D.’s--those
to whom c.c. means cubic centimeter and those to whom it means compound
cathartic. The second kind are more prosperous.”
(But one cannot convey the quality of it: the thin drawl, the sardonic
amiability, the hiss of the S’s, the D’s turned into blunt and
challenging T’s.)
The assistant held the guinea pig close; Gottlieb pinched up the skin
of the belly and punctured it with a quick down thrust of the hypodermic
needle. The pig gave a little jerk, a little squeak, and the co-eds
shuddered. Gottlieb’s wise fingers knew when the peritoneal wall was
reached. He pushed home the plunger of the syringe. He said quietly,
“This poor animal will now soon be dead as Moses.” The class glanced at
one another uneasily. “Some of you will think that it does not matter;
some of you will think, like Bernard Shaw, that I am an executioner and
the more monstrous because I am cool about it; and some of you will not
think at all. This difference in philosophy iss what makes life
interesting.”
While the assistant tagged the pig with a tin disk in its ear and
restored it to the battery jar, Gottlieb set down its weight in a
note-book, with the time of inoculation and the age of the bacterial
culture. These notes he reproduced on the blackboard, in his fastidious
script, murmuring, “Gentlemen, the most important part of living is not
the living but pondering upon it. And the most important part of
experimentation is not doing the experiment but making notes, ve-ry
accurate _quantitative_ notes--in ink. I am told that a great many
clever people feel they can keep notes in their heads. I have often
observed with pleasure that such persons do not have heads in which to
keep their notes. This iss very good, because thus the world never sees
their results and science is not encumbered with them. I shall now
inoculate the second guinea pig, and the class will be dismissed. Before
the next lab hour I shall be glad if you will read Pater’s ‘Marius the
Epicurean,’ to derife from it the calmness which is the secret of
laboratory skill.”
II
As they bustled down the hall, Angus Duer observed to a brother Digam,
“Gottlieb is an old laboratory plug; he hasn’t got any imagination; he
sticks here instead of getting out into the world and enjoying the
fight. But he certainly is handy. Awfully good technique. He might have
been a first-rate surgeon, and made fifty thousand dollars a year. As it
is, I don’t suppose he gets a cent over four thousand!”
Ira Hinkley walked alone, worrying. He was an extraordinarily kindly
man, this huge and bumbling parson. He reverently accepted everything,
no matter how contradictory to everything else, that his medical
instructors told him, but this killing of animals--he hated it. By a
connection not evident to him he remembered that the Sunday before, in
the slummy chapel where he preached during his medical course, he had
exalted the sacrifice of the martyrs and they had sung of the blood of
the lamb, the fountain filled with blood drawn from Emmanuel’s veins,
but this meditation he lost, and he lumbered toward Digamma Pi in a fog
of pondering pity.
Clif Clawson, walking with Fatty Pfaff, shouted, “Gosh, ole pig
certainly did jerk when Pa Gottlieb rammed that needle home!” and Fatty
begged, “Don’t! Please!”
But Martin Arrowsmith saw himself doing the same experiment and, as he
remembered Gottlieb’s unerring fingers, his hands curved in imitation.
III
The guinea pigs grew drowsier and drowsier. In two days they rolled
over, kicked convulsively, and died. Full of dramatic expectation, the
class reassembled for the necropsy. On the demonstrator’s table was a
wooden tray, scarred from the tacks which for years had pinned down the
corpses. The guinea pigs were in a glass jar, rigid, their hair ruffled.
The class tried to remember how nibbling and alive they had been. The
assistant stretched out one of them with thumb-tacks. Gottlieb swabbed
its belly with a cotton wad soaked in lysol, slit it from belly to neck,
and cauterized the heart with a red-hot spatula--the class quivered as
they heard the searing of the flesh. Like a priest of diabolic
mysteries, he drew out the blackened blood with a pipette. With the
distended lungs, the spleen and kidneys and liver, the assistant made
wavy smears on glass slides which were stained and given to the class
for examination. The students who had learned to look through the
microscope without having to close one eye were proud and professional,
and all of them talked of the beauty of identifying the bacillus, as
they twiddled the brass thumbscrews to the right focus and the cells
rose from cloudiness to sharp distinctness on the slides before them.
But they were uneasy, for Gottlieb remained with them that day, stalking
behind them, saying nothing, watching them always, watching the disposal
of the remains of the guinea pigs, and along the benches ran nervous
rumors about a bygone student who had died from anthrax infection in the
laboratory.
IV
There was for Martin in these days a quality of satisfying delight; the
zest of a fast hockey game, the serenity of the prairie, the
bewilderment of great music, and a feeling of creation. He woke early
and thought contentedly of the day; he hurried to his work, devout,
unseeing.
The confusion of the bacteriological laboratory was ecstasy to him--the
students in shirt-sleeves, filtering nutrient gelatine, their fingers
gummed from the crinkly gelatine leaves; or heating media in an
autoclave like a silver howitzer. The roaring Bunsen flames beneath the
hot-air ovens, the steam from the Arnold sterilizers rolling to the
rafters, clouding the windows, were to Martin lovely with activity, and
to him the most radiant things in the world were rows of test-tubes
filled with watery serum and plugged with cotton singed to a coffee
brown, a fine platinum loop leaning in a shiny test-glass, a fantastic
hedge of tall glass tubes mysteriously connecting jars, or a bottle rich
with gentian violet stain.
He had begun, perhaps in youthful imitation of Gottlieb, to work by
himself in the laboratory at night.... The long room was dark, thick
dark, but for the gas-mantle behind his microscope. The cone of light
cast a gloss on the bright brass tube, a sheen on his black hair, as he
bent over the eyepiece. He was studying trypanosomes from a rat--an
eight-branched rosette stained with polychrome methylene blue; a cluster
of organisms delicate as a narcissus, with their purple nuclei, their
light blue cells, and the thin lines of the flagella. He was excited and
a little proud; he had stained the germs perfectly, and it is not easy
to stain a rosette without breaking the petal shape. In the darkness, a
step, the weary step of Max Gottlieb, and a hand on Martin’s shoulder.
Silently Martin raised his head, pushed the microscope toward him.
Bending down, a cigarette stub in his mouth--the smoke would have stung
the eyes of any human being-- Gottlieb peered at the preparation.
He adjusted the gas light a quarter inch, and mused, “Splendid! You have
craftsmanship. Oh, there is an art in science--for a few. You Americans,
so many of you--all full with ideas, but you are impatient with the
beautiful dullness of long labors. I see already--and I watch you in the
lab before--perhaps you may try the trypanosomes of sleeping sickness.
They are very, very interesting, and very, very tickelish to handle. It
is quite a nice disease. In some villages in Africa, fifty per cent. of
the people have it, and it is invariably fatal. Yes, I think you might
work on the bugs.”
Which, to Martin, was getting his brigade in battle.
“I shall have,” said Gottlieb, “a little sandwich in my room at
midnight. If you should happen to work so late, I should be very pleast
if you would come to have a bite.”
Diffidently, Martin crossed the hall to Gottlieb’s immaculate laboratory
at midnight. On the bench were coffee and sandwiches, curiously small
and excellent sandwiches, foreign to Martin’s lunch-room taste.
Gottlieb talked till Clif had faded from existence and Angus Duer seemed
but an absurd climber. He summoned forth London laboratories, dinners on
frosty evenings in Stockholm, walks on the Pincio with sunset behind the
dome of San Pietro, extreme danger and overpowering disgust from
excreta-smeared garments in an epidemic at Marseilles. His reserve
slipped from him and he talked of himself and of his family as though
Martin were a contemporary.
The cousin who was a colonel in Uruguay and the cousin, a rabbi, who was
tortured in a pogrom in Moscow. His sick wife--it might be cancer. The
three children--the youngest girl, Miriam, she was a good musician, but
the boy, the fourteen-year-old, he was a worry; he was saucy, he would
not study. Himself, he had worked for years on the synthesis of
antibodies; he was at present in a blind alley, and at Mohalis there was
no one who was interested, no one to stir him, but he was having an
agreeable time massacring the opsonin theory, and that cheered him.
“No, I have done nothing except be unpleasant to people that claim too
much, but I have dreams of real discoveries some day. And-- No. Not five
times in five years do I have students who understand craftsmanship and
precision and maybe some big imagination in hypotheses. I t’ink perhaps
you may have them. If I can help you-- So!
“I do not t’ink you will be a good doctor. Good doctors are fine--often
they are artists--but their trade, it is not for us lonely ones that
work in labs. Once, I took an M.D. label. In Heidelberg that was-- Herr
Gott, back in 1875! I could not get much interested in bandaging legs
and looking at tongues. I was a follower of Helmholtz--what a wild
blithering young fellow! I tried to make researches into the physics of
sound-- I was bad, most unbelievable, but I learned that in this wale of
tears there is nothing certain but the quantitative method. And I was a
chemist--a fine stink-maker was I. And so into biology and much trouble.
It has been good. I have found one or two things. And if sometimes I
feel an exile, cold-- I had to get out of Germany one time for refusing
to sing _Die Wacht am Rhein_ and trying to kill a cavalry captain--he
was a stout fellow-- I had to choke him--you see I am boasting, but I
was a lifely _Kerl_ thirty years ago! Ah! So!
“There is but one trouble of a philosophical bacteriologist. Why should
we destroy these amiable pathogenic germs? Are we too sure, when we
regard these oh, most unbeautiful young students attending Y. M. C. A.’s
and singing dinkle-songs and wearing hats with initials burned into
them--iss it worth while to protect them from the so elegantly
functioning _Bacillus typhosus_ with its lovely flagella? You know, once
I asked Dean Silva would it not be better to let loose the pathogenic
germs on the world, and so solve all economic questions. But he did not
care for my met’od. Oh, well, he is older than I am; he also gives, I
hear, some dinner parties with bishops and judges present, all in nice
clothes. He would know more than a German Jew who loves Father Nietzsche
and Father Schopenhauer (but damn him, he was teleological-minded!) and
Father Koch and Father Pasteur and Brother Jacques Loeb and Brother
Arrhenius. Ja! I talk foolishness. Let us go look at your slides and so
good-night.”
When he had left Gottlieb at his stupid brown little house, his face as
reticent as though the midnight supper and all the rambling talk had
never happened, Martin ran home, altogether drunk.
CHAPTER V
I
Though bacteriology was all of Martin’s life now, it was the theory of
the university that he was also studying pathology, hygiene, surgical
anatomy, and enough other subjects to swamp a genius.
Clif Clawson and he lived in a large room with flowered wall-paper,
piles of filthy clothes, iron beds, and cuspidors. They made their own
breakfasts; they dined on hash at the Pilgrim Lunch Wagon or the Dew
Drop Inn. Clif was occasionally irritating; he hated open windows; he
talked of dirty socks; he sang “Some Die of Diabetes” when Martin was
studying; and he was altogether unable to say anything directly. He had
to be humorous. He remarked, “Is it your combobulatory concept that we
might now feed the old faces?” or “How about ingurgitating a few
calories?” But he had for Martin a charm that could not be accounted for
by his cheerfulness, his shrewdness, his vague courage. The whole of
Clif was more than the sum of his various parts.
In the joy of his laboratory work Martin thought rarely of his recent
associates in Digamma Pi. He occasionally protested that the Reverend
Ira Hinkley was a village policeman and Irving Watters a plumber, that
Angus Duer would walk to success over his grandmother’s head, and that
for an idiot like Fatty Pfaff to practise on helpless human beings was
criminal, but mostly he ignored them and ceased to be a pest. And when
he had passed his first triumphs in bacteriology and discovered how
remarkably much he did not know, he was curiously humble.
If he was less annoying in regard to his classmates, he was more so in
his classrooms. He had learned from Gottlieb the trick of using the word
“control” in reference to the person or animal or chemical left
untreated during an experiment, as a standard for comparison; and there
is no trick more infuriating. When a physician boasted of his success
with this drug or that electric cabinet, Gottlieb always snorted,
“Where was your control? How many cases did you have under identical
conditions, and how many of them did not get the treatment?” Now Martin
began to mouth it--control, control, control, where’s your control?
where’s your control?--till most of his fellows and a few of his
instructors desired to lynch him.
He was particularly tedious in materia medica.
The professor of materia medica, Dr. Lloyd Davidson, would have been an
illustrious shopkeeper. He was very popular. From him a future physician
could learn that most important of all things: the proper drugs to give
a patient, particularly when you cannot discover what is the matter with
him. His classes listened with zeal, and memorized the sacred hundred
and fifty favorite prescriptions. (He was proud that this was fifty more
than his predecessor had required.)
But Martin was rebellious. He inquired, and publicly, “Dr. Davidson, how
do they know ichthyol is good for erysipelas? Isn’t it just rotten
fossil fish--isn’t it like the mummy-dust and puppy-ear stuff they used
to give in the olden days?”
“How do they know? Why, my critical young friend, because thousands of
physicians have used it for years and found their patients getting
better, and that’s how they know!”
“But honest, Doctor, wouldn’t the patients maybe have gotten better
anyway? Wasn’t it maybe a _post hoc, propter hoc_? Have they ever
experimented on a whole slew of patients together, with controls?”
“Probably not--and until some genius like yourself, Arrowsmith, can herd
together a few hundred people with exactly identical cases of
erysipelas, it probably never will be tried! Meanwhile I trust that you
other gentlemen, who perhaps lack Mr. Arrowsmith’s profound scientific
attainments and the power to use such handy technical terms as
‘control,’ will, merely on my feeble advice, continue to use ichthyol!”
But Martin insisted, “Please, Dr. Davidson, what’s the use of getting
all these prescriptions by heart, anyway? We’ll forget most of ’em, and
besides, we can always look ’em up in the book.”
Davidson pressed his lips together, then:
“Arrowsmith, with a man of your age I hate to answer you as I would a
three-year-old boy, but apparently I must. Therefore, you will learn the
properties of drugs and the contents of prescriptions _because I tell
you to_! If I did not hesitate to waste the time of the other members of
this class, I would try to convince you that my statements may be
accepted, not on my humble authority, but because they are the
conclusions of wise men--men wiser or certainly a little older than you,
my friend--through many ages. But as I have no desire to indulge in
fancy flights of rhetoric and eloquence, I shall merely say that you
will accept, and you will study, and you will memorize, because I tell
you to!”
Martin considered dropping his medical course and specializing in
bacteriology. He tried to confide in Clif, but Clif had become impatient
of his fretting, and he turned again to the energetic and willowy
Madeline Fox.
II
Madeline was at once sympathetic and sensible. Why not complete his
medical course, then see what he wanted to do?
They tramped, they skated, they skied, they went to the University
Dramatic Society play. Madeline’s widowed mother had come to live with
her, and they had taken a top-floor flat in one of the tiny
apartment-houses which were beginning to replace the expansive old
wooden houses of Mohalis. The flat was full of literature and
decoration: a bronze Buddha from Chicago, a rubbing of Shakespeare’s
epitaph, a set of Anatole France in translation, a photograph of Cologne
cathedral, a wicker tea-table with a samovar whose operation no one in
the university understood, and a souvenir post-card album. Madeline’s
mother was a Main Street dowager duchess. She was stately and
white-haired but she attended the Methodist Church. In Mohalis she was
flustered by the chatter of the students; she longed for her home-town,
for the church sociables and the meetings of the women’s club--they were
studying Education this year and she hated to lose all the information
about university ways.
With a home and a chaperone, Madeline began to “entertain”:
eight-o’clock parties with coffee, chocolate cake, chicken salad, and
word-games. She invited Martin, but he was jealous of his evenings,
beautiful evenings of research. The first affair to which she enticed
him was her big New Year’s Party in January. They “did
advertisements”--guessed at tableaux representing advertising pictures;
they danced to the phonograph; and they had not merely a lap-supper but
little tables excessively covered with doilies.
Martin was unaccustomed to such elegance. Though he had come in sulky
unwillingness, he was impressed by the supper, by the frocks of the
young women; he realized that his dancing was rusty, and he envied the
senior who could do the new waltz called the “Boston.” There was no
strength, no grace, no knowledge, that Martin Arrowsmith did not covet,
when consciousness of it had pierced through the layers of his
absorption. If he was but little greedy for possessions, he was hungry
for every skill.
His reluctant wonder at the others was drowned in his admiration for
Madeline. He had known her as a jacketed outdoor girl, but this was an
exquisite indoor Madeline, slender in yellow silk. She seemed to him a
miracle of tact and ease as she bullied her guests into an appearance of
merriment. She had need of tact, for Dr. Norman Brumfit was there, and
it was one of Dr. Brumfit’s evenings to be original and naughty. He
pretended to kiss Madeline’s mother, which vastly discomforted the poor
lady; he sang a strongly improper negro song containing the word hell;
he maintained to a group of women graduate students that George Sand’s
affairs might perhaps be partially justified by their influence on men
of talent; and when they looked shocked, he pranced a little, and his
eye-glasses glittered.
Madeline took charge of him. She trilled, “Dr. Brumfit, you’re terribly
learned and so on and so forth, and sometimes in English classes I’m
simply scared to death of you, but other times you’re nothing but a bad
small boy, and I won’t have you teasing the girls. You can help me bring
in the sherbet, that’s what you can do.”
Martin adored her. He hated Brumfit for the privilege of disappearing
with her into the closet-like kitchen of the flat. Madeline! She was the
one person who understood him! Here, where every one snatched at her and
Dr. Brumfit beamed on her with almost matrimonial fondness, she was
precious, she was something he must have.
On pretense of helping her set the tables, he had a moment with her, and
whimpered, “Lord, you’re so lovely!”
“I’m glad you think I’m a wee bit nice.” She, the rose and the adored of
all the world, gave him her favor.
“Can I come call on you to-morrow evening?”
“Well, I-- Perhaps.”
III
It cannot be said, in this biography of a young man who was in no degree
a hero, who regarded himself as a seeker after truth yet who stumbled
and slid back all his life and bogged himself in every obvious morass,
that Martin’s intentions toward Madeline Fox were what is called
“honorable.” He was not a Don Juan, but he was a poor medical student
who would have to wait for years before he could make a living.
Certainly he did not think of proposing marriage. He wanted--like most
poor and ardent young men in such a case, he wanted all he could get.
As he raced toward her flat, he was expectant of adventure. He pictured
her melting; he felt her hand glide down his cheek. He warned himself,
“Don’t be a fool now! Probably nothing doing at all. Don’t go get all
worked up and then be disappointed. She’ll probably cuss you out for
something you did wrong at the party. She’ll probably be sleepy and wish
you hadn’t come. Nothing!” But he did not for a second believe it.
He rang, he saw her opening the door, he followed her down the meager
hall, longing to take her hand. He came into the over-bright
living-room--and he found her mother, solid as a pyramid,
permanent-looking as sunless winter.
But of course Mother would obligingly go, and leave him to conquest.
Mother did not.
In Mohalis, the suitable time for young men callers to depart is ten
o’clock, but from eight till a quarter after eleven Martin did battle
with Mrs. Fox; talked to her in two languages, an audible gossip and a
mute but furious protest, while Madeline--she was present; she sat about
and looked pretty. In an equally silent tongue Mrs. Fox answered him,
till the room was thick with their antagonism, while they seemed to be
discussing the weather, the university, and the trolley service into
Zenith.
“Yes, of course, some day I guess they’ll have a car every twenty
minutes,” he said weightily.
(“Darn her, why doesn’t she go to bed? Cheers! She’s doing up her
knitting. Nope. Damn it! She’s taking another ball of wool.”)
“Oh, yes, I’m sure they’ll have to have better service,” said Mrs. Fox.
(“Young man, I don’t know much about you, but I don’t believe you’re the
right kind of person for Madeline to go with. Anyway, it’s time you went
home.”)
“Oh, yes, sure, you bet. Lot better service.”
(“I know I’m staying too long, and I know you know it, but I don’t
care!”)
It seemed impossible that Mrs. Fox should endure his stolid persistence.
He used thought-forms, will-power, and hypnotism, and when he rose,
defeated, she was still there, extremely placid. They said good-by not
too warmly. Madeline took him to the door; for an exhilarating
half-minute he had her alone.
“I wanted so much-- I wanted to talk to you!”
“I know. I’m sorry. Some time!” she muttered.
He kissed her. It was a tempestuous kiss, and very sweet.
IV
Fudge parties, skating parties, sleighing parties, a literary party with
the guest of honor a lady journalist who did the social page for the
Zenith _Advocate-Times_-- Madeline leaped into an orgy of jocund but
extraordinarily tiring entertainments, and Martin obediently and
smolderingly followed her. She appeared to have trouble in getting
enough men, and to the literary evening Martin dragged the enraged Clif
Clawson. Clif grumbled, “This is the damnedest zoo of sparrows I ever
did time in,” but he bore off treasure--he had heard Madeline call
Martin by her favorite name of “Martykins.” That was very valuable. Clif
called him Martykins. Clif told others to call him Martykins. Fatty
Pfaff and Irving Watters called him Martykins. And when Martin wanted to
go to sleep, Clif croaked:
“Yuh, you’ll probably marry her. She’s a dead shot. She can hit a smart
young M.D. at ninety paces. Oh, you’ll have one fine young time going on
with science after that skirt sets you at tonsil-snatching.... She’s one
of these literary birds. She knows all about lite’ature except maybe how
to read.... She’s not so bad-looking, now. She’ll get fat, like her Ma.”
Martin said that which was necessary, and he concluded, “She’s the only
girl in the graduate school that’s got any pep. The others just sit
around and talk, and she gets up the best parties--”
“Any kissing parties?”
“Now you look here! I’ll be getting sore, first thing you know! You and
I are roughnecks, but Madeline Fox--she’s like Angus Duer, some ways. I
realize all the stuff we’re missing: music and literature, yes, and
decent clothes, too--no harm to dressing well--”
“That’s just what I was tellin’ you! She’ll have you all dolled up in a
Prince Albert and a boiled shirt, diagnosing everything as
rich-widowitis. How you can fall for that four-flushing dame--_Where’s
your control?_”
Clif’s opposition stirred him to consider Madeline not merely with a sly
and avaricious interest but with a dramatic conviction that he longed to
marry her.
V
Few women can for long periods keep from trying to Improve their men,
and To Improve means to change a person from what he is, whatever that
may be, into something else. Girls like Madeline Fox, artistic young
women who do not work at it, cannot be restrained from Improving for
more than a day at a time. The moment the urgent Martin showed that he
was stirred by her graces, she went at his clothes--his corduroys and
soft collars and eccentric old gray felt hat--at his vocabulary and his
taste in fiction, with new and more patronizing vigor. Her sketchy way
of saying, “Why, of course everybody knows that Emerson was the greatest
thinker” irritated him the more in contrast to Gottlieb’s dark patience.
“Oh, let me alone!” he hurled at her. “You’re the nicest thing the Lord
ever made, when you stick to things you know about, but when you spring
your ideas on politics and chemotherapy-- Darn it, quit bullying me! I
guess you’re right about slang. I’ll cut out all this junk about
‘feeding your face’ and so on. But I will not put on a hard-boiled
collar! I won’t!”
He might never have proposed to her but for the spring evening on the
roof.
She used the flat roof of her apartment-house as a garden. She had set
out one box of geraniums and a cast-iron bench like those once beheld
in cemetery plots; she had hung up two Japanese lanterns--they were
ragged and they hung crooked. She spoke with scorn of the other
inhabitants of the apartment-house, who were “so prosaic, so
conventional, that they never came up to this darling hidey-place.” She
compared her refuge to the roof of a Moorish palace, to a Spanish patio,
to a Japanese garden, to a “pleasaunce of old Provençal.” But to Martin
it seemed a good deal like a plain roof. He was vaguely ready for a
quarrel, that April evening when he called on Madeline and her mother
sniffily told him that she was to be found on the roof.
“Damned Japanese lanterns. Rather look at liver-sections,” he grumbled,
as he trudged up the curving stairs.
Madeline was sitting on the funereal iron bench, her chin in her hands.
For once she did not greet him with flowery excitement but with a
noncommittal “Hello.” She seemed spiritless. He felt guilty for his
scoffing; he suddenly saw the pathos in her pretense that this stretch
of tar-paper and slatted walks was a blazing garden. As he sat beside
her he piped, “Say, that’s a dandy new strip of matting you’ve put
down.”
“It is not! It’s mangy!” She turned toward him. She wailed, “Oh, Mart,
I’m so sick of myself, to-night. I’m always trying to make people think
I’m somebody. I’m not. I’m a bluff.”
“What is it, dear?”
“Oh, it’s lots. Dr. Brumfit, hang him--only he was right--he as good as
told me that if I don’t work harder I’ll have to get out of the graduate
school. I’m not doing a thing, he said, and if I don’t have my Ph.D.,
then I won’t be able to land a nice job teaching English in some swell
school, and I’d better land one, too, because it doesn’t look to poor
Madeline as if anybody was going to marry her.”
His arm about her, he blared, “I know exactly who--”
“No, I’m not fishing. I’m almost honest, to-night. I’m no good, Mart. I
tell people how clever I am. And I don’t suppose they believe it.
Probably they go off and laugh at me!”
“They do not! If they did-- I’d like to see anybody that tried
laughing--”
“It’s awfully sweet and dear of you, but I’m not worth it. The poetic
Madeline! With her ree-fined vocabulary! I’m a-- I’m a-- Martin, I’m a
tin-horn sport! I’m everything your friend Clif thinks I am. Oh, you
needn’t tell me. I know what he thinks. And-- I’ll have to go home with
mother, and I can’t stand it, dear, I can’t stand it! I won’t go back!
That town! Never anything doing! The old tabbies, and the beastly old
men, always telling the same old jokes. I won’t!”
Her head was in the hollow of his arm; she was weeping, hard; he was
stroking her hair, not covetously now but tenderly, and he was
whispering:
“Darling! I almost feel as if I dared to love you. You’re going to marry
me and-- Take me couple more years to finish my medical course and
couple in hospital, then we’ll be married and-- By thunder, with you
helping me, I’m going to climb to the top! Be big surgeon! We’re going
to have everything!”
“Dearest, do be wise. I don’t want to keep you from your scientific
work--”
“Oh. Well. Well, I would like to keep up _some_ research. But thunder,
I’m not just a lab-cat. Battle o’ life. Smashing your way through.
Competing with real men in real he-struggle. If I can’t do that and do
some scientific work too, I’m no good. Course while I’m with Gottlieb, I
want to take advantage of it, but afterward-- Oh, Madeline!”
Then was all reasoning lost in a blur of nearness to her.
VI
He dreaded the interview with Mrs. Fox; he was certain that she would
demand, “Young man, how do you expect to support my Maddy? And you use
bad language.” But she took his hand and mourned, “I hope you and my
baby will be happy. She’s a dear good girl, even if she is a little
flighty sometimes, and I know you’re nice and kind and hard-working. I
shall pray you’ll be happy--oh, I’ll pray so hard! You young people
don’t seem to think much of prayer, but if you knew how it helped
me-- Oh, I’ll petition for your sweet happiness!”
She was weeping; she kissed Martin’s forehead with the dry, soft, gentle
kiss of an old woman, and he was near to weeping with her.
At parting Madeline whispered, “Boy, I don’t care a bit, myself, but
Mother would love it if we went to church with her. Don’t you think you
could, just once?”
The astounded world, the astounded and profane Clif Clawson, had the
spectacle of Martin in shiny pressed clothes, a painful linen collar,
and an arduously tied scarf, accompanying Mrs. Fox and the chastely
chattering Madeline to the Mohalis Methodist Church, to hear the
Reverend Dr. Myron Schwab discourse on “The One Way to Righteousness.”
They passed the Reverend Ira Hinkley, and Ira gloated with a holy
gloating at Martin’s captivity.
VII
For all his devotion to Max Gottlieb’s pessimistic view of the human
intellect, Martin had believed that there was such a thing as progress,
that events meant something, that people could learn something, that if
Madeline had once admitted she was an ordinary young woman who
occasionally failed, then she was saved. He was bewildered when she
began improving him more airily than ever. She complained of his
vulgarity and what she asserted to be his slack ambition. “You think
it’s terribly smart of you to feel superior. Sometimes I wonder if it
isn’t just laziness. You like to day-dream around labs. Why should _you_
be spared the work of memorizing your materia medica and so on and so
forth? All the others have to do it. No, I won’t kiss you. I want you to
grow up and listen to reason.”
In fury at her badgering, in desire for her lips and forgiving smile, he
was whirled through to the end of the term.
A week before examinations, when he was trying to spend twenty-four
hours a day in making love to her, twenty-four in grinding for
examinations, and twenty-four in the bacteriological laboratory, he
promised Clif that he would spend that summer vacation with him, working
as a waiter in a Canadian hotel. He met Madeline in the evening, and
with her walked through the cherry orchard on the Agricultural
Experiment Station grounds.
“You know what I think of your horrid Clif Clawson,” she complained. “I
don’t suppose you care to hear my opinion of him.”
“I’ve had your opinion, my beloved.” Martin sounded mature, and not too
pleasant.
“Well, I can tell you right now you haven’t had my opinion of your being
a waiter! For the life of me I can’t understand why you don’t get some
gentlemanly job for vacation, instead of hustling dirty dishes. Why
couldn’t you work on a newspaper, where you’d have to dress decently and
meet nice people?”
“Sure. I might edit the paper. But since you say so, I won’t work at all
this summer. Fool thing to do, anyway. I’ll go to Newport and play golf
and wear a dress suit every night.”
“It wouldn’t hurt you any! I do respect honest labor. It’s like Burns
says. But waiting on table! Oh, Mart, why are you so proud of being a
roughneck? Do stop being smart, for a minute. Listen to the night. And
smell the cherry blossoms.... Or maybe a great scientist like you,
that’s so superior to ordinary people, is too good for cherry blossoms!”
“Well, except for the fact that every cherry blossom has been gone for
weeks now, you’re dead right.”
“Oh, they have, have they! They may be faded but-- Will you be so good
as to tell me what that pale white mass is up there?”
“I will. It looks to me like a hired-man’s shirt.”
“Martin Arrowsmith, if you think for one moment that I’m ever going to
marry a vulgar, crude, selfish, microbe-grubbing smart aleck--”
“And if you think I’m going to marry a dame that keeps nag-nag-naggin’
and jab-jab-jabbin’ at me all day long--”
They hurt each other; they had pleasure in it; and they parted forever,
twice they parted forever, the second time very rudely, near a
fraternity-house where students were singing heart-breaking summer songs
to a banjo.
In ten days, without seeing her again, he was off with Clif to the North
Woods, and in his sorrow of losing her, his longing for her soft flesh
and for her willingness to listen to him, he was only a little excited
that he should have led the class in bacteriology, and that Max Gottlieb
should have appointed him undergraduate assistant for the coming year.
CHAPTER VI
I
The waiters at Nokomis Lodge, among the Ontario pines, were all of them
university students. They were not supposed to appear at the Lodge
dances--they merely appeared, and took the prettiest girls away from the
elderly and denunciatory suitors in white flannels. They had to work but
seven hours a day. The rest of the time they fished, swam, and tramped
the shadowy trails, and Martin came back to Mohalis placid--and
enormously in love with Madeline.
They had written to each other, politely, regretfully, and once a
fortnight; then passionately and daily. For the summer she had been
dragged to her home town, near the Ohio border of Winnemac, a town
larger than Martin’s native Elk Mills but more sun-baked, more barren
with little factories. She sighed, in a huge loose script dashing all
over the page:
Perhaps we shall never see each other again but I do want you to
know how much I prize all the talks we had together about science &
ideals & education, etc.-- I certainly appreciate them here when I
listen to these stick in the muds going on, oh, it is too dreadful,
about their automobiles & how much they have to pay their maids and
so on & so forth. You gave me so much but I did give you something
didn’t I? I can’t always be in the wrong can I?
“My dear, my little girl!” he lamented. “‘Can’t always be in the wrong’!
You poor kid, you poor dear kid!”
By midsummer they were firmly re-engaged and, though he was slightly
disturbed by the cashier, a young and giggling Wisconsin school-teacher
with ankles, he so longed for Madeline that he lay awake thinking of
giving up his job and fleeing to her caresses--lay awake for minutes at
a time.
The returning train was torturingly slow, and he dismounted at Mohalis
fevered with visions of her. Twenty minutes after, they were clinging
together in the quiet of her living-room. It is true that twenty minutes
after that, she was sneering at Clif Clawson, at fishing, and at all
school-teachers, but to his fury she yielded in tears.
II
His Junior year was a whirlwind. To attend lectures on physical
diagnosis, surgery, neurology, obstetrics, and gynecology in the
morning, with hospital demonstrations in the afternoon; to supervise the
making of media and the sterilization of glassware for Gottlieb; to
instruct a new class in the use of microscope and filter and autoclave;
to read a page now and then of scientific German or French; to see
Madeline constantly; to get through it all he drove himself to
hysterical hurrying, and in the dizziest of it he began his first
original research--his first lyric, his first ascent of unexplored
mountains.
He had immunized rabbits to typhoid, and he believed that if he mixed
serum taken from these immune animals with typhoid germs, the germs
would die. Unfortunately--he felt--the germs grew joyfully. He was
troubled; he was sure that his technique had been clumsy; he performed
his experiment over and over, working till midnight, waking at dawn to
ponder on his notes. (Though in letters to Madeline his writing was an
inconsistent scrawl, in his laboratory notes it was precise.) When he
was quite sure that Nature was persisting in doing something she ought
not to, he went guiltily to Gottlieb, protesting, “The darn’ bugs ought
to die in this immune serum, but they don’t. There’s something wrong
with the theories.”
“Young man, do you set yourself up against science?” grated Gottlieb,
flapping the papers on his desk. “Do you feel competent, huh, to attack
the dogmas of immunology?”
“I’m sorry, sir. I can’t help what the dogma is. Here’s my protocols.
Honestly, I’ve gone over and over the stuff, and I get the same results,
as you can see. I only know what I observe.”
Gottlieb beamed. “I give you, my boy, my episcopal blessings! That is
the way! Observe what you observe, and if it does violence to all the
nice correct views of science--out they go! I am very pleast, Martin.
But now find out the Why, the underneath principle.”
Ordinarily, Gottlieb called him “Arrowsmith” or “You” or “Uh.” When he
was furious he called him, or any other student, “Doctor.” It was only
in high moments that he honored him with “Martin,” and the boy trotted
off blissfully, to try to find (but never to succeed in finding) the Why
that made everything so.
III
Gottlieb had sent him into Zenith, to the huge Zenith General Hospital,
to secure a strain of meningococcus from an interesting patient. The
bored reception clerk--who was interested only in obtaining the names,
business addresses, and religions of patients, and did not care who died
or who spat on the beautiful blue and white linoleum or who went about
collecting meningococci, so long as the addresses were properly
entered--loftily told him to go up to Ward D. Through the long hallways,
past numberless rooms from which peered yellow-faced old women sitting
up in bed in linty nightgowns, Martin wandered, trying to look
important, hoping to be taken for a doctor, and succeeding only in
feeling extraordinarily embarrassed.
He passed several nurses rapidly, half nodding to them, in the manner
(or what he conceived to be the manner) of a brilliant young surgeon who
is about to operate. He was so absorbed in looking like a brilliant
young surgeon that he was completely lost, and discovered himself in a
wing filled with private suites. He was late. He had no more time to go
on being impressive. Like all males, he hated to confess ignorance by
asking directions, but grudgingly he stopped at the door of a bedroom in
which a probationer nurse was scrubbing the floor.
She was a smallish and slender probationer, muffled in a harsh blue
denim dress, an enormous white apron, and a turban bound about her head
with an elastic--a uniform as grubby as her pail of scrub-water. She
peered up with the alert impudence of a squirrel.
“Nurse,” he said, “I want to find Ward D.”
Lazily, “Do you?”
“I do! If I can interrupt your work--”
“Doesn’t matter. The damn’ superintendent of nurses put me at scrubbing,
and we aren’t ever _supposed_ to scrub floors, because she caught me
smoking a cigarette. She’s an old terror. If she found a child like you
wandering around here, she’d drag you out by the ear.”
“My _dear_ young woman, it may interest you to know--”
“Oh! ‘My dear young woman, it may--’ Sounds exactly like our old prof,
back home.”
Her indolent amusement, her manner of treating him as though they were
a pair of children making tongues at each other in a railroad station,
was infuriating to the earnest young assistant of Professor Gottlieb.
“I am Dr. Arrowsmith,” he snorted, “and I’ve been informed that even
probationers learn that the first duty of a nurse is to stand when
addressing doctors! I wish to find Ward D, to take a strain of--_it may
interest you to know!_--a very dangerous microbe, and if you will kindly
direct me--”
“Oh, gee, I’ve been getting fresh again. I don’t seem to get along with
this military discipline. All right. I’ll stand up.” She did. Her every
movement was swiftly smooth as the running of a cat. “You go back, turn
right, then left. I’m sorry I was fresh. But if you saw some of the old
muffs of doctors that a nurse has to be meek to-- Honestly, Doctor--if
you _are_ a doctor--”
“I don’t see that I need to convince you!” he raged, as he stalked off.
All the way to Ward D he was furious at her veiled derision. He was an
eminent scientist, and it was outrageous that he should have to endure
impudence from a probationer--a singularly vulgar probationer, a thin
and slangy young woman apparently from the West. He repeated his rebuke:
“I don’t see that I need to convince you.” He was proud of himself for
having been lofty. He pictured himself telling Madeline about it,
concluding, “I just said to her quietly, ‘My dear young woman, I don’t
know that you are the person to whom I have to explain my mission here,’
I said, and she wilted.”
But her image had not wilted, when he had found the intern who was to
help him and had taken the spinal fluid. She was before him,
provocative, enduring. He had to see her again, and convince her--“Take
a better man than she is, better man than I’ve ever met, to get away
with being insulting to _me_!” said the modest young scientist.
He had raced back to her room and they were staring at each other before
it came to him that he had not worked out the crushing things he was
going to say. She had risen from her scrubbing. She had taken off her
turban, and her hair was silky and honey-colored, her eyes were blue,
her face childish. There was nothing of the slavey in her. He could
imagine her running down hillsides, shinning up a stack of straw.
“Oh,” she said gravely. “I didn’t mean to be rude then. I was
just-- Scrubbing makes me bad-tempered. I thought you were awfully nice,
and I’m sorry I hurt your feelings, but you did seem so young for a
doctor.”
“I’m not. I’m a medic. I was showing off.”
“So was I!”
He felt an instant and complete comradeship with her, a relation free
from the fencing and posing of his struggle with Madeline. He knew that
this girl was of his own people. If she was vulgar, jocular, unreticent,
she was also gallant, she was full of laughter at humbugs, she was
capable of a loyalty too casual and natural to seem heroic. His voice
was lively, though his words were only:
“Pretty hard, this training for nursing, I guess.”
“Not so awful, but it’s just as romantic as being a hired girl--that’s
what we call ’em in Dakota.”
“Come from Dakota?”
“I come from the most enterprising town--three hundred and sixty-two
inhabitants--in the entire state of North Dakota-- Wheatsylvania. Are
you in the U. medic school?”
To a passing nurse, the two youngsters would have seemed absorbed in
hospital business. Martin stood at the door, she by her scrubbing pail.
She had reassumed her turban; its bagginess obscured her bright hair.
“Yes, I’m a Junior medic in Mohalis. But-- I don’t know. I’m not much of
a medic. I like the lab side. I think I’ll be a bacteriologist, and
raise Cain with some of the fool theories of immunology. And I don’t
think much of the bedside manner.”
“I’m glad you don’t. You get it here. You ought to hear some of the docs
that are the sweetest old pussies with their patients--the way they bawl
out the nurses. But labs--they seem sort of real. I don’t suppose you
can bluff a bacteria--what is it?--bacterium?”
“No, they’re-- What do they call you?”
“Me? Oh, it’s an idiotic name-- Leora Tozer.”
“What’s the matter with Leora? It’s fine.”
Sound of mating birds, sound of spring blossoms dropping in the tranquil
air, the bark of sleepy dogs at midnight; who is to set them down and
make them anything but hackneyed? And as natural, as conventional, as
youthfully gauche, as eternally beautiful and authentic as those ancient
sounds was the talk of Martin and Leora in that passionate half-hour
when each found in the other a part of his own self, always vaguely
missed, discovered now with astonished joy. They rattled like hero and
heroine of a sticky tale, like sweat-shop operatives, like bouncing
rustics, like prince and princess. Their words were silly and
inconsequential, heard one by one, yet taken together they were as wise
and important as the tides or the sounding wind.
He told her that he admired Max Gottlieb, that he had crossed her North
Dakota on a train, and that he was an excellent hockey-player. She told
him that she “adored” vaudeville, that her father, Andrew Jackson Tozer,
was born in the East (by which she meant Illinois), and that she didn’t
particularly care for nursing. She had no especial personal ambition;
she had come here because she liked adventure. She hinted, with debonair
regret, that she was not too popular with the superintendent of nurses;
she meant to be good but somehow she was always dragged into rebellions
connected with midnight fudge or elopements. There was nothing heroic in
her story but from her placid way of telling it he had an impression of
gay courage.
He interrupted with an urgent, “When can you get away from the hospital
for dinner? To-night?”
“Why--”
“Please!”
“All right.”
“When can I call for you?”
“Do you think I ought to-- Well, seven.”
All the way back to Mohalis he alternately raged and rejoiced. He
informed himself that he was a moron to make this long trip into Zenith
twice in one day; he remembered that he was engaged to a girl called
Madeline Fox; he worried the matter of unfaithfulness; he asserted that
Leora Tozer was merely an imitation nurse who was as illiterate as a
kitchen wench and as impertinent as a newsboy; he decided, several times
he decided, to telephone her and free himself from the engagement.
He was at the hospital at a quarter to seven.
He had to wait for twenty minutes in a reception-room like that of an
undertaker. He was in a panic. What was he doing here? She’d probably be
agonizingly dull, through a whole long dinner. Would he even recognize
her, in mufti? Then he leaped up. She was at the door. Her sulky blue
uniform was gone; she was childishly slim and light in a princess frock
that was a straight line from high collar and soft young breast to her
feet. It seemed natural to tuck her hand under his arm as they left the
hospital. She moved beside him with a little dancing step, shyer now
than she had been in the dignity of her job but looking up at him with
confidence.
“Glad I came?” he demanded.
She thought it over. She had a trick of gravely thinking over obvious
questions; and gravely (but with the gravity of a child, not the
ponderous gravity of a politician or an office-manager) she admitted,
“Yes, I am glad. I was afraid you’d go and get sore at me because I was
so fresh, and I wanted to apologize and-- I liked your being so crazy
about your bacteriology. I think I’m a little crazy, too. The interns
here--they come bothering around a lot, but they’re so sort of--so sort
of _soggy_, with their new stethoscopes and their brand-new dignity.
Oh--” Most gravely of all: “Oh, gee, yes, I’m glad you came.... Am I an
idiot to admit it?”
“You’re a darling to admit it.” He was a little dizzy with her. He
pressed her hand with his arm.
“You won’t think I let every medic and doctor pick me up, will you?”
“Leora! And you don’t think I try and pick up every pretty girl I meet?
I liked-- I felt somehow we two could be chums. Can’t we? Can’t we?”
“I don’t know. We’ll see. Where are we going for dinner?”
“The Grand Hotel.”
“We are not! It’s terribly expensive. Unless you’re awfully rich. You
aren’t, are you?”
“No, I’m not. Just enough money to get through medic school. But I
want--”
“Let’s go to the Bijou. It’s a nice place, and it isn’t expensive.”
He remembered how often Madeline Fox had hinted that it would be a tasty
thing to go to the Grand, Zenith’s most resplendent hotel, but that was
the last time he thought of Madeline that evening. He was absorbed in
Leora. He found in her a casualness, a lack of prejudice, a directness,
surprising in the daughter of Andrew Jackson Tozer. She was feminine but
undemanding; she was never Improving and rarely shocked; she was neither
flirtatious nor cold. She was indeed the first girl to whom he had ever
talked without self-consciousness. It is doubtful if Leora herself had
a chance to say anything, for he poured out his every confidence as a
disciple of Gottlieb. To Madeline, Gottlieb was a wicked old man who
made fun of the sanctities of Marriage and Easter lilies, to Clif, he
was a bore, but Leora glowed as Martin banged the table and quoted his
idol: “Up to the present, even in the work of Ehrlich, most research has
been largely a matter of trial and error, the empirical method, which is
the opposite of the scientific method, by which one seeks to establish a
general law governing a group of phenomena so that he may predict what
will happen.”
He intoned it reverently, staring across the table at her, almost
glaring at her. He insisted, “Do you see where he leaves all these
detail-grubbing, machine-made researchers buzzing in the manure heap
just as much as he does the commercial docs? Do you get him? Do you?”
“Yes, I think I do. Anyway, I get your enthusiasm for him. But please
don’t bully me so!”
“Was I bullying? I didn’t mean to. Only, when I get to thinking about
the way most of these damned profs don’t even know what he’s up to--”
Martin was off again, and if Leora did not altogether understand the
relation of the synthesis of antibodies to the work of Arrhenius, yet
she listened with comfortable pleasure in his zeal, with none of
Madeline Fox’s gently corrective admonitions.
She had to warn him that she must be at the hospital by ten.
“I’ve talked too much! Lord, I hope I haven’t bored you,” he blurted.
“I loved it.”
“And I was so technical, and so noisy-- Oh, I _am_ a chump!”
“I like having you trust me. I’m not ‘earnest,’ and I haven’t any brains
whatever, but I do love it when my menfolks think I’m intelligent enough
to hear what they really think and-- Good night!”
They dined together twice in two weeks, and only twice in that time,
though she telephoned to him, did Martin see his honest affianced,
Madeline.
He came to know all of Leora’s background. Her bedridden grand-aunt in
Zenith, who was her excuse for coming so far to take hospital training.
The hamlet of Wheatsylvania, North Dakota; one street of shanties with
the red grain-elevators at the end. Her father, Andrew Jackson Tozer,
sometimes known as Jackass Tozer; owner of the bank, of the creamery,
and an elevator, therefore the chief person in town; pious at Wednesday
evening prayer-meeting, fussing over every penny he gave to Leora or her
mother. Bert Tozer, her brother; squirrel teeth, a gold eye-glass chain
over his ear, cashier and all the rest of the staff in the one-room bank
owned by his father. The chicken salad and coffee suppers at the United
Brethren Church; German Lutheran farmers singing ancient Teutonic hymns;
the Hollanders, the Bohemians and Poles. And round about the village,
the living wheat, arched above by tremendous clouds. He saw Leora,
always an “odd child,” doing obediently enough the flat household tasks
but keeping snug the belief that some day she would find a youngster
with whom, in whatever danger or poverty, she would behold all the
colored world.
It was at the end of her hesitating effort to make him see her childhood
that he cried, “Darling, you don’t have to tell me about you. I’ve
always known you. I’m not going to let you go, no matter what. You’re
going to marry me--”
They said it with clasping hands, confessing eyes, in that blatant
restaurant. Her first words were:
“I want to call you ‘Sandy.’ Why do I? I don’t know why. You’re as
unsandy as can be, but somehow ‘Sandy’ means you to me and-- Oh, my
dear, I do like you!”
Martin went home engaged to two girls at once.
IV
He had promised to see Madeline the next morning.
By any canon of respectable behavior he should have felt like a low dog;
he assured himself that he must feel like a low dog; but he could not
bring it off. He thought of Madeline’s pathetic enthusiasms: her
“Provençal pleasaunce” and the limp-leather volumes of poetry which she
patted with fond finger-tips; of the tie she had bought for him, and her
pride in his hair when he brushed it like the patent-leather heroes in
magazine illustrations. He mourned that he had sinned against loyalty.
But his agitation broke against the solidity of his union with Leora.
Her companionship released his soul. Even when, as advocate for
Madeline, he pleaded that Leora was a trivial young woman who probably
chewed gum in private and certainly was careless about her nails in
public, her commonness was dear to the commonness that was in himself,
valid as ambition or reverence, an earthy base to her gaiety as it was
to his nervous scientific curiosity.
He was absent-minded in the laboratory, that fatal next day. Gottlieb
had twice to ask him whether he had prepared the new batch of medium,
and Gottlieb was an autocrat, sterner with his favorites than with the
ruck of students. He snarled, “Arrowsmith, you are a moon-calf! My God,
am I to spend my life with _Dummköpfe_? I cannot be always alone,
Martin! Are you going to fail me? Two, three days now you haf not been
keen about work.”
Martin went off mumbling, “I love that man!” In his tangled mood he
catalogued Madeline’s pretenses, her nagging, her selfishness, her
fundamental ignorance. He worked himself up to a state of virtue in
which it was agreeably clear to him that he must throw Madeline over,
entirely as a rebuke. He went to her in the evening prepared to blaze
out at her first complaining, to forgive her finally, but to break their
engagement and make life resolutely simple again.
She did not complain.
She ran to him. “Dear, you’re so tired--your eyes look tired. Have you
been working frightfully hard? I’ve been so sorry you couldn’t come
’round, this week. Dear, you mustn’t kill yourself. Think of all the
years you have ahead to do splendid things in. No, don’t talk. I want
you to rest. Mother’s gone to the movies. Sit here. See, I’ll make you
so comfy with these pillows. Just lean back--go to sleep if you want
to--and I’ll read you ‘The Crock of Gold.’ You’ll love it.”
He was determined that he would not love it and, as he probably had no
sense of humor whatever, it is doubtful whether he appreciated it, but
its differentness aroused him. Though Madeline’s voice was shrill and
cornfieldish after Leora’s lazy softness, she read so eagerly that he
was sick ashamed of his intention to hurt her. He saw that it was she,
with her pretenses, who was the child, and the detached and fearless
Leora who was mature, mistress of a real world. The reproofs with which
he had planned to crush her vanished.
Suddenly she was beside him, begging, “I’ve been so lonely for you, all
week!”
So he was a traitor to both women. It was Leora who had intolerably
roused him; it was really Leora whom he was caressing now; but it was
Madeline who took his hunger to herself, and when she whimpered, “I’m so
glad you’re glad to be here,” he could say nothing. He wanted to talk
about Leora, to shout about Leora, to exult in her, his woman. He
dragged out a few sound but unimpassioned flatteries; he observed that
Madeline was a handsome young woman and a sound English scholar; and
while she gaped with disappointment at his lukewarmness, he got himself
away, at ten. He had finally succeeded very well indeed in feeling like
a low dog.
He hastened to Clif Clawson.
He had told Clif nothing about Leora. He resented Clif’s probable
scoffing. He thought well of himself for the calmness with which he came
into their room. Clif was sitting on the small of his back, shoeless
feet upon the study table, reading a Sherlock Holmes story which rested
on the powerful volume of Osler’s Medicine which he considered himself
to be reading.
“Clif! Want a drink. Tired. Let’s sneak down to Barney’s and see if we
can rustle one.”
“Thou speakest as one having tongues and who putteth the speed behind
the ole rhombencephalon comprising the cerebellum and the medulla
oblongata.”
“Oh, cut out the cuteness! I’m in a bad temper.”
“Ah, the laddy has been having a scrap with his chaste lil Madeline! Was
she horrid to ickly Martykins? All right. I’ll quit. Come on. Yoicks for
the drink.”
He told three new stories about Professor Robertshaw, all of them
scurrilous and most of them untrue, on their way, and he almost coaxed
Martin into cheerfulness. “Barney’s” was a pool-room, a tobacco shop
and, since Mohalis was dry by local option, an admirable blind-pig. Clif
and the hairy-handed Barney greeted each other in a high and worthy
manner:
“The benisons of eventide to you, Barney. May your circulation proceed
unchecked and particularly the dorsal carpal branch of the ulnar artery,
in which connection, comrade, Prof. Dr. Col. Egbert Arrowsmith and I
would fain trifle with another bottle of that renowned strawberry pop.”
“Gosh, Clif, you cer’nly got a swell line of jaw-music. If I ever need
a’ arm amputated when you get to be a doc, I’ll come around and let you
talk it off. Strawberry pop, gents?”
The front room of Barney’s was an impressionistic painting in which a
pool-table, piles of cigarettes, chocolate bars, playing cards, and pink
sporting papers were jumbled in chaos. The back room was simpler: cases
of sweet and thinly flavored soda, a large ice-box, and two small tables
with broken chairs. Barney poured, from a bottle plainly marked Ginger
Ale, two glasses of powerful and appallingly raw whisky, and Clif and
Martin took them to the table in the corner. The effect was swift.
Martin’s confused sorrows turned to optimism. He told Clif that he was
going to write a book exposing idealism, but what he meant was that he
was going to do something clever about his dual engagement. He had it!
He would invite Leora and Madeline to lunch together, tell them the
truth, and see which of them loved him. He whooped, and had another
whisky; he told Clif that he was a fine fellow, and Barney that he was a
public benefactor, and unsteadily he retired to the telephone, which was
shut off from public hearing in a closet.
At the Zenith General Hospital he got the night superintendent, and the
night superintendent was a man frosty and suspicious. “This is no time
to be calling up a probationer! Half-past eleven! Who are you, anyway?”
Martin checked the “I’ll damn’ soon tell you who I am!” which was his
natural reaction, and explained that he was speaking for Leora’s invalid
grand-aunt, that the poor old lady was very low, and if the night
superintendent cared to take upon himself the murder of a blameless
gentlewoman--
When Leora came to the telephone he said quickly, and soberly now,
feeling as though he had come from the menace of thronging strangers
into the security of her presence:
“Leora? Sandy. Meet me Grand lobby to-morrow, twelve-thirty. Must!
Important! Fix ’t somehow--your aunt’s sick.”
“All right, dear. G’ night,” was all she said.
It took him long minutes to get an answer from Madeline’s flat, then
Mrs. Fox’s voice sounded, sleepily, quaveringly:
“Yes, yes?”
“’S Martin.”
“Who is it Who is it? What is it? Are you calling the Fox apartment?”
“Yes, yes! Mrs. Fox, it’s Martin Arrowsmith speaking.”
“Oh, oh, my dear! The ’phone woke me out of a sound sleep, and I
couldn’t make out what you were saying. I was so frightened. I thought
maybe it was a telegram or something. I thought perhaps something had
happened to Maddy’s brother. What is it, dear? Oh, I do hope nothing’s
happened!”
Her confidence in him, the affection of this uprooted old woman
bewildered in a strange land, overcame him; he lost all his
whisky-colored feeling that he was a nimble fellow, and in a melancholy
way, with all the weight of life again upon him, he sighed that no,
nothing had happened, but he’d forgotten to tell Madeline something--so
shor--so sorry call so late--could he speak Mad just minute--
Then Madeline was bubbling, “Why, Marty dear, what is it? I do hope
nothing has happened! Why, dear, you just left here--”
“Listen, d-dear. Forgot to tell you. There’s a--there’s a great friend
of mine in Zenith that I want you to meet--”
“Who is he?”
“You’ll see to-morrow. Listen, I want you come in and meet--come meet um
at lunch. Going,” with ponderous jocularity, “going to blow you all to a
swell feed at the Grand--”
“Oh, how nice!”
“--so I want you to meet me at the eleven-forty interurban, at College
Square. Can you?”
Vaguely, “Oh, I’d love to but-- I have an eleven o’clock, and I don’t
like to cut it, and I promised May Harmon to go shopping with her--she’s
looking for some kind of shoes that you can wear with her pink crêpe de
chine but that you can walk in--and we sort of thought maybe we might
lunch at Ye Kollege Karavanserai--and I’d half planned to go to the
movies with her or somebody, Mother says that new Alaska film is simply
dandy, she saw it to-night, and I thought I might go see it before they
take it off, though Heaven knows I ought to come right home and study
and not go anywhere at all--”
“Now _listen_! It’s important. Don’t you trust me? Will you come or
not?”
“Why, of course I trust you, dear. All right, I’ll try to be there. The
eleven-forty?”
“Yes.”
“At College Square? Or at Bluthman’s Book Shop?”
“_At College Square!_”
Her gentle “I trust you” and her wambling “I’ll try to” were warring in
his ears as he plunged out of the suffocating cell and returned to Clif.
“What’s the grief?” Clif wondered. “Wife passed away? Or did the Giants
win in the ninth? Barney, our wandering-boy-to-night looks like a
necropsy. Slip him another strawberry pop, quick. Say, Doctor, I think
you better call a physician.”
“Oh, shut up,” was all Martin had to say, and that without conviction.
Before telephoning he had been full of little brightnesses; he had
praised Clif’s pool-playing and called Barney “old _Cimex lectularius_”;
but now, while the affectionate Clif worked on him, he sat brooding save
when he grumbled (with a return of self-satisfaction), “If you knew all
the troubles I have--all the doggone mess a fellow can get into--_you’d_
feel down in the mouth!”
Clif was alarmed. “Look here, old socks. If you’ve gotten in debt, I’ll
raise the cash, somehow. If it’s-- Been going a little too far with
Madeline?”
“You make me sick! You’ve got a dirty mind. I’m not worthy to touch
Madeline’s hand. I regard her with nothing but respect.”
“The hell you do! But never mind, if you say so. Gosh, wish there was
_something_ I could do for you. Oh! Have ’nother shot! Barney! Come
a-runnin’!”
By several drinks Martin was warmed into a hazy carelessness, and Clif
solicitously dragged him home after he had desired to fight three large
academic sophomores. But in the morning he awoke with a crackling skull
and a realization that he was going to face Leora and Madeline at lunch.
V
His half-hour journey with Madeline into Zenith seemed a visible and
oppressing thing, like a tornado cloud. He had not merely to get through
each minute as it came; the whole grim thirty minutes were present at
the same time. While he was practising the tactful observation he was
going to present two minutes from now, he could still hear the clumsy
thing he had said two minutes before. He fought to keep her attention
from the “great friend of his” whom they were to meet. With fatuous
beaming he described a night at Barney’s; without any success whatever
he tried to be funny; and when Madeline lectured him on the evils of
liquor and the evils of association with immoral persons, he was for
once relieved. But he could not sidetrack her.
“Who is this man we’re going to see? What are you so mysterious about?
Oh, Martykins, is it a joke? Aren’t we going to meet anybody? Did you
just want to run away from Mama for a while and we have a bat at the
Grand together? Oh, what fun! I’ve always wanted to lunch at the Grand.
Of course I do think it’s too sort of rococo, but still, it is
impressive, and-- Did I guess it, darling?”
“No, there’s some one-- Oh, we’re going to meet somebody, all right!”
“Then why don’t you tell me who he is? Honestly, Mart, you make me
impatient.”
“Well, I’ll tell you. It isn’t a Him; it’s a Her.”
“Oh!”
“It’s-- You know my work takes me to the hospitals, and some of the
nurses at Zenith General have been awfully helpful.” He was panting. His
eyes ached. Since the torture of the coming lunch was inevitable, he
wondered why he should go on trying to resist his punishment.
“Especially there’s one nurse there who’s a wonder. She’s learned so
much about the care of the sick, and she puts me onto a lot of good
stunts, and she seems like a nice girl-- Miss Tozer, her name is-- I
think her first name is Lee or something like that--and she’s so--her
father is one of the big men in North Dakota--awfully rich--big
banker-- I guess she just took up nursing to do her share in the world’s
work.” He had achieved Madeline’s own tone of poetic uplift. “I thought
you two might like to know each other. You remember you were saying how
few girls there are in Mohalis that really appreciate--appreciate
ideals.”
“Ye-es.” Madeline gazed at something far away and, whatever it was, she
did not like it. “I shall be ver’ pleased to meet her, of course. _Any_
friend of yours-- Oh, Mart! I do hope you don’t flirt; I hope you don’t
get too friendly with all these nurses. I don’t know anything about it,
of course, but I keep hearing how some of these nurses are regular
manhunters.”
“Well, let me tell you right now, Leora isn’t!”
“No, I’m sure, but-- Oh, Martykins, you won’t be silly and let these
nurses just amuse themselves with you? I mean, for your own sake. They
have such an advantage. Poor Madeline, she wouldn’t be allowed to go
hanging around men’s rooms learning--things, and you think you’re so
psychological, Mart, but honestly, any smart woman can twist you around
her finger.”
“Well, I guess I can take care of myself!”
“Oh, I mean-- I don’t mean-- But I do hope this Tozer person-- I’m sure
I shall like her, if you do, but-- I am your own true love, aren’t I,
always!”
She, the proper, ignored the passengers as she clasped his hand. She
sounded so frightened that his anger at her reflections on Leora turned
into misery. Incidentally, her thumb was gouging painfully into the back
of his hand. He tried to look tender as he protested, “Sure--sure--gosh,
honest, Mad, look out. That old duffer across the aisle is staring at
us.”
For whatever infidelities he might ever commit he was adequately
punished before they had reached the Grand Hotel.
The Grand was, in 1907, the best hotel in Zenith. It was compared by
traveling salesmen to the Parker House, the Palmer House, the West
Hotel. It has been humbled since by the supercilious modesty of the vast
Hotel Thornleigh; dirty now is its tessellated floor and all the wild
gilt tarnished, and in its ponderous leather chairs are torn seams and
stogie ashes and horse-dealers. But in its day it was the proudest inn
between Chicago and Pittsburg; an oriental palace, the entrance a score
of brick Moorish arches, the lobby towering from a black and white
marble floor, up past gilt iron balconies, to the green, pink, pearl,
and amber skylight seven stories above.
They found Leora in the lobby, tiny on an enormous couch built round a
pillar. She stared at Madeline, quiet, waiting. Martin perceived that
Leora was unusually sloppy--his own word. It did not matter to him how
clumsily her honey-colored hair was tucked under her black hat, a
characterless little mushroom of a hat, but he did see and resent the
contrast between her shirtwaist, with the third button missing, her
checked skirt, her unfortunate bright brown bolero jacket, and
Madeline’s sleekness of blue serge. The resentment was not toward Leora.
Scanning them together (not haughtily, as the choosing and lofty male,
but anxiously) he was more irritated than ever by Madeline. That she
should be better dressed was an affront. His affection flew to guard
Leora, to wrap and protect her.
And all the while he was bumbling:
“--thought you two girls ought know each other-- Miss Fox, want t’ make
you ’quainted with Miss Tozer--little celebration--lucky dog have two
Queens of Sheba--”
And to himself, “Oh, hell!”
While they murmured nothing in particular to each other he herded them
into the famous dining-room of the Grand. It was full of gilt
chandeliers, red plush chairs, heavy silverware, and aged negro
retainers with gold and green waistcoats. Round the walls ran select
views of Pompeii, Venice, Lake Como, and Versailles.
“Swell room!” chirped Leora.
Madeline had looked as though she intended to say the same thing in
longer words, but she considered the frescoes all over again and
explained, “Well, it’s very large--”
He was ordering, with agony. He had appropriated four dollars for the
orgy, strictly including the tip, and his standard of good food was that
he must spend every cent of the four dollars. While he wondered what
“Purée St. Germain” could be, and the waiter hideously stood watching
behind his shoulder, Madeline fell to. She chanted with horrifying
politeness:
“Mr. Arrowsmith tells me you are a nurse, Miss-- Tozer.”
“Yes, sort of.”
“Do you find it interesting?”
“Well--yes--yes, I think it’s interesting.”
“I suppose it must be wonderful to relieve suffering. Of course my
work-- I’m taking my Doctor of Philosophy degree in English--” She made
it sound as though she were taking her earldom--“it’s rather dry and
detached. I have to master the growth of the language and so on and so
forth. With your practical training, I suppose you’d find that rather
stupid.”
“Yes, it must be--no, it must be very interesting.”
“Do you come from Zenith, Miss-- Tozer?”
“No, I come from-- Just a little town. Well, hardly a town ... North
Dakota.”
“Oh! North Dakota!”
“Yes ... Way West.”
“Oh, yes.... Are you staying East for some time?” It was precisely what
a much-resented New York cousin had once said to Madeline.
“Well, I don’t-- Yes, I guess I may be here quite some time.”
“Do you, uh, do you find you like it here?”
“Oh, yes, it’s pretty nice. These big cities-- So much to see.”
“‘Big’? Well, I suppose it all depends on the point of view, _doesn’t_
it? I always think of New York as big but-- Of course-- Do you find the
contrast to North Dakota interesting?”
“Well, of course it’s different.”
“Tell me what North Dakota’s like. I’ve always wondered about these
Western states.” It was Madeline’s second plagiarism of her cousin.
“What is the general impression it makes on you?”
“I don’t think I know just how you mean.”
“I mean what is the general effect? The--_impression_.”
“Well, it’s got lots of wheat and lots of Swedes.”
“But I mean-- I suppose you’re all terribly virile and energetic,
compared with us Easterners.”
“I don’t-- Well, yes, maybe.”
“Have you met lots of people in Zenith?”
“Not so _awfully_ many.”
“Oh, have you met Dr. Birchall, that operates in your hospital? He’s
such a nice man, and not just a good surgeon but frightfully talented.
He sings won-derfully, and he comes from the most frightfully nice
family.”
“No, I don’t think I’ve met him yet,” Leora bleated.
“Oh, you must. And he plays the slickest--the most gorgeous game of
tennis. He always goes to all these millionaire parties on Royal Ridge.
Frightfully smart.”
Martin now first interrupted. “Smart? Him? He hasn’t got any brains
whatever.”
“My dear child, I didn’t mean ‘smart’ in that sense!” He sat alone and
helpless while she again turned on Leora and ever more brightly inquired
whether Leora knew this son of a corporation lawyer and that famous
débutante, this hat-shop and that club. She spoke familiarly of what
were known as the Leaders of Zenith Society, the personages who appeared
daily in the society columns of the _Advocate-Times_, the Cowxes and
Van Antrims and Dodsworths. Martin was astonished by the familiarity; he
remembered that she had once gone to a charity ball in Zenith but he had
not known that she was so intimate with the peerage. Certainly Leora had
appallingly never heard of these great ones, nor ever attended the
concerts, the lectures, the recitals at which Madeline apparently spent
all her glittering evenings.
Madeline shrugged a little, then, “Well-- Of course with the fascinating
doctors and everybody that you meet in the hospital, I suppose you’d
find lectures frightfully tame. Well--” She dismissed Leora and looked
patronizingly at Martin. “Are you planning some more work on the
what-is-it with rabbits?”
He was grim. He could do it now, if he got it over quickly. “Madeline!
Brought you two together because-- Don’t know whether you cotton to each
other or not, but I wish you could, because I’ve-- I’m not making any
excuses for myself. I couldn’t help it. I’m engaged to both of you, and
I want to know--”
Madeline had sprung up. She had never looked quite so proud and fine.
She stared at them, and walked away, wordless. She came back, she
touched Leora’s shoulder, and quietly kissed her. “Dear, I’m sorry for
you. You’ve got a job! You poor baby!” She strode away, her shoulders
straight.
Hunched, frightened, Martin could not look at Leora.
He felt her hand on his. He looked up. She was smiling, easy, a little
mocking. “Sandy, I warn you that I’m never going to give you up. I
suppose you’re as bad as She says; I suppose I’m foolish-- I’m a hussy.
But you’re mine! I warn you it isn’t a bit of use your getting engaged
to somebody else again. I’d tear her eyes out! Now don’t think so well
of yourself! I guess you’re pretty selfish. But I don’t care. You’re
mine!”
He said brokenly many things beautiful in their commonness.
She pondered, “I do feel we’re nearer together than you and Her. Perhaps
you like me better because you can bully me--because I tag after you and
She never would. And I know your work is more important to you than I
am, maybe more important than you are. But I am stupid and ordinary and
She isn’t. I simply admire you frightfully (Heaven knows why, but I
do), while She has sense enough to make you admire Her and tag after
Her.”
“No! I swear it isn’t because I can bully you, Leora-- I swear it
isn’t-- I don’t think it is. Dearest, don’t, _don’t_ think she’s
brighter than you are. She’s glib but-- Oh, let’s stop talking! I’ve
found you! My life’s begun!”
CHAPTER VII
I
The difference between Martin’s relations to Madeline and to Leora was
the difference between a rousing duel and a serene comradeship. From
their first evening, Leora and he depended on each other’s loyalty and
liking, and certain things in his existence were settled forever. Yet
his absorption in her was not stagnant. He was always making discoveries
about the observations of life which she kept incubating in her secret
little head while she made smoke rings with her cigarettes and smiled
silently. He longed for the girl Leora; she stirred him, and with gay
frank passion she answered him; but to another, sexless Leora he talked
more honestly than to Gottlieb or his own worried self, while with her
boyish nod or an occasional word she encouraged him to confidence in his
evolving ambition and disdains.
II
Digamma Pi fraternity was giving a dance. It was understood among the
anxiously whispering medics that so cosmopolitan was the University of
Winnemac becoming that they were expected to wear the symbols of
respectability known as “dress-suits.” On the solitary and nervous
occasion when Martin had worn evening clothes he had rented them from
the Varsity Pantorium, but he must own them, now that he was going to
introduce Leora to the world as his pride and flowering. Like two little
old people, absorbed in each other and diffidently exploring new,
unwelcoming streets of the city where their alienated children live,
Martin and Leora edged into the garnished magnificence of Benson, Hanley
and Koch’s, the loftiest department store in Zenith. She was intimidated
by the luminous cases of mahogany and plate glass, by the opera hats and
lustrous mufflers and creamy riding breeches. When he had tried on a
dinner suit and come out for her approval, his long brown tie and
soft-collared shirt somewhat rustic behind the low evening waistcoat,
and when the clerk had gone to fetch collars, she wailed:
“Darn it, Sandy, you’re too grand for me. I just simply can’t get myself
to fuss over my clothes, and here you’re going to go and look so spiffy
I won’t have a chance with you.”
He almost kissed her.
The clerk, returning, warbled, “I think, Modom, you’ll find that your
husband will look vurry nice indeed in these wing collars.”
Then, while the clerk sought ties, he did kiss her, and she sighed:
“Oh, gee, you’re one of these people that get ahead. I never thought I’d
have to live up to a man with a dress-suit and a come-to-Heaven collar.
Oh, well, I’ll tag!”
III
For the Digamma Ball, the University Armory was extremely decorated. The
brick walls were dizzy with bunting, spotty with paper chrysanthemums
and plaster skulls and wooden scalpels ten feet long.
In six years at Mohalis, Martin had gone to less than a score of dances,
though the refined titillations of communal embracing were the chief
delight of the co-educational university. When he arrived at the Armory,
with Leora timorously brave in a blue crêpe de chine made in no
recognized style, he did not care whether he had a single two-step,
though he did achingly desire to have the men crowd in and ask Leora,
admire her and make her welcome. Yet he was too proud to introduce her
about, lest he seem to be begging his friends to dance with her. They
stood alone, under the balcony, disconsolately facing the vastness of
the floor, while beyond them flashed the current of dancers, beautiful,
formidable, desirable. Leora and he had assured each other that, for a
student affair, dinner jacket and black waistcoat would be the thing, as
stated in the Benson, Hanley and Koch Chart of Correct Gents’ Wearing
Apparel, but he grew miserable at the sight of voluptuous white
waistcoats, and when that embryo famous surgeon, Angus Duer, came by,
disdainful as a greyhound and pushing on white gloves (which are the
whitest, the most superciliously white objects on earth), then Martin
felt himself a hobbledehoy.
“Come on, _we’ll_ dance,” he said, as though it were a defiance to all
Angus Duers.
He very much wanted to go home.
He did not enjoy the dance, though she waltzed easily and himself not
too badly. He did not even enjoy having her in his arms. He could not
believe that she was in his arms. As they revolved he saw Duer join a
brilliance of pretty girls and distinguished-looking women about the
great Dr. Silva, dean of the medical school. Angus seemed appallingly at
home, and he waltzed off with the prettiest girl, sliding, swinging,
deft. Martin tried to hate him as a fool, but he remembered that
yesterday Angus had been elected to the honorary society of Sigma Xi.
Leora and he crept back to the exact spot beneath the balcony where they
had stood before, to their den, their one safe refuge. While he tried to
be nonchalant and talk up to his new clothes, he was cursing the men he
saw go by laughing with girls, ignoring his Leora.
“Not many here yet,” he fussed. “Pretty soon they’ll all be coming, and
then you’ll have lots of dances.”
“Oh, I don’t mind.”
(“God, won’t somebody come and ask the poor kid?”)
He fretted over his lack of popularity among the dancing-men of the
medical school. He wished Clif Clawson were present-- Clif liked any
sort of assembly, but he could not afford dress-clothes. Then, rejoicing
as at sight of the best-beloved, he saw Irving Watters, that paragon of
professional normality, wandering toward them, but Watters passed by,
merely nodding. Thrice Martin hoped and desponded, and now all his pride
was gone. If Leora could be happy--
“I wouldn’t care a hoot if she fell for the gabbiest fusser in the whole
U., and gave me the go-by all evening. Anything to let her have a good
time! If I could coax Duer over-- No, that’s one thing I couldn’t stand:
crawling to that dirty snob-- I will!”
Up ambled Fatty Pfaff, just arrived. Martin pounced on him lovingly.
“H’lo, old Fat! You a stag to-night? Meet my friend Miss Tozer.”
Fatty’s bulbous eyes showed approval of Leora’s cheeks and amber hair.
He heaved, “Pleasedmeetch--dance starting--have the honor?” in so
flattering a manner that Martin could have kissed him.
That he himself stood alone through the dance did not occur to him. He
leaned against a pillar and gloated. He felt gorgeously unselfish....
That various girl wallflowers were sitting near him, waiting to be
asked, did not occur to him either.
He saw Fatty introduce Leora to a decorative pair of Digams, one of whom
begged her for the next. Thereafter she had more invitations than she
could take. Martin’s excitement cooled. It seemed to him that she clung
too closely to her partners, that she followed their steps too eagerly.
After the fifth dance he was agitated. “Course! _She’s_ enjoying
herself! Hasn’t got time to notice that I just stand here--yes, by
thunder, and hold her scarf! Sure! Fine for her. Fact I might like a
little dancing myself-- And the way she grins and gawps at that fool
Brindle Morgan, the--the--the damnedest-- Oh, you and I are going to
have a talk, young woman! And those hounds trying to pinch her off
me--the one thing I’ve ever loved! Just because they dance better than I
can, and spiel a lot of foolishness-- And that damn’ orchestra playing
that damn’ peppery music-- And she falling for all their damn’ cheap
compliments and-- You and I are going to have one lovely little
understanding!”
When she next returned to him, besieged by three capering medics, he
muttered to her, “Oh, it doesn’t _matter_ about _me_!”
“Would you like this one? _Course_ you shall have it!” She turned to him
fully; she had none of Madeline’s sense of having to act for the benefit
of observers. Through a strained eternity of waiting, while he glowered,
she babbled of the floor, the size of the room, and her “dandy
partners.” At the sound of the music he held out his arms.
“No,” she said. “I want to talk to you.” She led him to a corner and
hurled at him, “Sandy, this is the last time I’m going to stand for your
looking jealous. Oh, I know! See here! If we’re going to stick
together--and we are!-- I’m going to dance with just as many men as I
want to, and I’m going to be just as foolish with ’em as I want to.
Dinners and those things-- I suppose I’ll always go on being a clam.
Nothing to say. But I love dancing, and I’m going to do exactly what I
want to, and if you had any sense whatever, you’d know I don’t care a
hang for anybody but you. Yours! Absolute. No matter what fool things
you do--and they’ll probably be a plenty. So when you go and get
jealous on me again, you sneak off and get rid of it. Aren’t you ashamed
of yourself!”
“I wasn’t jealous-- Yes, I was. Oh, I can’t help it! I love you so much.
I’d be one fine lover, now wouldn’t I, if I never got jealous!”
“All right. Only you’ve got to keep it under cover. Now we’ll finish the
dance.”
He was her slave.
IV
It was regarded as immoral, at the University of Winnemac, to dance
after midnight, and at that hour the guests crowded into the Imperial
Cafeteria. Ordinarily it closed at eight, but to-night it kept open till
one, and developed a spirit of almost lascivious mirth. Fatty Pfaff did
a jig, another humorous student, with a napkin over his arm, pretended
to be a waiter, and a girl (but she was much disapproved) smoked a
cigarette.
At the door Clif Clawson was waiting for Martin and Leora. He was in his
familiar shiny gray suit, with a blue flannel shirt.
Clif assumed that he was the authority to whom all of Martin’s friends
must be brought for judgment. He had not met Leora. Martin had confessed
his double engagement; he had explained that Leora was unquestionably
the most gracious young woman on earth; but as he had previously used up
all of his laudatory adjectives and all of Clif’s patience on the
subject of Madeline, Clif failed to listen, and prepared to dislike
Leora as another siren of morality.
He eyed her now with patronizing enmity. He croaked at Martin, behind
her back, “Good-looking kid, I will say that for her--what’s wrong with
her?” When they had brought their own sandwiches and coffee and mosaic
cake from the long counter, Clif rasped:
“Well, it’s grand of a couple of dress-suit swells like you to
assassinate with me ’mid the midmosts of sartorials and Sassiety. Gosh,
it’s fierce I had to miss the select pleasures of an evening with
Anxious Duer and associated highboys, and merely play a low game of
poker--in which Father deftly removed the sum of six simolea, point
ten, from the foregathered bums and yahoos. Well, Leory, I suppose you
and Martykins here have now ratiocinated all these questions of polo
and, uh, Monte Carlo and so on.”
She had an immense power of accepting people as they were. While Clif
waited, leering, she placidly investigated the inside of a chicken
sandwich and assented, “Um-huh.”
“Good boy! I thought you were going to pull that ‘If you are a
roughneck, I don’t see why you think you’ve got to boast about it’ stuff
that Mart springs on me!”
Clif turned into a jovial and (for him) unusually quiet companion....
Ex-farmhand, ex-book-agent, ex-mechanic, he had so little money yet so
scratching a desire to be resplendent that he took refuge in pride in
poverty, pride in being offensive. Now, when Leora seemed to look
through his boasting, he liked her as quickly as had Martin, and they
buzzed with gaiety. Martin was warmed to benevolence toward mankind,
including Angus Duer, who was at the end of the room at a table with
Dean Silva and his silvery women. Without plan, Martin sprang up, raced
down the room. Holding out his hand he clamored:
“Angus, old man, want to congratulate you on getting Sigma Xi. That’s
fine.”
Duer regarded the outstretched hand as though it was an instrument which
he had seen before but whose use he could not quite remember. He picked
it up and shook it tentatively. He did not turn his back; he was worse
than rude--he looked patient.
“Well, good luck,” said Martin, chilled and shaky.
“Very good of you. Thanks.”
Martin returned to Leora and Clif, to tell them the incident as a cosmic
tragedy. They agreed that Angus Duer was to be shot. In the midst of it
Duer came past, trailing after Dean Silva’s party, and nodded to Martin,
who glared back, feeling noble and mature.
At parting, Clif held Leora’s hand and urged, “Honey, I think a lot of
Mart, and one time I was afraid the old kid was going to get tied up
to--to parties that would turn him into a hand-shaker. I’m a hand-shaker
myself. I know less about medicine than Prof Robertshaw. But this boob
has some conscience to him, and I’m so darn’ glad he’s playing around
with a girl that’s real folks and-- Oh, listen at me fallin’ all over
my clumsy feet! But I just mean I hope you won’t mind Uncle Clif saying
he does by golly like you a lot!”
It was almost four when Martin returned from taking Leora home and
sagged into bed. He could not sleep. The aloofness of Angus Duer racked
him as an insult to himself, as somehow an implied insult to Leora, but
his boyish rage had passed into a bleaker worry. Didn’t Duer, for all
his snobbishness and shallowness, have something that he himself lacked?
Didn’t Clif, with his puppy-dog humor, his speech of a vaudeville
farmer, his suspicion of fine manners as posing, take life too easily?
Didn’t Duer know how to control and drive his hard little mind? Wasn’t
there a technique of manners as there was of experimentation....
Gottlieb’s fluent bench-technique versus the clumsy and podgy hands of
Ira Hinkley.... Or was all this inquiry a treachery, a yielding to
Duer’s own affected standard?
He was so tired that behind his closed eyelids were flashes of fire. His
whirling mind flew over every sentence he had said or heard that night,
till round his twisting body there was fevered shouting.
V
As he grumped across the medical campus next day, he came unexpectedly
upon Angus and he was smitten with the guiltiness and embarrassment one
has toward a person who has borrowed money and probably will not return
it. Mechanically he began to blurt “Hello,” but he checked it in a
croak, scowled, and stumbled on.
“Oh, Mart,” Angus called. He was dismayingly even. “Remember speaking to
me last evening? It struck me when I was going out that you looked
huffy. I was wondering if you thought I’d been rude. I’m sorry if you
did. Fact is, I had a rotten headache. Look. I’ve got four tickets for
‘As It Listeth,’ in Zenith, next Friday evening--original New York cast!
Like to see it? And I noticed you were with a peach, at the dance.
Suppose she might like to go along with us, she and some friend of
hers?”
“Why--gosh-- I’ll ’phone her--darn’ nice of you to ask us--”
It was not till melancholy dusk, when Leora had accepted and promised
to bring with her a probationer-nurse named Nelly Byers, that Martin
began to brood:
“Wonder if he did have a headache last night?
“Wonder if somebody _gave_ him the tickets?
“Why didn’t he ask Dad Silva’s daughter to go with us? Does he think
Leora is some tart I’ve picked up?
“Sure, he never really quarrels with anybody--wants to keep us all
friendly, so we’ll send him surgical patients some day when we’re hick
G. P.’s and he’s a Great and Only.
“Why did I crawl down so meekly?
“I don’t care! If Leora enjoys it-- Me personally, I don’t care two
hoots for all this trotting around-- Though of course it isn’t so bad to
see pretty women in fine clothes, and be dressed as good as
anybody-- Oh, I don’t _know_!”
VI
In the slightly Midwestern city of Zenith, the appearance of a play
“with the original New York cast” was an event. (What play it was did
not much matter.) The Dodsworth Theatre was splendid with the
aristocracy from the big houses on Royal Ridge. Leora and Nelly Byers
admired the bloods--graduates of Yale and Harvard and Princeton, lawyers
and bankers, motor-manufacturers and inheritors of real estate, virtuosi
of golf, familiars of New York--who with their shrill and glistening
women occupied the front rows. Miss Byers pointed out the Dodsworths,
who were often mentioned in _Town Topics_.
Leora and Miss Byers bounced with admiration of the hero when he refused
the governorship; Martin worried because the heroine was prettier than
Leora; and Angus Duer (who gave an appearance of knowing all about plays
without having seen more than half a dozen in his life) admitted that
the set depicting “Jack Vanduzen’s Camp in the Adirondacks: Sunset, the
Next Day” was really very nice.
Martin was in a mood of determined hospitality. He was going to give
them supper and that was all there was to it. Miss Byers explained that
they had to be in the hospital by a quarter after eleven, but Leora said
lazily, “Oh, I don’t care. I’ll slip in through a window. If you’re
there in the morning, the Old Cat can’t prove you got in late.” Shaking
her head at this lying wickedness, Miss Byers fled to a trolley car,
while Leora, Angus, and Martin strolled to Epstein’s Alt Nuremberg Café
for beer and Swiss cheese sandwiches flavored by the sight of German
drinking mottos and papier-mâché armor.
Angus was studying Leora, looking from her to Martin, watching their
glances of affection. That a keen young man should make a comrade of a
girl who could not bring him social advancement, that such a thing as
the boy and girl passion between Martin and Leora could exist, was
probably inconceivable to him. He decided that she was conveniently
frail. He gave Martin a refined version of a leer, and set himself to
acquiring her for his own uses.
“I hope you enjoyed the play,” he condescended to her.
“Oh, yes--”
“Jove, I envy you two. Of course I understand why girls fall for Martin
here, with his romantic eyes, but a grind like me, I have to go on
working without a single person to give me sympathy. Oh, well, I deserve
it for being shy of women.”
With unexpected defiance from Leora: “When anybody says that, it means
they’re not shy, and they despise women.”
“Despise them? Why, child, honestly, I long to be a Don Juan. But I
don’t know how. Won’t you give me a lesson?” Angus’s aridly correct
voice had become lulling; he concentrated on Leora as he would have
concentrated on dissecting a guinea pig. She smiled at Martin now and
then to say, “Don’t be jealous, idiot. I’m magnificently uninterested in
this conceited hypnotist.” But she was flustered by Angus’s sleek
assurance, by his homage to her eyes and wit and reticence.
Martin twitched with jealousy. He blurted that they must be
going-- Leora really had to be back-- The trolleys ran infrequently
after midnight and they walked to the hospital through hollow and
sounding streets. Angus and Leora kept up a high-strung chatter, while
Martin stalked beside them, silent, sulky, proud of being sulky.
Skittering through a garage alley they came out on the mass of Zenith
General Hospital, a block long, five stories of bleak windows with
infrequent dim blotches of light. No one was about. The first floor was
but five feet from the ground, and they lifted Leora up to the limestone
ledge of a half-open corridor window. She slid in, whispering, “G’night!
Thanks!”
Martin felt empty, dissatisfied. The night was full of a chill
mournfulness. A light was suddenly flickering in a window above them,
and there was a woman’s scream breaking down into moans. He felt the
tragedy of parting--that in the briefness of life he should lose one
moment of her living presence.
“I’m going in after her; see she gets there safe,” he said.
The frigid edge of the stone sill bit his hands, but he vaulted, thrust
up his knee, crawled hastily through the window. Ahead of him, in the
cork-floored hallway lit only by a tiny electric globe, Leora was
tiptoeing toward a flight of stairs. He ran after her, on his toes. She
squeaked as he caught her arm.
“We got to say good-night better than that!” he grumbled. “With that
damn’ Duer--”
“Ssssssh! They’d simply murder me if they caught you here. Do you want
to get me fired?”
“Would you care, if it was because of me?”
“Yes--no--well-- But they’d probably fire you from medic school, my lad.
If--” His caressing hands could feel her shiver with anxiety. She peered
along the corridor, and his quickened imagination created sneaking
forms, eyes peering from doorways. She sighed, then, resolutely: “We
can’t talk here. We’ll slip up to my room--roommate’s away for the week.
Stand there, in the shadow. If nobody in sight upstairs, I’ll come
back.”
He followed her to the floor above, to a white door, then breathlessly
inside. As he closed the door he was touched by this cramped refuge,
with its camp-beds and photographs from home and softly wrinkled linen.
He clasped her, but with hand against his chest she forbade him, as she
mourned:
“You were jealous again! How can you distrust me so? With that fool!
Women not like him? They wouldn’t have a chance! Likes himself too well.
And then you jealous!”
“I wasn’t-- Yes, I was, but I don’t care! To have to sit there and grin
like a hyena, with him between us, when I wanted to talk to you, to kiss
you! All right! Probably I’ll always be jealous. It’s you that have got
to trust me. I’m not easy-going; never will be. Oh, trust me--”
Their profound and unresisted kiss was the more blind in memory of that
barren hour with Angus. They forgot that the superintendent of nurses
might dreadfully come bursting in; they forgot that Angus was waiting.
“Oh, curse Angus--let him go home!” was Martin’s only reflection, as his
eyes closed and his long loneliness vanished.
“Good night, dear love--my love forever,” he exulted.
In the still ghostliness of the hall, he laughed as he thought of how
irritably Angus must have marched away. But from the window he
discovered Angus huddled on the stone steps, asleep. As he touched the
ground, he whistled, but stopped short. He saw bursting from the shadow
a bulky man, vaguely in a porter’s uniform, who was shouting:
“I’ve caught yuh! Back you come into the hospital, and we’ll find out
what you’ve been up to!”
They closed. Martin was wiry, but in the watchman’s clasp he was
smothered. There was a reek of dirty overalls, of unbathed flesh. Martin
kicked his shins, struck at his boulder of red cheek, tried to twist his
arm. He broke loose, started to flee, and halted. The struggle, in its
contrast to the aching sweetness of Leora, had infuriated him. He faced
the watchman, raging.
From the awakened Angus, suddenly appearing beside him, there was a thin
sound of disgust. “Oh, come _on_! Let’s get out of this. Why do you
dirty your hands on scum like him?”
The watchman bellowed, “Oh, I’m scum, am I? I’ll show you!”
He collared Angus and slapped him.
Under the sleepy street-lamp, Martin saw a man go mad. It was not the
unfeeling Angus Duer who stared at the watchman; it was a killer, and
his eyes were the terrible eyes of the killer, speaking to the least
experienced a message of death. He gasped only, “He dared to touch me!”
A pen-knife was somehow in his hands, he had leaped at the watchman, and
he was busily and earnestly endeavoring to cut his throat.
As Martin tried to hold them he heard the agitated pounding of a
policeman’s night stick on the pavement. Martin was slim but he had
pitched hay and strung telephone wire. He hit the watchman, judiciously,
beside the left ear, snatched Angus’s wrist, and dragged him away. They
ran up an alley, across a courtyard. They came to a thoroughfare as an
owl trolley glowed and rattled round the corner; they ran beside it,
swung up on the steps, and were safe.
Angus stood on the back platform, sobbing. “My God, I wish I’d killed
him! He laid his filthy hands on me! Martin! Hold me here on the car. I
thought I’d got over that. Once when I was a kid I tried to kill a
fellow-- God, I wish I’d cut that filthy swine’s throat!”
As the trolley came into the center of the city, Martin coaxed, “There’s
an all-night lunch up Oberlin Avenue where we can get some white mule.
Come on. It’ll straighten you up.”
Angus was shaky and stumbling-- Angus the punctilious. Martin led him
into the lunch-room where, between catsup bottles, they had raw whisky
in granite-like coffee cups. Angus leaned his head on his arm and
sobbed, careless of stares, till he had drunk himself into obliteration,
and Martin steered him home. Then to Martin, in his furnished room with
Clif snoring, the evening became incredible and nothing more incredible
than Angus Duer. “Well, he’ll be a good friend of mine now, for always.
Fine!”
Next morning, in the hall of the Anatomy Building, he saw Angus and
rushed toward him. Angus snapped, “You were frightfully stewed last
night, Arrowsmith. If you can’t handle your liquor better than that, you
better cut it out entirely.”
He walked on, clear-eyed, unruffled.
CHAPTER VIII
I
And always Martin’s work went on--assisting Max Gottlieb, instructing
bacteriological students, attending lectures and hospital
demonstrations--sixteen merciless hours to the day. He stole occasional
evenings for original research or for peering into the stirring worlds
of French and German bacteriological publications; he went proudly now
and then to Gottlieb’s cottage where, against rain-smeared brown
wall-paper, were Blake drawings and a signed portrait of Koch. But the
rest was nerve-gnawing.
Neurology, O.B., internal medicine, physical diagnosis; always a few
pages more than he could drudge through before he fell asleep at his
rickety study-table.
Memorizing of gynecology, of ophthalmology, till his mind was burnt raw.
Droning afternoons of hospital demonstrations, among stumbling students
barked at by tired clinical professors.
The competitive exactions of surgery on dogs, in which Angus Duer lorded
it with impatient perfection.
Martin admired the professor of internal medicine, T. J. H. Silva, known
as “Dad” Silva, who was also dean of the medical faculty. He was a round
little man with a little crescent of mustache. Silva’s god was Sir
William Osler, his religion was the art of sympathetic healing, and his
patriotism was accurate physical diagnosis. He was a Doc Vickerson of
Elk Mills, grown wiser and soberer and more sure. But Martin’s reverence
for Dean Silva was counterbalanced by his detestation for Dr. Roscoe
Geake, professor of otolaryngology.
Roscoe Geake was a pedler. He would have done well with oil stock. As an
otolaryngologist he believed that tonsils had been placed in the human
organism for the purpose of providing specialists with closed motors. A
physician who left the tonsils in any patient was, he felt, foully and
ignorantly overlooking his future health and comfort--the physician’s
future health and comfort. His earnest feeling regarding the nasal
septum was that it never hurt any patient to have part of it removed,
and if the most hopeful examination could find nothing the matter with
the patient’s nose and throat except that he was smoking too much,
still, in any case, the enforced rest after an operation was good for
him. Geake denounced this cant about Letting Nature Alone. Why, the
average well-to-do man appreciated attention! He really didn’t think
much of his specialists unless he was operated on now and then--just a
little and not very painfully. Geake had one classic annual address in
which, winging far above otolaryngology, he evaluated all medicine, and
explained to grateful healers like Irving Watters the method of getting
suitable fees:
“Knowledge is the greatest thing in the medical world but it’s no good
whatever unless you can sell it, and to do this you must first impress
your personality on the people who have the dollars. Whether a patient
is a new or an old friend, you must always use _salesmanship_ on him.
Explain to him, also to his stricken and anxious family, the hard work
and thought you are giving to his case, and so make him feel that the
good you have done him, or intend to do him, is even greater than the
fee you plan to charge. Then, when he gets your bill, he will not
misunderstand or kick.”
II
There was, as yet, no vision in Martin of serene spaciousness of the
mind. Beyond doubt he was a bustling young man, and rather shrill. He
had no uplifted moments when he saw himself in relation to the whole
world--if indeed he realized that there was a deal of the world besides
himself. His friend Clif was boorish, his beloved Leora was rustic,
however gallant she might be, and he himself wasted energy in hectic
busyness and in astonishment at dullness. But if he had not ripened, yet
he was close to earth, he did hate pretentiousness, he did use his
hands, and he did seek iron actualities with a curiosity
inextinguishable.
And at infrequent times he perceived the comedy of life; relaxed for a
gorgeous hour from the intensity wearing to his admirers. Such was the
hour before Christmas vacation when Roscoe Geake rose to glory.
It was announced in the _Winnemac Daily News_ that Dr. Geake had been
called from the chair of otolaryngology to the vice-presidency of the
puissant New Idea Medical Instrument and Furniture Company of Jersey
City. In celebration he gave a final address to the entire medical
school on “The Art and Science of Furnishing the Doctor’s Office.”
He was a neatly finished person, Geake, eye-glassed and enthusiastic and
fond of people. He beamed on his loving students and cried:
“Gentlemen, the trouble with too many doctors, even those splendid old
pioneer war-horses who through mud and storm, through winter’s chill
blast and August’s untempered heat, go bringing cheer and surcease from
pain to the world’s humblest, yet even these old Nestors not so
infrequently settle down in a rut and never shake themselves loose. Now
that I am leaving this field where I have labored so long and happily, I
want to ask every man jack of you to read, before you begin to practise
medicine, not merely your Rosenau and Howell and Gray, but also, as a
preparation for being that which all good citizens must be, namely,
practical men, a most valuable little manual of modern psychology, ‘How
to Put Pep in Salesmanship,’ by Grosvenor A. Bibby. For don’t forget,
gentlemen, and this is my last message to you, the man worth while is
not merely the man who takes things with a smile but also the man who’s
trained in philosophy, _practical_ philosophy, so that instead of
day-dreaming and spending all his time talking about ‘ethics,’ splendid
though they are, and ‘charity,’ glorious virtue though that be, yet he
never forgets that unfortunately the world judges a man by the amount of
good hard cash he can lay away. The graduates of the University of Hard
Knocks judge a physician as they judge a business man, not merely by his
alleged ‘high ideals’ but by the horse-power he puts into carrying them
out--and making them pay! And from a scientific standpoint, don’t
overlook the fact that the impression of properly remunerated competence
which you make on a patient is of just as much importance, in these days
of the new psychology, as the drugs you get into him or the operations
he lets you get away with. The minute he begins to see that other folks
appreciate and reward your skill, that minute he must begin to feel your
power and so to get well.
“Nothing is more important in inspiring him than to have such an office
that as soon as he steps into it, you have begun to sell him the idea of
being properly cured. I don’t care whether a doctor has studied in
Germany, Munich, Baltimore, and Rochester. I don’t care whether he has
all science at his finger-tips, whether he can instantly diagnose with a
considerable degree of accuracy the most obscure ailment, whether he has
the surgical technique of a Mayo, a Crile, a Blake, an Ochsner, a
Cushing. If he has a dirty old office, with hand-me-down chairs and a
lot of second-hand magazines, then the patient isn’t going to have
confidence in him; he is going to resist the treatment--and the doctor
is going to have difficulty in putting over and collecting an adequate
fee.
“To go far below the surface of this matter into the fundamental
philosophy and esthetics of office-furnishing for the doctor, there are
to-day two warring schools, the Tapestry School and the Aseptic School,
if I may venture to so denominate and conveniently distinguish them.
Both of them have their merits. The Tapestry School claims that
luxurious chairs for waiting patients, handsome hand-painted pictures, a
bookcase jammed with the world’s best literature in expensively bound
sets, together with cut-glass vases and potted palms, produce an
impression of that opulence which can come only from sheer ability and
knowledge. The Aseptic School, on the other hand, maintains that what
the patient wants is that appearance of scrupulous hygiene which can be
produced only by furnishing the outer waiting-room as well as the inner
offices in white-painted chairs and tables, with merely a Japanese print
against a gray wall.
“But, gentlemen, it seems obvious to me, so obvious that I wonder it has
not been brought out before, that the ideal reception-room is a
combination of these two schools! Have your potted palms and handsome
pictures--to the practical physician they are as necessary a part of his
working equipment as a sterilizer or a Baumanometer. But so far as
possible have everything in sanitary-looking white--and think of the
color-schemes you can evolve, or the good wife for you, if she be one
blessed with artistic tastes! Rich golden or red cushions, in a Morris
chair enameled the purest white! A floor-covering of white enamel, with
just a border of delicate rose! Recent and unspotted numbers of
expensive magazines, with art covers, lying on a white table! Gentlemen,
there is the idea of imaginative salesmanship which I wish to leave with
you; there is the gospel which I hope to spread in my fresh field of
endeavor, the New Ideal Instrument Company of Jersey City, where at any
time I shall be glad to see and shake by the hand any and all of you.”
III
Through the storm of his Christmas examinations, Martin had an
intensified need of Leora. She had been summoned home to Dakota, perhaps
for months, on the ground that her mother was unwell, and he had, or
thought he had, to see her daily. He must have slept less than four
hours a night. Grinding at examinations on the interurban car, he dashed
in to her, looking up to scowl when he thought of the lively interns and
the men patients whom she met in the hospital, scorning himself for
being so primitive, and worrying all over again. To see her at all, he
had to wait for hours in the lobby, or walk up and down in the snow
outside till she could slip to a window and peep out. When they were
together, they were completely absorbed. She had a genius for frank
passion; she teased him, tantalized him, but she was tender and
unafraid.
He was sick lonely when he saw her off at the Union Station.
His examination papers were competent but, save in bacteriology and
internal medicine, they were sketchy. He turned emptily to the
laboratory for vacation time.
He had so far displayed more emotion than achievement in his tiny
original researches. Gottlieb was patient. “It iss a fine system, this
education. All what we cram into the students, not Koch and two dieners
could learn. Do not worry about the research. We shall do it yet.” But
he expected Martin to perform a miracle or two in the whole fortnight of
the holidays and Martin had no stomach with which to think. He played in
the laboratory; he spent his time polishing glassware, and when he
transplanted cultures from his rabbits, his notes were incomplete.
Gottlieb was instantly grim. “_Wass giebt es dann?_ Do you call these
notes? Always when I praise a man must he stop working? Do you think
that you are a Theobald Smith or a Novy that you should sit and
meditate? You have the ability of Pfaff!”
For once, Martin was impenitent. He mumbled to himself, as Gottlieb
stamped out like a Grand Duke, “Rats, I’ve got _some_ rest coming to
me. Gosh, most fellows, why, they go to swell homes for vacation, and
have dances and fathers and everything. If Leora was here, we’d go to a
show to-night.”
He viciously seized his cap (a soggy and doubtful object), sought Clif
Clawson, who was spending the vacation in sleeping between poker games
at Barney’s, and outlined a project of going into town and getting
drunk. It was executed so successfully that during vacation it was
repeated whenever he thought of the coming torture-wheel of uninspiring
work, whenever he realized that it was only Gottlieb and Leora who held
him here. After vacation, in late January, he found that whisky relieved
him from the frenzy of work, from the terror of loneliness--then
betrayed him and left him the more weary, the more lonely. He felt
suddenly old; he was twenty-four now, he reminded himself, and a
schoolboy, his real work not even begun. Clif was his refuge; Clif
admired Leora and would listen to his babbling of her.
But Clif and Martin came to the misfortune of Founder’s Day.
IV
January thirtieth, the birthday of the late Dr. Warburton Stonedge,
founder of the medical department of Winnemac, was annually celebrated
by a banquet rich in fraternalism and speeches and large lack of wine.
All the faculty reserved their soundest observations for the event, and
all the students were expected to be present.
This year it was held in the large hall of the University Y. M. C. A., a
moral apartment with red wall paper, portraits of whiskered alumni who
had gone out to be missionaries, and long thin pine boxes intended to
resemble exposed oak beams. About the famous guests-- Dr. Rouncefield
the Chicago surgeon, a diabetes specialist from Omaha, a Pittsburg
internist--stood massed the faculty members. They tried to look festal,
but they were worn and nervous after four months of school. They had
wrinkles and tired eyes. They were all in business suits, mostly
unpressed. They sounded scientific and interested; they used words like
phlebarteriectasia and hepatocholangio-enterostomy, and they asked the
guests, “So you just been in Rochester? What’s, uh, what’re Charley and
Will doing in orthopedics?” But they were full of hunger and
melancholy. It was half-past seven, and they who did not normally dine
at seven, dined at six-thirty.
Upon this seedy gaiety entered a splendor, a tremendous black-bearded
personage, magnificent of glacial shirt-bosom, vast of brow, wild-eyed
with genius or with madness. In a marvelous great voice, with a flavor
of German accent, he inquired for Dr. Silva, and sailed into the dean’s
group like a frigate among fishing-smacks.
“Who the dickens is that?” wondered Martin.
“Let’s edge in and find out,” said Clif, and they clung to the fast
increasing knot about Dean Silva and the mystery, who was introduced as
Dr. Benoni Carr, the pharmacologist.
They heard Dr. Carr, to the pale admiration of the school-bound
assistant professors, boom genially of working with Schmiedeberg in
Germany on the isolation of dihydroxypentamethylendiamin, of the
possibilities of chemotherapy, of the immediate cure of sleeping
sickness, of the era of scientific healing. “Though I am American-born,
I have the advantage of speaking German from a child, and so perhaps I
can better understand the work of my dear friend Ehrlich. I saw him
receive a decoration from His Imperial Highness the Kaiser. Dear old
Ehrlich, he was like a child!”
There was at this time (but it changed curiously in 1914 and 1915) an
active Germanophile section of the faculty. They bent before this
tornado of erudition. Angus Duer forgot that he was Angus Duer; and
Martin listened with excited stimulation. Benoni Carr had all of
Gottlieb’s individuality, all his scorn of machine-made teachers, all
his air of a great world which showed Mohalis as provincial, with none
of Gottlieb’s nervous touchiness. Martin wished Gottlieb were present;
he wondered whether the two giants would clash.
Dr. Carr was placed at the speakers’ table, near the dean. Martin was
astonished to see the eminent pharmacologist, after a shocked inspection
of the sour chicken and mishandled salad which made up most of the
dinner, pour something into his water glass from a huge silver
flask--and pour that something frequently. He became boisterous. He
leaned across two men to slap the indignant dean on the shoulder; he
contradicted his neighbors; he sang a stanza of “I’m Bound Away for the
Wild Missourai.”
Few phenomena at the dinner were so closely observed by the students as
the manners of Dr. Benoni Carr.
After an hour of strained festivity, when Dean Silva had risen to
announce the speakers, Carr lumbered to his feet and shouted, “Let’s not
have any speeches. Only fools make speeches. Wise men sing songs.
Whoopee! Oh, tireolee, oh, tireolee, oh, tireolee a lady! You profs are
the bunk!”
Dean Silva was to be seen beseeching him, then leading him out of the
room, with the assistance of two professors and a football tackle, and
in the hush of a joyful horror Clif grunted to Martin:
“Here’s where I get mine! And the damn’ fool promised to stay sober!”
“Huh?”
“I might of known he’d show up stewed and spill the beans. Oh, maybe the
dean won’t hand me hell proper!”
He explained. Dr. Benoni Carr was born Benno Karkowski. He had graduated
from a medical school which gave degrees in two years. He had read
vastly, but he had never been in Europe. He had been “spieler” in
medicine shows, chiropodist, spiritualist medium, esoteric teacher, head
of sanitariums for the diversion of neurotic women. Clif had encountered
him in Zenith, when they were both drunk. It was Clif who had told Dean
Silva that the celebrated pharmacologist, just back from Europe, was in
Zenith for a few days and perhaps might accept an invitation--
The dean had thanked Clif ardently.
The banquet ended early, and there was inadequate attention to Dr.
Rouncefield’s valuable address on the Sterilization of Catgut.
Clif sat up worrying, and admitting the truth of Martin’s several
observations. Next day--he had a way with women when he deigned to take
the trouble--he pumped the dean’s girl secretary, and discovered his
fate. There had been a meeting of a faculty committee; the blame for the
Benoni Carr outrage had been placed on Clif; and the dean had said all
the things Clif had imagined, with a number which he had not possessed
the talent to conceive. But the dean was not going to summon him at
once; he was going to keep him waiting in torture, then execute him in
public.
“Good-by, old M.D. degree! Rats, I never thought much of the doctor
business. Guess I’ll be a bond salesman,” said Clif to Martin. He
strolled away, he went to the dean, and remarked:
“Oh, Dean Silva, I just dropped in to tell you I’ve decided to resign
from the medic school. Been offered a big job in, uh, in Chicago, and I
don’t think much of the way you run the school, anyway. Too much
memorizing and too little real spirit of science. Good luck, Doc. So
long.”
“Gggggg--” said Dean Silva.
Clif moved into Zenith, and Martin was left alone. He gave up the double
room at the front of his boarding-house for a hall-room at the rear, and
in that narrow den he sat and mourned in a desolation of loneliness. He
looked out on a vacant lot in which a tattered advertisement of pork and
beans flapped on a leaning billboard. He saw Leora’s eyes and heard
Clif’s comfortable scoffing, and the quiet was such as he could not
endure.
CHAPTER IX
I
The persistent yammer of a motor horn drew Martin to the window of the
laboratory, a late afternoon in February. He looked down on a startling
roadster, all streamlines and cream paint, with enormous headlights. He
slowly made out that the driver, a young man in coffee-colored loose
motor coat and hectic checked cap and intense neckwear, was Clif
Clawson, and that Clif was beckoning.
He hastened down, and Clif cried:
“Oh, boy! How do you like the boat? Do you diagnose this suit? Scotch
heather--honest! Uncle Clif has nabbed off a twenty-five-buck-a-week job
_with_ commissions, selling autos. Boy, I was lost in your old medic
school. I can sell anything to anybody. In a year I’ll be making eighty
a week. Jump in, old son. I’m going to take you in to the Grand and blow
you to the handsomest feed you ever stuffed into your skinny organism.”
The thirty-eight miles an hour at which Clif drove into Zenith was, in
1908, dismaying speed. Martin discovered a new Clif. He was as noisy as
ever, but more sure, glowing with schemes for immediately acquiring
large sums of money. His hair, once bushy and greasy in front, tending
to stick out jaggedly behind, was sleek now, and his face had the
pinkness of massage. He stopped at the fabulous Grand Hotel with a jar
of brakes; before he left the car he changed his violent yellow
driving-gauntlets for a pair of gray gloves with black stitching, which
he immediately removed as he paraded through the lobby. He called the
coat-girl “Sweetie,” and at the dining-room door he addressed the
head-waiter:
“Ah, Gus, how’s the boy, how’s the boy feeling to-night? How’s the mucho
famoso majordomoso? Gus, want to make you ’quainted with Dr. Arrowsmith.
Any time the doc comes here I want you to shake a leg and hand him out
that well-known service, my boy, and give him anything he wants, and if
he’s broke, you charge it to me. Now, Gus, I want a nice little table
for two, with garage and hot and cold water, and wouldst fain have thy
advice, Gustavus, on the oysters and hore duffers and all the
ingredients fair of a Mæcenan feast.”
“Yes, sir, right this way, Mr. Clawson,” breathed the head-waiter.
Clif whispered to Martin, “I’ve got him like that in two weeks! You
watch my smoke!”
While Clif was ordering, a man stopped beside their table. He resembled
an earnest traveling-man who liked to get back to his suburban bungalow
every Saturday evening. He was beginning to grow slightly bald, slightly
plump. His rimless eye-glasses, in the midst of a round smooth face,
made him seem innocent. He stared about as though he wished he had some
one with whom to dine. Clif darted up, patted the man’s elbow, and
bawled:
“Ah, there, Babski, old boy. Feeding with anybody? Come join the
Sporting Gents’ Association.”
“All right, be glad to. Wife’s out of town,” said the man.
“Shake hands with Dr. Arrowsmith. Mart, meet George F. Babbitt, the
hoch-gecelebrated Zenith real-estate king. Mr. Babbitt has just adorned
his thirty-fourth birthday by buying his first benzine buggy from yours
truly and beg to remain as always.”
It was, at least on the part of Clif and Mr. Babbitt, a mirthful affair,
and when Martin had joined them in cocktails, St. Louis beer, and
highballs, he saw that Clif was the most generous person now living, and
Mr. George F. Babbitt a companion of charm.
Clif explained how certain he was--apparently his distinguished medical
training had something to do with it--to be president of a motor
factory, and Mr. Babbitt confided:
“You fellows are a lot younger than I am, eight-ten years, and you
haven’t learned yet, like I have, that where the big pleasure is, is in
Ideals and Service and a Public Career. Now just between you and me and
the gatepost, my vogue doesn’t lie in real estate but in oratory. Fact,
one time I planned to study law and go right in for politics. Just
between ourselves, and I don’t want this to go any farther, I’ve been
making some pretty good affiliations lately--been meeting some of the
rising young Republican politicians. Of course a fellow has got to start
in modestly, but I may say, _sotto voce_, that I expect to run for
alderman next fall. It’s practically only a step from that to mayor and
then to governor of the state, and if I find the career suits me,
there’s no reason why in ten or twelve years, say in 1918 or 1920, I
shouldn’t have the honor of representing the great state of Winnemac in
Washington, D. C.!”
In the presence of a Napoleon like Clif and a Gladstone like George F.
Babbitt, Martin perceived his own lack of power and business skill, and
when he had returned to Mohalis he was restless. Of his poverty he had
rarely thought, but now, in contrast to Clif’s rich ease, his own shabby
clothes and his pinched room seemed shameful.
II
A long letter from Leora, hinting that she might not be able to return
to Zenith, left him the more lonely. Nothing seemed worth doing. In that
listless state he was mooning about the laboratory during elementary
bacteriology demonstration hour, when Gottlieb sent him to the basement
to bring up six male rabbits for inoculation. Gottlieb was working
eighteen hours a day on new experiments; he was jumpy and testy; he gave
orders like insults. When Martin came dreamily back with six females
instead of males, Gottlieb shrieked at him, “You are the worst fool that
was ever in this lab!”
The groundlings, second-year men who were not unmindful of Martin’s own
scoldings, tittered like small animals, and jarred him into raging,
“Well, I couldn’t make out what you said. And it’s the first time I ever
fell down. I won’t stand your talking to me like that!”
“You will stand anything I say! Clumsy! You can take your hat and get
out!”
“You mean I’m fired as assistant?”
“I am glad you haf enough intelligence to understand that, no matter how
wretchet I talk!”
Martin flung away. Gottlieb suddenly looked bewildered and took a step
toward Martin’s retreating back. But the class, the small giggling
animals, they stood delighted, hoping for more, and Gottlieb shrugged,
glared them into terror, sent the least awkward of them for the rabbits,
and went on, curiously quiet.
And Martin, at Barney’s dive, was hotly drinking the first of the
whiskys which sent him wandering all night, by himself. With each drink
he admitted that he had an excellent chance to become a drunkard, and
with each he boasted that he did not care. Had Leora been nearer than
Wheatsylvania, twelve hundred miles away, he would have fled to her for
salvation. He was still shaky next morning, and he had already taken a
drink to make it possible to live through the morning when he received
the note from Dean Silva bidding him report to the office at once.
The dean lectured:
“Arrowsmith, you’ve been discussed a good deal by the faculty council of
late. Except in one or two courses--in my own I have no fault to
find--you have been very inattentive. Your marks have been all right,
but you could do still better. Recently you have also been drinking. You
have been seen in places of very low repute, and you have been intimate
with a man who took it upon himself to insult me, the Founder, our
guests, and the University. Various faculty members have complained of
your superior attitude--making fun of our courses right out in class!
But Dr. Gottlieb has always warmly defended you. He insisted that you
have a real flair for investigative science. Last night, however, he
admitted that you had recently been impertinent to him. Now unless you
immediately turn over a new leaf, young man, I shall have to suspend you
for the rest of the year and, if that doesn’t do the work, I shall have
to ask for your resignation. And I think it might be a good thing for
your humility--you seem to have the pride of the devil, young man!--it
might be a good idea for you to see Dr. Gottlieb and start off your
reformation by apologizing--”
It was the whisky spoke, not Martin:
“I’m damned if I will! He can go to the devil! I’ve given him my life,
and then he tattles on me--”
“That’s absolutely unfair to Dr. Gottlieb. He merely--”
“Sure. He merely let me down. I’ll see him in hell before I’ll
apologize, after the way I’ve worked for him. And as for Clif Clawson
that you were hinting at--him ‘take it on himself to insult anybody’? He
just played a joke, and you went after his scalp. I’m glad he did it!”
Then Martin waited for the words that would end his scientific life.
The little man, the rosy, pudgy, good little man, he stared and hummed
and spoke softly:
“Arrowsmith, I could fire you right now, of course, but I believe you
have good stuff in you. I decline to let you go. Naturally, you’re
suspended, at least till you come to your senses and apologize to me and
to Gottlieb.” He was fatherly; almost he made Martin repent; but he
concluded, “And as for Clawson, his ‘joke’ regarding this Benoni Carr
person--and why I never looked the fellow up is beyond me, I suppose I
was too busy--his ‘joke,’ as you call it, was the action either of an
idiot or a blackguard, and until you are able to perceive that fact, I
don’t think you will be ready to come back to us.”
“All right,” said Martin, and left the room.
He was very sorry for himself. The real tragedy, he felt, was that
though Gottlieb had betrayed him and ended his career, ended the
possibility of his mastering science and of marrying Leora, he still
worshiped the man.
He said good-by to no one in Mohalis save his landlady. He packed, and
it was a simple packing. He stuffed his books, his notes, a shabby suit,
his inadequate linen, and his one glory, the dinner clothes, into his
unwieldy imitation-leather bag. He remembered with drunken tears the
hour of buying the dinner jacket.
Martin’s money, from his father’s tiny estate, came in bimonthly checks
from the bank at Elk Mills. He had now but six dollars.
In Zenith he left his bag at the interurban trolley station and sought
Clif, whom he found practising eloquence over a beautiful pearl-gray
motor hearse, in which a beer-fed undertaker was jovially interested. He
waited, sitting hunched and twisted on the steel running-board of a
limousine. He resented but he was too listless to resent greatly the
stares of the other salesmen and the girl stenographers.
Clif dashed up, bumbling, “Well, well, how’s the boy? Come out and
catchum little drink.”
“I could use one.”
Martin knew that Clif was staring at him. As they entered the bar of the
Grand Hotel, with its paintings of lovely but absent-minded ladies, its
mirrors, its thick marble rail along a mahogany bar, he blurted:
“Well, I got mine, too. Dad Silva’s fired me, for general footlessness.
I’m going to bum around a little and then get some kind of a job. God,
but I’m tired and nervous! Say, can you lend me some money?”
“You bet. All I’ve got. How much you want?”
“Guess I’ll need a hundred dollars. May drift around quite some time.”
“Golly, I haven’t got that much, but prob’ly I can raise it at the
office. Here, sit down at this table and wait for me.”
How Clif obtained the hundred dollars has never been explained, but he
was back with it in a quarter-hour. They went on to dinner, and Martin
had much too much whisky. Clif took him to his own boarding-house--which
was decidedly less promissory of prosperity than Clif’s clothes--firmly
gave him a cold bath to bring him to, and put him to bed. Next morning
he offered to find a job for him, but Martin refused and left Zenith by
the northbound train at noon.
Always, in America, there remains from pioneer days a cheerful pariahdom
of shabby young men who prowl causelessly from state to state, from gang
to gang, in the power of the Wanderlust. They wear black sateen shirts,
and carry bundles. They are not permanently tramps. They have home towns
to which they return, to work quietly in the factory or the section-gang
for a year--for a week--and as quietly to disappear again. They crowd
the smoking cars at night; they sit silent on benches in filthy
stations; they know all the land yet of it they know nothing, because in
a hundred cities they see only the employment agencies, the all-night
lunches, the blind-pigs, the scabrous lodging-houses. Into that world of
voyageurs Martin vanished. Drinking steadily, only half-conscious of
whither he was going, of what he desired to do, shamefully haunted by
Leora and Clif and the swift hands of Gottlieb, he flitted from Zenith
to the city of Sparta, across to Ohio, up into Michigan, west to
Illinois. His mind was a shambles. He could never quite remember,
afterward, where he had been. Once, it is clear, he was soda-fountain
clerk in a Minnemagantic drug-store. Once he must have been, for a week,
dishwasher in the stench of a cheap restaurant. He wandered by freight
trains, on blind baggages, on foot. To his fellow prospectors he was
known as “Slim,” the worst-tempered and most restless of all their
company.
After a time a sense of direction began to appear in his crazy drifting.
He was instinctively headed westward, and to the west, toward the long
prairie dusk, Leora was waiting. For a day or two he stopped drinking.
He woke up feeling not like the sickly hobo called “Slim,” but like
Martin Arrowsmith, and he pondered, with his mind running clear, “Why
shouldn’t I go back? Maybe this hasn’t been so bad for me. I was working
too hard. I was pretty high-strung. Blew up. Like to, uh-- Wonder what
happened to my rabbits?... Will they ever let me do research again?”
But to return to the University before he had seen Leora was impossible.
His need of her was an obsession, making the rest of earth absurd and
worthless. He had, with blurry cunning, saved most of the hundred
dollars he had taken from Clif; he had lived--very badly, on
grease-swimming stews and soda-reeking bread--by what he earned along
the way. Suddenly, on no particular day, in no particular town in
Wisconsin, he stalked to the station, bought a ticket to Wheatsylvania,
North Dakota, and telegraphed to Leora, “Coming 2:43 to-morrow Wednesday
Sandy.”
III
He crossed the wide Mississippi into Minnesota. He changed trains at St.
Paul; he rolled into gusty vastnesses of snow, cut by thin lines of
fence-wire. He felt free, in release from the little fields of Winnemac
and Ohio, in relaxation from the shaky nerves of midnight study and
midnight booziness. He remembered his days of wire-stringing in Montana
and regained that careless peace. Sunset was a surf of crimson, and by
night, when he stepped from the choking railroad coach and tramped the
platform at Sauk Center, he drank the icy air and looked up to the vast
and solitary winter stars. The fan of the Northern Lights frightened and
glorified the sky. He returned to the coach with the energy of that
courageous land. He nodded and gurgled in brief smothering sleep; he
sprawled on the seat and talked with friendly fellow vagrants; he drank
bitter coffee and ate enormously of buckwheat cakes at a station
restaurant; and so, changing at anonymous towns, he came at last to the
squatty shelters, the two wheat-elevators, the cattle-pen, the oil-tank,
and the red box of a station with its slushy platform, which composed
the outskirts of Wheatsylvania. Against the station, absurd in a huge
coonskin coat, stood Leora. He must have looked a little mad as he
stared at her from the vestibule, as he shivered with the wind. She
lifted to him her two open hands, childish in red mittens. He ran down,
he dropped his awkward bag on the platform and, unaware of the gaping
furry farmers, they were lost in a kiss.
Years after, in a tropic noon, he remembered the freshness of her
wind-cooled cheeks.
The train was gone, pounding out of the tiny station. It had stood like
a dark wall beside the platform, protecting them, but now the light from
the snowfields glared in on them and left them exposed and
self-conscious.
“What--what’s happened?” she fluttered. “No letters. I was so
frightened.”
“Off bumming. The dean suspended me--being fresh to profs. D’ y’ care?”
“Course not, if you wanted to--”
“I’ve come to marry you.”
“I don’t see how we can, dearest, but-- All right. There’ll be a lovely
row with Dad.” She laughed. “He’s always so surprised and _hurt_ when
anything happens that he didn’t plan out. It’ll be nice to have you with
me in the scrap, because you aren’t supposed to know that he expects to
plan out everything for everybody and-- Oh, Sandy, I’ve been so lonely
for you! Mother isn’t really a bit sick, not the least bit, but they go
on keeping me here. I think probably somebody hinted to Dad that folks
were saying he must be broke, if his dear little daughter had to go off
and learn nursing, and he hasn’t worried it all out yet--it takes Andrew
Jackson Tozer about a year to worry out anything. Oh, Sandy! You’re
here!”
After the clatter and jam of the train, the village seemed blankly
empty. He could have walked around the borders of Wheatsylvania in ten
minutes. Probably to Leora one building differed from another--she
appeared to distinguish between the general store of Norblom and that of
Frazier & Lamb--but to Martin the two-story wooden shacks creeping
aimlessly along the wide Main Street were featureless and inappreciable.
Then “There’s our house, end of the next block,” said Leora, as they
turned the corner at the feed and implement store, and in a panic of
embarrassment Martin wanted to halt. He saw a storm coming: Mr. Tozer
denouncing him as a failure who desired to ruin Leora, Mrs. Tozer
weeping.
“Say--say--say--have you told ’em about me?” he stammered.
“Yes. Sort of. I said you were a wonder in medic school, and maybe we’d
get married when you finished your internship, and then when your wire
came, they wanted to know why you were coming, and why it was you wired
from Wisconsin, and what color necktie you had on when you were sending
the wire, and I couldn’t make ’em understand I didn’t know. They
discussed it. Quite a lot. They do discuss things. All through supper.
Solemn. Oh, Sandy, do curse and swear some at meals.”
He was in a funk. Her parents, formerly amusing figures in a story,
became oppressively real in sight of the wide, brown, porchy house. A
large plate-glass window with a colored border had recently been cut
through the wall, as a sign of prosperity, and the garage was new and
authoritative.
He tagged after Leora, expecting the blast. Mrs. Tozer opened the door,
and stared at him plaintively--a thin, faded, unhumorous woman. She
bowed as though he was not so much unwelcome as unexplained and
doubtful.
“Will you show Mr. Arrowsmith his room, Ory, or shall I?” she peeped.
It was the kind of house that has a large phonograph but no books, and
if there were any pictures, as beyond hope there must have been, Martin
never remembered them. The bed in his room was lumpy but covered with a
chaste figured spread, and the flowery pitcher and bowl rested on a
cover embroidered in red with lambs, frogs, water lilies, and a pious
motto.
He took as long as he could in unpacking things which needed no
unpacking, and hesitated down the stairs. No one was in the parlor,
which smelled of furnace-heat and balsam pillows; then, from nowhere
apparent, Mrs. Tozer was there, worrying about him and trying to think
of something polite to say.
“Did you have a comfortable trip on the train?”
“Oh, yes, it was-- Well, it was pretty crowded.”
“Oh, was it crowded?”
“Yes, there were a lot of people traveling.”
“Were there? I suppose-- Yes. Sometimes I wonder where all the people
can be going that you see going places all the time. Did you--was it
very cold in the Cities--in Minneapolis and St. Paul?”
“Yes, it was pretty cold.”
“Oh, was it cold?”
Mrs. Tozer was so still, so anxiously polite. He felt like a burglar
taken for a guest, and intensely he wondered where Leora could be. She
came in serenely, with coffee and a tremendous Swedish coffee-ring
voluptuous with raisins and glistening brown sugar, and she had them
talking, almost easily, about the coldness of winter and the value of
Fords when into the midst of all this brightness slid Mr. Andrew Jackson
Tozer, and they drooped again to politeness.
Mr. Tozer was as thin and undistinguished and sun-worn as his wife, and
like her he peered, he kept silence and fretted. He was astonished by
everything in the world that did not bear on his grain elevator, his
creamery, his tiny bank, the United Brethren Church, and the careful
conduct of an Overland car. It was not astounding that he should have
become almost rich, for he accepted nothing that was not natural and
convenient to Andrew Jackson Tozer.
He hinted a desire to know whether Martin “drank,” how prosperous he
was, and how he could possibly have come all this way from the
urbanities of Winnemac. (The Tozers were born in Illinois, but they had
been in Dakota since childhood, and they regarded Wisconsin as the
farthest, most perilous rim of the Eastern horizon.) They were so blank,
so creepily polite, that Martin was able to avoid such unpleasant
subjects as being suspended. He dandled an impression that he was an
earnest young medic who in no time at all would be making large and
suitable sums of money for the support of their Leora, but as he was
beginning to lean back in his chair he was betrayed by the appearance of
Leora’s brother.
Bert Tozer, Albert R. Tozer, cashier and vice-president of the
Wheatsylvania State Bank, auditor and vice-president of the Tozer Grain
and Storage Company, treasurer and vice-president of the Star Creamery,
was not in the least afflicted by the listening dubiousness of his
parents. Bertie was a very articulate and modern man of affairs. He had
buck teeth, and on his eye-glasses was a gold chain leading to a dainty
hook behind his left ear. He believed in town-boosting, organized motor
tours, Boy Scouts, baseball, and the hanging of I. W. W.’s; and his most
dolorous regret was that Wheatsylvania was too small--as yet--to have a
Y. M. C. A. or a Commercial Club. Plunging in beside him was his
fiancée, Miss Ada Quist, daughter of the feed and implement store. Her
nose was sharp, but not so sharp as her voice or the suspiciousness
with which she faced Martin.
“This Arrowsmith?” demanded Bert. “Huh! Well, guess you’re glad to be
out here in God’s country!”
“Yes, it’s fine--”
“Trouble with the Eastern states is, they haven’t got the git, or the
room to grow. You ought to see a real Dakota harvest! Look here, how
come you’re away from school this time of year?”
“Why--”
“I know all about school-terms. I went to business college in Grand
Forks. How come you can get away now?”
“I took a little lay-off.”
“Leora says you and her are thinking of getting married.”
“We--”
“Got any cash outside your school-money?”
“I have not!”
“Thought so! How juh expect to support a wife?”
“I suppose I’ll be practising medicine some day.”
“Some day! Then what’s the use of talking about being engaged till you
can support a wife?”
“That,” interrupted Bert’s lady-love, Miss Ada Quist, “that’s just what
_I_ said, Ory!” She seemed to speak with her pointed nose as much as
with her button of a mouth. “If Bert and I can wait, I guess other
people can!”
Mrs. Tozer whimpered, “Don’t be too hard on Mr. Arrowsmith, Bertie. I’m
sure he wants to do the right thing.”
“I’m not being hard on anybody! I’m being sensible. If Pa and you would
tend to things instead of standing around fussing, I wouldn’t have to
butt in. I don’t believe in interfering with anybody else’s doings, or
anybody interfering with mine. Live and let live and mind your own
business is my motto, and that’s what I said to Alec Ingleblad the other
day when I was in there having a shave and he was trying to get funny
about our holding so many mortgages, but I’ll be blamed if I’m going to
allow a fellow that I don’t know anything about to come snooping around
My Sister till I find out something about his prospects!”
Leora crooned, “Bertie, lamb, your tie is climbing your collar again.”
“Yes and _you_, Ory,” shrieked Bert, “if it wasn’t for me you’d have
married Sam Petchek, two years ago!”
Bert further said, with instances and illustrations, that she was
light-minded, and as for nursing--_Nursing!_
She said that Bert was what he was, and tried to explain to Martin the
matter of Sam Petchek. (It has never yet been altogether explained.)
Ada Quist said that Leora did not care if she broke her dear parents’
hearts and ruined Bert’s career.
Martin said, “Look here, I--” and never got farther.
Mr. and Mrs. Tozer said they were all to be calm, and of course Bert
didn’t mean-- But really, it was true; they had to be sensible, and how
Mr. Arrowsmith could expect to support a wife--
The conference lasted till nine-thirty, which, as Mr. Tozer pointed out,
was everybody’s bedtime, and except for the five-minute discussion as to
whether Miss Ada Quist was to stay to supper, and the debate on the
saltiness of this last cornbeef, they clave faithfully to the inquiry as
to whether Martin and Leora were engaged. All persons interested, which
apparently did not include Martin and Leora, decided that they were not.
Bert ushered Martin upstairs. He saw to it that the lovers should not
have a chance for a good-night kiss; and until Mr. Tozer called down the
hall, at seven minutes after ten, “You going to stay up and chew the rag
the whole blessed night, Bert?” he made himself agreeable by sitting on
Martin’s bed, looking derisively at his shabby baggage, and demanding
the details of his parentage, religion, politics, and attitude toward
the horrors of card-playing and dancing.
At breakfast they all hoped that Martin would stay one more night in
their home--plenty of room.
Bert stated that Martin would come down-town at ten and be shown the
bank, creamery, and wheat elevator.
But at ten Martin and Leora were on the eastbound train. They got out at
the county seat, Leopolis, a vast city of four thousand population, with
a three-story building. At one that afternoon they were married, by the
German Lutheran pastor. His study was a bareness surrounding a large,
rusty wood-stove, and the witnesses, the pastor’s wife and an old German
who had been shoveling walks, sat on the wood-box and looked drowsy. Not
till they had caught the afternoon train for Wheatsylvania did Martin
and Leora escape from the ghostly apprehension which had hunted them all
day. In the fetid train, huddled close, hands locked, innocently free of
the alienation which the pomposity of weddings sometimes casts between
lovers, they sighed, “Now what are we going to do--what _are_ we going
to do?”
At the Wheatsylvania station they were met by the whole family, rampant.
Bert had suspected elopement. He had searched half a dozen towns by
long-distance telephone, and got through to the county clerk just after
the license had been granted. It did not soften Bert’s mood to have the
clerk remark that if Martin and Leora were of age, there was nothing he
could do, and he didn’t “care a damn who’s talking-- I’m running this
office!”
Bert had come to the station determined to make Martin perfect, even as
Bert Tozer was perfect, and to do it right now.
It was a dreadful evening in the Tozer mansion.
Mr. Tozer said, with length, that Martin had undertaken
responsibilities.
Mrs. Tozer wept, and said that she hoped Ory had not, for certain
reasons, _had_ to be married--
Bert said that if such was the case, he’d kill Martin--
Ada Quist said that Ory could now see what came of pride and boasting
about going off to her old Zenith--
Mr. Tozer said that there was one good thing about it, anyway: Ory could
see for herself that they couldn’t let her go back to nursing school and
get into more difficulties--
Martin from time to time offered remarks to the effect that he was a
good young man, a wonderful bacteriologist, and able to take care of
_his_ wife; but no one save Leora listened.
Bert further propounded (while his father squeaked, “Now don’t be _too_
hard on the boy,”) that if Martin _thought_ for one single _second_ that
he was going to get one red _cent_ out of the Tozers because he’d gone
and butted _in_ where nobody’d _invited_ him, he, Bert, wanted to _know_
about it, that was all, he certainly wanted to _know_ about it!
And Leora watched them, turning her little head from one to another.
Once she came over to press Martin’s hand. In the roughest of the storm,
when Martin was beginning to glare, she drew from a mysterious pocket a
box of very bad cigarettes, and lighted one. None of the Tozers had
discovered that she smoked. Whatever they thought about her sex morals,
her infidelity to United Brethrenism, and her general dementia, they had
not suspected that she could commit such an obscenity as smoking. They
charged on her, and Martin caught his breath savagely.
During these fulminations Mr. Tozer had somehow made up his mind. He
could at times take the lead away from Bert, whom he considered useful
but slightly indiscreet, and unable to grasp the “full value of a
dollar.” (Mr. Tozer valued it at one dollar and ninety, but the
progressive Bert at scarce more than one-fifty.) Mr. Tozer mildly gave
orders:
They were to stop “scrapping.” They had no proof that Martin was
necessarily a bad match for Ory. They would see. Martin would return to
medical school at once, and be a good boy and get through as quickly as
he could and begin to earn money. Ory would remain at home and behave
herself--and she certainly would never act like a Bad Woman again, and
smoke cigarettes. Meantime Martin and she would have no, uh, relations.
(Mrs. Tozer looked embarrassed, and the hungrily attentive Ada Quist
tried to blush.) They could write to each other once a week, but that
was all. They would in no way, uh, act as though they were married till
he gave permission.
“Well?” he demanded.
Doubtless Martin should have defied them and with his bride in his arms
have gone forth into the night. But it seemed only a moment to
graduation, to beginning his practise. He had Leora now, forever. For
her, he must be sensible. He would return to work, and be Practical.
Gottlieb’s ideals of science? Laboratories? Research? Rot!
“All right,” he said.
It did not occur to him that their abstention from love began to-night;
it did not come to him till, holding out his hands to Leora, smiling
with virtue at having determined to be prudent, he heard Mr. Tozer
cackling, “Ory, you go on up to bed now--in your own room!”
That was his bridal night; tossing in his bed, ten yards from her.
Once he heard a door open, and thrilled to her coming. He waited, taut.
She did not come. He peeped out, determined to find her room. His deep
feeling about his brother-in-law suddenly increased. Bert was parading
the hall, on guard. Had Bert been more formidable, Martin might have
killed him, but he could not face that buck-toothed and nickering
righteousness. He lay and resolved to curse them all in the morning and
go off with Leora, but with the coming of the three-o’clock depression
he perceived that with him she would probably starve, that he was
disgraced, that it was not at all certain he would not become a
drunkard.
“Poor kid, I’m not going to spoil her life. God, I do love her! I’m
going back, and the way I’m going to work-- Can I stand this?”
That was his bridal night and the barren dawn.
Three days later he was walking into the office of Dr. Silva, dean of
the Winnemac Medical School.
CHAPTER X
I
Dean Silva’s secretary looked up delightedly, she harkened with
anticipation. But Martin said meekly, “Please, could I see the dean?”
and meekly he waited, in the row of oak chairs beneath the Dawson
Hunziker pharmaceutical calendar.
When he had gone solemnly through the ground-glass door to the dean’s
office, he found Dr. Silva glowering. Seated, the little man seemed
large, so domed was his head, so full his rounding mustache.
“Well, sir!”
Martin pleaded, “I’d like to come back, if you’ll let me. Honest, I do
apologize to you, and I’ll go to Dr. Gottlieb and apologize--though
honest, I can’t lay down on Clif Clawson--”
Dr. Silva bounced up from his chair, bristling. Martin braced himself.
Wasn’t he welcome? Had he no home, anywhere? He could not fight. He had
no more courage. He was so tired after the drab journey, after
restraining himself from flaring out at the Tozers. He was so tired! He
looked wistfully at the dean.
The little man chuckled, “Never mind, boy. It’s all right! We’re glad
you’re back. Bother the apologies! I just wanted you to do whatever’d
buck you up. It’s good to have you back! I believed in you, and then I
thought perhaps we’d lost you. Clumsy old man!”
Martin was sobbing, too weak for restraint, too lonely and too weak, and
Dr. Silva soothed, “Let’s just go over everything and find out where the
trouble was. What can I do? Understand, Martin, the thing I want most in
life is to help give the world as many good physicians, great healers,
as I can. What started your nervousness? Where have you been?”
When Martin came to Leora and his marriage, Silva purred, “I’m
delighted! She sounds like a splendid girl. Well, we must try and get
you into Zenith General for your internship, a year from now, and make
you able to support her properly.”
Martin remembered how often, how astringently, Gottlieb had sneered at
“dese merry vedding or jail bells.” He went away Silva’s disciple; he
went away to study furiously; and the brilliant insanity of Max
Gottlieb’s genius vanished from his faith.
II
Leora wrote that she had been dropped from the school of nursing for
over-absence and for being married. She suspected that it was her father
who had informed the hospital authorities. Then, it appeared, she had
secretly sent for a shorthand book and, on pretense of helping Bert, she
was using the typewriter in the bank, hoping that by next autumn she
could join Martin and earn her own living as a stenographer.
Once he offered to give up medicine, to take what work he could find and
send for her. She refused.
Though in his service to Leora and to the new god, Dean Silva, he had
become austere, denying himself whisky, learning page on page of
medicine with a frozen fury, he was always in a vacuum of desire for
her, and always he ran the last block to his boarding-house, looking for
a letter from her. Suddenly he had a plan. He had tasted shame--this one
last shame would not matter. He would flee to her in Easter vacation; he
would compel Tozer to support her while she studied stenography in
Zenith; he would have her near him through the last year. He paid Clif
the borrowed hundred, when the bimonthly check came from Elk Mills, and
calculated his finances to the penny. By not buying the suit he
distressingly needed, he could manage it. Then for a month and more he
had but two meals a day, and of those meals one was bread and butter and
coffee. He washed his own linen in the bath-tub and, except for
occasional fiercely delightful yieldings, he did not smoke.
His return to Wheatsylvania was like his first flight, except that he
talked less with fellow tramps, and all the way, between uneasy naps in
the red-plush seats of coaches, he studied the bulky books of gynecology
and internal medicine. He had written certain instructions to Leora. He
met her on the edge of Wheatsylvania and they had a moment’s talk, a
resolute kiss.
News spreads not slowly in Wheatsylvania. There is a certain interest
in other people’s affairs, and the eyes of citizens of whose existence
Martin did not know had followed him from his arrival. When the culprits
reached the bone-littered castle of the Tozer ogres, Leora’s father and
brother were already there, and raging. Old Andrew Jackson cried out
upon them. He said that conceivably it may not have been insane in
Martin to have “run away from school once, but to go and sneak back this
second time was absolutely plumb crazy.” Through his tirade, Martin and
Leora smiled confidently.
From Bert, “By God, sir, this is too much!” Bert had been reading
fiction. “I object to the use of profanity, but when you come and annoy
My Sister a second time, all I can say is, by God, sir, this is too
blame much!”
Martin looked meditatively out of the window. He noticed three people
strolling the muddy street. They all viewed the Tozer house with hopeful
interest. Then he spoke steadily:
“Mr. Tozer, I’ve been working hard. Everything has gone fine. But I’ve
decided I don’t care to live without my wife. I’ve come to take her
back. Legally, you can’t prevent me. I’ll admit, without any argument, I
can’t support her yet, if I stay in the University. She’s going to study
stenography. She’ll be supporting herself in a few months, and meanwhile
I expect you to be decent enough to send her money.”
“This _is_ too much,” said Tozer, and Bert carried it on: “Fellow not
only practically ruins a girl but comes and demands that we support her
for him!”
“All right. Just as you want. In the long run it’ll be better for her
and for me and for you if I finish medic school and have my profession,
but if you won’t take care of her, I’ll chuck school, I’ll go to work.
Oh, I’ll support her, all right! Only you’ll never see her again. If you
go on being idiots, she and I will leave here on the night train for the
Coast, and that’ll be the end.” For the first time in his centuries of
debate with the Tozers, he was melodramatic. He shook his fist under
Bert’s nose. “And if you try to prevent our going, God help you! And the
way this town will laugh at you!... How about it, Leora? Are you ready
to go away with me--forever?”
“Yes,” she said.
They discussed it, greatly. Tozer and Bert struck attitudes of defense.
They couldn’t, they said, be bullied by anybody. Also, Martin was an
Adventurer, and how did Leora know he wasn’t planning to live on the
money they sent her? In the end they crawled. They decided that this
new, mature Martin, this new, hard-eyed Leora were ready to throw away
everything for each other.
Mr. Tozer whined a good deal, and promised to send her seventy dollars a
month till she should be prepared for office-work.
At the Wheatsylvania station, looking from the train window, Martin
realized that this anxious-eyed, lip-puckering Andrew Jackson Tozer did
love his daughter, did mourn her going.
III
He found for Leora a room on the frayed northern edge of Zenith, miles
nearer Mohalis and the University than her hospital had been; a square
white and blue room, with blotchy but shoulder-wise chairs. It looked
out on breezy, stubbly waste land reaching to distant glittering
railroad tracks. The landlady was a round German woman with an eye for
romance. It is doubtful if she ever believed that they were married. She
was a good woman.
Leora’s trunk had come. Her stenography books were primly set out on her
little table and her pink felt slippers were arranged beneath the white
iron bed. Martin stood with her at the window, mad with the pride of
proprietorship. Suddenly he was so weak, so tired, that the mysterious
cement which holds cell to cell seemed dissolved, and he felt that he
was collapsing. But with knees rigidly straightening, his head back, his
lips tight across his teeth, he caught himself, and cried, “Our first
home!”
That he should be with her, quiet, none disturbing, was intoxication.
The commonplace room shone with peculiar light; the vigorous weeds and
rough grass of the waste land were radiant under the April sun, and
sparrows were cheeping.
“Yes,” said Leora, with voice, then hungry lips.
IV
Leora attended the Zenith University of Business Administration and
Finance, which title indicated that it was a large and quite reasonably
bad school for stenographers, bookkeepers, and such sons of Zenith
brewers and politicians as were unable to enter even state universities.
She trotted daily to the car-line, a neat, childish figure with
note-books and sharpened pencils, to vanish in the horde of students. It
was six months before she had learned enough stenography to obtain a
place in an insurance office.
Till Martin graduated they kept that room, their home, ever dearer. No
one was so domestic as these birds of passage. At least two evenings a
week Martin dashed in from Mohalis and studied there. She had a genius
for keeping out of his way, for not demanding to be noticed, so that,
while he plunged into his books as he never had done in Clif’s rustling,
grunting, expectorating company, he had ever the warm, half-conscious
feeling of her presence. Sometimes, at midnight, just as he began to
realize that he was hungry, he would find that a plate of sandwiches had
by silent magic appeared at his elbow. He was none the less affectionate
because he did not comment. She made him secure. She shut out the world
that had pounded at him.
On their walks, at dinner, in the dissolute and deliciously wasteful
quarter-hour when they sat on the edge of the bed with comforters
wrapped about them and smoked an inexcusable cigarette before breakfast,
he explained his work to her, and when her own studying was done, she
tried to read whichever of his books was not in use. Knowing nothing,
never learning much, of the actual details of medicine, yet she
understood--better it may be than Angus Duer--his philosophy and the
basis of his work. If he had given up Gottlieb-worship and his yearning
for the laboratory as for a sanctuary, if he had resolved to be a
practical and wealth-mastering doctor, yet something of
Gottlieb’s spirit remained. He wanted to look behind details and
impressive-sounding lists of technical terms for the causes of things,
for general rules which might reduce the chaos of dissimilar and
contradictory symptoms to the orderliness of chemistry.
Saturday evening they went solemnly to the motion pictures--one and
two-reel films with Cowboy Billy Anderson and a girl later to be famous
as Mary Pickford--and solemnly they discussed the non-existent plots as
they returned, unconscious of other people on the streets; but when they
walked into the country on a Sunday (with four sandwiches and a bottle
of ginger ale in his threadbare pockets), he chased her up-hill and
down-gully, and they lost their solemnity in joyous childishness. He
intended, when he came to her room in the evening, to catch the owl-car
to Mohalis and be near his work when he woke in the morning. He was
resolute about it, always, and she admired his efficiency, but he never
caught the car. The crew of the six o’clock morning interurban became
used to a pale, quick-moving young man who sat hunched in a back seat,
devouring large red books, absently gnawing a rather dreadful doughnut.
But in this young man there was none of the heaviness of workers dragged
out of bed at dawn for another gray and futile day of labor. He appeared
curiously determined, curiously content.
It was all so much easier, now that he was partly freed from the
tyrannical honesty of Gottliebism, from the unswerving quest for causes
which, as it drove through layer below layer, seemed ever farther from
the bottommost principles, from the intolerable strain of learning day
by day how much he did not know. It warmed him to escape from Gottlieb’s
ice-box into Dean Silva’s neighborly world.
Now and then he saw Gottlieb on the campus. They bowed in embarrassment
and passed in haste.
V
There seemed to be no division between his Junior and Senior years.
Because of the time he had lost, he had to remain in Mohalis all summer.
The year and a half from his marriage to his graduation was one whirling
bewilderment, without seasons or dates.
When he had, as they put it, “cut out his nonsense and buckled down to
work,” he had won the admiration of Dr. Silva and all the Good Students,
especially Angus Duer and the Reverend Ira Hinkley. Martin had always
announced that he did not care for their approbation, for the applause
of commonplace drudges, but now that he had it, he prized it. However
much he scoffed, he was gratified when he was treated as a peer by
Angus, who spent the summer as extern in the Zenith General Hospital,
and who already had the unapproachable dignity of a successful young
surgeon.
Through that hot summer Martin and Leora labored, panting, and when they
sat in her room, over their books and a stout pot of beer, neither
their costumes nor their language had the decorum which one ought to
expect from a romantic pair devoted to science and high endeavor. They
were not very modest. Leora came to use, in her casual way, such words,
such ancient Anglo-Saxon monosyllables, as would have dismayed Angus or
Bert Tozer. On their evenings off they went economically to an imitation
Coney Island beside a scummy and stinking lake, and with grave pleasure
they ate Hot Dogs, painstakingly they rode the scenic railway.
Their chief appetizer was Clif Clawson. Clif was never willingly alone
or silent except when he was asleep. It is probable that his success in
motor-salesmanship came entirely from his fondness for the enormous
amounts of bright conversation which seem necessary in that occupation.
How much of his attention to Martin and Leora was friendliness and how
much of it was due to his fear of being alone cannot be determined, but
certainly he entertained them and drew them out of themselves, and never
seemed offended by the surly unwillingness with which Martin was
sometimes guilty of greeting him.
He would come roaring up to the house in a motor, the muffler always cut
out. He would shout at their window, “Come on, you guys! Come out of it!
Shake a leg! Lez have a little drive and get cooled off, and then I’ll
buy you a feed.”
That Martin had to work, Clif never comprehended. There was small excuse
for Martin’s occasional brutality in showing his annoyance but, now that
he was fulfilled in Leora and quite thoroughly and selfishly careless as
to what hungry need others might have of himself, now that he was in a
rut of industry and satisfied companionship, he was bored by Clif’s
unchanging flood of heavy humor. It was Leora who was courteous. She had
heard rather too often the seven jokes which, under varying guises, made
up all of Clif’s humor and philosophy, but she could sit for hours
looking amiable while Clif told how clever he was at selling, and she
sturdily reminded Martin that they would never have a friend more loyal
or generous.
But Clif went to New York, to a new motor agency, and Martin and Leora
were more completely and happily dependent on each other than ever
before.
Their last agitation was removed by the complacence of Mr. Tozer. He
was cordial now in all his letters, however much he irritated them by
the parental advice with which he penalized them for every check he
sent.
VI
None of the hectic activities of Senior year--neurology and pediatrics,
practical work in obstetrics, taking of case-histories in the hospitals,
attendance on operations, dressing wounds, learning not to look
embarrassed when charity patients called one “Doctor”--was quite so
important as the discussion of “What shall we do after graduation?”
Is it necessary to be an intern for more than a year? Shall we remain
general practitioners all our lives, or work toward becoming
specialists? Which specialties are the best--that is, the best paid?
Shall we settle in the country or in the city? How about going West?
What about the army medical corps; salutes, riding-boots, pretty women,
travel?
This discussion they harried in the corridors of Main Medical, at the
hospital, at lunch-rooms; and when Martin came home to Leora he went
through it all again, very learnedly, very explanatorily. Almost every
evening he “reached a decision” which was undecided again by morning.
Once when Dr. Loizeau, professor of surgery, had operated before a
clinic which included several renowned visiting doctors--the small white
figure of the surgeon below them, slashing between life and death,
dramatic as a great actor taking his curtain-call-- Martin came away
certain that he was for surgery. He agreed then with Angus Duer, who had
just won the Hugh Loizeau Medal in Experimental Surgery, that the
operator was the lion, the eagle, the soldier among doctors. Angus was
one of the few who knew without wavering precisely what he was going to
do: after his internship he was to join the celebrated Chicago clinic
headed by Dr. Rouncefield, the eminent abdominal surgeon. He would, he
said briefly, be making twenty thousand a year as a surgeon within five
years.
Martin explained it all to Leora. Surgery. Drama. Fearless nerves.
Adoring assistants. Save lives. Science in devising new techniques. Make
money--not be commercial, of course, but provide Leora with comforts. To
Europe--they two together--gray London. Viennese cafés. Leora was
useful to him during his oration. She blandly agreed; and the next
evening, when he sought to prove that surgery was all rot and most
surgeons merely good carpenters, she agreed more amiably than ever.
Next to Angus, and the future medical missionary, Ira Hinkley, Fatty
Pfaff was the first to discover what his future was. He was going to be
an obstetrician--or, as the medical students called it technically, a
“baby-snatcher.” Fatty had the soul of a midwife; he sympathized with
women in their gasping agony, sympathized honestly and almost tearfully,
and he was magnificent at sitting still and drinking tea and waiting.
During his first obstetrical case, when the student with him was merely
nervous as they fidgeted by the bed in the hard desolation of the
hospital room, Fatty was terrified, and he longed as he had never longed
for anything in his flabby yet wistful life to comfort this gray-faced,
straining, unknown woman, to take her pains on himself.
While the others drifted, often by chance, often through relatives, into
their various classes, Martin remained doubtful. He admired Dean Silva’s
insistence on the physician’s immediate service to mankind, but he could
not forget the cool ascetic hours in the laboratory. Toward the end of
Senior year, decision became necessary, and he was moved by a speech in
which Dean Silva condemned too much specialization and pictured the fine
old country doctor, priest and father of his people, sane under open
skies, serene in self-conquest. On top of this came urgent letters from
Mr. Tozer, begging Martin to settle in Wheatsylvania.
Tozer loved his daughter, apparently, and more or less liked Martin, and
he wanted them near him. Wheatsylvania was a “good location,” he said:
solid Scandinavian and Dutch and German and Bohemian farmers who paid
their bills. The nearest doctor was Hesselink, at Groningen, nine and a
half miles away, and Hesselink had more than he could do. If they would
come, he would help Martin buy his equipment; he would even send him a
check now and then during his two-year hospital internship. Martin’s
capital was practically gone. Angus Duer and he had received
appointments to Zenith General Hospital, where he would have an
incomparable training, but Zenith General gave its interns, for the
first year, nothing but board and room, and he had feared that he could
not take the appointment. Tozer’s offer excited him. All night Leora
and he sat up working themselves into enthusiasm about the freedom of
the West, about the kind hearts and friendly hands of the pioneers,
about the heroism and usefulness of country doctors, and this time they
reached a decision which remained decided.
They would settle in Wheatsylvania.
If he ached a little for research and Gottlieb’s divine curiosity--well,
he would be such a country doctor as Robert Koch! He would not
degenerate into a bridge-playing, duck-hunting drone. He would have a
small laboratory of his own. So he came to the end of the year and
graduated, looking rather flustered in his cap and gown. Angus stood
first and Martin seventh in the class. He said good-by, with
lamentations and considerable beer; he found a room for Leora nearer to
the hospital; and he emerged as Martin L. Arrowsmith, M.D., house
physician in the Zenith General Hospital.
CHAPTER XI
I
The Boardman Box Factory was afire. All South Zenith was agitated by the
glare on the low-hung clouds, the smell of scorched timber, the infernal
bells of charging fire-apparatus. Miles of small wooden houses west of
the factory were threatened, and shawled women, tousled men in trousers
over nightshirts, tumbled out of bed and came running with a thick
mutter of footsteps in the night-chilled streets.
With professional calmness, firemen in helmets were stoking the dripping
engines. Policemen tramped in front of the press of people, swinging
their clubs, shouting, “Get back there, you!” The fire-line was sacred.
Only the factory-owner and the reporters were admitted. A crazy-eyed
factory-hand was stopped by a police sergeant.
“My tools are in there!” he shrieked.
“That don’t make no never-minds,” bawled the strutting sergeant.
“_Nobody_ can’t get through here!”
But one got through. They heard the blang-blang-blang of a racing
ambulance, incessant, furious, defiant. Without orders, the crowd
opened, and through them, almost grazing them, slid the huge gray car.
At the back, haughty in white uniform, nonchalant on a narrow seat, was
The Doctor-- Martin Arrowsmith.
The crowd admired him, the policemen sprang to receive him.
“Where’s the fireman got hurt?” he snapped.
“Over in that shed,” cried the police sergeant, running beside the
ambulance.
“Drive over closer. Nev’ mind the smoke!” Martin barked at the driver.
A lieutenant of firemen led him to a pile of sawdust on which was
huddled an unconscious youngster, his face bloodless and clammy.
“He got a bad dose of smoke from the green lumber and keeled over. Fine
kid. Is he a goner?” the lieutenant begged.
Martin knelt by the man, felt his pulse, listened to his breathing.
Brusquely opening a black bag, he gave him a hypodermic of strychnin and
held a vial of ammonia to his nose. “He’ll come around. Here, you two,
getum into the ambulance--hustle!”
The police sergeant and the newest probationer patrolman sprang
together, and together they mumbled, “All right, Doc.”
To Martin came the chief reporter of the _Advocate-Times_. In years he
was only twenty-nine, but he was the oldest and perhaps the most cynical
man in the world. He had interviewed senators; he had discovered graft
in charity societies and even in prize-fights. There were fine wrinkles
beside his eyes, he rolled Bull Durham cigarettes constantly, and his
opinion of man’s honor and woman’s virtue was but low. Yet to Martin, or
at least to The Doctor, he was polite.
“Will he pull through, Doc?” he twanged.
“Sure, I think so. Suffocation. Heart’s still going.”
Martin yelped the last words from the step at the back of the
ambulance as it went bumping and rocking through the factory yard,
through the bitter smoke, toward the shrinking crowd. He owned
and commanded the city, he and the driver. They ignored traffic
regulations, they disdained the people, returning from theaters and
movies, who dotted the streets which unrolled before the flying
gray hood. Let ’em get out of the way! The traffic officer at
Chickasaw and Twentieth heard them coming, speeding like the Midnight
Express--urrrrrr--blang-blang-blang-blang--and cleared the noisy
corner. People were jammed against the curb, threatened by rearing
horses and backing motors, and past them hurled the ambulance,
blang-blang-blang-blang, with The Doctor holding a strap and swinging
easily on his perilous seat.
At the hospital the hall-man cried, “Shooting case in the Arbor, Doc.”
“All right. Wait’ll I sneak in a drink,” said Martin placidly.
On the way to his room he passed the open door of the hospital
laboratory, with its hacked bench, its lifeless rows of flasks and
test-tubes.
“Huh! That stuff! Poking ’round labs! This is real sure-enough life,” he
exulted, and he did not permit himself to see the vision of Max Gottlieb
waiting there, so gaunt, so tired, so patient.
II
The six interns in Zenith General, including Martin and Angus Duer,
lived in a long dark room with six camp beds, and six bureaus fantastic
with photographs and ties and undarned socks. They spent hours sitting
on their beds, arguing surgery versus internal medicine, planning the
dinners which they hoped to enjoy on their nights off, and explaining to
Martin, as the only married man, the virtues of the various nurses with
whom, one by one, they fell in love.
Martin found the hospital routine slightly dull. Though he developed the
Intern’s Walk, that quick corridor step with the stethoscope conspicuous
in the pocket, he did not, he could not, develop the bedside manner. He
was sorry for the bruised, yellowed, suffering patients, always changing
as to individuals and never changing as a mass of drab pain, but when he
had thrice dressed a wound, he had had enough; he wanted to go on to new
experiences. Yet the ambulance work outside the hospital was endlessly
stimulating to his pride.
The Doctor, and The Doctor alone, was safe by night in the slum called
“the Arbor.” His black bag was a pass. Policemen saluted him,
prostitutes bowed to him without mockery, saloon-keepers called out,
“Evenin’, Doc,” and hold-up men stood back in doorways to let him pass.
Martin had power, the first obvious power in his life. And he was led
into incessant adventure.
He took a bank-president out of a dive; he helped the family conceal the
disgrace; he irritably refused their bribe; and afterward, when he
thought of how he might have dined with Leora, he was sorry he had
refused it. He broke into hotel-rooms reeking with gas and revived
would-be suicides. He drank Trinidad rum with a Congressman who
advocated prohibition. He attended a policeman assaulted by strikers,
and a striker assaulted by policemen. He assisted at an emergency
abdominal operation at three o’clock in the morning. The
operating-room--white tile walls and white tile floor and glittering
frosted-glass skylight--seemed lined with fire-lit ice, and the large
incandescents glared on the glass instrument cases, the cruel little
knives. The surgeon, in long white gown, white turban, and pale orange
rubber gloves, made his swift incision in the square of yellowish flesh
exposed between towels, cutting deep into layers of fat, and Martin
looked on unmoved as the first blood menacingly followed the cut. And a
month after, during the Chaloosa River flood, he worked for seventy-six
hours, with half-hours of sleep in the ambulance or on a police-station
table.
He landed from a boat at what had been the second story of a tenement
and delivered a baby on the top floor; he bound up heads and arms for a
line of men; but what gave him glory was the perfectly foolhardy feat of
swimming the flood to save five children marooned and terrified on a
bobbing church pew. The newspapers gave him large headlines, and when he
had returned to kiss Leora and sleep twelve hours, he lay and thought
about research with salty self-defensive scorn.
“Gottlieb, the poor old impractical fusser! I’d like to see him swim
that current!” jeered Dr. Arrowsmith to Martin.
But on night duty, alone, he had to face the self he had been afraid to
uncover, and he was homesick for the laboratory, for the thrill of
uncharted discoveries, the quest below the surface and beyond the
moment, the search for fundamental laws which the scientist (however
blasphemously and colloquially he may describe it) exalts above
temporary healing as the religious exalts the nature and terrible glory
of God above pleasant daily virtues. With this sadness there was envy
that he should be left out of things, that others should go ahead of
him, ever surer in technique, more widely aware of the phenomena of
biological chemistry, more deeply daring to explain laws at which the
pioneers had but fumbled and hinted.
In his second year of internship, when the thrills of fires and floods
and murder became as obvious a routine as bookkeeping, when he had seen
the strangely few ways in which mankind can contrive to injure
themselves and slaughter one another, when it was merely wearing to have
to live up to the pretentiousness of being The Doctor, Martin tried to
satisfy and perhaps kill his guilty scientific lust by voluntary
scrabbling about the hospital laboratory, correlating the blood counts
in pernicious anemia. His trifling with the drug of research was risky.
Amid the bustle of operations he began to picture the rapt quietude of
the laboratory. “I better cut this out,” he said to Leora, “if I’m going
to settle down in Wheatsylvania and ’tend to business and make a
living--and I by golly am!”
Dean Silva often came to the hospital on consultations. He passed
through the lobby one evening when Leora, returned from the office where
she was a stenographer, was meeting Martin for dinner. Martin introduced
them, and the little man held her hand, purred at her, and squeaked,
“Will you children give me the pleasure of taking you to dinner? My wife
has deserted me. I am a lone and misanthropic man.”
He trotted between them, round and happy. Martin and he were not student
and teacher, but two doctors together, for Dean Silva was one pedagogue
who could still be interested in a man who no longer sat at his feet. He
led the two starvelings to a chop-house and in a settle-walled booth he
craftily stuffed them with roast goose and mugs of ale.
He concentrated on Leora, but his talk was of Martin:
“Your husband must be an Artist Healer, not a picker of trifles like
these laboratory men.”
“But Gottlieb’s no picker of trifles,” insisted Martin.
“No-o. But with him-- It’s a difference of one’s gods. Gottlieb’s gods
are the cynics, the destroyers--crapehangers, the vulgar call ’em:
Diderot and Voltaire and Elser; great men, wonder-workers, yet men that
had more fun destroying other people’s theories than creating their own.
But my gods now, they’re the men who took the discoveries of Gottlieb’s
gods and turned them to the use of human beings--made them come alive!
“All credit to the men who invented paint and canvas, but there’s more
credit, eh? to the Raphaels and Holbeins who used those discoveries!
Laënnec and Osler, those are the men! It’s all very fine, this business
of pure research: seeking the truth, unhampered by commercialism or
fame-chasing. Getting to the bottom. Ignoring consequences and practical
uses. But do you realize if you carry that idea far enough, a man could
justify himself for doing nothing but count the cobblestones on
Warehouse Avenue--yes, and justify himself for torturing people just to
see how they screamed--and then sneer at a man who was making millions
of people well and happy!
“No, no! Mrs. Arrowsmith, this lad Martin is a passionate fellow, not a
drudge. He must be passionate on behalf of mankind. He’s chosen the
highest calling in the world, but he’s a feckless, experimental devil.
You must keep him at it, my dear, and not let the world lose the benefit
of his passion.”
After this solemnity Dad Silva took them to a musical comedy and sat
between them, patting Martin’s shoulder, patting Leora’s arm, choking
with delight when the comedian stepped into the pail of whitewash. In
midnight volubility Martin and Leora sputtered their affection for him,
and saw their Wheatsylvania venture as glory and salvation.
But a few days before the end of Martin’s internship and their migration
to North Dakota, they met Max Gottlieb on the street.
Martin had not seen him for more than a year; Leora never. He looked
worried and ill. While Martin was agonizing as to whether to pass with a
bow, Gottlieb stopped.
“How is everything, Martin?” he said cordially. But his eyes said, “Why
have you never come back to me?”
The boy stammered something, nothing, and when Gottlieb had gone by,
stooped and moving as in pain, he longed to run after him.
Leora was demanding, “Is that the Professor Gottlieb you’re always
talking about?”
“Yes. Say! How does he strike you?”
“I don’t-- Sandy, he’s the greatest man I’ve ever seen! I don’t know how
I know, but he is! Dr. Silva is a darling, but that was a _great_ man! I
wish-- I wish we were going to see him again. There’s the first man I
ever laid eyes on that I’d leave you for, if he wanted me. He’s so--oh,
he’s like a sword--no, he’s like a brain walking. Oh, Sandy, he looked
so wretched. I wanted to cry. I’d black his shoes!”
“God! So would I!”
But in the bustle of leaving Zenith, the excitement of the journey to
Wheatsylvania, the scramble of his state examinations, the dignity of
being a Practising Physician, he forgot Gottlieb, and on that Dakota
prairie radiant in early June, with meadow larks on every fence post, he
began his work.
CHAPTER XII
I
At the moment when Martin met him on the street, Gottlieb was ruined.
Max Gottlieb was a German Jew, born in Saxony in 1850. Though he took
his medical degree, at Heidelberg, he was never interested in practising
medicine. He was a follower of Helmholtz, and youthful researches in the
physics of sound convinced him of the need of the quantitative method in
the medical sciences. Then Koch’s discoveries drew him into biology.
Always an elaborately careful worker, a maker of long rows of figures,
always realizing the presence of uncontrollable variables, always a
vicious assailant of what he considered slackness or lie or pomposity,
never too kindly to well-intentioned stupidity, he worked in the
laboratories of Koch, of Pasteur, he followed the early statements of
Pearson in biometrics, he drank beer and wrote vitriolic letters, he
voyaged to Italy and England and Scandinavia, and casually, between two
days, he married (as he might have bought a coat or hired a housekeeper)
the patient and wordless daughter of a Gentile merchant.
Then began a series of experiments, very important, very
undramatic-sounding, very long, and exceedingly unappreciated. Back in
1881 he was confirming Pasteur’s results in chicken cholera immunity
and, for relief and pastime, trying to separate an enzyme from yeast. A
few years later, living on the tiny inheritance from his father, a petty
banker, and quite carelessly and cheerfully exhausting it, he was
analyzing critically the ptomain theory of disease, and investigating
the mechanism of the attenuation of virulence of microörganisms. He got
thereby small fame. Perhaps he was over-cautious, and more than the
devil or starvation he hated men who rushed into publication unprepared.
Though he meddled little in politics, considering them the most
repetitious and least scientific of human activities, he was a
sufficiently patriotic German to hate the Junkers. As a youngster he
had a fight or two with ruffling subalterns; once he spent a week in
jail; often he was infuriated by discriminations against Jews: and at
forty he went sadly off to the America which could never become
militaristic or anti-Semitic--to the Hoagland Laboratory in Brooklyn,
then to Queen City University as professor of bacteriology.
Here he made his first investigation of toxin-anti-toxin reactions. He
announced that antibodies, excepting antitoxin, had no relation to the
immune state of an animal, and while he himself was being ragingly
denounced in the small but hectic world of scientists, he dealt calmly
and most brutally with Yersin’s and Marmorek’s theories of sera.
His dearest dream, now and for years of racking research, was the
artificial production of antitoxin--its production _in vitro_. Once he
was prepared to publish, but he found an error and rigidly suppressed
his notes. All the while he was lonely. There was apparently no one in
Queen City who regarded him as other than a cranky Jew catching microbes
by their little tails and leering at them--no work for a tall man at a
time when heroes were building bridges, experimenting with Horseless
Carriages, writing the first of the poetic Compelling Ads, and selling
miles of calico and cigars.
In 1899 he was called to the University of Winnemac, as professor of
bacteriology in the medical school, and here he drudged on for a dozen
years. Not once did he talk of results of the sort called “practical”;
not once did he cease warring on the _post hoc propter hoc_ conclusions
which still make up most medical lore; not once did he fail to be hated
by his colleagues, who were respectful to his face, uncomfortable in
feeling his ironic power, but privily joyous to call him Mephisto,
Diabolist, Killjoy, Pessimist, Destructive Critic, Flippant Cynic,
Scientific Bounder Lacking in Dignity and Seriousness, Intellectual
Snob, Pacifist, Anarchist, Atheist, Jew. They said, with reason, that he
was so devoted to Pure Science, to art for art’s sake, that he would
rather have people die by the right therapy than be cured by the wrong.
Having built a shrine for humanity, he wanted to kick out of it all mere
human beings.
The total number of his papers, in a brisk scientific realm where really
clever people published five times a year, was not more than twenty-five
in thirty years. They were all exquisitely finished, all easily
reduplicated and checked by the doubtfullest critics.
At Mohalis he was pleased by large facilities for work, by excellent
assistants, endless glassware, plenty of guinea pigs, enough monkeys;
but he was bored by the round of teaching, and melancholy again in a
lack of understanding friends. Always he sought some one to whom he
could talk without suspicion or caution. He was human enough, when he
meditated upon the exaltation of doctors bold through ignorance, of
inventors who were but tinkers magnified, to be irritated by his lack of
fame in America, even in Mohalis, and to complain not too nobly.
He had never dined with a duchess, never received a prize, never been
interviewed, never produced anything which the public could understand,
nor experienced anything since his schoolboy amours which nice people
could regard as romantic. He was, in fact, an authentic scientist.
He was of the great benefactors of humanity. There will never, in any
age, be an effort to end the great epidemics or the petty infections
which will not have been influenced by Max Gottlieb’s researches, for he
was not one who tagged and prettily classified bacteria and protozoa. He
sought their chemistry, the laws of their existence and destruction,
basic laws for the most part unknown after a generation of busy
biologists. Yet they were right who called him “pessimist,” for this man
who, as much as any other, will have been the cause of reducing
infectious diseases to almost-zero often doubted the value of reducing
infectious diseases at all.
He reflected (it was an international debate in which he was joined by a
few and damned by many) that half a dozen generations nearly free from
epidemics would produce a race so low in natural immunity that when a
great plague, suddenly springing from almost-zero to a world-smothering
cloud, appeared again, it might wipe out the world entire, so that the
measures to save lives to which he lent his genius might in the end be
the destruction of all human life.
He meditated that if science and public hygiene did remove tuberculosis
and the other major plagues, the world was grimly certain to become so
overcrowded, to become such a universal slave-packed shambles, that all
beauty and ease and wisdom would disappear in a famine-driven scamper
for existence. Yet these speculations never checked his work. If the
future became overcrowded, the future must by birth-control or otherwise
look to itself. Perhaps it would, he reflected. But even this drop of
wholesome optimism was lacking in his final doubts. For he doubted all
progress of the intellect and the emotions, and he doubted, most of all,
the superiority of divine mankind to the cheerful dogs, the infallibly
graceful cats, the unmoral and unagitated and irreligious horses, the
superbly adventuring sea-gulls.
While medical quacks, manufacturers of patent medicines, chewing-gum
salesmen, and high priests of advertising lived in large houses,
attended by servants, and took their sacred persons abroad
in limousines, Max Gottlieb dwelt in a cramped cottage whose
paint was peeling, and rode to his laboratory on an ancient and
squeaky bicycle. Gottlieb himself protested rarely. He was not so
unreasonable--usually--as to demand both freedom and the fruits of
popular slavery. “Why,” he once said to Martin, “should the world pay
me for doing what I want and what they do not want?”
If in his house there was but one comfortable chair, on his desk were
letters, long, intimate, and respectful, from the great ones of France
and Germany, Italy and Denmark, and from scientists whom Great Britain
so much valued that she gave them titles almost as high as those with
which she rewarded distillers, cigarette-manufacturers, and the owners
of obscene newspapers.
But poverty kept him from fulfilment of his summer longing to sit
beneath the poplars by the Rhine or the tranquil Seine, at a table on
whose checkered cloth were bread and cheese and wine and dusky cherries,
those ancient and holy simplicities of all the world.
II
Max Gottlieb’s wife was thick and slow-moving and mute; at sixty she had
not learned to speak easy English; and her German was of the small-town
bourgeois, who pay their debts and over-eat and grow red. If he was not
confidential with her, if at table he forgot her in long reflections,
neither was he unkind or impatient, and he depended on her housekeeping,
her warming of his old-fashioned nightgown. She had not been well of
late. She had nausea and indigestion, but she kept on with her work.
Always you heard her old slippers slapping about the house.
They had three children, all born when Gottlieb was over thirty-eight:
Miriam, the youngest, an ardent child who had a touch at the piano, an
instinct about Beethoven, and hatred for the “ragtime” popular in
America; an older sister who was nothing in particular; and their boy
Robert-- Robert Koch Gottlieb. He was a wild thing and a distress. They
sent him, with anxiety over the cost, to a smart school near Zenith,
where he met the sons of manufacturers and discovered a taste for fast
motors and eccentric clothes, and no taste whatever for studying. At
home he clamored that his father was a “tightwad.” When Gottlieb sought
to make it clear that he was a poor man, the boy answered that out of
his poverty he was always sneakingly spending money on his
researches--he had no right to do that and shame his son--let the
confounded University provide him with material!
III
There were few of Gottlieb’s students who saw him and his learning as
anything but hurdles to be leaped as quickly as possible. One of the few
was Martin Arrowsmith.
However harshly he may have pointed out Martin’s errors, however loftily
he may have seemed to ignore his devotion, Gottlieb was as aware of
Martin as Martin of him. He planned vast things. If Martin really
desired his help (Gottlieb could be as modest personally as he was
egotistic and swaggering in competitive science), he would make the
boy’s career his own. During Martin’s minute original research, Gottlieb
rejoiced in his willingness to abandon conventional--and
convenient--theories of immunology and in the exasperated carefulness
with which he checked results. When Martin for unknown reasons became
careless, when he was obviously drinking too much, obviously mixed up in
some absurd personal affair, it was tragic hunger for friends and
flaming respect for excellent work which drove Gottlieb to snarl at him.
Of the apologies demanded by Silva he had no notion. He would have
raged--
He waited for Martin to return. He blamed himself: “Fool! There was a
fine spirit. You should have known one does not use a platinum loop for
shoveling coal.” As long as he could (while Martin was dish-washing and
wandering on improbable trains between impossible towns), he put off
the appointment of a new assistant. Then all his wistfulness chilled to
anger. He considered Martin a traitor, and put him out of his mind.
IV
It is possible that Max Gottlieb was a genius. Certainly he was mad as
any genius. He did, during the period of Martin’s internship in Zenith
General, a thing more preposterous than any of the superstitions at
which he scoffed.
He tried to become an executive and a reformer! He, the cynic, the
anarch, tried to found an Institution, and he went at it like a spinster
organizing a league to keep small boys from learning naughty words.
He conceived that there might, in this world, be a medical school which
should be altogether scientific, ruled by exact quantitative biology and
chemistry, with spectacle-fitting and most of surgery ignored, and he
further conceived that such an enterprise might be conducted at the
University of Winnemac! He tried to be practical about it; oh, he was
extremely practical and plausible!
“I admit we should not be able to turn out doctors to cure village
bellyaches. And ordinary physicians are admirable and altogether
necessary--perhaps. But there are too many of them already. And on the
‘practical’ side, you gif me twenty years of a school that is precise
and cautious, and we shall cure diabetes, maybe tuberculosis and cancer,
and all these arthritis things that the carpenters shake their heads at
them and call them ‘rheumatism.’ So!”
He did not desire the control of such a school, nor any credit. He was
too busy. But at a meeting of the American Academy of Sciences he met
one Dr. Entwisle, a youngish physiologist from Harvard, who would make
an excellent dean. Entwisle admired him, and sounded him on his
willingness to be called to Harvard. When Gottlieb outlined his new sort
of medical school, Entwisle was fervent. “Nothing I’d like so much as to
have a chance at a place like that,” he fluttered, and Gottlieb went
back to Mohalis triumphant. He was the more assured because (though he
sardonically refused it) he was at this time offered the medical
deanship of the University of West Chippewa.
So simple, or so insane, was he that he wrote to Dean Silva politely
bidding him step down and hand over his school--his work, his life--to
an unknown teacher in Harvard! A courteous old gentleman was Dad Silva,
a fit disciple of Osler, but this incredible letter killed his patience.
He replied that while he could see the value of basic research, the
medical school belonged to the people of the state, and its task was to
provide them with immediate and practical attention. For himself, he
hinted, if he ever believed that the school would profit by his
resignation he would go at once, but he needed a rather broader
suggestion than a letter from one of his own subordinates!
Gottlieb retorted with spirit and indiscretion. He damned the People of
the State of Winnemac. Were they, in their present condition of
nincompoopery, worth any sort of attention? He unjustifiably took his
demand over Silva’s head to that great orator and patriot, Dr. Horace
Greeley Truscott, president of the University.
President Truscott said, “Really, I’m too engrossed to consider
chimerical schemes, however ingenious they may be.”
“You are too busy to consider anything but selling honorary degrees to
millionaires for gymnasiums,” remarked Gottlieb.
Next day he was summoned to a special meeting of the University Council.
As head of the medical department of bacteriology, Gottlieb was a member
of this all-ruling body, and when he entered the long Council Chamber,
with its gilt ceiling, its heavy maroon curtains, its somber paintings
of pioneers, he started for his usual seat, unconscious of the knot of
whispering members, meditating on far-off absorbing things.
“Oh, uh, Professor Gottlieb, will you please sit down there at the far
end of the table?” called President Truscott.
Then Gottlieb was aware of tensions. He saw that out of the seven
members of the Board of Regents, the four who lived in or near Zenith
were present. He saw that sitting beside Truscott was not the dean of
the academic department but Dean Silva. He saw that however easily they
talked, they were looking at him through the mist of their chatter.
President Truscott announced, “Gentlemen, this joint meeting of the
Council and the regents is to consider charges against Professor Max
Gottlieb preferred by his dean and by myself.”
Gottlieb suddenly looked old.
“These charges are: Disloyalty to his dean, his president, his regents,
and to the State of Winnemac. Disloyalty to recognized medical and
scholastic ethics. Insane egotism. Atheism. Persistent failure to
collaborate with his colleagues, and such inability to understand
practical affairs as makes it dangerous to let him conduct the important
laboratories and classes with which we have entrusted him. Gentlemen, I
shall now prove each of these points, from Professor Gottlieb’s own
letters to Dean Silva.”
He proved them.
The chairman of the Board of Regents suggested, “Gottlieb, I think it
would simplify things if you just handed us your resignation and
permitted us to part in good feeling, instead of having the
unpleasant--”
“I’m damned if I will resign!” Gottlieb was on his feet, a lean fury.
“Because you all haf schoolboy minds, golf-links minds, you are twisting
my expression, and perfectly accurate expression, of a sound
revolutionary ideal, which would personally to me be of no value or
advantage whatefer, into a desire to steal promotions. That fools should
judge honor--!” His long forefinger was a fish-hook, reaching for
President Truscott’s soul. “No! I will not resign! You can cast me out!”
“I’m afraid, then, we must ask you to leave the room while we vote.” The
president was very suave, for so large and strong and hearty a man.
Gottlieb rode his wavering bicycle to the laboratory. It was by
telephone message from a brusque girl clerk in the president’s office
that he was informed that “his resignation had been accepted.”
He agonized, “Discharge me? They couldn’t! I’m the chief glory, the only
glory, of this shopkeepers’ school!” When he comprehended that
apparently they very much had discharged him, he was shamed that he
should have given them a chance to kick him. But the really dismaying
thing was that he should by an effort to be a politician have
interrupted the sacred work.
He required peace and a laboratory, at once.
They’d see what fools they were when they heard that Harvard had called
him!
He was eager for the mellower ways of Cambridge and Boston. Why had he
remained so long in raw Mohalis? He wrote to Dr. Entwisle, hinting that
he was willing to hear an offer. He expected a telegram. He waited a
week, then had a long letter from Entwisle admitting that he had been
premature in speaking for the Harvard faculty. Entwisle presented the
faculty’s compliments and their hope that some time they might have the
honor of his presence, but as things were now--
Gottlieb wrote to the University of West Chippewa that, after all, he
was willing to think about their medical deanship ... and had answer
that the place was filled, that they had not greatly liked the tone of
his former letter, and they did not “care to go into the matter
further.”
At sixty-one, Gottlieb had saved but a few hundred dollars--literally a
few hundred. Like any bricklayer out of work, he had to have a job or go
hungry. He was no longer a genius impatient of interrupted creation but
a shabby schoolmaster in disgrace.
He prowled through his little brown house, fingering papers, staring at
his wife, staring at old pictures, staring at nothing. He still had a
month of teaching--they had dated ahead the resignation which they had
written for him--but he was too dispirited to go to the laboratory. He
felt unwanted, almost unsafe. His ancient sureness was broken into
self-pity. He waited from delivery to delivery for the mail. Surely
there would be aid from somebody who knew what he was, what he meant.
There were many friendly letters about research, but the sort of men
with whom he corresponded did not listen to intercollegiate faculty
tattle nor know of his need.
He could not, after the Harvard mischance and the West Chippewa rebuke,
approach the universities or the scientific institutes, and he was too
proud to write begging letters to the men who revered him. No, he would
be business-like! He applied to a Chicago teachers’ agency, and received
a stilted answer promising to look about and inquiring whether he would
care to take the position of teacher of physics and chemistry in a
suburban high school.
Before he had sufficiently recovered from his fury to be able to reply,
his household was overwhelmed by his wife’s sudden agony.
She had been unwell for months. He had wanted her to see a physician,
but she had refused, and all the while she was stolidly terrified by the
fear that she had cancer of the stomach. Now when she began to vomit
blood, she cried to him for help. The Gottlieb who scoffed at medical
credos, at “carpenters” and “pill mongers,” had forgotten what he knew
of diagnosis, and when he was ill, or his family, he called for the
doctor as desperately as any backwoods layman to whom illness was the
black malignity of unknown devils.
In unbelievable simplicity he considered that, as his quarrel with Silva
was not personal, he could still summon him, and this time he was
justified. Silva came, full of excessive benignity, chuckling to
himself, “When he’s got something the matter, he doesn’t run for
Arrhenhius or Jacques Loeb, but for me!” Into the meager cottage the
little man brought strength, and Gottlieb gazed down on him trustingly.
Mrs. Gottlieb was suffering. Silva gave her morphine. Not without
satisfaction he learned that Gottlieb did not even know the dose. He
examined her--his pudgy hands had the sensitiveness if not the precision
of Gottlieb’s skeleton fingers. He peered about the airless bedroom: the
dark green curtains, the crucifix on the dumpy bureau, the color-print
of a virtuously voluptuous maiden. He was bothered by an impression of
having recently been in the room. He remembered. It was the twin of the
doleful chamber of a German grocer whom he had seen during a
consultation a month ago.
He spoke to Gottlieb not as to a colleague or an enemy but as a patient,
to be cheered.
“Don’t think there’s any tumorous mass. As of course you know, Doctor,
you can tell such a lot by the differences in the shape of the lower
border of the ribs, and by the surface of the belly during deep
breathing.”
“Oh, yesss.”
“I don’t think you need to worry in the least. We’d better hustle her
off to the University Hospital, and we’ll give her a test meal and get
her X-rayed and take a look for Boas-Oppler bugs.”
She was taken away, heavy, inert, carried down the cottage steps.
Gottlieb was with her. Whether or not he loved her, whether he was
capable of ordinary domestic affection, could not be discovered. The
need of turning to Dean Silva had damaged his opinion of his own wisdom.
It was the final affront, more subtle and more enervating than the offer
to teach chemistry to children. As he sat by her bed, his dark face was
blank, and the wrinkles which deepened across that mask may have been
sorrow, may have been fear.... Nor is it known how, through the secure
and uninvaded years, he had regarded his wife’s crucifix, which Silva
had spied on their bureau--a gaudy plaster crucifix on a box set with
gilded shells.
Silva diagnosed it as probable gastric ulcer, and placed her on
treatment, with light and frequent meals. She improved, but she remained
in the hospital for four weeks, and Gottlieb wondered: Are these doctors
deceiving us? Is it really cancer, which by Their mystic craft They are
concealing from me who know naught?
Robbed of her silent assuring presence on which night by weary night he
had depended, he fretted over his daughters, despaired at their noisy
piano-practice, their inability to manage the slattern maid. When they
had gone to bed he sat alone in the pale lamplight, unmoving, not
reading. He was bewildered. His haughty self was like a robber baron
fallen into the hands of rebellious slaves, stooped under a filthy load,
the proud eye rheumy and patient with despair, the sword hand chopped
off, obscene flies crawling across the gnawed wrist.
It was at this time that he encountered Martin and Leora on the street
in Zenith.
He did not look back when they had passed him, but all that afternoon he
brooded on them. “That girl, maybe it was she that stole Martin from
me--from science! No! He was right. One sees what happens to the fools
like me!”
On the day after Martin and Leora had started for Wheatsylvania,
singing, Gottlieb went to Chicago to see the teachers’ agency.
The firm was controlled by a Live Wire who had once been a county
superintendent of schools. He was not much interested. Gottlieb lost his
temper: “Do you make an endeavor to find positions for teachers, or do
you merely send out circulars to amuse yourself? Haf you looked up my
record? Do you know who I am?”
The agent roared, “Oh, we know about you, all right, all right! I didn’t
when I first wrote you, but-- You seem to have a good record as a
laboratory man, though I don’t see that you’ve produced anything of the
slightest use in medicine. We had hoped to give you a chance such as you
nor nobody else ever had. John Edtooth, the Oklahoma oil magnate, has
decided to found a university that for plant and endowment and
individuality will beat anything that’s ever been pulled off in
education--biggest gymnasium in the world, with an ex-New York Giant
for baseball coach! We thought maybe we might work you in on the
bacteriology or the physiology-- I guess you could manage to teach that,
too, if you boned up on it. But we’ve been making some inquiries. From
some good friends of ours, down Winnemac way. And we find that you’re
not to be trusted with a position of real responsibility. Why, they
fired you for general incompetence! But now that you’ve had your
lesson-- Do you think you’d be competent to teach Practical Hygiene in
Edtooth University?”
Gottlieb was so angry that he forgot to speak English, and as all his
cursing was in student German, in a creaky dry voice, the whole scene
was very funny indeed to the cackling bookkeeper and the girl
stenographers. When he went from that place Max Gottlieb walked slowly,
without purpose, and in his eyes were senile tears.
CHAPTER XIII
I
No one in the medical world had ever damned more heartily than Gottlieb
the commercialism of certain large pharmaceutical firms, particularly
Dawson T. Hunziker & Co., Inc., of Pittsburgh. The Hunziker Company was
an old and ethical house which dealt only with reputable doctors--or
practically only with reputable doctors. It furnished excellent
antitoxins for diphtheria and tetanus, as well as the purest of official
preparations, with the plainest and most official-looking labels on the
swaggeringly modest brown bottles. Gottlieb had asserted that they
produced doubtful vaccines, yet he returned from Chicago to write to
Dawson Hunziker that he was no longer interested in teaching, and he
would be willing to work for them on half time if he might use their
laboratories, on possibly important research, for the rest of the day.
When the letter had gone he sat mumbling. He was certainly not
altogether sane. “Education! Biggest gymnasium in the world! Incapable
of responsibility. Teaching I can do no more. But Hunziker will laugh at
me. I haf told the truth about him and I shall haf to-- Dear Gott, what
shall I do?”
Into this still frenzy, while his frightened daughters peered at him
from doorways, hope glided.
The telephone rang. He did not answer it. On the third irascible burring
he took up the receiver and grumbled, “Yes, yes, vot iss it?”
A twanging nonchalant voice: “This M. C. Gottlieb?”
“This is Dr. Gottlieb!”
“Well, I guess you’re the party. Hola wire. Long distance wants yuh.”
Then, “Professor Gottlieb? This is Dawson Hunziker speaking. From
Pittsburgh. My dear fellow, we should be delighted to have you join our
staff.”
“I-- But--”
“I believe you have criticized the pharmaceutical houses--oh, we read
the newspaper clippings very efficiently!--but we feel that when you
come to us and understand the Spirit of the Old Firm better, you’ll be
enthusiastic. I hope, by the way, I’m not interrupting something.”
Thus, over certain hundreds of miles, from the gold and blue
drawing-room of his Sewickley home, Hunziker spoke to Max Gottlieb
sitting in his patched easy chair, and Gottlieb grated, with a forlorn
effort at dignity:
“No, it iss all right.”
“Well--we shall be glad to offer you five thousand dollars a year, for a
starter, and we shan’t worry about the half-time arrangement. We’ll give
you all the space and technicians and material you need, and you just go
ahead and ignore us, and work out whatever seems important to you. Our
only request is that if you do find any serums which are of real value
to the world, we shall have the privilege of manufacturing them, and if
we lose money on ’em, it doesn’t matter. We like to make money, if we
can do it honestly, but our chief purpose is to serve mankind. Of course
if the serums pay, we shall be only too delighted to give you a generous
commission. Now about practical details--”
II
Gottlieb, the placidly virulent hater of religious rites, had a
religious-seeming custom.
Often he knelt by his bed and let his mind run free. It was very much
like prayer, though certainly there was no formal invocation, no
consciousness of a Supreme Being--other than Max Gottlieb. This night,
as he knelt, with the wrinkles softening in his drawn face, he
meditated, “I was asinine that I should ever scold the commercialists!
This salesman fellow, he has his feet on the ground. How much more
aut’entic the worst counter-jumper than frightened professors! Fine
dieners! Freedom! No teaching of imbeciles! _Du Heiliger!_”
But he had no contract with Dawson Hunziker.
III
In the medical periodicals the Dawson Hunziker Company published
full-page advertisements, most starchy and refined in type, announcing
that Professor Max Gottlieb, perhaps the most distinguished
immunologist in the world, had joined their staff.
In his Chicago clinic, one Dr. Rouncefield chuckled, “That’s what
becomes of these super-highbrows. Pardon me if I seem to grin.”
In the laboratories of Ehrlich and Roux, Bordet and Sir David Bruce,
sorrowing men wailed, “How could old Max have gone over to that damned
pill-pedler? Why didn’t he come to us? Oh, well, if he didn’t want
to--_Voila!_ He is dead.”
In the village of Wheatsylvania, in North Dakota, a young doctor
protested to his wife, “Of all the people in the world! I wouldn’t have
believed it! Max Gottlieb falling for those crooks!”
“I don’t care!” said his wife. “If he’s gone into business, he had some
good reason for it. I told you, I’d leave you for--”
“Oh, well,” sighingly, “give and forgive. I learned a lot from Gottlieb
and I’m grateful for-- God, Leora, I wish _he_ hadn’t gone wrong!”
And Max Gottlieb, with his three young and a pale, slow-moving wife, was
arriving at the station in Pittsburgh, tugging a shabby wicker bag, an
immigrant bundle, and a Bond Street dressing-case. From the train he had
stared up at the valiant Clifs, down to the smoke-tinged splendor of
the river, and his heart was young. Here was fiery enterprise, not the
flat land and flat minds of Winnemac. At the station-entrance every
dingy taxicab seemed radiant to him, and he marched forth a conqueror.
IV
In the Dawson Hunziker building, Gottlieb found such laboratories as he
had never planned, and instead of student assistants he had an expert
who himself had taught bacteriology, as well as three swift technicians,
one of them German-trained. He was received with acclaim in the private
office of Hunziker, which was remarkably like a minor cathedral.
Hunziker was bald and business-like as to skull but tortoise-spectacled
and sentimental of eye. He stood up at his Jacobean desk, gave Gottlieb
a Havana cigar, and told him that they had awaited him pantingly.
In the enormous staff dining-room Gottlieb found scores of competent
young chemists and biologists who treated him with reverence. He liked
them. If they talked too much of money--of how much this new tincture of
cinchona ought to sell, and how soon their salaries would be
increased--yet they were free of the careful pomposities of college
instructors. As a youngster, the cap-tilted young Max had been a
laughing man, and now in gusty arguments his laughter came back.
His wife seemed better; his daughter Miriam found an excellent piano
teacher; the boy Robert entered college that autumn; they had a spacious
though decrepit house; the relief from the droning and the annually
repeated, inevitable routine of the classroom was exhilarating; and
Gottlieb had never in his life worked so well. He was unconscious of
everything outside of his laboratory and a few theaters and
concert-halls.
Six months passed before he realized that the young technical experts
resented what he considered his jolly thrusts at their commercialism.
They were tired of his mathematical enthusiasms and some of them viewed
him as an old bore, muttered of him as a Jew. He was hurt, for he liked
to be merry with fellow workers. He began to ask questions and to
explore the Hunziker building. He had seen nothing of it save his
laboratory, a corridor or two, the dining-room, and Hunziker’s office.
However abstracted and impractical, Gottlieb would have made an
excellent Sherlock Holmes--if anybody who would have made an excellent
Sherlock Holmes would have been willing to be a detective. His mind
burned through appearances to actuality. He discovered now that the
Dawson Hunziker Company was quite all he had asserted in earlier days.
They did make excellent antitoxins and ethical preparations, but they
were also producing a new “cancer remedy” manufactured from the orchid,
pontifically recommended and possessing all the value of mud. And to
various billboard-advertising beauty companies they sold millions of
bottles of a complexion-cream guaranteed to turn a Canadian Indian guide
as lily-fair as the angels. This treasure cost six cents a bottle to
make and a dollar over the counter, and the name of Dawson Hunziker was
never connected with it.
It was at this time that Gottlieb succeeded in his masterwork after
twenty years of seeking. He produced antitoxin in the test-tube, which
meant that it would be possible to immunize against certain diseases
without tediously making sera by the inoculation of animals. It was a
revolution, the revolution, in immunology ... if he was right.
He revealed it at a dinner for which Hunziker had captured a general, a
college president, and a pioneer aviator. It was an expansive dinner,
with admirable hock, the first decent German wine Gottlieb had drunk in
years. He twirled the slender green glass affectionately; he came out of
his dreams and became excited, gay, demanding. They applauded him and
for an hour he was a Great Scientist. Of them all, Hunziker was most
generous in his praise. Gottlieb wondered if some one had not tricked
this good bald man into intrigues with the beautifiers.
Hunziker summoned him to the office next day. Hunziker did his summoning
very well indeed (unless it happened to be merely a stenographer). He
sent a glossy morning-coated male secretary, who presented Mr.
Hunziker’s compliments to the much less glossy Dr. Gottlieb, and hinted
with the delicacy of a lilac bud that if it was quite altogether
convenient, if it would not in the least interfere with Dr. Gottlieb’s
experiments, Mr. Hunziker would be flattered to see him in the office at
a quarter after three.
When Gottlieb rambled in, Hunziker motioned the secretary out of
existence and drew up a tall Spanish chair.
“I lay awake half the night thinking about your discovery, Dr. Gottlieb.
I’ve been talking to the technical director and sales-manager and we
feel it’s the time to strike. We’ll patent your method of synthesizing
antibodies and immediately put them on the market in large quantities,
with a great big advertising campaign--you know--not circus it, of
course--strictly high-class ethical advertising. We’ll start with
anti-diphtheria serum. By the way, when you receive your next check
you’ll find we’ve raised your honorarium to seven thousand a year.”
Hunziker was a large purring pussy, now, and Gottlieb death-still. “Need
I say, my dear fellow, that if there’s the demand I anticipate, you will
have exceedingly large commissions coming!”
Hunziker leaned back with a manner of “How’s that for glory, my boy?”
Gottlieb spoke nervously: “I do not approve of patenting serological
processes. They should be open to all laboratories. And I am strongly
against premature production or even announcement. I think I am right,
but I must check my technique, perhaps improve it--be _sure_. Then, I
should think, there should be no objection to market production, but in
ve-ry small quantities and in fair competition with others, not under
patents, as if this was a dinglebat toy for the Christmas tradings!”
“My dear fellow, I quite sympathize. Personally I should like nothing so
much as to spend my whole life in just producing one priceless
scientific discovery, without consideration of mere profit. But we have
our duty toward the stockholders of the Dawson Hunziker Company to make
money for them. Do you realize that they have--and many of them are poor
widows and orphans--invested their Little All in our stock, and that we
must keep faith? I am helpless; I am but their Humble Servant. And on
the other side: I think we’ve treated you rather well, Dr. Gottlieb, and
we’ve given you complete freedom. And we intend to go on treating you
well! Why, man, you’ll be rich; you’ll be one of us! I don’t like to
make any demands, but on this point it’s my duty to insist, and I shall
expect you at the earliest possible moment to start manufacturing--”
Gottlieb was sixty-two. The defeat at Winnemac had done something to his
courage.... And he had no contract with Hunziker.
He protested shakily, but as he crawled back to his laboratory it seemed
impossible for him to leave this sanctuary and face the murderous
brawling world, and quite as impossible to tolerate a cheapened and
ineffective imitation of his antitoxin. He began, that hour, a sordid
strategy which his old proud self would have called inconceivable; he
began to equivocate, to put off announcement and production till he
should have “cleared up a few points,” while week on week Hunziker
became more threatening. Meantime he prepared for disaster. He moved his
family to a smaller house, and gave up every luxury, even smoking.
Among his economies was the reduction of his son’s allowance.
Robert was a square-rigged, swart, tempestuous boy, arrogant where there
seemed to be no reason for arrogance, longed for by the anemic, milky
sort of girls, yet ever supercilious to them. While his father was
alternately proud and amiably sardonic about his own Jewish blood, the
boy conveyed to his classmates in college that he was from pure and
probably noble German stock. He was welcomed, or half welcomed, in a
motoring, poker-playing, country-club set, and he had to have more
money. Gottlieb missed twenty dollars from his desk. He who ridiculed
conventional honor had the honor, as he had the pride, of a savage old
squire. A new misery stained his incessant bitterness at having to
deceive Hunziker. He faced Robert with, “My boy, did you take the money
from my desk?”
Few youngsters could have faced that jut of his hawk nose, the
red-veined rage of his sunken eyes. Robert spluttered, then shouted:
“Yes, I did! And I’ve got to have some more! I’ve got to get some
clothes and stuff. It’s your fault. You bring me up to train with a lot
of fellows that have all the cash in the world, and then you expect me
to dress like a hobo!”
“Stealing--”
“Rats! What’s stealing! You’re always making fun of these preachers that
talk about Sin and Truth and Honesty and all those words that’ve been
used so much they don’t mean a darn’ thing and-- I don’t care! Daws
Hunziker, the old man’s son, he told me his dad said you could be a
millionaire, and then you keep us strapped like this, and Mom sick-- Let
me tell you, back in Mohalis Mom used to slip me a couple of dollars
almost every week and-- I’m tired of it! If you’re going to keep me in
rags, I’m going to cut out college!”
Gottlieb stormed, but there was no force in it. He did not know, all the
next fortnight, what his son was going to do, what himself was going to
do.
Then, so quietly that not till they had returned from the cemetery did
they realize her passing, his wife died, and the next week his oldest
daughter ran off with a worthless laughing fellow who lived by gambling.
Gottlieb sat alone. Over and over he read the Book of Job. “Truly the
Lord hath smitten me and my house,” he whispered. When Robert came in,
mumbling that he would be good, the old man lifted to him a blind face,
unhearing. But as he repeated the fables of his fathers it did not occur
to him to believe them, or to stoop in fear before their God of
Wrath--or to gain ease by permitting Hunziker to defile his discovery.
He arose, in time, and went silently to his laboratory. His experiments
were as careful as ever, and his assistants saw no change save that he
did not lunch in hall. He walked blocks away, to a vile restaurant at
which he could save thirty cents a day.
V
Out of the dimness which obscured the people about him, Miriam emerged.
She was eighteen, the youngest of his brood, squat, and in no way comely
save for her tender mouth. She had always been proud of her father,
understanding the mysterious and unreasoning compulsions of his science,
but she had been in awe till now, when he walked heavily and spoke
rarely. She dropped her piano lessons, discharged the maid, studied the
cook-book, and prepared for him the fat crisp dishes that he loved. Her
regret was that she had never learned German, for he dropped now and
then into the speech of his boyhood.
He eyed her, and at length: “So! One is with me. Could you endure the
poverty if I went away--to teach chemistry in a high school?”
“Yes. Of course. Maybe I could play the piano in a movie theater.”
He might not have done it without her loyalty, but when Dawson Hunziker
next paraded into the laboratory, demanding, “Now look here. We’ve
fussed long enough. We got to put your stuff on the market,” then
Gottlieb answered, “No. If you wait till I have done all I can--maybe
one year, probably three--you shall have it. But not till I am sure.
No.”
Hunziker went off huffily, and Gottlieb prepared for sentence.
Then the card of Dr. A. DeWitt Tubbs, Director of the McGurk Institute
of Biology, of New York, was brought to him.
Gottlieb knew of Tubbs. He had never visited McGurk but he considered
it, next to Rockefeller and McCormick, the soundest and freest
organization for pure scientific research in the country, and if he had
pictured a Heavenly laboratory in which good scientists might spend
eternity in happy and thoroughly impractical research, he would have
devised it in the likeness of McGurk. He was mildly pleased that its
director should have called on him.
Dr. A. DeWitt Tubbs was tremendously whiskered on all visible spots save
his nose and temples and the palms of his hands, short but passionately
whiskered, like a Scotch terrier. Yet they were not comic whiskers; they
were the whiskers of dignity; and his eyes were serious, his step an
earnest trot, his voice a piping solemnity.
“Dr. Gottlieb, this is a great pleasure. I have heard your papers at the
Academy of Sciences but, to my own loss, I have hitherto failed to have
an introduction to you.”
Gottlieb tried not to sound embarrassed.
Tubbs looked at the assistants, like a plotter in a political play, and
hinted, “May we have a talk--”
Gottlieb led him to his office, overlooking a vast bustle of sidetracks,
of curving rails and brown freight-cars, and Tubbs urged:
“It has come to our attention, by a curious chance, that you are on the
eve of your most significant discovery. We all wondered, when you left
academic work, at your decision to enter the commercial field. We wished
that you had cared to come to us.”
“You would have taken me in? I needn’t at all have come here?”
“Naturally! Now from what we hear, you are not giving your attention to
the commercial side of things, and that tempts us to wonder whether you
could be persuaded to join us at McGurk. So I just sprang on a train and
ran down here. We should be delighted to have you become a member of the
institute, and chief of the Department of Bacteriology and Immunology.
Mr. McGurk and I desire nothing but the advancement of science. You
would, of course, have absolute freedom as to what researches you
thought it best to pursue, and I think we could provide as good
assistance and material as would be obtainable anywhere in the world. In
regard to salary--permit me to be business-like and perhaps blunt, as my
train leaves in one hour-- I don’t suppose we could equal the doubtless
large emolument which the Hunziker people are able to pay you, but we
can go to ten thousand dollars a year--”
“Oh, my God, do not talk of the money! I shall be wit’ you in New York
one week from to-day. You see,” said Gottlieb, “I haf no contract
here!”
CHAPTER XIV
I
All afternoon they drove in the flapping buggy across the long
undulations of the prairie. To their wandering there was no barrier,
neither lake nor mountain nor factory-bristling city, and the breeze
about them was flowing sunshine.
Martin cried to Leora, “I feel as if all the Zenith dust and hospital
lint were washed out of my lungs. Dakota. Real man’s country. Frontier.
Opportunity. America!”
From the thick swale the young prairie chickens rose. As he watched them
sweep across the wheat, his sun-drowsed spirit was part of the great
land, and he was almost freed of the impatience with which he had
started out from Wheatsylvania.
“If you’re going driving, don’t forget that supper is six o’clock,
sharp,” Mrs. Tozer had said, smiling to sugar-coat it.
On Main Street, Mr. Tozer waved to them and shouted, “Be back by six.
Supper at six o’clock sharp.”
Bert Tozer ran out from the bank, like a country schoolmaster skipping
from a one-room schoolhouse, and cackled, “Say, you folks better not
forget to be back at six o’clock for supper or the Old Man’ll have a
fit. He’ll expect you for supper at six o’clock sharp, and when he says
six o’clock _sharp_, he means six o’clock _sharp_, and not five minutes
_past_ six!”
“Now that,” observed Leora, “is funny, because in my twenty-two years in
Wheatsylvania I remember three different times when supper was as late
as seven minutes after six. Let’s get out of this, Sandy.... I wonder
were we so wise to live with the family and save money?”
Before they had escaped from the not very extensive limits of
Wheatsylvania they passed Ada Quist, the future Mrs. Bert Tozer, and
through the lazy air they heard her voice slashing: “Better be home by
six.”
Martin would be heroic. “We’ll by golly get back when we’re by golly
good and ready!” he said to Leora; but on them both was the cumulative
dread of the fussing voices, beyond every breezy prospect was the order,
“Be back at six sharp”; and they whipped up to arrive at eleven minutes
to six, as Mr. Tozer was returning from the creamery, full thirty
seconds later than usual.
“Glad to see you among us,” he said. “Hustle now and get that horse in
the livery stable. Supper’s at six--sharp!”
Martin survived it sufficiently to sound domestic when he announced at
the supper-table:
“We had a bully drive. I’m going to like it here. Well, I’ve loafed for
a day and a half, and now I’ve got to get busy. First thing is, I must
find a location for my office. What is there vacant, Father Tozer?”
Mrs. Tozer said brightly, “Oh, I have such a nice idea, Martin. Why
can’t we fix up an office for you out in the barn? It’d be so handy to
the house, for you to get to meals on time, and you could keep an eye on
the house if the girl was out and Ory and I went out visiting or to the
Embroidery Circle.”
“In the barn!”
“Why, yes, in the old harness room. It’s partly ceiled, and we could put
in some nice tar paper or even beaver board.”
“Mother Tozer, what the dickens do you think I’m planning to do? I’m not
a hired man in a livery stable, or a kid looking for a place to put his
birds’ eggs! I was thinking of opening an office as a physician!”
Bert made it all easy: “Yuh, but you aren’t much of a physician yet.
You’re just getting your toes in.”
“I’m one hell of a good physician! Excuse me for cussing, Mother Tozer,
but-- Why, nights in the hospital, I’ve held hundreds of lives in my
hand! I intend--”
“Look here, Mart,” said Bertie. “As we’re putting up the money-- I don’t
want to be a tightwad but after all, a dollar is a dollar--if we furnish
the dough, we’ve got to decide the best way to spend it.”
Mr. Tozer looked thoughtful and said helplessly, “That’s so. No sense
taking a risk, with the blame’ farmers demanding all the money they can
get for their wheat and cream, and then deliberately going to work and
not paying the interest on their loans. I swear, it don’t hardly pay to
invest in mortgages any longer. No sense putting on lugs. Stands to
reason you can look at a fellow’s sore throat or prescribe for an
ear-ache just as well in a nice simple little office as in some fool
place all fixed up like a Moorhead saloon. Mother will see you have a
comfortable corner in the barn--”
Leora intruded: “Look here, Papa. I want you to lend us one thousand
dollars, outright, to use as we see fit.” The sensation was immense.
“We’ll pay you six per cent--no, we won’t; we’ll pay you five; that’s
enough.”
“And mortgages bringing six, seven, and eight!” Bert quavered.
“Five’s enough. And we want our own say, absolute, as to how we use
it--to fit up an office or anything else.”
Mr. Tozer began, “That’s a foolish way to--”
Bert took it away from him: “Ory, you’re crazy! I suppose we’ll have to
lend you some money, but you’ll blame well come to us for it from time
to time, and you’ll blame well take our advice--”
Leora rose. “Either you do what I say, just exactly what I say, or Mart
and I take the first train and go back to Zenith, and I mean it! Plenty
of places open for him there, with a big salary, so we won’t have to be
dependent on anybody!”
There was much conversation, most of which sounded like all the rest of
it. Once Leora started for the stairs, to go up and pack; once Martin
and she stood waving their napkins as they shook their fists, the
general composition remarkably like the Laocoön.
Leora won.
They settled down to the most solacing fussing.
“Did you bring your trunk up from the depot?” asked Mr. Tozer.
“No sense leaving it there--paying two bits a day storage!” fumed Bert.
“I got it up this morning,” said Martin.
“Oh, yes, Martin had it brought up this morning,” agreed Mrs. Tozer.
“You had it brought? Didn’t you bring it up yourself?” agonized Mr.
Tozer.
“No. I had the fellow that runs the lumberyard haul it up for me,” said
Martin.
“Well, gosh almighty, you could just as well’ve put it on a wheelbarrow
and brought it up yourself and saved a quarter!” said Bert.
“But a doctor has to keep his dignity,” said Leora.
“Dignity, rats! Blame sight more dignified to be seen shoving a
wheelbarrow than smoking them dirty cigarettes all the time!”
“Well, anyway-- Where’d you put it?” asked Mr. Tozer.
“It’s up in our room,” said Martin.
“Where’d you think we better put it when it’s unpacked? The attic is
awful’ full,” Mr. Tozer submitted to Mrs. Tozer.
“Oh, I think Martin could get it in there.”
“Why couldn’t he put it in the barn?”
“Oh, not a nice new trunk like that!”
“What’s the matter with the barn?” said Bert. “It’s all nice and dry.
Seems a shame to waste all that good space in the barn, now that you’ve
gone and decided he mustn’t have his dear little office there!”
“Bertie,” from Leora, “I know what we’ll do. You seem to have the barn
on your brain. You move your old bank there, and Martin’ll take the bank
building for his office.”
“That’s entirely different--”
“Now there’s no sense you two showing off and trying to be smart,”
protested Mr. Tozer. “Do you ever hear your mother and I scrapping and
fussing like that? When do you think you’ll have your trunk unpacked,
Mart?” Mr. Tozer could consider barns and he could consider trunks but
his was not a brain to grasp two such complicated matters at the same
time.
“I can get it unpacked to-night, if it makes any difference--”
“Well, I don’t suppose it really makes any special difference, but when
you start to _do_ a thing--”
“Oh, what difference does it make whether he--”
“If he’s going to look for an office, instead of moving right into the
barn, he can’t take a month of Sundays getting unpacked and--”
“Oh, good Lord, I’ll get it done to-night--”
“And I think we can get it in the attic--”
“I tell you it’s jam full already--”
“We’ll go take a look at it after supper--”
“Well now, I tell you when I tried to get that duck-boat in--”
Martin probably did not scream, but he heard himself screaming. The free
and virile land was leagues away and for years forgotten.
II
To find an office took a fortnight of diplomacy, and of discussion
brightening three meals a day, every day. (Not that office-finding was
the only thing the Tozers mentioned. They went thoroughly into every
moment of Martin’s day; they commented on his digestion, his mail, his
walks, his shoes that needed cobbling, and whether he had yet taken them
to the farmer-trapper-cobbler, and how much the cobbling ought to cost,
and the presumable theology, politics, and marital relations of the
cobbler.)
Mr. Tozer had from the first known the perfect office. The Norbloms
lived above their general store, and Mr. Tozer knew that the Norbloms
were thinking of moving. There was indeed nothing that was happening or
likely to happen in Wheatsylvania which Mr. Tozer did not know and
explain. Mrs. Norblom was tired of keeping house, and she wanted to go
to Mrs. Beeson’s boarding house (to the front room, on the right as you
went along the up-stairs hall, the room with the plaster walls and the
nice little stove that Mrs. Beeson bought from Otto Krag for seven
dollars and thirty-five cents--no, seven and a quarter it was).
They called on the Norbloms and Mr. Tozer hinted that “it might be nice
for the Doctor to locate over the store, if the Norbloms were thinking
of making any change--”
The Norbloms stared at each other, with long, bleached, cautious,
Scandinavian stares, and grumbled that they “didn’t _know_--of course it
was the finest location in town--” Mr. Norblom admitted that if, against
all probability, they ever considered moving, they would probably ask
twenty-five dollars a month for the flat, unfurnished.
Mr. Tozer came out of the international conference as craftily joyful as
any Mr. Secretary Tozer or Lord Tozer in Washington or London:
“Fine! Fine! We made him commit himself! Twenty-five, he says. That
means, when the time’s ripe, we’ll offer him eighteen and close for
twenty-one-seventy-five. If we just handle him careful, and give him
time to go see Mrs. Beeson and fix up about boarding with her, we’ll
have him just where we want him!”
“Oh, if the Norbloms can’t make up their minds, then let’s try something
else,” said Martin. “There’s a couple of vacant rooms behind the _Eagle_
office.”
“What? Go chasing around, after we’ve given the Norbloms reason to think
we’re serious, and make enemies of ’em for life? Now that would be a
fine way to start building up a practise, wouldn’t it! And I must say I
wouldn’t blame the Norbloms one bit for getting wild if you let ’em
down like that. This ain’t Zenith, where you can go yelling around
expecting to get things done in two minutes!”
Through a fortnight, while the Norbloms agonized over deciding to do
what they had long ago decided to do, Martin waited, unable to begin
work. Until he should open a certified and recognizable office, most of
the village did not regard him as a competent physician but as “that
son-in-law of Andy Tozer’s.” In the fortnight he was called only once:
for the sick-headache of Miss Agnes Ingleblad, aunt and housekeeper of
Alec Ingleblad the barber. He was delighted, till Bert Tozer explained:
“Oh, so _she_ called you in, eh? She’s always doctorin’ around. There
ain’t a thing the matter with her, but she’s always trying out the
latest stunt. Last time it was a fellow that come through here selling
pills and liniments out of a Ford, and the time before that it was a
faith-healer, crazy loon up here at Dutchman’s Forge, and then for quite
a spell she doctored with an osteopath in Leopolis--though I tell you
there’s something to this osteopathy--they cure a lot of folks that you
regular docs can’t seem to find out what’s the matter with ’em, don’t
you think so?”
Martin remarked that he did not think so.
“Oh, you docs!” Bert crowed in his most jocund manner, for Bert could be
very joky and bright. “You’re all alike, especially when you’re just out
of school and think you know it all. You can’t see any good in
chiropractic or electric belts or bone-setters or anything, because they
take so many good dollars away from you.”
Then behold the Dr. Martin Arrowsmith who had once infuriated Angus Duer
and Irving Watters by his sarcasm on medical standards upholding to a
lewdly grinning Bert Tozer the benevolence and scientific knowledge of
all doctors; proclaiming that no medicine had ever (at least by any
Winnemac graduate) been prescribed in vain nor any operation needlessly
performed.
He saw a good deal of Bert now. He sat about the bank, hoping to be
called on a case, his fingers itching for bandages. Ada Quist came in
with frequency and Bert laid aside his figuring to be coy with her:
“You got to be careful what you even think about, when the doc is here,
Ade. He’s been telling me what a whale of a lot of neurology and all
that mind-reading stuff he knows. How about it, Mart? I’m getting so
scared that I’ve changed the combination on the safe.”
“Heh!” said Ada. “He may fool some folks but he can’t fool me. Anybody
can learn things in books, but when it comes to practising ’em-- Let me
tell you, Mart, if you ever have one-tenth of the savvy that old Dr.
Winter of Leopolis has, you’ll live longer than I expect!”
Together they pointed out that for a person who felt his Zenith training
had made him so “gosh-awful’ smart that he sticks up his nose at us poor
hicks of dirt-farmers,” Martin’s scarf was rather badly tied.
All of his own wit and some of Ada’s Bert repeated at the supper table.
“You oughtn’t to ride the boy so hard. Still, that was pretty cute about
the necktie-- I guess Mart does think he’s some punkins,” chuckled Mr.
Tozer.
Leora took Martin aside after supper. “Darlin’, can you stand it? We’ll
have our own house, soon as we can. Or shall we vamoose?”
“I’m by golly going to stand it!”
“Um. Maybe. Dear, when you hit Bertie, do be careful--they’ll hang you.”
He ambled to the front porch. He determined to view the rooms behind the
_Eagle_ office. Without a retreat in which to be safe from Bert he could
not endure another week. He could not wait for the Norbloms to make up
their minds, though they had become to him dread and eternal figures
whose enmity would crush him; prodigious gods shadowing this
Wheatsylvania which was the only perceptible world.
He was aware, in the late sad light, that a man was tramping the plank
walk before the house, hesitating and peering at him. The man was one
Wise, a Russian Jew known to the village as “Wise the Polack.” In his
shack near the railroad he sold silver stock and motor-factory stock,
bought and sold farmlands and horses and muskrat hides. He called out,
“That you, Doc?”
“Yup!”
Martin was excited. A patient!
“Say, I wish you’d walk down a ways with me. Couple things I’d like to
talk to you about. Or say, come on over to my place and sample some new
cigars I’ve got.” He emphasized the word “cigars.” North Dakota was,
like Mohalis, theoretically dry.
Martin was pleased. He had been sober and industrious so long now!
Wise’s shack was a one-story structure, not badly built, half a block
from Main Street, with nothing but the railroad track between it and
open wheat country. It was lined with pine, pleasant-smelling under the
stench of old pipe-smoke. Wise winked--he was a confidential,
untrustworthy wisp of a man--and murmured, “Think you could stand a
little jolt of first-class Kentucky bourbon?”
“Well, I wouldn’t get violent about it.”
Wise pulled down the sleazy window-shades and from a warped drawer of
his desk brought up a bottle out of which they both drank, wiping the
mouth of the bottle with circling palms. Then Wise, abruptly:
“Look here, Doc. You’re not like these hicks; you understand that
sometimes a fellow gets mixed up in crooked business he didn’t intend
to. Well, make a long story short, I guess I’ve sold too much mining
stock, and they’ll be coming down on me. I’ve got to be moving--curse
it--hoped I could stay settled for couple of years, this time. Well, I
hear you’re looking for an office. This place would be ideal. Ideal! Two
rooms at the back besides this one. I’ll rent it to you, furniture and
the whole shooting-match, for fifteen dollars a month, if you’ll pay me
one year in advance. Oh, this ain’t phony. Your brother-in-law knows all
about my ownership.”
Martin tried to be very business-like. Was he not a young doctor who
would soon be investing money, one of the most Substantial Citizens in
Wheatsylvania? He returned home, and under the parlor lamp, with its
green daisies on pink glass, the Tozers listened acutely, Bert stooping
forward with open mouth.
“You’d be safe renting it for a year, but that ain’t the point,” said
Bert.
“It certainly isn’t! Antagonize the Norbloms, now that they’ve almost
made up their minds to let you have their place? Make me a fool, after
all the trouble I’ve taken?” groaned Mr. Tozer.
They went over it and over it till almost ten o’clock, but Martin was
resolute, and the next day he rented Wise’s shack.
For the first time in his life he had a place utterly his own, his and
Leora’s.
In his pride of possession this was the most lordly building on earth,
and every rock and weed and doorknob was peculiar and lovely. At sunset
he sat on the back stoop (a very interesting and not too broken
soap-box) and from the flamboyant horizon the open country flowed across
the thin band of the railroad to his feet. Suddenly Leora was beside
him, her arm round his neck, and he hymned all the glory of their
future:
“Know what I found in the kitchen here? A dandy old auger, hardly rusty
a bit, and I can take a box and make a test-tube rack ... of my own!”
CHAPTER XV
I
With none of the profane observations on “medical pedlers” which had
annoyed Digamma Pi, Martin studied the catalogue of the New Idea
Instrument and Furniture Company, of Jersey City. It was a handsome
thing. On the glossy green cover, in red and black, were the portraits
of the president, a round quippish man who loved all young physicians;
the general manager, a cadaverous scholarly man who surely gave all his
laborious nights and days to the advancement of science; and the
vice-president, Martin’s former preceptor, Dr. Roscoe Geake, who had a
lively, eye-glassed, forward-looking modernity all his own. The cover
also contained, in surprisingly small space, a quantity of poetic prose,
and the inspiring promise:
Doctor, don’t be buffaloed by the unenterprising. No reason why YOU
should lack the equipment which impresses patients, makes practise
easy, and brings honor and riches. All the high-class supplies
which distinguish the Leaders of the Profession from the Dubs are
within YOUR reach right NOW by the famous New Idea Financial
System: ‘Just a little down and the rest FREE--out of the increased
earnings which New Idea apparatus will bring you!”
Above, in a border of laurel wreaths and Ionic capitals, was the
challenge:
Sing not the glory of soldiers or explorers or statesmen for who
can touch the doctor--wise, heroic, uncontaminated by common greed.
Gentlemen, we salute you humbly and herewith offer you the most
up-to-the-jiffy catalogue ever presented by any surgical supply
house.
The back cover, though it was less glorious with green and red, was
equally arousing. It presented illustrations of the Bindledorf
Tonsillectomy Outfit and of an electric cabinet, with the demand:
Doctor, are you sending your patients off to specialists for tonsil
removal or to sanitoriums for electric, etc., treatment? If so, you
are losing the chance to show yourself one of the distinguished
powers in the domain of medical advancement in your locality, and
losing a lot of big fees. Don’t you WANT to be a high-class
practitioner? Here’s the Open Door.
The Bindledorf Outfit is not only useful but exquisitely beautiful,
adorns and gives class to any office. We guarantee that by the
installation of a Bindledorf Outfit and a New Idea Panaceatic
Electro-Therapeutic Cabinet (see details on pp. 34 and 97) you can
increase your income from a thousand to ten thousand annually and
please patients more than by the most painstaking plugging.
When the Great Call sounds, Doctor, and it’s time for you to face
your reward, will you be satisfied by a big Masonic funeral and
tributes from Grateful Patients if you have failed to lay up
provision for the kiddies, and faithful wife who has shared your
tribulations?
You may drive through blizzard and August heat, and go down into
the purple-shadowed vale of sorrow and wrestle with the
ebon-cloaked Powers of Darkness for the lives of your patients, but
that heroism is incomplete without Modern Progress, to be obtained
by the use of a Bindledorf Tonsillectomy Outfit and the New Idea
Panaceatic Cabinet, to be obtained on small payment down, rest on
easiest terms known in history of medicine!
II
This poetry of passion Martin neglected, for his opinion of poetry was
like his opinion of electric cabinets, but excitedly he ordered a steel
stand, a sterilizer, flasks, test-tubes, and a white-enameled mechanism
with enchanting levers and gears which transformed it from
examining-chair to operating-table. He yearned over the picture of a
centrifuge while Leora was admiring the “stunning seven-piece Reception
Room fumed oak set, upholstered in genuine Barcelona Longware
Leatherette, will give your office the class and distinction of any
high-grade New York specialist’s.”
“Aw, let ’em sit on plain chairs,” Martin grunted.
In the attic Mrs. Tozer found enough seedy chairs for the
reception-room, and an ancient bookcase which, when Leora had lined it
with pink fringed paper, became a noble instrument-cabinet. Till the
examining-chair should arrive, Martin would use Wise’s lumpy couch, and
Leora busily covered it with white oilcloth. Behind the front room of
the tiny office-building were two cubicles, formerly bedroom and
kitchen. Martin made them into consultation-room and laboratory.
Whistling, he sawed out racks for the glassware and turned the oven of a
discarded kerosene stove into a hot-air oven for sterilizing glassware.
“But understand, Lee, I’m not going to go monkeying with any scientific
research. I’m through with all that.”
Leora smiled innocently. While he worked she sat outside in the long
wild grass, sniffing the prairie breeze, her hands about her ankles, but
every quarter-hour she had to come in and admire.
Mr. Tozer brought home a package at suppertime. The family opened it,
babbling. After supper Martin and Leora hastened with the new treasure
to the office and nailed it in place. It was a plate-glass sign; on it
in gold letters, “M. Arrowsmith, M.D.” They looked up, arms about
each other, squealing softly, and in reverence he grunted,
“There--by--jiminy!”
They sat on the back stoop, exulting in freedom from Tozers. Along the
railroad bumped a freight train with a cheerful clanking. The fireman
waved to them from the engine, a brakeman from the platform of the red
caboose. After the train there was silence but for the crickets and a
distant frog.
“I’ve never been so happy,” he murmured.
III
He had brought from Zenith his own Ochsner surgical case. As he laid out
the instruments he admired the thin, sharp, shining bistoury, the strong
tenotome, the delicate curved needles. With them was a dental forceps.
Dad Silva had warned his classes, “Don’t forget the country doctor often
has to be not only physician but dentist, yes, and priest, divorce
lawyer, blacksmith, chauffeur, and road engineer, and if you are too
lily-handed for those trades, don’t get out of sight of a trolley line
and a beauty parlor.” And the first patient whom Martin had in the new
office, the second patient in Wheatsylvania, was Nils Krag, the
carpenter, roaring with an ulcerated tooth. This was a week before the
glass sign was up, and Martin rejoiced to Leora, “Begun already! You’ll
see ’em tumbling in now.”
They did not see them tumbling in. For ten days Martin tinkered at his
hot-air oven or sat at his desk, reading and trying to look busy. His
first joy passed into fretfulness, and he could have yelped at the
stillness, the inactivity.
Late one afternoon, when he was in a melancholy way preparing to go
home, into the office stamped a grizzled Swedish farmer who grumbled,
“Doc, I got a fish-hook caught in my thumb and it’s all swole.” To
Arrowsmith, intern in Zenith General Hospital with its out-patient
clinic treating hundreds a day, the dressing of a hand had been less
important than borrowing a match, but to Dr. Arrowsmith of Wheatsylvania
it was a hectic operation, and the farmer a person remarkable and very
charming. Martin shook his left hand violently and burbled, “Now if
there’s anything, you just ’phone me--you just ’phone me.”
There had been, he felt, a rush of admiring patients sufficient to
justify them in the one thing Leora and he longed to do, the thing about
which they whispered at night: the purchase of a motor car for his
country calls.
They had seen the car at Frazier’s store.
It was a Ford, five years old, with torn upholstery, a gummy motor, and
springs made by a blacksmith who had never made springs before. Next to
the chugging of the gas engine at the creamery, the most familiar sound
in Wheatsylvania was Frazier’s closing the door of his Ford. He banged
it flatly at the store, and usually he had to shut it thrice again
before he reached home.
But to Martin and Leora, when they had tremblingly bought the car and
three new tires and a horn, it was the most impressive vehicle on earth.
It was their own; they could go when and where they wished.
During his summer at a Canadian hotel Martin had learned to drive the
Ford station wagon, but it was Leora’s first venture. Bert had given her
so many directions that she had refused to drive the family Overland.
When she first sat at the steering wheel, when she moved the
hand-throttle with her little finger and felt in her own hands all this
power, sorcery enabling her to go as fast as she might desire (within
distinct limits), she transcended human strength, she felt that she
could fly like the wild goose--and then in a stretch of sand she killed
the engine.
Martin became the demon driver of the village. To ride with him was to
sit holding your hat, your eyes closed, waiting for death. Apparently he
accelerated for corners, to make them more interesting. The sight of
anything on the road ahead, from another motor to a yellow pup, stirred
in him a frenzy which could be stilled only by going up and passing it.
The village adored, “The Young Doc is quite some driver, all right.”
They waited, with amiable interest, to hear that he had been killed. It
is possible that half of the first dozen patients who drifted into his
office came because of awe at his driving ... the rest because there was
nothing serious the matter, and he was nearer than Dr. Hesselink at
Groningen.
IV
With his first admirers he developed his first enemies.
When he met the Norbloms on the street (and in Wheatsylvania it is
difficult not to meet every one on the street every day), they glared.
Then he antagonized Pete Yeska.
Pete conducted what he called a “drug store,” devoted to the sale of
candy, soda water, patent medicines, fly paper, magazines,
washing-machines, and Ford accessories, yet Pete would have starved if
he had not been postmaster also. He alleged that he was a licensed
pharmacist but he so mangled prescriptions that Martin burst into the
store and addressed him piously.
“You young docs make me sick,” said Pete. “I was putting up
prescriptions when you was in the cradle. The old doc that used to be
here sent everything to me. My way o’ doing things suits me, and I don’t
figure on changing it for you or any other half-baked young
string-bean.”
Thereafter Martin had to purchase drugs from St. Paul, overcrowd his
tiny laboratory, and prepare his own pills and ointments, looking in a
homesick way at the rarely used test-tubes and the dust gathering on the
bell glass of his microscope, while Pete Yeska joined with the Norbloms
in whispering, “This new doc here ain’t any good. You better stick to
Hesselink.”
V
So blank, so idle, had been the week that when he heard the telephone at
the Tozers’, at three in the morning, he rushed to it as though he were
awaiting a love message.
A hoarse and shaky voice: “I want to speak to the doctor.”
“Yuh--yuh-- ’S the doctor speaking.”
“This is Henry Novak, four miles northeast, on the Leopolis road. My
little girl, Mary, she has a terrible sore throat. I think maybe it is
croup and she look awful and-- Could you come right away?”
“You bet. Be right there.”
Four miles--he would do it in eight minutes.
He dressed swiftly, dragging his worn brown tie together, while Leora
beamed over the first night call. He furiously cranked the Ford, banged
and clattered past the station and into the wheat prairie. When he had
gone six miles by the speedometer, slackening at each rural box to look
for the owner’s name, he realized that he was lost. He ran into a farm
driveway and stopped under the willows, his headlight on a heap of
dented milk-cans, broken harvester wheels, cordwood, and bamboo
fishing-poles. From the barn dashed a woolly anomalous dog, barking
viciously, leaping up at the car.
A frowsy head protruded from a ground-floor window. “What you want?”
screamed a Scandinavian voice.
“This is The Doctor. Where does Henry Novak live?”
“Oh! The Doctor! Dr. Hesselink?”
“No! Dr. Arrowsmith.”
“Oh. Dr. Arrowsmith. From Wheatsylvania? Um. Well, you went right near
his place. You yoost turn back one mile and turn to the right by the
brick schoolhouse, and it’s about forty rods up the road--the house with
a cement silo. Somebody sick by Henry’s?”
“Yuh--yuh--girl’s got croup--thanks--”
“Yoost keep to the right. You can’t miss it.”
Probably no one who has listened to the dire “you can’t miss it” has
ever failed to miss it.
Martin swung the Ford about, grazing a slashed chopping-block; he
rattled up the road, took the corner that side of the schoolhouse
instead of this, ran half a mile along a boggy trail between pastures,
and stopped at a farmhouse. In the surprising fall of silence, cows were
to be heard feeding, and a white horse, startled in the darkness, raised
its head to wonder at him. He had to arouse the house with wild
squawkings of his horn, and an irate farmer who bellowed, “Who’s there?
I’ve got a shotgun!” sent him back to the country road.
It was forty minutes from the time of the telephone call when he rushed
into a furrowed driveway and saw on the doorstep, against the lamplight,
a stooped man who called, “The Doctor? This is Novak.”
He found the child in a newly finished bedroom of white plastered walls
and pale varnished pine. Only an iron bed, a straight chair, a chromo of
St. Anne, and a shadeless hand-lamp on a rickety stand broke the staring
shininess of the apartment, a recent extension of the farmhouse. A
heavy-shouldered woman was kneeling by the bed. As she lifted her wet
red face, Novak urged:
“Don’t cry now; he’s here!” And to Martin: “The little one is pretty bad
but we done all we could for her. Last night and to-night we steam her
throat, and we put her here in our own bedroom!”
Mary was a child of seven or eight. Martin found her lips and
finger-tips blue, but in her face no flush. In the effort to expel her
breath she writhed into terrifying knots, then coughed up saliva dotted
with grayish specks. Martin worried as he took out his clinical
thermometer and gave it a professional-looking shake.
It was, he decided, laryngeal croup or diphtheria. Probably diphtheria.
No time now for bacteriological examination, for cultures and leisurely
precision. Silva the healer bulked in the room, crowding out Gottlieb
the inhuman perfectionist. Martin leaned nervously over the child on the
tousled bed, absent-mindedly trying her pulse again and again. He felt
helpless without the equipment of Zenith General, its nurses and Angus
Duer’s sure advice. He had a sudden respect for the lone country doctor.
He had to make a decision, irrevocable, perhaps perilous. He would use
diphtheria antitoxin. But certainly he could not obtain it from Pete
Yeska’s in Wheatsylvania.
Leopolis?
“Hustle up and get me Blassner, the druggist at Leopolis, on the
’phone,” he said to Novak, as calmly as he could contrive. He pictured
Blassner driving through the night, respectfully bringing the antitoxin
to The Doctor. While Novak bellowed into the farm-line telephone, in the
dining-room, Martin waited--waited--staring at the child; Mrs. Novak
waited for him to do miracles; the child’s tossing and hoarse gasping
became horrible; and the glaring walls, the glaring lines of pale yellow
woodwork, hypnotized him into sleepiness. It was too late for anything
short of antitoxin or tracheotomy. Should he operate; cut into the
wind-pipe that she might breathe? He stood and worried; he drowned in
sleepiness and shook himself awake. He had to do something, with the
mother kneeling there, gaping at him, beginning to look doubtful.
“Get some hot cloths--towels, napkins--and keep ’em around her neck. I
wish to God he’d get that telephone call!” he fretted.
As Mrs. Novak, padding on thick slippered feet, brought in the hot
cloths, Novak appeared with a blank “Nobody sleeping at the drug store,
and Blassner’s house-line is out of order.”
“Then listen. I’m afraid this may be serious. I’ve got to have
antitoxin. Going to drive t’ Leopolis and get it. You keep up these hot
applications and-- Wish we had an atomizer. And room ought to be
moister. Got ’n alcohol stove? Keep some water boiling in here. No use
of medicine. B’ right back.”
He drove the twenty-four miles to Leopolis in thirty-seven minutes. Not
once did he slow down for a cross-road. He defied the curves, the roots
thrusting out into the road, though always one dark spot in his mind
feared a blow-out and a swerve. The speed, the casting away of all
caution, wrought in him a high exultation, and it was blessed to be in
the cool air and alone, after the strain of Mrs. Novak’s watching. In
his mind all the while was the page in Osler regarding diphtheria, the
very picture of the words: “In severe cases the first dose should be
from 8,000--” No. Oh, yes: “--from 10,000 to 15,000 units.”
He regained confidence. He thanked the god of science for antitoxin and
for the gas motor. It was, he decided, a Race with Death.
“I’m going to do it--going to pull it off and save that poor kid!” he
rejoiced.
He approached a grade crossing and hurled toward it, ignoring possible
trains. He was aware of a devouring whistle, saw sliding light on the
rails, and brought up sharp. Past him, ten feet from his front wheels,
flung the Seattle Express like a flying volcano. The fireman was
stoking, and even in the thin clearness of coming dawn the glow from the
fire-box was appalling on the under side of the rolling smoke. Instantly
the apparition was gone and Martin sat trembling, hands trembling on the
little steering-wheel, foot trembling like St. Vitus’s dance on the
brake. “That was an awful’ close thing!” he muttered, and thought of a
widowed Leora, abandoned to Tozers. But the vision of the Novak child,
struggling for each terrible breath, overrode all else. “Hell! I’ve
killed the engine!” he groaned. He vaulted over the side, cranked the
car, and dashed into Leopolis.
To Crynssen County, Leopolis with its four thousand people was a
metropolis, but in the pinched stillness of the dawn it was a tiny
graveyard: Main Street a sandy expanse, the low shops desolate as huts.
He found one place astir; in the bleak office of the Dakota Hotel the
night clerk was playing poker with the ’bus-driver and the town
policeman.
They wondered at his hysterical entrance.
“Dr. Arrowsmith, from Wheatsylvania. Kid dying from diphtheria. Where’s
Blassner live? Jump in my car and show me.”
The constable was a lanky old man, his vest swinging open over a
collarless shirt, his trousers in folds, his eyes resolute. He guided
Martin to the home of the druggist, he kicked the door, then, standing
with his lean and bristly visage upraised in the cold early light, he
bawled, “Ed! Hey, you, Ed! Come out of it!”
Ed Blassner grumbled from the up-stairs window. To him, death and
furious doctors had small novelty. While he drew on his trousers and
coat he was to be heard discoursing to his drowsy wife on the woes of
druggists and the desirability of moving to Los Angeles and going into
real estate. But he did have diphtheria antitoxin in his shop, and
sixteen minutes after Martin’s escape from being killed by a train he
was speeding to Henry Novak’s.
VI
The child was still alive when he came bruskly into the house.
All the way back he had seen her dead and stiff. He grunted “Thank God!”
and angrily called for hot water. He was no longer the embarrassed cub
doctor but the wise and heroic physician who had won the Race with
Death, and in the peasant eyes of Mrs. Novak, in Henry’s nervous
obedience, he read his power.
Swiftly, smoothly, he made intravenous injection of the antitoxin, and
stood expectant.
The child’s breathing did not at first vary, as she choked in the labor
of expelling her breath. There was a gurgle, a struggle in which her
face blackened, and she was still. Martin peered, incredulous. Slowly
the Novaks began to glower, shaky hands at their lips. Slowly they knew
the child was gone.
In the hospital, death had become indifferent and natural to Martin. He
had said to Angus, he had heard nurses say one to another, quite
cheerfully, “Well, fifty-seven has just passed out.” Now he raged with
desire to do the impossible. She _couldn’t_ be dead. He’d do
something-- All the while he was groaning, “I should’ve operated-- I
should have.” So insistent was the thought that for a time he did not
realize that Mrs. Novak was clamoring, “She is dead? Dead?”
He nodded, afraid to look at the woman.
“You killed her, with that needle thing! And not even tell us, so we
could call the priest!”
He crawled past her lamentations and the man’s sorrow, and drove home,
empty of heart.
“I shall never practise medicine again,” he reflected.
“I’m through,” he said to Leora. “I’m no good. I should of operated. I
can’t face people, when they know about it. I’m through. I’ll go get a
lab job-- Dawson Hunziker or some place.”
Salutary was the tartness with which she protested, “You’re the most
conceited man that ever lived! Do you think you’re the only doctor that
ever lost a patient? I know you did everything you could.” But he went
about next day torturing himself, the more tortured when Mr. Tozer
whined at supper, “Henry Novak and his woman was in town to-day. They
say you ought to have saved their girl. Why didn’t you give your mind to
it and manage to cure her somehow? Ought to tried. Kind of too bad,
because the Novaks have a lot of influence with all these Pole and Hunky
farmers.”
After a night when he was too tired to sleep, Martin suddenly drove to
Leopolis.
From the Tozers he had heard almost religious praise of Dr. Adam Winter
of Leopolis, a man of nearly seventy, the pioneer physician of Crynssen
County, and to this sage he was fleeing. As he drove he mocked furiously
his melodramatic Race with Death, and he came wearily into the
dust-whirling Main Street. Dr. Winter’s office was above a grocery, in a
long “block” of bright red brick stores with an Egyptian cornice--of
tin. The darkness of the broad hallway was soothing after the prairie
heat and incandescence. Martin had to wait till three respectful
patients had been received by Dr. Winter, a hoary man with a sympathetic
bass voice, before he was admitted to the consultation-room.
The examining-chair was of doubtful superiority to that once used by Doc
Vickerson of Elk Mills, and sterilizing was apparently done in a
wash-bowl, but in a corner was an electric therapeutic cabinet with more
electrodes and pads than Martin had ever seen.
He told the story of the Novaks, and Winter cried, “Why, Doctor, you did
everything you could have and more too. Only thing is, next time, in a
crucial case, you better call some older doctor in consultation--not
that you need his advice, but it makes a hit with the family, it divides
the responsibility, and keeps ’em from going around criticizing. I, uh,
I frequently have the honor of being called by some of my younger
colleagues. Just wait. I’ll ’phone the editor of the _Gazette_ and give
him an item about the case.”
When he had telephoned, Dr. Winter shook hands ardently. He indicated
his electric cabinet. “Got one of those things yet? Ought to, my boy.
Don’t know as I use it very often, except with the cranks that haven’t
anything the matter with ’em, but say, it would surprise you how it
impresses folks. Well, Doctor, welcome to Crynssen County. Married?
Won’t you and your wife come take dinner with us some Sunday noon? Mrs.
Winter will be real pleased to meet you. And if I ever can be of service
to you in a consultation-- I only charge a very little more than my
regular fee, and it looks so well, talking the case over with an older
man.”
Driving home, Martin fell into vain and wicked boasting:
“You bet I’ll stick to it! At worst, I’ll never be as bad as that
snuffling old fee-splitter!”
Two weeks after, the _Wheatsylvania Eagle_, a smeary four-page rag,
reported:
Our enterprising contemporary, the _Leopolis Gazette_, had as
follows last week to say of one of our townsmen who we recently
welcomed to our midst.
“Dr. M. Arrowsmith of Wheatsylvania is being congratulated, we are
informed by our valued pioneer local physician, Dr. Adam Winter, by
the medical fraternity all through the Pony River Valley, there
being no occupation or profession more unselfishly appreciative of
each other’s virtues than the medical gentlemen, on the courage and
enterprise he recently displayed in addition to his scientific
skill.
“Being called to attend the little daughter of Henry Norwalk of
near Delft the well-known farmer and finding the little one near
death with diphtheria he made a desperate attempt to save it by
himself bringing antitoxin from Blassner our ever popular druggist,
who had on hand a full and fresh supply. He drove out and back in
his gasoline chariot, making the total distance of 48 miles in 79
minutes.
“Fortunately our ever alert policeman, Joe Colby, was on the job
and helped Dr. Arrowsmith find Mr. Blassner’s bungalow on Red River
Avenue and this gentleman rose from bed and hastened to supply the
doctor with the needed article but unfortunately the child was
already too low to be saved but it is by such incidents of pluck
and quick thinking as well as knowledge which make the medical
profession one of our greatest blessings.”
Two hours after this was published, Miss Agnes Ingleblad came in for
another discussion of her non-existent ailments, and two days later
Henry Novak appeared, saying proudly:
“Well, Doc, we all done what we could for the poor little girl, but I
guess I waited too long calling you. The woman is awful’ cut up. She and
I was reading that piece in the _Eagle_ about it. We showed it to the
priest. Say, Doc, I wish you’d take a look at my foot. I got kind of a
rheumatic pain in the ankle.”
CHAPTER XVI
I
When he had practised medicine in Wheatsylvania for one year, Martin was
an inconspicuous but not discouraged country doctor. In summer Leora and
he drove to the Pony River for picnic suppers and a swim, very noisy,
splashing, and immodest; through autumn he went duck-hunting with Bert
Tozer, who became nearly tolerable when he stood at sunset on a pass
between two slews; and with winter isolating the village in a sun-blank
desert of snow, they had sleigh-rides, card-parties, “sociables” at the
churches.
When Martin’s flock turned to him for help, their need and their patient
obedience made them beautiful. Once or twice he lost his temper with
jovial villagers who bountifully explained to him that he was less aged
than he might have been; once or twice he drank too much whisky at poker
parties in the back room of the Coöperative Store; but he was known as
reliable, skilful, and honest--and on the whole he was rather less
distinguished than Alec Ingleblad the barber, less prosperous than Nils
Krag, the carpenter, and less interesting to his neighbors than the
Finnish garageman.
Then one accident and one mistake made him famous for full twelve miles
about.
He had gone fishing, in the spring. As he passed a farmhouse a woman ran
out shrieking that her baby had swallowed a thimble and was choking to
death. Martin had for surgical kit a large jack-knife. He sharpened it
on the farmer’s oilstone, sterilized it in the tea-kettle, operated on
the baby’s throat, and saved its life.
Every newspaper in the Pony River Valley had a paragraph, and before
this sensation was over he cured Miss Agnes Ingleblad of her desire to
be cured.
She had achieved cold hands and a slow circulation, and he was called at
midnight. He was soggily sleepy, after two country drives on muddy
roads, and in his torpor he gave her an overdose of strychnin, which so
shocked and stimulated her that she decided to be well. It was so
violent a change that it made her more interesting than being an
invalid--people had of late taken remarkably small pleasure in her
symptoms. She went about praising Martin, and all the world said, “I
hear this Doc Arrowsmith is the only fellow Agnes ever doctored with
that’s done her a mite of good.”
He gathered a practise small, sound, and in no way remarkable. Leora and
he moved from the Tozers’ to a cottage of their own, with a
parlor-dining-room which displayed a nickeled stove on bright, new,
pleasant-smelling linoleum, and a goldenoak sideboard with a souvenir
match-holder from Lake Minnetonka. He bought a small Roentgen ray
outfit; and he was made a director of the Tozer bank. He became too busy
to long for his days of scientific research, which had never existed,
and Leora sighed:
“It’s fierce, being married. I did expect I’d have to follow you out on
the road and be a hobo, but I never expected to be a Pillar of the
Community. Well, I’m too lazy to look up a new husband. Only I warn you:
when you become the Sunday School superintendent, you needn’t expect me
to play the organ and smile at the cute jokes you make about Willy’s not
learning his Golden Text.”
II
So did Martin stumble into respectability.
In the autumn of 1912, when Mr. Debs, Mr. Roosevelt, Mr. Wilson, and Mr.
Taft were campaigning for the presidency, when Martin Arrowsmith had
lived in Wheatsylvania for a year and a half, Bert Tozer became a
Prominent Booster. He returned from the state convention of the Modern
Woodmen of America with notions. Several towns had sent boosting
delegations to the convention, and the village of Groningen had turned
out a motor procession of five cars, each with an enormous pennant,
“Groningen for White Men and Black Dirt.”
Bert came back clamoring that every motor in town must carry a
Wheatsylvania pennant. He had bought thirty of them, and they were on
sale at the bank at seventy-five cents apiece. This, Bert explained to
every one who came into the bank, was exactly cost-price, which was
within eleven cents of the truth. He came galloping at Martin, demanding
that he be the first to display a pennant.
“I don’t want one of those fool things flopping from my ’bus,” protested
Martin. “What’s the idea, anyway?”
“What’s the _idea_? To advertise your own town, of course!”
“What is there to advertise? Do you think you’re going to make strangers
believe Wheatsylvania is a metropolis like New York or Jimtown by
hanging a dusty rag behind a second-hand tin lizzie?”
“You never did have any patriotism! Let me tell you, Mart, if you don’t
put on a banner I’ll see to it that everybody in town notices it!”
While the other rickety cars of the village announced to the world, or
at least to several square miles of the world, that Wheatsylvania was
the “Wonder Town of Central N. D.,” Martin’s clattering Ford went bare;
and when his enemy Norblom remarked, “I like to see a fellow have some
public spirit and appreciate the place he gets his money outa,” the
citizenry nodded and spat, and began to question Martin’s fame as a
worker of miracles.
III
He had intimates--the barber, the editor of the _Eagle_, the
garageman--to whom he talked comfortably of hunting and the crops, and
with whom he played poker. Perhaps he was too intimate with them. It was
the theory of Crynssen County that it was quite all right for a young
professional man to take a timely drink providing he kept it secret and
made up for it by yearning over the clergy of the neighborhood. But with
the clergy Martin was brief, and his drinking and poker he never
concealed.
If he was bored by the United Brethren minister’s discourse on doctrine,
on the wickedness of movies, and the scandalous pay of pastors, it was
not at all because he was a distant and supersensitive young man but
because he found more savor in the garageman’s salty remarks on the art
of remembering to ante in poker.
Through all the state there were celebrated poker players,
rustic-looking men with stolid faces, men who sat in shirt-sleeves,
chewing tobacco; men whose longest remark was “By me,” and who delighted
to plunder the gilded and condescending traveling salesmen. When there
was news of a “big game on,” the county sports dropped in silently and
went to work--the sewing-machine agent from Leopolis, the undertaker
from Vanderheide’s Grove, the bootlegger from St. Luke, the red fat man
from Melody who had no known profession.
Once (still do men tell of it gratefully, up and down the Valley), they
played for seventy-two unbroken hours, in the office of the
Wheatsylvania garage. It had been a livery-stable; it was littered with
robes and long whips, and the smell of horses mingled with the reek of
gasoline.
The players came and went, and sometimes they slept on the floor for an
hour or two, but they were never less than four in the game. The stink
of cheap feeble cigarettes and cheap powerful cigars hovered about the
table like a malign spirit; the floor was scattered with stubs, matches,
old cards, and whisky bottles. Among the warriors were Martin, Alec
Ingleblad the barber, and a highway engineer, all of them stripped to
flannel undershirts, not moving for hour on hour, ruffling their cards,
eyes squinting and vacant.
When Bert Tozer heard of the affair, he feared for the good fame of
Wheatsylvania, and to every one he gossiped about Martin’s evil ways and
his own patience. Thus it happened that while Martin was at the height
of his prosperity and credit as a physician, along the Pony River Valley
sinuated the whispers that he was a gambler, that he was a “drinking
man,” that he never went to church; and all the godly enjoyed mourning,
“Too bad to see a decent young man like that going to the dogs.”
Martin was as impatient as he was stubborn. He resented the well-meant
greetings: “You ought to leave a little hooch for the rest of us to
drink, Doc,” or “I s’pose you’re too busy playing poker to drive out to
the house and take a look at the woman.” He was guilty of an absurd and
boyish tactlessness when he heard Norblom observing to the postmaster,
“A fellow that calls himself a doctor just because he had luck with that
fool Agnes Ingleblad, he hadn’t ought to go getting drunk and
disgracing--”
Martin stopped. “Norblom! You talking about me?”
The storekeeper turned slowly. “I got more important things to do ’n
talk about you,” he cackled.
As Martin went on he heard laughter.
He told himself that these villagers were generous; that their snooping
was in part an affectionate interest, and inevitable in a village where
the most absorbing event of the year was the United Brethren Sunday
School picnic on Fourth of July. But he could not rid himself of twitchy
discomfort at their unending and maddeningly detailed comments on
everything. He felt as though the lightest word he said in his
consultation-room would be megaphoned from flapping ear to ear all down
the country roads.
He was contented enough in gossiping about fishing with the barber, nor
was he condescending to meteorologicomania, but except for Leora he had
no one with whom he could talk of his work. Angus Duer had been cold,
but Angus had his teeth into every change of surgical technique, and he
was an acrid debater. Martin saw that, unless he struggled, not only
would he harden into timid morality under the pressure of the village,
but be fixed in a routine of prescriptions and bandaging.
He might find a stimulant in Dr. Hesselink of Groningen.
He had seen Hesselink only once, but everywhere he heard of him as the
most honest practitioner in the Valley. On impulse Martin drove down to
call on him.
Dr. Hesselink was a man of forty, ruddy, tall, broad-shouldered. You
knew immediately that he was careful and that he was afraid of nothing,
however much he might lack in imagination. He received Martin with no
vast ebullience, and his stare said, “Well, what do you want? I’m a busy
man.”
“Doctor,” Martin chattered, “do you find it hard to keep up with medical
developments?”
“No. Read the medical journals.”
“Well, don’t you--gosh, I don’t want to get sentimental about it, but
don’t you find that without contact with the Big Guns you get mentally
lazy--sort of lacking in inspiration?”
“I do not! There’s enough inspiration for me in trying to help the
sick.”
To himself Martin was protesting, “All right, if you don’t want to be
friendly, go to the devil!” But he tried again:
“I know. But for the game of the thing, for the pleasure of increasing
medical knowledge, how can you keep up if you don’t have anything but
routine practise among a lot of farmers?”
“Arrowsmith, I may do you an injustice, but there’s a lot of you young
practitioners who feel superior to the farmers, that are doing their own
jobs better than you are. You think that if you were only in the city
with libraries and medical meetings and everything, you’d develop.
Well, I don’t know of anything to prevent your studying at home! You
consider yourself so much better educated than these rustics, but I
notice you say ‘gosh’ and ‘Big Guns’ and that sort of thing. How much do
you read? Personally, I’m extremely well satisfied. My people pay me an
excellent living wage, they appreciate my work, and they honor me by
election to the schoolboard. I find that a good many of these farmers
think a lot harder and squarer than the swells I meet in the city. Well!
I don’t see any reason for feeling superior, or lonely either!”
“Hell, I don’t!” Martin mumbled. As he drove back he raged at
Hesselink’s superiority about not feeling superior, but he stumbled into
uncomfortable meditation. It was true; he was half-educated. He was
supposed to be a college graduate but he knew nothing of economics,
nothing of history, nothing of music or painting. Except in hasty
bolting for examinations he had read no poetry save that of Robert
Service, and the only prose besides medical journalism at which he
looked nowadays was the baseball and murder news in the Minneapolis
papers and Wild West stories in the magazines.
He reviewed the “intelligent conversation” which, in the desert of
Wheatsylvania, he believed himself to have conducted at Mohalis. He
remembered that to Clif Clawson it had been pretentious to use any
phrase which was not as colloquial and as smutty as the speech of a
truck-driver, and that his own discourse had differed from Clif’s
largely in that it had been less fantastic and less original. He could
recall nothing save the philosophy of Max Gottlieb, occasional scoldings
of Angus Duer, one out of ten among Madeline Fox’s digressions, and the
councils of Dad Silva which was above the level of Alec Ingleblad’s
barber-shop.
He came home hating Hesselink but by no means loving himself; he fell
upon Leora and, to her placid agreement, announced that they were “going
to get educated, if it kills us.” He went at it as he had gone at
bacteriology.
He read European history aloud at Leora, who looked interested or at
least forgiving; he worried the sentences in a copy of “The Golden Bowl”
which an unfortunate school-teacher had left at the Tozers’; he borrowed
a volume of Conrad from the village editor and afterward, as he drove
the prairie roads, he was marching into jungle villages--sun helmets,
orchids, lost temples of obscene and dog-faced deities, secret and
sun-scarred rivers. He was conscious of his own mean vocabulary. It
cannot be said that he became immediately and conspicuously articulate,
yet it is possible that in those long intense evenings of reading with
Leora he advanced a step or two toward the tragic enchantments of Max
Gottlieb’s world--enchanting sometimes and tragic always.
But in becoming a schoolboy again he was not so satisfied as Dr.
Hesselink.
IV
Gustaf Sondelius was back in America.
In medical school, Martin had read of Sondelius, the soldier of science.
He held reasonable and lengthy degrees, but he was a rich man and
eccentric, and neither toiled in laboratories nor had a decent office
and a home and a lacy wife. He roamed the world fighting epidemics and
founding institutions and making inconvenient speeches and trying new
drinks. He was a Swede by birth, a German by education, a little of
everything by speech, and his clubs were in London, Paris, Washington,
and New York. He had been heard of from Batoum and Fuchau, from Milan
and Bechuanaland, from Antofagasta and Cape Romanzoff. Manson on
Tropical Diseases mentions Sondelius’s admirable method of killing rats
with hydrocyanic acid gas, and _The Sketch_ once mentioned his atrocious
system in baccarat.
Gustaf Sondelius shouted, in high places and low, that most diseases
could be and must be wiped out; that tuberculosis, cancer, typhoid, the
plague, influenza, were an invading army against which the world must
mobilize--literally; that public health authorities must supersede
generals and oil kings. He was lecturing through America, and his
exclamatory assertions were syndicated in the press.
Martin sniffed at most newspaper articles touching on science or health
but Sondelius’s violence caught him, and suddenly he was converted, and
it was an important thing for him, that conversion.
He told himself that however much he might relieve the sick, essentially
he was a business man, in rivalry with Dr. Winter of Leopolis and Dr.
Hesselink of Groningen; that though they might be honest, honesty and
healing were less their purpose than making money; that to get rid of
avoidable disease and produce a healthy population would be the worst
thing in the world for them; and that they must all be replaced by
public health officials.
Like all ardent agnostics, Martin was a religious man. Since the death
of his Gottlieb-cult he had unconsciously sought a new passion, and he
found it now in Gustaf Sondelius’s war on disease. Immediately he became
as annoying to his patients as he had once been to Digamma Pi.
He informed the farmers at Delft that they had no right to have so much
tuberculosis.
This was infuriating, because none of their rights as American citizens
was better established, or more often used, than the privilege of being
ill. They fumed, “Who does he think he is? We call him in for doctoring,
not for bossing. Why, the damn’ fool said we ought to burn down our
houses--said we were committing a crime if we had the con. here! Won’t
stand for nobody talking to me like that!”
Everything became clear to Martin--too clear. The nation must make the
best physicians autocratic officials, at once, and that was all there
was to it. As to how the officials were to become perfect executives,
and how people were to be persuaded to obey them, he had no suggestions
but only a beautiful faith. At breakfast he scolded, “Another idiotic
day of writing prescriptions for bellyaches that ought never to have
happened! If I could only get into the Big Fight, along with men like
Sondelius! It makes me tired!”
Leora murmured, “Yes, darling. I’ll promise to be good. I won’t have any
little bellyaches or T. B. or anything, so please don’t lecture me!”
Even in his irritability he was gentle, for Leora was with child.
V
Their baby was coming in five months. Martin promised to it everything
he had missed.
“He’s going to have a real education!” he gloated, as they sat on the
porch in spring twilight. “He’ll learn all this literature and stuff. We
haven’t done much ourselves--here we are, stuck in this two-by-twice
crossroads for the rest of our lives--but maybe we’ve gone a little
beyond our dads, and he’ll go way beyond us.”
He was worried, for all his flamboyance. Leora had undue morning
sickness. Till noon she dragged about the house, pea-green and tousled
and hollow-faced. He found a sort of maid, and came home to help, to
wipe the dishes and sweep the front walk. All evening he read to her,
not history now and Henry James but “Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch,”
which both of them esteemed a very fine tale. He sat on the floor by the
grubby second-hand couch on which she lay in her weakness; he held her
hand and crowed:
“Golly, we-- No, not ‘golly’. Well, what _can_ you say except ‘golly’?
Anyway: Someday we’ll save up enough money for a couple months in Italy
and all those places. All those old narrow streets and old castles!
There must be scads of ’em that are couple hundred years old or older!
And we’ll take the boy.... Even if he turns out to be a girl, darn
him!... And he’ll learn to chatter Wop and French and everything like a
regular native, and his dad and mother’ll be so proud! Oh, we’ll be a
fierce pair of old birds! We never did have any more morals ’n a rabbit,
either of us, and probably when we’re seventy we’ll sit out on the
doorstep and smoke pipes and snicker at all the respectable people going
by, and tell each other scandalous stories about ’em till they want to
take a shot at us, and our boy--he’ll wear a plug hat and have a
chauffeur--he won’t dare to recognize us!”
Trained now to the false cheerfulness of the doctor, he shouted, when
she was racked and ghastly with the indignity of morning sickness,
“There, that’s fine, old girl! Wouldn’t be making a good baby if you
weren’t sick. Everybody is.” He was lying, and he was nervous. Whenever
he thought of her dying, he seemed to die with her. Barren of her
companionship, there would be nothing he wanted to do, nowhere to go.
What would be the worth of having all the world if he could not show it
to her, if she was not there--
He denounced Nature for her way of tricking human beings, by every gay
device of moonlight and white limbs and reaching loneliness, into having
babies, then making birth as cruel and clumsy and wasteful as she could.
He was abrupt and jerky with patients who called him into the country.
With their suffering he was sympathetic as he had never been, for his
eyes had opened to the terrible beauty of pain, but he must not go far
from Leora’s need.
Her morning sickness turned into pernicious vomiting. Suddenly, while
she was torn and inhuman with agony, he sent for Dr. Hesselink, and that
horrible afternoon when the prairie spring was exuberant outside the
windows of the poor iodoform-reeking room, they took the baby from her,
dead.
Had it been possible, he might have understood Hesselink’s success then,
have noted that gravity and charm, that pity and sureness, which made
people entrust their lives to him. Not cold and blaming was Hesselink
now, but an older and wiser brother, very compassionate. Martin saw
nothing. He was not a physician. He was a terrified boy, less useful to
Hesselink than the dullest nurse.
When he was certain that Leora would recover, Martin sat by her bed,
coaxing, “We’ll just have to make up our minds we never can have a baby
now, and so I want-- Oh, I’m no good! And I’ve got a rotten temper. But
to you, I want to be everything!”
She whispered, scarce to be heard:
“He would have been such a sweet baby. Oh, I know! I saw him so often.
Because I knew he was going to be like you, when you were a baby.” She
tried to laugh. “Perhaps I wanted him because I could boss him. I’ve
never had anybody that would let me boss him. So if I can’t have a real
baby, I’ll have to bring you up. Make you a great man that everybody
will wonder at, like your Sondelius.... Darling, I worried so about your
worrying--”
He kissed her, and for hours they sat together, unspeaking, eternally
understanding, in the prairie twilight.
CHAPTER XVII
I
Dr. Coughlin of Leopolis had a red mustache, a large heartiness, and a
Maxwell which, though it was three years old this May and deplorable as
to varnish, he believed to be the superior in speed and beauty of any
motor in Dakota.
He came home in high cheerfulness, rode the youngest of his three
children pickaback, and remarked to his wife:
“Tessie, I got a swell idea.”
“Yes, and you got a swell breath, too. I wish you’d quit testing that
old Spirits Frumentus bottle at the drug store!”
“’At a girl! But honest, listen!”
“I will not!” She bussed him heartily. “Nothing doing about driving to
Los Angeles this summer. Too far, with all the brats squalling.”
“Sure. All right. But I mean: Let’s pack up and light out and spend a
week touring ’round the state. Say to-morrow or next day. Got nothing to
keep me now except that obstetrical case, and we’ll hand that over to
Winter.”
“All right. We can try out the new thermos bottles!”
Dr. Coughlin, his lady, and the children started at four in morning. The
car was at first too well arranged to be interesting, but after three
days, as he approached you on the flat road that without an inch of
curving was slashed for leagues through the grassy young wheat, you saw
the doctor in his khaki suit, his horn-rimmed spectacles, and white
linen boating hat; his wife in a green flannel blouse and a lace boudoir
cap. The rest of the car was slightly confused. While you motored by you
noticed a canvas Egyptian Water Bottle, mud on wheels and fenders, a
spade, two older children leaning perilously out and making tongues at
you, the baby’s diapers hanging on a line across the tonneau, a torn
copy of _Snappy Stories_, seven lollypop sticks, a jack, a fish-rod, and
a rolled tent.
Your last impression was of two large pennants labeled “Leopolis, N.
D.,” and “Excuse Our Dust.”
The Coughlins had agreeable adventures. Once they were stuck in a
mud-hole. To the shrieking admiration of the family, the doctor got them
out by making a bridge of fence rails. Once the ignition ceased and,
while they awaited a garageman summoned by telephone, they viewed a
dairy farm with an electrical milking machine. All the way they were
broadened by travel, and discovered the wonders of the great world: the
movie theater at Roundup, which had for orchestra not only a hand-played
piano but also a violin; the black fox farm at Melody; and the Severance
water-tower, which was said to be the tallest in Central North Dakota.
Dr. Coughlin “dropped in to pass the time of day,” as he said, with all
the doctors. At St. Luke he had an intimate friend in Dr. Tromp--at
least they had met twice, at the annual meetings of the Pony River
Valley Medical Association. When he told Tromp how bad they had found
the hotels, Tromp looked uneasy and conscientious, and sighed, “If the
wife could fix it up somehow, I’d like to invite you all to stay with us
to-night.”
“Oh, don’t want to impose on you. Sure it wouldn’t be any trouble?” said
Coughlin.
After Mrs. Tromp had recovered from her desire to call her husband aside
and make unheard but vigorous observations, and after the oldest Tromp
boy had learned that “it wasn’t nice for a little gentleman to kick his
wee guests that came from so far, far away,” they were all very happy.
Mrs. Coughlin and Mrs. Tromp bewailed the cost of laundry soap and
butter, and exchanged recipes for pickled peaches, while the men,
sitting on the edge of the porch, their knees crossed, eloquently waving
their cigars, gave themselves up to the ecstasy of shop-talk:
“Say, Doctor, how do you find collections?”
(It was Coughlin speaking--or it might have been Tromp.)
“Well, they’re pretty good. These Germans pay up first rate. Never send
’em a bill, but when they’ve harvested they come in and say, ‘How much
do I owe you, Doctor?’”
“Yuh, the Germans are pretty good pay.”
“Yump, they certainly are. Not many dead-beats among the Germans.”
“Yes, that’s a fact. Say, tell me, Doctor, what do you do with your
jaundice cases?”
“Well, I’ll tell you, Doctor: if it’s a persistent case I usually give
ammonium chlorid.”
“Do you? I’ve been giving ammonium chlorid but here the other day I see
a communication in the _Journal of the A.M.A._ where a fellow was
claiming it wasn’t any good.”
“Is that a fact! Well, well! I didn’t see that. Hum. Well. Say, Doctor,
do you find you can do much with asthma?”
“Well now, Doctor, just in confidence, I’m going to tell you something
that may strike you as funny, but I believe that foxes’ lungs are fine
for asthma, and T.B. too. I told that to a Sioux City pulmonary
specialist one time and he laughed at me--said it wasn’t scientific--and
I said to him, ‘Hell!’ I said, ‘scientific!’ I said, ‘I don’t know if
it’s the latest fad and wrinkle in science or not,’ I said, ‘but I get
results, and that’s what I’m looking for ’s results!’ I said. I tell you
a plug G.P. may not have a lot of letters after his name, but he sees a
slew of mysterious things that he can’t explain, and I swear I believe
most of these damn’ alleged scientists could learn a whale of a lot from
the plain country practitioners, let me tell you!’
“Yuh, that’s a fact. Personally I’d rather stay right here in the
country and be able to do a little hunting and take it easy than be the
classiest specialist in the cities. One time I kind of figured on
becoming an X-ray specialist--place in New York where you can take the
whole course in eight weeks--and maybe settling in Butte or Sioux Falls,
but I figured that even if I got to making eight-ten thousand a year,
’twouldn’t hardly mean more than three thousand does here and so-- And a
fellow has to consider his duty to his old patients.”
“That’s so.... Say, Doctor, say what sort of fellow is McMinturn, down
your way?”
“Well, I don’t like to knock any fellow practitioner, and I suppose he’s
well intentioned, but just between you and me he does too confounded
much guesswork. Now you take you and me, we apply _science_ to a case,
instead of taking a chance and just relying on experience and going off
half-cocked. But McMinturn, he doesn’t know enough. And _say_, that wife
of his, she’s, a caution--she’s got the meanest tongue in four counties,
and the way she chases around drumming up business for Mac-- Well, I
suppose that’s their way of doing business.”
“Is old Winter keeping going?”
“Oh, yes, in a sort of way. You know how he is. Of course he’s about
twenty years behind the times, but he’s a great hand-holder--keep some
fool woman in bed six weeks longer than he needs to, and call around
twice a day and chin with her--absolutely unnecessary.”
“I suppose you get your biggest competition from Silzer, Doctor?”
“Don’t you believe it, Doctor! He isn’t beginning to do the practise he
lets on to. Trouble with Silzer is, he’s too brash--shoots off his mouth
too much--likes to hear himself talk. Oh, say, by the way, have you run
into this new fellow--will been located here about two years now--at
Wheatsylvania-- Arrowsmith?”
“No, but they say he’s a good bright young fellow.”
“Yes, they claim he’s a brainy man--very well-informed--and I hear his
wife is a nice brainy little woman.”
“I hear Arrowsmith hits it up too much though--likes his booze awful’
well.”
“Yes, so they say. Shame, for a nice hustling young fellow. I like a nip
myself, now and then, but a Drinking Man--! Suppose he’s drunk and gets
called out on a case! And a fellow from down there was telling me
Arrowsmith is great on books and study, but he’s a freethinker--never
goes to church.”
“Is that a fact! Hm. Great mistake for any doctor to not identify
himself with some good solid religious denomination, whether he believes
the stuff or not. I tell you a priest or a preacher can send you an
awful lot of business.”
“You bet he can! Well, this fellow said Arrowsmith was always arguing
with the preachers--he told some Reverend that everybody ought to read
this immunologist Max Gottlieb, and this Jacques Loeb--you know--the
fellow that, well I don’t recall just exactly what it was, but he
claimed he could create living fishes out of chemicals.”
“Sure! There you got it! That’s the kind of delusions these laboratory
fellows get unless they have some practical practise to keep ’em well
balanced. Well, if Arrowsmith falls for that kind of fellow, no wonder
people don’t trust him.”
“That’s so. Hm. Well, it’s too bad Arrowsmith goes drinking and helling
around and neglecting his family and his patients. I can see his finish.
Shame. Well--wonder what time o’ night it’s getting to be?”
II
Bert Tozer wailed, “Mart, what you been doing to Dr. Coughlin of
Leopolis? Fellow told me he was going around saying you were a
boose-hoister and so on.”
“Did he? People do sort of keep an eye on one another around here, don’t
they.”
“You bet your life they do, and that’s why I tell you you ought to cut
out the poker and the booze. You don’t see _me_ needing any liquor, do
you?”
Martin more desperately than ever felt the whole county watching him. He
was not a praise-eater; he was not proud that he should feel misplaced;
but however sturdily he struggled he saw himself outside the picture of
Wheatsylvania and trudging years of country practise.
Suddenly, without planning it, forgetting in his admiration for
Sondelius and the health war his pride of the laboratory, he was thrown
into a research problem.
III
There was blackleg among the cattle in Crynssen County. The state
veterinarian had been called and Dawson Hunziker vaccine had been
injected, but the disease spread. Martin heard the farmers wailing. He
noted that the injected cattle showed no inflammation nor rise in
temperature. He was roused by a suspicion that the Hunziker vaccine had
insufficient living organisms, and he went yelping on the trail of his
hypothesis.
He obtained (by misrepresentations) a supply of the vaccine and tested
it in his stuffy closet of a laboratory. He had to work out his own
device for growing anaërobic cultures, but he had been trained by the
Gottlieb who remarked, “Any man dat iss unable to build a filter out of
toot’-picks, if he has to, would maybe better buy his results along with
his fine equipment.” Out of a large fruit-jar and a soldered pipe Martin
made his apparatus.
When he was altogether sure that the vaccine did not contain living
blackleg organisms, he was much more delighted than if he had found that
good Mr. Dawson Hunziker was producing honest vaccine.
With no excuse and less encouragement he isolated blackleg organisms
from sick cattle and prepared an attenuated vaccine of his own. It took
much time. He did not neglect his patients but certainly he failed to
appear in the stores, at the poker games. Leora and he dined on a
sandwich every evening and hastened to the laboratory, to heat the
cultures in the improvised water-bath, an ancient and leaky
oatmeal-cooker with an alcohol lamp. The Martin who had been impatient
of Hesselink was of endless patience as he watched his results. He
whistled and hummed, and the hours from seven to midnight were a moment.
Leora, frowning placidly, the tip of her tongue at the corner of her
mouth, guarded the temperature like a good little watchdog.
After three efforts with two absurd failures, he had a vaccine which
satisfied him, and he injected a stricken herd. The blackleg stopped,
which was for Martin the end and the reward, and he turned his notes and
supply of vaccine over to the state veterinarian. For others, it was not
the end. The veterinarians of the county denounced him for intruding on
their right to save or kill cattle; the physicians hinted, “That’s the
kind of monkey-business that ruins the dignity of the profession. I tell
you Arrowsmith’s a medical nihilist and a notoriety-seeker, that’s what
he is. You mark my words, instead of his sticking to decent regular
practise, you’ll be hearing of his opening a quack sanitarium, one of
these days!”
He commented to Leora:
“Dignity, hell! If I had my way I’d be doing research--oh, not this cold
detached stuff of Gottlieb but really practical work--and then I’d have
some fellow like Sondelius take my results and jam ’em down people’s
throats, and I’d make them and their cattle and their tabby-cats healthy
whether they wanted to be or not, that’s what I’d do!”
In this mood he read in his Minneapolis paper, between a half column on
the marriage of the light middleweight champion and three lines devoted
to the lynching of an I.W.W. agitator, the announcement:
Gustave Sundelios, well-known authority on cholera prevention, will
give an address on “Heroes of Health” at the University summer
school next Friday evening.
He ran into the house gloating, “Lee! Sondelius going to lecture in
Minneapolis. I’m going! Come on! We’ll hear him and have a bat and
everything!”
“No, you run down by yourself. Be fine for you to get away from the town
and the family and me for a while. I’ll go down with you in the fall.
Honestly. If I’m not in the way, maybe you can manage to have a good
long talk with Dr. Sondelius.”
“Fat chance! The big city physicians and the state health authorities
will be standing around him ten deep. But I’m going.”
IV
The prairie was hot, the wheat rattled in a weary breeze, the day-coach
was gritty with cinders. Martin was cramped by the hours of slow riding.
He drowsed and smoked and meditated. “I’m going to forget medicine and
everything else,” he vowed. “I’ll go up and talk to somebody in the
smoker and tell him I’m a shoe-salesman.”
He did. Unfortunately his confidant happened to be a real shoe-salesman,
with a large curiosity as to what firm Martin represented, and he
returned to the day coach with a renewed sense of injury. When he
reached Minneapolis, in mid-afternoon, he hastened to the University and
besought a ticket to the Sondelius lecture before he had even found a
hotel, though not before he had found the long glass of beer which he
had been picturing for a hundred miles.
He had an informal but agreeable notion of spending his first evening of
freedom in dissipation. Somewhere he would meet a company of worthies
who would succor him with laughter and talk and many drinks--not too
many drinks, of course--and motor very rapidly to Lake Minnetonka for a
moonlight swim. He began his search for the brethren by having a
cocktail at a hotel bar and dinner in a Hennepin Avenue restaurant.
Nobody looked at him, nobody seemed to desire a companion. He was lonely
for Leora, and all his state of grace, all his earnest and
simple-hearted devotion to carousal, degenerated into sleepiness.
As he turned and turned in his hotel bed he lamented, “And probably the
Sondelius lecture will be rotten. Probably he’s simply another Roscoe
Geake.”
V
In the hot night desultory students wandered up to the door of the
lecture-hall, scanned the modest Sondelius poster, and ambled away.
Martin was half minded to desert with them, and he went in sulkily. The
hall was a third full of summer students and teachers, and men who might
have been doctors or school-principals. He sat at the back, fanning
with his straw hat, disliking the man with side-whiskers who shared the
row with him, disapproving of Gustaf Sondelius, and as to himself having
no good opinions whatever.
Then the room was charged with vitality. Down the central aisle,
ineffectively attended by a small fussy person, thundered a man with a
smile, a broad brow, and a strawpile of curly flaxen hair--a
Newfoundland dog of a man. Martin sat straight. He was strengthened to
endure even the depressing man with side-whiskers as Sondelius launched
out, in a musical bellow with Swedish pronunciation and Swedish
singsong:
“The medical profession can have but one desire: to destroy the medical
profession. As for the laymen, they can be sure of but one thing:
nine-tenths of what they know about health is not so, and with the other
tenth they do nothing. As Butler shows in ‘Erewhon’--the swine stole
that idea from me, too, maybe thirty years before I ever got it--the
only crime for w’ich we should hang people is having toobercoolosis.”
“Umph!” grunted the studious audience, doubtful whether it was fitting
to be amused, offended, bored, or edified.
Sondelius was a roarer and a playboy, but he knew incantations. With him
Martin watched the heroes of yellow fever, Reed, Agramonte, Carroll, and
Lazear; with him he landed in a Mexican port stilled with the plague and
famished beneath the virulent sun; with him rode up the mountain trails
to a hill town rotted with typhus; with him, in crawling August, when
babies were parched skeletons, fought an ice trust beneath the gilt and
blunted sword of the law.
“That’s what I want to do! Not just tinker at a lot of worn-out bodies
but make a new world!” Martin hungered. “Gosh, I’d follow him through
fire! And the way he lays out the crapehangers that criticize public
health results! If I could only manage to meet him and talk to him for a
couple o’ minutes--”
He lingered after the lecture. A dozen people surrounded Sondelius on
the platform; a few shook hands; a few asked questions; a doctor
worried, “But how about the danger of free clinics and all those things
drifting into socialism?” Martin stood back till Sondelius had been
deserted. A janitor was closing the windows, very firmly and
suggestively. Sondelius looked about, and Martin would have sworn that
the Great Man was lonely. He shook hands with him, and quaked:
“Sir, if you aren’t due some place, I wonder if you’d like to come out
and have a--a--”
Sondelius loomed over him in solar radiance and rumbled, “Have a drink?
Well I think maybe I would. How did the joke about the dog and his fleas
go to-night? Do you think they liked it?”
“Oh, sure, you bet.”
The warrior who had been telling of feeding five thousand Tatars, of
receiving a degree from a Chinese university and refusing a decoration
from quite a good Balkan king, looked affectionately on his band of one
disciple and demanded, “Was it all right--was it? Did they like it? So
hot to-night, and I been lecturing nine time a week-- Des Moines, Fort
Dodge, LaCrosse, Elgin, Joliet (but he pronounced it Zho-lee-ay) and-- I
forget. Was it all right? Did they like it?”
“Simply corking! Oh, they just ate it up! Honestly, I’ve never enjoyed
anything so much in my life!”
The prophet crowed, “Come! I buy a drink. As a hygienist, I war on
alcohol. In excessive quantities it is almost as bad as coffee or even
ice cream soda. But as one who is fond of talking, I find a nice long
whisky and soda a great solvent of human idiocy. Is there a cool
place with some Pilsener here in Detroit--no; where am I
to-night?-- Minneapolis?”
“I understand there’s a good beer-garden. And we can get the trolley
right near here.”
Sondelius stared at him. “Oh, I have a taxi waiting.”
Martin was abashed by this luxury. In the taxi-cab he tried to think of
the proper things to say to a celebrity.
“Tell me, Doctor, do they have city health boards in Europe?”
Sondelius ignored him. “Did you see that girl going by? What ankles!
What shoulders! Is it good beer at the beer-garden? Have they any decent
cognac? Do you know Courvoisier 1865 cognac? Oof! Lecturing! I swear I
will give it up. And wearing dress clothes a night like this! You know,
I mean all the crazy things I say in my lectures, but let us now forget
being earnest, let us drink, let us sing ‘Der Graf von Luxemburg,’ let
us detach exquisite girls from their escorts, let us discuss the joys of
‘Die Meistersinger,’ which only I appreciate!”
In the beer-garden the tremendous Sondelius discoursed of the Cosmos
Club, Halle’s investigation of infant morality, the suitability of
combining benedictine and apple-jack, Biarritz, Lord Haldane, the
Doane-Buckley method of milk examination, George Gissing, and _homard
thermidor_, Martin looked for a connection between Sondelius and
himself, as one does with the notorious or with people met abroad. He
might have said, “I think I met a man who knows you,” or “I have had the
pleasure of reading all your articles,” but he fished with “Did you ever
run into the two big men in my medical school-- Winnemac-- Dean Silva
and Max Gottlieb?”
“Silva? I don’t remember. But Gottlieb--you know him? Oh!” Sondelius
waved his mighty arms. “The greatest! The spirit of science! I had the
pleasure to talk with him at McGurk. He would not sit here bawling like
me! He makes me like a circus clown! He takes all my statements about
epidemiology and shows me I am a fool! Ho, ho, ho!” He beamed, and was
off on a denunciation of high tariff.
Each topic had its suitable refreshment. Sondelius was a fantastic
drinker, and zinc-lined. He mixed Pilsener, whisky, black coffee, and a
liquid which the waiter asserted to be absinthe. “I should go to bed at
midnight,” he lamented, “but it is a cardinal sin to interrupt good
talk. Yoost tempt me a little! I am an easy one to be tempted! But I
must have five hours’ sleep. Absolute! I lecture in--it’s some place in
Iowa--to-morrow evening. Now that I am past fifty, I cannot get along
with three hours as I used to, and yet I have found so many new things
that I want to talk about.”
He was more eloquent than ever; then he was annoyed. A surly-looking man
at the next table listened and peered, and laughed at them. Sondelius
dropped from Haffkine’s cholera serum to an irate:
“If that fellow stares at me some more, I am going over and kill him! I
am a peaceful man, now that I am not so young, but I do not like
starers. I will go and argue with him. I will yoost hit him a little!”
While the waiters came rushing, Sondelius charged the man, threatened
him with enormous fists, then stopped, shook hands repeatedly, and
brought him back to Martin.
“This is a born countryman of mine, from Gottenborg. He is a carpenter.
Sit down, Nilsson, sit down and have a drink. Herumph! VAI-ter!”
The carpenter was a socialist, a Swedish Seventh Day Adventist, a
ferocious arguer, and fond of drinking aquavit. He denounced Sondelius
as an aristocrat, he denounced Martin for his ignorance of economics, he
denounced the waiter concerning the brandy; Sondelius and Martin and the
waiter answered with vigor; and the conversation became admirable.
Presently they were turned out of the beer-garden and the three of them
crowded into the still waiting taxicab, which shook to their debating.
Where they went, Martin could never trace. He may have dreamed the whole
tale. Once they were apparently in a roadhouse on a long street which
must have been University Avenue; once in a saloon on Washington Avenue
South, where three tramps were sleeping at the end of the bar; once in
the carpenter’s house, where an unexplained man made coffee for them.
Wherever they might be, they were at the same time in Moscow and Curaçao
and Murwillumbah. The carpenter created communistic states, while
Sondelius, proclaiming that he did not care whether he worked under
socialism or an emperor so long as he could bully people into being
well, annihilated tuberculosis and by dawn had cancer fleeing.
They parted at four, tearfully swearing to meet again, in Minnesota or
Stockholm, in Rio or on the southern seas, and Martin started for
Wheatsylvania to put an end to all this nonsense of allowing people to
be ill.
And the great god Sondelius had slain Dean Silva, as Silva had slain
Gottlieb, Gottlieb had slain “Encore” Edwards the playful chemist,
Edwards had slain Doc Vickerson, and Vickerson had slain the minister’s
son who had a real trapeze in his barn.
CHAPTER XVIII
I
Dr. Woestijne of Vanderheide’s Grove acted in spare time as
Superintendent of Health for Crynssen County, but the office was not
well paid and it did not greatly interest him. When Martin burst in and
offered to do all the work for half the pay, Woestijne accepted with
benevolence, assuring him that it would have a great effect on his
private practise.
It did. It almost ruined his private practise.
There was never an official appointment. Martin signed Woestijne’s name
(spelling it in various interesting ways, depending on how he felt) to
papers, and the Board of County Commissioners recognized Martin’s
limited power, but the whole thing was probably illegal.
There was small science and considerably less heroism in his first
furies as a health officer, but a great deal of irritation for his
fellow-townsmen. He poked into yards, he denounced Mrs. Beeson for her
reeking ash-barrels, Mr. Norblom for piling manure on the street, and
the schoolboard for the school ventilation and lack of instruction in
tooth-brushing. The citizens had formerly been agitated by his
irreligion, his moral looseness, and his lack of local patriotism, but
when they were prodded out of their comfortable and probably beneficial
dirt, they exploded.
Martin was honest and appallingly earnest, but if he had the innocence
of the dove he lacked the wisdom of the serpent. He did not make them
understand his mission; he scarce tried to make them understand. His
authority, as Woestijne’s _alter ego_, was imposing on paper but feeble
in action, and it was worthless against the stubbornness which he
aroused.
He advanced from garbage-spying to a drama of infection.
The community at Delft had a typhoid epidemic which slackened and
continually reappeared. The villagers believed that it came from a tribe
of squatters six miles up the creek, and they considered lynching the
offenders, as a practical protest and an interesting break in
wheat-farming. When Martin insisted that in six miles the creek would
purify any waste and that the squatters were probably not the cause, he
was amply denounced.
“He’s a fine one, he is, to go around blatting that we’d ought to have
more health precautions! Here we go and show him where there’s some
hellhounds that ought to be shot, and them only Bohunks anyway, and he
doesn’t do a darn’ thing but shoot a lot of hot air about germicidal
effect or whatever the fool thing is,” remarked Kaes, the wheat-buyer at
the Delft elevator.
Flashing through the county, not neglecting but certainly not enlarging
his own practise, Martin mapped every recent case of typhoid within five
miles of Delft. He looked into milk-routes and grocery deliveries. He
discovered that most of the cases had appeared after the visits of an
itinerant seamstress, a spinster virtuous and almost painfully hygienic.
She had had typhoid four years before.
“She’s a chronic carrier of the bugs. She’s got to be examined,” he
announced.
He found her sewing at the house of an old farmer-preacher.
With modest indignation she refused to be examined, and as he went away
she could be heard weeping at the insult, while the preacher cursed him
from the doorstep. He returned with the township police officer and had
the seamstress arrested and confined in the segregation ward of the
county poor-farm. In her discharges he found billions of typhoid
bacilli.
The frail and decent body was not comfortable in the board-lined
whitewashed ward. She was shamed and frightened. She had always been
well beloved, a gentle, shabby, bright-eyed spinster who brought
presents to the babies, helped the overworked farmwives to cook dinner,
and sang to the children in her thin sparrow voice. Martin was reviled
for persecuting her. “He wouldn’t dare pick on her if she wasn’t so
poor,” they said, and they talked of a jail-delivery.
Martin fretted. He called upon the seamstress at the poor-farm, he tried
to make her understand that there was no other place for her, he brought
her magazines and sweets. But he was firm. She could not go free. He was
convinced that she had caused at least one hundred cases of typhoid,
with nine deaths.
The county derided him. Cause typhoid now, when she had been well for
four years? The County Commissioners and the County Board of Health
called Dr. Hesselink in from the next county. He agreed with Martin and
his maps. Every meeting of the Commissioners was a battle now, and it
was uncertain whether Martin would be ruined or throned.
Leora saved him, and the seamstress. “Why not take up a collection to
send her off to some big hospital where she can be treated, or where
they can keep her if she can’t be cured?” said she.
The seamstress entered a sanitarium--and was amiably forgotten by
everybody for the rest of her life--and his recent enemies said of
Martin, “He’s mighty smart, and right on the job.” Hesselink drove over
to inform him, “You did pretty well this time, Arrowsmith. Glad to see
you’re settling down to business.”
Martin was slightly cocky, and immediately bounded after a fine new
epidemic. He was so fortunate as to have a case of small-pox and several
which he suspected. Some of these lay across the border in Mencken
County, Hesselink’s domain, and Hesselink laughed at him. “It’s probably
all chicken-pox, except your one case. Mighty rarely you get small-pox
in summer,” he chuckled, while Martin raged up and down the two
counties, proclaiming the scourge, imploring every one to be vaccinated,
thundering, “There’s going to be all hell let loose here in ten or
fifteen days!”
But the United Brethren parson, who served chapels in Wheatsylvania and
two other villages, was an anti-vaccinationist and he preached against
it. The villages sided with him. Martin went from house to house,
beseeching them, offering to treat them without charge. As he had never
taught them to love him and follow him as a leader, they questioned,
they argued long and easily on doorsteps, they cackled that he was
drunk. Though for weeks his strongest draft had been the acrid coffee of
the countryside, they peeped one to another that he was drunk every
night, that the United Brethren minister was about to expose him from
the pulpit.
And ten dreadful days went by and fifteen, and all but the first case
did prove to be chicken-pox. Hesselink gloated and the village roared
and Martin was the butt of the land.
He had only a little resented their gossip about his wickedness, only in
evenings of slow depression had he meditated upon fleeing from them,
but at their laughter he was black furious.
Leora comforted him with cool hands. “It’ll pass over,” she said. But it
did not pass.
By autumn it had become such a burlesque epic as peasants love through
all the world. He had, they mirthfully related, declared that anybody
who kept hogs would die of small-pox; he had been drunk for a week, and
diagnosed everything from gall-stones to heart-burn as small-pox. They
greeted him, with no meaning of offense in their snickering, “Got a
pimple on my chin, Doc. What is ’t--small-pox?”
More terrible than their rage is the people’s laughter, and if it rend
tyrants, with equal zest it pursues the saint and wise man and befouls
their treasure.
When the neighborhood suddenly achieved a real epidemic of diphtheria
and Martin shakily preached antitoxin, one-half of them remembered his
failure to save Mary Novak and the other half clamored, “Oh, give us a
rest! You got epidemics on the brain!” That a number of children quite
adequately died did not make them relinquish their comic epic.
Then it was that Martin came home to Leora and said quietly, “I’m
licked. I’ve got to get out. Nothing more I can do here. Take years
before they’d trust me again. They’re so damned _humorous_! I’m going to
go get a real job--public health.”
“I’m so glad! You’re too good for them here. We’ll find some big place
where they’ll appreciate your work.”
“No, that’s not fair. I’ve learned a little something. I’ve failed here.
I’ve antagonized too many people. I didn’t know how to handle them. We
could stick it out, and I would, except that life is short and I think
I’m a good worker in some ways. Been worrying about being a coward,
about running away, ‘turning my--’ What is it? ‘--turning my hand from
the plow.’ I don’t care now! By God, I know what I can do! Gottlieb saw
it! And I want to get to work. On we go. All right?”
“Of course!”
II
He had read in the _Journal of the American Medical Association_ that
Gustaf Sondelius was giving a series of lectures at Harvard. He wrote
asking whether he knew of a public health appointment. Sondelius
answered, in a profane and blotty scrawl, that he remembered with joy
their Minneapolis vacation, that he disagreed with Entwisle of Harvard
about the nature of metathrombin, that there was an excellent Italian
restaurant in Boston, and that he would inquire among his
health-official friends as to a position.
Two days later he wrote that Dr. Almus Pickerbaugh, Director of Public
Health in the city of Nautilus, Iowa, was looking for a
second-in-command, and would probably be willing to send particulars.
Leora and Martin swooped on an almanac.
“Gosh! Sixty-nine thousand people in Nautilus! Against three hundred and
sixty-six here--no, wait, it’s three hundred and sixty-seven now, with
that new baby of Pete Yeska’s that the dirty swine called in Hesselink
for. People! People that can talk! Theaters! Maybe concerts! Leora,
we’ll be like a pair of kids let loose from school!”
He telegraphed for details, to the enormous interest of the station
agent, who was also telegraph operator.
The mimeographed form which was sent to him said that Dr. Pickerbaugh
required an assistant who would be the only full-time medical officer
besides Pickerbaugh himself, as the clinic and school doctors were
private physicians working part-time. The assistant would be
epidemiologist, bacteriologist, and manager of the office clerks, the
nurses, and the lay inspectors of dairies and sanitation. The salary
would be twenty-five hundred dollars a year--against the fifteen or
sixteen hundred Martin was making in Wheatsylvania.
Proper recommendations were desired.
Martin wrote to Sondelius, to Dad Silva, and to Max Gottlieb, now at the
McGurk Institute in New York.
Dr. Pickerbaugh informed him, “I have received very pleasant letters
from Dean Silva and Dr. Sondelius about you, but the letter from Dr.
Gottlieb is quite remarkable. He says you have rare gifts as a
laboratory man. I take great pleasure in offering you the appointment
kindly wire.”
Not till then did Martin completely realize that he was leaving
Wheatsylvania--the tedium of Bert Tozer’s nagging--the spying of Pete
Yeska and the Norbloms--the inevitability of turning, as so many
unchanging times he had turned, south from the Leopolis road at the Two
Mile Grove and following again that weary, flat, unbending trail--the
superiority of Dr. Hesselink and the malice of Dr. Coughlin--the round
which left him no time for his dusty laboratory--leaving it all for the
achievement and splendor of the great city of Nautilus.
“Leora, we’re going! We’re really going!”
III
Bert Tozer said:
“You know by golly there’s folks that would call you a traitor, after
all we’ve done for you, even if you did pay back the thousand, to let
some other doc come in here and get all that influence away from the
Family.”
Ada Quist said:
“I guess if you ain’t any too popular with the folks around here you’ll
have one fine time in a big city like Nautilus! Well Bert and me are
going to get married next year and when you two swells make a failure of
it I suppose we’ll have to take care of you at our house when you come
sneaking back do you think we could get your house at the same rent you
paid for it oh Bert why couldn’t we take Mart’s office instead it would
save money well I’ve always said since we were in school together you
couldn’t stand a decent regular life Ory.”
Mr. Tozer said:
“I simply can’t understand it, with everything going so nice. Why, you’d
be making three-four thousand a year some day, if you just stuck to it.
Haven’t we tried to treat you nice? I don’t like to have my little girl
go away and leave me alone, now I’m getting on in years. And Bert gets
so cranky with me and Mother, but you and Ory would always kind of
listen to us. Can’t you fix it somehow so you could stay?”
Pete Yeska said:
“Doc, you could of knocked me down with a feather when I heard you were
going! Course you and me have scrapped about this drug business, but
Lord! I been kind of half thinking about coming around some time and
offering you a partnership and let you run the drug end to suit
yourself, and we could get the Buick agency, maybe, and work up a nice
little business. I’m real sorry you’re going to leave us.... Well, come
back some day and we’ll take a shot at the ducks, and have a good laugh
about that bull you made over the small-pox. I never will forget that! I
was saying to the old woman just the other day, when she had an
ear-ache, ‘Ain’t got small-pox, have yuh, Bess!’”
Dr. Hesselink said:
“Doctor, what’s this I hear? You’re not going away? Why, you and I were
just beginning to bring medical practise in this neck of the woods up to
where it ought to be, so I drove over to-night-- Huh? We panned you?
Ye-es, I suppose we did, but that doesn’t mean we didn’t appreciate you.
Small place like here or Groningen, you have to roast your neighbors to
keep busy. Why, Doctor, I’ve been watching you develop from an unlicked
cub to a real upstanding physician, and now you’re going away--you don’t
know how I feel!”
Henry Novak said:
“Why, Doc, you ain’t going to _leave_ us? And we got a new baby coming,
and I said to the woman, just the other day, ‘It’s a good thing we got a
doctor that hands you out the truth and not all this guff we used to get
from Doc Winter.’”
The wheat-buyer at Delft said:
“Doc, what’s this I hear? You ain’t going _away_? A fellow told me you
was and I says to him, ‘Don’t be more of a damn’ fool than the Lord
meant you to be,’ I says. But I got to worrying about it, and I drove
over and-- Doc, I fire off my mouth pretty easy, I guess. I was agin you
in the typhoid epidemic, when you said that seamstress was carrying the
sickness around, and then you showed me up good. Doc, if you’d like to
be state senator, and if you’ll stay-- I got quite a little
influence--believe me, I’ll get out and work my shirt off for you!”
Alec Ingleblad said:
“You’re a lucky guy!”
All the village was at the train when they left for Nautilus.
For a hundred autumn-blazing miles Martin mourned his neighbors. “I feel
like getting off and going back. Didn’t we used to have fun playing Five
Hundred with the Fraziers! I hate to think of the kind of doctor they
may get. I swear, if some quack settles there or if Woestijne neglects
the health work again, I’ll go back and run ’em both out of business!
And be kind of fun to be state senator, some ways.”
But as evening thickened and nothing in all the rushing world existed
save the yellow Pinsch gas globes above them in the long car, they saw
ahead of them great Nautilus, high honor and achievement, the making of
a radiant model city, and the praise of Sondelius--perhaps even of Max
Gottlieb.
CHAPTER XIX
I
Midmost of the black-soiled Iowa plain, watered only by a shallow and
insignificant creek, the city of Nautilus bakes and rattles and
glistens. For hundreds of miles the tall corn springs in a jungle of
undeviating rows, and the stranger who sweatily trudges the corn-walled
roads is lost and nervous with the sense of merciless growth.
Nautilus is to Zenith what Zenith is to Chicago.
With seventy thousand people, it is a smaller Zenith but no less brisk.
There is one large hotel to compare with the dozen in Zenith, but that
one is as busy and standardized and frenziedly modern as its owner can
make it. The only authentic difference between Nautilus and Zenith is
that in both cases all the streets look alike but in Nautilus they do
not look alike for so many miles.
The difficulty in defining its quality is that no one has determined
whether it is a very large village or a very small city. There are
houses with chauffeurs and Baccardi cocktails, but on August evenings
all save a few score burghers sit in their shirt-sleeves on front
porches. Across from the ten-story office building, in which a little
magazine of the New Prose is published by a young woman who for five
months lived in the cafés of Montparnasse, is an old frame mansion
comfortable with maples, and a line of Fords and lumber-wagons in which
the overalled farmers have come to town.
Iowa has the richest land, the lowest illiteracy rate, the largest
percentages of native-born whites and motor-car owners, and the most
moral and forward-looking cities of all the States, and Nautilus is the
most Iowan city in Iowa. One out of every three persons above the age of
sixty has spent a winter in California, and among them are the champion
horseshoe pitcher of Pasadena and the woman who presented the turkey
which Miss Mary Pickford, the cinema princess, enjoyed at her Christmas
dinner in 1912.
Nautilus is distinguished by large houses with large lawns and by an
astounding quantity of garages and lofty church spires. The fat fields
run up to the edge of the city, and the scattered factories, the
innumerable railroad side-tracks, and the scraggly cottages for workmen
are almost amid the corn. Nautilus manufactures steel windmills,
agricultural implements, including the celebrated Daisy Manure Spreader,
and such corn-products as Maize Mealies, the renowned breakfast-food. It
makes brick, it sells groceries wholesale, and it is the headquarters of
the Cornbelt Coöperative Insurance Company.
One of its smallest but oldest industries is Mugford Christian College,
which has two hundred and seventeen students, and sixteen instructors,
of whom eleven are ministers of the Church of Christ. The well-known Dr.
Tom Bissex is football coach, health director, and professor of hygiene,
chemistry, physics, French, and German. Its shorthand and piano
departments are known far beyond the limits of Nautilus, and once,
though that was some years ago, Mugford held the Grinnell College
baseball team down to a score of eleven to five. It has never been
disgraced by squabbles over teaching evolutionary biology--it never has
thought of teaching biology at all.
II
Martin left Leora at the Sims House, the old-fashioned, second-best
hotel in Nautilus, to report to Dr. Pickerbaugh, Director of the
Department of Public Health.
The department was on an alley, in a semi-basement at the back of that
large graystone fungus, the City Hall. When he entered the drab
reception-office he was highly received by the stenographer and the two
visiting nurses. Into the midst of their flutterings--“Did you have a
good trip, Doctor? Dr. Pickerbaugh didn’t hardly expect you till
to-morrow, Doctor. Is Mrs. Arrowsmith with you, Doctor?”--charged
Pickerbaugh, thundering welcomes.
Dr. Almus Pickerbaugh was forty-eight. He was a graduate of Mugford
College and of the Wassau Medical School. He looked somewhat like
President Roosevelt, with the same squareness and the same bristly
mustache, and he cultivated the resemblance. He was a man who never
merely talked; he either bubbled or made orations.
He received Martin with four “Well’s,” which he gave after the manner of
a college cheer; he showed him through the Department, led him into the
Director’s private office, gave him a cigar, and burst the dam of manly
silence:
“Doctor, I’m delighted to have a man with your scientific inclinations.
Not that I should consider myself entirely without them. In fact I make
it a regular practise to set aside a period for scientific research,
without a certain amount of which even the most ardent crusade for
health methods would scarcely make much headway.”
It sounded like the beginning of a long seminar. Martin settled in his
chair. He was doubtful about his cigar, but he found that it helped him
to look more interested.
“But with me, I admit, it’s a matter of temperament. I have often hoped
that, without any desire whatever for mere personal aggrandizement, the
powers above may yet grant me the genius to become at once the Roosevelt
and the Longfellow of the great and universally growing movement for
public health measures is your cigar too mild, Doctor? or perhaps it
would be better to say the Kipling of public health rather than the
Longfellow, because despite the beautiful passages and high moral
atmosphere of the Sage of Cambridge, his poetry lacked the swing and
punch of Kipling.
“I assume you agree with me, or you will when you have had an
opportunity to see the effect our work has on the city, and the success
we have in selling the idea of Better Health, that what the world needs
is a really inspired, courageous, overtowering leader--say a Billy
Sunday of the movement--a man who would know how to use sensationalism
properly and wake the people out of their sloth. Sometimes the
papers, and I can only say they flatter me when they compare me
with Billy Sunday, the greatest of all evangelists and Christian
preachers--sometimes they claim that I’m too sensational. Huh! If they
only could understand it, trouble is I can’t be sensational enough!
Still, I try, I try, and-- Look here. Here’s a placard, it was painted
by my daughter Orchid and the poetry is my own humble effort, and let
me tell you it gets quoted around everywhere:
You can’t get health
By a pussyfoot stealth,
So let’s every health-booster
Crow just like a rooster.
“Then there’s another--this is a minor thing; it doesn’t try to drive
home general abstract principles, but it’d surprise you the effect it’s
had on careless housewives, who of course don’t mean to neglect the
health of their little ones and merely need instruction and a little pep
put into them, and when they see a card like this, it makes ’em think:
Boil the milk bottles or by gum
You better buy your ticket to Kingdom Come.
“I’ve gotten quite a lot of appreciation in my small way for some of
these things that didn’t hardly take me five minutes to dash off. Some
day when you get time, glance over this volume of clippings--just to
show you, Doctor, what you can do if you go at the Movement in the
up-to-date and scientific manner. This one, about the temperance meeting
I addressed in Des Moines--say, I had that hall, and it was
jam-pack-full, lifting right up on their feet when I proved by
statistics that ninety-three per cent. of all insanity is caused by
booze! Then this--well, it hasn’t anything to do with health, directly,
but it’ll just indicate the opportunity you’ll have here to get in touch
with all the movements for civic weal.”
He held out a newspaper clipping in which, above a pen-and-ink
caricature portraying him with large mustached head on a tiny body, was
the headline:
DOC PICKERBAUGH BANNER BOOSTER
OF EVANGELINE COUNTY LEADS BIG
GO-TO-CHURCH DEMONSTRATION HERE
Pickerbaugh looked it over, reflecting, “That was a dandy meeting! We
increased church attendance here seventeen per cent.! Oh, Doctor, you
went to Winnemac and had your internship in Zenith, didn’t you? Well,
this might interest you then. It’s from the _Zenith Advocate-Times_, and
it’s by Chum Frink, who, I think you’ll agree with me, ranks with Eddie
Guest and Walt Mason as the greatest, as they certainly are the most
popular, of all our poets, showing that you can bank every time on the
literary taste of the American Public. Dear old Chum! That was when I
was in Zenith to address the national convention of Congregational
Sunday-schools, I happen to be a Congregationalist myself, on ‘The
Morality of A I Health.’ So Chum wrote this poem about me:”
Zenith welcomes with high hurraw
A friend in Almus Pickerbaugh,
The two-fisted fightin’ poet doc
Who stands for health like Gibraltar’s rock.
He’s jammed with figgers and facts and fun,
The plucky old, lucky old son--of--a--gun!
For a moment the exuberant Dr. Pickerbaugh was shy.
“Maybe it’s kind of immodest in me to show that around. And when I read
a poem with such originality and swing, when I find a genu-ine
vest-pocket masterpiece like this, then I realize that I’m not a poet at
all, no matter how much my jingles may serve to jazz up the Cause of
Health. My brain-children may teach sanitation and do their little part
to save thousands of dear lives, but they aren’t literature, like what
Chum Frink turns out. No, I guess I’m nothing but just a plain scientist
in an office.
“Still, you’ll readily see how one of these efforts of mine, just by
having a good laugh and a punch and some melody in it, does gild the
pill and make careless folks stop spitting on the sidewalks, and get out
into God’s great outdoors and get their lungs packed full of ozone and
lead a real hairy-chested he-life. In fact you might care to look over
the first number of a little semi-yearly magazine I’m just starting-- I
know for a fact that a number of newspaper editors are going to quote
from it and so carry on the good work as well as boost my circulation.”
He handed to Martin a pamphlet entitled _Pickerbaugh Pickings_.
In verse and aphorism, _Pickings_ recommended good health, good roads,
good business, and the single standard of morality. Dr. Pickerbaugh
backed up his injunctions with statistics as impressive as those the
Reverend Ira Hinkley had once used at Digamma Pi. Martin was edified by
an item which showed that among all families divorced in Ontario,
Tennessee, and Southern Wyoming in 1912, the appalling number of
fifty-three per cent. of the husbands drank at least one glass of whisky
daily.
Before this warning had sunk in, Pickerbaugh snatched _Pickings_ from
him with a boyish, “Oh, you won’t want to read any more of my rot. You
can look it over some future time. But this second volume of my
clippings may perhaps interest you, just as a hint of what a fellow can
do.”
While he considered the headlines in the scrapbook, Martin realized that
Dr. Pickerbaugh was vastly better known than he had realized. He was
exposed as the founder of the first Rotary Club in Iowa; superintendent
of the Jonathan Edwards Congregational Sunday School of Nautilus;
president of the Moccasin Ski and Hiking Club, of the West Side Bowling
Club, and the 1912 Bull Moose and Roosevelt Club; organizer and
cheer-leader of a Joint Picnic of the Woodmen, Moose, Elks, Masons,
Oddfellows, Turnverein, Knights of Columbus, B’nai B’rith, and the Y. M.
C. A.; and winner of the prizes both for reciting the largest number of
Biblical texts and for dancing the best Irish jig at the Harvest Moon
Soiree of the Jonathan Edwards Bible Class for the Grown-ups.
Martin read of him as addressing the Century Club of Nautilus on “A
Yankee Doctor’s Trip Through Old Europe,” and the Mugford College Alumni
Association on “Wanted: A Man-sized Feetball Coach for Old Mugford.” But
outside of Nautilus as well, there were loud alarums of his presence.
He had spoken at the Toledo Chamber of Commerce Weekly Luncheon on “More
Health-- More Bank Clearings.” He had edified the National Interurban
Trolley Council, meeting at Wichita, on “Health Maxims for Trolley
Folks.” Seven thousand, six hundred Detroit automobile mechanics had
listened to his observations on “Health First, Safety Second, and Booze
Nowhere A-tall.” And in a great convention at Waterloo he had helped
organize the first regiment in Iowa of the Anti-rum Minute Men.
The articles and editorials regarding him, in newspapers, house organs,
and one rubber-goods periodical, were accompanied by photographs of
himself, his buxom wife, and his eight bounding daughters, depicted in
Canadian winter costumes among snow and icicles, in modest but easy
athletic costumes, playing tennis in the backyard, and in costumes of no
known genus whatever, frying bacon against a background of Northern
Minnesota pines.
Martin felt strongly that he would like to get away and recover.
He walked back to the Sims House. He realized that to a civilized man
the fact that Pickerbaugh advocated any reform would be sufficient
reason for ignoring it.
When he had gone thus far, Martin pulled himself up, cursed himself for
what he esteemed his old sin of superiority to decent normal people....
Failure. Disloyalty. In medical school, in private practise, in his
bullying health administration. Now again?
He urged, “This pep and heartiness stuff of Pickerbaugh’s is exactly the
thing to get across to the majority of people the scientific discoveries
of the Max Gottliebs. What do I care how much Pickerbaugh gases before
conventions of Sunday School superintendents and other morons, as long
as he lets me alone and lets me do my work in the lab and dairy
inspection?”
He pumped up enthusiasm and came quite cheerfully and confidently into
the shabby, high-ceilinged hotel bedroom where Leora sat in a rocker by
the window.
“Well?” she said.
“It’s fine--gave me fine welcome. And they want us to come to dinner,
to-morrow evening.”
“What’s he like?”
“Oh, he’s awfully optimistic--he puts things over--he-- Oh, Leora, am I
going to be a sour, cranky, unpopular, rotten failure again?”
His head was buried in her lap and he clung to her affection, the one
reality in a world of chattering ghosts.
III
When the maples fluttered beneath their window in the breeze that sprang
up with the beginning of twilight, when the amiable citizens of Nautilus
had driven home to supper in their shaky Fords, Leora had persuaded him
that Pickerbaugh’s flamboyance would not interfere with his own work,
that in any case they would not remain in Nautilus forever, that he was
impatient, and that she loved him dearly. So they descended to supper,
an old-fashioned Iowa supper with corn fritters and many little dishes
which were of interest after the loving but misinformed cooking of
Leora, and they went to the movies and held hands and were not ill
content.
The next day Dr. Pickerbaugh was busier and less buoyant. He gave Martin
a notion of the details of his work.
Martin had thought of himself, freed from tinkering over cut fingers and
ear-aches, as spending ecstatic days in the laboratory, emerging only to
battle with factory-owners who defied sanitation. But he found that it
was impossible to define his work, except that he was to do a little of
everything that Pickerbaugh, the press, or any stray citizen of Nautilus
might think of.
He was to placate voluble voters who came in to complain of everything
from the smell of sewer-gas to the midnight beer parties of neighbors;
he was to dictate office correspondence to the touchy stenographer, who
was not a Working Girl but a Nice Girl Who Was Working; to give
publicity to the newspapers; to buy paper-clips and floor-wax and
report-blanks at the lowest prices; to assist, in need, the two
part-time physicians in the city clinic; to direct the nurses and the
two sanitary inspectors; to scold the Garbage Removal Company; to
arrest--or at least to jaw at--all public spitters; to leap into a Ford
and rush out to tack placards on houses in which were infectious
diseases; to keep a learned implacable eye on epidemics from Vladivostok
to Patagonia, and to prevent (by methods not very clearly outlined)
their coming in to slay the yeomanry and even halt the business
activities of Nautilus.
But there was a little laboratory work: milk tests, Wassermanns for
private physicians, the making of vaccines, cultures in suspected
diphtheria.
“I get it,” said Leora, as they dressed for the dinner at Pickerbaugh’s.
“Your job will only take about twenty-eight hours a day, and the rest of
the time you’re perfectly welcome to spend in research, unless somebody
interrupts you.”
IV
The home of Dr. and Mrs. Almus Pickerbaugh, on the steeple-prickly West
Side, was a Real Old-fashioned Home. It was a wooden house with towers,
swings, hammocks, rather mussy shade trees, a rather mangy lawn, a
rather damp arbor, and an old carriage-house with a line of steel spikes
along the ridge-pole. Over the front gate was the name: UNEEDAREST.
Martin and Leora came into a shambles of salutations and daughters. The
eight girls, from pretty Orchid aged nineteen to the five-year-old
twins, surged up in a tidal wave of friendly curiosity and tried to talk
all at once.
Their hostess was a plump woman with an air of worried trustfulness. Her
conviction that everything was all right was constantly struggling with
her knowledge that a great many things seemed to be all wrong. She
kissed Leora while Pickerbaugh was pump-handling Martin. Pickerbaugh
had a way of pressing his thumb into the back of your hand which was
extraordinarily cordial and painful.
He immediately drowned out even his daughters by an oration on the Home
Nest:
“Here you’ve got an illustration of Health in the Home. Look at these
great strapping girls, Arrowsmith! Never been sick a day in their
lives--practically--and though Mother does have her sick-headaches,
that’s to be attributed to the early neglect of her diet, because while
her father, the old deacon--and a fine upstanding gentleman of the old
school he was, too, if there ever was one, and a friend of Nathaniel
Mugford, to whom more than any other we owe not only the foundation of
Mugford College but also the tradition of integrity and industry which
have produced our present prosperity-- BUT he had no knowledge of diet
or sanitation, and I’ve always thought--”
The daughters were introduced as Orchid, Verbena, Daisy, Jonquil,
Hibisca, Narcissa, and the twins, Arbuta and Gladiola.
Mrs. Pickerbaugh sighed:
“I suppose it would be dreadfully conventional to call them My
Jewels-- I do so hate these conventional phrases that everybody uses,
don’t you?--but that’s what they really are to their mother, and the
Doctor and I have sometimes wished-- Of course when we’d started giving
them floral names we had to keep it up, but if we’d started with jewels,
just think of all the darling names we might have used, like Agate and
Cameo and Sardonyx and Beryl and Topaz and Opal and Esmeralda and
Chrysoprase--it _is_ Chrysoprase, isn’t it, not Chrysalis? Oh, well,
many people have congratulated us on their names as it is. You know the
girls are getting quite famous--their pictures in so many papers, and we
have a Pickerbaugh Ladies’ Baseball Team all our own--only the Doctor
has to play on it now, because I’m beginning to get a little stout.”
Except by their ages, it was impossible to tell the daughters apart.
They were all bouncing, all blond, all pretty, all eager, all musical,
and not merely pure but clamorously clean-minded. They all belonged to
the Congregational Sunday School, and to either the Y. W. C. A. or the
Camp Fire Girls; they were all fond of picnicking; and they could all of
them, except the five-year-old twins, quote practically without error
the newest statistics showing the evils of alcohol.
“In fact,” said Dr. Pickerbaugh, “_we_ think they’re a very striking
brood of chickabiddies.”
“They certainly are!” quivered Martin.
“But best of all, they are able to help me put over the doctrine of the
_Mens Sana_ in the _Corpus Sano_. Mrs. Pickerbaugh and I have trained
them to sing together, both in the home and publicly, and as an
organization we call them the Healthette Octette.”
“Really?” said Leora, when it was apparent that Martin had passed beyond
speech.
“Yes, and before I get through with it I hope to popularize the name
Healthette from end to end of this old nation, and you’re going to see
bands of happy young women going around spreading their winged message
into every dark corner. Healthette Bands! Beautiful and pure-minded and
enthusiastic and good basket-ball players! I tell you, _they’ll_ make
the lazy and wilful stir their stumps! They’ll shame the filthy livers
and filthy talkers into decency! I’ve already worked out a poem-slogan
for the Healthette Bands. Would you like to hear it?
Winsome young womanhood wins with a smile
Boozers, spitters, and gamblers from things that are vile.
Our parents and teachers have explained the cause of life,
So against the evil-minded we’ll also make strife.
We’ll shame them, reclaim them, from bad habits, you bet!
Better watch out, Mr. Loafer, I am a Healthette!
“But of course an even more important Cause is--and I was one of the
first to advocate it--having a Secretary of Health and Eugenics in the
cabinet at Washington--”
On the tide of this dissertation they were swept through a stupendous
dinner. With a hearty “Nonsense, nonsense, man, of course you want a
second helping--this is Hospitality Hall!” Pickerbaugh so stuffed Martin
and Leora with roast duck, candied sweet potatoes, and mince pie that
they became dangerously ill and sat glassy-eyed. But Pickerbaugh himself
did not seem to be affected. While he carved and gobbled, he went on
discoursing till the dining-room, with its old walnut buffet, its
Hoffmann pictures of Christ, and its Remington pictures of cowpunchers,
seemed to vanish, leaving him on a platform beside a pitcher of
ice-water.
Not always was he merely fantastic. “Dr. Arrowsmith, I tell you we’re
lucky men to be able to get a living out of doing our honest best to
make the people in a he-town like this well and vital. I could be
pulling down eight or ten thousand a year in private practise, and I’ve
been told I could make more than that in the art of advertising, yet I’m
glad, and my dear ones are glad with me, to take a salary of four
thousand. Think of our having a job where we’ve got nothing to sell but
honesty and decency and the brotherhood o’ man!”
Martin perceived that Pickerbaugh meant it, and the shame of the
realization kept him from leaping up, seizing Leora, and catching the
first freight train out of Nautilus.
After dinner the younger daughters desired to love Leora, in swarms.
Martin had to take the twins on his knees and tell them a story. They
were remarkably heavy twins, but no heavier than the labor of inventing
a plot. Before they went to bed, the entire Healthette Octette sang the
famous Health Hymn (written by Dr. Almus Pickerbaugh) which Martin was
to hear on so many bright and active public occasions in Nautilus. It
was set to the tune of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” but as the
twins’ voices were energetic and extraordinarily shrill, it had an
effect all its own:
Oh, are you out for happiness or are you out for pelf?
You owe it to the grand old flag to cultivate yourself,
To train the mind, keep clean the streets, and ever guard your health,
Then we’ll all go marching on.
A healthy mind in A clean body,
A healthy mind in A clean body,
A healthy mind in A clean body,
The slogan for one and all.
As a bedtime farewell, the twins then recited, as they had recently
recited at the Congregational Festival, one of their father’s minor
lyrics:
What does little birdie say
On the sill at break o’ day?
“Hurrah for health in Nautilus
For Pa and Ma and all of us,
Hurray, hurray, hurray!”
“There, my popsywopsies, up to bed we go!” said Mrs. Pickerbaugh. “Don’t
you think, Mrs. Arrowsmith, they’re natural-born actresses? They’re not
afraid of any audience, and the way they throw themselves into
it--perhaps not Broadway, but the more refined theaters in New York
would just love them, and maybe they’ve been sent to us to elevate the
drama. Upsy go.”
During her absence the others gave a brief musical program.
Verbena, the second oldest, played Chaminade. (“Of course we all love
music, and popularize it among the neighbors, but Verby is perhaps the
only real musical genius in the family.”) But the unexpected feature was
Orchid’s cornet solo.
Martin dared not look at Leora. It was not that he was sniffily superior
to cornet solos, for in Elk Mills, Wheatsylvania, and surprisingly large
portions of Zenith, cornet solos were done by the most virtuous females.
But he felt that he had been in a madhouse for dozens of years.
“I’ve never been so drunk in my life. I wish I could get at a drink and
sober up,” he agonized. He made hysterical and completely impractical
plans for escape. Then Mrs. Pickerbaugh, returning from the still
audible twins, sat down at the harp.
While she played, a faded woman and thickish, she fell into a great
dreaming, and suddenly Martin had a picture of her as gay, good,
dove-like maiden who had admired the energetic young medical student,
Almus Pickerbaugh. She must have been a veritable girl of the late
eighties and the early nineties, the naïve and idyllic age of Howells,
when young men were pure, when they played croquet and sang Swanee
River; a girl who sat on a front porch enchanted by the sweetness of
lilacs, and hoped that when Almus and she were married they would have a
nickel-plated baseburner stove and a son who would become a missionary
or a millionaire.
For the first time that evening, Martin managed to put a respectable
heartiness into his “Enjoyed that s’ much.” He felt victorious, and
somewhat recovered from his weakness.
But the evening’s orgy was only begun.
They played word-games, which Martin hated and Leora did very badly
indeed. They acted charades, at which Pickerbaugh was tremendous. The
sight of him on the floor in his wife’s fur coat, being a seal on an
ice-floe, was incomparable. Then Martin, Orchid, and Hibisca (aged
twelve) had to present a charade, and there were complications.
Orchid was as full of simple affections, of smilings and pattings and
bouncings, as her younger sisters, but she was nineteen and not
altogether a child. Doubtless she was as pure-minded and as devoted to
Clean and Wholesome Novels as Dr. Pickerbaugh stated, and he stated it
with frequency, but she was not unconscious of young men, even though
they were married.
She planned to enact the word _doleful_, with a beggar asking a dole,
and a corncrib full. As they skipped upstairs to dress, she hugged
Martin’s arm, frisked beside him, and murmured, “Oh, Doctor, I’m so glad
Daddy has you for assistant--somebody that’s young and good-looking. Oh,
was that dreadful of me? But I mean: you look so athletic and
everything, and the other assistant director--don’t tell Daddy I said
so, but he was an old crank!”
He was conscious of brown eyes and unshadowed virginal lips. As Orchid
put on her agreeably loose costume as a beggar, he was also conscious of
ankles and young bosom. She smiled at him, as one who had long known
him, and said loyally, “We’ll show ’em! I know you’re a dan-dy actor!”
When they bustled downstairs, as she did not take his arm, he took hers,
and he pressed it slightly and felt alarmed and relinquished it with
emphasis.
Since his marriage he had been so absorbed in Leora, as lover, as
companion, as helper, that till this hour his most devastating adventure
had been a glance at a pretty girl in a train. But the flushed young
gaiety of Orchid disturbed him. He wanted to be rid of her, he hoped
that he would not be altogether rid of her, and for the first time in
years he was afraid of Leora’s eyes.
There were acrobatic feats later, and a considerable prominence of
Orchid, who did not wear stays, who loved dancing, and who praised
Martin’s feats in the game of “Follow the Leader.”
All the daughters save Orchid were sent to bed, and the rest of the fête
consisted of what Pickerbaugh called “a little quiet scientific
conversation by the fireside,” made up of his observations on good
roads, rural sanitation, Ideals in politics, and methods of letter
filing in health departments. Through this placid hour, or it may have
been an hour and a half, Martin saw that Orchid was observing his hair,
his jaw, his hands, and he had, and dismissed, and had again a thought
about the innocent agreeableness of holding her small friendly paw.
He also saw that Leora was observing both of them, and he suffered a
good deal, and had practically no benefit whatever from Pickerbaugh’s
notes on the value of disinfectants. When Pickerbaugh predicted for
Nautilus, in fifteen years, a health department thrice as large, with
many full-time clinic and school physicians and possibly Martin as
director (Pickerbaugh himself having gone off to mysterious and
interesting activities in a Larger Field), Martin merely croaked, “Yes,
that’d be--be fine,” while to himself he was explaining, “Damn that
girl, I wish she wouldn’t shake herself at me.”
At half-past eight he had pictured his escape as life’s highest ecstasy;
at twelve he took leave with nervous hesitation.
They walked to the hotel. Free from the sight of Orchid, brisk in the
coolness, he forgot the chit and pawed again the problem of his work in
Nautilus.
“Lord, I don’t know whether I can do it. To work under that gas-bag,
with his fool pieces about boozers--”
“They weren’t so bad,” protested Leora.
“Bad? Why, he’s probably the worst poet that ever lived, and he
certainly knows less about epidemiology than I thought any one man could
ever learn, all by himself. But when it comes to this--what was it Clif
Clawson used to call it?--by the way, wonder what’s ever become of Clif;
haven’t heard from him for a couple o’ years--when it comes to this
‘overpowering Christian Domesticity’-- Oh, let’s hunt for a blind-pig
and sit around with the nice restful burglars.”
She insisted, “I thought his poems were kind of cute.”
“Cute! What a word!”
“It’s no worse than the cuss-words you’re always using! But the cornet
yowling by that awful oldest daughter-- Ugh!”
“Well, now she played darn’ well!”
“Martin, the cornet is the kind of an instrument my brother would play.
And you so superior about the doctor’s poetry and my saying ‘cute’!
You’re just as much a backwoods hick as I am, and maybe more so!”
“Why, gee, Leora, I never knew you to get sore about nothing before! And
can’t you understand how important-- You see, a man like Pickerbaugh
makes all public health work simply ridiculous by his circusing and his
ignorance. If he said that fresh air was a good thing, instead of making
me open my windows it’d make me or any other reasonable person close
’em. And to use the word ‘science’ in those flop-eared limericks or
whatever you call ’em--it’s sacrilege!”
“Well, if you want to _know_, Martin Arrowsmith, I’ll have no more of
these high jinks with that Orchid girl! Practically hugging her when you
came downstairs, and then mooning at her all evening! I don’t mind your
cursing and being cranky and even getting drunk, in a reasonable sort of
way, but ever since the lunch when you told me and that Fox woman, ‘I
hope you girls won’t mind, but I just happen to remember that I’m
engaged to both of you’-- You’re mine, and I won’t have any trespassers.
I’m a cavewoman, and you’d better learn it, and as for that Orchid, with
her simper and her stroking your arm and her great big absurd
feet-- Orchid! She’s no orchid! She’s a bachelor’s button!”
“But, honest, I don’t even remember which of the eight she was.”
“Huh! Then you’ve been making love to all of ’em, that’s why. Drat her!
Well, I’m not going to go on scrapping about it. I just wanted to warn
you, that’s all.”
At the hotel, after giving up the attempt to find a short, jovial,
convincing way of promising that he would never flirt with Orchid, he
stammered, “If you don’t mind, I think I’ll stay down and walk a little
more. I’ve got to figure this health department business out.”
He sat in the Sims House office--singularly dismal it was, after
midnight, and singularly smelly.
“That fool Pickerbaugh! I wish I’d told him right out that we know
hardly anything about the epidemiology of tuberculosis, for instance.
“Just the same, she’s a darling child. Orchid! She’s like an orchid--no,
she’s too healthy. Be a great kid to go hunting with. Sweet. And she
acted as if I were her own age, not an old doctor. I’ll be good, oh,
I’ll be good, but-- I’d like to kiss her once, _good_! She likes me.
Those darling lips, like--like rosebuds!
“Poor Leora. I nev’ was so astonished in my life. Jealous. Well, she’s
got a right to be! No woman ever stood by a man like-- Lee, sweet, can’t
you see, idiot, if I skipped round the corner with seventeen billion
Orchids, it’d be you I loved, and never anybody but you!
“I can’t go round singing Healthette Octette Pantalette stuff. Even if
it did instruct people, which it don’t. Be almost better to let ’em die
than have to live and listen to--
“Leora said I was a ‘backwoods hick.’ Let me tell you, young woman, as
it happens I am a Bachelor of Arts, and you may recall the kind of books
the ‘backwoods hick’ was reading to you last winter, and even Henry
James and everybody and-- Oh, she’s right. I am. I do know how to make
pipets and agar, but-- And yet some day I want to travel like
Sondelius--
“Sondelius! God! If it were he I was working for, instead of
Pickerbaugh, I’d slave for him--
“Or does he pull the bunk, too?
“Now that’s just what I mean. That kind of phrase. ‘Pull the bunk’!
Horrible!
“Hell! I’ll use any kind of phrase I want to! I’m not one of your social
climbers like Angus. The way Sondelius cusses, for instance, and yet
he’s used to all those highbrows--
“And I’ll be so busy here in Nautilus that I won’t even be able to go on
reading. Still-- I don’t suppose they read much, but there must be quite
a few of these rich men here that know about nice houses. Clothes.
Theaters. That stuff.
“Rats!”
He wandered to an all-night lunch-wagon, where he gloomily drank coffee.
Beside him, seated at the long shelf which served as table, beneath the
noble red-glass window with a portrait of George Washington, was a
policeman who, as he gnawed a Hamburger sandwich, demanded:
“Say, ain’t you this new doctor that’s come to assist Pickerbaugh? Seen
you at City Hall.”
“Yes. Say, uh, say how does the city like Pickerbaugh? How do you like
him? Tell me honestly, because I’m just starting in, and, uh-- You get
me.”
With his spoon held inside the cup by a brawny thumb, the policeman
gulped his coffee and proclaimed, while the greasy friendly cook of the
lunch-wagon nodded in agreement:
“Well, if you want the straight dope, he hollers a good deal, but he’s
one awful brainy man. He certainly can sling the Queen’s English, and
jever hear one of his poems? They’re darn’ bright. I’ll tell you:
There’s some people say Pickerbaugh pulls the song and dance too much,
but way I figure it, course maybe for you and me, Doctor, it’d be all
right if he just looked after the milk and the garbage and the kids’
teeth. But there’s a lot of careless, ignorant, foreign slobs that need
to be jollied into using their konks about these health biznai, so’s
they won’t go getting sick with a lot of these infectious diseases and
pass ’em on to the rest of us, and believe me, old Doc Pickerbaugh is
the boy that gets the idea into their noodles!
“Yes, sir, he’s a great old coot--he ain’t a clam like some of these
docs. Why, say, one day he showed up at the St. Patrick picnic, even if
he is a dirty Protestant, and him and Father Costello chummed up like
two old cronies, and darn’ if he didn’t wrestle a fellow half his age,
and awful’ near throw him, yes, you bet he did, he certainly give that
young fellow a run for his money all right! We fellows on the Force all
like him, and we have to grin, the way he comes around and soft-soaps us
into doing a lot of health work that by law we ain’t hardly supposed to
do, you might say, instead of issuing a lot of fool orders. You bet.
He’s a real guy.”
“I see,” said Martin, and as he returned to the hotel he meditated:
“But think of what Gottlieb would say about him.
“Damn Gottlieb! Damn everybody except Leora!
“I’m not going to fail here, way I did in Wheatsylvania.
“Some day Pickerbaugh will get a bigger job-- Huh! He’s just the kind of
jollying fourflusher that _would_ climb! But anyway, I’ll have my
training then, and maybe I’ll make a real health department here.
“Orchid said we’d go skating this winter--
“_Damn_ Orchid!”
CHAPTER XX
I
Martin found in Dr. Pickerbaugh a generous chief. He was eager to have
Martin invent and clamor about his own Causes and Movements. His
scientific knowledge was rather thinner than that of the visiting
nurses, but he had little jealousy, and he demanded of Martin only the
belief that a rapid and noisy moving from place to place is the means
(and possibly the end) of Progress.
In a two-family house on Social Hill, which is not a hill but a slight
swelling in the plain, Martin and Leora found an upper floor. There was
a simple pleasantness in these continuous lawns, these wide maple-shaded
streets, and a joy in freedom from the peering whisperers of
Wheatsylvania.
Suddenly they were being courted by the Nice Society of Nautilus.
A few days after their arrival Martin was summoned to the telephone to
hear a masculine voice rasping:
“Hello. Martin? I bet you can’t guess who this is!”
Martin, very busy, restrained his desire to observe, “You win--g’ by!”
and he buzzed, with the cordiality suitable to a new Assistant Director:
“No, I’m afraid I can’t.”
“Well, make a guess.”
“Oh-- Clif Clawson?”
“Nope. Say, I see you’re looking fine. Oh, I guess I’ve got you guessing
this time! Go on! Have another try!”
The stenographer was waiting to take letters, and Martin had not yet
learned to become impersonal and indifferent in her presence. He said
with a perceptible tartness:
“Oh, I suppose it’s President Wilson. Look here--”
“Well, Mart, it’s Irve Watters! What do you know about that!”
Apparently the jester expected large gratification, but it took ten
seconds for Martin to remember who Irving Watters might be. Then he had
it: Watters, the appalling normal medical student whose faith in the
good, the true, the profitable, had annoyed him at Digamma Pi. He made
his response as hearty as he could:
“Well, well, what you doing here, Irve?”
“Why, I’m settled here. Been here ever since internship. And got a nice
little practise, too. Look, Mart, Mrs. Watters and I want you and your
wife-- I believe you are married, aren’t you?--to come up to the house
for dinner, to-morrow evening, and I’ll put you onto all the local
slants.”
The dread of Watters’s patronage enabled Martin to lie vigorously:
“Awfully sorry--awfully sorry--got a date for to-morrow evening and the
next evening.”
“Then come have lunch with me to-morrow at the Elks’ Club, and you and
your wife take dinner with us Sunday noon.”
Hopelessly, “I don’t think I can make it for lunch but-- Well, we’ll
dine with you Sunday.”
It is one of the major tragedies that nothing is more discomforting than
the hearty affection of the Old Friends who never were friends. Martin’s
imaginative dismay at being caught here by Watters was not lessened when
Leora and he reluctantly appeared on Sunday at one-thirty and were by a
fury of Old Friendship dragged back into the days of Digamma Pi.
Watters’s house was new, and furnished in a highly built-in and
leaded-glass manner. He had in three years of practise already become
didactic and incredibly married; he had put on weight and infallibility;
and he had learned many new things about which to be dull. Having been
graduated a year earlier than Martin and having married an almost rich
wife, he was kind and hospitable with an emphasis which aroused a desire
to do homicide. His conversation was a series of maxims and admonitions:
“If you stay with the Department of Public Health for a couple of years
and take care to meet the right people, you’ll be able to go into very
lucrative practise here. It’s a fine town--prosperous--so few dead
beats.
“You want to join the country club and take up golf. Best opportunity in
the world to meet the substantial citizens. I’ve picked up more than one
high-class patient there.
“Pickerbaugh is a good active man and a fine booster but he’s got a bad
socialistic tendency. These clinics--outrageous--the people that go to
them that can afford to pay! Pauperize people. Now this may startle
you--oh, you had a lot of crank notions when you were in school, but you
aren’t the only one that does some thinking for himself!--sometimes I
believe it’d be better for the general health situation if there weren’t
any public health departments at all, because they get a lot of people
into the habit of going to free clinics instead of to private
physicians, and cut down the earnings of the doctors and reduce their
number, so there are less of us to keep a watchful eye on sickness.
“I guess by this time you’ve gotten over the funny ideas you used to
have about being practical--‘commercialism’ you used to call it. You can
see now that you’ve got to support your wife and family, and if you
don’t, nobody else is going to.
“Any time you want a straight tip about people here, you just come to
me. Pickerbaugh is a crank--he won’t give you the right dope--the people
you want to tie up with are the good, solid, conservative, successful
business men.”
Then Mrs. Watters had her turn. She was meaty with advice, being the
daughter of a prosperous person, none other than Mr. S. A. Peaseley, the
manufacturer of the Daisy Manure Spreader.
“You haven’t any children?” she sobbed at Leora. “Oh, you must! Irving
and I have two, and you don’t know what an interest they are to us, and
they keep us so young.”
Martin and Leora looked at each other pitifully.
After dinner, Irving insisted on their recalling the “good times we used
to have together at the dear old U.” He took no denial. “You always want
to make folks think you’re eccentric, Mart. You pretend you haven’t any
college patriotism, but I know better-- I know you’re showing off--you
admire the old place and our profs just as much as anybody. Maybe I know
you better than you do yourself! Come on, now; let’s give a long cheer
and sing ‘Winnemac, Mother of Brawny Men.’”
And, “Don’t be silly; of course you’re going to sing,” said Mrs.
Watters, as she marched to the piano, with which she dealt in a firm
manner.
When they had politely labored through the fried chicken and brick ice
cream, through the maxims, gurglings, and memories, Martin and Leora
went forth and spoke in tongues:
“Pickerbaugh must be a saint, if Watters roasts him. I begin to believe
he has sense enough to come in when it rains.”
In their common misery they forgot that they had been agitated by a girl
named Orchid.
II
Between Pickerbaugh and Irving Watters, Martin was drafted into many of
the associations, clubs, lodges, and “causes” with which Nautilus
foamed; into the Chamber of Commerce, the Moccasin Ski and Hiking Club,
the Elks’ Club, the Oddfellows, and the Evangeline County Medical
society. He resisted, but they said in a high hurt manner, “Why, my boy,
if you’re going to be a public official, and if you have the slightest
appreciation of their efforts to make you welcome here--”
Leora and he found themselves with so many invitations that they, who
had deplored the dullness of Wheatsylvania, complained now that they
could have no quiet evenings at home. But they fell into the habit of
social ease, of dressing, of going places without nervous anticipation.
They modernized their rustic dancing; they learned to play bridge,
rather badly, and tennis rather well; and Martin, not by virtue and
heroism but merely by habit, got out of the way of resenting the chirp
of small talk.
Probably they were never recognized by their hostesses as pirates, but
considered a Bright Young Couple who, since they were protégés of
Pickerbaugh, must be earnest and forward-looking, and who, since they
were patronized by Irving and Mrs. Watters, must be respectable.
Watters took them in hand and kept them there. He had so thick a rind
that it was impossible for him to understand that Martin’s frequent
refusals of his invitations could conceivably mean that he did not wish
to come. He detected traces of heterodoxy in Martin, and with affection,
diligence, and an extraordinarily heavy humor he devoted himself to the
work of salvation. Frequently he sought to entertain other guests by
urging, “Come on now, Mart, let’s hear some of those crazy ideas of
yours!”
His friendly zeal was drab compared with that of his wife. Mrs. Watters
had been reared by her father and by her husband to believe that she was
the final fruit of the ages, and she set herself to correct the
barbarism of the Arrowsmiths. She rebuked Martin’s damns, Leora’s
smoking, and both their theories of bidding at bridge. But she never
nagged. To have nagged would have been to admit that there were persons
who did not acknowledge her sovereignty. She merely gave orders, brief,
humorous, and introduced by a strident “Now don’t be silly,” and she
expected that to settle the matter.
Martin groaned, “Oh, Lord, between Pickerbaugh and Irve, it’s easier to
become a respectable member of society than to go on fighting.”
But Watters and Pickerbaugh were not so great a compulsion to
respectability as the charms of finding himself listened to in Nautilus
as he never had been in Wheatsylvania, and of finding himself admired by
Orchid.
III
He had been seeking a precipitation test for the diagnosis of syphilis
which should be quicker and simpler than the Wassermann. His slackened
fingers and rusty mind were becoming used to the laboratory and to
passionate hypotheses when he was dragged away to help Pickerbaugh in
securing publicity. He was coaxed into making his first speech: an
address on “What the Laboratory Teaches about Epidemics” for the Sunday
Afternoon Free Lecture Course of the Star of Hope Universalist Church.
He was flustered when he tried to prepare his notes, and on the morning
of the affair he was chill as he remembered the dreadful thing he would
do this day, but he was desperate with embarrassment when he came up to
the Star of Hope Church.
People were crowding in; mature, responsible people. He quaked, “They’re
coming to hear _me_, and I haven’t got a darn’ thing to say to ’em!” It
made him feel the more ridiculous that they who presumably wished to
listen to him should not be aware of him, and that the usher, profusely
shaking hands at the Byzantine portal, should bluster, “You’ll find
plenty room right up the side aisles, young man.”
“I’m the speaker for the afternoon.”
“Oh, oh, yes, oh, yes, Doctor. Right round to the Bevis Street entrance,
if you please, Doctor.”
In the parlors he was unctuously received by the pastor and a committee
of three, wearing morning clothes and a manner of Christian
intellectuality.
They held his hand in turn, they brought up rustling women to meet him,
they stood about him in a polite and twittery circle, and dismayingly
they expected him to say something intelligent. Then, suffering, ghastly
frightened, dumb, he was led through an arched doorway into the
auditorium. Millions of faces were staring at his apologetic
insignificance--faces in the curving lines of pews, faces in the low
balcony, eyes which followed him and doubted him and noted that his
heels were run down.
The agony grew while he was prayed over and sung over.
The pastor and the lay chairman of the Lecture Course opened with
suitable devotions. While Martin trembled and tried to look brazenly at
the massed people who were looking at him, while he sat nude and exposed
and unprotected on the high platform, the pastor made announcement of
the Thursday Missionary Supper and the Little Lads’ Marching Club. They
sang a brief cheerful hymn or two-- Martin wondering whether to sit or
stand--and the chairman prayed that “our friend who will address us
to-day may have power to put his Message across.” Through the prayer
Martin sat with his forehead in his hand, feeling foolish, and raving,
“I guess this is the proper attitude--they’re all gawping at me--gosh,
won’t he ever quit?--oh, damn it, now what was that point I was going to
make about fumigation?--oh, Lord, he’s winding up and I’ve got to
shoot!”
Somehow, he was standing by the reading-desk, holding it for support,
and his voice seemed to be going on, producing reasonable words. The
blur of faces cleared and he saw individuals. He picked out a keen old
man and tried to make him laugh and marvel.
He found Leora, toward the back, nodding to him, reassuring him. He
dared to look away from the path of faces directly in front of him. He
glanced at the balcony--
The audience perceived a young man who was being earnest about sera and
vaccines but, while his voice buzzed on, that churchly young man had
noted two silken ankles distinguishing the front row of the balcony, had
discovered that they belonged to Orchid Pickerbaugh and that she was
flashing down admiration.
At the end Martin had the most enthusiastic applause ever known--all
lecturers, after all lectures, are gratified by that kind of
applause--and the chairman said the most flattering things ever uttered,
and the audience went out with the most remarkable speed ever
witnessed, and Martin discovered himself holding Orchid’s hand in the
parlors while she warbled, in the most adorable voice ever heard, “Oh,
Dr. Arrowsmith, you were just wonderful! Most of these lecturers are old
stuffs, but you put it right over! I’m going to do a dash home and tell
Dad. He’ll be so tickled!”
Not till then did he find that Leora had made her way to the parlors and
was looking at them like a wife.
As they walked home Leora was eloquently silent.
“Well, did you like my spiel?” he said, after a suitable time of
indignant waiting.
“Yes, it wasn’t bad. It must have been awfully hard to talk to all those
stupid people.”
“Stupid? What d’you mean by ‘stupid’? They got me splendidly. They were
fine.”
“Were they? Well anyway, thank Heaven, you won’t have to keep up this
silly gassing. Pickerbaugh likes to hear himself talk too well to let
you in on it very often.”
“I didn’t mind it. Fact, don’t know but what it’s a good thing to have
to express myself publicly now and then. Makes you think more lucidly.”
“As for instance the nice, lovely, lucid politicians!”
“Now you look here, Lee! Of course we know your husband is a mutt, and
no good outside the laboratory, but I do think you might _pretend_ to be
a little enthusiastic over the first address he’s ever made--the very
first he’s ev-er tackled--when it went off so well.”
“Why, silly, I was enthusiastic. I applauded a lot. I thought you were
terribly smart. It’s just-- There’s other things I think you can do
better. What shall we do to-night; have a cold snack at home or go to
the cafeteria?”
Thus was he reduced from hero to husband, and he had all the pleasures
of inappreciation.
He thought about his indignities the whole week, but with the coming of
winter there was a fever of dully sprightly dinners and safely wild
bridge and their first evening at home, their first opportunity for
secure and comfortable quarreling, was on Friday. They sat down to what
he announced as “getting back to some real reading, like physiology and
a little of this fellow Arnold Bennett--nice quiet reading,” but which
consisted of catching up on the news notes in the medical journals.
He was restless. He threw down his magazine. He demanded:
“What’re you going to wear at Pickerbaugh’s snow-picnic to-morrow?”
“Oh, I haven’t-- I’ll find something.”
“Lee, I want to ask you: Why the devil did you say I talked too much at
Dr. Strafford’s last evening? I know I’ve got most of the faults going,
but I didn’t know talking too much was one of ’em.”
“It hasn’t been, till now.”
“’Till now’!”
“You look here, Sandy Arrowsmith! You’ve been pouting like a bad brat,
all week. What’s the matter with you?”
“Well, I-- Gosh, it makes me tired! Here everybody is so enthusiastic
about my Star of Hope spiel--that note in the _Morning Frontiersman_,
and Pickerbaugh says Orchid said it was a corker--and you never so much
as peep!”
“Didn’t I applaud? But-- It’s just that I hope you aren’t going to keep
up this drooling.”
“You do, do you! Well, let me tell you I _am_ going to keep it up! Not
that I’m going to talk a lot of hot air. I gave ’em straight science,
last Sunday, and they ate it up. I hadn’t realized it isn’t necessary to
be mushy, to hold an audience. And the amount of good you can do! Why, I
got across more Health Instruction and ideas about the value of the lab
in that three-quarters of an hour than-- I don’t care for being a big
gun but it’s fine to have people where they have to listen to what
you’ve got to say and can’t butt in, way they did in Wheatsylvania. You
bet I’m going to keep up what you so politely call my damn’ fool
drooling--”
“Sandy, it may be all right for some people, but not for you. I can’t
tell you--that’s one reason why I haven’t said more about your talk-- I
can’t tell you how astonished I am to hear you, who’re always sneering
at what you call sentimentality, simply weeping over the Dear Little
Tots!”
“I never said that--never used the phrase and you know it. And by God!
_You_ talk about sneering! Just let me tell you that the Public Health
Movement, by correcting early faults in children, by looking after their
eyes and tonsils and so on, can save millions of lives and make a future
generation--”
“I know it! I love children much more than you do! But I mean all this
ridiculous simpering--”
“Well, gosh, somebody has to do it. You can’t work with people till you
educate ’em. There’s where old Pick, even if he is an imbecile, does
such good work with his poems and all that stuff. Prob’ly be a good
thing if I could write ’em--golly, wonder if I couldn’t learn to?”
“They’re horrible!”
“Now there’s a fine consistency for you! The other evening you called
’em ‘cute.’”
“I don’t have to be consistent. I’m a mere woman. You, Martin
Arrowsmith, you’d be the first to tell me so. And for Dr. Pickerbaugh
they’re all right, but not for you. You belong in a laboratory, finding
out things, not advertising them. Do you remember once in Wheatsylvania
for five minutes you almost thought of joining a church and being a
Respectable Citizen? Are you going on for the rest of your life,
stumbling into respectability and having to be dug out again? Will you
never learn you’re a barbarian?”
“By God, I am! And--what was that other lovely thing you called
me?-- I’m also, soul of my soul, a damn’ backwoods hick! And a fine lot
you help! When I want to settle down to a decent and useful life and not
go ’round antagonizing people, you, the one that ought to believe in me,
you’re the first one to crab!”
“Maybe Orchid Pickerbaugh would help you better.”
“She probably would! Believe me, she’s a darling, and she did appreciate
my spiel at the church, and if you think I’m going to sit up all night
listening to you sneering at my work and my friends-- I’m going to have
a hot bath. Good _night_!”
In the bath he gasped that it was impossible he should have been
quarreling with Leora. Why! She was the only person in the world,
besides Gottlieb and Sondelius and Clif Clawson--by the way, where was
Clif? still in New York? didn’t Clif owe him a letter? but anyway-- He
was a fool to have lost his temper, even if she was so stubborn that she
wouldn’t adjust her opinions, couldn’t see that he had a gift for
influencing people. Nobody would ever stand by him as she had, and he
loved her--
He dried himself violently; he dashed in with repentances; they told
each other that they were the most reasonable persons living; they
kissed with eloquence; and then Leora reflected:
“Just the same, my lad, I’m not going to help you fool yourself. You’re
not a booster. You’re a lie-hunter. Funny, you’d think to hear about
these lie-hunters, like Professor Gottlieb and your old Voltaire, they
couldn’t be fooled. But maybe they were like you: always trying to get
away from the tiresome truth, always hoping to settle down and be rich,
always selling their souls to the devil and then going and
double-crossing the poor devil. I think-- I think--” She sat up in bed,
holding her temples in the labor of articulation. “You’re different from
Professor Gottlieb. He never makes mistakes or wastes time on--”
“He wasted time at Hunziker’s nostrum factory all right, and his title
is ‘Doctor,’ not ‘Professor,’ if you _must_ give him a--”
“If he went to Hunziker’s he had some good reason. He’s a genius; he
couldn’t be wrong. Or could he, even he? But _anyway_: you, Sandy, you
have to stumble every so often; have to learn by making mistakes. I will
say one thing: you learn from your crazy mistakes. But I get a little
tired, sometimes, watching you rush up and put your neck in every
noose--like being a blinking orator or yearning over your Orchid.”
“Well by golly! After I come in here trying to make peace! It’s a good
thing _you_ never make any mistakes! But one perfect person in a
household is enough!”
He banged into bed. Silence. Soft sounds of “Mart--_Sandy_!” He ignored
her, proud that he could be hard with her, and so fell asleep. At
breakfast, when he was ashamed and eager, she was curt.
“I don’t care to discuss it,” she said.
In that wry mood they went on Saturday afternoon to the Pickerbaughs’
snow picnic.
IV
Dr. Pickerbaugh owned a small log cabin in a scanty grove of oaks among
the hillocks north of Nautilus. A dozen of them drove out in a bob-sled
filled with straw and blue woolly robes. The sleigh bells were exciting
and the children leaped out to run beside the sled.
The school physician, a bachelor, was attentive to Leora; twice he
tucked her in, and that, for Nautilus, was almost compromising. In
jealousy Martin turned openly and completely to Orchid.
He grew interested in her not for the sake of disciplining Leora but
for her own rosy sweetness. She was wearing a tweed jacket, with a tam,
a flamboyant scarf, and the first breeches any girl had dared to display
in Nautilus. She patted Martin’s knee, and when they rode behind the
sled on a perilous toboggan, she held his waist, resolutely.
She was calling him “Dr. Martin” now, and he had come to a warm
“Orchid.”
At the cabin there was a clamor of disembarkation. Together Martin and
Orchid carried in the hamper of food; together they slid down the
hillocks on skiis. When their skiis were entangled, they rolled into a
drift, and as she clung to him, unafraid and unembarrassed, it seemed to
him that in the roughness of tweeds she was but the softer and more
wonderful--eyes fearless, cheeks brilliant as she brushed the coating of
wet snow from them, flying legs of a slim boy, shoulders adorable in
their pretense of sturdy boyishness--
But “I’m a sentimental fool! Leora was right!” he snarled at himself. “I
thought you had some originality! And poor little Orchid--she’d be
shocked if she knew how sneak-minded you are!”
But poor little Orchid was coaxing, “Come on, Dr. Martin, let’s shoot
off that high bluff. We’re the only ones that have any pep.”
“That’s because we’re the only young ones.”
“It’s because you’re so young. I’m dreadfully old. I just sit and moon
when you rave about your epidemics and things.”
He saw that, with her infernal school physician, Leora was sliding on a
distant slope. It may have been pique and it may have been relief that
he was licensed to be alone with Orchid, but he ceased to speak to her
as though she were a child and he a person laden with wisdom; ceased to
speak to her as though he were looking over his shoulder. They raced to
the high bluff. They skiied down it and fell; they had one glorious
swooping slide, and wrestled in the snow.
They returned to the cabin together, to find the others away. She
stripped off her wet sweater and patted her soft blouse. They ferreted
out a thermos of hot coffee, and he looked at her as though he was going
to kiss her, and she looked back at him as though she did not mind. As
they laid out the food they hummed with the intimacy of understanding,
and when she trilled, “Now hurry up, lazy one, and put those cups on
that horrid old table,” it was as one who was content to be with him
forever.
They said nothing compromising, they did not hold hands, and as they
rode home in the electric snow-flying darkness, though they sat shoulder
by shoulder he did not put his arms about her except when the bob-sled
slewed on sharp corners. If Martin was exalted with excitement, it was
presumably caused by the wholesome exercises of the day. Nothing
happened and nobody looked uneasy. At parting all their farewells were
cheery and helpful.
And Leora made no comments, though for a day or two there was about her
a chill air which the busy Martin did not investigate.
CHAPTER XXI
I
Nautilus was one of the first communities in the country to develop the
Weeks habit, now so richly grown that we have Correspondence School
Week, Christian Science Week, Osteopathy Week, and Georgia Pine Week.
A Week is not merely a week.
If an aggressive, wide-awake, live-wire, and go-ahead church or chamber
of commerce or charity desires to improve itself, which means to get
more money, it calls in those few energetic spirits who run any city,
and proclaims a Week. This consists of one month of committee meetings,
a hundred columns of praise for the organization in the public prints,
and finally a day or two on which athletic persons flatter
inappreciative audiences in churches or cinema theaters, and the
prettiest girls in town have the pleasure of being allowed to talk to
male strangers on the street corners, apropos of giving them extremely
undecorative tags in exchange for the smallest sums which those
strangers think they must pay if they are to be considered gentlemen.
The only variation is the Weeks in which the object is not to acquire
money immediately by the sale of tags but by general advertising to get
more of it later.
Nautilus had held a Pep Week, during which a race of rapidly talking
men, formerly book-agents but now called Efficiency Engineers, went
about giving advice to shopkeepers on how to get money away from one
another more rapidly, and Dr. Almus Pickerbaugh addressed a
prayer-meeting on “The Pep of St. Paul, the First Booster.” It had held
a Gladhand Week, when everybody was supposed to speak to at least three
strangers daily, to the end that infuriated elderly traveling salesmen
were backslapped all day long by hearty and powerful unknown persons.
There had also been an Old Home Week, a Write to Mother Week, a We Want
Your Factory in Nautilus Week, an Eat More Corn Week, a Go to Church
Week, a Salvation Army Week, and an Own Your Own Auto Week.
Perhaps the bonniest of all was Y. Week, to raise eighty thousand
dollars for a new Y. M. C. A. building.
On the old building were electric signs, changed daily, announcing “You
Must Come Across,” “Young Man Come Along” and “Your Money Creates
’Appiness.” Dr. Pickerbaugh made nineteen addresses in three days,
comparing the Y. M. C. A. to the Crusaders, the Apostles, and the
expeditions of Dr. Cook--who, he believed, really had discovered the
North Pole. Orchid sold three hundred and nineteen Y. tags, seven of
them to the same man, who afterward made improper remarks to her. She
was rescued by a Y. M. C. A. secretary, who for a considerable time held
her hand to calm her.
No organization could rival Almus Pickerbaugh in the invention of Weeks.
He started in January with a Better Babies Week, and a very good Week it
was, but so hotly followed by Banish the Booze Week, Tougher Teeth Week,
and Stop the Spitter Week that people who lacked his vigor were heard
groaning, “My health is being ruined by all this fretting over health.”
During Clean-up Week, Pickerbaugh spread abroad a new lyric of his own
composition:
Germs come by stealth
And ruin health,
So listen, pard,
Just drop a card
To some man who’ll clean up your yard
And that will hit the old germs hard.
Swat the Fly Week brought him, besides the joy of giving prizes to the
children who had slaughtered the most flies, the inspiration for two
verses. Posters admonished:
Sell your hammer and buy a horn,
But hang onto the old fly-swatter.
If you don’t want disease sneaking into the Home
Then to kill the fly you gotter!
It chanced that the Fraternal Order of Eagles were holding a state
convention at Burlington that week, and Pickerbaugh telegraphed to them:
Just mention fly-prevention
At the good old Eagles’ convention.
This was quoted in ninety-six newspapers, including one in Alaska, and
waving the clippings Pickerbaugh explained to Martin, “Now you see the
way a fellow can get the truth across, if he goes at it right.”
Three Cigars a Day Week, which Pickerbaugh invented in midsummer, was
not altogether successful, partly because an injudicious humorist on a
local newspaper wanted to know whether Dr. Pickerbaugh really expected
all babes in arms to smoke as many as three cigars a day, and partly
because the cigar-manufacturers came around to the Department of Health
with strong remarks about Common Sense. Nor was there thorough
satisfaction in Can the Cat and Doctor the Dog Week.
With all his Weeks, Pickerbaugh had time to preside over the Program
Committee of the State Convention of Health Officers and Agencies.
It was he who wrote the circular letter sent to all members:
Brother Males and Shemales:
Are you coming to the Health Bee? It will be the livest Hop-to-it
that this busy lil ole planet has ever see. And it’s going to be
Practical. We’ll kiss out on all these glittering generalities and
get messages from men as kin talk, so we can lug a think or two (2)
home wid us.
Luther Botts, the famous community-sing leader, will be there to
put Wim an Wigor neverything into the program. John F. Zeisser,
M.A., M.D., nall the rest of the alphabet (part your hair Jack and
look cute, the ladies sure love you) will unlimber a coupla
key-notes. (On your tootsies, fellers, thar she blows!) From time
to time, if the brakes hold, we will, or shall in the infinitive,
hie oursellufs from wherein we are at to thither, and grab a lunch
with Wild Wittles.
Do it sound like a good show? It do! Barber, you’re next. Let’s
have those cards saying you’re coming.
This created much enthusiasm and merriment. Dr. Feesons of Clinton wrote
to Pickerbaugh:
I figure it was largely due to your snappy come-on letter that we
pulled such an attendance and with all modesty I think we may say
it was the best health convention ever held in the world. I had to
laugh at one old hen, Bostonian or somepun, who was howling that
your letter was “undignified”! Can you beat it! I think people as
hypercritical and lacking in humor as her should be treated with
the dignified contempt they deserve, the damn fool!
II
Martin was enthusiastic during Better Babies Week. Leora and he weighed
babies, examined them, made out diet charts, and in each child saw the
baby they could never have. But when it came to More Babies Week, then
he was argumentative. He believed, he said, in birth-control.
Pickerbaugh answered with theology, violence, and the example of his own
eight beauties.
Martin was equally unconvinced by Anti-Tuberculosis Week. He liked his
windows open at night and he disliked men who spat tobacco juice on
sidewalks, but he was jarred by hearing these certainly esthetic and
possibly hygienic reforms proposed with holy frenzy and bogus
statistics.
Any questioning of his fluent figures about tuberculosis, any hint that
the cause of decline in the disease may have been natural growth of
immunity and not the crusades against spitting and stale air,
Pickerbaugh regarded as a criticism of his honesty in making such
crusades. He had the personal touchiness of most propagandists; he
believed that because he was sincere, therefore his opinions must always
be correct. To demand that he be accurate in his statements, to quote
Raymond Pearl’s dictum: “As a matter of objective scientific fact,
extremely little is known about why the mortality from tuberculosis has
declined”--this was to be a scoundrel who really liked to befoul the
pavements.
Martin was so alienated that he took an anti-social and probably vicious
joy in discovering that though the death-rate in tuberculosis certainly
had decreased during Pickerbaugh’s administration in Nautilus, it had
decreased at the same rate in most villages of the district, with no
speeches about spitting, no Open Your Windows parades.
It was fortunate for Martin that Pickerbaugh did not expect him to take
much share in his publicity campaigns but rather to be his substitute in
the office during them. They stirred in Martin the most furious and
complicated thoughts that had ever afflicted him.
Whenever he hinted criticism, Pickerbaugh answered, “What if my
statistics aren’t always exact? What if my advertising, my jollying of
the public, does strike some folks as vulgar? It all does good; it’s all
on the right side. No matter what methods we use, if we can get people
to have more fresh air and cleaner yards and less alcohol, we’re
justified.”
To himself, a little surprised, Martin put it, “Yes, does it really
matter? Does truth matter--clean, cold, unfriendly truth, Max Gottlieb’s
truth? Everybody says, ‘Oh, you mustn’t tamper with the truth,’ and
everybody is furious if you hint that they themselves are tampering with
it. Does anything matter, except making love and sleeping and eating and
being flattered?
“I think truth does matter to me, but if it does, isn’t the desire for
scientific precision simply my hobby, like another man’s excitement
about his golf? Anyway, I’m going to stick by Pickerbaugh.”
To the defense of his chief he was the more impelled by the attitude of
Irving Watters and such other physicians as attacked Pickerbaugh because
they feared that he really would be successful, and reduce their
earnings. But all the while Martin was weary of unchecked statistics.
He estimated that according to Pickerbaugh’s figures on bad teeth,
careless motoring, tuberculosis, and seven other afflictions alone,
every person in the city had a one hundred and eighty per cent chance of
dying before the age of sixteen, and he could not startle with much
alarm when Pickerbaugh shouted, “Do you realize that the number of
people who died from yaws in Pickens County, Mississippi, last year
alone, was twenty-nine and that they might all have been saved, yes,
sir, _saved_, by a daily cold shower?”
For Pickerbaugh had the dreadful habit of cold showers, even in winter,
though he might have known that nineteen men between the ages of
seventeen and forty-two died of cold showers in twenty-two years in
Milwaukee alone.
To Pickerbaugh the existence of “variables,” a word which Martin now
used as irritatingly as once he had used “control,” was without
significance. That health might be determined by temperature, heredity,
profession, soil, natural immunity, or by anything save
health-department campaigns for increased washing and morality, was to
him inconceivable.
“Variables! Huh!” Pickerbaugh snorted. “Why, every enlightened man in
the public service _knows_ enough about the causes of disease--matter
now of acting on that knowledge.”
When Martin sought to show that they certainly knew very little about
the superiority of fresh air to warmth in schools, about the hygienic
dangers of dirty streets, about the real danger of alcohol, about the
value of face-masks in influenza epidemics, about most of the things
they tub-thumped in their campaigns, Pickerbaugh merely became angry,
and Martin wanted to resign, and saw Irving Watters again, and returned
to Pickerbaugh with new zeal, and was in general as agitated and
wretched as a young revolutionist discovering the smugness of his
leaders.
He came to question what Pickerbaugh called “the proven practical value”
of his campaigns as much as the accuracy of Pickerbaugh’s biology. He
noted how bored were most of the newspapermen by being galvanized into a
new saving of the world once a fortnight, and how incomparably bored was
the Man in the Street when the nineteenth pretty girl in twenty days had
surged up demanding that he buy a tag to support an association of which
he had never heard.
But more dismaying was the slimy trail of the dollar which he beheld in
Pickerbaugh’s most ardent eloquence.
When Martin suggested that all milk should be pasteurized, that certain
tenements known to be tuberculosis-breeders should be burnt down instead
of being fumigated in a fiddling useless way, when he hinted that these
attacks would save more lives than ten thousand sermons and ten years of
parades by little girls carrying banners and being soaked by the rain,
then Pickerbaugh worried, “No, no, Martin, don’t think we could do that.
Get so much opposition from the dairymen and the landlords. Can’t
accomplish anything in this work unless you keep from offending people.”
When Pickerbaugh addressed a church or the home circle he spoke of “the
value of health in making life more joyful,” but when he addressed a
business luncheon he changed it to “the value in good round dollars and
cents of having workmen who are healthy and sober, and therefore able to
work faster at the same wages.” Parents’ associations he enlightened
upon “the saving in doctors’ bills of treating the child before
maladjustments go too far,” but to physicians he gave assurance that
public health agitation would merely make the custom of going regularly
to doctors more popular.
To Martin, he spoke of Pasteur, George Washington, Victor Vaughan, and
Edison as his masters, but in asking the business men of Nautilus--the
Rotary Club, the Chamber of Commerce, the association of
wholesalers--for their divine approval of more funds for his department,
he made it clear that they were his masters and lords of all the land,
and fatly, behind cigars, they accepted their kinghood.
Gradually Martin’s contemplation moved beyond Almus Pickerbaugh to all
leaders, of armies or empires, of universities or churches, and he saw
that most of them were Pickerbaughs. He preached to himself, as Max
Gottlieb had once preached to him, the loyalty of dissent, the faith of
being very doubtful, the gospel of not bawling gospels, the wisdom of
admitting the probable ignorance of one’s self and of everybody else,
and the energetic acceleration of a Movement for going very slow.
III
A hundred interruptions took Martin out of his laboratory. He was
summoned into the reception-room of the department to explain to angry
citizens why the garage next door to them should smell of gasoline; he
went back to his cubbyhole to dictate letters to school-principals about
dental clinics; he drove out to Swede Hollow to see what attention the
food and dairy inspector had given to the slaughter-houses; he ordered a
family in Shantytown quarantined; and escaped at last into the
laboratory.
It was well lighted, convenient, well stocked. Martin had little time
for anything but cultures, blood-tests, and Wassermanns for the private
physicians of the city, but the work rested him, and now and then he
struggled over a precipitation test which was going to replace
Wassermanns and make him famous.
Pickerbaugh apparently believed that this research would take six weeks;
Martin had hoped to do it in two years; and with the present
interruptions it would require two hundred, by which time the
Pickerbaughs would have eradicated syphilis and made the test useless.
To Martin’s duties was added the entertainment of Leora in the strange
city of Nautilus.
“Do you manage to keep busy all day?” he encouraged her, and, “Any place
you’d like to go this evening?”
She looked at him suspiciously. She was as easily and automatically
contented by herself as a pussy cat, and he had never before worried
about her amusement.
IV
The Pickerbaugh daughters were always popping into Martin’s laboratory.
The twins broke test-tubes, and made doll tents out of filter paper.
Orchid lettered the special posters for her father’s Weeks, and the
laboratory, she said, was the quietest place in which to work. While
Martin stood at his bench he was conscious of her, humming at a table in
the corner. They talked, tremendously, and he listened with fatuous
enthusiasm to opinions which, had Leora produced them, he would have
greeted with “That’s a damn’ silly remark!”
He held a clear, claret-red tube of hemolyzed blood up to the light,
thinking half of its color and half of Orchid’s ankles as she bent over
the table, absurdly patient with her paint-brushes, curling her legs in
a fantastic knot.
Abruptly he asked her, “Look here, honey. Suppose you--suppose a kid
like you were to fall in love with a married man. What d’you think she
ought to do? Be nice to him? Or chuck him?”
“Oh, she ought to chuck him. No matter how much she suffered. Even if
she liked him terribly. Because even if she liked him, she oughtn’t to
wrong his wife.”
“But suppose the wife never knew, or maybe didn’t care?” He had stopped
his pretense of working; he was standing before her, arms akimbo, dark
eyes demanding.
“Well, if she didn’t know-- But it isn’t that. I believe marriages
really and truly are made in Heaven, don’t you? Some day Prince Charming
will come, the perfect lover--” She was so young, her lips were so
young, so very sweet! “--and of course I want to keep myself for him. It
would spoil everything if I made light of love before my Hero came.”
But her smile was caressing.
He pictured them thrown together in a lonely camp. He saw her parroted
moralities forgotten. He went through a change as definite as religious
conversion or the coming of insane frenzy in war; the change from shamed
reluctance to be unfaithful to his wife, to a determination to take what
he could get. He began to resent Leora’s demand that she, who had
eternally his deepest love, should also demand his every wandering
fancy. And she did demand it. She rarely spoke of Orchid, but she could
tell (or nervously he thought she could tell) when he had spent an
afternoon with the child. Her mute examination of him made him feel
illicit. He who had never been unctuous was profuse and hearty as he
urged her, “Been home all day? Well, we’ll just skip out after dinner
and take in a movie. Or shall we call up somebody and go see ’em?
Whatever you’d like.”
He heard his voice being flowery, and he hated it and knew that Leora
was not cajoled. Whenever he drifted into one of his meditations on the
superiority of his brand of truth to Pickerbaugh’s, he snarled, “You’re
a fine bird to think about truth, you liar!”
He paid, in fact, an enormous price for looking at Orchid’s lips, and no
amount of anxiety about the price kept him from looking at them.
In early summer, two months before the outbreak of the Great War in
Europe, Leora went to Wheatsylvania for a fortnight with her family.
Then she spoke:
“Sandy, I’m not going to ask you any questions when I come back, but I
hope you won’t look as foolish as you’ve been looking lately. I don’t
think that bachelor’s button, that ragweed, that lady idiot of yours is
worth our quarreling. Sandy darling, I do want you to be happy, but
unless I up and die on you some day, I’m not going to be hung up like an
old cap. I warn you. Now about ice. I’ve left an order for a hundred
pounds a week, and if you want to get your own dinners sometimes--”
When she had gone, nothing immediately happened, though a good deal was
always about to happen. Orchid had the flapper’s curiosity as to what a
man was likely to do, but she was satisfied by exceedingly small
thrills.
Martin swore, that morning of June, that she was a fool and a flirt, and
he “hadn’t the slightest intention of going near her.” No! He would call
on Irving Watters in the evening, or read, or have a walk with the
school-clinic dentist.
But at half-past eight he was loitering toward her house.
If the elder Pickerbaughs were there-- Martin could hear himself saying,
“Thought I’d just drop by, Doctor, and ask you what you thought about--”
Hang it! Thought about what? Pickerbaugh never thought about anything.
On the low front steps he could see Orchid. Leaning over her was a boy
of twenty, one Charley, a clerk.
“Hello, Father in?” he cried, with a carelessness on which he could but
pride himself.
“I’m terribly sorry; he and Mama won’t be back till eleven. Won’t you
sit down and cool off a little?”
“Well--” He did sit down, firmly, and tried to make youthful
conversation, while Charley produced sentiments suitable, in Charley’s
opinion, to the aged Dr. Arrowsmith, and Orchid made little purry
interested sounds, an art in which she was very intelligent.
“Been, uh, been seeing many of the baseball games?” said Martin.
“Oh, been getting in all I can,” said Charley. “How’s things going at
City Hall? Been nailing a lot of cases of small-pox and winkulus
pinkulus and all those fancy diseases?”
“Oh, keep busy,” grunted old Dr. Arrowsmith.
He could think of nothing else. He listened while Charley and Orchid
giggled cryptically about things which barred him out and made him feel
a hundred years old: references to Mamie and Earl, and a violent “Yeh,
that’s all right, but any time you see me dancing with her you just tell
me about it, will yuh!” At the corner, Verbena Pickerbaugh was yelping,
and observing, “Now you quit!” to persons unknown.
“Hell! It isn’t worth it! I’m going home,” Martin sighed, but at the
moment Charley screamed, “Well, ta, ta, be good; gotta toddle along.”
He was left to Orchid and peace and a silence rather embarrassing.
“It’s so nice to be with somebody that has brains and doesn’t always try
to flirt, like Charley,” said Orchid.
He considered, “Splendid! She’s going to be just a nice good girl. And
I’ve come to my senses. We’ll just have a little chat and I’ll go home.”
She seemed to have moved nearer. She whispered at him, “I was so lonely,
especially with that horrid slangy boy, till I heard your step on the
walk. I knew it the second I heard it.”
He patted her hand. As his pats were becoming more ardent than might
have been expected from the assistant and friend of her father, she
withdrew her hand, clasped her knees, and began to chatter.
Always it had been so in the evenings when he had drifted to the porch
and found her alone. She was ten times more incalculable than the most
complex woman. He managed to feel guilty toward Leora without any of the
reputed joys of being guilty.
While she talked he tried to discover whether she had any brains
whatever. Apparently she did not have enough to attend a small
Midwestern denominational college. Verbena was going to college this
autumn, but Orchid, she explained, thought she “ought to stay home and
help Mama take care of the chickabiddies.”
“Meaning,” Martin reflected, “that she can’t even pass the Mugford
entrance exams!” But his opinion of her intelligence was suddenly
enlarged as she whimpered, “Poor little me, prob’ly I’ll always stay
here in Nautilus, while you--oh, with your knowledge and your
frightfully strong will-power, I know you’re going to conquer the
world!”
“Nonsense, I’ll never conquer any world, but I do hope to pull off a few
good health measures. Honestly, Orchid honey, do you think I have much
will-power?”
The full moon was spacious now behind the maples. The seedy Pickerbaugh
domain was enchanted; the tangled grass was a garden of roses, the
ragged grape-arbor a shrine to Diana, the old hammock turned to fringed
cloth of silver, the bad-tempered and sputtering lawn-sprinkler a
fountain, and over all the world was the proper witchery of moonstruck
love. The little city, by day as noisy and busy as a pack of children,
was stilled and forgotten. Rarely had Martin been inspired to perceive
the magic of a perfect hour, so absorbed was he ever in irascible
pondering, but now he was caught, and lifted in rapture.
He held Orchid’s quiet hand--and was lonely for Leora.
The belligerent Martin who had carried off Leora had not thought about
romance, because in his clumsy way he had been romantic. The Martin who,
like a returned warrior scented and enfeebled, yearned toward a girl in
the moonlight, now desirously lifted his face to romance and was
altogether unromantic.
He felt the duty of making love. He drew her close, but when she sighed,
“Oh, please don’t,” there was in him no ruthlessness and no conviction
with which to go on. He considered the moonlight again, but also he
considered being at the office early in the morning, and he wondered if
he could without detection slip out his watch and see what time it was.
He managed it. He stooped to kiss her good-night, and somehow didn’t
quite kiss her, and found himself walking home.
As he went, he was ruthless and convinced enough regarding himself. He
had never, he raged, however stumbling he might have been, expected to
find himself a little pilferer of love, a peeping, creeping area-sneak,
and not even successful in his sneaking, less successful than the
soda-clerks who swanked nightly with the virgins under the maples. He
told himself that Orchid was a young woman of no great wisdom, a sigher
and drawer-out of her M’s and O’s, but once he was in his lonely flat he
longed for her, thought of miraculous and completely idiotic ways of
luring her here to-night, and went to bed yearning, “Oh, Orchid--”
Perhaps he had paid too much attention to moonlight and soft summer, for
quite suddenly, one day when Orchid came swarming all over the
laboratory and perched on the bench with a whisk of stockings, he
stalked to her, masterfully seized her wrists, and kissed her as she
deserved to be kissed.
He immediately ceased to be masterful. He was frightened. He stared at
her wanly. She stared back, shocked, eyes wide, lips uncertain.
“Oh!” she profoundly said.
Then, in a tone of immense interest and some satisfaction:
“Martin--oh--my dear--do you think you ought to have done that?”
He kissed her again. She yielded and for a moment there was nothing in
the universe, neither he nor she, neither laboratory nor fathers nor
wives nor traditions, but only the intensity of their being together.
Suddenly she babbled, “I know there’s lots of conventional people that
would say we’d done wrong, and perhaps I’d have thought so, one time,
but-- Oh, I’m terribly glad I’m liberal! Of course I wouldn’t hurt dear
Leora or do anything _really_ wrong for the world, but isn’t it
wonderful that with so many bourgeois folks all around, we can rise
above them and realize the call that strength makes to strength
and-- But I’ve simply _got_ to be at the Y. W. C. A. meeting. There’s a
woman lawyer from New York that’s going to tell us about the Modern
Woman’s Career.”
When she had gone Martin viewed himself as a successful lover. “I’ve won
her,” he gloated.... Probably never has gloating been so shakily and
badly done.
That evening, when he was playing poker in his flat with Irving
Watters, the school-clinic dentist, and a young doctor from the city
clinic, the telephone bell summoned him to an excited but saccharine:
“This is Orchid. Are you glad I called up?”
“Oh, yes, yes, mighty glad you called up.” He tried to make it at once
amorously joyful, and impersonal enough to beguile the three coatless,
beer-swizzling, grinning doctors.
“Are you doing anything this evening, Marty?”
“Just, uh, couple fellows here for a little game cards.”
“Oh!” It was acute. “Oh, then you-- I was such a baby to call you up,
but Daddy is away and Verbena and everybody, and it was such a lovely
evening, and I just thought--_Do_ you think I’m an awful little silly?”
“No--no--sure not.”
“I’m so glad you don’t. I’d hate it if I thought you thought I was just
a silly to call you up. You don’t, do you?”
“No--no--course not. Look, I’ve got to--”
“I know. I mustn’t keep you. But I just wanted you to tell me whether
you thought I was a silly to--”
“No! Honest! Really!”
Three fidgety minutes later, deplorably aware of masculine snickers from
behind him, he escaped. The poker-players said all the things considered
suitable in Nautilus: “Oh, you little Don Jewen!” and “Can you beat
it--his wife only gone for a week!” and “Who is she, Doctor? Go on, you
tightwad, bring her up here!” and “Say, I know who it is; it’s that
little milliner on Prairie Avenue.”
Next noon she telephoned from a drug store that she had lain awake all
night, and on profound contemplation decided that they “mustn’t ever do
that sort of thing again”--and would he meet her at the corner of
Crimmins Street and Missouri Avenue at eight, so that they might talk it
all over?
In the afternoon she telephoned and changed the tryst to half-past
eight.
At five she called him up just to remind him--
In the laboratory that day Martin transplanted cultures no more. He was
too confusedly human to be a satisfactory experimenter, too coldly
thinking to be a satisfactory sinful male, and all the while he longed
for the sure solace of Leora.
“I can go as far as I like with her to-night.
“But she’s a brainless man-chaser.
“All the better. I’m tired of being a punk philosopher.
“I wonder if these other lucky lovers that you read about in all this
fiction and poetry feel as glum as I do?
“I will _not_ be middle-aged and cautious and monogamic and moral! It’s
against my religion. I demand the right to be free--
“Hell! These free souls that have to slave at being free are just as bad
as their Methodist dads. I have enough sound natural immorality in me so
I can afford to be moral. I want to keep my brain clear for work. I
don’t want it blurred by dutifully running around trying to kiss
everybody I can.
“Orchid is too easy. I hate to give up the right of being a happy
sinner, but my way was so straight, with just Leora and my work, and I’m
not going to mess it. God help any man that likes his work and his wife!
He’s beaten from the beginning.”
He met Orchid at eight-thirty, and the whole matter was unkind. He was
equally distasteful of the gallant Martin of two days ago and the prosy
cautious Martin of to-night. He went home desolately ascetic, and longed
for Orchid all the night.
A week later Leora returned from Wheatsylvania.
He met her at the station.
“It’s all right, “he said. “I feel a hundred and seven years old. I’m a
respectable, moral young man, and Lord how I’d hate it, if it wasn’t for
my precipitation test and you and--_Why_ do you always lose your trunk
check? I suppose I am a bad example for others, giving up so easily. No,
no, darling, can’t you _see_; that’s the transportation check the
conductor gave you!”
CHAPTER XXII
I
This summer Pickerbaugh had shouted and hand-shaken his way through a
brief Chautauqua tour in Iowa, Nebraska, and Kansas. Martin realized
that though he seemed, in contrast to Gustaf Sondelius, an unfortunately
articulate and generous lout, he was destined to be ten times better
known in America than Sondelius could ever be, a thousand times better
known than Max Gottlieb.
He was a correspondent of many of the nickel-plated Great Men whose
pictures and sonorous aphorisms appeared in the magazines: the
advertising men who wrote little books about Pep and Optimism, the
editor of the magazine which told clerks how to become Goethes and
Stonewall Jacksons by studying correspondence-courses and never touching
the manhood-rotting beer, and the cornfield sage who was equally an
authority on finance, peace, biology, editing, Peruvian ethnology, and
making oratory pay. These intellectual rulers recognized Pickerbaugh as
one of them; they wrote quippish letters to him: and when he answered he
signed himself “Pick,” in red pencil.
The _Onward March Magazine_, which specialized in biographies of Men Who
Have Made Good, had an account of Pickerbaugh among its sketches of the
pastor who built his own beautiful Neo-Gothic church out of tin cans,
the lady who had in seven years kept 2,698 factory-girls from leading
lives of shame, and the Oregon cobbler who had taught himself to read
Sanskrit, Finnish, and Esperanto.
“Meet Ol’ Doc Almus Pickerbaugh, a he-man whom Chum Frink has hailed as
‘the two-fisted, fighting poet-doc,’ a scientist who puts his remarkable
discoveries right over third base, yet who, as a reg-lar old-fashioned
Sunday-school superintendent, rebukes the atheistic so-called scientists
that are menacing the foundations of our religion and liberties by their
smart-aleck cracks at everything that is noble and improving,” chanted
the chronicler.
Martin was reading this article, trying to realize that it was actually
exposed in a fabulous New York magazine, with a million circulation,
when Pickerbaugh summoned him.
“Mart,” he said, “do you feel competent to run this Department?”
“Why, uh--”
“Do you think you can buck the Interests and keep a clean city all by
yourself?”
“Why, uh--”
“Because it looks as if I were going to Washington, as the next
congressman from this district!”
“Really?”
“Looks that way. Boy, I’m going to take to the whole nation the Message
I’ve tried to ram home here!”
Martin got out quite a good “I congratulate you.” He was so astonished
that it sounded fervent. He still had a fragment of his boyhood belief
that congressmen were persons of intelligence and importance.
“I’ve just been in conference with some of the leading Republicans of
the district. Great surprise to me. Ha, ha, ha! Maybe they picked me
because they haven’t anybody else to run this year. Ha, ha, ha!”
Martin also laughed. Pickerbaugh looked as though that was not exactly
the right response, but he recovered and caroled on:
“I said to them, ‘Gentlemen, I must warn you that I am not sure I
possess the rare qualifications needful in a man who shall have the high
privilege of laying down, at Washington, the rules and regulations for
the guidance, in every walk of life, of this great nation of a hundred
million people. However, gentlemen,’ I said, ‘the impulse that prompts
me to consider, in all modesty, your unexpected and probably undeserved
honor is the fact that it seems to me that what Congress needs is more
forward-looking scientists to plan and more genu-ine trained business
men to execute the improvements demanded by our evolving commonwealth,
and also the possibility of persuading the Boys there at Washington of
the pre-eminent and crying need of a Secretary of Health who shall
completely control--’”
But no matter what Martin thought about it, the Republicans really did
nominate Pickerbaugh for Congress.
II
While Pickerbaugh went out campaigning, Martin was in charge of the
Department, and he began his reign by getting himself denounced as a
tyrant and a radical.
There was no more sanitary and efficient dairy in Iowa than that of old
Klopchuk, on the outskirts of Nautilus. It was tiled and drained and
excellently lighted; the milking machines were perfect; the bottles were
super-boiled; and Klopchuk welcomed inspectors and the tuberculin test.
He had fought the dairymen’s union and kept his dairy open-shop by
paying more than the union scale. Once, when Martin attended a meeting
of the Nautilus Central Labor Council as Pickerbaugh’s representative,
the secretary of the council confessed that there was no plant which
they would so like to unionize and which they were so unlikely to
unionize as Klopchuk’s Dairy.
Now Martin’s labor sympathies were small. Like most laboratory men, he
believed that the reason why workmen found less joy in sewing vests or
in pulling a lever than he did in a long research was because they were
an inferior race, born lazy and wicked. The complaint of the unions was
the one thing to convince him that at last he had found perfection.
Often he stopped at Klopchuk’s merely for the satisfaction of it. He
noted but one thing which disturbed him: a milker had a persistent sore
throat. He examined the man, made cultures, and found hemolytic
streptococcus. In a panic he hurried back to the dairy, and after
cultures he discovered that there was streptococcus in the udders of
three cows.
When Pickerbaugh had saved the health of the nation through all the
smaller towns in the congressional district and had returned to
Nautilus, Martin insisted on the quarantine of the infected milker and
the closing of the Klopchuk Dairy till no more infection should be
found.
“Nonsense! Why, that’s the cleanest place in the city,” Pickerbaugh
scoffed. “Why borrow trouble? There’s no sign of an epidemic of strep.”
“There darn’ well will be! Three cows infected. Look at what’s happened
in Boston and Baltimore, here recently. I’ve asked Klopchuk to come in
and talk it over.”
“Well, you know how busy I am, but--”
Klopchuk appeared at eleven, and to Klopchuk the affair was tragic.
Born in a gutter in Poland, starving in New York, working twenty hours a
day in Vermont, in Ohio, in Iowa, he had made this beautiful thing, his
dairy.
Seamed, drooping, twirling his hat, almost in tears, he protested, “Dr.
Pickerbaugh, I do everything the doctors say is necessary. I know
dairies! Now comes this young man and he says because one of my men has
a cold, I kill little children with diseased milk! I tell you, this is
my life, and I would sooner hang myself than send out one drop of bad
milk. The young man has some wicked reason. I have asked questions. I
find he is a great friend from the Central Labor Council. Why, he go to
their meetings! And they want to break me!”
To Martin the trembling old man was pitiful, but he had never before
been accused of treachery. He said grimly:
“You can take up the personal charges against me later, Dr. Pickerbaugh.
Meantime I suggest you have in some expert to test my results; say Long
of Chicago or Brent of Minneapolis or somebody.”
“I-- I-- I--” The Kipling and Billy Sunday of health looked as
distressed as Klopchuk. “I’m sure our friend here doesn’t really mean to
make charges against you, Mart. He’s overwrought, naturally. Can’t we
just treat the fellow that has the strep infection and not make
everybody uncomfortable?”
“All right, if you want a bad epidemic here, toward the end of your
campaign!”
“You know cussed well I’d do anything to avoid-- Though I want you to
distinctly understand it has nothing to do with my campaign for
Congress! It’s simply that I owe my city the most scrupulous performance
of duty in safeguarding it against disease, and the most fearless
enforcement--”
At the end of his oratory Pickerbaugh telegraphed to Dr. J. C. Long, the
Chicago bacteriologist.
Dr. Long looked as though he had made the train journey in an ice-box.
Martin had never seen a man so free from the poetry and flowing
philanthropy of Almus Pickerbaugh. He was slim, precise, lipless,
lapless, and eye-glassed, and his hair was parted in the middle. He
coolly listened to Martin, coldly listened to Pickerbaugh, icily heard
Klopchuk, made his inspection, and reported, “Dr. Arrowsmith seems to
know his business perfectly, there is certainly a danger here, I advise
closing the dairy, my fee is one hundred dollars, thank you no I shall
not stay to dinner I must catch the evening train.”
Martin went home to Leora snarling, “That man was just as lovable as a
cucumber salad, but my God, Lee, with his freedom from bunk, he’s made
me wild to get back to research; away from all these humanitarians that
are so busy hollering about loving the dear people that they let the
people die! I hated him, but-- Wonder what Max Gottlieb’s doing this
evening? The old German crank! I’ll bet-- I’ll bet he’s talking music or
something with some terrible highbrow bunch. Wouldn’t you like to see
the old coot again? You know, just couple minutes. D’I ever tell you
about the time I made the dandy stain of the trypanosomes-- Oh, did I?”
He assumed that with the temporary closing of the dairy the matter was
ended. He did not understand how hurt was Klopchuk. He knew that Irving
Watters, Klopchuk’s physician, was unpleasant when they met, grumbling,
“What’s the use going on being an alarmist, Mart?” But he did not know
how many persons in Nautilus had been trustily informed that this fellow
Arrowsmith was in the pay of labor-union thugs.
III
Two months before, when Martin had been making his annual inspection of
factories, he had encountered Clay Tredgold, the president (by
inheritance) of the Steel Windmill Company. He had heard that Tredgold,
an elaborate but easy-spoken man of forty-five, moved as one clad in
purple on the loftiest planes of Nautilus society. After the inspection
Tredgold urged, “Sit down, Doctor; have a cigar and tell me all about
sanitation.”
Martin was wary. There was in Tredgold’s affable eye a sardonic flicker.
“What d’you want to know about sanitation?”
“Oh, all about it.”
“The only thing I know is that your men must like you. Of course you
haven’t enough wash-bowls in that second-floor toilet room, and the
whole lot of ’em swore you were putting in others immediately. If they
like you enough to lie against their own interests, you must be a good
boss, and I think I’ll let you get away with it--till my next
inspection! Well, got to hustle.”
Tredgold beamed on him. “My dear man, I’ve been pulling that dodge on
Pickerbaugh for three years. I’m glad to have seen you. And I think I
really may put in some more bowls--just before your next inspection.
Good-by!”
After the Klopchuk affair, Martin and Leora encountered Clay Tredgold
and that gorgeous slim woman, his wife, in front of a motion-picture
theater.
“Give you a lift, Doctor?” cried Tredgold.
On the way he suggested, “I don’t know whether you’re dry, like
Pickerbaugh, but if you’d like I’ll run you out to the house and present
you with the noblest cocktail conceived since Evangeline County went
dry. Does it sound reasonable?”
“I haven’t heard anything so reasonable for years,” said Martin.
The Tredgold house was on the highest knoll (fully twenty feet above the
general level of the plain) in Ashford Grove, which is the Back Bay of
Nautilus. It was a Colonial structure, with a sun-parlor, a
white-paneled hall, and a blue and silver drawing-room. Martin tried to
look casual as they were wafted in on Mrs. Tredgold’s chatter, but it
was the handsomest house he had ever entered.
While Leora sat on the edge of her chair in the manner of one likely to
be sent home, and Mrs. Tredgold sat forward like a hostess, Tredgold
flourished the cocktail-shaker and performed courtesies:
“How long you been here now, Doctor?”
“Almost a year.”
“Try that. Look here, it strikes me you’re kind of different from
Salvation Pickerbaugh.”
Martin felt that he ought to praise his chief but, to Leora’s gratified
amazement, he sprang up and ranted in something like Pickerbaugh’s best
manner:
“Gentlemen of the Steel Windmill Industries, than which there is no
other that has so largely contributed to the prosperity of our
commonwealth, while I realize that you are getting away with every
infraction of the health laws that the inspector doesn’t catch you at,
yet I desire to pay a tribute to your high respect for sanitation,
patriotism, and cocktails, and if I only had an assistant more earnest
than young Arrowsmith, I should, with your permission, become President
of the United States.”
Tredgold clapped. Mrs. Tredgold asserted, “If that isn’t exactly like
Dr. Pickerbaugh!” Leora looked proud, and so did her husband.
“I’m glad you’re free from this socialistic clap-trap of Pickerbaugh’s,”
said Tredgold.
The assumption roused something sturdy and defensive in Martin:
“Oh, I don’t care a hang how socialistic he is--whatever that means.
Don’t know anything about socialism. But since I’ve gone and given an
imitation of him-- I suppose it was probably disloyal-- I must say I’m
not very fond of oratory that’s so full of energy it hasn’t any room for
facts. But mind you, Tredgold, it’s partly the fault of people like your
Manufacturers’ Association. You encourage him to rant. I’m a laboratory
man--or rather, I sometimes wish I were. I like to deal with exact
figures.”
“So do I. I was keen on mathematics in Williams,” said Tredgold.
Instantly Martin and he were off on education, damning the universities
for turning out graduates like sausages. Martin found himself becoming
confidential about “variables,” and Tredgold proclaimed that he had not
wanted to take up the ancestral factory, but to specialize in astronomy.
Leora was confessing to the friendly Mrs. Tredgold how cautiously the
wife of an assistant director has to economize, and with that caressing
voice of hers Mrs. Tredgold comforted, “I know. I was horribly hard-up
after Dad died. Have you tried the little Swedish dressmaker on Crimmins
Street, two doors from the Catholic church? She’s awfully clever, and so
cheap.”
Martin had found, for the first time since marriage, a house in which he
was altogether happy; Leora had found, in a woman with the easy
smartness which she had always feared and hated, the first woman to whom
she could talk of God and the price of toweling. They came out from
themselves and were not laughed at.
It was at midnight, when the charms of bacteriology and toweling were
becoming pallid, that outside the house sounded a whooping, wheezing
motor horn, and in lumbered a ruddy fat man who was introduced as Mr.
Schlemihl, president of the Cornbelt Insurance Company of Nautilus.
Even more than Clay Tredgold was he a leader of the Ashford Grove
aristocracy, but, while he stood like an invading barbarian in the blue
and silver room, Schlemihl was cordial:
“Glad meet yuh, Doctor. Well, say, Clay, I’m tickled to death you’ve
found another highbrow to gas with. Me, Arrowsmith, I’m simply a poor
old insurance salesman. Clay is always telling me what an illiterate
boob I am. Look here, Clay darling, do I get a cocktail or don’t I? I
seen your lights! I seen you in here telling what a smart guy you are!
Come on! _Mix!_”
Tredgold mixed, extensively. Before he had finished, young Monte
Mugford, great-grandson of the sainted but side-whiskered Nathaniel
Mugford who had founded Mugford College, also came in, uninvited. He
wondered at the presence of Martin, found him human, told him he was
human, and did his rather competent best to catch up on the cocktails.
Thus it happened that at three in the morning Martin was singing to a
commendatory audience the ballad he had learned from Gustaf Sondelius:
She’d a dark and a roving eye,
And her hair hung down in ringlets,
A nice girl, a decent girl,
But one of the rakish kind.
At four, the Arrowsmiths had been accepted by the most desperately Smart
Set of Nautilus, and at four-thirty they were driven home, at a speed
neither legal nor kind, by Clay Tredgold.
IV
There was in Nautilus a country club which was the axis of what they
called Society, but there was also a tribe of perhaps twelve families in
the Ashford Grove section who, though they went to the country club for
golf, condescended to other golfers, kept to themselves, and considered
themselves as belonging more to Chicago than to Nautilus. They took
turns in entertaining one another. They assumed that they were all
welcome at any party given by any of them, and to none of their parties
was any one outside the Group invited except migrants from larger cities
and occasional free lances like Martin. They were a tight little
garrison in a heathen town.
The members of the Group were very rich, and one of them, Montgomery
Mugford, knew something about his great-grandfather. They lived in
Tudor manor houses and Italian villas so new that the scarred lawns had
only begun to grow. They had large cars and larger cellars, though the
cellars contained nothing but gin, whisky, vermouth, and a few sacred
bottles of rather sweet champagne. Every one in the Group was familiar
with New York--they stayed at the St. Regis or the Plaza and went about
buying clothes and discovering small smart restaurants--and five of the
twelve couples had been in Europe; had spent a week in Paris, intending
to go to art galleries and actually going to the more expensive
fool-traps of Montmartre.
In the Group Martin and Leora found themselves welcomed as poor
relations. They were invited to choric dinners, to Sunday lunches at the
country club. Whatever the event, it always ended in rapidly motoring
somewhere, having a number of drinks, and insisting that Martin again
“give that imitation of Doc Pickerbaugh.”
Besides motoring, drinking, and dancing to the Victrola, the chief
diversion of the Group was cards. Curiously, in this completely unmoral
set, there were no flirtations; they talked with considerable freedom
about “sex,” but they all seemed monogamic, all happily married or
afraid to appear unhappily married. But when Martin knew them better he
heard murmurs of husbands having “times” in Chicago, of wives picking up
young men in New York hotels, and he scented furious restlessness
beneath their superior sexual calm.
It is not known whether Martin ever completely accepted as a
gentleman-scholar the Clay Tredgold who was devoted to everything about
astronomy except studying it, or Monte Mugford as the highly descended
aristocrat, but he did admire the Group’s motor cars, shower baths,
Fifth Avenue frocks, tweed plus-fours, and houses somewhat impersonally
decorated by daffodillic young men from Chicago. He discovered sauces
and old silver. He began to consider Leora’s clothes not merely as
convenient coverings, but as a possible expression of charm, and
irritably he realized how careless she was.
In Nautilus, alone, rarely saying much about herself, Leora had
developed an intense mute little life of her own. She belonged to a
bridge club, and she went solemnly by herself to the movies, but her
ambition was to know France and it engrossed her. It was an old desire,
mysterious in source and long held secret, but suddenly she was
sighing:
“Sandy, the one thing I want to do, maybe ten years from now, is to see
Touraine and Normandy and Carcassonne. Could we, do you think?”
Rarely had Leora asked for anything. He was touched and puzzled as he
watched her reading books on Brittany, as he caught her, over a highly
simplified French grammar, breathing “J’ay--j’aye--damn it, whatever it
is!”
He crowed, “Lee, dear, if you want to go to France-- Listen! Some day
we’ll shoot over there with a couple of knapsacks on our backs, and
we’ll see that ole country from end to end!”
Gratefully yet doubtfully: “You know, if you got bored, Sandy, you could
go see the work at the Pasteur Institute. Oh, I would like to tramp,
just once, between high plastered walls, and come to a foolish little
café and watch the men with funny red sashes and floppy blue pants go
by. Really, do you think maybe we could?”
Leora was strangely popular in the Ashford Grove Group, though she
possessed nothing of what Martin called their “elegance.” She always had
at least one button missing. Mrs. Tredgold, best natured as she was
least pious of women, adopted her complete.
Nautilus had always doubted Clara Tredgold. Mrs. Almus Pickerbaugh said
that she “took no part in any movement for the betterment of the city.”
For years she had seemed content to grow her roses, to make her
startling hats, to almond-cream her lovely hands, and listen to her
husband’s improper stories--and for years she had been a lonely woman.
In Leora she perceived an interested casualness equal to her own. The
two women spent afternoons sitting on the sun-porch, reading, doing
their nails, smoking cigarettes, saying nothing, trusting each other.
With the other women of the Group Leora was never so intimate as with
Clara Tredgold, but they liked her, the more because she was a heretic
whose vices, her smoking, her indolence, her relish of competent
profanity, disturbed Mrs. Pickerbaugh and Mrs. Irving Watters. The Group
rather approved all unconventionalities--except such economic
unconventionalities as threatened their easy wealth. Leora had tea, or a
cocktail, alone with nervous young Mrs. Monte Mugford, who had been the
lightest-footed débutante in Des Moines four years before and who hated
now the coming of her second baby; and it was to Leora that Mrs.
Schlemihl, though publicly she was rompish and serene with her porker of
a husband, burst out, “If that man would only quit pawing me--reaching
for me--slobbering on me! I hate it here! I _will_ have my winter in New
York--alone!”
The childish Martin Arrowsmith, so unworthy of Leora’s old quiet
wisdoms, was not content with her acceptance by the Group. When she
appeared with a hook unfastened or her hair like a crow’s nest, he
worried, and said things about her “sloppiness” which he later
regretted.
“Why can’t you take a little time to make yourself attractive? God knows
you haven’t anything else to do! Great Jehoshaphat, can’t you even sew
on buttons?”
But Clara Tredgold laughed, “Leora, I do think you have the sweetest
back, but do you mind if I pin you up before the others come?”
It happened after a party which lasted till two, when Mrs. Schlemihl had
worn the new frock from Lucile’s and Jack Brundidge (by day
vice-president and sales-manager of the Maize Mealies Company) had
danced what he belligerently asserted to be a Finnish polka, that when
Martin and Leora were driving home in a borrowed Health Department car
he snarled, “Lee, why can’t you ever take any trouble with what you
wear? Here this morning--or yesterday morning--you were going to mend
that blue dress, and as far as I can figure out you haven’t done a darn’
thing the whole day but sit around and read, and then you come out with
that ratty embroidery--”
“Will you stop the car!” she cried.
He stopped it, astonished. The headlights made ridiculously important a
barbed-wire fence, a litter of milkweeds, a bleak reach of gravel road.
She demanded, “Do you want me to become a harem beauty? I could. I could
be a floosey. But I’ve never taken the trouble. Oh, Sandy, I won’t go on
fighting with you. Either I’m the foolish sloppy wife that I am, or I’m
nothing. What do you want? Do you want a real princess like Clara
Tredgold, or do you want me, that don’t care a hang where we go or what
we do as long as we stand by each other? You do such a lot of worrying.
I’m tired of it. Come on now. What do you want?”
“I don’t want anything but you. But can’t you understand-- I’m not just
a climber-- I want us both to be equal to anything we run into. I
certainly don’t see why we should be inferior to this bunch, in
_anything_. Darling, except for Clara, maybe, they’re nothing but rich
bookkeepers! But we’re real soldiers of fortune. Your France that you
love so much--some day we’ll go there, and the French President will be
at the N. P. depot to meet us! Why should we let anybody do anything
better than we can? Technique!”
They talked for an hour in that drab place, between the poisonous lines
of barbed wire.
Next day, when Orchid came into his laboratory and begged, with the
wistfulness of youth, “Oh, Dr. Martin, aren’t you ever coming to the
house again?” he kissed her so briskly, so cheerfully, that even a
flapper could perceive that she was unimportant.
V
Martin realized that he was likely to be the next Director of the
Department. Pickerbaugh had told him, “Your work is very satisfactory.
There’s only one thing you lack, my boy: enthusiasm for getting together
with folks and giving a long pull and a strong pull, all together. But
perhaps that’ll come to you when you have more responsibility.”
Martin sought to acquire a delight in giving long strong pulls all
together, but he felt like a man who has been dragooned into wearing
yellow tights at a civic pageant.
“Gosh, I may be up against it when I become Director,” he fretted. “I
wonder if there’s people who become what’s called ‘successful’ and then
hate it? Well, anyway, I’ll start a decent system of vital statistics in
the department before they get me. I won’t lay down! I’ll fight! I’ll
make myself succeed!”
CHAPTER XXIII
I
It may have been a yearning to give one concentrated dose of inspiration
so powerful that no citizen of Nautilus would ever again dare to be ill,
or perhaps Dr. Pickerbaugh desired a little reasonable publicity for his
congressional campaign, but certainly the Health Fair which the good man
organized was overpowering.
He got an extra appropriation from the Board of Aldermen; he bullied all
the churches and associations into coöperation; he made the newspapers
promise to publish three columns of praise each day.
He rented the rather dilapidated wooden “tabernacle” in which the
Reverend Mr. Billy Sunday, an evangelist, had recently wiped out all the
sin in the community. He arranged for a number of novel features. The
Boy Scouts were to give daily drills. There was a W. C. T. U. booth at
which celebrated clergymen and other physiologists would demonstrate the
evils of alcohol. In a bacteriology booth, the protesting Martin (in a
dinky white coat) was to do jolly things with test-tubes. An
anti-nicotine lady from Chicago offered to kill a mouse every half-hour
by injecting ground-up cigarette paper into it. The Pickerbaugh twins,
Arbuta and Gladiola, now aged six, were to show the public how to brush
its teeth, and in fact they did, until a sixty-year-old farmer of whom
they had lovingly inquired, “Do you brush your teeth daily?” made
thunderous answer, “No, but I’m going to paddle your bottoms daily, and
I’m going to start in right now.”
None of these novelties was so stirring as the Eugenic Family, who had
volunteered to give, for a mere forty dollars a day, an example of the
benefits of healthful practises.
They were father, mother, and five children, all so beautiful and
powerful that they had recently been presenting refined acrobatic
exhibitions on the Chautauqua Circuit. None of them smoked, drank, spit
upon pavements, used foul language, or ate meat. Pickerbaugh assigned to
them the chief booth, on the platform once sacerdotally occupied by the
Reverend Mr. Sunday.
There were routine exhibits: booths with charts and banners and
leaflets. The Pickerbaugh Healthette Octette held song recitals, and
daily there were lectures, most of them by Pickerbaugh or by his friend
Dr. Bissex, football coach and professor of hygiene and most other
subjects in Mugford College.
A dozen celebrities, including Gustaf Sondelius and the governor of the
state, were invited to come and “give their messages,” but it happened,
unfortunately, that none of them seemed able to get away that particular
week.
The Health Fair opened with crowds and success. There was a slight
misunderstanding the first day. The Master Bakers’ Association spoke
strongly to Pickerbaugh about the sign “Too much pie makes pyorrhea” on
the diet booth. But the thoughtless and prosperity-destroying sign was
removed at once, and the Fair was thereafter advertised in every bakery
in town.
The only unhappy participant, apparently, was Martin. Pickerbaugh had
fitted up for him an exhibition laboratory which, except that it had no
running water and except that the fire laws forbade his using any kind
of a flame, was exactly like a real one. All day long he poured a
solution of red ink from one test-tube into another, with his microscope
carefully examined nothing at all, and answered the questions of persons
who wished to know how you put bacterias to death once you had caught
them swimming about.
Leora appeared as his assistant, very pretty and demure in a nurse’s
costume, very exasperating as she chuckled at his low cursing. They
found one friend, the fireman on duty, a splendid person with stories
about pet cats in the fire-house and no tendency to ask questions in
bacteriology. It was he who showed them how they could smoke in safety.
Behind the Clean Up and Prevent Fires exhibit, consisting of a miniature
Dirty House with red arrows to show where a fire might start and an
extremely varnished Clean House, there was an alcove with a broken
window which would carry off the smoke of their cigarettes. To this
sanctuary Martin, Leora, and the bored fireman retired a dozen times a
day, and thus wore through the week.
One other misfortune occurred. The detective sergeant, coming in not to
detect but to see the charming spectacle of the mouse dying in agony
from cigarette paper, stopped before the booth of the Eugenic Family,
scratched his head, hastened to the police station, and returned with
certain pictures. He growled to Pickerbaugh:
“Hm. That Eugenic Family. Don’t smoke or booze or anything?”
“Absolutely! And look at their perfect health.”
“Hm. Better keep an eye on ’em. I won’t spoil your show, Doc--we fellows
at City Hall had all ought to stick together. I won’t run ’em out of
town till after the Fair. But they’re the Holton gang. The man and woman
ain’t married, and only one of the kids is theirs. They’ve done time for
selling licker to the Indians, but their specialty, before they went
into education, used to be the badger game. I’ll detail a plain-clothes
man to keep ’em straight. Fine show you got here, Doc. Ought to give
this city a lasting lesson in the value of up-to-date health methods.
Good luck! Say, have you picked your secretary yet, for when you get to
Congress? I’ve got a nephew that’s a crackajack stenographer and a
bright kid and knows how to keep his mouth shut about stuff that don’t
concern him. I’ll send him around to have a talk with you. So long.”
But, except that once he caught the father of the Eugenic Family
relieving the strain of being publicly healthy by taking a long,
gurgling, ecstatic drink from a flask, Pickerbaugh found nothing wrong
in their conduct, till Saturday. There was nothing wrong with anything,
till then.
Never had a Fair been such a moral lesson, or secured so much publicity.
Every newspaper in the congressional district gave columns to it, and
all the accounts, even in the Democratic papers, mentioned Pickerbaugh’s
campaign.
Then, on Saturday, the last day of the Fair, came tragedy.
There was terrific rain, the roof leaked without restraint, and the lady
in charge of the Healthy Housing Booth, which also leaked, was taken
home threatened with pneumonia. At noon, when the Eugenic Family were
giving a demonstration of perfect vigor, their youngest blossom had an
epileptic fit, and before the excitement was over, upon the Chicago
anti-nicotine lady as she triumphantly assassinated a mouse charged an
anti-vivisection lady, also from Chicago.
Round the two ladies and the unfortunate mouse gathered a crowd. The
anti-vivisection lady called the anti-nicotine lady a murderer, a
wretch, and an atheist, all of which the anti-nicotine lady endured,
merely weeping a little and calling for the police. But when the
anti-vivisection lady wound up, “And as for your pretensions to know
anything about science, you’re no scientist at all!” then with a shriek
the anti-nicotine lady leaped from her platform, dug her fingers into
the anti-vivisection lady’s hair, and observed with distinctness, “I’ll
show you whether I know anything about science!”
Pickerbaugh tried to separate them. Martin, standing happily with Leora
and their friend the fireman on the edge, distinctly did not. Both
ladies turned on Pickerbaugh and denounced him, and when they had been
removed he was the center of a thousand chuckles, in decided danger of
never going to Congress.
At two o’clock, when the rain had slackened, when the after-lunch crowd
had come in and the story of the anti ladies was running strong, the
fireman retired behind the Clean Up and Prevent Fires exhibit for his
hourly smoke. He was a very sleepy and unhappy little fireman; he was
thinking about the pleasant fire-house and the unending games of
pinochle. He dropped the match, unextinguished, on the back porch of the
model Clean House. The Clean House had been so handsomely oiled that it
was like kindling soaked in kerosene. It flared up, and instantly the
huge and gloomy Tabernacle was hysterical with flames. The crowd rushed
toward the exits.
Naturally, most of the original exits of the Tabernacle had been blocked
by booths. There was a shrieking panic, and children were being
trampled.
Almus Pickerbaugh was neither a coward nor slothful. Suddenly, coming
from nowhere, he was marching through the Tabernacle at the head of his
eight daughters, singing “Dixie,” his head up, his eyes terrible, his
arms wide in pleading. The crowd weakly halted. With the voice of a
clipper captain he unsnarled them and ushered them safely out, then
charged back into the spouting flames.
The rain-soaked building had not caught. The fireman, with Martin and
the head of the Eugenic Family, was beating the flames. Nothing was
destroyed save the Clean House, and the crowd which had fled in agony
came back in wonder. Their hero was Pickerbaugh.
Within two hours the Nautilus papers vomited specials which explained
that not merely had Pickerbaugh organized the greatest lesson in health
ever seen, but he had also, by his courage and his power to command,
saved hundreds of people from being crushed, which latter was probably
the only completely accurate thing that has been said about Dr. Almus
Pickerbaugh in ten thousand columns of newspaper publicity.
Whether to see the Fair, Pickerbaugh, the delightful ravages of a
disaster, or another fight between the anti ladies, half the city
struggled into the Tabernacle that evening, and when Pickerbaugh took
the platform for his closing lecture he was greeted with frenzy. Next
day, when he galloped into the last week of his campaign, he was
overlord of all the district.
II
His opponent was a snuffy little lawyer whose strength lay in his
training. He had been state senator, lieutenant governor, county judge.
But the Democratic slogan, “Pickerbaugh the Pick-up Candidate,” was
drowned in the admiration for the hero of the health fair. He dashed
about in motors, proclaiming, “I am not running because I want office,
but because I want the chance to take to the whole nation my ideals of
health.” Everywhere was plastered:
For Congress
PICKERBAUGH
The two-fisted fighting poet doc
Just elect him for a term
And all through the nation he’ll swat the germ.
Enormous meetings were held. Pickerbaugh was ample and vague about his
Policies. Yes, he was opposed to our entering the European War, but he
assured them, he certainly did assure them, that he was for using every
power of our Government to end this terrible calamity. Yes, he was for
high tariff, but it must be so adjusted that the farmers in his district
could buy everything cheaply. Yes, he was for high wages for each and
every workman, but he stood like a rock, like a boulder, like a moraine,
for protecting the prosperity of all manufacturers, merchants, and
real-estate owners.
While this larger campaign thundered, there was proceeding in Nautilus a
smaller and much defter campaign, to reëlect as mayor one Mr. Pugh,
Pickerbaugh’s loving chief. Mr. Pugh sat nicely at desks, and he was
pleasant and promissory to everybody who came to see him; clergymen,
gamblers, G. A. R. veterans, circus advance-agents, policemen, and
ladies of reasonable virtue--everybody except perhaps socialist
agitators, against whom he staunchly protected the embattled city. In
his speeches Pickerbaugh commended Pugh for “that firm integrity and
ready sympathy with which His Honor had backed up every movement for the
public weal,” and when Pickerbaugh (quite honestly) begged, “Mr. Mayor,
if I go to Congress you must appoint Arrowsmith in my place; he knows
nothing about politics but he’s incorruptible,” then Pugh gave his
promise, and amity abode in that land.... Nobody said anything at all
about Mr. F. X. Jordan.
F. X. Jordan was a contractor with a generous interest in politics.
Pickerbaugh called him a grafter, and the last time Pugh had been
elected--it had been on a Reform Platform, though since that time the
reform had been coaxed to behave itself and be practical--both Pugh and
Pickerbaugh had denounced Jordan as a “malign force.” But so kindly was
Mayor Pugh that in the present election he said nothing that could hurt
Mr. Jordan’s feelings, and in return what could Mr. Jordan do but speak
forgivingly about Mr. Pugh to the people in blind-pigs and houses of ill
fame?
On the evening of the election, Martin and Leora were among the company
awaiting the returns at the Pickerbaughs’. They were confident. Martin
had never been roused by politics, but he was stirred now by
Pickerbaugh’s twitchy pretense of indifference, by the telephoned report
from the newspaper office, “Here’s Willow Grove township-- Pickerbaugh
leading, two to one!” by the crowds which went past the house howling,
“Pickerbaugh, Pickerbaugh, Pickerbaugh!”
At eleven the victory was certain, and Martin, his bowels weak with
unconfidence, realized that he was now Director of Public Health, with
responsibility for seventy thousand lives.
He looked wistfully toward Leora and in her still smile found assurance.
Orchid had been airy and distant with Martin all evening, and
dismayingly chatty and affectionate with Leora. Now she drew him into
the back parlor and “So I’m going off to Washington--and you don’t care
a bit!” she said, her eyes blurred and languorous and undefended. He
held her, muttering, “You darling child, I can’t let you go!” As he
walked home he thought less of being Director than of Orchid’s eyes.
In the morning he groaned, “Doesn’t anybody ever learn anything? Must I
watch myself and still be a fool, all my life? Doesn’t any story ever
end?”
He never saw her afterward, except on the platform of the train.
Leora surprisingly reflected, after the Pickerbaughs had gone, “Sandy
dear, I know how you feel about losing your Orchid. It’s sort of Youth
going. She really is a peach. Honestly, I can appreciate how you feel,
and sympathize with you-- I mean, of course, providin’ you aren’t ever
going to see her again.”
III
Over the _Nautilus Cornfield’s_ announcement was the vigorous headline:
ALMUS PICKERBAUGH WINS
First Scientist Ever Elected
to Congress
Side-kick of Darwin and Pasteur
Gives New Punch to Steering
Ship of State
Pickerbaugh’s resignation was to take effect at once; he was, he
explained, going to Washington before his term began, to study
legislative methods and start his propaganda for the creation of a
national Secretaryship of Health. There was a considerable struggle over
the appointment of Martin in his stead. Klopchuk the dairyman was
bitter; Irving Watters whispered to fellow doctors that Martin was
likely to extend the socialistic free clinics; F. X. Jordan had a
sensible young doctor as his own candidate. It was the Ashford Grove
Group, Tredgold, Schlemihl, Monte Mugford, who brought it off.
Martin went to Tredgold worrying, “Do the people want me? Shall I fight
Jordan or get out?”
Tredgold said balmily, “Fight? What about? I own a good share of the
bank that’s lent various handy little sums to Mayor Pugh. You leave it
to me.”
Next day Martin was appointed, but only as Acting Director, with a
salary of thirty-five hundred instead of four thousand.
That he had been put in by what he would have called “crooked politics”
did not occur to him.
Mayor Pugh called him in and chuckled:
“Doc, there’s been a certain amount of opposition to you, because you’re
pretty young and not many folks know you. I haven’t any doubt I can give
you the full appointment later--if we find you’re competent and popular.
Meantime you better avoid doing anything brash. Just come and ask my
advice. I know this town and the people that count better than you do.”
IV
The day of Pickerbaugh’s leaving for Washington was made a fiesta. At
the Armory, from twelve to two, the Chamber of Commerce gave to
everybody who came a lunch of hot wienies, doughnuts, and coffee, with
chewing gum for the women and, for the men, Schweinhügel’s Little Dandy
Nautilus-made Cheroots.
The train left at three-fifty-five. The station was, to the astonishment
of innocent passengers gaping from the train windows, jammed with
thousands.
By the rear platform, on a perilous packing box, Mayor Pugh held forth.
The Nautilus Silver Cornet Band played three patriotic selections, then
Pickerbaugh stood on the platform, his family about him. As he looked on
the crowd, tears were in his eyes.
“For once,” he stammered, “I guess I can’t make a speech. D-darn it, I’m
all choked up! I meant to orate a lot, but all I can say is-- I love you
all, I’m mighty grateful, I’ll represent you my level best, neighbors!
God bless you!”
The train moved out, Pickerbaugh waving as long as he could see them.
And Martin to Leora, “Oh, he’s a fine old boy. He-- No, I’m hanged if he
is! The world’s always letting people get away with asininities because
they’re kind-hearted. And here I’ve sat back like a coward, not saying a
word, and watched ’em loose that wind-storm on the whole country. Oh,
curse it, isn’t anything in the world simple? Well, let’s go to the
office, and I’ll begin to do things conscientiously and all wrong.”
CHAPTER XXIV
I
It cannot be said that Martin showed any large ability for organization,
but under him the Department of Public Health changed completely. He
chose as his assistant Dr. Rufus Ockford, a lively youngster recommended
by Dean Silva of Winnemac. The routine work, examination of babies,
quarantines, anti-tuberculosis placarding, went on as before.
Inspection of plumbing and food was perhaps more thorough, because
Martin lacked Pickerbaugh’s buoyant faith in the lay inspectors, and one
of them he replaced, to the considerable displeasure of the colony of
Germans in the Homedale district. Also he gave thought to the killing of
rats and fleas, and he regarded the vital statistics as something more
than a recording of births and deaths. He had notions about their value
which were most amusing to the health department clerk. He wanted a
record of the effect of race, occupation, and a dozen other factors upon
the disease rate.
The chief difference was that Martin and Rufus Ockford found themselves
with plenty of leisure. Martin estimated that Pickerbaugh must have used
half his time in being inspirational and eloquent.
He made his first mistake in assigning Ockford to spend part of the week
in the free city clinic, in addition to the two half-time physicians.
There was fury in the Evangeline County Medical Society. At a
restaurant, Irving Watters came over to Martin’s table.
“I hear you’ve increased the clinic staff,” said Dr. Watters.
“Yuh.”
“Thinking of increasing it still more?”
“Might be a good idea.”
“Now you see here, Mart. As you know, Mrs. Watters and I have done
everything in our power to make you and Leora welcome. Glad to do
anything I can for a fellow alumnus of old Winnemac. But at the same
time, there are limits, you know! Not that I’ve got any objection to
your providing free clinical facilities. Don’t know but what it’s a
good thing to treat the damn’, lazy, lousy pauper-class free, and keep
the D.B.’s off the books of the regular physicians. But same _time_,
when you begin to make a practise of encouraging a lot of folks, that
can afford to pay, to go and get free treatment, and practically you
attack the integrity of the physicians of this city, that have been
giving God knows how much of their time to charity--”
Martin answered neither wisely nor competently: “Irve, sweetheart, you
can go straight to hell!”
After that hour, when they met there was nothing said between them.
Without disturbing his routine work, he found himself able to sink
blissfully into the laboratory. At first he merely tinkered, but
suddenly he was in full cry, oblivious of everything save his
experiment.
He was playing with cultures isolated from various dairies and various
people, thinking mostly of Klopchuk and streptococcus. Accidentally he
discovered the lavish production of hemolysin in sheep’s blood as
compared with the blood of other animals. Why should streptococcus
dissolve the red blood corpuscles of sheep more easily than those of
rabbits?
It is true that a busy health-department bacteriologist has no right to
waste the public time in being curious, but the irresponsible sniffing
beagle in Martin drove out the faithful routineer.
He neglected the examination of an ominously increasing number of
tubercular sputums; he set out to answer the question of the hemolysin.
He wanted the streptococcus to produce its blood-destroying poison in
twenty-four-hour cultures.
He beautifully and excitedly failed, and sat for hours meditating. He
tried a six-hour culture. He mixed the supernatant fluid from a
centrifugated culture with a suspension of red blood corpuscles and
placed it in the incubator. When he returned, two hours after, the blood
cells were dissolved.
He telephoned to Leora: “Lee! Got something! C’n you pack up sandwich
and come down here f’r evening?”
“Sure,” said Leora.
When she appeared he explained to her that his discovery was accidental,
that most scientific discoveries were accidental, and that no
investigator, however great, could do anything more than see the value
of his chance results.
He sounded mature and rather angry.
Leora sat in the corner, scratching her chin, reading a medical journal.
From time to time she reheated coffee, over a doubtful Bunsen flame.
When the office staff arrived in the morning they found something that
had but rarely occurred during the regime of Almus Pickerbaugh: the
Director of the Department was transplanting cultures, and on a long
table was his wife, asleep.
Martin blared at Dr. Ockford, “Get t’ hell out of this, Rufus, and take
charge of the department for to-day-- I’m out-- I’m dead--and oh, say,
get Leora home and fry her a couple o’ eggs, and you might bring me a
Denver sandwich from the Sunset Trail Lunch, will you?”
“You bet, chief,” said Ockford.
Martin repeated his experiment, testing the cultures for hemolysin after
two, four, six, eight, ten, twelve, fourteen, sixteen, and eighteen
hours of incubation. He discovered that the maximum production of
hemolysin occurred between four and ten hours. He began to work out the
formula of production--and he was desolate. He fumed, raged, sweated. He
found that his mathematics was childish, and all his science rusty. He
pottered with chemistry, he ached over his mathematics, and slowly he
began to assemble his results. He believed that he might have a paper
for the _Journal of Infectious Diseases_.
Now Almus Pickerbaugh had published scientific papers--often. He had
published them in the _Midwest Medical Quarterly_, of which he was one
of fourteen editors. He had discovered the germ of epilepsy and the germ
of cancer--two entirely different germs of cancer. Usually it took him a
fortnight to make the discovery, write the report, and have it accepted.
Martin lacked this admirable facility.
He experimented, he re-experimented, he cursed, he kept Leora out of
bed, he taught her to make media, and was ill-pleased by her opinions on
agar. He was violent to the stenographer; not once could the pastor of
the Jonathan Edwards Congregational Church get him to address the Bible
Class; and still for months his paper was not complete.
The first to protest was His Honor the Mayor. Returning from an
extremely agreeable game of chemin de fer with F. X. Jordan, taking a
short cut through the alley behind the City Hall, Mayor Pugh saw Martin
at two in the morning drearily putting test-tubes into the incubator,
while Leora sat in a corner smoking. Next day he summoned Martin, and
protested:
“Doc, I don’t want to butt in on your department--my specialty is never
butting in--but it certainly strikes me that after being trained by a
seventy-horse-power booster like Pickerbaugh, you ought to know that
it’s all damn’ foolishness to spend so much time in the laboratory, when
you can hire an AI laboratory fellow for thirty bucks a week. What you
ought to be doing is jollying along these sobs that are always panning
the administration. Get out and talk to the churches and clubs, and help
me put across the ideas that we stand for.”
“Maybe he’s right,” Martin considered. “I’m a rotten bacteriologist.
Probably I never will get this experiment together. My job here is to
keep tobacco-chewers from spitting. Have I the right to waste the
tax-payers’ money on anything else?”
But that week he read, as an announcement issued by the McGurk Institute
of Biology of New York, that Dr. Max Gottlieb had synthesized antibodies
_in vitro_.
He pictured the saturnine Gottlieb not at all enjoying the triumph but,
with locked door, abusing the papers for their exaggerative reports of
his work; and as the picture became sharp Martin was like a subaltern
stationed in a desert isle when he learns that his old regiment is going
off to an agreeable Border war.
Then the McCandless fury broke.
II
Mrs. McCandless had once been a “hired girl”; then nurse, then
confidante, then wife to the invalid Mr. McCandless, wholesale grocer
and owner of real estate. When he died she inherited everything. There
was a suit, of course, but she had an excellent lawyer.
She was a grim, graceless, shady, mean woman, yet a nymphomaniac. She
was not invited into Nautilus society, but in her unaired parlor, on the
mildewed couch, she entertained seedy, belching, oldish married
men, a young policeman to whom she often lent money, and the
contractor-politician, F. X. Jordan.
She owned, in Swede Hollow, the filthiest block of tenements in
Nautilus. Martin had made a tuberculosis map of these tenements, and in
conferences with Dr. Ockford and Leora he denounced them as
murder-holes. He wanted to destroy them, but the police power of the
Director of Public Health was vague. Pickerbaugh had enjoyed the
possession of large power only because he never used it.
Martin sought a court decision for the demolition of the McCandless
tenements. Her lawyer was also the lawyer of F. X. Jordan, and the most
eloquent witness against Martin was Dr. Irving Watters. But it chanced,
because of the absence of the proper judge, that the case came before an
ignorant and honest person who quashed the injunction secured by Mrs.
McCandless’s lawyer and instructed the Department of Public Health that
it might use such methods as the city ordinances provided for
emergencies.
That evening Martin grumbled to young Ockford, “You don’t suppose for a
moment, do you, Rufus, that McCandless and Jordan won’t appeal the case?
Let’s get rid of the tenements while it’s comparatively legal, heh?”
“You bet, chief,” said Ockford, and, “Say, let’s go out to Oregon and
start practise when we get kicked out. Well, we can depend on our
sanitary inspector, anyway. Jordan seduced his sister, here ’bout six
years back.”
At dawn a gang headed by Martin and Ockford, in blue overalls, joyful
and rowdyish, invaded the McCandless tenements, drove the tenants into
the street, and began to tear down the flimsy buildings. At noon, when
lawyers appeared and the tenants were in new flats commandeered by
Martin, the wreckers set fire to the lower stories, and in half an hour
the buildings had been annihilated.
F. X. Jordan came to the scene after lunch. A filthy Martin and a dusty
Ockford were drinking coffee brought by Leora.
“Well, boys,” said Jordan, “you’ve put it all over us. Only if you ever
pull this kind of stunt again, use dynamite and save a lot of time. You
know, I like you boys-- I’m sorry for what I’ve got to do to you. But
may the saints help you, because it’s just a question of time when I
learn you not to monkey with the buzz-saw.”
III
Clay Tredgold admired their amateur arson and rejoiced, “Fine! I’m going
to back you up in everything the D. P. H. does.”
Martin was not too pleased by the promise, for Tredgold’s set were
somewhat exigent. They had decided that Martin and Leora were free
spirits like themselves, and amusing, but they had also decided, long
before the Arrowsmiths had by coming to Nautilus entered into authentic
existence, that the Group had a monopoly of all Freedom and Amusingness,
and they expected the Arrowsmiths to appear for cocktails and poker
every Saturday and Sunday evening. They could not understand why Martin
should desire to spend his time in a laboratory, drudging over something
called “streptolysin,” which had nothing to do with cocktails, motors,
steel windmills, or insurance.
On an evening perhaps a fortnight after the destruction of the
McCandless tenements, Martin was working late in the laboratory. He
wasn’t even doing experiments which might have diverted the
Group--causing bacterial colonies to cloud liquids, or making things
change color. He was merely sitting at a table, looking at logarithmic
tables. Leora was not there, and he was mumbling, “Confound her, why did
she have to go and be sick to-day?”
Tredgold and Schlemihl and their wives were bound for the Old Farmhouse
Inn. They had telephoned to Martin’s flat and learned where he was. From
the alley behind City Hall they could peer in and see him, dreary and
deserted.
“We’ll take the old boy out and brighten him up. First, let’s rush home
and shake up a few cocktails and bring ’em down to surprise him,” was
Tredgold’s inspiration.
Tredgold came into the laboratory, a half-hour later, with much clamor.
“This is a nice way to put in a moonlit spring evening, young
Narrowsmith! Come on, we’ll all go out and dance a little. Grab your
hat.”
“Gosh, Clay, I’d like to, but honestly I can’t. I’ve got to work; simply
got to.”
“Rats! Don’t be silly. You’ve been working too hard. Here--look what
Father’s brought. Be reasonable. Get outside of a nice long cocktail and
you’ll have a new light on things.”
Martin was reasonable up to that point, but he did not have a new light.
Tredgold would not take No. Martin continued to refuse, affectionately,
then a bit tartly. Outside, Schlemihl pressed down the button of the
motor horn and held it, producing a demanding, infuriating yawp which
made Martin cry, “For God’s sake go out and make ’em quit that, will
you, and let me alone! I’ve got to work, I told you!”
Tredgold stared a moment. “I certainly shall! I’m not accustomed to
force my attentions on people. Pardon me for disturbing you!”
By the time Martin sulkily felt that he must apologize, the car was
gone. Next day and all the week, he waited for Tredgold to telephone,
and Tredgold waited for him to telephone, and they fell into a circle of
dislike. Leora and Clara Tredgold saw each other once or twice, but they
were uncomfortable, and a fortnight later, when the most prominent
physician in town dined with the Tredgolds and attacked Martin as a
bumptious and narrow-visioned young man, both the Tredgolds listened and
agreed.
Opposition to Martin developed all at once.
Various physicians were against him, not only because of the enlarged
clinics, but because he rarely asked their help and never their advice.
Mayor Pugh considered him tactless. Klopchuk and F. X. Jordan were
assailing him as crooked. The reporters disliked him for his secrecy and
occasional bruskness. And the Group had ceased to defend him. Of all
these forces Martin was more or less aware, and behind them he fancied
that doubtful business men, sellers of impure ice-cream and milk, owners
of unsanitary shops and dirty tenements, men who had always hated
Pickerbaugh but who had feared to attack him because of his popularity,
were gathering to destroy the entire Department of Public Health.... He
appreciated Pickerbaugh in those days, and loved soldier-wise the
Department.
There came from Mayor Pugh a hint that he would save trouble by
resigning. He would not resign. Neither would he go to the citizens
begging for support. He did his work, and leaned on Leora’s assurance,
and tried to ignore his detractors. He could not.
News-items and three-line editorial squibs dug at his tyranny, his
ignorance, his callowness. An old woman died after treatment at the
clinic, and the coroner hinted that it had been the fault of “our
almighty health-officer’s pet cub assistant.” Somewhere arose the name
“the Schoolboy Czar” for Martin, and it stuck.
In the gossip at luncheon clubs, in discussions at the Parents’ and
Teachers’ Association, in one frank signed protest sent to the Mayor,
Martin was blamed for too strict an inspection of milk, for
insufficiently strict inspection of milk; for permitting garbage to lie
untouched, for persecuting the overworked garbage collectors; and when a
case of small-pox appeared in the Bohemian section, there was an opinion
that Martin had gone out personally and started it.
However vague the citizens were as to the nature of his wickedness, once
they lost faith in him they lost it completely and with joy, and they
welcomed an apparently spontaneously generated rumor that he had
betrayed his benefactor, their beloved Dr. Pickerbaugh, by seducing
Orchid.
At this interesting touch of immorality, he had all the fashionable
churches against him. The pastor of the Jonathan Edwards Church touched
up a sermon about Sin in High Places by a reference to “one who, while
like a Czar he pretends to be safeguarding the city from entirely
imaginary dangers, yet winks at the secret vice rampant in hidden
places; who allies himself with the forces of graft and evil and the
thugs who batten on honest but deluded Labor; one who cannot arise, a
manly man among men, and say, ‘I have a clean heart and clean hands.’”
It is true that some of the delighted congregation thought that this
referred to Mayor Pugh, and others applied it to F. X. Jordan, but wise
citizens saw that it was a courageous attack on that monster of
treacherous lewdness, Dr. Arrowsmith.
In all the city there were exactly two ministers who defended him:
Father Costello of the Irish Catholic Church, and Rabbi Rovine. They
were, it happened, very good friends, and not at all friendly with the
pastor of the Jonathan Edwards Church. They bullied their congregations;
each of them asserted, “People come sneaking around with criticisms of
our new Director of Health. If you want to make charges, make them
openly. I will not listen to cowardly hints. And let me tell you that
this city is lucky in having for health-officer a man who is honest and
who actually knows something!”
But their congregations were poor.
Martin realized that he was lost. He tried to analyze his unpopularity.
“It isn’t just Jordan’s plotting and Tredgold’s grousing and Pugh’s weak
spine. It’s my own fault. I can’t go out and soft-soap the people and
get their permission to help keep them well. And I won’t tell them what
a hell of an important thing my work is--that I’m the one thing that
saves the whole lot of ’em from dying immediately. Apparently an
official in a democratic state has to do those things. Well, I don’t!
But I’ve got to think up something or they’ll emasculate the whole
Department.”
One inspiration he did have. If Pickerbaugh were here, he could crush,
or lovingly smother, the opposition. He remembered Pickerbaugh’s
farewell: “Now, my boy, even if I’m way off there in Washington, this
Work will be as close to my heart as it ever was, and if you should
really need me, you just send for me and I’ll drop everything and come.”
Martin wrote hinting that he was very much needed.
Pickerbaugh replied by return mail--good old Pickerbaugh!--but the reply
was, “I cannot tell you how grieved I am that I cannot for the moment
possibly get away from Washington but am sure that in your earnestness
you exaggerate strength of opposition, write me freely, at any time.”
“That’s my last shot,” Martin said to Leora. “I’m done. Mayor Pugh will
fire me, just as soon as he comes back from his fishing trip. I’m a
failure again, darling.”
“You’re not a failure, and you must eat some of this nice steak, and
what shall we do now--time for us to be moving on, anyway-- I hate
staying in one place,” said Leora.
“I don’t know what we’ll do. Maybe I could get a job at Hunziker’s. Or
go back to Dakota and try to work up a practise. What I’d like is to
become a farmer and get me a big shot-gun and drive every earnest
Christian citizen off the place. But meantime I’m going to stick here. I
might win yet--with just a couple of miracles and a divine intervention.
Oh, God, I am so tired! Are you coming back to the lab with me this
evening? Honest, I’ll quit early--before eleven, maybe.”
He had completed his paper on the streptolysin research, and he took a
day off to go to Chicago and talk it over with an editor of the _Journal
of Infectious Diseases_. As he left Nautilus he was confused. He had
caught himself rejoicing that he was free of Wheatsylvania and bound for
great Nautilus. Time bent back, progress was annihilated, and he was
mazed with futility.
The editor praised his paper, accepted it, and suggested only one
change. Martin had to wait for his train. He remembered that Angus Duer
was in Chicago, with the Rouncefield Clinic--a private organization of
medical specialists, sharing costs and profits.
The clinic occupied fourteen rooms in a twenty-story building
constructed (or so Martin certainly remembered it) of marble, gold, and
rubies. The clinic reception-room, focused on a vast stone fireplace,
was like the drawing-room of an oil magnate, but it was not a place of
leisure. The young woman at the door demanded Martin’s symptoms and
address. A page in buttons sped with his name to a nurse, who flew to
the inner offices. Before Angus appeared, Martin had to wait a
quarter-hour in a smaller, richer, still more abashing reception-room.
But this time he was so awed that he would have permitted the clinic
surgeons to operate on him for any ill which at the moment they happened
to fancy.
In medical school and Zenith General Hospital, Angus Duer had been
efficient enough, but now he was ten times as self-assured. He was
cordial; he invited Martin to step out for a dish of tea as though he
almost meant it; but beside him Martin felt young, rustic, inept.
Angus won him by pondering, “Irving Watters? He was Digam? I’m not sure
I remember him. Oh, yes--he was one of these boneheads that are the
curse of every profession.”
When Martin had sketched his conflict at Nautilus, Angus suggested, “You
better come join us here at Rouncefield, as pathologist. Our pathologist
is leaving in a few weeks. You could do the job, all right. You’re
getting thirty-five hundred a year now? Well, I think I could get you
forty-five hundred, as a starter, and some day you’d become a regular
member of the clinic and get in on all the profits. Let me know if you
want it. Rouncefield told me to dig up a man.”
With this resource and with an affection for Angus, Martin returned to
Nautilus and open war. When Mayor Pugh returned he did not discharge
Martin, but he appointed over him, as full Director, Pickerbaugh’s
friend, Dr. Bissex, the football coach and health director of Mugford
College.
Dr. Bissex first discharged Rufus Ockford, which took five minutes, went
out and addressed a Y. M. C. A. meeting, then bustled in and invited
Martin to resign.
“I will like hell!” said Martin. “Come on, be honest, Bissex. If you
want to fire me, do it, but let’s have things straight. I won’t resign,
and if you do fire me I think I’ll take it to the courts, and maybe I
can turn enough light on you and His Honor and Frank Jordan to keep you
from taking all the guts out of the work here.”
“Why, Doctor, what a way to talk! Certainly I won’t fire you,” said
Bissex, in the manner of one who has talked to difficult students and to
lazy football teams. “Stay with us as long as you like. Only, in the
interests of economy, I reduce your salary to eight hundred dollars a
year!”
“All right, reduce and be damned,” said Martin.
It sounded particularly fine and original when he said it, but less so
when Leora and he found that, with their rent fixed by their lease, they
could not by whatever mean economies live on less than a thousand a
year.
Now that he was free from responsibility he began to form his own
faction, to save the Department. He gathered Rabbi Rovine, Father
Costello, Ockford, who was going to remain in town and practise, the
secretary of the Labor Council, a banker who regarded Tredgold as
“fast,” and that excellent fellow the dentist of the school clinic.
“With people like that behind me, I can do something,” he gloated to
Leora. “I’m going to stick by it. I’m not going to have the D. P. H.
turned into a Y. M. C. A. Bissex has all of Pickerbaugh’s mush without
his honesty and vigor. I can beat him! I’m not much of an executive, but
I was beginning to visualize a D. P. H. that would be solid and not
gaseous--that would save kids and prevent epidemics. I won’t give it up.
You watch me!”
His committee made representations to the Commercial Club, and for a
time they were certain that the chief reporter of the _Frontiersman_ was
going to support them, “as soon as he could get his editor over being
scared of a row.” But Martin’s belligerency was weakened by shame, for
he never had enough money to meet his bills, and he was not used to
dodging irate grocers, receiving dunning letters, standing at the door
arguing with impertinent bill-collectors. He, who had been a city
dignitary a few days before, had to endure, “Come on now, you pay up,
you dead beat, or I’ll get a cop!” When the shame had grown to terror,
Dr. Bissex suddenly reduced his salary another two hundred dollars.
Martin stormed into the mayor’s office to have it out, and found F. X.
Jordan sitting with Pugh. It was evident that they both knew of the
second reduction and considered it an excellent joke.
He reassembled his committee. “I’m going to take this into the courts,”
he raged.
“Fine,” said Father Costello; and Rabbi Rovine: “Jenkins, that radical
lawyer, would handle the case free.”
The wise banker observed, “You haven’t got anything to take into the
courts till they discharge you without cause. Bissex has a legal right
to reduce your salary all he wants to. The city regulations don’t fix
the salary for anybody except the Director and the inspectors. You
haven’t a thing to say.”
With a melodramatic flourish Martin protested, “And I suppose I haven’t
a thing to say if they wreck the Department!”
“Not a thing, if the city doesn’t care.”
“Well, I care! I’ll starve before I’ll resign!”
“You’ll starve if you don’t resign, and your wife, too. Now here’s my
plan,” said the banker. “You go into private practise here-- I’ll
finance your getting an office and so on--and when the time comes, maybe
in five or ten years from now, we’ll all get together again and have you
put in as full Director.”
“Ten years of waiting--in _Nautilus_? Nope. I’m licked. I’m a complete
failure--at thirty-two! I’ll resign. I’ll wander on,” said Martin.
“I know I’m going to love Chicago,” said Leora.
IV
He wrote to Angus Duer. He was appointed pathologist in the Rouncefield
Clinic. But, Angus wrote, “they could not at the moment see their way
clear to pay him forty-five hundred a year, though they were glad to go
to twenty-five hundred.”
Martin accepted.
V
When the Nautilus papers announced that Martin had resigned, the good
citizens chuckled, “Resigned? He got kicked out, that’s what happened.”
One of the papers had an innocent squib:
Probably a certain amount of hypocrisy is inevitable in us sinful
human critters, but when a public official tries to pose as a saint
while indulging in every vice, and tries to cover up his gross
ignorance and incompetence by pulling political wires, and makes a
holy show of himself by not even doing a first-class job of
wire-pulling, then even the cussedest of us old scoundrels begins
to holler for the meat-ax.
Pickerbaugh wrote to Martin from Washington:
I greatly regret to hear that you have resigned your post. I cannot
tell you how disappointed I am, after all the pains I took in
breaking you in and making you acquainted with my ideals. Bissex
informs me that, because of crisis in city finances, he had to
reduce your salary temporarily. Well personally I would rather work
for the D.P.H. for nothing a year and earn my keep by being a night
watchman than give up the fight for everything that is decent and
constructive. I am sorry. I had a great liking for you, and your
defection, your going back to private practise merely for
commercial gain, your selling out for what I presume is a very high
emolument, is one of the very greatest blows I have recently had to
sustain.
VI
As they rode up to Chicago Martin thought aloud:
“I never knew I could be so badly licked. I never want to see a
laboratory or a public health office again. I’m done with everything but
making money.
“I suppose this Rouncefield Clinic is probably nothing but a gilded
boob-trap--scare the poor millionaire into having all the fancy kinds of
examinations and treatments the traffic will bear. I hope it is! I
expect to be a commercial-group doctor the rest of my life. I hope I
have the sense to be!
“All wise men are bandits. They’re loyal to their friends, but they
despise the rest. Why not, when the mass of people despise them if they
_aren’t_ bandits? Angus Duer had the sense to see this from the
beginning, way back in medic school. He’s probably a perfect technician
as a surgeon, but he knows you get only what you grab. Think of the
years it’s taken me to learn what he savvied all the time!
“Know what I’ll do? I’ll stick to the Rouncefield Clinic till I’m making
maybe thirty thousand a year, and then I’ll get Ockford and start my own
clinic, with myself as internist and head of the whole shooting-match,
and collect every cent I can.
“All right, if what people want is a little healing and a lot of
tapestry, they shall have it--and pay for it.
“I never thought I could be such a failure--to become a commercialist
and not want to be anything else. And I don’t want to be anything else,
believe me! I’m through!”
CHAPTER XXV
I
Then for a year with each day longer than a sleepless night, yet the
whole year speeding without events or seasons or eagerness, Martin was a
faithful mechanic in that most competent, most clean and brisk and
visionless medical factory, the Rouncefield Clinic. He had nothing of
which to complain. The clinic did, perhaps, give over-many
roentgenological examinations to socially dislocated women who needed
children and floor-scrubbing more than pretty little skiagraphs; they
did, perhaps, view all tonsils with too sanguinary a gloom; but
certainly no factory could have been better equipped or more
gratifyingly expensive, and none could have routed its raw human
material through so many processes so swiftly. The Martin Arrowsmith who
had been supercilious toward Pickerbaughs and old Dr. Winters had for
Rouncefield and Angus Duer and the other keen taut specialists of the
clinic only the respect of the poor and uncertain for the rich and
shrewd.
He admired Angus’s firmness of purpose and stability of habit.
Angus had a swim or a fencing lesson daily; he swam easily and fenced
like a still-faced demon. He was in bed before eleven-thirty; he never
took more than one drink a day; and he never read anything or said
anything which would not contribute to his progress as a Brilliant Young
Surgeon. His underlings knew that Dr. Duer would not fail to arrive
precisely on time, precisely well dressed, absolutely sober, very cool,
and appallingly unpleasant to any nurse who made a mistake or looked for
a smile.
Martin would without fear have submitted to the gilded and ardent
tonsil-snatcher of the clinic, would have submitted to Angus for
abdominal surgery or to Rouncefield for any operation of the head or
neck, providing he was himself quite sure the operation was necessary,
but he was never able to rise to the clinic’s lyric faith that any
portions of the body without which people could conceivably get along
should certainly be removed at once.
The real flaw in his year of Chicago was that through all his working
day he did not live. With quick hands, and one-tenth of his brain, he
made blood counts, did urinalyses and Wassermanns and infrequent
necropsies, and all the while he was dead, in a white-tiled coffin. Amid
the blattings of Pickerbaugh and the peepings of Wheatsylvania, he had
lived, had fought his environment. Now there was nothing to fight.
After hours, he almost lived. Leora and he discovered the world of
book-shops and print-shops and theaters and concerts. They read novels
and history and travel; they talked, at dinners given by Rouncefield or
Angus, to journalists, engineers, bankers, merchants. They saw a Russian
play, and heard Mischa Elman, and read Gottlieb’s beloved Rabelais.
Martin learned to flirt without childishness, and Leora went for the
first time to a hair-dresser and to a manicure, and began her lessons in
French. She had called Martin a “lie-hunter,” a “truth-seeker.” They
decided now, talking it over in their tight little two-and-quarter room
flat, that most people who called themselves “truth-seekers”--persons
who scurry about chattering of Truth as though it were a tangible
separable thing, like houses or salt or bread--did not so much desire to
find Truth as to cure their mental itch. In novels, these truth-seekers
quested the “secret of life” in laboratories which did not seem to be
provided with Bunsen flames or reagents; or they went, at great expense
and much discomfort from hot trains and undesirable snakes, to Himalayan
monasteries, to learn from unaseptic sages that the Mind can do all
sorts of edifying things if one will but spend thirty or forty years in
eating rice and gazing on one’s navel.
To these high matters Martin responded, “Rot!” He insisted that there is
no Truth but only many truths; that Truth is not a colored bird to be
chased among the rocks and captured by its tail, but a skeptical
attitude toward life. He insisted that no one could expect more than, by
stubbornness or luck, to have the kind of work he enjoyed and an ability
to become better acquainted with the facts of that work than the average
job-holder.
His mechanistic philosophy did not persuade him that he was progressing
adequately. When he tried to match himself with the experts of the
clinic or with their professional friends, he was even more
uncomfortable than he had been under the disconcerting scorn of Dr.
Hesselink of Groningen. At clinic luncheons he met surgeons from London,
New York, Boston; men with limousines and social positions and the
offensive briskness of the man who has numerous engagements, or the yet
more offensive quietness of the person who is amused by his inferiors;
master technicians, readers of papers at medical congresses, executives
and controllers, unafraid to operate before a hundred peering doctors,
or to give well-bred and exceedingly final orders to subordinates;
captain-generals of medicine, never doubting themselves; great priests
and healers; men mature and wise and careful and blandly cordial.
In their winged presences, Max Gottlieb seemed an aged fusser, Gustaf
Sondelius a mountebank, and the city of Nautilus unworthy of passionate
warfare. As their suave courtesy smothered him, Martin felt like a
footman.
In long hours of increasing frankness and lucidity he discussed with
Leora the question of “What is this Martin Arrowsmith and whither is he
going?” and he admitted that the sight of the Famous Surgeons disturbed
his ancient faith that he was somehow a superior person. It was Leora
who consoled him:
“I’ve got a lovely description for your dratted Famous Surgeons. You
know how polite and important they are, and they smile so carefully?
Well, don’t you remember you once said that Professor Gottlieb called
all such people like that ‘men of measured merriment’?”
He caught up the phrase; they sang it together; and they made of it a
beating impish song:
“Men of measured merriment! Men of measured merriment! Damn the great
executives, the men of measured merriment, damn the men with careful
smiles, damn the men that run the shops, oh, damn their measured
merriment, the men with measured merriment, oh, damn their measured
merriment, and DAMN their careful smiles!”
II
While Martin developed in a jagged way from the boy of Wheatsylvania to
mature man, his relations to Leora developed from loyal boy-and-girl
adventurousness to lasting solidity. They had that understanding of each
other known only to married people, a few married people, wherein for
all their differences they were as much indissoluble parts of a whole as
are the eye and hand. Their identification did not mean that they dwelt
always in rosy bliss. Because he was so intimately fond of her and so
sure of her, because anger and eager hot injustices are but ways of
expressing trust, Martin was irritated by her and querulous with her as
he would not have endured being with any other woman, any charming
Orchid.
He stalked out now and then after a quarrel, disdaining to answer her,
and for hours he left her alone, enjoying the knowledge that he was
hurting her, that she was alone, waiting, perhaps weeping. Because he
loved her and also was fond of her, he was annoyed when she was less
sleek, less suave, than the women he encountered at Angus Duer’s.
Mrs. Rouncefield was a worthy old waddler--beside her, Leora was shining
and exquisite. But Mrs. Duer was of amber and ice. She was a rich young
woman, she dressed with distinction, she spoke with finishing-school
mock-melodiousness, she was ambitious, and she was untroubled by the
possession of a heart or a brain. She was, indeed, what Mrs. Irving
Watters believed herself to be.
In the simple gorgeousness of the Nautilus Smart set, Mrs. Clay Tredgold
had petted Leora and laughed at her if she lacked a shoe-buckle or split
an infinitive, but the gold-slippered Mrs. Duer was accustomed to sneer
at carelessness with the most courteous and unresentable and
unmistakable sneers.
As they returned by taxicab from the Duers’, Martin flared:
“Don’t you ever learn anything? I remember once in Nautilus we stopped
on a country road and talked till--oh, darn’ near dawn, and you were
going to be so energetic, but here we are again to-night, with just the
same thing-- Good God, couldn’t you even take the trouble to notice that
you had a spot of soot on your nose to-night? Mrs. Duer noticed it, all
right! Why are you so sloppy? Why can’t you take a little care? And why
can’t you make an effort, anyway, to have something to say? You just sit
there at dinner--you just sit and look healthy! Don’t you want to help
me? Mrs. Duer will probably help Angus to become president of the
American Medical Association, in about twenty years, and by that time I
suppose you’ll have me back in Dakota as assistant to Hesselink!”
Leora had been snuggling beside him in the unusual luxury of a taxicab.
She sat straight now, and when she spoke she had lost the casual
independence with which she usually regarded life:
“Dear, I’m awfully sorry. I went out this afternoon, I went out and had
a facial massage, so as to look nice for you, and then I knew you like
conversation, so I got my little book about modern painting that I
bought and I studied it terribly hard, but to-night I just couldn’t seem
to get the conversation around to modern painting--”
He was sobbing, with her head on his shoulder, “Oh, you poor, scared,
bullied kid, trying to be grown-up with these dollar-chasers!”
III
After the first daze of white tile and bustling cleverness at the
Rouncefield Clinic, Martin had the desire to tie up a few loose knots of
his streptolysin research.
When Angus Duer discovered it he hinted, “Look here, Martin, I’m glad
you’re keeping on with your science, but if I were you I wouldn’t, I
think, waste too much energy on mere curiosity. Dr. Rouncefield was
speaking about it the other day. We’d be glad to have you do all the
research you want, only we’d like it if you went at something practical.
Take for instance: if you could make a tabulation of the blood-counts in
a couple of hundred cases of appendicitis and publish it, that’d get
somewhere, and you could sort of bring in a mention of the clinic, and
we’d all receive a little credit--and incidentally maybe we could raise
you to three thousand a year then.”
This generosity had the effect of extinguishing Martin’s desire to do
any research whatever.
“Angus is right. What he means is: as a scientist I’m finished. I am.
I’ll never try to do anything original again.”
It was at this time, when Martin had been with the clinic for a year,
that his streptolysin paper was published in the _Journal of Infectious
Diseases_. He gave reprints to Rouncefield and to Angus. They said
extremely nice things which showed that they had not read the paper, and
again they suggested his tabulating blood-counts.
He also sent a reprint to Max Gottlieb, at the McGurk Institute of
Biology.
Gottlieb wrote to him, in that dead-black spider-web script:
Dear Martin:
I have read your paper with great pleasure. The curves of the
relation of hemolysin production to age of culture are
illuminating. I have spoken about you to Tubbs. When are you coming
to us--to me? Your laboratory and diener are waiting for you here.
The last thing I want to be is a mystic, but I feel when I see your
fine engraved letterhead of a clinic and a Rouncefield that you
should be tired of trying to be a good citizen and ready to come
back to work. We shall be glad, & Dr. Tubbs, if you can come.
Truly yours,
M. Gottlieb.
“I’m simply going to adore New York,” said Leora.
CHAPTER XXVI
I
The McGurk Building. A sheer wall, thirty blank stories of glass and
limestone, down in the pinched triangle whence New York rules a quarter
of the world.
Martin was not overwhelmed by his first hint of New York; after a year
in the Chicago Loop, Manhattan seemed leisurely. But when from the
elevated railroad he beheld the Woolworth Tower, he was exalted. To him
architecture had never existed; buildings were larger or smaller bulks
containing more or less interesting objects. His most impassioned
architectural comment had been, “There’s a cute bungalow; be nice place
to live.” Now he pondered, “Like to see that tower every day--clouds and
storms behind it and everything--so sort of satisfying.”
He came along Cedar Street, among thunderous trucks portly with wares
from all the world; came to the bronze doors of the McGurk Building and
a corridor of intemperately colored terra-cotta, with murals of Andean
Indians, pirates booming up the Spanish Main, guarded gold-trains, and
the stout walls of Cartagena. At the Cedar Street end of the corridor, a
private street, one block long, was the Bank of the Andes and Antilles
(Ross McGurk chairman of the board), in whose gold-crusted sanctity
red-headed Yankee exporters drew drafts on Quito, and clerks hurled
breathless Spanish at bulky women. A sign indicated, at the Liberty
Street end, “Passenger Offices, McGurk Line, weekly sailings for the
West Indies and South America.”
Born to the prairies, never far from the sight of the cornfields, Martin
was conveyed to blazing lands and portentous enterprises.
One of the row of bronze-barred elevators was labeled “Express to McGurk
Institute.” He entered it proudly, feeling himself already a part of the
godly association. They rose swiftly, and he had but half-second
glimpses of ground glass doors with the signs of mining companies,
lumber companies, Central American railroad companies.
The McGurk Institute is probably the only organization for scientific
research in the world which is housed in an office building. It has the
twenty-ninth and thirtieth stories of the McGurk Building, and the roof
is devoted to its animal house and to tiled walks along which (above a
world of stenographers and bookkeepers and earnest gentlemen who desire
to sell Better-bilt Garments to the golden dons of the Argentine)
saunter rapt scientists dreaming of osmosis in Spirogyra.
Later, Martin was to note that the reception-room of the Institute was
smaller, yet more forbiddingly polite, in its white paneling and
Chippendale chairs, than the lobby of the Rouncefield Clinic, but now he
was unconscious of the room, of the staccato girl attendant, of
everything except that he was about to see Max Gottlieb, for the first
time in five years.
At the door of the laboratory he stared hungrily.
Gottlieb was thin-cheeked and dark as ever, his hawk nose bony, his
fierce eyes demanding, but his hair had gone gray, the flesh round his
mouth was sunken, and Martin could have wept at the feebleness with
which he rose. The old man peered down at him, his hand on Martin’s
shoulder, but he said only:
“Ah! Dis is good.... Your laboratory is three doors down the hall....
But I object to one thing in the good paper you send me. You say, ‘The
regularity of the rate at which the streptolysin disappears suggests
that an equation may be found--’”
“But it can, sir!”
“Then why did you not make the equation?”
“Well-- I don’t know. I wasn’t enough of a mathematician.”
“Then you should not have published till you knew your math!”
“I-- Look, Dr. Gottlieb, do you really think I know enough to work here?
I want terribly to succeed.”
“Succeed? I have heard that word. It is English? Oh, yes, it is a word
that liddle schoolboys use at the University of Winnemac. It means
passing examinations. But there are no examinations to pass here....
Martin, let us be clear. You know something of laboratory technique; you
have heard about dese bacilli; you are not a good chemist, and
mathematics--pfui!--most terrible! But you have curiosity and you are
stubborn. You do not accept rules. Therefore I t’ink you will either
make a very good scientist or a very bad one, and if you are bad enough,
you will be popular with the rich ladies who rule this city, New York,
and you can gif lectures for a living or even become, if you get to be
plausible enough, a college president. So anyvay, it will be
interesting.”
Half an hour later they were arguing ferociously, Martin asserting that
the whole world ought to stop warring and trading and writing and get
straightway into laboratories to observe new phenomena; Gottlieb
insisting that there were already too many facile scientists, that the
one thing necessary was the mathematical analysis (and often the
destruction) of phenomena already observed.
It sounded bellicose, and all the while Martin was blissful with the
certainty that he had come home.
The laboratory in which they talked (Gottlieb pacing the floor, his long
arms fantastically knotted behind his thin back; Martin leaping on and
off tall stools) was not in the least remarkable--a sink, a bench with
racks of numbered test-tubes, a microscope, a few note-books and
hydrogen-ion charts, a grotesque series of bottles connected by glass
and rubber tubes on an ordinary kitchen table at the end of the
room--yet now and then during his tirades Martin looked about
reverently.
Gottlieb interrupted their debate: “What work do you want to do here?”
“Why, sir, I’d like to help you, if I can. I suppose you’re cleaning up
some things on the synthesis of antibodies.”
“Yes, I t’ink I can bring immunity reactions under the mass action law.
But you are not to help me. You are to do your own work. What do you
want to do? This is not a clinic, wit’ patients going through so neat in
a row!”
“I want to find a hemolysin for which there’s an antibody. There isn’t
any for streptolysin. I’d like to work with staphylolysin. Would you
mind?”
“I do not care what you do--if you just do not steal my staph cultures
out of the ice-box, and if you will look mysterious all the time, so Dr.
Tubbs, our Director, will t’ink you are up to something big. So! I haf
only one suggestion: when you get stuck in a problem, I have a fine
collection of detective stories in my office. But no. Should I be
serious--this once, when you are just come?
“Perhaps I am a crank, Martin. There are many who hate me. There are
plots against me--oh, you t’ink I imagine it, but you shall see! I make
many mistakes. But one thing I keep always pure: the religion of a
scientist.
“To be a scientist--it is not just a different job, so that a man should
choose between being a scientist and being an explorer or a
bond-salesman or a physician or a king or a farmer. It is a tangle of
ver-y obscure emotions, like mysticism, or wanting to write poetry; it
makes its victim all different from the good normal man. The normal man,
he does not care much what he does except that he should eat and sleep
and make love. But the scientist is intensely religious--he is so
religious that he will not accept quarter-truths, because they are an
insult to his faith.
“He wants that everything should be subject to inexorable laws. He is
equal opposed to the capitalists who t’ink their silly money-grabbing is
a system, and to liberals who t’ink man is not a fighting animal; he
takes both the American booster and the European aristocrat, and he
ignores all their blithering. Ignores it! All of it! He hates the
preachers who talk their fables, but he iss not too kindly to the
anthropologists and historians who can only make guesses, yet they have
the nerf to call themselves scientists! Oh, yes, he is a man that all
nice good-natured people should naturally hate!
“He speaks no meaner of the ridiculous faith-healers and chiropractors
than he does of the doctors that want to snatch our science before it is
tested and rush around hoping they heal people, and spoiling all the
clues with their footsteps; and worse than the men like hogs, worse than
the imbeciles who have not even heard of science, he hates
pseudo-scientists, guess-scientists--like these psycho-analysts; and
worse than those comic dream-scientists he hates the men that are
allowed in a clean kingdom like biology but know only one text-book and
how to lecture to nincompoops all so popular! He is the only real
revolutionary, the authentic scientist, because he alone knows how
liddle he knows.
“He must be heartless. He lives in a cold, clear light. Yet dis is a
funny t’ing: really, in private, he is not cold nor heartless--so much
less cold than the Professional Optimists. The world has always been
ruled by the Philanthropists: by the doctors that want to use
therapeutic methods they do not understand, by the soldiers that want
something to defend their country against, by the preachers that yearn
to make everybody listen to them, by the kind manufacturers that love
their workers, by the eloquent statesmen and soft-hearted authors--and
see once what a fine mess of hell they haf made of the world! Maybe now
it is time for the scientist, who works and searches and never goes
around howling how he loves everybody!
“But once again always remember that not all the men who work at science
are scientists. So few! The rest--secretaries, press-agents,
camp-followers! To be a scientist is like being a Goethe: it is born in
you. Sometimes I t’ink you have a liddle of it born in you. If you haf,
there is only one t’ing--no, there is two t’ings you must do: work twice
as hard as you can, and keep people from using you. I will try to
protect you from Success. It is all I can do. So ... I should wish,
Martin, that you will be very happy here. May Koch bless you!”
II
Five rapt minutes Martin spent in the laboratory which was to be
his--smallish but efficient, the bench exactly the right height, a
proper sink with pedal taps. When he had closed the door and let his
spirit flow out and fill that minute apartment with his own essence, he
felt secure.
No Pickerbaugh or Rouncefield could burst in here and drag him away to
be explanatory and plausible and public; he would be free to work,
instead of being summoned to the package-wrapping and dictation of
breezy letters which men call work.
He looked out of the broad window above his bench and saw that he did
have the coveted Woolworth Tower, to keep and gloat on. Shut in to a joy
of precision, he would nevertheless not be walled out from flowing life.
He had, to the north, not the Woolworth Tower alone but the Singer
Building, the arrogant magnificence of the City Investing Building. To
the west, tall ships were riding, tugs were bustling, all the world went
by. Below his Clif, the streets were feverish. Suddenly he loved
humanity as he loved the decent, clean rows of test-tubes, and he prayed
then the prayer of the scientist:
“God give me unclouded eyes and freedom from haste. God give me a quiet
and relentless anger against all pretense and all pretentious work and
all work left slack and unfinished. God give me a restlessness whereby
I may neither sleep nor accept praise till my observed results equal my
calculated results or in pious glee I discover and assault my error. God
give me strength not to trust to God!”
III
He walked all the way up to their inconsiderable hotel in the Thirties,
and all the way the crowds stared at him--this slim, pale, black-eyed,
beaming young man who thrust among them, half-running, seeing nothing
yet in a blur seeing everything: gallant buildings, filthy streets,
relentless traffic, soldiers of fortune, fools, pretty women, frivolous
shops, windy sky. His feet raced to the tune of “I’ve found my work,
I’ve found my work, I’ve found my work!”
Leora was awaiting him-- Leora whose fate it was ever to wait for him in
creaky rocking-chairs in cheapish rooms. As he galloped in she smiled,
and all her thin, sweet body was illumined. Before he spoke she cried:
“Oh, Sandy, I’m so glad!”
She interrupted his room-striding panegyrics on Max Gottlieb, on the
McGurk Institute, on New York, on the charms of staphylolysin, by a meek
“Dear, how much are they going to pay you?”
He stopped with a bump. “Gosh! I forgot to ask!”
“Oh!”
“Now you look here! This isn’t a Rouncefield Clinic! I hate these
buzzards that can’t see anything but making money--”
“I know, Sandy. Honestly, I don’t care. I was just wondering what kind
of a flat we’ll be able to afford, so I can begin looking for it. Go on.
Dr. Gottlieb said--”
It was three hours after, at eight, when they went to dinner.
IV
The city of magic was to become to Martin neither a city nor any sort of
magic but merely a route: their flat, the subway, the Institute, a
favorite inexpensive restaurant, a few streets of laundries and
delicatessens and movie theaters. But to-night it was a fog of wonder.
They dined at the Brevoort, of which Gustaf Sondelius had told him. This
was in 1916, before the country had become wholesome and sterile, and
the Brevoort was a tumult of French uniforms, caviar, Louis, dangling
neckties, Nuits St. Georges, illustrators, Grand Marnier, British
Intelligence officers, brokers, conversation, and Martell, V.O.
“It’s a fine crazy bunch,” said Martin. “Do you realize we can stop
being respectable now? Irving Watters isn’t watching us, or Angus! Would
we be too insane if we had a bottle of champagne?”
He awoke next day to fret that there must be a trick somewhere, as there
had been in Nautilus, in Chicago. But as he set to work he seemed to be
in a perfect world. The Institute deftly provided all the material and
facilities he could desire--animals, incubators, glassware, cultures,
media--and he had a thoroughly trained technician--“garçon” they called
him at the Institute. He really was let alone; he really was encouraged
to do individual work; he really was associated with men who thought not
in terms of poetic posters or of two-thousand-dollar operations but of
colloids and sporulation and electrons, and of the laws and energies
which governed them.
On his first day there came to greet him the head of the Department of
Physiology, Dr. Rippleton Holabird.
Holabird seemed, though Martin had found his name starred in
physiological journals, too young and too handsome to be the head of a
department: a tall, slim, easy man with a trim mustache. Martin had been
reared in the school of Clif Clawson; he had not realized, till he heard
Dr. Holabird’s quick greeting, that a man’s voice may be charming
without effeminacy.
Holabird guided him through the two floors of the Institute, and Martin
beheld all the wonders of which he had ever dreamed. If it was not so
large, McGurk ranked in equipment with Rockefeller, Pasteur, McCormick,
Lister. Martin saw rooms for sterilizing glass and preparing media, for
glass-blowing, for the polariscope and the spectroscope, and a
steel-and-cement-walled combustion-chamber. He saw a museum of pathology
and bacteriology to which he longed to add. There was a department of
publications, whence were issued the Institute reports, and the
_American Journal of Geographic Pathology_, edited by the Director, Dr.
Tubbs; there was a room for photography, a glorious library, an aquarium
for the Department of Marine Biology, and (Dr. Tubbs’s own idea) a row
of laboratories which visiting foreign scientists were invited to use as
their own. A Belgian biologist and a Portuguese bio-chemist were
occupying guest laboratories now, and once, Martin thrilled to learn,
Gustaf Sondelius had been here.
Then Martin saw the Berkeley-Saunders centrifuge.
The principle of the centrifuge is that of the cream-separator. It
collects as sediment the solids scattered through a liquid, such as
bacteria in a solution. Most centrifuges are hand-or water-power
contrivances the size of a large cocktail-shaker, but this noble
implement was four feet across, electrically driven, the central bowl
enclosed in armor plate fastened with levers like a submarine hatch, the
whole mounted on a cement pillar.
Holabird explained, “There’re only three of these in existence. They’re
made by Berkeley-Saunders in England. You know the normal speed, even
for a good centrifuge, is about four thousand revolutions a minute. This
does twenty thousand a minute--fastest in the world. Eh?”
“Jove, they do give you the stuff to work with!” gloated Martin. (He
really did, under Holabird’s handsome influence, say Jove, not Gosh.)
“Yes, McGurk and Tubbs are the most generous men in the scientific
world. I think you’ll find it very pleasant to be here, Doctor.”
“I know I will--shall. And Jove, it’s awfully nice of you to take me
around this way.”
“Can’t you see how much I’m enjoying my chance to display my knowledge?
There’s no form of egotism so agreeable and so safe as being a cicerone.
But we still have the real wonder of the Institute for to behold,
Doctor. Down this way.”
The real wonder of the Institute had nothing visible to do with science.
It was the Hall, in which lunched the staff, and in which occasional
scientific dinners were given, with Mrs. McGurk as hostess. Martin
gasped and his head went back as his glance ran from glistening floor to
black and gold ceiling. The Hall rose the full height of the two floors
of the Institute. Clinging to the soaring wall, above the dais on which
lunched the Director and the seven heads of departments, was a carved
musicians’-gallery. Against the oak paneling of the walls were
portraits of the pontiffs of science, in crimson robes, with a vast
mural by Maxfield Parrish, and above all was an electrolier of a hundred
globes.
“Gosh--_Jove!_” said Martin. “I never knew there was such a room!”
Holabird was generous. He did not smile. “Oh, perhaps it’s almost too
gorgeous. It’s Capitola’s pet creation-- Capitola is Mrs. Ross McGurk,
wife of the founder; she’s really an awfully nice woman but she does
love Movements and Associations. Terry Wickett, one of the chemists
here, calls this ‘Bonanza Hall.’ Yet it does inspire you when you come
in to lunch all tired and grubby. Now let’s go call on the Director. He
told me to bring you in.”
After the Babylonian splendor of the Hall, Martin expected to find the
office of Dr. A. DeWitt Tubbs fashioned like a Roman bath, but it was,
except for a laboratory bench at one end, the most rigidly business-like
apartment he had ever seen.
Dr. Tubbs was an earnest man, whiskered like a terrier, very scholarly,
and perhaps the most powerful American exponent of coöperation in
science, but he was also a man of the world, fastidious of boots and
waistcoats. He had graduated from Harvard, studied on the Continent,
been professor of pathology in the University of Minnesota, president of
Hartford University, minister to Venezuela, editor of the _Weekly
Statesman_ and president of the Sanity League, finally Director of
McGurk.
He was a member both of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and of
the Academy of Sciences. Bishops, generals, liberal rabbis, and musical
bankers dined with him. He was one of the Distinguished Men to whom the
newspapers turned for authoritative interviews on all subjects.
You realized before he had talked to you for ten minutes that here was
one of the few leaders of mankind who could discourse on any branch of
knowledge, yet could control practical affairs and drive stumbling
mankind on to sane and reasonable ideals. Though a Max Gottlieb might in
his research show a certain talent, yet his narrowness, his sour and
antic humor, kept him from developing the broad view of education,
politics, commerce, and all other noble matters which marked Dr. A.
DeWitt Tubbs.
But the Director was as cordial to the insignificant Martin Arrowsmith
as though Martin were a visiting senator. He shook his hand warmly; he
unbent in a smile; his baritone was mellow.
“Dr. Arrowsmith, I trust we shall do more than merely say you are
welcome here; I trust we shall show you how welcome you are! Dr.
Gottlieb tells me that you have a natural aptitude for cloistered
investigation but that you have been looking over the fields of medical
practise and public health before you settled down to the laboratory. I
can’t tell you how wise I consider you to have made that broad
preliminary survey. Too many would-be scientists lack the tutored vision
which comes from coördinating all mental domains.”
Martin was dazed to discover that he had been making a broad survey.
“Now you’ll doubtless wish to take some time, perhaps a year or more, in
getting into your stride, Dr. Arrowsmith. I shan’t ask you for any
reports. So long as Dr. Gottlieb feels that you yourself are satisfied
with your progress, I shall be content. Only if there is anything in
which I can advise you, from a perhaps somewhat longer career in
science, please believe that I shall be delighted to be of aid, and I am
quite sure the same obtains with Dr. Holabird here, though he really
ought to be jealous, because he is one of our youngest workers--in fact
I call him my _enfant terrible_--but you, I believe, are only
thirty-three, and you quite put the poor fellow’s nose out!”
Holabird merrily suggested, “Oh, no, Doctor, it’s been put out long ago.
You forget Terry Wickett. He’s under forty.”
“Oh. _Him!_” murmured Dr. Tubbs.
Martin had never heard a man disposed of so poisonously with such
politeness. He saw that in Terry Wickett there might be a serpent even
in this paradise.
“Now,” said Dr. Tubbs, “perhaps you might like to glance around my place
here. I pride myself on keeping our card-indices and letter-files as
unimaginatively as though I were an insurance agent. But there is a
certain exotic touch in these charts.” He trotted across the room to
show a nest of narrow drawers filled with scientific blue-prints.
Just what they were charts of, he did not say, nor did Martin ever
learn.
He pointed to the bench at the end of the room, and laughingly
admitted:
“You can see there what an inefficient fellow I really am. I keep
asserting that I have given up all the idyllic delights of pathological
research for the less fascinating but so very important and fatiguing
cares of the directorship. Yet such is the weakness of _genus homo_ that
sometimes, when I ought to be attending to practical details, I become
obsessed by some probably absurd pathological concept, and so ridiculous
am I that I can’t wait to hasten down the hall to my regular
laboratory-- I must always have a bench at hand and an experiment going
on. Oh, I’m afraid I’m not the moral man that I pose as being in public!
Here I am married to executive procedure, and still I hanker for my
first love, Milady Science!”
“I think it’s fine you still have an itch for it,” Martin ventured.
He was wondering just what experiments Dr. Tubbs had been doing lately.
The bench seemed rather unused.
“And now, Doctor, I want you to meet the real Director of the
Institute--my secretary, Miss Pearl Robbins.”
Martin had already noticed Miss Robbins. You could not help noticing
Miss Robbins. She was thirty-five and stately, a creamy goddess. She
rose to shake hands--a firm, competent grasp--and to cry in her glorious
contralto, “Dr. Tubbs is so complimentary only because he knows that
otherwise I wouldn’t give him his afternoon tea. We’ve heard so much
about your cleverness from Dr. Gottlieb that I’m almost afraid to
welcome you, Dr. Arrowsmith, but I do want to.”
Then, in a glow, Martin stood in his laboratory looking at the Woolworth
Tower. He was dizzy with these wonders--his own wonders, now! In
Rippleton Holabird, so gaily elegant yet so distinguished, he hoped to
have a friend. He found Dr. Tubbs somewhat sentimental, but he was moved
by his kindness and by Miss Robbins’s recognition. He was in a haze of
future glory when his door was banged open by a hard-faced, red-headed,
soft-shirted man of thirty-six or-eight.
“Arrowsmith?” the intruder growled. “My name is Wickett, Terry Wickett.
I’m a chemist. I’m with Gottlieb. Well, I noticed the Holy Wren was
showing you the menagerie.”
“Dr. Holabird?”
“Him.... Well, you must be more or less intelligent, if Pa Gottlieb let
you in. How’s it starting? Which kind are you going to be? One of the
polite birds that uses the Institute for social climbing and catches
him a rich wife, or one of the roughnecks like me and Gottlieb?”
Terry Wickett’s croak was as irritating a sound as Martin had ever
heard. He answered in a voice curiously like that of Rippleton Holabird:
“I don’t think you need to worry. I happen to be married already!”
“Oh, don’t let that fret you, Arrowsmith. Divorces are cheap, in this
man’s town. Well, did the Holy Wren show you Gladys the Tart?”
“Huh?”
“Gladys the Tart, or the Galloping Centrifuge.”
“Oh. You mean the Berkeley-Saunders?”
“I do, soul of my soul. Whajuh think of it?”
“It’s the finest centrifuge I’ve ever seen. Dr. Holabird said--”
“Hell, he ought to say something! He went and got old Tubbs to buy it.
He just loves it, Holy Wren does.”
“Why not? It’s the fastest--”
“Sure. Speediest centrifuge in the whole _Vereinigen_, and made of the
best toothpick steel. The only trouble is, it always blows out fuses,
and it spatters the bugs so that you need a gas-mask if you’re going to
use it.... And did you love dear old Tubbsy and the peerless Pearl?”
“I did!”
“Fine. Of course Tubbs is an illiterate jackass but still, at that, he
hasn’t got persecution-mania, like Gottlieb.”
“Look here, Wickett--is it Dr. Wickett?”
“Uh-huh.... M.D., Ph.D., but a first-rate chemist just the same.”
“Well, Dr. Wickett, it seems to me a shame that a man of your talents
should have to associate with idiots like Gottlieb and Tubbs and
Holabird. I’ve just left a Chicago clinic where everybody is nice and
sensible. I’d be glad to recommend you for a job there!”
“Wouldn’t be so bad. At least I’d avoid all the gassing at lunch in
Bonanza Hall. Well, sorry I got your goat, Arrowsmith, but you look all
right to me.”
“Thanks!”
Wickett grinned obscenely--red-headed, rough-faced, wiry--and snorted,
“By the way, did Holabird tell you about being wounded in the first
month of the war, when he was a field 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 of medical science,”
Martin perceived new avenues of exciting research; he stood on a
mountain, and unknown valleys, craggy tantalizing paths, were open to
his feet.
V
Dr. and Mrs. Rippleton Holabird invited them to dinner, a week after
their coming.
As Holabird’s tweeds made Clay Tredgold’s smartness seem hard and
pretentious, so his dinner revealed Angus Duer’s affairs in Chicago as
mechanical and joyless and a little anxious. Every one whom Martin met
at the Holabirds’ flat was a Somebody, though perhaps a minor Somebody:
a goodish editor or a rising ethnologist; and all of them had Holabird’s
graceful casualness.
The provincial Arrowsmiths arrived on time, therefore fifteen minutes
early. Before the cocktails appeared, in old Venetian glass, Martin
demanded, “Doctor, what problems are you getting after now in your
physiology?”
Holabird was transformed into an ardent boy. With a deprecatory “Would
you really like to hear about ’em--you needn’t be polite, you know!” he
dashed into an exposition of his experiments, drawing sketches on the
blank spaces in newspaper advertisements, on the back of a wedding
invitation, on the fly-leaf of a presentation novel, looking at Martin
apologetically, learned yet gay.
“We’re working on the localization of brain functions. I think we’ve
gone beyond Bolton and Flechsig. Oh, it’s jolly exciting, exploring the
brain. Look here!”
His swift pencil was sketching the cerebrum; the brain lived and beat
under his fingers.
He threw down the paper. “I say, it’s a shame to inflict my hobbies on
you. Besides, the others are coming. Tell me, how is your work going?
Are you comfortable at the Institute? Do you find you like people?”
“Everybody except-- To be frank, I’m jarred by Wickett.”
Generously, “I know. His manner is slightly aggressive. But you mustn’t
mind him; he’s really an extraordinarily gifted bio-chemist. He’s a
bachelor--gives up everything for his work. And he doesn’t really mean
half the rude things he says. He detests me, among others. Has he
mentioned me?”
“Why, not especially--”
“I have a feeling he goes around saying that I talk about my experiences
in the war, which really isn’t quite altogether true.”
“Yes,” in a burst, “he did say that.”
“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.
CHAPTER XXVII
I
His work began fumblingly. There were days when, for all the joy of it,
he dreaded lest Tubbs stride in and bellow, “What are you doing here?
You’re the wrong Arrowsmith! Get out!”
He had isolated twenty strains of staphylococcus germs and he was
testing them to discover which of them was most active in producing a
hemolytic, a blood-disintegrating toxin, so that he might produce an
antitoxin.
There were picturesque moments when, after centrifuging, the organisms
lay in coiling cloudy masses at the bottoms of the tubes; or when the
red corpuscles were completely dissolved and the opaque brick-red liquid
turned to the color of pale wine. But most of the processes were
incomparably tedious: removing samples of the culture every six hours,
making salt suspensions of corpuscles in small tubes, recording the
results.
He never knew they were tedious.
Tubbs came in now and then, found him busy, patted his shoulder, said
something which sounded like French and might even have been French, and
gave vague encouragement; while Gottlieb imperturbably told him to go
ahead, and now and then stirred him by showing his own note-books (they
were full of figures and abbreviations, stupid-seeming as invoices of
calico) or by speaking of his own work, in a vocabulary as heathenish as
Tibetan magic:
“Arrhenius and Madsen have made a contribution toward bringing immunity
reactions under the mass action law, but I hope to show that
antigen-antibody combinations occur in stoicheiometric proportions when
certain variables are held constant.”
“Oh, yes, I see,” said Martin; and to himself: “Well, I darn’ near a
quarter understand that! Oh, Lord, if they’ll only give me a little time
and not send me back to tacking up diphtheria posters!”
When he had obtained a satisfactory toxin, Martin began his effort to
find an antitoxin. He made vast experiments with no results. Sometimes
he was certain that he had something, but when he rechecked his
experiments he was bleakly certain that he hadn’t. Once he rushed into
Gottlieb’s laboratory with the announcement of the antitoxin, whereupon
with affection and several discomforting questions and the present of a
box of real Egyptian cigarettes, Gottlieb showed him that he had not
considered certain dilutions.
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.
But her real grievance arose when, after Rippleton Holabird had agreed
to give midnight supper on the roof of the Institute to one of her most
intellectual dinner-parties, she telephoned to Gottlieb, merely asking,
“Would it be too much trouble for you to go down and open your lab, so
we can all enjoy just a tiny peep at it?” and he answered:
“It would! Good night!”
Capitola protested to her husband. He listened--at least he seemed to
listen--and remarked:
“Cap, I don’t mind your playing the fool with the footmen. They’ve got
to stand it. But if you get funny with Max, I’ll simply shut up the
whole Institute, and then you won’t have anything to talk about at the
Colony Club. And it certainly does beat the deuce that a man worth
thirty million dollars--at least a fellow that’s got that much--can’t
find a clean pair of pajamas. No, I _won’t_ have a valet! Oh, please
now, Capitola, please quit being high-minded and let me go to sleep,
will you!”
But Capitola was uncontrollable, especially in the matter of the monthly
dinners which she gave at the Institute.
III
The first of the McGurk Scientific Dinners which Martin and Leora
witnessed was a particularly important and explanatory dinner, because
the guest of honor was Major-General Sir Isaac Mallard, the London
surgeon, who was in America with a British War Mission. He had already
beautifully let himself be shown through the Institute; he had been Sir
Isaac’d by Dr. Tubbs and every researcher except Terry Wickett; he
remembered meeting Rippleton Holabird in London, or said he remembered;
and he admired Gladys the Centrifuge.
The dinner began with one misfortune in that Terry Wickett, who hitherto
could be depended upon to stay decently away, now appeared, volunteering
to the wife of an ex-ambassador, “I simply couldn’t duck this spread,
with dear Sir Isaac coming. Say, if I hadn’t told you, you wouldn’t
hardly think my dress-suit was rented, would you! Have you noticed that
Sir Isaac is getting so he doesn’t tear the carpet with his spurs any
more? I wonder if he still kills all his mastoid patients?”
There was vast music, vaster food; there were uncomfortable scientists
explaining to golden cooing ladies, in a few words, just what they were
up to and what in the next twenty years they hoped to be up to; there
were the cooing ladies themselves, observing in tones of pretty rebuke,
“But I’m afraid you haven’t yet made it as clear as you might.” There
were the cooing ladies’ husbands--college graduates, manipulators of oil
stocks or of corporation law--who sat ready to give to anybody who
desired it their opinion that while antitoxins might be racy, what we
really needed was a good substitute for rubber.
There was Rippleton Holabird, being charming.
And in the pause of the music, there suddenly was Terry Wickett, saying
to quite an important woman, one of Capitola’s most useful friends,
“Yes, his name is spelled G-o-t-t-l-i-e-b but it’s pronounced Gottdamn.”
But such outsiders as Wickett and such silent riders as Martin and Leora
and such totally absent members as Max Gottlieb were few, and the dinner
waxed magnificently to a love-feast when Dr. Tubbs and Sir Isaac Mallard
paid compliments to each other, to Capitola, to the sacred soil of
France, to brave little Belgium, to American hospitality, to British
love of privacy, and to the extremely interesting things a young man
with a sense of coöperation might do in modern science.
The guests were conducted through the Institute. They inspected the
marine biology aquarium, the pathological museum, and the animal house,
at sight of which one sprightly lady demanded of Wickett, “Oh, the poor
little guinea pigs and darling rabbicks! Now honestly, Doctor, don’t you
think it would be ever so much nicer if you let them go free, and just
worked with your test-tubes?”
A popular physician, whose practise was among rich women, none of them
west of Fifth Avenue, said to the sprightly lady, “I think you’re
absolutely right. I never have to kill any poor wee little beasties to
get my knowledge!”
With astounding suddenness Wickett took his hat and went away.
The sprightly lady said, “You see, he didn’t dare stand up to a real
argument. Oh, Dr. Arrowsmith, of course I know how wonderful Ross McGurk
and Dr. Tubbs and all of you are, but I must say I’m disappointed in
your laboratories. I’d expected there’d be such larky retorts and
electric furnaces and everything but, honestly, I don’t see a single
thing that’s interesting, and I do think all you clever people ought to
do _something_ for us, now that you’ve coaxed us all the way down here.
Can’t you or somebody create life out of turtle eggs, or whatever it is?
Oh, please do! Pretty please! Or at least, do put on one of these
cunnin’ dentist coats that you wear.”
Then Martin also went rapidly away, accompanied by a furious Leora, who
in the taxicab announced that she had desired to taste the champagne-cup
which she had observed on the buffet, and that her husband was little
short of a fool.
IV
Thus, however satisfying his work, Martin began to wonder about the
perfection of his sanctuary; to wonder why Gottlieb should be so
insulting at lunch to neat Dr. Sholtheis, the industrious head of the
Department of Epidemiology, and why Dr. Sholtheis should endure the
insults; to wonder why Dr. Tubbs, when he wandered into one’s
laboratory, should gurgle, “The one thing for you to keep in view in all
your work is the ideal of coöperation”; to wonder why so ardent a
physiologist as Rippleton Holabird should all day long be heard
conferring with Tubbs instead of sweating at his bench.
Holabird had, five years before, done one bit of research which had
taken his name into scientific journals throughout the world: he had
studied the effect of the extirpation of the anterior lobes of a dog’s
brain on its ability to find its way through the laboratory. Martin had
read of that research before he had thought of going to McGurk; on his
arrival he was thrilled to have it chronicled by the master himself; but
when he had heard Holabird refer to it a dozen times he was considerably
less thrilled, and he speculated whether all his life Holabird would go
on being “the man--_you_ remember--the chap that did the big stunt,
whatever it was, with locomotion in dogs or something.”
Martin speculated still more as he perceived that all his colleagues
were secretly grouped in factions.
Tubbs, Holabird, and perhaps Tubbs’s secretary, Pearl Robbins, were the
ruling caste. It was murmured that Holabird hoped some day to be made
Assistant Director, an office which was to be created for him. Gottlieb,
Terry Wickett, and Dr. Nicholas Yeo, that long-mustached and rustic
biologist whom Martin had first taken for a carpenter, formed an
independent faction of their own, and however much he disliked the
boisterous Wickett, Martin was dragged into it.
Dr. William Smith, with his little beard and a notion of mushrooms
formed in Paris, kept to himself. Dr. Sholtheis, who had been born to a
synagogue in Russia but who was now the most zealous high-church
Episcopalian in Yonkers, was constantly in his polite small way trying
to have his scientific work commended by Gottlieb. In the Department of
Bio-Physics, the good-natured chief was reviled and envied by his own
assistant. And in the whole Institute there was not one man who would,
in all states of liquor, assert that the work of any other scientist
anywhere was completely sound, or that there was a single one of his
rivals who had not stolen ideas from him. No rocking-chair clique on a
summer-hotel porch, no knot of actors, ever whispered more scandal or
hinted more warmly of complete idiocy in their confrères than did these
uplifted scientists.
But these discoveries Martin could shut out by closing his door, and he
had that to do now which deafened him to the mutters of intrigue.
V
For once Gottlieb did not amble into his laboratory but curtly summoned
him. In a corner of Gottlieb’s office, a den opening from his
laboratory, was Terry Wickett, rolling a cigarette and looking sardonic.
Gottlieb observed, “Martin, I haf taken the privilege of talking you
over with Terry, and we concluded that you haf done well enough now so
it is time you stop puttering and go to work.”
“I thought I was working, sir!”
All the wide placidness of his halcyon days was gone; he saw himself
driven back to Pickerbaughism.
Wickett intruded, “No, you haven’t. You’ve just been showing that you’re
a bright boy who might work if he only knew something.”
While Martin turned on Wickett with a “Who the devil are you?”
expression, Gottlieb went on:
“The fact is, Martin, you can do nothing till you know a little
mathematics. If you are not going to be a cook-book bacteriologist, like
most of them, you must be able to handle some of the fundamentals of
science. All living things are physico-chemical machines. Then how can
you make progress if you do not know physical chemistry, and how can you
know physical chemistry without much mathematics?”
“Yuh,” said Wickett, “you’re lawn-mowing and daisy-picking, not
digging.”
Martin faced them. “But rats, Wickett, a man can’t know everything. I’m
a bacteriologist, not a physicist. Strikes me a fellow ought to use his
insight, not just a chest of tools, to make discoveries. A good sailor
could find his way at sea even if he didn’t have instruments, and a
whole _Lusitania_-ful of junk wouldn’t make a good sailor out of a dub.
Man ought to develop his brain, not depend on tools.”
“Ye-uh, but if there were charts and quadrants in existence, a sailor
that cruised off without ’em would be a chump!”
For half an hour Martin defended himself, not too politely, before the
gem-like Gottlieb, the granite Wickett. All the while he knew that he
was sickeningly ignorant.
They ceased to take interest. Gottlieb was looking at his note-books,
Wickett was clumping off to work. Martin glared at Gottlieb. The man
meant so much that he could be furious with him as he would have been
with Leora, with his own self.
“I’m sorry you think I don’t know anything,” he raged, and departed with
the finest dramatic violence. He slammed into his own laboratory, felt
freed, then wretched. Without volition, like a drunken man, he stormed
to Wickett’s room, protesting, “I suppose you’re right. My physical
chemistry is nix, and my math rotten. What am I going to do--what am I
going to do?”
The embarrassed barbarian grumbled, “Well, for Pete’s sake, Slim, don’t
worry. The old man and I were just egging you on. Fact is, he’s tickled
to death about the careful way you’re starting in. About the
math--probably you’re better off than the Holy Wren and Tubbs right now;
you’ve forgotten all the math you ever knew, and they never knew any.
Gosh all fish-hooks! Science is supposed to mean Knowledge--from the
Greek, a handsome language spoken by the good old booze-hoisting
Helleens--and the way most of the science boys resent having to stop
writing little jeweled papers or giving teas and sweat at getting some
knowledge certainly does make me a grand booster for the human race. My
own math isn’t any too good, Slim, but if you’d like to have me come
around evenings and tutor you-- Free, I mean!”
Thus began the friendship between Martin and Terry Wickett; thus began a
change in Martin’s life whereby he gave up three or four hours of
wholesome sleep each night to grind over matters which every one is
assumed to know, and almost every one does not know.
He took up algebra; found that he had forgotten most of it; cursed over
the competition of the indefatigable A and the indolent B who walk from
Y to Z; hired a Columbia tutor; and finished the subject, with a spurt
of something like interest in regard to quadratic equations, in six
weeks ... while Leora listened, watched, waited, made sandwiches, and
laughed at the tutor’s jokes.
By the end of his first nine months at McGurk, Martin had reviewed
trigonometry and analytic geometry and he was finding differential
calculus romantic. But he made the mistake of telling Terry Wickett how
much he knew.
Terry croaked, “Don’t trust math too much, son,” and he so confused him
with references to the thermo-dynamical derivation of the mass action
law, and to the oxidation reduction potential, that he stumbled again
into raging humility, again saw himself an impostor and a tenth-rater.
He read the classics of physical science: Copernicus and Galileo,
Lavoisier, Newton, LaPlace, Descartes, Faraday. He became completely
bogged in Newton’s “Fluxions”; he spoke of Newton to Tubbs and found
that the illustrious Director knew nothing about him. He cheerfully
mentioned this to Terry, and was shockingly cursed for his conceit as a
“nouveau cultured,” as a “typical enthusiastic convert,” and so returned
to the work whose end is satisfying because there is never an end.
His life did not seem edifying nor in any degree amusing. When Tubbs
peeped into his laboratory he found a humorless young man going about
his tests of hemolytic toxins with no apparent flair for the Real Big
Thing in Science, which was coöperation and being efficient. Tubbs tried
to set him straight with “Are you quite sure you’re following a regular
demarked line in your work?”
It was Leora who bore the real tedium.
She sat quiet (a frail child, only up to one’s shoulder, not nine
minutes older than at marriage, nine years before), or she napped
inoffensively, in the long living-room of their flat, while he worked
over his dreary digit-infested books till one, till two, and she
politely awoke to let him worry at her, “But look here now, I’ve got to
keep up my research at the same time. God, I am so tired!”
She dragged him away for an illegal five-day walk on Cape Cod, in March.
He sat between the Twin Lights at Chatham, and fumed, “I’m going back
and tell Terry and Gottlieb they can go to the devil with their crazy
physical chemistry. I’ve had enough, now I’ve done math,” and she
commented, “Yes, I certainly would--though isn’t it funny how Dr.
Gottlieb always seems to be right?”
He was so absorbed in staphylolysin and in calculus that he did not
realize the world was about to be made safe for democracy. He was a
little dazed when America entered the war.
VI
Dr. Tubbs dashed to Washington to offer the services of the Institute to
the War Department.
All the members of the staff, except Gottlieb and two others who
declined to be so honored, were made officers and told to run out and
buy nice uniforms.
Tubbs became a Colonel, Rippleton Holabird a Major, Martin and Wickett
and Billy Smith were Captains. But the garçons had no military rank
whatever, nor any military duties except the polishing of brown
riding-boots and leather puttees, which the several warriors wore as
pleased their fancies or their legs. And the most belligerent of all,
Miss Pearl Robbins, she who at tea heroically slaughtered not only
German men but all their women and viperine children, was wickedly
unrecognized and had to make up a uniform for herself.
The only one of them who got nearer to the front than Liberty Street was
Terry Wickett, who suddenly asked for leave, was transferred to the
artillery, and sailed off to France.
He apologized to Martin: “I’m ashamed of chucking my work like this, and
I certainly don’t want to kill Germans-- I mean not any more’n I want to
kill most people--but I never could resist getting into a big show. Say,
Slim, keep an eye on Pa Gottlieb, will you? This has hit him bad. He’s
got a bunch of nephews and so on in the German army, and the patriots
like Big Foot Pearl will give an exhibit of idealism by persecuting him.
So long, Slim, take care y’self.”
Martin had vaguely protested at being herded into the army. The war was
to him chiefly another interruption to his work, like Pickerbaughism,
like earning his living at Wheatsylvania. But when he had gone
strutting forth in uniform, it was so enjoyable that for several weeks
he was a standard patriot. He had never looked so well, so taut and
erect, as in khaki. It was enchanting to be saluted by privates, quite
as enchanting to return the salute in the dignified, patronizing,
all-comrades-together splendor which Martin shared with the other
doctors, professors, lawyers, brokers, authors, and former socialist
intellectuals who were his fellow-officers.
But in a month the pleasures of being a hero became mechanical, and
Martin longed for soft shirts, easy shoes, and clothes with reasonable
pockets. His puttees were a nuisance to wear and an inferno to put on;
his collar pinched his neck and jabbed his chin; and it was wearing on a
man who sat up till three, on the perilous duty of studying calculus, to
be snappy at every salute.
Under the martinet eye of Col. Director Dr. A. DeWitt Tubbs he had to
wear his uniform, at least recognizable portions of it, at the
Institute, but by evening he slipped into the habit of sneaking into
citizen clothes, and when he went with Leora to the movies he had an
agreeable feeling of being Absent Without Leave, of risking at every
street corner arrest by the Military Police and execution at dawn.
Unfortunately no M.P. ever looked at him. But one evening when in an
estimable and innocent manner he was looking at the remains of a gunman
who had just been murdered by another gunman, he realized that Major
Rippleton Holabird was standing by, glaring. For once the Major was
unpleasant:
“Captain, does it seem to you that this is quite playing the game, to
wear mufti? We, unfortunately, with our scientific work, haven’t the
privilege of joining the Boys who are up against the real thing, but we
are under orders just as if we were in the trenches--where _some_ of us
would so much like to be again! Captain, I trust I shall never again see
you breaking the order about being in uniform, or--uh--”
Martin blurted to Leora, later:
“I’m sick of hearing about his being wounded. Nothing that I can see to
prevent his going back to the trenches. Wound’s all right now. I want to
be patriotic, but my patriotism is chasing antitoxins, doing my job, not
wearing a particular kind of pants and a particular set of ideas about
the Germans. Mind you, I’m anti-German all right-- I think they’re
probably just as bad as we are. Oh, let’s go back and do some more
calculus.... Darling, my working nights doesn’t bore you too much, does
it?”
Leora had cunning. When she could not be enthusiastic, she could be
unannoyingly silent.
At the Institute Martin perceived that he was not the only defender of
his country who was not comfortable in the garb of heroes. The most
dismal of the staff-members was Dr. Nicholas Yeo, the Yankee
sandy-mustached head of the Department of Biology.
Yeo had put on Major’s uniform, but he never felt neighborly with it.
(He knew he was a Major, because Col. Dr. Tubbs had told him he was, and
he knew that this was a Major’s uniform, because the clothing salesman
said so.) He walked out of the McGurk Building in a melancholy,
deprecatory way, with one breeches leg bulging over his riding-boots;
and however piously he tried, he never remembered to button his blouse
over the violet-flowered shirts which, he often confided, you could buy
ever so cheap on Eighth Avenue.
But Major Dr. Yeo had one military triumph. He hoarsely explained to
Martin, as they were marching to the completely militarized dining-hall:
“Say, Arrowsmith, do you ever get balled up about this saluting? Darn
it, I never can figure out what all these insignia mean. One time I took
a Salvation Army Lieutenant for a Y.M.C.A. General, or maybe he was a
Portygee. But I’ve got the idea now!” Yeo laid his finger beside his
large nose, and produced wisdom: “Whenever I see any fellow in uniform
that looks older than I am, I salute him--my nephew, Ted, has drilled me
so I salute swell now--and if he don’t salute back, well, Lord, I just
think about my work and don’t fuss. If you look at it scientifically,
this military life isn’t so awful’ hard after all!”
VII
Always, in Paris or in Bonn, Max Gottlieb had looked to America as a
land which, in its freedom from Royalist tradition, in its contact with
the realities of cornfields and blizzards and town-meetings, had set its
face against the puerile pride of war. He believed that he had ceased to
be a German, now, and become a countryman of Lincoln.
The European War was the one thing, besides his discharge from Winnemac,
which had ever broken his sardonic serenity. In the war he could see no
splendor nor hope, but only crawling tragedy. He treasured his months of
work and good talk in France, in England, in Italy; he loved his French
and English and Italian friends as he loved his ancient _Korpsbrüder_,
and very well indeed beneath his mocking did he love the Germans with
whom he had drudged and drunk.
His sister’s sons--on home-craving vacations he had seen them, in
babyhood, in boyhood, in ruffling youngmanhood--went out with the
Kaiser’s colors in 1914; one of them became an Oberst, much decorated,
one existed insignificantly, and one was dead and stinking in ten days.
This he sadly endured, as later he endured his son Robert’s going out as
an American lieutenant, to fight his own cousins. What struck down this
man to whom abstractions and scientific laws were more than kindly
flesh was the mania of hate which overcame the unmilitaristic America to
which he had emigrated in protest against Junkerdom.
Incredulously he perceived women asserting that all Germans were
baby-killers, universities barring the language of Heine, orchestras
outlawing the music of Beethoven, professors in uniform bellowing at
clerks, and the clerks never protesting.
It is uncertain whether the real hurt was to his love for America or to
his egotism, that he should have guessed so grotesquely; it is curious
that he who had so denounced the machine-made education of the land
should yet have been surprised when it turned blithely to the old, old,
mechanical mockeries of war.
When the Institute sanctified the war, he found himself regarded not as
the great and impersonal immunologist but as a suspect German Jew.
True, the Terry who went off to the artillery did not look upon him
dourly, but Major Rippleton Holabird became erect and stiff when they
passed in the corridor. When Gottlieb insisted to Tubbs at lunch, “I am
villing to admit every virtue of the French-- I am very fond of that so
individual people--but on the theory of probabilities I suggest that
there must be some good Germans out of sixty millions,” then Col. Dr.
Tubbs commanded, “In this time of world tragedy, it does not seem to me
particularly becoming to try to be flippant, Dr. Gottlieb!”
In shops and on the elevated trains, little red-faced sweaty people when
they heard his accent glared at him, and growled one to another,
“There’s one of them damn’ barb’rous well-poisoning Huns!” and however
contemptuous he might be, however much he strove for ignoring pride,
their nibbling reduced him from arrogant scientist to an insecure,
raw-nerved, shrinking old man.
And once a hostess who of old time had been proud to know him, a hostess
whose maiden name was Straufnabel and who had married into the famous
old Anglican family of Rosemont, when Gottlieb bade her “_Auf
Wiedersehen_” cried out upon him, “Dr. Gottlieb, I’m very sorry, but the
use of that disgusting language is not permitted in this house!”
He had almost recovered from the anxieties of Winnemac and the Hunziker
factory; he had begun to expand, to entertain people--scientists,
musicians, talkers. Now he was thrust back into himself. With Terry
gone, he trusted only Miriam and Martin and Ross McGurk; and his
deep-set wrinkle-lidded eyes looked ever on sadness.
But he could still be tart. He suggested that Capitola ought to have in
the window of her house a Service Flag with a star for every person at
the Institute who had put on uniform.
She took it quite seriously, and did it.
VIII
The military duties of the McGurk staff did not consist entirely in
wearing uniforms, receiving salutes, and listening to Col. Dr. Tubbs’s
luncheon lectures on “the part America will inevitably play in the
reconstruction of a Democratic Europe.”
They prepared sera; the assistant in the Department of Bio-Physics was
inventing electrified wire entanglements; Dr. Billy Smith, who six
months before had been singing _Student Lieder_ at Lüchow’s, was working
on poison gas to be used against all singers of _Lieder_; and to Martin
was assigned the manufacture of lipovaccine, a suspension of finely
ground typhoid and paratyphoid organisms in oil. It was a greasy job,
and dull. Martin was faithful enough about it, and gave to it almost
every morning, but he blasphemed more than usual and he unholily
welcomed scientific papers in which lipovaccines were condemned as
inferior to ordinary salt solutions.
He was conscious of Gottlieb’s sorrowing and tried to comfort him.
It was Martin’s most pitiful fault that he was not very kind to shy
people and lonely people and stupid old people; he was not cruel to
them, he simply was unconscious of them or so impatient of their
fumbling that he avoided them. Whenever Leora taxed him with it he
grumbled:
“Well, but-- I’m too much absorbed in my work, or in doping stuff out,
to waste time on morons. And it’s a good thing. Most people above the
grade of hog do so much chasing around after a lot of vague philanthropy
that they never get anything done--and most of your confounded shy
people get spiritually pauperized. Oh, it’s so much easier to be
good-natured and purring and self-congratulatory and generally footless
than it is to pound ahead and keep yourself strictly for your own work,
the work that gets somewhere. Very few people have the courage to be
decently selfish--not answer letters--and demand the right to work. If
they had their way, these sentimentalists would’ve had a Newton--yes, or
probably a Christ!--giving up everything they did for the world to
address meetings and listen to the troubles of cranky old maids. Nothing
takes so much courage as to keep hard and clear-headed.”
And he hadn’t even that courage.
When Leora had made complaint, he would be forcibly kind to all sorts of
alarmed stray beggars for a day or two, then drift back into his
absorption. There were but two people whose unhappiness could always
pierce him: Leora and Gottlieb.
Though he was busier than he had known any one could ever be, with
lipovaccines in the morning, physical chemistry in the evening and, at
all sorts of intense hours between, the continuation of his
staphylolysin research, he gave what time he could to seeking out
Gottlieb and warming his vanity by reverent listening.
Then his research wiped out everything else, made him forget Gottlieb
and Leora and all his briskness about studying, made him turn his war
work over to others, and confounded night and day in one insane flaming
blur as he realized that he had something not unworthy of a Gottlieb,
something at the mysterious source of life.
CHAPTER XXVIII
I
Captain Martin Arrowsmith, M.R.C., came home to his good wife Leora,
wailing, “I’m so rotten tired, and I feel kind of discouraged. I haven’t
accomplished a darn’ thing in this whole year at McGurk. Sterile. No
good. And I’m hanged if I’ll study calculus this evening. Let’s go to
the movies. Won’t even change to regular human clothes. Too tired.”
“All right, honey,” said Leora. “But let’s have dinner here. I bought a
wonderful ole fish this afternoon.”
Through the film Martin gave his opinion, as a captain and as a doctor,
that it seemed improbable a mother should not know her daughter after an
absence of ten years. He was restless and rational, which is not a mood
in which to view the cinema. When they came blinking out of that
darkness lit only from the shadowy screen, he snorted, “I’m going back
to the lab. I’ll put you in a taxi.”
“Oh, let the beastly thing go for one night.”
“Now that’s unfair! I haven’t worked late for three or four nights now!”
“Then take me along.”
“Nope. I have a hunch I may be working all night.”
Liberty Street, as he raced along it, was sleeping below its towers. It
was McGurk’s order that the elevator to the Institute should run all
night, and indeed three or four of the twenty staff-members did
sometimes use it after respectable hours.
That morning Martin had isolated a new strain of staphylococcus bacteria
from the gluteal carbuncle of a patient in the Lower Manhattan Hospital,
a carbuncle which was healing with unusual rapidity. He had placed a bit
of the pus in broth and incubated it. In eight hours a good growth of
bacteria had appeared. Before going wearily home he had returned the
flask to the incubator.
He was not particularly interested in it, and now, in his laboratory,
he removed his military blouse, looked down to the lights on the
blue-black river, smoked a little, thought what a dog he was not to be
gentler to Leora, and damned Bert Tozer and Pickerbaugh and Tubbs and
anybody else who was handy to his memory before he absent-mindedly
wavered to the incubator, and found that the flask, in which there
should have been a perceptible cloudy growth, had no longer any signs of
bacteria--of staphylococci.
“Now what the hell!” he cried. “Why, the broth’s as clear as when I
seeded it! Now what the-- Think of this fool accident coming up just
when I was going to start something new!”
He hastened from the incubator, in a closet off the corridor, to his
laboratory and, holding the flask under a strong light, made certain
that he had seen aright. He fretfully prepared a slide from the flask
contents and examined it under the microscope. He discovered nothing but
shadows of what had been bacteria: thin outlines, the form still there
but the cell substance gone; minute skeletons on an infinitesimal
battlefield.
He raised his head from the microscope, rubbed his tired eyes,
reflectively rubbed his neck--his blouse was off, his collar on the
floor, his shirt open at the throat. He considered:
“Something funny here. This culture was growing all right, and now it’s
committed suicide. Never heard of bugs doing that before. I’ve hit
something! What caused it? Some chemical change? Something organic?”
Now in Martin Arrowsmith there were no decorative heroisms, no genius
for amours, no exotic wit, no edifyingly borne misfortunes. He presented
neither picturesque elegance nor a moral message. He was full of hasty
faults and of perverse honesty; a young man often unkindly, often
impolite. But he had one gift: a curiosity whereby he saw nothing as
ordinary. Had he been an acceptable hero, like Major Rippleton Holabird,
he would have chucked the contents of the flask into the sink, avowed
with pretty modesty, “Silly! I’ve made some error!” and gone his ways.
But Martin, being Martin, walked prosaically up and down his laboratory,
snarling, “Now there was some _cause_ for that, and I’m going to find
out what it was.”
He did have one romantic notion: he would telephone to Leora and tell
her that splendor was happening, and she wasn’t to worry about him. He
fumbled down the corridor, lighting matches, trying to find electric
switches.
At night all halls are haunted. Even in the smirkingly new McGurk
Building there had been a bookkeeper who committed suicide. As Martin
groped he was shakily conscious of feet padding behind him, of shapes
which leered from doorways and insolently vanished, of ancient bodiless
horrors, and when he found the switch he rejoiced in the blessing and
security of sudden light that recreated the world.
At the Institute telephone switchboard he plugged in wherever it seemed
reasonable. Once he thought he was talking to Leora, but it proved to be
a voice, sexless and intolerant, which said “Nummer pleeeeeze” with a
taut alertness impossible to any one so indolent as Leora. Once it was a
voice which slobbered, “Is this Sarah?” then, “I don’t want _you_! Ring
off, will yuh!” Once a girl pleaded, “Honestly, Billy, I did try to get
there but the boss came in at five and he said--”
As for the rest it was only a burring; the sound of seven million people
hungry for sleep or love or money.
He observed, “Oh, rats, I guess Lee’ll have gone to bed by now,” and
felt his way back to the laboratory.
A detective, hunting the murderer of bacteria, he stood with his head
back, scratching his chin, scratching his memory for like cases of
microörganisms committing suicide or being slain without perceptible
cause. He rushed up-stairs to the library, consulted the American and
English authorities and, laboriously, the French and German. He found
nothing.
He worried lest there might, somehow, have been no living staphylococci
in the pus which he had used for seeding the broth--none there to die.
At a hectic run, not stopping for lights, bumping corners and sliding on
the too perfect tile floor, he skidded down the stairs and galloped
through the corridors to his room. He found the remains of the original
pus, made a smear on a glass slide, and stained it with gentian-violet,
nervously dribbling out one drop of the gorgeous dye. He sprang to the
microscope. As he bent over the brass tube and focused the objective,
into the gray-lavender circular field of vision rose to existence the
grape-like clusters of staphylococcus germs, purple dots against the
blank plane.
“Staph in it, all right!” he shouted.
Then he forgot Leora, war, night, weariness, success, everything as he
charged into preparations for an experiment, his first great
experiment. He paced furiously, rather dizzy. He shook himself into
calmness and settled down at a table, among rings and spirals of
cigarette smoke, to list on small sheets of paper all the possible
causes of suicide in the bacteria--all the questions he had to answer
and the experiments which should answer them.
It might be that alkali in an improperly cleaned flask had caused the
clearing of the culture. It might be some anti-staph substance existing
in the pus, or something liberated by the staphylococci themselves. It
might be some peculiarity of this particular broth.
Each of these had to be tested.
He pried open the door of the glass-storeroom, shattering the lock. He
took new flasks, cleaned them, plugged them with cotton, and placed them
in the hot-air oven to sterilize. He found other batches of broth--as a
matter of fact he stole them, from Gottlieb’s private and highly sacred
supply in the ice-box. He filtered some of the clarified culture through
a sterile porcelain filter, and added it to his regular staphylococcus
strains.
And, perhaps most important of all, he discovered that he was out of
cigarettes.
Incredulously he slapped each of his pockets, and went the round and
slapped them all over again. He looked into his discarded military
blouse; had a cheering idea about having seen cigarettes in a drawer;
did not find them; and brazenly marched into the room where hung the
aprons and jackets of the technicians. Furiously he pilfered pockets,
and found a dozen beautiful cigarettes in a wrinkled and flattened paper
case.
To test each of the four possible causes of the flask’s clearing he
prepared and seeded with bacteria a series of flasks under varying
conditions, and set them away in the incubator at body temperature. Till
the last flask was put away, his hand was steady, his worn face calm. He
was above all nervousness, free from all uncertainty, a professional
going about his business.
By this time it was six o’clock of a fine wide August morning, and as he
ceased his swift work, as taut nerves slackened, he looked out of his
lofty window and was conscious of the world below: bright roofs,
jubilant towers, and a high-decked Sound steamer swaggering up the
glossy river.
He was completely fagged; he was, like a surgeon after a battle, like a
reporter during an earthquake, perhaps a little insane; but sleepy he
was not. He cursed the delay involved in the growth of the bacteria,
without which he could not discover the effect of the various sorts of
broths and bacterial strains, but choked his impatience.
He mounted the noisy slate stairway to the lofty world of the roof. He
listened at the door of the Institute’s animal house. The guinea pigs,
awake and nibbling, were making a sound like that of a wet cloth rubbed
on glass in window-cleaning. He stamped his foot, and in fright they
broke out in their strange sound of fear, like the cooing of doves.
He marched violently up and down, refreshed by the soaring sky, till he
was calmed to hunger. Again he went pillaging. He found chocolate
belonging to an innocent technician; he even invaded the office of the
Director and in the desk of the Diana-like Pearl Robbins unearthed tea
and a kettle (as well as a lip-stick, and a love-letter beginning “My
Little Ickles”). He made himself a profoundly bad cup of tea, then, his
whole body dragging, returned to his table to set down elaborately, in a
shabby, nearly-filled note-book, every step of his experiment.
After seven he worked out the operation of the telephone switchboard and
called the Lower Manhattan Hospital. Could Dr. Arrowsmith have some more
pus from the same carbuncle? What? It’d healed? Curse it! No more of
that material.
He hesitated over waiting for Gottlieb’s arrival, to tell him of the
discovery, but determined to keep silence till he should have determined
whether it was an accident. Eyes wide, too wrought up to sleep in the
subway, he fled uptown to tell Leora. He had to tell some one! Waves of
fear, doubt, certainty, and fear again swept over him; his ears rang and
his hands trembled.
He rushed up to the flat; he bawled “Lee! Lee!” before he had unlocked
the door. And she was gone.
He gaped. The flat breathed emptiness. He searched it again. She had
slept there, she had had a cup of coffee, but she had vanished.
He was at once worried lest there had been an accident, and furious that
she should not have been here at the great hour. Sullenly he made
breakfast for himself.... It is strange that excellent bacteriologists
and chemists should scramble eggs so waterily, should make such bitter
coffee and be so casual about dirty spoons.... By the time he had
finished the mess he was ready to believe that Leora had left him
forever. He quavered, “I’ve neglected her a lot.” Sluggishly, an old man
now, he started for the Institute, and at the entrance to the subway he
met her.
She wailed, “I was so worried! I couldn’t get you on the ’phone. I went
clear down to the Institute to see what’d happened to you.”
He kissed her, very competently, and raved, “God, woman, I’ve got it!
The real big stuff! I’ve found something, not a chemical you put in I
mean, that eats bugs--dissolves ’em--kills ’em. May be a big new step in
therapeutics. Oh, no, rats, I don’t suppose it really is. Prob’ly just
another of my bulls.”
She sought to reassure him but he did not wait. He dashed down to the
subway, promising to telephone to her. By ten, he was peering into his
incubator.
There was a cloudy appearance of bacteria in all the flasks except those
in which he had used broth from the original alarming flask. In these,
the mysterious murderer of germs had prevented the growth of the new
bacteria which he had introduced.
“Great stuff,” he said.
He returned the flasks to the incubator, recorded his observations, went
again to the library, and searched handbooks, bound proceedings of
societies, periodicals in three languages. He had acquired a reasonable
scientific French and German. It is doubtful whether he could have
bought a drink or asked the way to the Kursaal in either language, but
he understood the universal Hellenistic scientific jargon, and he pawed
through the heavy books, rubbing his eyes, which were filled with salty
fire.
He remembered that he was an army officer and had lipovaccine to make
this morning. He went to work, but he was so twitchy that he ruined the
batch, called his patient garçon a fool, and after this injustice sent
him out for a pint of whisky.
He had to have a confidant. He telephoned to Leora, lunched with her
expensively, and asserted, “It still looks as if there were something to
it.” He was back in the Institute every hour that afternoon, glancing at
his flasks, but between he tramped the streets, creaking with
weariness, drinking too much coffee.
Every five minutes it came to him, as a quite new and ecstatic idea,
“Why don’t I go to sleep?” then remembered, and groaned, “No, I’ve got
to keep going and watch every step. Can’t leave it, or I’ll have to
begin all over again. But I’m so sleepy! Why don’t I go to sleep?”
He dug down, before six, into a new layer of strength, and at six his
examination showed that the flasks containing the original broth still
had no growth of bacteria, and the flasks which he had seeded with the
original pus had, like the first eccentric flask, after beginning to
display a good growth of bacteria cleared up again under the slowly
developing attack of the unknown assassin.
He sat down, drooping with relief. He had it! He stated in the
conclusions of his first notes:
“I have observed a principle, which I shall temporarily call the X
Principle, in pus from a staphylococcus infection, which checks the
growth of several strains of staphylococcus, and which dissolves the
staphylococci from the pus in question.”
When he had finished, at seven, his head was on his note-book and he was
asleep.
He awoke at ten, went home, ate like a savage, slept again, and was in
the laboratory before dawn. His next rest was an hour that afternoon,
sprawled on his laboratory table, with his garçon on guard; the next, a
day and a half later, was eight hours in bed, from dawn till noon.
But in dreams he was constantly upsetting a rack of test-tubes or
breaking a flask. He discovered an X Principle which dissolved chairs,
tables, human beings. He went about smearing it on Bert Tozers and Dr.
Bissexes and fiendishly watching them vanish, but accidentally he
dropped it on Leora and saw her fading, and he woke screaming to find
the real Leora’s arms about him, while he sobbed, “Oh, I couldn’t do
anything without you! Don’t ever leave me! I do love you so, even if
this damned work does keep me tied up. Stay with me!”
While she sat by him on the frowsy bed, gay in her gingham, he went to
sleep, to wake up three hours later and start off for the Institute, his
eyes blood-glaring and set. She was ready for him with strong coffee,
waiting on him silently, looking at him proudly, while he waved his
arms, babbling:
“Gottlieb better not talk any more about the importance of new
observations! The X Principle may not just apply to staph. Maybe you can
sic it on any bug--cure any germ disease by it. Bug that lives on bugs!
Or maybe it’s a chemical principle, an enzyme. Oh, I don’t know. But I
will!”
As he bustled to the Institute he swelled with the certainty that after
years of stumbling he had arrived. He had visions of his name in
journals and textbooks; of scientific meetings cheering him. He had been
an unknown among the experts of the Institute, and now he pitied all of
them. But when he was back at his bench the grandiose aspirations faded
and he was the sniffing, snuffling beagle, the impersonal worker. Before
him, supreme joy of the investigator, new mountain-passes of work
opened, and in him was new power.
II
For a week Martin’s life had all the regularity of an escaped soldier in
the enemy’s country, with the same agitation and the same desire to
prowl at night. He was always sterilizing flasks, preparing media of
various hydrogen-ion concentrations, copying his old notes into a new
book lovingly labeled “X Principle, Staph,” and adding to it further
observations. He tried, elaborately, with many flasks and many
reseedings, to determine whether the X Principle would perpetuate itself
indefinitely, whether when it was transmitted from tube to new tube of
bacteria it would reappear, whether, growing by cell-division
automatically, it was veritably a germ, a sub-germ infecting germs.
During the week Gottlieb occasionally peered over his shoulder, but
Martin was unwilling to report until he should have proof, and one good
night’s sleep, and perhaps even a shave.
When he was sure that the X Principle did reproduce itself indefinitely,
so that in the tenth tube it grew to have as much effect as in the
first, then he solemnly called on Gottlieb and laid before him his
results, with his plans for further investigation.
The old man tapped his thin fingers on the report, read it intently,
looked up and, not wasting time in congratulations, vomited questions:
Have you done dis? Why have you not done dat? At what temperature is the
activity of the Principle at its maximum? Is its activity manifested on
agar-solid medium?
“This is my plan for new work. I think you’ll find it includes most of
your suggestions.”
“Huh!” Gottlieb ran through it and snorted, “Why have you not planned to
propagate it on dead staph? That is most important of all.”
“Why?”
Gottlieb flew instantly to the heart of the jungle in which Martin had
struggled for many days: “Because that will show whether you are dealing
with a living virus.”
Martin was humbled, but Gottlieb beamed:
“You haf a big thing. Now do not let the Director know about this and
get enthusiastic too soon. I am glad, Martin!”
There was that in his voice which sent Martin swanking down the
corridor, back to work--and to not sleeping.
What the X Principle was--chemical or germ--he could not determine, but
certainly the original Principle flourished. It could be transmitted
indefinitely; he determined the best temperature for it and found that
it did not propagate on dead staphylococcus. When he added a drop
containing the Principle to a growth of staphylococcus which was a gray
film on the solid surface of agar, the drop was beautifully outlined by
bare patches, as the enemy made its attack, so that the agar slant
looked like moth-eaten beeswax. But within a fortnight one of the knots
of which Gottlieb warned him appeared.
Wary of the hundreds of bacteriologists who would rise to slay him once
his paper appeared, he sought to make sure that his results could be
confirmed. At the hospital he obtained pus from many boils, of the arms,
the legs, the back; he sought to reduplicate his results--and failed,
complete. No X Principle appeared in any of the new boils, and sadly he
went to Gottlieb.
The old man meditated, asked a question or two, sat hunched in his
cushioned chair, and demanded:
“What kind of a carbuncle was the original one?”
“Gluteal.”
“Ah, den the X Principle may be present in the intestinal contents. Look
for it, in people with boils and without.”
Martin dashed off. In a week he had obtained the Principle from
intestinal contents and from other gluteal boils, finding an especial
amount in boils which were “healing of themselves”; and he transplanted
his new Principle, in a heaven of triumph, of admiration for Gottlieb.
He extended his investigation to the intestinal group of organisms and
discovered an X Principle against the colon bacillus. At the same time
he gave some of the original Principle to a doctor in the Lower
Manhattan Hospital for the treatment of boils, and from him had excited
reports of cures, more excited inquiries as to what this mystery might
be.
With these new victories he went parading in to Gottlieb, and suddenly
he was being trounced:
“Oh! So! Beautiful! You let a doctor try it before you finished your
research? You want fake reports of cures to get into the newspapers, to
be telegraphed about places, and have everybody in the world that has a
pimple come tumbling in to be cured, so you will never be able to work?
You want to be a miracle man, and not a scientist? You do not want to
complete things? You wander off monkey-skipping and flap-doodeling with
colon bacillus before you have finish with staph--before you haf really
begun your work--before you have found what is the _nature_ of the X
Principle? Get out of my office! You are a--a--a college president! Next
I know you will be dining with Tubbs, and get your picture in the papers
for a smart cure-vendor!”
Martin crept out, and when he met Billy Smith in the corridor and the
little chemist twittered, “Up to something big? Haven’t seen you
lately,” Martin answered in the tone of Doc Vickerson’s assistant in Elk
Mills:
“Oh--no--gee-- I’m just grubbing along, I guess.”
III
As sharply and quite as impersonally as he would have watched the
crawling illness of an infected guinea pig, Martin watched himself, in
the madness of overwork, drift toward neurasthenia. With considerable
interest he looked up the symptoms of neurasthenia, saw one after
another of them twitch at him, and casually took the risk.
From an irritability which made him a thoroughly impossible person to
live with, he passed into a sick nervousness in which he missed things
for which he reached, dropped test-tubes, gasped at sudden footsteps
behind him. Dr. Yeo’s croaking voice became to him a fever, an insult,
and he waited with his whole body clenched, muttering, “Shut up--shut
up--oh, shut _up_!” when Yeo stopped to talk to some one outside his
door.
Then he was obsessed by the desire to spell backward all the words which
snatched at him from signs.
As he stood dragging out his shoulder on a subway strap, he pored over
the posters, seeking new words to spell backward. Some of them were
remarkably agreeable: No Smoking became a jaunty and agreeable “gnikoms
on,” and Broadway was tolerable as “yawdaorb,” but he was displeased by
his attempts on Punch, Health, Rough; while Strength, turning into
“htgnerts” was abominable.
When he had to return to his laboratory three times before he was
satisfied that he had closed the window, he sat down, coldly, informed
himself that he was on the edge, and took council as to whether he dared
go on. It was not very good council: he was so glorified by his
unfolding work that his self could not be taken seriously.
At last Fear closed in on him.
It began with childhood’s terror of the darkness. He lay awake dreading
burglars; footsteps in the hall were a creeping cutthroat; an
unexplained scratching on the fire-escape was a murderer with an
automatic in his fist. He beheld it so clearly that he had to spring
from bed and look timorously out, and when in the street below he did
actually see a man standing still, he was cold with panic.
Every sky glow was a fire. He was going to be trapped in his bed, be
smothered, die writhing.
He knew absolutely that his fears were absurd, and that knowledge did
not at all keep them from dominating him.
He was ashamed at first to acknowledge his seeming cowardice to Leora.
Admit that he was crouching like a child? But when he had lain rigid,
almost screaming, feeling the cord of an assassin squeezing his throat,
till the safe dawn brought back a dependable world, he muttered of
“insomnia” and after that, night on night, he crept into her arms and
she shielded him from the horrors, protected him from garroters, kept
away the fire.
He made a checking list of the favorite neurasthenic fears: agoraphobia,
claustrophobia, pyrophobia, anthropophobia, and the rest, ending with
what he asserted to be “the most fool, pretentious, witch-doctor term of
the whole bloomin’ lot,” namely, siderodromophobia, the fear of a
railway journey. The first night, he was able to check against
pyrophobia, for at the vaudeville with Leora, when on the stage a dancer
lighted a brazier, he sat waiting for the theater to take fire. He
looked cautiously along the row of seats (raging at himself the while
for doing it), he estimated his chance of reaching an exit, and became
easy only when he had escaped into the street.
It was when anthropophobia set in, when he was made uneasy by people who
walked too close to him, that, sagely viewing his list and seeing how
many phobias were now checked, he permitted himself to rest.
He fled to the Vermont hills for a four-day tramp--alone, that he might
pound on the faster. He went at night, by sleeper, and was able to make
the most interesting observations of siderodromophobia.
He lay in a lower berth, the little pillow wadded into a lump. He was
annoyed by the waving of his clothes as they trailed from the hanger
beside him, at the opening of the green curtains. The window-shade was
up six inches; it left a milky blur across which streaked yellow lights,
emphatic in the noisy darkness of his little cell. He was shivering with
anxiety. Whenever he tried to relax, he was ironed back into
apprehension. When the train stopped between stations and from the
engine came a questioning, fretful whistle, he was aghast with certainty
that something had gone wrong--a bridge was out, a train was ahead of
them; perhaps another was coming just behind them, about to smash into
them at sixty miles an hour--
He imagined being wrecked, and he suffered more than from the actual
occurrence, for he pictured not one wreck but half a dozen, with
assorted miseries.... The flat wheel just beneath him--surely it
shouldn’t pound like that--why hadn’t the confounded man with the hammer
detected it at the last big station?--the flat wheel cracking; the car
lurching, falling, being dragged on its side.... A collision, a crash,
the car instantly a crumpled, horrible heap, himself pinned in the
telescoped berth, caught between seat and seat. Shrieks, death groans,
the creeping flames.... The car turning, falling, plumping into a river
on its side; himself trying to crawl through a window as the water
seeped about his body.... Himself standing by the wrenched car, deciding
whether to keep away and protect his sacred work or go back, rescue
people, and be killed.
So real were the visions that he could not endure lying here, waiting.
He reached for the berth light, and could not find the button. In
agitation he tore a match-box from his coat pocket, scratched a match,
snapped on the light. He saw himself, under the sheets, reflected in the
polished wooden ceiling of his berth like a corpse in a coffin. Hastily
he crawled out, with trousers and coat over his undergarments (he had
somehow feared to show so much trust in the train as to put on pajamas),
and with bare disgusted feet he paddled up to the smoking compartment.
The porter was squatting on a stool, polishing an amazing pile of shoes.
Martin longed for his encouraging companionship, and ventured, “Warm
night.”
“Uh-huh,” said the porter.
Martin curled on the chill leather seat of the smoking compartment,
profoundly studying a brass wash-bowl. He was conscious that the porter
was disapproving, but he had comfort in calculating that the man must
make this run thrice a week, tens of thousand of miles yearly,
apparently without being killed, and there might be a chance of their
lasting till morning.
He smoked till his tongue was raw and till, fortified by the calmness of
the porter, he laughed at the imaginary catastrophes. He staggered
sleepily to his berth.
Instantly he was tense again, and he lay awake till dawn.
For four days he tramped, swam in cold brooks, slept under trees or in
straw stacks, and came back (but by day) with enough reserve of energy
to support him till his experiment should have turned from overwhelming
glory into sane and entertaining routine.
CHAPTER XXIX
When the work on the X Principle had gone on for six weeks, the
Institute staff suspected that something was occurring, and they hinted
to Martin that he needed their several assistances. He avoided them. He
did not desire to be caught in any of the log-rolling factions, though
for Terry Wickett, still in France, and for Terry’s rough compulsion to
honesty he was sometimes lonely.
How the Director first heard that Martin was finding gold is not known.
Dr. Tubbs was tired of being a Colonel--there were too many Generals in
New York--and for two weeks he had not had an Idea which would
revolutionize even a small part of the world. One morning he burst in,
whiskers alive, and reproached Martin:
“What is this mysterious discovery you’re making, Arrowsmith? I’ve asked
Dr. Gottlieb, but he evades me; he says you want to be sure, first. I
must know about it, not only because I take a very friendly interest in
your work but because I am, after all, your Director!”
Martin felt that his one ewe lamb was being snatched from him but he
could see no way to refuse. He brought out his note-books, and the agar
slants with their dissolved patches of bacilli. Tubbs gasped, assaulted
his whiskers, did a moment of impressive thinking, and clamored:
“Do you mean to say you think you’ve discovered an infectious disease of
bacteria, and you haven’t told me about it? My dear boy, I don’t believe
you quite realize that you may have hit on the supreme way to kill
pathogenic bacteria.... And you didn’t tell me!”
“Well, sir, I wanted to make certain--”
“I admire your caution, but you must understand, Martin, that the basic
aim of this Institution is the conquest of disease, not making pretty
scientific notes! You _may_ have hit on one of the discoveries of a
generation; the sort of thing that Mr. McGurk and I are looking for....
If your results are confirmed.... I shall ask Dr. Gottlieb’s opinion.”
He shook Martin’s hand five or six times and bustled out. Next day he
called Martin to his office, shook his hand some more, told Pearl
Robbins that they were honored to know him, then led him to a mountain
top and showed him all the kingdoms of the world:
“Martin, I have some plans for you. You have been working brilliantly,
but without a complete vision of broader humanity. Now the Institute is
organized on the most flexible lines. There are no set departments, but
only units formed about exceptional men like our good friend Gottlieb.
If any new man has the real right thing, we’ll provide him with every
facility, instead of letting him merely plug along doing individual
work. I have given your results the most careful consideration, Martin;
I have talked them over with Dr. Gottlieb--though I must say he does not
altogether share my enthusiasm about immediate practical results. And I
have decided to submit to the Board of Trustees a plan for a Department
of Microbic Pathology, with you as head! You will have an assistant--a
real trained Ph.D.--and more room and technicians, and you will report
to me directly, talk things over with me daily, instead of with
Gottlieb. You will be relieved of all war work, by my order--though you
can retain your uniform and everything. And your salary will be, I
should think, if Mr. McGurk and the other Trustees confirm me, ten
thousand a year instead of five.
“Yes, the best room for you would be that big one on the upper floor, to
the right of the elevators. That’s vacant now. And your office across
the hall.
“And all the assistance you require. Why, my boy, you won’t need to sit
up nights using your hands in this wasteful way, but just think things
out and take up possible extensions of the work--cover all the possible
fields. We’ll extend this to everything! We’ll have scores of physicians
in hospitals helping us and confirming our results and widening our
efforts.... We might have a weekly council of all these doctors and
assistants, with you and me jointly presiding.... If men like Koch and
Pasteur had only had such a system, how much more _scope_ their work
might have had! Efficient universal _coöperation_--that’s the thing in
science to-day--the time of this silly, jealous, fumbling individual
research has gone by.
“My boy, we may have found the real thing--another salvarsan! We’ll
publish together! We’ll have the whole world talking! Why, I lay awake
last night thinking of our magnificent opportunity! In a few months we
may be curing not only staph infections but typhoid, dysentery! Martin,
as your colleague, I do not for a moment wish to detract from the great
credit which is yours, but I must say that if you had been more closely
allied with Me you would have extended your work to practical proofs and
results long before this.”
Martin wavered back to his room, dazzled by the view of a department of
his own, assistants, a cheering world--and ten thousand a year. But his
work seemed to have been taken from him, his own self had been taken
from him; he was no longer to be Martin, and Gottlieb’s disciple, but a
Man of Measured Merriment, Dr. Arrowsmith, Head of the Department of
Microbic Pathology, who would wear severe collars and make addresses and
never curse.
Doubts enfeebled him. Perhaps the X Principle would develop only in the
test-tube; perhaps it had no large value for human healing. He wanted to
know--to _know_.
Then Rippleton Holabird burst in on him:
“Martin, my dear boy, the Director has just been telling me about your
discovery and his splendid plans for you. I want to congratulate you
with all my heart, and to welcome you as a fellow department-head--and
you so young--only thirty-four, isn’t it? What a magnificent future!
Think, Martin”-- Major Holabird discarded his dignity, sat astride a
chair--“think of all you have ahead! If this work really pans out,
there’s no limit to the honors that’ll come to you, you lucky young dog!
Acclaim by scientific societies, any professorship you might happen to
want, prizes, the biggest men begging to consult you, a ripping place in
society!
“Now listen, old boy: Perhaps you know how close I am to Dr. Tubbs, and
I see no reason why you shouldn’t come in with us, and we three run
things here to suit ourselves. Wasn’t it simply too decent of the
Director to be so eager to recognize and help you in every way! So
cordial--and so helpful. Now you really understand him. And the three of
us-- Some day we might be able to erect a superstructure of coöperative
science which would control not only McGurk but every institute and
every university scientific department in the country, and so produce
really efficient research. When Dr. Tubbs retires, I have-- I’m speaking
with the most complete confidence-- I have some reason to suppose that
the Board of Trustees will consider me as his successor. Then, old boy,
if this work succeeds, you and I can do things together!
“To be ever so frank, there are very few men in our world (think of poor
old Yeo!) who combine presentable personalities with first-rate
achievement, and if you’ll just get over some of your abruptness and
your unwillingness to appreciate big executives and charming women
(because, thank God, you do wear your clothes well--when you take the
trouble!) why, you and I can become the dictators of science throughout
the whole country!”
Martin did not think of an answer till Holabird had gone.
He perceived the horror of the shrieking bawdy thing called Success,
with its demand that he give up quiet work and parade forth to be pawed
by every blind devotee and mud-spattered by every blind enemy.
He fled to Gottlieb as to the wise and tender father, and begged to be
saved from Success and Holabirds and A. DeWitt Tubbses and their hordes
of address-making scientists, degree-hunting authors, pulpit orators,
popular surgeons, valeted journalists, sentimental merchant princes,
literary politicians, titled sportsmen, statesmenlike generals,
interviewed senators, sententious bishops.
Gottlieb was worried:
“I knew Tubbs was up to something idealistic and nasty when he came
purring to me, but I did not t’ink he would try to turn you into a
megaphone all so soon in one day! I will gird up my loins and go oud to
battle with the forces of publicity!”
He was defeated.
“I have let you alone, Dr. Gottlieb,” said Tubbs, “but hang it, I am the
Director! And I must say that, perhaps owing to my signal stupidity, I
fail to see the horrors of enabling Arrowsmith to cure thousands of
suffering persons and to become a man of weight and esteem!”
Gottlieb took it to Ross McGurk.
“Max, I love you like a brother, but Tubbs is the Director, and if he
feels he needs this Arrowsmith (is he the thin young fellow I see around
your lab?) then I have no right to stop him. I’ve got to back him up the
same as I would the master of one of our ships,” said McGurk.
Not till the Board of Trustees, which consisted of McGurk himself, the
president of the University of Wilmington, and three professors of
science in various universities, should meet and give approval, would
Martin be a department-head. Meantime Tubbs demanded:
“Now, Martin, you must hasten and publish your results. Get right to it.
In fact you should have done it before this. Throw your material
together as rapidly as possible and send a note in to the Society for
Experimental Biology and Medicine, to be published in their next
proceedings.”
“But I’m not ready to publish! I want to have every loophole plugged up
before I announce anything whatever!”
“Nonsense! That attitude is old-fashioned. This is no longer an age of
parochialism but of competition, in art and science just as much as in
commerce--coöperation with your own group, but with those outside it,
competition to the death! Plug up the holes thoroughly, later, but we
can’t have somebody else stealing a march on us. Remember you have your
name to make. The way to make it is by working with me--toward the
greatest good for the greatest number.”
As Martin began his paper, thinking of resigning but giving it up
because Tubbs seemed to him at least better than the Pickerbaughs, he
had a vision of a world of little scientists, each busy in a roofless
cell. Perched on a cloud, watching them, was the divine Tubbs, a glory
of whiskers, ready to blast any of the little men who stopped being
earnest and wasted time on speculation about anything which he had not
assigned to them. Back of their welter of coops, unseen by the tutelary
Tubbs, the lean giant figure of Gottlieb stood sardonic on a stormy
horizon.
Literary expression was not easy to Martin. He delayed with his paper,
while Tubbs became irritable and whipped him on. The experiments had
ceased; there was misery and pen-scratching and much tearing of
manuscript paper in Martin’s particular roofless cell.
For once he had no refuge in Leora. She cried:
“Why not? Ten thousand a year would be awfully nice, Sandy. Gee! We’ve
always been so poor, and you do like nice flats and things. And to boss
your own department-- And you could consult Dr. Gottlieb just the same.
He’s a department-head, isn’t he, and yet he keeps independent of Dr.
Tubbs. Oh, I’m for it!”
And slowly, under the considerable increase in respect given to him at
Institute lunches, Martin himself was “for it.”
“We could get one of those new apartments on Park Avenue. Don’t suppose
they cost more than three thousand a year,” he meditated. “Wouldn’t be
so bad to be able to entertain people there. Not that I’d let it
interfere with my work.... Kind of nice.”
It was still more kind of nice, however agonizing in the taking, to be
recognized socially.
Capitola McGurk, who hitherto had not perceived him except as an object
less interesting than Gladys the Centrifuge, telephoned: “ ... Dr. Tubbs
so enthusiastic and Ross and I are so pleased. Be delighted if Mrs.
Arrowsmith and you could dine with us next Thursday at eight-thirty.”
Martin accepted the royal command.
It was his conviction that after glimpses of Angus Duer and Rippleton
Holabird he had seen luxury, and understood smart dinner parties. Leora
and he went without too much agitation to the house of Ross McGurk, in
the East Seventies, near Fifth Avenue. The house did, from the street,
seem to have an unusual quantity of graystone gargoyles and carven
lintels and bronze grills, but it did not seem large.
Inside, the vaulted stone hallway opened up like a cathedral. They were
embarrassed by the footmen, awed by the automatic elevator, oppressed by
a hallway full of vellum folios and Italian chests and a drawing-room
full of water-colors, and reduced to rusticity by Capitola’s queenly
white satin and pearls.
There were eight or ten Persons of Importance, male and female, looking
insignificant but bearing names as familiar as Ivory Soap.
Did one give his arm to some unknown lady and “take her in,” Martin
wondered. He rejoiced to find that one merely straggled into the
dining-room under McGurk’s amiable basso herding.
The dining-room was gorgeous and very hideous, in stamped leather and
hysterias of gold, with collections of servants watching one’s use of
asparagus forks. Martin was seated (it is doubtful if he ever knew that
he was the guest of honor) between Capitola McGurk and a woman of whom
he could learn only that she was the sister of a countess.
Capitola leaned toward him in her great white splendor.
“Now, Dr. Arrowsmith, just what is this you are discovering?”
“Why, it’s--uh-- I’m trying to figure--”
“Dr. Tubbs tells us that you have found such wonderful new ways of
controlling disease.” Her L’s were a melody of summer rivers, her R’s
the trill of birds in the brake. “Oh, what--_what_ could be more
beau-tiful than relieving this sad old world of its burden of illness!
But just precisely what _is_ it that you’re doing?”
“Why, it’s awfully early to be sure but-- You see, it’s like this. You
take certain bugs like staph--”
“Oh, how interesting science is, but how frightfully difficult for
simple people like me to grasp! But we’re all so humble. We’re just
waiting for scientists like you to make the world secure for
friendship--”
Then Capitola gave all her attention to her other man. Martin looked
straight ahead and ate and suffered. The sister of the countess, a
sallow and stringy woman, was glowing at him. He turned with unhappy
meekness (noting that she had one more fork than he, and wondering where
he had got lost).
She blared, “You are a scientist, I am told.”
“Ye-es.”
“The trouble with scientists is that they do not understand beauty. They
are so cold.”
Rippleton Holabird would have made pretty mirth, but Martin could only
quaver, “No, I don’t think that’s true,” and consider whether he dared
drink another glass of champagne.
When they had been herded back to the drawing-room, after masculine but
achingly elaborate passings of the port, Capitola swooped on him with
white devouring wings:
“Dear Dr. Arrowsmith, I really didn’t get a chance at dinner to ask you
just exactly _what_ you are doing.... Oh! Have you seen my dear little
children at the Charles Street settlement? I’m sure ever so many of them
will become the most fascinating scientists. You must come lecture to
them.”
That night he fretted to Leora, “Going to be hard to keep up this
twittering. But I suppose I’ve got to learn to enjoy it. Oh, well, think
how nice it’ll be to give some dinners of our own, with real people,
Gottlieb and everybody, when I’m a department-head.”
Next morning Gottlieb came slowly into Martin’s room. He stood by the
window; he seemed to be avoiding Martin’s eyes. He sighed, “Something
sort of bad--perhaps not altogether bad--has happened.”
“What is it, sir? Anything I can do?”
“It does not apply to me. To you.”
Irritably Martin thought, “Is he going into all this
danger-of-rapid-success stuff again? I’m getting tired of it!”
Gottlieb ambled toward him. “It iss a pity, Martin, but you are not the
discoverer of the X Principle.”
“Wh-what--”
“Some one else has done it.”
“They have not! I’ve searched all the literature, and except for Twort,
not one person has even hinted at anticipating-- Why, good Lord, Dr.
Gottlieb, it would mean that all I’ve done, all these weeks, has just
been waste, and I’m a fool--”
“Vell. Anyvay. D’Hérelle of the Pasteur Institute has just now published
in the _Comptes Rendus, Académie des Sciences_, a report--it is your X
Principle, absolute. Only he calls it ‘bacteriophage.’ So.”
“Then I’m--”
In his mind Martin finished it, “Then I’m not going to be a
department-head or famous or anything else. I’m back in the gutter.” All
strength went out of him and all purpose, and the light of creation
faded to dirty gray.
“Now of course,” said Gottlieb, “you could claim to be codiscoverer and
spend the rest of your life fighting to get recognized. Or you could
forget it, and write a nice letter congratulating D’Hérelle, and go back
to work.”
Martin mourned, “Oh, I’ll go back to work. Nothing else to do. I guess
Tubbs’ll chuck the new department now. I’ll have time to really finish
my research--maybe I’ve got some points that D’Hérelle hasn’t hit
on--and I’ll publish it to corroborate him.... Damn him!... Where is his
report?... I suppose you’re glad that I’m saved from being a Holabird.”
“I ought to be. It is a sin against my religion that I am not. But I am
getting old. And you are my friend. I am sorry you are not to have the
fun of being pretentious and successful--for a while.... Martin, it iss
nice that you will corroborate D’Hérelle. That is science: to work and
not to care--too much--if somebody else gets the credit.... Shall I tell
Tubbs about D’Hérelle’s priority, or will you?”
Gottlieb straggled away, looking back a little sadly.
Tubbs came in to wail, “If you had only published earlier, as I told
you, Dr. Arrowsmith! You have really put me in a most embarrassing
position before the Board of Trustees. Of course there can be no
question now of a new department.”
“Yes,” said Martin vacantly.
He carefully filed away the beginnings of his paper and turned to his
bench. He stared at a shining flask till it fascinated him like a
crystal ball. He pondered:
“Wouldn’t have been so bad if Tubbs had let me alone. Damn these old
men, damn these Men of Measured Merriment, these Important Men that come
and offer you honors. Money. Decorations. Titles. Want to make you windy
with authority. Honors! If you get ’em, you become pompous, and then
when you’re used to ’em, if you lose ’em you feel foolish.
“So I’m not going to be rich. Leora, poor kid, she won’t have her new
dresses and flat and everything. We-- Won’t be so much fun in the lil
old flat, now. Oh, quit whining!
“I wish Terry were here.
“I love that man Gottlieb. He might have gloated--
“Bacteriophage, the Frenchman calls it. Too long. Better just call it
_phage_. Even got to take his name for it, for my own X Principle! Well,
I had a lot of fun, working all those nights. Working--”
He was coming out of his trance. He imagined the flask filled with
staph-clouded broth. He plodded into Gottlieb’s office to secure the
journal containing D’Hérelle’s report, and read it minutely,
enthusiastically.
“There’s a man, there’s a scientist!” he chuckled.
On his way home he was planning to experiment on the Shiga dysentery
bacillus with phage (as henceforth he called the X Principle), planning
to volley questions and criticisms at D’Hérelle, hoping that Tubbs would
not discharge him for a while, and expanding with relief that he would
not have to do his absurd premature paper on phage, that he could be
lewd and soft-collared and easy, not judicious and spied-on and weighty.
He grinned, “Gosh, I’ll bet Tubbs was disappointed! He’d figured on
signing all my papers with me and getting the credit. Now for this Shiga
experiment-- Poor Lee, she’ll have to get used to my working nights, I
guess.”
Leora kept to herself what she felt about it--or at least most of what
she felt.
CHAPTER XXX
I
For a year broken only by Terry Wickett’s return after the Armistice,
and by the mockeries of that rowdy intelligence, Martin was in a grind
of drudgery. Week on week he toiled at complicated phage experiments.
His work--his hands, his technique--became more adept, and his days more
steady, less fretful.
He returned to his evening studying. He went from mathematics into
physical chemistry; began to understand the mass action law; became as
sarcastic as Terry about what he called the “bedside manner” of Tubbs
and Holabird; read much French and German; went canoeing on the Hudson
on Sunday afternoons; and had a bawdy party with Leora and Terry to
celebrate the day when the Institute was purified by the sale of
Holabird’s pride, Gladys the Centrifuge.
He suspected that Dr. Tubbs, now magnificent with the ribbon of the
Legion of Honor, had retained him in the Institute only because of
Gottlieb’s intervention. But it may be that Tubbs and Holabird hoped he
would again blunder into publicity-bringing miracles, for they were both
polite to him at lunch--polite and wistfully rebuking, and full of meaty
remarks about publishing one’s discoveries early instead of dawdling.
It was more than a year after Martin’s anticipation by D’Hérelle when
Tubbs appeared in the laboratory with suggestions:
“I’ve been thinking, Arrowsmith,” said Tubbs.
He looked it.
“D’Hérelle’s discovery hasn’t aroused the popular interest I thought it
would. If he’d only been here with us, I’d have seen to it that he got
the proper attention. Practically no newspaper comment at all. Perhaps
we can still do something. As I understand it, you’ve been going along
with what Dr. Gottlieb would call ‘fundamental research.’ I think it may
now be time for you to use phage in practical healing. I want you to
experiment with phage in pneumonia, plague, perhaps typhoid, and when
your experiments get going, make some practical tests in collaboration
with the hospitals. Enough of all this mere frittering and vanity. Let’s
really _cure_ somebody!”
Martin was not free from a fear of dismissal if he refused to obey. And
he was touched as Tubbs went on:
“Arrowsmith, I suspect you sometimes feel I lack a sense of scientific
precision when I insist on practical results. I-- Somehow I don’t see
the really noble and transforming results coming out of this Institute
that we ought to be getting, with our facilities. I’d like to do
something big, my boy, something fine for poor humanity, before I pass
on. Can’t you give it to me? Go cure the plague!”
For once Tubbs was a tired smile and not an earnestness of whiskers.
That day, concealing from Gottlieb his abandonment of the quest for the
fundamental nature of phage, Martin set about fighting pneumonia, before
attacking the Black Death. And when Gottlieb learned of it, he was
absorbed in certain troubles of his own.
Martin cured rabbits of pleuro-pneumonia by the injection of phage, and
by feeding them with it he prevented the spread of pneumonia. He found
that phage-produced immunity could be as infectious as a disease.
He was pleased with himself, and expected pleasure from Tubbs, but for
weeks Tubbs did not heed him. He was off on a new enthusiasm, the most
virulent of his whole life: he was organizing the League of Cultural
Agencies.
He was going to standardize and coördinate all mental activities in
America, by the creation of a bureau which should direct and pat and
gently rebuke and generally encourage chemistry and batik-making, poetry
and Arctic exploration, animal husbandry and Bible study, negro
spirituals and business-letter writing. He was suddenly in conference
with conductors of symphony orchestras, directors of art-schools, owners
of itinerant Chautauquas, liberal governors, ex-clergymen who wrote
tasty philosophy for newspaper syndicates, in fact all the proprietors
of American intellectuality--particularly including a millionaire named
Minnigen who had recently been elevating the artistic standards of the
motion pictures.
Tubbs was all over the Institute inviting the researchers to join him in
the League of Cultural Agencies with its fascinating committee-meetings
and dinners. Most of them grunted, “The Old Man is erupting again,” and
forgot him, but one ex-major went out every evening to confer with
serious ladies who wore distinguished frocks, who sobbed over “the loss
of spiritual and intellectual horse-power through lack of coördination,”
and who went home in limousines.
There were rumors. Dr. Billy Smith whispered that he had gone in to see
Tubbs and heard McGurk shouting at him, “Your job is to run this shop
and not work for that land-stealing, four-flushing, play-producing son
of evil, Pete Minnigen!”
The morning after, when Martin ambled to his laboratory, he discovered a
gasping, a muttering, a shaking in the corridors, and incredulously he
heard:
“Tubbs has resigned!”
“No!”
“They say he’s gone to his League of Cultural Agencies. This fellow
Minnigen has given the League a scad of money, and Tubbs is to get twice
the salary he had here!”
II
Instantly, for all but the zealots like Gottlieb, Terry, Martin, and the
bio-physics assistant, research was halted. There was a surging of
factions, a benevolent and winning buzz of scientists who desired to be
the new Director of the Institute.
Rippleton Holabird, Yeo the carpenter-like biologist, Gillingham the
joky chief in bio-physics, Aaron Sholtheis the neat Russian Jewish High
Church Episcopalian, all of them went about with expressions of modest
willingness. They were affectionate with everybody they met in the
corridors, however violent they were in private discussions. Added to
them were no few outsiders, professors and researchers in other
institutes, who found it necessary to come and confer about rather
undefined matters with Ross McGurk.
Terry remarked to Martin, “Probably Pearl Robbins and your garçon are
pitching horseshoes for the Directorship. My garçon ain’t--the only
reason, though, is because I’ve just murdered him. At that, I think
Pearl would be the best choice. She’s been Tubbs’s secretary so long
that she’s learned all his ignorance about scientific technique.”
Rippleton Holabird was the most unctuous of the office-seekers, and the
most hungry. The war over, he missed his uniform and his authority. He
urged Martin:
“You know how I’ve always believed in your genius, Martin, and I know
how dear old Gottlieb believes in you. If you would get Gottlieb to back
me, to talk to McGurk-- Of course in taking the Directorship I would be
making a sacrifice, because I’d have to give up my research, but I’d be
willing because I feel, really, that somebody with a Tradition ought to
carry on the control. Tubbs is backing me, and if Gottlieb did-- I’d see
that it was to Gottlieb’s advantage. I’d give him a lot more
floor-space!”
Through the Institute it was vaguely known that Capitola was advocating
the election of Holabird as “the only scientist here who is also a
gentleman.” She was seen sailing down corridors, a frigate, with
Holabird a sloop in her wake.
But while Holabird beamed, Nicholas Yeo looked secret and satisfied.
The whole Institute fluttered on the afternoon when the Board of
Trustees met in the Hall, for the election of a Director. They were
turned from investigators into boarding-school girls. The Board debated,
or did something annoying, for draining hours.
At four, Terry Wickett hastened to Martin with, “Say, Slim, I’ve got a
straight tip that they’ve elected Silva, dean of the Winnemac medical
school. That’s your shop, isn’t it? Wha’s like?”
“He’s a fine old-- No! He and Gottlieb hate each other. Lord!
Gottlieb’ll resign, and I’ll have to get out. Just when my work’s going
nice!”
At five, past doors made of attentive eyes, the Board of Trustees
marched to the laboratory of Max Gottlieb.
Holabird was heard saying bravely, “Of course with me, I wouldn’t give
my research up for any administrative job.” And Pearl Robbins informed
Terry, “Yes, it’s true-- Mr. McGurk himself just told me--the Board has
elected Dr. Gottlieb the new Director.”
“Then they’re fools,” said Terry. “He’ll refuse it, with wilence. ‘Dot
dey should ask me to go monkey-skipping mit committee meetings!’ Fat
chance!”
When the Board had gone, Martin and Terry flooded into Gottlieb’s
laboratory and found the old man standing by his bench, more erect than
they had seen him for years.
“Is it true--they want you to be Director?” panted Martin.
“Yes, they have asked me.”
“But you’ll refuse? You won’t let’em gum up your work!”
“Vell.... I said my real work must go on. They consent I should appoint
an Assistant Director to do the detail. You see-- Of course nothing must
interfere with my immunology, but dis gives me the chance to do big
t’ings and make a free scientific institute for all you boys. And those
fools at Winnemac that laughed at my idea of a real medical school, now
maybe they will see-- Do you know who was my rival for Director--do you
know who it was, Martin? It was that man Silva! Ha!”
In the corridor Terry groaned, “_Requiescat in pace_.”
III
To the dinner in Gottlieb’s honor (the only dinner that ever was given
in Gottlieb’s honor) there came not only the men of impressive but easy
affairs who attend all dinners of honor, but the few scientists whom
Gottlieb admired.
He appeared late, rather shaky, escorted by Martin. When he reached the
speakers’ table, the guests rose to him, shouting. He peered at them, he
tried to speak, he held out his long arms as if to take them all in, and
sank down sobbing.
There were cables from Europe; ardent letters from Tubbs and Dean Silva
bewailing their inability to be present; telegrams from college
presidents; and all of these were read to admiring applause.
But Capitola murmured, “Just the same, we shall miss dear Dr. Tubbs. He
was so forward-looking. Don’t play with your fork, Ross.”
So Max Gottlieb took charge of the McGurk Institute of Biology, and in a
month that Institute became a shambles.
IV
Gottlieb planned to give only an hour a day to business. As Assistant
Director he appointed Dr. Aaron Sholtheis, the epidemiologist, the
Yonkers churchman and dahlia-fancier. Gottlieb explained to Martin
that, though of course Sholtheis was a fool, yet he was the only man in
sight who combined at least a little scientific ability with a
willingness to endure the routine and pomposity and compromises of
executive work.
By continuing his ancient sneers at all bustling managers, Gottlieb
obviously felt that he excused himself for having become a manager.
He could not confine his official work to an hour a day. There were too
many conferences, too many distinguished callers, too many papers which
needed his signature. He was dragged into dinner-parties; and the long,
vague, palavering luncheons to which a Director has to go, and the
telephoning to straighten out the dates of these tortures, took nervous
hours. Each day his executive duties crawled into two hours or three or
four, and he raged, he became muddled by complications of personnel and
economy, he was ever more autocratic, more testy; and the loving
colleagues of the Institute, who had been soothed or bullied into
surface peace by Tubbs, now jangled openly.
While he was supposed to radiate benevolence from the office recently
occupied by Dr. A. DeWitt Tubbs, Gottlieb clung to his own laboratory
and to his narrow office as a cat clings to its cushion under a table.
Once or twice he tried to sit and look impressive in the office of the
Director, but he fled from that large clean vacuity and from Miss
Robbins’s snapping typewriter to his own den that smelled not of
forward-looking virtue but only of cigarettes and old papers.
To McGurk, as to every scientific institution, came hundreds of farmers
and practical nurses and suburban butchers who had paid large fares from
Oklahoma or Oregon to get recognition for the unquestionable cures which
they had discovered: oil of Mississippi catfish which saved every case
of tuberculosis, arsenic pastes guaranteed to cure all cancers. They
came with letters and photographs amid the frayed clean linen in their
shabby suit-cases--at any opportunity they would stoop over their bags
and hopefully bring out testimonials from their Pastors; they begged for
a chance to heal humanity, and for themselves only enough money to send
The Girl to musical conservatory. So certain, so black-crapely
beseeching were they that no reception-clerk could be trained to keep
them all out.
Gottlieb found them seeping into his office. He was sorry for them. They
did take his working hours, they did scratch his belief that he was
hard-hearted, but they implored him with such wretched timorousness that
he could not get rid of them without making promises, and admitting
afterward that to have been more cruel would have been less cruel.
It was the Important People to whom he was rude.
The Directorship devoured enough time and peace to prevent Gottlieb from
going on with the ever more recondite problems of his inquiry into the
nature of specificity, and his inquiry prevented him from giving enough
attention to the Institute to keep it from falling to pieces. He
depended on Sholtheis, passed decisions on to him, but Sholtheis, since
in any case Gottlieb would get all the credit for a successful
Directorship, kept up his own scientific work and passed the decisions
to Miss Pearl Robbins, so that the actual Director was the handsome and
jealous Pearl.
There was no craftier or crookeder Director in the habitable world.
Pearl enjoyed it. She so warmly and modestly assured Ross McGurk of the
merits of Gottlieb and of her timorous devotion to him, she so purred to
the flattery of Rippleton Holabird, she so blandly answered the hoarse
hostility of Terry Wickett by keeping him from getting materials for his
work, that the Institute reeled with intrigue.
Yeo was not speaking to Sholtheis. Terry threatened Holabird to “paste
him one.” Gottlieb constantly asked Martin for advice, and never took
it. Joust, the vulgar but competent bio-physicist, lacking the affection
which kept Martin and Terry from reproaching the old man, told Gottlieb
that he was a “rotten Director and ought to quit,” and was straightway
discharged and replaced by a muffin.
Max Gottlieb had ever discoursed to Martin of “the jests of the gods.”
Among these jests Martin had never beheld one so pungent as this whereby
the pretentiousness and fussy unimaginativeness which he had detested in
Tubbs should have made him a good manager, while the genius of Gottlieb
should have made him a feeble tyrant; the jest that the one thing worse
than a too managed and standardized institution should be one that was
not managed and standardized at all. He would once have denied it with
violence, but nightly now he prayed for Tubbs’s return.
If the business of the Institute was not more complicated thereby,
certainly its placidity was the more disturbed by the appearance of
Gustaf Sondelius, who had just returned from a study of sleeping
sickness in Africa and who noisily took one of the guest laboratories.
Gustaf Sondelius, the soldier of preventive medicine whose lecture had
sent Martin from Wheatsylvania to Nautilus, had remained in his gallery
of heroes as possessing a little of Gottlieb’s perception, something of
Dad Silva’s steady kindliness, something of Terry’s tough honesty though
none of his scorn of amenities, and with these a spicy, dripping
richness altogether his own. It is true that Sondelius did not remember
Martin. Since their evening in Minneapolis he had drunk and debated and
flamboyantly ridden to obscure but vinuous destinations with too many
people. But he was made to remember, and in a week Sondelius and Terry
and Martin were to be seen tramping and dining, or full of topics and
gin at Martin’s flat.
Sondelius’s wild flaxen hair was almost gray, but he had the same bull
shoulders, the same wide brow, and the same tornado of plans to make the
world aseptic, without neglecting to enjoy a few of the septic things
before they should pass away.
His purpose was, after finishing his sleeping sickness report, to found
a school of tropical medicine in New York.
He besieged McGurk and the wealthy Mr. Minnigen who was Tubbs’s new
patron, and in and out of season he besieged Gottlieb.
He adored Gottlieb and made noises about it. Gottlieb admired his
courage and his hatred of commercialism, but his presence Gottlieb could
not endure. He was flustered by Sondelius’s hilarity, his compliments,
his bounding optimism, his inaccuracy, his boasting, his oppressive
bigness. It may be that Gottlieb resented the fact that though Sondelius
was only eleven years younger--fifty-eight to Gottlieb’s sixty-nine--he
seemed thirty years younger, half a century gayer.
When Sondelius perceived this grudgingness he tried to overcome it by
being more noisy and complimentary and enthusiastic than ever. On
Gottlieb’s birthday he gave him a shocking smoking-jacket of cherry and
mauve velvet, and when he called at Gottlieb’s flat, which was often,
Gottlieb had to put on the ghastly thing and sit humming while Sondelius
assaulted him with roaring condemnations of mediocre soup and mediocre
musicians.... That Sondelius gave up surprisingly decorative
dinner-parties for these calls, Gottlieb never knew.
Martin turned to Sondelius for courage as he turned to Terry for
concentration. Courage and concentration were needed, in these days of
an Institute gone insane, if a man was to do his work.
And Martin was doing it.
V
After a consultation with Gottlieb and a worried conference with Leora
about the danger of handling the germs, he had gone on to bubonic
plague, to the possibilities of preventing it and curing it with phage.
To have heard him asking Sondelius about his experience in plague
epidemics, one would have believed that Martin found the Black Death
delightful. To have beheld him infecting lean snaky rats with the
horror, all the while clucking to them and calling them pet names, one
would have known him mad.
He found that rats fed with phage failed to come down with plague; that
after phage-feeding, _Bacillus pestis_ disappeared from carrier rats
which, without themselves being killed thereby, harbored and spread
chronic plague; and that, finally, he could cure the disease. He was as
absorbed and happy and nervous as in the first days of the X Principle.
He worked all night.... At the microscope, under a lone light, fishing
out with a glass pipette drawn fine as a hair one single plague
bacillus.
To protect himself from infection by the rat-fleas he wore, while he
worked with the animals, rubber gloves, high leather boots, straps about
his sleeves. These precautions thrilled him, and to the others at McGurk
they had something of the esoteric magic of the alchemists. He became a
bit of a hero and a good deal of a butt. No more than hearty business
men in offices or fussy old men in villages are researchers free from
the tedious vice of jovial commenting. The chemists and biologists
called him “The Pest,” refused to come to his room, and pretended to
avoid him in the corridors.
As he went fluently on from experiment to experiment, as the drama of
science obsessed him, he thought very well of himself and found himself
taken seriously by the others. He published one cautious paper on phage
in plague, which was mentioned in numerous scientific journals. Even the
harassed Gottlieb was commendatory, though he could give but little
attention and no help. But Terry Wickett remained altogether cool. He
showed for Martin’s somewhat brilliant work only enough enthusiasm to
indicate that he was not jealous; he kept poking in to ask whether, with
his new experimentation, Martin was continuing his quest for the
fundamental nature of all phage, and his study of physical chemistry.
Then Martin had such an assistant as has rarely been known, and that
assistant was Gustaf Sondelius.
Sondelius was discouraged regarding his school of tropical medicine. He
was looking for new trouble. He had been through several epidemics, and
he viewed plague with affectionate hatred. When he understood Martin’s
work he gloated, “Hey, Yesus! Maybe you got the t’ing that will be
better than Yersin or Haffkine or anybody! Maybe you cure all the world
of plague--the poor devils in India--millions of them. Let me in!”
He became Martin’s collaborator; unpaid, tireless, not very skilful,
valuable in his buoyancy. As well as Martin he loved irregularity; by
principle he never had his meals at the same hours two days in
succession, and by choice he worked all night and made poetry, rather
bad poetry, at dawn.
Martin had always been the lone prowler. Possibly the thing he most
liked in Leora was her singular ability to be cheerfully non-existent
even when she was present. At first he was annoyed by Sondelius’s
disturbing presence, however interesting he found his fervors about
plague-bearing rats (whom Sondelius hated not at all but whom, with
loving zeal, he had slaughtered by the million, with a romantic
absorption in traps and poison gas). But the Sondelius who was raucous
in conversation could be almost silent at work. He knew exactly how to
hold the animals while Martin did intrapleural injections; he made
cultures of _Bacillus pestis_; when Martin’s technician had gone home at
but a little after midnight (the garçon liked Martin and thought well
enough of science, but he was prejudiced in favor of six hours daily
sleep and sometimes seeing his wife and children in Harlem), then
Sondelius cheerfully sterilized glassware and needles, and lumbered up
to the animal house to bring down victims.
The change whereby Sondelius was turned from Martin’s master to his
slave was so unconscious, and Sondelius, for all his Pickerbaughian love
of sensationalism, cared so little about mastery or credit, that neither
of them considered that there had been a change. They borrowed
cigarettes from each other; they went out at the most improbable hours
to have flap-jacks and coffee at an all-night lunch; and together they
handled test-tubes charged with death.
CHAPTER XXXI
I
From Yunnan in China, from the clattering bright bazaars, crept
something invisible in the sun and vigilant by dark, creeping, sinister,
ceaseless; creeping across the Himalayas down through walled
market-places, across a desert, along hot yellow rivers, into an
American missionary compound--creeping, silent, sure; and here and there
on its way a man was black and stilled with plague.
In Bombay a new dock-guard, unaware of things, spoke boisterously over
his family rice of a strange new custom of the rats.
Those princes of the sewer, swift to dart and turn, had gone mad. They
came out on the warehouse floor, ignoring the guard, springing up as
though (the guard said merrily) they were trying to fly, and straightway
falling dead. He had poked at them, but they did not move.
Three days later that dock-guard died of the plague.
Before he died, from his dock a ship with a cargo of wheat steamed off
to Marseilles. There was no sickness on it all the way; there was no
reason why at Marseilles it should not lie next to a tramp steamer, nor
why that steamer, pitching down to Montevideo with nothing more
sensational than a discussion between the supercargo and the second
officer in the matter of a fifth ace, should not berth near the S.S.
_Pendown Castle_, bound for the island of St. Hubert to add cocoa to its
present cargo of lumber.
On the way to St. Hubert, a Goanese seedie boy and after him the
messroom steward on the _Pendown Castle_ died of what the skipper called
influenza. A greater trouble was the number of rats which, ill satisfied
with lumber as diet, scampered up to the food-stores, then into the
forecastle, and for no reason perceptible died on the open decks. They
danced comically before they died, and lay in the scuppers stark and
ruffled.
So the _Pendown Castle_ came to Blackwater, the capital and port of St.
Hubert.
It is a little isle of the southern West Indies, but St. Hubert supports
a hundred thousand people-- English planters and clerks, Hindu
road-makers, negro cane-hands, Chinese merchants. There is history along
its sands and peaks. Here the buccaneers careened their ships; here the
Marquess of Wimsbury, when he had gone mad, took to repairing clocks and
bade his slaves burn all the sugar-cane.
Hither that peasant beau, Gaston Lopo, brought Madame de Merlemont, and
dwelt in fashionableness till the slaves whom he had often relished to
lash came on him shaving, and straightway the lather was fantastically
smeared with blood.
To-day, St. Hubert is all sugar-cane and Ford cars, oranges and
plantains and the red and yellow pods of cocoa, bananas and rubber trees
and jungles of bamboo, Anglican churches and tin chapels, colored
washerwomen busy at the hollows in the roots of silk-cotton trees,
steamy heat and royal palms and the immortelle that fills the valleys
with crimson; to-day it is all splendor and tourist dullness and cabled
cane-quotations, against the unsparing sun.
Blackwater, flat and breathless town of tin-roofed plaster houses and
incandescent bone-white roads, of salmon-red hibiscus and balconied
stores whose dark depths open without barrier from the stifling streets,
has the harbor to one side and a swamp to the other. But behind it are
the Penrith Hills, on whose wholesome and palm-softened heights is
Government House, looking to the winking sails.
Here lived in bulky torpor His Excellency the Governor of St. Hubert,
Colonel Sir Robert Fairlamb.
Sir Robert Fairlamb was an excellent fellow, a teller of messroom
stories, one who in a heathen day never smoked till the port had gone
seven times round; but he was an execrable governor and a worried
governor. The man whose social rank was next to his own--the Hon. Cecil
Eric George Twyford, a lean, active, high-nosed despot who owned and
knew rod by snake-writhing rod some ten thousand acres of cane in St.
Swithin’s Parish-- Twyford said that His Excellency was a “potty and
snoring fool,” and versions of the opinion came not too slowly to
Fairlamb. Then, to destroy him complete, the House of Assembly, which is
the St. Hubert legislature, was riven by the feud of Kellett the Red
Leg and George William Vertigan.
The Red Legs were a tribe of Scotch-Irish poor whites who had come to
St. Hubert as indentured servants two hundred years before. Most of them
were still fishermen and plantation-foremen, but one of them, Kellett, a
man small-mouthed and angry and industrious, had risen from office-boy
to owner of a shipping company, and while his father still spread his
nets on the beach at Point Carib, Kellett was the scourge of the House
of Assembly and a hound for economy--particularly any economy which
would annoy his fellow legislator, George William Vertigan.
George William, who was sometimes known as “Old Jeo Wm” and sometimes as
“The King of the Ice House” (that enticing and ruinous bar), had been
born behind a Little Bethel in Lancashire. He owned The Blue Bazaar, the
hugest stores in St. Hubert; he caused tobacco to be smuggled into
Venezuela; he was as full of song and incaution and rum as Kellett the
Red Leg was full of figures and envy and decency.
Between them, Kellett and George William split the House of Assembly.
There could be, to a respectable person, no question as to their merits:
Kellett the just and earnest man of domesticity whose rise was an
inspiration to youth; George William the gambler, the lusher, the
smuggler, the liar, the seller of shoddy cottons, a person whose only
excellence was his cheap good nature.
Kellett’s first triumph in economy was to pass an ordinance removing the
melancholy Cockney (a player of oboes) who was the official rat-catcher
of St. Hubert.
George William Vertigan insisted in debate, and afterward privily to Sir
Robert Fairlamb, that rats destroy food and perhaps spread disease, and
His Excellency must veto the bill. Sir Robert was troubled. He called in
The Surgeon General, Dr. R. E. Inchcape Jones (but he preferred to be
called Mister, not Doctor).
Dr. Inchcape Jones was a thin, tall, fretful, youngish man, without
bowels. He had come out from Home only two years before, and he wanted
to go back Home, to that particular part of Home represented by
tennis-teas in Surrey. He remarked to Sir Robert that rats and their
ever faithful fleas do carry diseases--plague and infectious jaundice
and rat-bite fever and possibly leprosy--but these diseases did not and
therefore could not exist in St. Hubert, except for leprosy, which was a
natural punishment of outlandish Native Races. In fact, noted Inchcape
Jones, nothing did exist in St. Hubert except malaria, dengue, and a
general beastly dullness, and if Red Legs like Kellett longed to die of
plague and rat-bite fever, why should decent people object?
So by the sovereign power of the House of Assembly of St. Hubert, and of
His Excellency the Governor, the Cockney rat-catcher and his jiggling
young colored assistant were commanded to cease to exist. The
rat-catcher became a chauffeur. He drove Canadian and American tourists,
who stopped over at St. Hubert for a day or two between Barbados and
Trinidad, along such hill-trails as he considered most easy to achieve
with a second-hand motor, and gave them misinformation regarding the
flowers. The rat-catcher’s assistant became a respectable smuggler and
leader of a Wesleyan choir. And as for the rats themselves, they
flourished, they were glad in the land, and each female produced from
ten to two hundred offspring every year.
They were not often seen by day. “The rats aren’t increasing; the cats
kill ’em,” said Kellett the Red Leg. But by darkness they gamboled in
the warehouses and in and out of the schooners along the quay. They
ventured countryward, and lent their fleas to a species of ground
squirrels which were plentiful about the village of Carib.
A year and a half after the removal of the rat-catcher, when the
_Pendown Castle_ came in from Montevideo and moored by the Councillor
Pier, it was observed by ten thousand glinty small eyes among the piles.
As a matter of routine, certainly not as a thing connected with the
deaths from what the skipper had called influenza, the crew of the
_Pendown Castle_ put rat-shields on the mooring hawsers, but they did
not take up the gang-plank at night, and now and then a rat slithered
ashore to find among its kin in Blackwater more unctuous fare than
hardwood lumber. The _Pendown_ sailed amiably for home, and from
Avonmouth came to Surgeon General Inchcape Jones a cable announcing that
the ship was held, that others of the crew had died ... and died of
plague.
In the curt cablegram the word seemed written in bone-scorching fire.
Two days before the cable came, a Blackwater lighterman had been
smitten by an unknown ill, very unpleasant, with delirium and buboes.
Inchcape Jones said that it could not be plague, because there never was
plague in St. Hubert. His confrère, Stokes, retorted that perhaps it
couldn’t be plague, but it damn’ well _was_ plague.
Dr. Stokes was a wiry, humorless man, the parish medical officer of St.
Swithin Parish. He did not remain in the rustic reaches of St. Swithin,
where he belonged, but snooped all over the island, annoying Inchcape
Jones. He was an M.B. of Edinburgh; he had served in the African bush;
he had had blackwater fever and cholera and most other reasonable
afflictions; and he had come to St. Hubert only to recover his red blood
corpuscles and to disturb the unhappy Inchcape Jones. He was not a nice
man; he had beaten Inchcape Jones at tennis, with a nasty, unsporting
serve--the sort of serve you’d expect from an American.
And this Stokes, rather a bounder, a frightful bore, fancied himself as
an amateur bacteriologist! It was a bit thick to have him creeping about
the docks, catching rats, making cultures from the bellies of their
fleas, and barging in--sandy-headed and red-faced, thin and
unpleasant--to insist that they bore plague.
“My dear fellow, there’s always some _Bacillus pestis_ among rats,” said
Inchcape Jones, in a kindly but airy way.
When the lighterman died, Stokes irritatingly demanded that it be openly
admitted that the plague had come to St. Hubert.
“Even if it was plague, which is not certain,” said Inchcape Jones,
“there’s no reason to cause a row and frighten everybody. It was a
sporadic case. There won’t be any more.”
There was more, immediately. In a week three other waterfront workers
and a fisherman at Point Carib were down with something which, even
Inchcape Jones acknowledged, was uncomfortably like the description of
plague in “Manson’s Tropical Diseases”: “a prodromal stage characterized
by depression, anorexia, aching of the limbs,” then the fever, the
vertigo, the haggard features, the bloodshot and sunken eyes, the buboes
in the groin. It was not a pretty disease. Inchcape Jones ceased being
chattery and ever so jolly about picnics, and became almost as grim as
Stokes. But publicly he still hoped and denied, and St. Hubert did not
know ... did not know.
II
To drinking men and wanderers, the pleasantest place in the rather dull
and tin-roofed town of Blackwater is the bar and restaurant called the
Ice House.
It is on the floor above the Kellett Shipping Agency and the shop where
the Chinaman who is supposed to be a graduate of Oxford sells carved
tortoise, and cocoanuts in the horrible likeness of a head shrunken by
headhunters. Except for the balcony, where one lunches and looks down on
squatting breech-clouted Hindu beggars, and unearthly pearl-pale English
children at games in the savannah, all of the Ice House is a large and
dreaming dimness wherein you are but half conscious of Moorish grills, a
touch of gilt on white-painted walls, a heavy, amazingly long mahogany
bar, slot machines, and marble-topped tables beyond your own.
Here, at the cocktail-hour, are all the bloodless, sun-helmeted white
rulers of St. Hubert who haven’t quite the caste to belong to the
Devonshire Club: the shipping-office clerks, the merchants who have no
grandfathers, the secretaries to the Inchcape Joneses, the Italians and
Portuguese who smuggle into Venezuela.
Calmed by rum swizzles, those tart and commanding apéritifs which are
made in their deadly perfection only by the twirling swizzle-sticks of
the darkies at the Ice House bar, the exiles become peaceful, and have
another swizzle, and grow certain again (as for twenty-four hours, since
the last cocktail-hour, they have not been certain) that next year they
will go Home. Yes, they will taper off, take exercise in the dawn
coolness, stop drinking, become strong and successful, and go Home ...
the Lotus Eaters, tears in their eyes when in the dimness of the Ice
House they think of Piccadilly or the heights of Quebec, of Indiana or
Catalonia or the clogs of Lancashire.... They never go Home. But always
they have new reassuring cocktail-hours at the Ice House, until they
die, and the other lost men come to their funerals and whisper one to
another that they _are_ going Home.
Now of the Ice House, George William Vertigan, owner of the Blue Bazaar,
was unchallenged monarch. He was a thick, ruddy man, the sort of
Englishman one sees in the Midlands, the sort that is either very
Non-Conformist or very alcoholic, and George William was not
Non-Conformist. Each day from five to seven he was tilted against the
bar, never drunk, never altogether sober, always full of melody and
kindliness; the one man who did not long for Home, because outside the
Ice House he remembered no home.
When it was whispered that a man had died of something which might be
plague, George William announced to his court that if it were true, it
would serve Kellett the Red Leg jolly well right. But every one knew
that the West Indian climate prevented plague.
The group, quivering on the edge of being panicky, were reassured.
It was two nights afterward that there writhed into the Ice House a
rumor that George William Vertigan was dead.
III
No one dared speak of it, whether in the Devonshire Club or the Ice
House or the breeze-fluttered, sea-washed park where the negroes gather
after working hours, but they heard, almost without hearing, of this
death--and this--and another. No one liked to shake hands with his
oldest friend; every one fled from every one else, though the rats
loyally stayed with them; and through the island galloped the Panic,
which is more murderous than its brother, the Plague.
Still there was no quarantine, no official admission. Inchcape Jones
vomited feeble proclamations on the inadvisability of too-large public
gatherings, and wrote to London to inquire about Haffkine’s
prophylactic, but to Sir Robert Fairlamb he protested, “Honestly,
there’s only been a few deaths, and I think it’s all passed over. As for
these suggestions of Stokes that we burn the village of Carib, merely
because they’ve had several cases--why, it’s barbarous! And it’s been
conveyed to me that if we were to establish a quarantine, the merchants
would take the strongest measures against the administration. It would
ruin the tourist and export business.”
But Stokes of St. Swithin’s secretly wrote to Dr. Max Gottlieb, Director
of the McGurk Institute, that the plague was ready to flare up and
consume all the West Indies, and would Dr. Gottlieb do something about
it?
CHAPTER XXXII
I
There may have been in the shadowy heart of Max Gottlieb a diabolic
insensibility to divine pity, to suffering humankind; there may have
been mere resentment of the doctors who considered his science of value
only as it was handy to advertising their business of healing; there may
have been the obscure and passionate and unscrupulous demand of genius
for privacy. Certainly he who had lived to study the methods of
immunizing mankind against disease had little interest in actually using
those methods. He was like a fabulous painter, so contemptuous of
popular taste that after a lifetime of creation he should destroy
everything he had done, lest it be marred and mocked by the dull eyes of
the crowd.
The letter from Dr. Stokes was not his only intimation that plague was
striding through St. Hubert, that to-morrow it might be leaping to
Barbados, to the Virgin Islands ... to New York. Ross McGurk was an
emperor of the new era, better served than any cloistered satrap of old.
His skippers looked in at a hundred ports; his railroads penetrated
jungles; his correspondents whispered to him of the next election in
Colombia, of the Cuban cane-crop, of what Sir Robert Fairlamb had said
to Dr. R. E. Inchcape Jones on his bungalow porch. Ross McGurk, and
after him Max Gottlieb, knew better than did the Lotus Eaters of the Ice
House how much plague there was in St. Hubert.
Yet Gottlieb did not move, but pondered the unknown chemical structure
of antibodies, interrupted by questions as to whether Pearl Robbins had
enough pencils, whether it would be quite all right for Dr. Holabird to
receive the Lettish scientific mission this afternoon, so that Dr.
Sholtheis might attend the Anglican Conference on the Reservation of the
Host.
He was assailed by inquirers: public health officials, one Dr. Almus
Pickerbaugh, a congressman who was said to be popular in Washington,
Gustaf Sondelius, and a Martin Arrowsmith who could not (whether
because he was too big or too small) quite attain Gottlieb’s
concentrated indifference.
It was rumored that Arrowsmith of McGurk had something which might
eradicate plague. Letters demanded of Gottlieb, “Can you stand by, with
the stuff of salvation in your hands, and watch thousands of these
unfortunate people dying in St. Hubert, and what is more, are you going
to let the dreaded plague gain a foothold in the Western hemisphere? My
dear man, this is the time to come out of your scientific reverie and
act!”
Then Ross McGurk, over a comfortable steak, hinted, not too diffidently,
that this was the opportunity for the Institute to acquire world-fame.
Whether it was the compulsion of McGurk or the demands of the
public-spirited, or whether Gottlieb’s own imagination aroused enough to
visualize the far-off misery of the blacks in the canefields, he
summoned Martin and remarked:
“It comes to me that there is pneumonic plague in Manchuria and bubonic
in St. Hubert, in the West Indies. If I could trust you, Martin, to use
the phage with only half your patients and keep the others as controls,
under normal hygienic conditions but without the phage, then you could
make an absolute determination of its value, as complete as what we have
of mosquito transmission of yellow fever, and then I would send you down
to St. Hubert. What do you t’ink?”
Martin swore by Jacques Loeb that he would observe test conditions; he
would determine forever the value of phage by the contrast between
patients treated and untreated, and so, perhaps, end all plague forever;
he would harden his heart and keep clear his eyes.
“We will get Sondelius to go along,” said Gottlieb. “He will do the big
boom-boom and so bring us the credit in the newspapers which, I am now
told, a Director must obtain.”
Sondelius did not merely consent--he insisted.
Martin had never seen a foreign country--he could not think of Canada,
where he had spent a vacation as hotel-waiter, as foreign to him. He
could not comprehend that he was really going to a place of palm trees
and brown faces and languid Christmas Eves. He was busy (while Sondelius
was out ordering linen suits and seeking a proper new sun helmet) making
anti-plague phage on a large scale: a hundred liters of it, sealed in
tiny ampules. He felt like the normal Martin, but conferences and powers
were considering him.
There was a meeting of the Board of Trustees to advise Martin and
Sondelius as to their methods. For it the President of the University of
Wilmington gave up a promising interview with a millionaire alumnus,
Ross McGurk gave up a game of golf, and one of the three university
scientists arrived by aeroplane. Called in from the laboratory, a rather
young man in a wrinkled soft collar, dizzy still with the details of
Erlenmeyer flasks, infusorial earth, and sterile filters, Martin was
confronted by the Men of Measured Merriment, and found that he was no
longer concealed in the invisibility of insignificance but regarded as a
leader who was expected not only to produce miracles but to explain
beforehand how important and mature and miraculous he was.
He was shy before the spectacled gravity of the five Trustees as they
sat, like a Supreme Court, at the dais table in Bonanza Hall-- Gottlieb
a little removed, also trying to look grave and supreme. But Sondelius
rolled in, enthusiastic and tremendous, and suddenly Martin was not shy,
nor was he respectful to his one-time master in public health.
Sondelius wanted to exterminate all the rodents in St. Hubert, to
enforce a quarantine, to use Yersin’s serum and Haffkine’s prophylactic,
and to give Martin’s phage to everybody in St. Hubert, all at once, all
with everybody.
Martin protested. For the moment it might have been Gottlieb speaking.
He knew, he flung at them, that humanitarian feeling would make it
impossible to use the poor devils of sufferers as mere objects of
experiment, but he must have at least a few real test cases, and he was
damned, even before the Trustees he was damned, if he would have his
experiment so mucked up by multiple treatment that they could never tell
whether the cures were due to Yersin or Haffkine or phage or none of
them.
The Trustees adopted his plan. After all, while they desired to save
humanity, wasn’t it better to have it saved by a McGurk representative
than by Yersin or Haffkine or the outlandish Sondelius?
It was agreed that if Martin could find in St. Hubert a district which
was comparatively untouched by the plague, he should there endeavor to
have test cases, one half injected with phage, one half untreated. In
the badly afflicted districts, he might give the phage to every one, and
if the disease slackened unusually, that would be a secondary proof.
Whether the St. Hubert government, since they had not asked for aid,
would give Martin power to experiment and Sondelius police authority,
the Trustees did not know. The Surgeon General, a chap named Inchcape
Jones, had replied to their cables: “No real epidemic not need help.”
But McGurk promised that he would pull his numerous wires to have the
McGurk Commission (Chairman, Martin Arrowsmith, B.A., M.D.) welcomed by
the authorities.
Sondelius still insisted that in this crisis mere experimentation was
heartless, yet he listened to Martin’s close-reasoned fury with the
enthusiasm which this bull-necked eternal child had for anything which
sounded new and preferably true. He did not, like Almus Pickerbaugh,
regard a difference of scientific opinion as an attack on his character.
He talked of going on his own, independent of Martin and McGurk, but he
was won back when the Trustees murmured that though they really did wish
the dear man wouldn’t fool with sera, they would provide him with
apparatus to kill all the rats he wanted.
Then Sondelius was happy:
“And you watch me! I am the captain-general of rat-killers! I yoost walk
into a warehouse and the rats say, ‘There’s that damn’ old Uncle
Gustaf--what’s the use?’ and they turn up their toes and die! I am yoost
as glad I have you people behind me, because I am broke-- I went and
bought some oil stock that don’t look so good now--and I shall need a
lot of hydrocyanic acid gas. Oh, those rats! You watch me! Now I go and
telegraph I can’t keep a lecture engagement next week--huh! me to
lecture to a women’s college, me that can talk rat-language and know
seven beautiful deadly kind of traps!”
II
Martin had never known greater peril than swimming a flood as a hospital
intern. From waking to midnight he was too busy making phage and
receiving unsolicited advice from all the Institute staff to think of
the dangers of a plague epidemic, but when he went to bed, when his
brain was still revolving with plans, he pictured rather too well the
chance of dying, unpleasantly.
When Leora received the idea that he was going off to a death-haunted
isle, to a place of strange ways and trees and faces (a place, probably,
where they spoke funny languages and didn’t have movies or tooth-paste),
she took the notion secretively away with her, to look at it and examine
it, precisely as she often stole little foods from the table and hid
them and meditatively ate them at odd hours of the night, with the
pleased expression of a bad child. Martin was glad that she did not add
to his qualms by worrying. Then, after three days, she spoke:
“I’m going with you.”
“You are not!”
“Well.... I am!”
“It’s not safe.”
“Silly! Of course it is. You can shoot your nice old phage into me, and
then I’ll be absolutely all right. Oh, I have a husband who cures
things, I have! I’m going to blow in a lot of money for thin dresses,
though I bet St. Hubert isn’t any hotter than Dakota can be in August.”
“Listen! Lee, darling! Listen! I do think the phage will immunize
against the plague--you bet I’ll be mighty well injected with it
myself!--but I don’t _know_, and even if it were practically perfect,
there’d always be some people it wouldn’t protect. You simply can’t go,
sweet. Now I’m terribly sleepy--”
Leora seized his lapels, as comic fierce as a boxing kitten, but her
eyes were not comic, nor her wailing voice; age-old wail of the
soldiers’ women:
“Sandy, don’t you know I haven’t any life outside of you? I might’ve
had, but honestly, I’ve been glad to let you absorb me. I’m a lazy,
useless, ignorant scut, except as maybe I keep you comfortable. If you
were off there, and I didn’t know you were all right, or if you died and
somebody else cared for your body that I’ve loved so--haven’t I loved
it, dear?-- I’d go mad. I mean it--can’t you see I mean it-- I’d go mad!
It’s just-- I’m you, and I got to be with you. And I _will_ help you!
Make your media and everything. You know how often I’ve helped you. Oh,
I’m not much good at McGurk, with all your awful’ complicated jiggers,
but I did help you at Nautilus-- I _did_ help you, didn’t I?--and maybe
in St. Hubert”--her voice was the voice of women in midnight
terror--“maybe you won’t find anybody that can help you even my little
bit, and I’ll cook and everything--”
“Darling, don’t make it harder for me. Going to be hard enough in any
case--”
“Damn you, Sandy Arrowsmith, don’t you dare use those old stuck-up
expressions that husbands have been drooling out to wives forever and
ever! I’m not a wife, any more’n you’re a husband. You’re a rotten
husband! You neglect me absolutely. The only time you know what I’ve got
on is when some doggone button slips--and how they can pull off when a
person has gone over ’em and sewed ’em all on again is simply beyond
me!--and then you bawl me out. But I don’t care. I’d rather have you
than any decent husband.... Besides. I’m going.”
Gottlieb opposed it, Sondelius roared about it, Martin worried about it,
but Leora went, and--his only act of craftiness as Director of the
Institute-- Gottlieb made her “Secretary and Technical Assistant to the
McGurk Plague and Bacteriophage Commission to the Lesser Antilles,” and
blandly gave her a salary.
III
The day before the Commission sailed, Martin insisted that Sondelius
take his first injection of phage. He refused.
“No, I will not touch it till you get converted to humanity, Martin, and
give it to everybody in St. Hubert. And you will! Wait till you see them
suffering by the thousand. You have not seen such a thing. Then you will
forget science and try to save everybody. You shall not inject me till
you will inject all my negro friends down there too.”
That afternoon Gottlieb called Martin in. He spoke with hesitation:
“You’re off for Blackwater to-morrow.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Hm. You may be gone some time. I-- Martin, you are my oldest friend in
New York, you and the good Miriam. Tell me: At first you and Terry
t’ought I should not take up the Directorship. Don’t you now t’ink I was
wise?”
Martin stared, then hastily he lied and said that which was comforting
and expected.
“I am glad you t’ink so. You have known so long what I have tried to
do. I haf faults, but I t’ink I begin to see a real scientific note
coming into the Institute at last, after the popoolarity-chasing of
Tubbs and Holabird.... I wonder how I can discharge Holabird, that
pants-presser of science? If only he dit not know Capitola so
well--socially, they call it! But anyway--
“There are those that said Max Gottlieb could not do the child job of
running an institution. Huh! Buying note-books! Hiring women that sweep
floors! Or no--the floors are swept by women hired by the superintendent
of the building, _nicht wahr_? But anyway--
“I did not make a rage when Terry and you doubted. I am a great fellow
for allowing every one his opinion. But it pleases me-- I am very fond
of you two boys--the only real sons I have--” Gottlieb laid his withered
hand on Martin’s arm. “It pleases me that you see now I am beginning to
make a real scientific Institute. Though I have enemies. Martin, you
would t’ink I was joking if I told you the plotting against me--
“Even Yeo. I t’ought he was my friend. I t’ought he was a real
biologist. But just to-day he comes to me and says he cannot get enough
sea-urchins for his experiments. As if I could make sea-urchins out of
thin air! He said I keep him short of all materials. Me! That have
always stood for-- I do not care what they _pay_ scientists, but always
I have stood, against that fool Silva and all of them, all my enemies--
“You do not know how many enemies I have, Martin! They do not dare show
their faces. They smile to me, but they whisper-- I will show
Holabird--always he plot against me and try to win over Pearl Robbins,
but she is a good girl, she knows what I am doing, but--”
He looked perplexed; he peered at Martin as though he did not quite
recognize him, and begged:
“Martin, I grow old--not in years--it is a lie I am over seventy--but I
have my worries. Do you mind if I give you advice as I have done so
often, so many years? Though you are not a schoolboy now in Queen
City--no, at Winnemac it was. You are a man and you are a genuine
worker. But--
“Be sure you do not let anything, not even your own good kind heart,
spoil your experiment at St. Hubert. I do not make funniness about
humanitarianism as I used to; sometimes now I t’ink the vulgar and
contentious human race may yet have as much grace and good taste as the
cats. But if this is to be, there must be knowledge. So many men,
Martin, are kind and neighborly; so few have added to knowledge. You
have the chance! You may be the man who ends all plague, and maybe old
Max Gottlieb will have helped, too, _hein_, maybe?
“You must not be just a good doctor at St. Hubert. You must pity, oh, so
much the generation after generation yet to come that you can refuse to
let yourself indulge in pity for the men you will see dying.
“Dying.... It will be peace.
“Let nothing, neither beautiful pity nor fear of your own death, keep
you from making this plague experiment complete. And as my friend-- If
you do this, something will yet have come out of my Directorship. If but
one fine thing could come, to justify me--”
When Martin came sorrowing into his laboratory he found Terry Wickett
waiting.
“Say, Slim,” Terry blurted, “just wanted to butt in and suggest, now for
St. Gottlieb’s sake keep your phage notes complete and up-to-date, and
keep ’em in ink!”
“Terry, it looks to me as if you thought I had a fine chance of not
coming back with the notes myself.”
“Aw, what’s biting you!” said Terry feebly.
IV
The epidemic in St. Hubert must have increased, for on the day before
the McGurk Commission sailed, Dr. Inchcape Jones declared that the
island was quarantined. People might come in, but no one could leave. He
did this despite the fretting of the Governor, Sir Robert Fairlamb, and
the protests of the hotel-keepers who fed on tourists, the
ex-rat-catchers who drove the same, Kellett the Red Leg who sold them
tickets, and all the other representatives of sound business in St.
Hubert.
V
Besides his ampules of phage and his Luer syringes for injection, Martin
made personal preparations for the tropics. He bought, in seventeen
minutes, a Palm Beach suit, two new shirts, and, as St. Hubert was a
British possession and as he had heard that all Britishers carry canes,
a stick which the shop-keeper guaranteed to be as good as genuine
malacca.
VI
They started, Martin and Leora and Gustaf Sondelius, on a winter
morning, on the six-thousand-ton steamer _St. Buryan_ of the McGurk
Line, which carried machinery and flour and codfish and motors to the
Lesser Antilles and brought back molasses, cocoa, avocados, Trinidad
asphalt. A score of winter tourists made the round trip, but only a
score, and there was little handkerchief-waving.
The McGurk Line pier was in South Brooklyn, in a district of brown
anonymous houses. The sky was colorless above dirty snow. Sondelius
seemed well content. As they drove upon a wharf littered with hides and
boxes and disconsolate steerage passengers, he peered out of their
crammed taxicab and announced that the bow of the _St. Buryan_--all they
could see of it--reminded him of the Spanish steamer he had taken to the
Cape Verde Isles. But to Martin and Leora, who had read of the drama of
departure, of stewards darting with masses of flowers, dukes and
divorcees being interviewed, and bands playing “The Star Spangled
Banner,” the _St. Buryan_ was unromantic and its ferry-like casualness
was discouraging.
Only Terry came to see them off, bringing a box of candy for Leora.
Martin had never ridden a craft larger than a motor launch. He stared up
at the black wall of the steamer’s side. As they mounted the gang-plank
he was conscious that he was cutting himself off from the safe, familiar
land, and he was embarrassed by the indifference of more
experienced-looking passengers, staring down from the rail. Aboard, it
seemed to him that the forward deck looked like the backyard of an
old-iron dealer, that the _St. Buryan_ leaned too much to one side, and
that even in the dock she swayed undesirably.
The whistle snorted contemptuously; the hawsers were cast off. Terry
stood on the pier till the steamer, with Martin and Leora and Sondelius
above him, their stomachs pressed against the rail, had slid past him,
then he abruptly clumped away.
Martin realized that he was off for the perilous sea and the perilous
plague; that there was no possibility of leaving the ship till they
should reach some distant island. This narrow deck, with its tarry lines
between planks, was his only home. Also, in the breeze across the wide
harbor he was beastly cold, and in general God help him!
As the _St. Buryan_ was warped out into the river, as Martin was
suggesting to his Commission, “How about going downstairs and seeing if
we can raise a drink?” there was the sound of a panicky taxicab on the
pier, the sight of a lean, tall figure running--but so feebly, so
shakily--and they realized that it was Max Gottlieb, peering for them,
tentatively raising his thin arm in greeting, not finding them in the
line at the rail, and turning sadly away.
VII
As representatives of Ross McGurk and his various works, evil and
benevolent, they had the two suites de luxe on the boat deck.
Martin was cold off snow-blown Sandy Hook, sick off Cape Hatteras, and
tired and relaxed between; with him Leora was cold, and in a ladylike
manner she was sick, but she was not at all tired. She insisted on
conveying information to him, from the West Indian guide-book which she
had earnestly bought.
Sondelius was conspicuously all over the ship. He had tea with the
Captain, scouse with the fo’c’sle, and intellectual conferences with the
negro missionary in the steerage. He was to be heard--always he was to
be heard: singing on the promenade deck, defending Bolshevism against
the boatswain, arguing oil-burning with the First Officer, and
explaining to the bar steward how to make a gin sling. He held a party
for the children in the steerage, and he borrowed from the First Officer
a volume of navigation to study between parties.
He gave flavor to the ordinary cautious voyage of the _St. Buryan_, but
he made a mistake. He was courteous to Miss Gwilliam; he tried to cheer
her on a seemingly lonely adventure.
Miss Gwilliam came from one of the best families in her section of New
Jersey; her father was a lawyer and a church-warden, her grandfather had
been a solid farmer. That she had not married, at thirty-three, was due
entirely to the preference of modern young men for jazz-dancing hussies;
and she was not only a young lady of delicate reservations but also a
singer; in fact, she was going to the West Indies to preserve the
wonders of primitive art for reverent posterity in the native ballads
she would collect and sing to a delighted public--if only she learned
how to sing.
She studied Gustaf Sondelius. He was a silly person, not in the least
like the gentlemanly insurance-agents and office-managers she was
accustomed to meet at the country club, and what was worse, he did not
ask her opinions on art and good form. His stories about generals and
that sort of people could be discounted as lies, for did he not
associate with grimy engineers? He needed some of her gentle but merry
chiding.
When they stood together at the rail and he chanted in his ludicrous
up-and-down Swedish sing-song that it was a fine evening, she remarked,
“Well, Mr. Roughneck, have you been up to something smart again to-day?
Or have you been giving somebody else a chance to talk, for once?”
She was placidly astonished when he clumped away with none of the
obedient reverence which any example of cultured American womanhood has
a right to expect from all males, even foreigners.
Sondelius came to Martin lamenting, “Slim--if I may call you so, like
Terry-- I think you and your Gottlieb are right. There is no use saving
fools. It’s a great mistake to be natural. One should always be a
stuffed shirt, like old Tubbs. Then one would have respect even from
artistic New Jersey spinsters.... How strange is conceit! That I who
have been cursed and beaten by so many Great Ones, who was once led out
to be shot in a Turkish prison, should never have been annoyed by them
as by this smug wench. Ah, smugness! That is the enemy!”
Apparently he recovered from Miss Gwilliam. He was seen arguing with the
ship’s doctor about sutures in negro skulls, and he invented a game of
deck cricket. But one evening when he sat reading in the “social hall,”
stooped over, wearing betraying spectacles and his mouth puckered,
Martin walked past the window and incredulously saw that Sondelius was
growing old.
VIII
As he sat by Leora in a deck-chair, Martin studied her, really looked at
her pale profile, after years when she had been a matter of course. He
pondered on her as he pondered on phage; he weightily decided that he
had neglected her, and weightily he started right in to be a good
husband.
“Now I have a chance to be human, Lee, I realize how lonely you must
have been in New York.”
“But I haven’t.”
“Don’t be foolish! Of course you’ve been lonely! Well, when we get back,
I’ll take a little time off every day and we’ll--we’ll have walks and go
to the movies and everything. And I’ll send you flowers, every morning.
Isn’t it a relief to just sit here! But I do begin to think and realize
how I’ve prob’ly neglected-- Tell me, honey, has it been too terribly
dull?”
“Hunka. Really.”
“No, but _tell_ me.”
“There’s nothing to tell.”
“Now hang it, Leora, here when I _do_ have the first chance in eleven
thousand years to think about you, and I come right out frankly and
admit how slack I’ve been-- And planning to send you flowers--”
“You look here, Sandy Arrowsmith! Quit bullying me! You want the luxury
of harrowing yourself by thinking what a poor, bawling, wretched,
story-book wife I am. You’re working up to become perfectly miserable if
you can’t enjoy being miserable.... It would be terrible, when we got
back to New York, if you did get on the job and devoted yourself to
showing me a good time. You’d go at it like a bull. I’d have to be so
dratted grateful for the flowers every day--the days you didn’t
forget!--and the way you’d sling me off to the movies when I wanted to
stay home and snooze--”
“Well, by thunder, of all the--”
“No, please! You’re dear and good, but you’re so bossy that I’ve always
got to be whatever _you_ want, even if it’s lonely. But-- Maybe I’m
lazy. I’d rather just snoop around than have to work at being
well-dressed and popular and all those jobs. I fuss over the flat--hang
it, wish I’d had the kitchen repainted while we’re away, it’s a _nice_
little kitchen--and I make believe read my French books, and go out for
a walk, and look in the windows, and eat an ice cream soda, and the day
slides by. Sandy, I do love you awful’ much; if I could, I’d be as
ill-treated as the dickens, so you could enjoy it, but I’m no good at
educated lies, only at easy little ones like the one I told you last
week-- I said I hadn’t eaten any candy and didn’t have a stomach-ache,
and I’d eaten half a pound and I was sick as a pup.... Gosh, I’m a good
wife I am!”
They rolled from gray seas to purple and silver. By dusk they stood at
the rail, and he felt the spaciousness of the sea, of life. Always he
had lived in his imagination. As he had blundered through crowds, an
inconspicuous young husband trotting out to buy cold roast beef for
dinner, his brain-pan had been wide as the domed sky. He had seen not
the streets, but microörganisms large as jungle monsters, miles of
flasks cloudy with bacteria, himself giving orders to his garçon, Max
Gottlieb awesomely congratulating him. Always his dreams had clung about
his work. Now, no less passionately, he awoke to the ship, the
mysterious sea, the presence of Leora, and he cried to her, in the warm
tropic winter dusk:
“Sweet, this is only the first of our big hikes! Pretty soon, if I’m
successful in St. Hubert, I’ll begin to count in science, and we’ll go
abroad, to your France and England and Italy and everywhere!”
“Can we, do you think? Oh, Sandy! Going _places_!”
IX
He never knew it but for an hour, in their cabin half-lighted from the
lamps in their sitting-room beyond, she watched him sleeping.
He was not handsome; he was grotesque as a puppy napping on a hot
afternoon. His hair was ruffled, his face was deep in the crumpled
pillow he had encircled with both his arms. She looked at him, smiling,
with the stretched corners of her lips like tiny flung arrows.
“I do love him so when he’s frowsy! Don’t you see, Sandy, I was wise to
come! You’re so worn out. _It_ might get you, and nobody but me could
nurse you. Nobody knows all your cranky ways--about how you hate prunes
and everything. Night and day I’ll nurse you--the least whisper and I’ll
be awake. And if you need ice bags and stuff-- And I’ll _have_ ice, too,
if I have to sneak into some millionaire’s house and steal it out of his
highballs! My dear!”
She shifted the electric fan so that it played more upon him, and on
soft toes she crept into their stiff sitting-room. It did not contain
much save a round table, a few chairs, and a Sybaritic glass and
mahogany wall-cabinet whose purpose was never discovered.
“It’s so sort of-- Aah! Pinched. I guess maybe I ought to fix it up
somehow.”
But she had no talent for the composing of chairs and pictures which
brings humanness into a dead room. Never in her life had she spent three
minutes in arranging flowers. She looked doubtful, she smiled and turned
out the light, and slipped in to him.
She lay on the coverlet of her berth, in the tropic languidness, a
slight figure in a frivolous nightgown. She thought, “I like a small
bedroom, because Sandy is nearer and I don’t get so scared by things.
What a dratted bully the man is! Some day I’m going to up and say to
him: ‘You go to the devil!’ I will so! Darling, we will hike off to
France together, just you and I, won’t we!”
She was asleep, smiling, so thin a little figure--
CHAPTER XXXIII
I
Misty mountains they saw, and on their flanks the palm-crowned
fortifications built of old time against the pirates. In Martinique were
white-faced houses like provincial France, and a boiling market full of
colored women with kerchiefs ultramarine and scarlet. They passed hot
St. Lucia, and Saba that is all one lone volcano. They devoured paw-paws
and breadfruit and avocados, bought from coffee-colored natives who came
alongside in nervous small boats; they felt the languor of the isles,
and panted before they approached Barbados.
Just beyond was St. Hubert.
None of the tourists had known of the quarantine. They were raging that
the company should have taken them into danger. In the tepid wind they
felt the plague.
The skipper reassured them, in a formal address. Yes, they would stop at
Blackwater, the port of St. Hubert, but they would anchor far out in the
harbor; and while the passengers bound for St. Hubert would be permitted
to go ashore, in the port-doctor’s launch, no one in St. Hubert would be
allowed to leave--nothing from that pest-hole would touch the steamer
except the official mail, which the ship’s surgeon would disinfect.
(The ship’s surgeon was wondering, the while, how you disinfected
mail--let’s see--sulfur burning in the presence of moisture, wasn’t it?)
The skipper had been trained in oratory by arguments with wharf-masters,
and the tourists were reassured. But Martin murmured to his Commission,
“I hadn’t thought of that. Once we go ashore, we’ll be practically
prisoners till the epidemic’s over--if it ever does get over--prisoners
with the plague around us.”
“Why, of course!” said Sondelius.
II
They left Bridgetown, the pleasant port of Barbados, by afternoon. It
was late night, with most of the passengers asleep, when they arrived at
Blackwater. As Martin came out on the damp and vacant deck, it seemed
unreal, harshly unfriendly, and of the coming battleground he saw
nothing but a few shore lights beyond uneasy water.
About their arrival there was something timorous and illicit. The ship’s
surgeon ran up and down, looking disturbed; the captain could be heard
growling on the bridge; the first officer hastened up to confer with him
and disappeared below again; and there was no one to meet them. The
steamer waited, rolling in a swell, while from the shore seemed to belch
a hot miasma.
“And here’s where we’re going to land and _stay_!” Martin grunted to
Leora, as they stood by their bags, their cases of phage, on the
heaving, black-shining deck near the top of the accommodation-ladder.
Passengers came out in dressing-gowns, chattering, “Yes, this must be
the place, those lights there. Must be fierce. _What?_ Somebody going
ashore? Oh, sure, those two doctors. Well, they got nerve. I certainly
don’t envy them!”
Martin heard.
From shore a pitching light made toward the ship, slid round the bow,
and sidled to the bottom of the accommodation-ladder. In the haze of a
lantern held by a steward at the foot of the steps, Martin could see a
smart covered launch, manned by darky sailors in naval uniform and
glazed black straw hats with ribbons, and commanded by a Scotch-looking
man with some sort of a peaked uniform cap over a civilian jacket.
The captain clumped down the swinging steps beside the ship. While the
launch bobbed, its wet canvas top glistening, he had a long and
complaining conference with the commander of the launch, and received a
pouch of mail, the only thing to come aboard.
The ship’s surgeon took it from the captain with aversion, grumbling,
“Now where can I get a barrel to disinfect these darn’ letters in?”
Martin and Leora and Sondelius waited, without option.
They had been joined by a thin woman in black whom they had not seen all
the trip--one of the mysterious passengers who are never noticed till
they come on deck at landing. Apparently she was going ashore. She was
pale, her hands twitching.
The captain shouted at them, “All right--all right--all right! You can
go now. Hustle, please. I’ve got to get on.... Damn’ nuisance.”
The _St. Buryan_ had not seemed large or luxurious, but it was a castle,
steadfast among storms, its side a massy wall, as Martin crept down the
swaying stairs, thinking all at once, “We’re in for it; like going to
the scaffold--they lead you along--no chance to resist,” and, “You’re
letting your imagination run away with you; quit it now!” and, “Is it
too late to make Lee stay behind, on the steamer?” and an agonized, “Oh,
Lord, are the stewards handling that phage carefully?” Then he was on
the tiny square platform at the bottom of the accommodation-ladder, the
ship’s side was high above him, lit by the round ports of cabins, and
some one was helping him into the launch.
As the unknown woman in black came aboard, Martin saw in lantern light
how her lips tightened once, then her whole face went blank, like one
who waited hopelessly.
Leora squeezed his hand, hard, as he helped her in.
He muttered, while the steamer whistled, “Quick! You can still go back!
You must!”
“And leave the pretty launch? Why, Sandy! Just look at the elegant
engine it’s got!... Gosh, I’m scared blue!”
As the launch sputtered, swung round, and headed for the filtering of
lights ashore, as it bowed its head and danced to the swell, the
sandy-headed official demanded of Martin:
“You’re the McGurk Commission?”
“Yes.”
“Good.” He sounded pleased yet cold, a busy voice and humorless.
“Are you the port-doctor?” asked Sondelius.
“No, not exactly. I’m Dr. Stokes, of St. Swithin’s Parish. We’re all of
us almost everything, nowadays. The port-doctor-- In fact he died couple
of days ago.”
Martin grunted. But his imagination had ceased to agitate him.
“You’re Dr. Sondelius, I imagine. I know your work in Africa, in German
East--was out there myself. And you’re Dr. Arrowsmith? I read your
plague phage paper. Much impressed. Now I have just the chance to say
before we go ashore-- You’ll both be opposed. Inchcape Jones, the S.G.,
has lost his head. Running in circles, lancing buboes--afraid to burn
Carib, where most of the infection is. Arrowsmith, I have a notion of
what you may want to do experimentally. If Inchcape balks, you come to
me in my parish--if I’m still alive. Stokes, my name is.... Damn it,
boy, what _are_ you doing? Trying to drift clear down to Venezuela?...
Inchcape and H.E. are so afraid that they won’t even cremate the
bodies--some religious prejudice among the blacks--obee or something.”
“I see,” said Martin.
“How many cases plague you got now?” said Sondelius.
“Lord knows. Maybe a thousand. And ten million rats.... I’m so
sleepy!... Well, welcome, gentlemen--” He flung out his arms in a dry
hysteria. “Welcome to the Island of Hesperides!”
Out of darkness Blackwater swung toward them, low flimsy barracks
on a low swampy plain stinking of slimy mud. Most of the town was
dark, dark and wickedly still. There was no face along the dim
waterfront--warehouses, tram station, mean hotels--and they ground
against a pier, they went ashore, without attention from customs
officials. There were no carriages, and the hotel-runners who once had
pestered tourists landing from the _St. Buryan_, whatever the hour,
were dead now or hidden.
The thin mysterious woman passenger vanished, staggering with her
suit-case--she had said no word, and they never saw her again. The
Commission, with Stokes and the harbor-police who had manned the launch,
carried the baggage (Martin weaving with a case of the phage) through
the rutty balconied streets to the San Marino Hotel.
Once or twice faces, disembodied things with frightened lips, stared at
them from alley-mouths; and when they came to the hotel, when they stood
before it, a weary caravan laden with bags and boxes, the bulging-eyed
manageress peered from a window before she would admit them.
As they entered, Martin saw under a street light the first stirring of
life: a crying woman and a bewildered child following an open wagon in
which were heaped a dozen stiff bodies.
“And I might have saved all of them, with phage,” he whispered to
himself.
His forehead was cold, yet it was greasy with sweat as he babbled to the
manageress of rooms and meals, as he prayed that Leora might not have
seen the Things in that slow creaking wagon.
“I’d have choked her before I let her come, if I’d known,” he was
shuddering.
The woman apologized, “I must ask you gentlemen to carry your things up
to your rooms. Our boys-- They aren’t here any more.”
What became of the walking stick which, in such pleased vanity, Martin
had bought in New York, he never knew. He was too busy guarding the
cases of phage, and worrying, “Maybe this stuff would save everybody.”
Now Stokes of St. Swithin’s was a reticent man and hard, but when they
had the last bag up-stairs, he leaned his head against a door, cried,
“My God, Arrowsmith, I’m so glad you’ve got here,” and broke from them,
running.... One of the negro harbor-police, expressionless, speaking the
English of the Antilles with something of the accent of Piccadilly,
said, “Sar, have you any other command for I? If you permit, we boys
will now go home. Sar, on the table is the whisky Dr. Stokes have told I
to bring.”
Martin stared. It was Sondelius who said, “Thank you very much, boys.
Here’s a quid between you. Now get some sleep.”
They saluted and were not.
Sondelius made the novices as merry as he could for half an hour.
Martin and Leora woke to a broiling, flaring, green and crimson morning,
yet ghastly still; awoke and realized that about them was a strange
land, as yet unseen, and before them the work that in distant New York
had seemed dramatic and joyful and that stank now of the charnel house.
III
A sort of breakfast was brought to them by a negress who, before she
would enter, peeped fearfully at them from the door.
Sondelius rumbled in from his room, in an impassioned silk
dressing-gown. If ever, spectacled and stooped, he had looked old, now
he was young and boisterous.
“Hey, ya, Slim, I think we get some work here! Let me at those rats!
This Inchcape--to try to master them with strychnin! A noble melon!
Leora, when you divorce Martin, you marry me, heh? Give me the salt.
Yey, I sleep fine!”
The night before, Martin had scarce looked at their room. Now he was
diverted by what he considered its foreignness: the lofty walls of wood
painted a watery blue, the wide furnitureless spaces, the bougainvillæa
at the window, and in the courtyard the merciless heat and rattling
metallic leaves of palmettoes.
Beyond the courtyard walls were the upper stories of a balconied Chinese
shop, and the violent-colored skylight of the Blue Bazaar.
He felt that there should be a clamor from this exotic world, but there
was only a rebuking stillness, and even Sondelius became dumb, though he
had his moment. He waddled back to his room, dressed himself in surah
silk last worn on the East Coast of Africa, and returned bringing a
sun-helmet which secretly he had bought for Martin.
In linen jacket and mushroom helmet, Martin belonged more to the tropics
than to his own harsh Northern meadows. But his pleasure in looking
foreign was interrupted by the entrance of the Surgeon General, Dr. R.
E. Inchcape Jones, lean but apple-cheeked, worried and hasty.
“Of course you chaps are welcome, but really, with all we have to do I’m
afraid we can’t give you the attention you doubtless expect,” he said
indignantly.
Martin sought for adequate answer. It was Sondelius who spoke of a
non-existent cousin who was a Harley Street specialist, and who
explained that all they wanted was a laboratory for Martin and, for
himself, a chance to slaughter rats. How many times, in how many lands,
had Gustaf Sondelius flattered pro-consuls, and persuaded the heathen to
let themselves be saved!
Under his hands the Surgeon General became practically human; he looked
as though he really thought Leora was pretty; he promised that he might
perhaps let Sondelius tamper with his rats. He would return that
afternoon and conduct them to the house prepared for them, Penrith
Lodge, on the safe secluded hills behind Blackwater. And (he bowed
gallantly) he thought that Mrs. Arrowsmith would find the Lodge a
topping bungalow, with three rather decent servants. The butler, though
a colored chap, was an old mess-sergeant.
Inchcape Jones had scarce gone when at the door there was a pounding and
it opened on Martin’s classmate at Winnemac, Dr. the Rev. Ira Hinkley.
Martin had forgotten Ira, that bulky Christian who had tried to save him
during otherwise dulcet hours of dissection. He recalled him confusedly.
The man came in, vast and lumbering. His eyes were staring and
altogether mad, and his voice was parched:
“Hello, Mart. Yump, it’s old Ira. I’m in charge of all the chapels of
the Sanctification Brotherhood here. Oh, Mart, if you only knew the
wickedness of the natives, and the way they lie and sing indecent songs
and commit all manner of vileness! And the Church of England lets them
wallow in their sins! Only us to save them. I heard you were coming. I
have been laboring, Mart. I’ve nursed the poor plague-stricken devils,
and I’ve told them how hellfire is roaring about them. Oh, Mart, if you
knew how my heart bleeds to see these ignorant fellows going unrepentant
to eternal torture! After all these years I know you can’t still be a
scoffer. I come to you with open hands, begging you not merely to
comfort the sufferers but to snatch their souls from the burning lakes
of sulfur to which, in His everlasting mercy, the Lord of Hosts hath
condemned those that blaspheme against His gospel, freely given--”
Again it was Sondelius who got Ira Hinkley out, not too discontented,
while Martin could only splutter, “Now how do you suppose that maniac
ever got here? This is going to be awful!”
Before Inchcape Jones returned, the Commission ventured out for their
first sight of the town.... A Scientific Commission, yet all the while
they were only boisterous Gustaf and doubtful Martin and casual Leora.
The citizens had been told that in bubonic plague, unlike pneumonic,
there is no danger from direct contact with people developing the
disease, so long as vermin were kept away, but they did not believe it.
They were afraid of one another, and the more afraid of strangers. The
Commission found a street dying with fear. House-shutters were closed,
hot slatted patches in the sun; and the only traffic was an empty
trolley-car with a frightened motorman who peered down at them and sped
up lest they come aboard. Grocery shops and drug-stores were open, but
from their shady depths the shopkeepers looked out timidly, and when
the Commission neared a fish-stall, the one customer fled, edging past
them.
Once a woman, never explained, a woman with wild ungathered hair, ran by
them shrieking, “My little boy--”
They came to the market, a hundred stalls under a long corrugated-iron
roof, with stone pillars bearing the fatuous names of the commissioners
who had built it--by voting bonds for the building. It should have been
buzzing with jovial buyers and sellers, but in all the gaudy booths
there were only one negress with a row of twig besoms, one Hindu in gray
rags squatting before his wealth of a dozen vegetables. The rest was
emptiness, and a litter of rotted potatoes and scudding papers.
Down a grim street of coal yards, they found a public square, and here
was the stillness not of sleep but of ancient death.
The square was rimmed with the gloom of mango trees, which shut out the
faint-hearted breeze and cooped in the heat--stale lifeless heat, in
whose misery the leering silence was the more dismaying. Through a break
in the evil mangoes they beheld a plaster house hung with black crape.
“It’s too hot to walk. Perhaps we’d better go back to the hotel,” said
Leora.
IV
In the afternoon Inchcape Jones appeared with a Ford, whose familiarity
made it the more grotesque in this creepy world, and took them to
Penrith Lodge, on the cool hills behind Blackwater.
They traversed a packed native section of bamboo hovels, and shops that
were but unpainted, black-weathered huts, without doors, without
windows, from whose recesses dark faces looked at them resentfully. They
passed, at their colored driver’s most jerky speed, a new brick
structure in front of which stately negro policemen with white gloves,
white sun-helmets, and scarlet coats cut by white belts, marched with
rifles at the carry.
Inchcape Jones sighed, “Schoolhouse. Turned it into pest-house. Hundred
cases in there. Die every hour. Have to guard it--patients get delirious
and try to escape.”
After them trailed an odor of rotting.
Martin did not feel superior to humanity.
V
With broad porches and low roof, among bright flamboyants and the
cheerful sago palms, the bungalow of Penrith Lodge lay high on a crest,
looking across the ugly flat of the town to the wash of sea. At its
windows the reed jalousies whispered and clattered, and the high bare
rooms were enlivened by figured Carib scarfs.... It had belonged to the
port-doctor, dead these three days.
Inchcape Jones assured the doubtful Leora that she would nowhere else be
so safe; the house was rat-proofed, and the doctor had caught the plague
at the pier, had died without ever coming back to this well-beloved
bungalow in which he, the professional bachelor, had given the most
clamorous parties in St. Hubert.
Martin had with him sufficient equipment for a small laboratory, and he
established it in a bedroom with gas and running water. Next to it was
his and Leora’s bedroom, then an apartment which Sondelius immediately
made homelike by dropping his clothes and his pipe ashes all over it.
There were two colored maids and an ex-soldier butler, who received them
and unpacked their bags as though the plague did not exist.
Martin was perplexed by their first caller. He was a singularly handsome
young negro, quick-moving, intelligent of eye. Like most white
Americans, Martin had talked a great deal about the inferiority of
negroes and had learned nothing whatever about them. He looked
questioning as the young man observed:
“My name is Oliver Marchand.”
“Yes?”
“Dr. Marchand-- I have my M.D. from Howard.”
“Oh.”
“May I venture to welcome you, Doctor? And may I ask before I hurry
off-- I have three cases from official families isolated at the bottom
of the hill--oh, yes, in this crisis they permit a negro doctor to
practise even among the whites! But-- Dr. Stokes insists that D’Hérelle
and you are right in calling bacteriophage an organism. But what about
Bordet’s contention that it’s an enzyme?”
Then for half an hour did Dr. Arrowsmith and Dr. Marchand, forgetting
the plague, forgetting the more cruel plague of race-fear, draw
diagrams.
Marchand sighed, “I must go, Doctor. May I help you in any way I can? It
is a great privilege to know you.”
He saluted quietly and was gone, a beautiful young animal.
“I never thought a negro doctor-- I wish people wouldn’t keep showing me
how much I don’t know!” said Martin.
VI
While Martin prepared his laboratory, Sondelius was joyfully at work,
finding out what was wrong with Inchcape Jones’s administration, which
proved to be almost anything that could be wrong.
A plague epidemic to-day, in a civilized land, is no longer an affair of
people dying in the streets and of drivers shouting “Bring out your
dead.” The fight against it is conducted like modern warfare, with
telephones instead of foaming chargers. The ancient horror bears a face
of efficiency. There are offices, card indices, bacteriological
examinations of patients and of rats. There is, or should be, a lone
director with superlegal powers. There are large funds, education of the
public by placard and newspaper, brigades of rat-killers, a corps of
disinfectors, isolation of patients lest vermin carry the germs from
them to others.
In most of these particulars Inchcape Jones had failed. To have the
existence of the plague admitted in the first place, he had had to fight
the merchants controlling the House of Assembly, who had howled that a
quarantine would ruin them, and who now refused to give him complete
power and tried to manage the epidemic with a Board of Health, which was
somewhat worse than navigating a ship during a typhoon by means of a
committee.
Inchcape Jones was courageous enough, but he could not cajole people.
The newspapers called him a tyrant, would not help win over the public
to take precautions against rats and ground squirrels. He had tried to
fumigate a few warehouses with sulfur dioxid, but the owners complained
that the fumes stained fabrics and paint; and the Board of Health bade
him wait--wait a little while--wait and see. He had tried to have the
rats examined, to discover what were the centers of infection, but his
only bacteriologists were the overworked Stokes and Oliver Marchand; and
Inchcape Jones had often explained, at nice dinner-parties, that he did
not trust the intelligence of negroes.
He was nearly insane; he worked twenty hours a day; he assured himself
that he was not afraid; he reminded himself that he had an honestly won
D.S.O.; he longed to have some one besides a board of Red Leg merchants
give him orders; and always in the blur of his sleepless brain he saw
the hills of Surrey, his sisters in the rose-walk, and the basket-chairs
and tea-table beside his father’s tennis-lawn.
Then Sondelius, that crafty and often lying lobbyist, that unmoral
soldier of the Lord, burst in and became dictator.
He terrified the Board of Health. He quoted his own experiences in
Mongolia and India. He assured them that if they did not cease being
politicians, the plague might cling in St. Hubert forever, so that they
would no more have the amiable dollars of the tourists and the pleasures
of smuggling.
He threatened and flattered, and told a story which they had never
heard, even at the Ice House; and he had Inchcape Jones appointed
dictator of St. Hubert.
Gustaf Sondelius stood extremely close behind the dictator.
He immediately started rat-killing. On a warrant signed by Inchcape
Jones, he arrested the owner of a warehouse who had declared that he was
not going to have _his_ piles of cocoa ruined. He marched his policemen,
stout black fellows trained in the Great War, to the warehouse, set them
on guard, and pumped in hydrocyanic acid gas.
The crowd gathered beyond the police line, wondering, doubting. They
could not believe that anything was happening, for the cracks in the
warehouse walls had been adequately stuffed and there was no scent of
gas. But the roof was leaky. The gas crept up through it, colorless,
diabolic, and suddenly a buzzard circling above the roof tilted forward,
fell slantwise, and lay dead among the watchers.
A man picked it up, goggling.
“Dead, right enough,” everybody muttered. They looked at Sondelius,
parading among his soldiers, with reverence.
His rat-crew searched each warehouse before pumping in the gas, lest
some one be left in the place, but in the third one a tramp had been
asleep, and when the doors were anxiously opened after the fumigation,
there were not only thousands of dead rats but also a dead and very
stiff tramp.
“Poor fella--bury him,” said Sondelius.
There was no inquest.
Over a rum swizzle at the Ice House, Sondelius reflected, “I wonder how
many men I murder, Martin? When I was disinfecting ships at Antofagasta,
always afterward we find two or three stowaways. They hide too good.
Poor fellas.”
Sondelius arbitrarily dragged bookkeepers and porters from their work,
to pursue the rats with poison, traps, and gas, or to starve them by
concreting and screening stables and warehouses. He made a violent red
and green rat map of the town. He broke every law of property by raiding
shops for supplies. He alternately bullied and caressed the leaders of
the House of Assembly. He called on Kellett, told stories to his
children, and almost wept as he explained what a good Lutheran he
was--and consistently (but not at Kellett’s) he drank too much.
The Ice House, that dimmest and most peaceful among saloons, with its
cool marble tables, its gilt-touched white walls, had not been closed,
though only the oldest topers and the youngest bravos, fresh out from
Home and agonizingly lonely for Peckham or Walthamstow, for Peel Park or
the Cirencester High Street, were desperate enough to go there, and of
the attendants there remained only one big Jamaica barman. By chance he
was among them all the most divine mixer of the planter’s punch, the New
Orleans fizz, and the rum swizzle. His masterpieces Sondelius acclaimed,
he alone placid among the scary patrons who came in now not to dream but
to gulp and flee. After a day of slaughtering rats and disinfecting
houses he sat with Martin, with Martin and Leora, or with whomever he
could persuade to linger.
To Gustaf Sondelius, dukes and cobblers were alike remarkable, and
Martin was sometimes jealous when he saw Sondelius turning to a
cocoa-broker’s clerk with the same smile he gave to Martin. For hours
Sondelius talked, of Shanghai and epistemology and the painting of
Nevinson; for hours he sang scurrilous lyrics of the Quarter, and
boomed, “Yey, how I kill the rats at Kellett’s wharf to-day! I don’t
t’ink one little swizzle would break down too many glomeruli in an
honest man’s kidneys.”
He was cheerful, but never with the reproving and infuriating
cheerfulness of an Ira Hinkley. He mocked himself, Martin, Leora, and
their work. At home dinner he never cared what he ate (though he did
care what he drank), which at Penrith Lodge was desirable, in view of
Leora’s efforts to combine the views of Wheatsylvania with the standards
of West Indian servants and the absence of daily deliveries. He shouted
and sang--and took precautions for working among rats and the agile
fleas: the high boots, the strapped wrists, and the rubber neck-band
which he had invented and which is known in every tropical supply shop
to-day as the Sondelius Anti-vermin Neck Protector.
It happened that he was, without Martin or Gottlieb ever understanding
it, the most brilliant as well as the least pompous and therefore least
appreciated warrior against epidemics that the world has known.
Thus with Sondelius, though for Martin there were as yet but
embarrassment and futility and the fear of fear.
CHAPTER XXXIV
I
To persuade the shopkeeping lords of St. Hubert to endure a test in
which half of them might die, so that all plague might--perhaps--be
ended forever, was impossible. Martin argued with Inchcape Jones, with
Sondelius, but he had no favor, and he began to meditate a political
campaign as he would have meditated an experiment.
He had seen the suffering of the plague and he had (though he still
resisted) been tempted to forget experimentation, to give up the
possible saving of millions for the immediate saving of thousands.
Inchcape Jones, a little rested now under Sondelius’s padded bullying
and able to slip into a sane routine, drove Martin to the village of
Carib, which, because of its pest of infected ground squirrels, was
proportionately worse smitten than Blackwater.
They sped out of the capital by white shell roads agonizing to the
sun-poisoned eyes; they left the dusty shanties of suburban Yamtown for
a land cool with bamboo groves and palmettos, thick with sugar-cane.
From a hilltop they swung down a curving road to a beach where the high
surf boomed in limestone caves. It seemed impossible that this joyous
shore could be threatened by plague, the slimy creature of dark alleys.
The motor cut through a singing trade wind which told of clean sails and
disdainful men. They darted on where the foam feathers below Point Carib
and where, round that lone royal palm on the headland, the bright wind
hums. They slipped into a hot valley, and came to the village of Carib
and to creeping horror.
The plague had been dismaying in Blackwater; in Carib it was the end of
all things. The rat-fleas had found fat homes in the ground squirrels
which burrowed in every garden about the village. In Blackwater there
had from the first been isolation of the sick, but in Carib death was in
every house, and the village was surrounded by soldier police, with
bayonets, who let no one come or go save the doctors.
Martin was guided down the stinking street of cottages palm-thatched and
walled with cow-dung plaster on bamboo laths, cottages shared by the
roosters and the goats. He heard men shrieking in delirium; a dozen
times he saw that face of terror--sunken bloody eyes, drawn face, open
mouth--which marks the Black Death; and once he beheld an exquisite girl
child in coma on the edge of death, her tongue black and round her the
scent of the tomb.
They fled away, to Point Carib and the trade wind, and when Inchcape
Jones demanded, “After that sort of thing, can you really talk of
experimenting?” then Martin shook his head, while he tried to recall the
vision of Gottlieb and all their little plans: “half to get the phage,
half to be sternly deprived.”
It came to him that Gottlieb, in his secluded innocence, had not
realized what it meant to gain leave to experiment amid the hysteria of
an epidemic.
He went to the Ice House; he had a drink with a frightened clerk from
Derbyshire; he regained the picture of Gottlieb’s sunken, demanding
eyes; and he swore that he would not yield to a compassion which in the
end would make all compassion futile.
Since Inchcape Jones could not understand the need of experimentation,
he would call on the Governor, Colonel Sir Robert Fairlamb.
II
Though Government House was officially the chief residence of St.
Hubert, it was but a thatched bungalow a little larger than Martin’s own
Penrith Lodge. When he saw it, Martin felt more easy, and he ambled up
to the broad steps, at nine of the evening, as though he were dropping
in to call on a neighbor in Wheatsylvania.
He was stopped by a Jamaican man-servant of appalling courtesy.
He snorted that he was Dr. Arrowsmith, head of the McGurk Commission,
and he was sorry but he must see Sir Robert at once.
The servant was suggesting, in his blandest and most annoying manner,
that really Dr. Uh would do better to see the Surgeon General, when a
broad red face and a broad red voice projected themselves over the
veranda railing, with a rumble of, “Send him up, Jackson, and don’t be a
fool!”
Sir Robert and Lady Fairlamb were finishing dinner on the verandah, at a
small round table littered with coffee and liqueurs and starred with
candles. She was a slight, nervous insignificance; he was rather puffy,
very flushed, undoubtedly courageous, and altogether dismayed; and at a
time when no laundress dared go anywhere, his evening shirt was
luminous.
Martin was in his now beloved linen suit, with a crumply soft shirt
which Leora had been meanin’ to wash.
Martin explained what he wanted to do--what he must do, if the world was
ever to get over the absurdity of having plague.
Sir Robert listened so agreeably that Martin thought he understood, but
at the end he bellowed:
“Young man, if I were commanding a division at the front, with a dud
show, an awful show, going on, and a War Office clerk asked me to risk
the whole thing to try out some precious little invention of his own,
can you imagine what I’d answer? There isn’t much I can do now--these
doctor Johnnies have taken everything out of my hands--but as far as
possible I shall certainly prevent you Yankee vivisectionists from
coming in and using us as a lot of sanguinary--sorry, Evelyn--sanguinary
corpses. Good night, sir!”
III
Thanks to Sondelius’s crafty bullying, Martin was able to present his
plan to a Special Board composed of the Governor, the temporarily
suspended Board of Health, Inchcape Jones, several hearty members of the
House of Assembly, and Sondelius himself, attending in the unofficial
capacity which all over the world he had found useful for masking a
cheerful tyranny. Sondelius even brought in the negro doctor, Oliver
Marchand, not on the ground that he was the most intelligent person on
the island (which happened to be Sondelius’s reason) but because he
“represented the plantation hands.”
Sondelius himself was as much opposed to Martin’s unemotional
experiments as was Fairlamb; he believed that all experiments should be,
by devices not entirely clear to him, carried on in the laboratory
without disturbing the conduct of agreeable epidemics, but he could
never resist a drama like the innocent meeting of the Special Board.
The meeting was set for a week ahead ... with scores dying every day.
While he waited for it Martin manufactured more phage and helped
Sondelius murder rats, and Leora listened to the midnight debates of the
two men and tried to make them acknowledge that it had been wise to let
her come. Inchcape Jones offered to Martin the position of Government
bacteriologist, but he refused lest he be sidetracked.
The Special Board met in Parliament House, all of them trying to look
not like their simple and domestic selves but like judges. With them
appeared such doctors of the island as could find the time.
While Leora listened from the back of the room, Martin addressed them,
not unaware of the spectacle of little Mart Arrowsmith of Elk Mills
taken seriously by the rulers of a tropic isle headed by a Sir Somebody.
Beside him stood Max Gottlieb, and in Gottlieb’s power he reverently
sought to explain that mankind has ever given up eventual greatness
because some crisis, some war or election or loyalty to a Messiah which
at the moment seemed weighty, has choked the patient search for truth.
He sought to explain that he could--perhaps--save half of a given
district, but that to test for all time the value of phage, the other
half must be left without it ... though, he craftily told them, in any
case the luckless half would receive as much care as at present.
Most of the Board had heard that he possessed a magic cure for the
plague which, for unknown and probably discreditable reasons, he was
withholding, and they were not going to have it withheld. There was a
great deal of discussion rather unconnected with what he had said, and
out of it came only the fact that everybody except Stokes and Oliver
Marchand was against him; Kellett was angry with this American, Sir
Robert Fairlamb was beefily disapproving, and Sondelius admitted that
though Martin was quite a decent young man, he was a fanatic.
Into their argument plunged a fury in the person of Ira Hinkley,
missionary of the Sanctification Brotherhood.
Martin had not seen him since the first morning in Blackwater. He gaped
as he heard Ira pleading:
“Gentlemen, I know almost the whole bunch of you are Church of England,
but I beg you to listen to me, not as a minister but as a qualified
doctor of medicine. Oh, the wrath of God is upon you-- But I mean: I was
a classmate of Arrowsmith in the States. I’m onto him! He was such a
failure that he was suspended from medical school. A scientist! And his
boss, this fellow Gottlieb, he was fired from the University of Winnemac
for incompetence! I know ’em! Liars and fools! Scorners of
righteousness! Has anybody but Arrowsmith himself told you he’s a
qualified scientist?”
The face of Sondelius changed from curiosity to stolid Scandinavian
wrath. He arose and shouted:
“Sir Robert, this man is crazy! Dr. Gottlieb is one of the seven
distinguished living scientists, and Dr. Arrowsmith is his
representative! I announce my agreement with him, complete. As you must
have seen from my work, I’m perfectly independent of him and entirely at
your service, but I know his standing and I follow him, quite humbly.”
The Special Board coaxed Ira Hinkley out, for the meanest of reasons--in
St. Hubert the whites do not greatly esteem the holy ecstasies of
negroes in the Sanctification Brotherhood chapels--but they voted only
to “give the matter their consideration,” while still men died by the
score each day, and in Manchuria as in St. Hubert they prayed for rest
from the ancient clawing pain.
Outside, as the Special Board trudged away, Sondelius blared at Martin
and the indignant Leora, “Yey, a fine fight!”
Martin answered, “Gustaf, you’ve joined me now. The first darn’ thing
you do, you come have a shot of phage.”
“No. Slim, I said I will not have your phage till you give it to
everybody. I mean it, no matter how much I make fools of your Board.”
As they stood before Parliament House, a small motor possessing
everything but comfort and power staggered up to them, and from it
vaulted a man lean as Gottlieb and English as Inchcape Jones.
“You Dr. Arrowsmith? My name is Twyford, Cecil Twyford of St. Swithin’s
Parish. Tried to get here for the Special Board meeting, but my beastly
foreman had to take the afternoon off and die of plague. Stokes has told
me your plans. Quite right. All nonsense to go on having plague. Board
refused? Sorry. Perhaps we can do something in St. Swithin’s. Goo’
day.”
All evening Martin and Sondelius were full of language. Martin went to
bed longing for the regularity of working all night and foraging for
cigarettes at dawn. He could not sleep, because an imaginary Ira Hinkley
was always bursting in on him.
Four days later he heard that Ira was dead.
Till he had sunk in coma, Ira had nursed and blessed his people, the
humble colored congregation in the hot tin chapel which he had now
turned into a pest-house. He staggered from cot to cot, under the gospel
texts he had lettered on the whitewashed wall, then he cried once,
loudly, and dropped by the pine pulpit where he had joyed to preach.
IV
One chance Martin did have. In Carib, where every third man was down
with plague and one doctor to attend them all, he now gave phage to the
entire village; a long strain of injections, not improved by the
knowledge that one jaunty flea from any patient might bring him the
plague.
The tedium of dread was forgotten when he began to find and make precise
notes of a slackening of the epidemic, which was occurring nowhere
except here at Carib.
He came home raving to Leora, “I’ll show ’em! Now they’ll let me try
test conditions, and then when the epidemic’s over we’ll hustle home.
It’ll be lovely to be cold again! Wonder if Holabird and Sholtheis are
any more friendly now? Be pretty good to see the little ole flat, eh?”
“Yes, won’t it!” said Leora. “I wish I’d thought to have the kitchen
painted while we’re away.... I think I’ll put that blue chair in the
bedroom.”
Though there was a decrease in the plague at Carib, Sondelius was
worried, because it was the worst center for infected ground squirrels
on the island. He made decisions quickly. One evening he explained
certain things to Inchcape Jones and Martin, rode down their doubts, and
snorted:
“Only way to disinfect that place is to burn it--burn th’ whole thing.
Have it done by morning, before anybody can stop us.”
With Martin as his lieutenant he marshaled his troop of
rat-catchers--ruffians all of them, with high boots, tied jacket
sleeves, and ebon visages of piracy. They stole food from shops, tents
and blankets and camp-stoves from the Government military warehouse, and
jammed their booty into motor trucks. The line of trucks roared down to
Carib, the rat-catchers sitting atop, singing pious hymns.
They charged on the village, drove out the healthy, carried the sick on
litters, settled them all in tents in a pasture up the valley, and after
midnight they burned the town.
The troops ran among the huts, setting them alight with fantastic
torches. The palm thatch sent up thick smoke, dead sluggish white with
currents of ghastly black through which broke sudden flames. Against the
glare the palmettos were silhouetted. The solid-seeming huts were
instantly changed into thin bamboo frameworks, thin lines of black
slats, with the thatch falling in sparks. The flame lighted the whole
valley; roused the terrified squawking birds, and turned the surf at
Point Carib to bloody foam.
With such of the natives as had strength enough and sense enough,
Sondelius’s troops made a ring about the burning village, shouting
insanely as they clubbed the fleeing rats and ground squirrels. In the
flare of devastation Sondelius was a fiend, smashing the bewildered rats
with a club, shooting at them as they fled, and singing to himself all
the while the obscene chantey of Bill the Sailor. But at dawn he was
nursing the sick in the bright new canvas village, showing mammies how
to use their camp-stoves, and in a benevolent way discussing methods of
poisoning ground squirrels in their burrows.
Sondelius returned to Blackwater, but Martin remained in the tent
village for two days, giving them the phage, making notes, directing the
amateur nurses. He returned to Blackwater one mid-afternoon and sought
the office of the Surgeon General, or what had been the office of the
Surgeon General till Sondelius had come and taken it away from him.
Sondelius was there, at Inchcape Jones’s desk, but for once he was not
busy. He was sunk in his chair, his eyes bloodshot.
“Yey! We had a fine time with the rats at Carib, eh? How is my new tent
willage?” he chuckled, but his voice was weak, and as he rose he
staggered.
“What is it? What is it?”
“I t’ink-- It’s got me. Some flea got me. Yes,” in a shaky but extremely
interested manner, “I was yoost thinking I will go and quarantine
myself. I have fever all right, and adenitis. My strength-- Huh! I am
almost sixty, but the way I can lift weights that no sailor can
touch-- And I could fight five rounds! Oh, my God, Martin, I am so weak!
Not scared! No!”
But for Martin’s arms he would have collapsed.
He refused to return to Penrith Lodge and Leora’s nursing. “I who have
isolated so many--it is my turn,” he said.
Martin and Inchcape Jones found for Sondelius a meager clean
cottage--the family had died there, all of them, but it had been
fumigated. They procured a nurse and Martin himself attended the sick
man, trying to remember that once he had been a doctor, who understood
ice-bags and consolation. One thing was not to be had--mosquito
netting--and only of this did Sondelius complain.
Martin bent over him, agonized to see how burning was his skin, how
swollen his face and his tongue, how weak his voice as he babbled:
“Gottlieb is right about these jests of God. Yey! His best one is the
tropics. God planned them so beautiful, flowers and sea and mountains.
He made the fruit to grow so well that man need not work--and then He
laughed, and stuck in volcanoes and snakes and damp heat and early
senility and the plague and malaria. But the nastiest trick He ever
played on man was inventing the flea.”
His bloated lips widened, from his hot throat oozed a feeble croaking,
and Martin realized that he was trying to laugh.
He became delirious, but between spasms he muttered, with infinite pain,
tears in his eyes at his own weakness:
“I want you to see how an agnostic can die!
“I am not afraid, but yoost once more I would like to see Stockholm, and
Fifth Avenue on the day the first snow falls, and Holy Week at Sevilla.
And one good last drunk! I am very peaceful, Slim. It hurts some, but
life was a good game. And-- I am a pious agnostic. Oh, Martin, give my
people the phage! Save all of them-- God, I did not think they could
hurt me so!”
His heart had failed. He was still on his low cot.
V
Martin had an unhappy pride that, with all his love for Gustaf
Sondelius, he could still keep his head, still resist Inchcape Jones’s
demand that he give the phage to every one, still do what he had been
sent to do.
“I’m not a sentimentalist; I’m a scientist!” he boasted.
They snarled at him in the streets now; small boys called him names and
threw stones. They had heard that he was wilfully withholding their
salvation. The citizens came in committees to beg him to heal their
children, and he was so shaken that he had ever to keep before him the
vision of Gottlieb.
The panic was increasing. They who had at first kept cool could not
endure the strain of wakening at night to see upon their windows the
glow of the pile of logs on Admiral Knob, the emergency crematory where
Gustaf Sondelius and his curly gray mop had been shoveled into the fire
along with a crippled negro boy and a Hindu beggar.
Sir Robert Fairlamb was a blundering hero, exasperating the sick while
he tried to nurse them; Stokes remained the Rock of Ages--he had only
three hours’ sleep a night, but he never failed to take his accustomed
fifteen minutes of exercise when he awoke; and Leora was easy in Penrith
Lodge, helping Martin prepare phage.
It was the Surgeon General who went to pieces.
Robbed of his dependence on the despised Sondelius, sunk again in a mad
planlessness, Inchcape Jones shrieked when he thought he was speaking
low, and the cigarette which was ever in his thin hand shook so that the
smoke quivered up in trembling spirals.
Making his tour, he came at night on a sloop by which a dozen Red Legs
were escaping to Barbados, and suddenly he was among them, bribing them
to take him along.
As the sloop stood out from Blackwater Harbor he stretched his arms
toward his sisters and the peace of the Surrey hills, but as the few
frightened lights of the town were lost, he realized that he was a
coward and came up out of his madness, with his lean head high.
He demanded that they turn the sloop and take him back. They refused,
howling at him, and locked him in the cabin. They were becalmed; it was
two days before they reached Barbados, and by then the world would know
that he had deserted.
Altogether expressionless, Inchcape Jones tramped from the sloop to a
waterfront hotel in Barbados, and stood for a long time in a slatternly
room smelling of slop-pails. He would never see his sisters and the cool
hills. With the revolver which he had carried to drive terrified
patients back into the isolation wards, with the revolver which he had
carried at Arras, he killed himself.
VI
Thus Martin came to his experiment. Stokes was appointed Surgeon
General, vice Inchcape Jones, and he made an illegal assignment of
Martin to St. Swithin’s Parish, as medical officer with complete power.
This, and the concurrence of Cecil Twyford, made his experiment
possible.
He was invited to stay at Twyford’s. His only trouble was the guarding
of Leora. He did not know what he would encounter in St. Swithin’s,
while Penrith Lodge was as safe as any place on the island. When Leora
insisted that, during his experiment, the cold thing which had stilled
the laughter of Sondelius might come to him and he might need her, he
tried to satisfy her by promising that if there was a place for her in
St. Swithin’s, he would send for her.
Naturally, he was lying.
“Hard enough to see Gustaf go. By thunder she’s not going to run risks!”
he vowed.
He left her, protected by the maids and the soldier butler, with Dr.
Oliver Marchand to look in when he could.
VII
In St. Swithin’s Parish the cocoa and bamboo groves and sharp hills of
southern St. Hubert gave way to unbroken canefields. Here Cecil Twyford,
that lean abrupt man, ruled every acre and interpreted every law.
His place, Frangipani Court, was a refuge from the hot humming plain.
The house was old and low, of thick stone and plaster walls; the paneled
rooms were lined with the china, the portraits, and the swords of
Twyfords for three hundred years; and between the wings was a walled
garden dazzling with hibiscus.
Twyford led Martin through the low cool hall and introduced him to five
great sons and to his mother, who, since his wife’s death, ten years
ago, had been mistress of the house.
“Have tea?” said Twyford. “Our American guest will be down in a moment.”
He would not have thought of saying it, but he had sworn that since for
generations Twyfords had drunk tea here at a seemly hour, no panic
should prevent their going on drinking it at that hour.
When Martin came into the garden, when he saw the old silver on the
wicker table and heard the quiet voices, the plague seemed conquered,
and he realized that, four thousand miles southwest of the Lizard, he
was in England.
They were seated, pleasant but not too comfortable, when the American
guest came down and from the door stared at Martin as strangely as he
stared in turn.
He beheld a woman who must be his sister. She was perhaps thirty to his
thirty-seven, but in her slenderness, her paleness, her black brows and
dusky hair, she was his twin; she was his self enchanted.
He could hear his voice croaking, “But you’re my sister!” and she opened
her lips, yet neither of them spoke as they bowed at introduction. When
she sat down, Martin had never been so conscious of a woman’s presence.
He learned, before evening, that she was Joyce Lanyon, widow of Roger
Lanyon of New York. She had come to St. Hubert to see her plantations
and had been trapped by the quarantine. He had tentatively heard of her
dead husband as a young man of wealth and family; he seemed to remember
having seen in _Vanity Fair_ a picture of the Lanyons at Palm Beach.
She talked only of the weather, the flowers, but there was a rising
gaiety in her which stirred even the dour Cecil Twyford. In the midst of
her debonair insults to the hugest of the huge sons, Martin turned on
her:
“You _are_ my sister!”
“Obviously. Well, since you’re a scientist-- Are you a good scientist?”
“Pretty good.”
“I’ve met your Mrs. McGurk. And Dr. Rippleton Holabird. Met ’em in
Hessian Hook. You know it, don’t you?”
“No, I-- Oh, I’ve heard of it.”
“You know. It’s that renovated old part of Brooklyn where writers and
economists and all those people, some of them almost as good as the very
best, consort with people who are almost as smart as the very smartest.
You know. Where they dress for dinner but all of them have heard about
James Joyce. Dr. Holabird is frightfully charming, don’t you think?”
“Why--”
“Tell me. I really mean it. Cecil has been explaining what you plan to
do experimentally. Could I help you--nursing or cooking or something--or
would I merely be in the way?”
“I don’t know yet. If I can use you, I’ll be unscrupulous enough!”
“Oh, don’t be earnest like Cecil here, and Dr. Stokes! They have no
sense of play. Do you like that man Stokes? Cecil adores him, and I
suppose he’s simply infested with virtues, but I find him so dry and
thin and unappetizing. Don’t you think he might be a little gayer?”
Martin gave up all chance of knowing her as he hurled:
“Look here! You said you found Holabird ‘charming.’ It makes me tired to
have you fall for his scientific tripe and not appreciate Stokes. Stokes
is hard--thank God!--and probably he’s rude. Why not? He’s fighting a
world that bellows for fake charm. No scientist can go through his grind
and not come out more or less rude. And I tell you Stokes was born a
researcher. I wish we had him at McGurk. Rude? Wish you could hear him
being rude to me!”
Twyford looked doubtful, his mother looked delicately shocked, and the
five sons beefily looked nothing at all, while Martin raged on, trying
to convey his vision of the barbarian, the ascetic, the contemptuous
acolyte of science. But Joyce Lanyon’s lovely eyes were kind, and when
she spoke she had lost something of her too-cosmopolitan manner of a
diner-out:
“Yes. I suppose it’s the difference between me, playing at being a
planter, and Cecil.”
After dinner he walked with her in the garden and sought to defend
himself against he was not quite sure what, till she hinted:
“My dear man, you’re so apologetic about never being apologetic! If you
really must be my twin brother, do me the honor of telling me to go to
the devil whenever you want to. I don’t mind. Now about your Gottlieb,
who seems to be so much of an obsession with you--”
“Obsession! Rats! He--”
They parted an hour after.
Least of all things Martin desired such another peeping, puerile,
irritable restlessness as he had shared with Orchid Pickerbaugh, but as
he went to bed in a room with old prints and a four-poster, it was
disturbing to know that somewhere near him was Joyce Lanyon.
He sat up, aghast with truth. Was he going to fall in love with this
desirable and quite useless young woman? (How lovely her shoulders,
above black satin at dinner! She had a genius of radiant flesh; it made
that of most women, even the fragile Leora, seem coarse and thick. There
was a rosy glow behind it, as from an inner light.)
Did he really want Leora here, with Joyce Lanyon in the house? (Dear
Leora, who was the source of life! Was she now, off there in Penrith
Lodge, missing him, lying awake for him?)
How could he, even in the crisis of an epidemic, invite the formal
Twyfords to invite Leora? (How honest was he? That afternoon he had
recognized the rigid though kindly code of the Twyfords, but could he
not set it aside by being frankly an Outlander?)
Suddenly he was out of bed, kneeling, praying to Leora.
CHAPTER XXXV
I
The plague had only begun to invade St. Swithin’s, but it was
unquestionably coming, and Martin, with his power as official medical
officer of the parish, was able to make plans. He divided the population
into two equal parts. One of them, driven in by Twyford, was injected
with plague phage, the other half was left without.
He began to succeed. He saw far-off India, with its annual four hundred
thousand deaths from plague, saved by his efforts. He heard Max Gottlieb
saying, “Martin, you haf done your experiment. I am very glat!”
The pest attacked the unphaged half of the parish much more heavily than
those who had been treated. There did appear a case or two among those
who had the phage, but among the others there were ten, then twenty,
then thirty daily victims. These unfortunate cases he treated, giving
the phage to alternate patients, in the somewhat barren almshouse of the
parish, a whitewashed cabin the meaner against its vaulting background
of banyans and breadfruit trees.
He could never understand Cecil Twyford. Though Twyford had considered
his hands as slaves, though he had, in his great barony, given them only
this barren almshouse, yet he risked his life now in nursing them, and
the lives of all his sons.
Despite Martin’s discouragement, Mrs. Lanyon came down to cook, and a
remarkably good cook she was. She also made beds; she showed more
intelligence than the Twyford men about disinfecting herself; and as she
bustled about the rusty kitchen, in a gingham gown she had borrowed from
a maid, she so disturbed Martin that he forgot to be gruff.
II
In the evening, while they returned by Twyford’s rattling little motor
to Frangipani Court, Mrs. Lanyon talked to Martin as one who had shared
his work, but when she had bathed and powdered and dressed, he talked
to her as one who was afraid of her. Their bond was their resemblance as
brother and sister. They decided, almost irritably, that they looked
utterly alike, except that her hair was more patent-leather than his and
she lacked his impertinent, cocking eyebrow.
Often Martin returned to his patients at night, but once or twice Mrs.
Lanyon and he fled, as much from the family stolidity of the Twyfords as
from the thought of fever-scorched patients, to the shore of a rocky
lagoon which cut far in from the sea.
They sat on a Clif, full of the sound of the healing tide. His brain
was hectic with the memory of charts on the whitewashed broad planks of
the almshouse, the sun cracks in the wall, the puffy terrified faces of
black patients, how one of the Twyford sons had knocked over an ampule
of phage, and how itchingly hot it had been in the ward. But to his
intensity the lagoon breeze was cooling, and cooling the rustling tide.
He perceived that Mrs. Lanyon’s white frock was fluttering about her
knees; he realized that she too was strained and still. He turned
somberly toward her, and she cried:
“I’m so frightened, and so lonely! The Twyfords are heroic, but they’re
stone. I’m so marooned!”
He kissed her, and she rested against his shoulder. The softness of her
sleeve was agitating to his hand. But she broke away with:
“No! You don’t really care a hang about me. Just curious. Perhaps that’s
a good thing for me--to-night.”
He tried to assure her, to assure himself, that he did care with
peculiar violence, but languor was over him; between him and her
fragrance were the hospital cots, a great weariness, and the still face
of Leora. They were silent together, and when his hand crept to hers
they sat unimpassioned, comprehending, free to talk of what they would.
He stood outside her door, when they had returned to the house, and
imagined her soft moving within.
“No,” he raged. “Can’t do it. Joyce--women like her--one of the million
things I’ve given up for work and for Lee. Well. That’s all there is to
it then. But if I were here two weeks-- Fool! She’d be furious if you
knocked! But--”
He was aware of the dagger of light under her door; the more aware of it
as he turned his back and tramped to his room.
III
The telephone service in St. Hubert was the clumsiest feature of the
island. There was no telephone at Penrith Lodge--the port-doctor had
cheerfully been wont to get his calls through a neighbor. The central
was now demoralized by the plague, and when for two hours Martin had
tried to have Leora summoned, he gave up.
But he had triumphed. In three or four days he would drive to Penrith
Lodge. Twyford had blankly assented to his suggestion that Leora be
invited hither, and if she and Joyce Lanyon should become such friends
that Joyce would never again turn to him in loneliness, he was willing,
he was eager--he was almost eager.
IV
When Martin left her at the Lodge, in the leafy gloom high on the
Penrith Hills, Leora felt his absence. They had been so little apart
since he had first come on her, scrubbing a hospital room in Zenith.
The afternoon was unending; each time she heard a creaking she roused
with the hope that it was his step, and realized that he would not be
coming, all the blank evening, the terrifying night; would not be here
anywhere, not his voice nor the touch of his hand.
Dinner was mournful. Often enough she had dined alone when Martin was at
the Institute, but then he had been returning to her some time before
dawn--probably--and she had reflectively munched a snack on the corner
of the kitchen table, looking at the funnies in the evening paper.
To-night she had to live up to the butler, who served her as though she
were a dinner-party of twenty.
She sat on the porch, staring at the shadowy roofs of Blackwater below,
sure that she felt a “miasm” writhing up through the hot darkness.
She knew the direction of St. Swithin’s Parish--beyond that delicate
glimmer of lights from palm huts coiling up the hills. She concentrated
on it, wondering if by some magic she might not have a signal from him,
but she could get no feeling of his looking toward her. She sat long and
quiet.... She had nothing to do.
Her night was sleepless. She tried to read in bed, by an electric globe
inside the misty little tent of the mosquito-netting, but there was a
tear in the netting and the mosquitoes crept through. As she turned out
the light and lay tense, unable to give herself over to sleep, unable to
sink into security, while to her blurred eyes the half-seen folds of the
mosquito netting seemed to slide about her, she tried to remember
whether these mosquitoes might be carrying plague germs. She realized
how much she had depended on Martin for such bits of knowledge, as for
all philosophy. She recalled how annoyed he had been because she could
not remember whether the yellow fever mosquito was _Anopheles_ or
_Stegomyia_--or was it _Aëdes_?--and suddenly she laughed in the night.
She was reminded that he had told her to give herself another injection
of phage.
“Hang it, I forgot. Well, I must be sure to do that to-morrow.”
“Do that t’morrow--do that t’morrow,” buzzed in her brain, an irritating
inescapable refrain, while she was suspended over sleep, conscious of
how much she wanted to creep into his arms.
Next morning (and she did not remember to give herself another
injection) the servants seemed twitchy, and her effort to comfort them
brought out the news that Oliver Marchand, the doctor on whom they
depended, was dead.
In the afternoon the butler heard that his sister had been taken off to
the isolation ward, and he went down to Blackwater to make arrangements
for his nieces. He did not return; no one ever learned what had become
of him.
Toward dusk, when Leora felt as though a skirmish line were closing in
on her, she fled into Martin’s laboratory. It seemed filled with his
jerky brimming presence. She kept away from the flasks of plague germs,
but she picked up, because it was his, a half-smoked cigarette and
lighted it.
Now there was a slight crack in her lips; and that morning, fumbling at
dusting--here in the laboratory meant as a fortress against disease--a
maid had knocked over a test-tube, which had trickled. The cigarette
seemed dry enough, but in it there were enough plague germs to kill a
regiment.
Two nights after, when she was so desperately lonely that she thought of
walking to Blackwater, finding a motor, and fleeing to Martin, she woke
with a fever, a headache, her limbs chilly. When the maids discovered
her in the morning, they fled from the house. While lassitude flowed
round her, she was left alone in the isolated house, with no telephone.
All day, all night, as her throat crackled with thirst, she lay longing
for some one to help her. Once she crawled to the kitchen for water. The
floor of the bedroom was an endless heaving sea, the hall a writhing
dimness, and by the kitchen door she dropped and lay for an hour,
whimpering.
“Got to--got to--can’t remember what it was,” her voice kept appealing
to her cloudy brain.
Aching, fighting the ache, she struggled up, wrapped about her a shabby
cloak which one of the maids had abandoned in flight, and in the
darkness staggered out to find help. As she came to the highway she
stumbled, and lay under the hedge, unmoving, like a hurt animal. On
hands and knees she crawled back into the Lodge, and between times, as
her brain went dark, she nearly forgot the pain in her longing for
Martin.
She was bewildered; she was lonely; she dared not start on her long
journey without his hand to comfort her. She listened for
him--listened--tense with listening.
“You will come! I know you’ll come and help me! I know. You’ll come!
Martin! Sandy! _Sandy!_” she sobbed.
Then she slipped down into the kindly coma. There was no more pain, and
all the shadowy house was quiet but for her hoarse and struggling
breath.
V
Like Sondelius, Joyce Lanyon tried to persuade Martin to give the phage
to everybody.
“I’m getting to be good and stern, with all you people after me. Regular
Gottlieb. Nothing can make me do it, not if they tried to lynch me,” he
boasted.
He had explained Leora to Joyce.
“I don’t know whether you two will like each other. You’re so darn’
different. You’re awfully articulate, and you like these ‘pretty people’
that you’re always talking about, but she doesn’t care a hang for ’em.
She sits back--oh, she never misses anything, but she never says much.
Still, she’s got the best instinct for honesty that I’ve ever known. I
hope you two’ll get each other. I was afraid to let her come
here--didn’t know what I’d find--but now I’m going to hustle to Penrith
and bring her here to-day.”
He borrowed Twyford’s car and drove to Blackwater, up to Penrith, in
excellent spirits. For all the plague, they could have a lively time in
the evenings. One of the Twyford sons was not so solemn; he and Joyce,
with Martin and Leora, could slip down to the lagoon for picnic suppers;
they would sing--
He came up to Penrith Lodge bawling, “Lee! Leora! Come on! _Here_ we
are!”
The veranda, as he ran up on it, was leaf-scattered and dusty, and the
front door was banging. His voice echoed in a desperate silence. He was
uneasy. He darted in, found no one in the living-room, the kitchen, then
hastened into their bedroom.
On the bed, across the folds of the torn mosquito netting, was Leora’s
body, very frail, quite still. He cried to her, he shook her, he stood
weeping.
He talked to her, his voice a little insane, trying to make her
understand that he had loved her, and had left her here only for her
safety--
There was rum in the kitchen, and he went out to gulp down raw full
glasses. They did not affect him.
By evening he strode to the garden, the high and windy garden looking
toward the sea, and dug a deep pit. He lifted her light stiff body,
kissed it, and laid it in the pit. All night he wandered. When he came
back to the house and saw the row of her little dresses with the lines
of her soft body in them, he was terrified.
Then he went to pieces.
He gave up Penrith Lodge, left Twyford’s, and moved into a room behind
the Surgeon General’s office. Beside his cot there was always a bottle.
Because death had for the first time been brought to him, he raged, “Oh,
damn experimentation!” and, despite Stokes’s dismay, he gave the phage
to every one who asked.
Only in St. Swithin’s, since there his experiment was so excellently
begun, did some remnant of honor keep him from distributing the phage
universally; but the conduct of this experiment he turned over to
Stokes.
Stokes saw that he was a little mad, but only once, when Martin snarled,
“What do I care for your science?” did he try to hold Martin to his
test.
Stokes himself, with Twyford, carried on the experiment and kept the
notes Martin should have kept. By evening, after working fourteen or
fifteen hours since dawn, Stokes would hasten to St. Swithin’s by
motor-cycle--he hated the joggling and the lack of dignity and he found
it somewhat dangerous to take curving hill-roads at sixty miles an hour,
but this was the quickest way, and till midnight he conferred with
Twyford, gave him orders for the next day, arranged his clumsy
annotations, and marveled at his grim meekness.
Meantime, all day, Martin injected a line of frightened citizens, in the
Surgeon General’s office in Blackwater. Stokes begged him at least to
turn the work over to another doctor and take what interest he could in
St. Swithin’s, but Martin had a bitter satisfaction in throwing away all
his significance, in helping to wreck his own purposes.
With a nurse for assistant, he stood in the bare office. File on file of
people, black, white, Hindu, stood in an agitated cue a block long, ten
deep, waiting dumbly, as for death. They crept up to the nurse beside
Martin and in embarrassment exposed their arms, which she scrubbed with
soap and water and dabbled with alcohol before passing them on to him.
He brusquely pinched up the skin of the upper arm and jabbed it with the
needle of the syringe, cursing at them for jerking, never seeing their
individual faces. As they left him they fluttered with gratitude--“Oh,
may God bless you, Doctor!”--but he did not hear.
Sometimes Stokes was there, looking anxious, particularly when in the
cue he saw plantation-hands from St. Swithin’s, who were supposed to
remain in their parish under strict control, to test the value of the
phage. Sometimes Sir Robert Fairlamb came down to beam and gurgle and
offer his aid.... Lady Fairlamb had been injected first of all, and next
to her a tattered kitchen wench, profuse with Hallelujah’s.
After a fortnight when he was tired of the drama, he had four doctors
making the injections, while he manufactured phage.
But by night Martin sat alone, tousled, drinking steadily, living on
whisky and hate, freeing his soul and dissolving his body by hatred as
once hermits dissolved theirs by ecstasy. His life was as unreal as the
nights of an old drunkard. He had an advantage over normal cautious
humanity in not caring whether he lived or died, he who sat with the
dead, talking to Leora and Sondelius, to Ira Hinkley and Oliver
Marchand, to Inchcape Jones and a shadowy horde of blackmen with lifted
appealing hands.
After Leora’s death he had returned to Twyford’s but once, to fetch his
baggage, and he had not seen Joyce Lanyon. He hated her. He swore that
it was not her presence which had kept him from returning earlier to
Leora, but he was aware that while he had been chattering with Joyce,
Leora had been dying.
“Damn’ glib society climber! Thank God I’ll never see _her_ again!”
He sat on the edge of his cot, in the constricted and airless room, his
hair ruffled, his eyes blotched with red, a stray alley kitten, which he
esteemed his only friend, asleep on his pillow. At a knock he muttered,
“I can’t talk to Stokes now. Let him do his own experiments. Sick of
experiments!”
Sulkily, “Oh, come in!”
The door opened on Joyce Lanyon, cool, trim, sure.
“What do you want?” he grunted.
She stared at him; she shut the door; silently she straightened the
litter of food, papers, and instruments on his table. She coaxed the
indignant kitten to a mat, patted the pillow, and sat by him on the
frowsy cot. Then:
“Please! I know what’s happened. Cecil is in town for an hour and I
wanted to bring-- Won’t it comfort you a little if you know how fond we
are of you? Won’t you let me offer you friendship?”
“I don’t want anybody’s friendship. I haven’t any friends!”
He sat dumb, her hand on his, but when she was gone he felt a shiver of
new courage.
He could not get himself to give up his reliance on whisky, and he could
see no way of discontinuing the phage-injection of all who came begging
for it, but he turned both injection and manufacture over to others, and
went back to the most rigid observation of his experiment in St.
Swithin’s ... blotted as it now was by the unphaged portion of the
parish going in to Blackwater to receive the phage.
He did not see Joyce. He lived at the almshouse, but most evenings now
he was sober.
VI
The gospel of rat-extermination had spread through the island; everybody
from five-year-old to hobbling grandam was out shooting rats and ground
squirrels. Whether from phage or rat-killing or Providence, the epidemic
paused, and six months after Martin’s coming, when the West Indian May
was broiling and the season of hurricanes was threatened, the plague had
almost vanished and the quarantine was lifted.
St. Hubert felt safe in its kitchens and shops, and amid the roaring
spring the island rejoiced as a sick man first delivered from pain
rejoices at merely living and being at peace.
That chaffering should be abusive and loud in the public market, that
lovers should stroll unconscious of all save themselves, that loafers
should tell stories and drink long drinks at the Ice House, that old men
should squat cacking in the shade of the mangoes, that congregations
should sing together to the Lord--this was no longer ordinary to them
nor stupid, but the bliss of paradise.
They made a festival of the first steamer’s leaving. White and black,
Hindu and Chink and Caribbee, they crowded the wharf, shouting, waving
scarfs, trying not to weep at the feeble piping of what was left of the
Blackwater Gold Medal Band; and as the steamer, the _St. Ia_ of the
McGurk Line, was warped out, with her captain at the rail of the bridge,
very straight, saluting them with a flourish but his eyes so wet that he
could not see the harbor, they felt that they were no longer jailed
lepers but a part of the free world.
On that steamer Joyce Lanyon sailed. Martin said good-by to her at the
wharf.
Strong of hand, almost as tall as he, she looked at him without flutter,
and rejoiced, “You’ve come through. So have I. Both of us have been mad,
trapped here the way we’ve been. I don’t suppose I helped you, but I did
try. You see, I’d never been trained in reality. You trained me.
Good-by.”
“Mayn’t I come to see you in New York?”
“If you’d really like to.”
She was gone, yet she had never been so much with him as through that
tedious hour when the steamer was lost beyond the horizon, a line edged
with silver wire. But that night, in panic, he fled up to Penrith Lodge
and buried his cheek in the damp soil above the Leora with whom he had
never had to fence and explain, to whom he had never needed to say,
“Mayn’t I come to see you?”
But Leora, cold in her last bed, unsmiling, did not answer him nor
comfort him.
VII
Before Martin took leave he had to assemble the notes of his phage
experiment; add the observation of Stokes and Twyford to his own first
precise figures.
As the giver of phage to some thousands of frightened islanders, he had
become a dignitary. He was called, in the first issue of the _Blackwater
Guardian_ after the quarantine was raised, “the savior of all our
lives.” He was the universal hero. If Sondelius had helped to cleanse
them, had Sondelius not been his lieutenant? If it was the intervention
of the Lord, as the earnest old negro who succeeded Ira Hinkley in the
chapels of the Sanctification Brotherhood insisted, had not the Lord
surely sent him?
No one heeded a wry Scotch doctor, diligent but undramatic through the
epidemic, who hinted that plagues have been known to slacken and cease
without phage.
When Martin was completing his notes he had a letter from the McGurk
Institute, signed by Rippleton Holabird.
Holabird wrote that Gottlieb was “feeling seedy,” that he had resigned
the Directorship, suspended his own experimentation, and was now at
home, resting. Holabird himself had been appointed Acting Director of
the Institute, and as such he chanted:
The reports of your work in the letters from Mr. McGurk’s agents
which the quarantine authorities have permitted to get through to
us apprize us far more than does your own modest report what a
really sensational success you have had. You have done what few
other men living could do, both established the value of
bacteriophage in plague by tests on a large scale, and saved most
of the unfortunate population. The Board of Trustees and I are
properly appreciative of the glory which you have added, and still
more will add when your report is published, to the name of McGurk
Institute, and we are thinking, now that we may for some months be
unable to have your titular chief, Dr. Gottlieb, working with us,
of establishing a separate Department, with you as its head.
“Established the value--rats! I about half made the tests,” sighed
Martin, and: “Department! I’ve given too many orders here. Sick of
authority. I want to get back to my lab and start all over again.”
It came to him that now he would probably have ten thousand a year....
Leora would have enjoyed small extravagant dinners.
Though he had watched Gottlieb declining, it was a shock that he could
be so unwell as to drop his work even for a few months.
He forgot his own self as it came to him that in giving up his
experiment, playing the savior, he had been a traitor to Gottlieb and
all that Gottlieb represented. When he returned to New York he would
have to call on the old man and admit to him, to those sunken relentless
eyes, that he did not have complete proof of the value of the phage.
If he could have run to Leora with his ten thousand a year--
VIII
He left St. Hubert three weeks after Joyce Lanyon.
The evening before his sailing, a great dinner with Sir Robert Fairlamb
in the chair was given to him and to Stokes. While Sir Robert ruddily
blurted compliments and Kellett tried to explain things, and all of them
drank to him, standing, after the toast to the King, Martin sat lonely,
considering that to-morrow he would leave these trusting eyes and face
the harsh demands of Gottlieb, of Terry Wickett.
The more they shouted his glory, the more he thought about what unknown,
tight-minded scientists in distant laboratories would say of a man who
had had his chance and cast it away. The more they called him the giver
of life, the more he felt himself disgraced and a traitor; and as he
looked at Stokes he saw in his regard a pity worse than condemnation.
CHAPTER XXXVI
I
It happened that Martin returned to New York, as he had come, on the
_St. Buryan_. The ship was haunted with the phantoms of Leora dreaming,
of Sondelius shouting on the bridge.
And on the _St. Buryan_ was the country-club Miss Gwilliam who had
offended Sondelius.
She had spent the winter importantly making notes on native music in
Trinidad and Caracas; at least in planning to make notes. She saw Martin
come aboard at Blackwater, and pertly noted the friends who saw him
off--two Englishmen, one puffy, one rangy, and a dry-looking Scotsman.
“Your friends all seem to be British,” she enlightened him, when she had
claimed him as an old friend.
“Yes.”
“You’ve spent the winter here.”
“Yes.”
“Hard luck to be caught by the quarantine. But I _told_ you you were
silly to go ashore! You must have managed to pick up quite a little
money practising. But it must have been unpleasant, really.”
“Ye-es, I suppose it was.”
“I _told_ you it would be! You ought to have come on to Trinidad. Such a
fascinating island! And tell me, how is the Roughneck?”
“Who?”
“Oh, you know--that funny Swede that used to dance and everything.”
“He is dead.”
“Oh, I _am_ sorry. You know, no matter what the others said, I never
thought he was so bad. I’m sure he had quite a nice cultured mind, when
he wasn’t carousing around. Your wife isn’t with you, is she?”
“No--she isn’t with me. I must go down and unpack now.”
Miss Gwilliam looked after him with an expression which said that the
least people could do was to learn some manners.
II
With the heat and the threat of hurricanes, there were few first-class
passengers on the _St. Buryan_, and most of these did not count, because
they were not jolly, decent Yankee tourists but merely South Americans.
As tourists do when their minds have been broadened and enriched by
travel, when they return to New Jersey or Wisconsin with the credit of
having spent a whole six months in the West Indies and South America,
the respectable remnant studied one another fastidiously, and noted the
slim pale man who seemed so restless, who all day trudged round the
deck, who after midnight was seen standing by himself at the rail.
“That guy looks awful’ restless to me!” said Mr. S. Sanborn Hibble of
Detroit to the charming Mrs. Dawson of Memphis, and she answered, with
the wit which made her so popular wherever she went, “Yes, don’t he. I
reckon he must be in love!”
“Oh, I know him!” said Miss Gwilliam. “He and his wife were on the _St.
Buryan_ when I came down. She’s in New York now. He’s some kind of a
doctor--not awful’ successful I don’t believe. Just between ourselves, I
don’t think much of him or of her either. They sat and looked stupid all
the way down.”
III
Martin was itching to get his fingers on his test-tubes. He knew, as
once he had guessed, that he hated administration and Large Affairs.
As he tramped the deck, his head cleared and he was himself. Angrily he
pictured the critics who would soon be pecking at whatever final report
he might make. For a time he hated the criticism of his fellow
laboratory-grinds as he had hated their competition; he hated the need
of forever looking over his shoulder at pursuers. But on a night when he
stood at the rail for hours, he admitted that he was afraid of their
criticism, and afraid because his experiment had so many loopholes. He
hurled overboard all the polemics with which he had protected himself:
“Men who never have had the experience of trying, in the midst of an
epidemic, to remain calm and keep experimental conditions, do not
realize in the security of their laboratories what one has to contend
with.”
Constant criticism was good, if only it was not spiteful, jealous,
petty--
No, even then it might be good! Some men had to be what easy-going
workers called “spiteful.” To them the joyous spite of crushing the
almost-good was more natural than creation. Why should a great
house-wrecker, who could clear the cumbered ground, be set at trying to
lay brick?
“All right!” he rejoiced. “Let ’em come! Maybe I’ll anticipate ’em and
publish a roast of my own work. I have got something, from the St.
Swithin test, even if I did let things slide for a while. I’ll take my
tables to a biometrician. He may rip ’em up. Good! What’s left, I’ll
publish.”
He went to bed feeling that he could face the eyes of Gottlieb and
Terry, and for the first time in weeks he slept without terror.
IV
At the pier in Brooklyn, to the astonishment and slight indignation of
Miss Gwilliam, Mr. S. Sanborn Hibble, and Mrs. Dawson, Martin was
greeted by reporters who agreeably though vaguely desired to know what
were these remarkable things he had been doing to some disease or other,
in some island some place.
He was rescued from them by Rippleton Holabird, who burst through them
with his hands out, crying, “Oh, my dear fellow! We know all that’s
happened. We grieve for you so, and we’re so glad you were spared to
come back to us.”
Whatever Martin might, under the shadow of Max Gottlieb, have said about
Holabird, now he wrung his hands and muttered, “It’s good to be home.”
Holabird (he was wearing a blue shirt with a starched blue collar, like
an actor) could not wait till Martin’s baggage had gone through the
customs. He had to return to his duties as Acting Director of the
Institute. He delayed only to hint that the Board of Trustees were going
to make him full Director, and that certainly, my dear fellow, he would
see that Martin had the credit and the reward he deserved.
When Holabird was gone, driving away in his neat coupé (he often
explained that his wife and he could afford a chauffeur, but they
preferred to spend the money on other things), Martin was conscious of
Terry Wickett, leaning against a gnawed wooden pillar of the
wharf-house, as though he had been there for hours.
Terry strolled up and snorted, “Hello, Slim. All O.K.? Lez shoot the
stuff through the customs. Great pleasure to see the Director and you
kissing.”
As they drove through the summer-walled streets of Brooklyn, Martin
inquired, “How’s Holabird working out as Director? And how is Gottlieb?”
“Oh, the Holy Wren is no worse than Tubbs; he’s even politer and more
ignorant.... Me, you watch me! One of these days I’m going off to the
woods--got a shack in Vermont--going to work there without having to
produce results for the Director! They’ve stuck me in the Department of
Biochemistry. And Gottlieb--” Terry’s voice became anxious. “I guess
he’s pretty shaky-- They’ve pensioned him off. Now look, Slim: I hear
you’re going to be a gilded department-head, and I’ll never be anything
but an associate member. Are you going on with me, or are you going to
be one of the Holy Wren’s pets--hero-scientist?”
“I’m with you, Terry, you old grouch.” Martin dropped the cynicism which
had always seemed proper between him and Terry. “I haven’t got anybody
else. Leora and Gustaf are gone and now maybe Gottlieb. You and I have
got to stick together!”
“It’s a go!”
They shook hands, they coughed gruffly, and talked of straw hats.
V
When Martin entered the Institute, his colleagues galloped up to shake
hands and to exclaim, and if their praise was flustering, there is no
time at which one can stomach so much of it as at home-coming.
Sir Robert Fairlamb had written to the Institute a letter glorifying
him. The letter arrived on the same boat with Martin, and next day
Holabird gave it out to the press.
The reporters, who had been only a little interested at his landing,
came around for interviews, and while Martin was sulky and jerky
Holabird took them in hand, so that the papers were able to announce
that America, which was always rescuing the world from something or
other, had gone and done it again. It was spread in the prints that Dr.
Martin Arrowsmith was not only a powerful witch-doctor and possibly
something of a laboratory-hand, but also a ferocious rat-killer,
village-burner, Special Board addresser, and snatcher from death. There
was at the time, in certain places, a doubt as to how benevolent the
United States had been to its Little Brothers-- Mexico, Cuba, Haiti,
Nicaragua--and the editors and politicians were grateful to Martin for
this proof of their sacrifice and tender watchfulness.
He had letters from the Public Health service; from an enterprising
Midwestern college which desired to make him a Doctor of Civil Law; from
medical schools and societies which begged him to address them.
Editorials on his work appeared in the medical journals and the
newspapers; and Congressman Almus Pickerbaugh telegraphed him from
Washington, in what the Congressman may conceivably have regarded as
verse: “They got to go some to get ahead of fellows that come from old
Nautilus.” And he was again invited to dinner at the McGurks’, not by
Capitola but by Ross McGurk, whose name had never had such a
whitewashing.
He refused all invitations to speak, and the urgent organizations which
had invited him responded with meekness that they understood how
intimidatingly busy Dr. Arrowsmith was, and if he ever _could_ find the
time, they would be most highly honored--
Rippleton Holabird was elected full Director now, in succession to
Gottlieb, and he sought to use Martin as the prize exhibit of the
Institute. He brought all the visiting dignitaries, all the foreign Men
of Measured Merriment, in to see him, and they looked pleased and tried
to think up questions. Then Martin was made head of the new Department
of Microbiology at twice his old salary.
He never did learn what was the difference between microbiology and
bacteriology. But none of his glorification could he resist. He was
still too dazed--he was the more dazed when he had seen Max Gottlieb.
VI
The morning after his return he had telephoned to Gottlieb’s flat, had
spoken to Miriam and received permission to call in the late afternoon.
All the way up-town he could hear Gottlieb saying, “You were my son! I
gave you eferyt’ing I knew of truth and honor, and you haf betrayed me.
Get out of my sight!”
Miriam met him in the hall, fretting, “I don’t know if I should have let
you come at all, Doctor.”
“Why? Isn’t he well enough to see people?”
“It isn’t that. He doesn’t really seem ill, except that he’s feeble, but
he doesn’t know any one. The doctors say it’s senile dementia. His
memory is gone. And he’s just suddenly forgotten all his English. He can
only speak German, and I can’t speak it, hardly at all. If I’d only
studied it, instead of music! But perhaps it may do him good to have you
here. He was always so fond of you. You don’t know how he talked of you
and the splendid experiment you’ve been doing in St. Hubert.”
“Well, I--” He could find nothing to say.
Miriam led him into a room whose walls were dark with books. Gottlieb
was sunk in a worn chair, his thin hand lax on the arm.
“Doctor, it’s Arrowsmith, just got back!” Martin mumbled.
The old man looked as though he half understood; he peered at him, then
shook his head and whimpered, “_Versteh’ nicht_.” His arrogant eyes were
clouded with ungovernable slow tears.
Martin understood that never could he be punished now and cleansed.
Gottlieb had sunk into his darkness still trusting him.
VII
Martin closed his flat--their flat--with a cold swift fury, lest he
yield to his misery in finding among Leora’s possessions a thousand
fragments which brought her back: the frock she had bought for Capitola
McGurk’s dinner, a petrified chocolate she had hidden away to munch
illegally by night, a memorandum, “Get almonds for Sandy.” He took a
grimly impersonal room in a hotel, and sunk himself in work. There was
nothing for him but work and the harsh friendship of Terry Wickett.
His first task was to check the statistics of his St. Swithin treatments
and the new figures still coming in from Stokes. Some of them were
shaky, some suggested that the value of phage certainly had been
confirmed, but there was nothing final. He took his figures to Raymond
Pearl the biometrician, who thought less of them than did Martin
himself.
He had already made a report of his work to the Director and the
Trustees of the Institute, with no conclusion except “the results await
statistical analysis and should have this before they are published.”
But Holabird had run wild, the newspapers had reported wonders, and in
on Martin poured demands that he send out phage; inquiries as to whether
he did not have a phage for tuberculosis, for syphilis; offers that he
take charge of this epidemic and that.
Pearl had pointed out that his agreeable results in first phaging the
whole of Carib village must be questioned, because it was possible that
when he began the curve of the disease had already passed its peak. With
this and the other complications, viewing his hot work in St. Hubert as
coldly as though it were the pretense of a man whom he had never seen,
Martin decided that he had no adequate proof, and strode in to see the
Director.
Holabird was gentle and pretty, but he sighed that if this conclusion
were published, he would have to take back all the things he had said
about the magnificence which, presumably, he had inspired his
subordinate to accomplish. He was gentle and pretty, but firm; Martin
was to suppress (Holabird did not say “suppress”--he said “leave to me
for further consideration”) the real statistical results, and issue the
report with an ambiguous summary.
Martin was furious, Holabird delicately relentless. Martin hastened to
Terry, declaring that he would resign--would denounce--would
expose-- Yes! He would! He no longer had to support Leora. He’d work as
a drug-clerk. He’d go back right now and tell the Holy Wren--
“Hey! Slim! Wait a minute! Hold your horses!” observed Terry. “Just get
along with Holy for a while, and we’ll work out something we can do
together, and be independent. Meanwhile you have got your lab here, and
you still have some physical chemistry to learn! And, uh-- Slim, I
haven’t said anything about your St. Hubert stuff, but you know and I
know you bunged it up badly. Can you come into court with clean hands,
if you’re going to indict the Holy One? Though I do agree that aside
from being a dirty, lying, social-climbing, sneaking, power-grabbing
hypocrite, he’s all right. Hold on. We’ll fix up something. Why, son,
we’ve just been learning our science; we’re just beginning to work.”
Then Holabird published officially, under the Institute’s seal, Martin’s
original report to the Trustees, with such quaint revisions as a change
of “the results should have analysis” to “while statistical analysis
would seem desirable, it is evident that this new treatment has
accomplished all that had been hoped.”
Again Martin went mad, again Terry calmed him; and with a hard fury
unlike his eagerness of the days when he had known that Leora was
waiting for him he resumed his physical chemistry.
He learned the involved mysteries of freezing-point determinations,
osmotic pressure determinations, and tried to apply Northrop’s
generalizations on enzymes to the study of phage.
He became absorbed in mathematical laws which strangely predicted
natural phenomena; his world was cold, exact, austerely materialistic,
bitter to those who founded their logic on impressions. He was daily
more scornful toward the counters of paving stones, the renamers of
species, the compilers of irrelevant data. In his absorption the
pleasant seasons passed unseen.
Once he raised his head in astonishment to perceive that it was spring;
once Terry and he tramped two hundred miles through the Pennsylvania
hills, by summer roads; but it seemed only a day later when it was
Christmas, and Holabird was being ever so jolly and yuley about the
Institute.
The absence of Gottlieb may have been good for Martin, since he no
longer turned to the master for solutions in tough queries. When he took
up diffusion problems, he began to develop his own apparatus, and
whether it was from inborn ingenuity or merely from a fury of labor, he
was so competent that he won from Terry the almost overwhelming praise:
“Why, that’s not so darn’ bad, Slim!”
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:
K = λ log e uo/u /E_o (ε-λr_1)
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.
He knew in an unformulated way that Joyce was rich, but after seeing her
in gingham, cooking in the kitchen of St. Swithin’s almshouse, he did
not grasp her position; and he was uncomfortable when, feeling dusty
from the laboratory, he came to her great house and found her the
soft-voiced mistress of many servants. Hers was a palace, and palaces,
whether they are such very little ones as Joyce’s, with its eighteen
rooms, or Buckingham or vast Fontainebleau, are all alike; they are
choked with the superfluities of pride, they are so complete that one
does not remember small endearing charms, they are indistinguishable in
their common feeling of polite and uneasy grandeur, they are therefore
altogether tedious.
But amid the pretentious splendor which Roger Lanyon had accumulated,
Joyce was not tedious. It is to be suspected that she enjoyed showing
Martin what she really was, by producing footmen and too many kinds of
sandwiches, and by boasting, “Oh, I never do know what they’re going to
give me for tea.”
But she had welcomed him, crying, “You look so much better. I’m
frightfully glad. Are you still my brother? I was a good cook at the
almshouse, wasn’t I!”
Had he been suave then and witty, she would not have been greatly
interested. She knew too many men who were witty and well-bred, ivory
smooth and competent to help her spend the four or five million dollars
with which she was burdened. But Martin was at once a scholar who made
osmotic pressure determinations almost interesting, a taut swift man
whom she could fancy running or making love, and a lonely youngster who
naïvely believed that here in her soft security she was still the girl
who had sat with him by the lagoon, still the courageous woman who had
come to him in a drunken room at Blackwater.
Joyce Lanyon knew how to make men talk. Thanks more to her than to his
own articulateness, he made living the Institute, the members, their
feuds, and the drama of coursing on the trail of a discovery.
Her easy life here had seemed tasteless after the risks of St. Hubert,
and in his contempt for ease and rewards she found exhilaration.
He came now and then to tea, to dinner; he learned the ways of her
house, her servants, the more nearly intelligent of her friends. He
liked--and possibly he was liked by--some of them. With one friend of
hers Martin had a state of undeclared war. This was Latham Ireland, an
achingly well-dressed man of fifty, a competent lawyer who was fond of
standing in front of fireplaces and being quietly clever. He fascinated
Joyce by telling her that she was subtle, then telling her what she was
being subtle about.
Martin hated him.
In midsummer Martin was invited for a week-end at Joyce’s vast
blossom-hid country house at Greenwich. She was half apologetic for its
luxury; he was altogether unhappy.
The strain of considering clothes, of galloping out to buy
white trousers when he wanted to watch the test-tubes in the
constant-temperature bath, of trying to look easy in the limousine
which met him at the station, and of deciding which servants to tip
and how much and when, was dismaying to a simple man. He felt rustic
when, after he had blurted, “Just a minute till I go up and unpack my
suit-case,” she said gently, “Oh, that will have been done for you.”
He discovered that a valet had laid out for him to put on, that first
evening, all the small store of underclothes he had brought, and had
squeezed out on his brush a ribbon of tooth-paste.
He sat on the edge of his bed, groaning, “This is too rich for my
blood!”
He hated and feared that valet, who kept stealing his clothes, putting
them in places where they could not be found, then popping in
menacingly when Martin was sneaking about the enormous room looking for
them.
But his chief unhappiness was that there was nothing to do. He had no
sport but tennis, at which he was too rusty to play with these
chattering unidentified people who filled the house and, apparently with
perfect willingness, worked at golf and bridge. He had met but few of
the friends of whom they talked. They said, “You know dear old R. G.,”
and he said, “Oh, _yes_,” but he never did know dear old R. G.
Joyce was as busily amiable as when they were alone at tea, and she
found for him a weedy flapper whose tennis was worse than his own, but
she had twenty guests--forty at Sunday lunch--and he gave up certain
agreeable notions of walking with her in fresh lanes and, after
excitedly saying this and that, perhaps kissing her. He had one moment
with her. As he was going, she ordered, “Come here, Martin,” and led him
apart.
“You haven’t really enjoyed it.”
“Why, sure, course I--”
“Of course you haven’t! And you despise us, rather, and perhaps you’re
partly right. I do like pretty people and gracious manners and good
games, but I suppose they seem piffling after nights in a laboratory.”
“No, I like ’em too. In a way. I like to look at beautiful women--at
you! But-- Oh, darn it, Joyce, I’m not up to it. I’ve always been poor,
and horribly busy. I haven’t learned your games.”
“But, Martin, you could, with the intensity you put into everything.”
“Even getting drunk in Blackwater!”
“And I hope in New York, too! Dear Roger, he did have such an innocent,
satisfying time getting drunk at class-dinners! But I mean: if you went
at it, you could play bridge and golf--and talking--better than any of
them. If you only knew how frightfully recent most of the ducal class in
America are! And Martin: wouldn’t it be good for you? Wouldn’t you work
all the better if you got away from your logarithmic tables now and
then? And are you going to admit there’s anything you can’t conquer?”
“No, I--”
“Will you come to dinner on Tuesday week, just us two, and we’ll fight
it out?”
“Be glad to.”
For a number of hours, on the train to Terry Wickett’s vacation place in
the Vermont hills, Martin was convinced that he loved Joyce Lanyon, and
that he was going to attack the art of being amusing as he had attacked
physical chemistry. Ardently, and quite humorlessly, as he sat stiffly
in a stale Pullman chair-car with his feet up on his suit-case, he
pictured himself wearing a club-tie (presumably first acquiring the tie
and the club), playing golf in plus-fours, and being entertaining about
dear old R. G. and incredibly witty about dear old Latham Ireland’s aged
Rolls-Royce.
But these ambitions he forgot as he came to Terry’s proud proprietary
shanty, by a lake among oaks and maples, and heard Terry’s real theories
of the decomposition of quinine derivatives.
Being perhaps the least sentimental of human beings, Terry had named his
place “Birdies’ Rest.” He owned five acres of woodland, two miles from a
railroad station. His shanty was a two-room affair of logs, with bunks
for beds and oilcloth for table-linen.
“Here’s the layout, Slim,” said Terry. “Some day I’m going to figure out
a way of making a lab here pay, by manufacturing sera or something, and
I’ll put up a couple more buildings on the flat by the lake, and have
one absolutely independent place for science--two hours a day on the
commercial end, and say about six for sleeping and a couple for feeding
and telling dirty stories. That leaves--two and six and two make ten, if
I’m any authority on higher math--that leaves fourteen hours a day for
research (except when you got something special on), with no Director
and no Society patrons and no Trustees that you’ve got to satisfy by
making fool reports. Of course there won’t be any scientific dinners
with ladies in candy-box dresses, but I figure we’ll be able to afford
plenty of salt pork and corncob pipes, and your bed will be made
perfectly--if you make it yourself. Huh? Lez go and have a swim.”
Martin returned to New York with the not very compatible plans of being
the best-dressed golfer in Greenwich and of cooking beef-stew with Terry
at Birdies’ Rest.
But the first of these was the more novel to him.
II
Joyce Lanyon was enjoying a conversion. Her St. Hubert experiences and
her natural variability had caused her to be dissatisfied with Roger’s
fast-motoring set.
She let the lady Mæcenases of her acquaintance beguile her into several
of their Causes, and she enjoyed them as she had enjoyed her active and
entirely purposeless war work in 1917, for Joyce Lanyon was to some
degree an Arranger, which was an epithet invented by Terry Wickett for
Capitola McGurk.
An Arranger and even an Improver was Joyce, but she was not a Capitola;
she neither waved a feathered fan and spoke spaciously, nor did she take
out her sex-passion in talking. She was fine and occasionally gorgeous,
with tiger in her, though she was as far from perfumed-boudoir and
black-lingerie passion as she was from Capitola’s cooing staleness. Hers
was sheer straight white silk and cherished skin.
Behind all her reasons for valuing Martin was the fact that the only
time in her life when she had felt useful and independent was when she
had been an almshouse cook.
She might have drifted on, in her world of drifters, but for the
interposition of Latham Ireland, the lawyer-dilettante-lover.
“Joy,” he observed, “there seems to be an astounding quantity of that
Dr. Arrowsmith person about the place. As your benign uncle--”
“Latham, my sweet, I quite agree that Martin is too aggressive,
thoroughly unlicked, very selfish, rather a prig, absolutely a pedant,
and his shirts are atrocious. And I rather think I shall marry him. I
almost think I love him!”
“Wouldn’t cyanide be a neater way of doing suicide?” said Latham
Ireland.
III
What Martin felt for Joyce was what any widowed man of thirty-eight
would feel for a young and pretty and well-spoken woman who was
attentive to his wisdom. As to her wealth, there was no problem at all.
He was no poor man marrying money! Why, he was making ten thousand a
year, which was eight thousand more than he needed to live on!
Occasionally he was suspicious of her dependence on luxury. With
tremendous craft he demanded that instead of their dining in her
Jacobean hall of state, she come with him on his own sort of party. She
came, with enthusiasm. They went to abysmal Greenwich Village
restaurants with candles, artistic waiters, and no food; or to Chinatown
dives with food and nothing else. He even insisted on their taking the
subway--though after dinner he usually forgot that he was being Spartan,
and ordered a taxicab. She accepted it all without either wincing or too
much gurgling.
She played tennis with him in the court on her roof; she taught him
bridge, which, with his concentration and his memory, he soon played
better than she and enjoyed astonishingly; she persuaded him that he had
a leg and would look well in golf clothes.
He came to take her to dinner, on a serene autumn evening. He had a taxi
waiting.
“Why don’t we stick to the subway?” she said.
They were standing on her doorstep, in a blankly expensive and quite
unromantic street off Fifth Avenue.
“Oh, I hate the rotten subway as much as you do! Elbows in my stomach
never did help me much to plan experiments. I expect when we’re married
I’ll enjoy your limousine.”
“Is this a proposal? I’m not at all sure I’m going to marry you. Really,
I’m _not_! You have no sense of ease!”
They were married the following January, in St. George’s Church, and
Martin suffered almost as much over the flowers, the bishop, the
relatives with high-pitched voices, and the top hat which Joyce had
commanded, as he did over having Rippleton Holabird wring his hand with
a look of, “At last, dear boy, you have come out of barbarism and become
One of Us.”
Martin had asked Terry to be his best man. Terry had refused, and
asserted that only with pain would he come to the wedding at all. The
best man was Dr. William Smith, with his beard trimmed for the occasion,
and distressing morning clothes and a topper which he had bought in
London eleven years before, but both of them were safe in charge of a
cousin of Joyce who was guaranteed to have extra handkerchiefs and to
recognize the Wedding March. He had understood that Martin was Groton
and Harvard, and when he discovered that he was Winnemac and nothing at
all, he became suspicious.
In their stateroom on the steamer Joyce murmured, “Dear, you were
brave! I didn’t know what a damn’ fool that cousin of mine was. Kiss
me!”
Thenceforth ... except for a dreadful second when Leora floated between
them, eyes closed and hands crossed on her pale cold breast ... they
were happy and in each other found adventurous new ways.
IV
For three months they wandered in Europe.
On the first day Joyce had said, “Let’s have this beastly money thing
over. I should think you are the least mercenary of men. I’ve put ten
thousand dollars to your credit in London--oh, yes, and fifty thousand
in New York--and if you’d like, when you have to do things for me, I’d
be glad if you’d draw on it. No! Wait! Can’t you see how easy and decent
I want to make it all? You won’t hurt me to save your own self-respect?”
V
They really had, it seemed, to stay with the Principessa del Oltraggio
(formerly Miss Lucy Deemy Bessy of Dayton), Madame des Basses Loges
(Miss Brown of San Francisco), and the Countess of Marazion (who had
been Mrs. Arthur Snaipe of Albany, and several things before that), but
Joyce did go with him to see the great laboratories in London, Paris,
Copenhagen. She swelled to perceive how Nobel-prize winners received Her
Husband, knew of him, desired to be violent with him about phage, and
showed him their work of years. Some of them were hasty and graceless,
she thought. Her Man was prettier than any of them, and if she would but
be patient with him, she could make him master polo and clothes and
conversation ... but of course go on with his science ... a pity he
could not have a knighthood, like one or two of the British scientists
they met. But even in America there were honorary degrees....
While she discovered and digested Science, Martin discovered Women.
VI
Aware only of Madeline Fox and Orchid Pickerbaugh, who were Nice
American Girls, of soon-forgotten ladies of the night, and of Leora who,
in her indolence, her indifference to decoration and good fame, was
neither woman nor wife but only her own self, Martin knew nothing
whatever about Women. He had expected Leora to wait for him, to obey his
wishes, to understand without his saying them all the flattering things
he had planned to say. He was spoiled, and Joyce was not timorous about
telling him so.
It was not for her to sit beaming and wordless while he and his
fellow-researchers arranged the world. With many jolts he perceived that
even outside the bedroom he had to consider the fluctuations and
variables of his wife, as A Woman, and sometimes as A Rich Woman.
It was confusing to find that where Leora had acidly claimed sex-loyalty
but had hummingly not cared in what manner he might say Good Morning,
Joyce was indifferent as to how many women he might have fondled (so
long as he did not insult her by making love to them in her presence)
but did require him to say Good Morning as though he meant it. It was
confusing to find how starkly she discriminated between his caresses
when he was absorbed in her and his hasty interest when he wanted to go
to sleep. She could, she said, kill a man who considered her merely
convenient furniture, and she uncomfortably emphasized the “kill.”
She expected him to remember her birthday, her taste in wine, her liking
for flowers, and her objection to viewing the process of shaving. She
wanted a room to herself; she insisted that he knock before entering;
and she demanded that he admire her hats.
When he was so interested in the work at Pasteur Institute that he had a
clerk telephone that he would not be able to meet her for dinner, she
was tight-lipped with rage.
“Oh, you got to expect that,” he reflected, feeling that he was being
tactful and patient and penetrating.
It annoyed him, sometimes, that she would never impulsively start off on
a walk with him. No matter how brief the jaunt, she must first go to her
room for white gloves--placidly stand there drawing them on.... And in
London she made him buy spats ... and even wear them.
Joyce was not only an Arranger--she was a Loyalist. Like most American
cosmopolites she revered the English peerage, adopted all their
standards and beliefs--or what she considered their standards and
beliefs--and treasured her encounters with them. Three and a half years
after the War of 1914-18, she still said that she loathed all Germans,
and the one complete quarrel between her and Martin occurred when he
desired to see the laboratories in Berlin and Vienna.
But for all their differences it was a romantic pilgrimage. They loved
fearlessly; they tramped through the mountains and came back to revel in
vast bathrooms and ingenious dinners; they idled before cafés, and save
when he fell silent as he remembered how much Leora had wanted to sit
before cafés in France, they showed each other all the eagernesses of
their minds.
Europe, her Europe, which she had always known and loved, Joyce offered
to him on generous hands, and he who had ever been sensitive to warm
colors and fine gestures--when he was not frenzied with work--was
grateful to her and boyish with wonder. He believed that he was learning
to take life easily and beautifully; he criticized Terry Wickett (but
only to himself) for provincialism; and so in a golden leisure they came
back to America and prohibition and politicians charging to protect the
Steel Trust from the communists, to conversation about bridge and motors
and to osmotic pressure determinations.
CHAPTER XXXVIII
I
Director Rippleton Holabird had also married money, and whenever his
colleagues hinted that since his first ardent work in physiology he had
done nothing but arrange a few nicely selected flowers on the tables
hewn out by other men, it was a satisfaction to him to observe that
these rotters came down to the Institute by subway, while he drove
elegantly in his coupé. But now Arrowsmith, once the poorest of them
all, came by limousine with a chauffeur who touched his hat, and
Holabird’s coffee was salted.
There was a simplicity in Martin, but it cannot be said that he did not
lick his lips when Holabird mooned at the chauffeur.
His triumph over Holabird was less than being able to entertain Angus
Duer and his wife, on from Chicago; to introduce them to Director
Holabird, to Salamon the king of surgeons, and to a medical baronet; and
to have Angus gush, “Mart, do you mind my saying we’re all awfully proud
of you? Rouncefield was speaking to me about it the other day. ‘It may
be presumptuous,’ he said, ‘but I really feel that perhaps the training
we tried to give Dr. Arrowsmith here in the Clinic did in some way
contribute to his magnificent work in the West Indies and at McGurk.’
What a lovely woman your wife is, old man! Do you suppose she’d mind
telling Mrs. Duer where she got that frock?”
Martin had heard about the superiority of poverty to luxury, but after
the lunch-wagons of Mohalis, after twelve years of helping Leora check
the laundry and worry about the price of steak, after a life of waiting
in the slush for trolleys, it was not at all dismaying to have a valet
who produced shirts automatically; not at all degrading to come to meals
which were always interesting, and, in the discretion of his car, to
lean an aching head against softness and think how clever he was.
“You see, by having other people do the vulgar things for you, it saves
your own energy for the things that only you can do,” said Joyce.
Martin agreed, then drove to Westchester for a lesson in golf.
A week after their return from Europe, Joyce went with him to see
Gottlieb. He fancied that Gottlieb came out of his brooding to smile on
them.
“After all,” Martin considered, “the old man did like beautiful things.
If he’d had the chance, he might’ve liked a big Establishment, too,
maybe.”
Terry was surprisingly complaisant.
“I’ll tell you, Slim--if you want to know. Personally I’d hate to have
to live up to servants. But I’m getting old and wise. I figure that
different folks like different things, and awful’ few of ’em have the
sense to come and ask me what they ought to like. But honest, Slim, I
don’t think I’ll come to dinner. I’ve gone and bought a
dress-suit--_bought_ it!--got it in my room--damn’ landlady keeps
filling it with moth-balls--but I don’t think I could stand listening to
Latham Ireland being clever.”
It was, however, Rippleton Holabird’s attitude which most concerned
Martin, for Holabird did not let him forget that unless he desired to
drift off and be merely a ghostly Rich Woman’s Husband, he would do well
to remember who was Director.
Along with the endearing manners which he preserved for Ross McGurk,
Holabird had developed the remoteness, the inhuman quiet courtesy, of
the Man of Affairs, and people who presumed on his old glad days he
courteously put in their places. He saw the need of repressing
insubordination, when Arrowsmith appeared in a limousine. He gave him
one week after his return to enjoy the limousine, then blandly called on
him in his laboratory.
“Martin,” he sighed, “I find that our friend Ross McGurk is just a bit
dissatisfied with the practical results that are coming out of the
Institute and, to convince him, I’m afraid I really must ask you to put
less emphasis on bacteriophage for the moment and take up influenza. The
Rockefeller Institute has the right idea. They’ve utilized their best
minds, and spent money magnificently, on such problems as pneumonia,
meningitis, cancer. They’ve already lessened the terrors of meningitis
and pneumonia, and yellow fever is on the verge of complete abolition
through Noguchi’s work, and I have no doubt that their hospital, with
its enormous resources and splendidly coöperating minds, will be the
first to find something to alleviate diabetes. Now, I understand,
they’re hot after the cause of influenza. They’re not going to permit
another great epidemic of it. Well, dear chap, it’s up to us to beat
them on the flu, and I’ve chosen you to represent us in the race.”
Martin was at the moment hovering over a method of reproducing phage on
dead bacteria, but he could not refuse, he could not risk being
discharged. He was too rich! Martin the renegade medical student could
flounder off and be a soda-clerk, but if the husband of Joyce Lanyon
should indulge in such insanity, he would be followed by reporters and
photographed at the soda handles. Still less could he chance becoming
merely her supported husband--a butler of the boudoir.
He assented, not very pleasantly.
He began to work on the cause of influenza with a half-heartedness
almost magnificent. In the hospitals he secured cultures from cases
which might be influenza and might be bad colds--no one was certain just
what the influenza symptoms were; nothing was clean cut. He left most of
the work to his assistants, occasionally giving them sardonic directions
to “put on another hundred tubes of the A medium--hell, make it another
thousand!” and when he found that they were doing as they pleased, he
was not righteous nor rebuking. If he did not guiltily turn his hand
from the plow it was only because he never touched the plow. Once his
own small laboratory had been as fussily neat as a New Hampshire
kitchen. Now the several rooms under his charge were a disgrace, with
long racks of abandoned test-tubes, many half-filled with mold, none of
them properly labeled.
Then he had his idea. He began firmly to believe that the Rockefeller
investigators had found the cause of flu. He gushed in to Holabird and
told him so. As for himself, he was going back to his search for the
real nature of phage.
Holabird argued that Martin must be wrong. If Holabird wanted the McGurk
Institute--and the Director of McGurk Institute--to have the credit for
capturing influenza, then it simply could not be possible that
Rockefeller was ahead of them. He also said weighty things about phage.
Its essential nature, he pointed out, was an academic question.
But Martin was by now too much of a scientific dialectician for
Holabird, who gave up and retired to his den (or so Martin gloomily
believed) to devise new ways of plaguing him. For a time Martin was
again left free to wallow in work.
He found a means of reproducing phage on dead bacteria by a very
complicated, very delicate use of partial oxygen-carbon dioxide
tension--as exquisite as cameo-carving, as improbable as weighing the
stars. His report stirred the laboratory world, and here and there (in
Tokio, in Amsterdam, in Winnemac) enthusiasts believed he had proven
that phage was a living organism; and other enthusiasts said, in
esoteric language with mathematical formulæ, that he was a liar and six
kinds of a fool.
It was at this time, when he might have become a Great Man, that he
pitched over most of his own work and some of the duties of being
Joyce’s husband to follow Terry Wickett, which showed that he lacked
common sense, because Terry was still an assistant while he himself was
head of a department.
Terry had discovered that certain quinine derivatives when introduced
into the animal body slowly decompose into products which are highly
toxic to bacteria but only mildly toxic to the body. There was hinted
here a whole new world of therapy. Terry explained it to Martin, and
invited him to collaborate. Buoyant with great things they got leave
from Holabird--and from Joyce--and though it was winter they went off to
Birdies’ Rest, in the Vermont hills. While they snowshoed and shot
rabbits, and all the long dark evenings while they lay on their bellies
before the fire, they ranted and planned.
Martin had not been so long silk-wrapped that he could not enjoy
gobbling salt pork after the northwest wind and the snow. It was not
unpleasant to be free of thinking up new compliments for Joyce.
They had, they saw, to answer an interesting question: Do the quinine
derivatives act by attaching themselves to the bacteria, or by changing
the body fluids? It was a simple, clear, definite question which
required for answer only the inmost knowledge of chemistry and biology,
a few hundred animals on which to experiment, and perhaps ten or twenty
or a million years of trying and failing.
They decided to work with the pneumococcus, and with the animal which
should most nearly reproduce human pneumonia. This meant the monkey,
and to murder monkeys is expensive and rather grim. Holabird, as
Director, could supply them, but if they took him into confidence he
would demand immediate results.
Terry meditated, “’Member there was one of these Nobel-prize winners,
Slim, one of these plumb fanatics that instead of blowing in the prize
spent the whole thing on chimps and other apes, and he got together with
another of those whiskery old birds, and they ducked up alleys and kept
the anti-viv folks from prosecuting them, and settled the problem of the
transfer of syphilis to lower animals? But we haven’t got any Nobel
Prize, I grieve to tell you, and it doesn’t look to me--”
“Terry, I’ll do it, if necessary! I’ve never sponged on Joyce yet, but I
will now, if the Holy Wren holds out on us.”
II
They faced Holabird in his office, sulkily, rather childishly, and they
demanded the expenditure of at least ten thousand dollars for monkeys.
They wished to start a research which might take two years without
apparent results--possibly without any results. Terry was to be
transferred to Martin’s department as co-head, their combined salaries
shared equally.
Then they prepared to fight.
Holabird stared, assembled his mustache, departed from his Diligent
Director manner, and spoke:
“Wait a minute, if you don’t mind. As I gather it, you are explaining to
me that occasionally it’s necessary to take some time to elaborate an
experiment. I really must tell you that I was formerly a researcher in
an Institute called McGurk, and learned several of these things all by
myself! Hell, Terry, and you, Mart, don’t be so egotistic! You’re not
the only scientists who like to work undisturbed! If you poor fish only
knew how I long to get away from signing letters and get my fingers on a
kymograph drum again! Those beautiful long hours of search for truth!
And if you knew how I’ve fought the Trustees for the chance to keep you
fellows free! All right. You shall have your monkeys. Fix up the joint
department to suit yourselves. And work ahead as seems best. I doubt if
in the whole scientific world there’s two people that can be trusted as
much as you two surly birds!”
Holabird rose, straight and handsome and cordial, his hand out. They
sheepishly shook it and sneaked away, Terry grumbling, “He’s spoiled my
whole day! I haven’t got a single thing to kick about! Slim, where’s the
catch? You can bet there is one--there always is!”
In a year of divine work, the catch did not appear. They had their
monkeys, their laboratories and garçons, and their unbroken leisure;
they began the most exciting work they had ever known, and decidedly the
most nerve-jabbing. Monkeys are unreasonable animals; they delight in
developing tuberculosis on no provocation whatever; in captivity they
have a liking for epidemics; and they make scenes by cursing at their
masters in seven dialects.
“They’re so up-and-coming,” sighed Terry. “I feel like lettin’ ’em go
and retiring to Birdies’ Rest to grow potatoes. Why should we murder
live-wires like them to save pasty-faced, big-bellied humans from
pneumonia?”
Their first task was to determine with accuracy the tolerated dose of
the quinine derivative, and to study its effects on the hearing and
vision, and on the kidneys, as shown by endless determinations of blood
sugar and blood urea. While Martin did the injections and observed the
effect on the monkeys and lost himself in chemistry, Terry toiled (all
night, all next day, then a drink and a frowsy nap and all night again)
on new methods of synthesizing the quinine derivative.
This was the most difficult period of Martin’s life. To work, staggering
sleepy, all night, to drowse on a bare table at dawn and to breakfast at
a greasy lunch-counter, these were natural and amusing, but to explain
to Joyce why he had missed her dinner to a lady sculptor and a lawyer
whose grandfather had been a Confederate General, this was impossible.
He won a brief tolerance by explaining that he really had longed to kiss
her good-night, that he did appreciate the basket of sandwiches which
she had sent, and that he was about to remove pneumonia from the human
race, a statement which he healthily doubted.
But when he had missed four dinners in succession; when she had raged,
“Can you imagine how awful it was for Mrs. Thorn to be short a man at
the last moment?” when she had wailed, “I didn’t so much mind your
rudeness on the other nights, but this evening when I had nothing to do
and sat home alone and waited for you”--then he writhed.
Martin and Terry began to produce pneumonia in their monkeys and to
treat them, and they had success which caused them to waltz solemnly
down the corridor. They could save the monkeys from pneumonia
invariably, when the infection had gone but one day, and most of them on
the second day and the third.
Their results were complicated by the fact that a certain number of the
monkeys recovered by themselves, and this they allowed for by
simple-looking figures which took days of stiff, shoulder-aching sitting
over papers ... one wild-haired collarless man at a table, while the
other walked among stinking cages of monkeys, clucking to them, calling
them Bess and Rover, and grunting placidly, “Oh, you would bite me,
would you, sweetheart!” and all the while, kindly but merciless as the
gods, injecting them with the deadly pneumonia.
They came into a high upland where the air was thin with failures. They
studied in the test-tube the break-down products of pneumococci--and
failed. They constructed artificial body fluids (carefully, painfully,
inadequately), they tried the effect of the derivative on germs in this
artificial blood--and failed.
Then Holabird heard of their previous success, and came down on them
with laurels and fury.
He understood, he said, that they had a cure for pneumonia. Very well!
The Institute could do with the credit for curing that undesirable
disease, and Terry and Martin would kindly publish their findings
(mentioning McGurk) at once.
“We will not! Look here, Holabird!” snarled Terry, “I thought you were
going to let us alone.”
“I have! Nearly a year! Till you should complete your research. And now
you’ve completed it. It’s time to let the world know what you’re doing.”
“If I did, the world would know a doggone sight more’n I do! Nothing
doing, Chief. Maybe we can publish in a year from now.”
“You’ll publish now or--”
“All right, Holy. The blessed moment has arrived. I quit! And I’m so
gentlemanly that I do it without telling you what I think of you!”
Thus was Terry Wickett discharged from McGurk. He patented the process
of synthesizing his quinine derivative and retired to Birdies’ Rest, to
build a laboratory out of his small savings and spend a life of
independent research supported by a restricted sale of sera and of his
drug.
For Terry, wifeless and valetless, this was easy enough, but for Martin
it was not simple.
III
Martin assumed that he would resign. He explained it to Joyce. How he
was to combine a town house and a Greenwich castle with flannel-shirt
collaboration at Birdies’ Rest he had not quite planned, but he was not
going to be disloyal.
“Can you beat it! The Holy Wren fires Terry but doesn’t dare touch me! I
waited simply because I wanted to watch Holabird figure out what I’d do.
And now--”
He was elucidating it to her in their--in her--car, on the way home from
a dinner at which he had been so gaily charming to an important dowager
that Joyce had crooned, “What a fool Latham Ireland was to say he
couldn’t be polite!”
“I’m free, by thunder at last I’m free, because I’ve worked up to
something that’s worth being free for!” he exulted.
She laid her fine hand on his, and begged, “Wait! I want to think.
Please! Do be quiet a moment.”
Then: “Mart, if you went on working with Mr. Wickett, you’d have to be
leaving me constantly.”
“Well--”
“I really don’t think that would be quite nice-- I mean especially now,
because I fancy I’m going to have a baby.”
He made a sound of surprise.
“Oh, I’m not going to do the weeping mother. And I don’t know whether
I’m glad or furious, though I do believe I’d like to have one baby. But
it does complicate things, you know. And personally, I should be sorry
if you left the Institute, which gives you a solid position, for a
hole-and-corner existence. Dear, I have been fairly nice, haven’t I? I
really do like you, you know! I don’t want you to desert me, and you
would if you went off to this horrid Vermont place.”
“Couldn’t we get a little house near there, and spend part of the year?”
“Pos-sibly. But we ought to wait till this beastly job of bearing a Dear
Little One is over, then think about it.”
Martin did not resign from the Institute, and Joyce did not think about
taking a house near Birdies’ Rest to the extent of doing it.
CHAPTER XXXIX
I
With Terry Wickett gone, Martin returned to phage. He made a false start
and did the worst work of his life. He had lost his fierce serenity. He
was too conscious of the ordeal of a professional social life, and he
could never understand that esoteric phenomenon, the dinner-party--the
painful entertainment of people whom one neither likes nor finds
interesting.
So long as he had had a refuge in talking to Terry, he had not been too
irritated by well-dressed nonentities, and for a time he had enjoyed the
dramatic game of making Nice People accept him. Now he was disturbed by
reason.
Clif Clawson showed him how tangled his life had grown.
When he had first come to New York, Martin had looked for Clif, whose
boisterousness had been his comfort among Angus Duers and Irving
Watterses in medical school. Clif was not to be found, neither at the
motor agency for which he had once worked nor elsewhere on Automobile
Row. For fourteen years Martin had not seen him.
Then to his laboratory at McGurk was brought a black-and-red card:
ClifORD L. CLAWSON
(Clif)
Top Notch Guaranteed Oil Investments
Higham Block
Butte
“Clif! Good old Clif! The best friend a man ever had! That time he lent
me the money to get to Leora! Old Clif! By golly I need somebody like
him, with Terry out of it and all these tea-hounds around me!” exulted
Martin.
He dashed out and stopped abruptly, staring at a man who was, not
softly, remarking to the girl reception-clerk:
“Well, sister, you scientific birds certainly do lay on the agony! Never
struck a sweller layout than you got here, except in crook
investment-offices--and I’ve never seen a nicer cutie than you anywhere.
How ’bout lil dinner one of these beauteous evenings? I expect I’ll
parley-vous with thou full often now-- I’m a great friend of Doc
Arrowsmith. Fact I’m a doc myself--honest--real sawbones--went to medic
school and everything. Ah! _Here’s_ the boy!”
Martin had not allowed for the changes of fourteen years. He was
dismayed.
Clif Clawson, at forty, was gross. His face was sweaty, and puffy with
pale flesh; his voice was raw; he fancied checked Norfolk jackets, tight
across his swollen shoulders and his beefy hips.
He bellowed, while he belabored Martin’s back:
“Well, well, well, well, well, well! Old Mart! Why, you old son of a
gun! Why, you old son of a gun! Why, you damn’ old chicken-thief! Say,
you skinny little runt, I’m a son of a gun if you look one day older’n
when I saw you last in Zenith!”
Martin was aware of the bright leering of the once humble
reception-clerk. He said, “Well, gosh, it certainly is good to see you,”
and hastened to get Clif into the privacy of his office.
“You look fine,” he lied, when they were safe. “What you been doing with
yourself? Leora and I did our best to look you up, when we first came to
New York. Uh-- Do you know about, uh, about her?”
“Yuh, I read about her passing away. Fierce luck. And about your swell
work in the West Indies--where was it? I guess you’re a great man
now--famous plague-chaser and all that stuff, and world-renowned
skee-entist. I don’t suppose you remember your old friends now.”
“Oh, don’t be a chump! It’s--it’s--it’s fine to see you.”
“Well, I’m glad to observe you haven’t got the _capitus enlargatus_,
Mart. Golly, I says to meself says I, if I blew in and old Mart
high-hatted me, I’d just about come nigh unto letting him hear the
straight truth, after all the compliments he’s been getting from the
sassiety dames. I’m glad you’ve kept your head. I thought about writing
you from Butte--been selling some bum oil-stock there and kind of got
out quick to save the inspectors the trouble of looking over my books.
‘Well,’ I thought, ‘I’ll just sit down and write the whey-faced runt a
letter, and make him feel good by telling him how tickled I am over his
nice work.’ But you know how it is--time kind of slips by. Well, this is
excellentus! We’ll have a chance to see a whole lot of each other now.
I’m going in with a fellow on an investment stunt here in New York.
Great pickings, old kid! I’ll take you out and show you how to order a
real feed, one of these days. Well, tell me what you been doing since
you got back from the West Indies. I suppose you’re laying your plans to
try and get in as the boss or president or whatever they call it of this
gecelebrated Institute.”
“No-- I, uh, well, I shouldn’t much care to be Director. I prefer
sticking to my lab. I-- Perhaps you’d like to hear about my work on
phage.”
Rejoicing to discover something of which he could talk, Martin sketched
his experiments.
Clif spanked his forehead with a spongy hand, and shouted:
“Wait! Say, I’ve got an idea--and you can come right in on it. As I
apperceive it, the dear old Gen. Public is just beginning to hear about
this bac--what is it?--bacteriophage junk. Look here! Remember that old
scoundrel Benoni Carr, that I introduced as a great pharmacologist at
the medical banquet? Had din-din with him last eventide. He’s running a
sanitarium out on Long Island--slick idea, too--practically he’s a
bootlegger; gets a lot of high-rollers out there and let’s ’em have all
the hooch they want, on prescriptions, absolutely legal and water-tight!
The parties they throw at that joint, dames and everything! Believe me,
Uncle Clif is sore stricken with tootelus bootelus and is going to the
Carr Sanitarium for what ails him! But now look: Suppose we got him or
somebody to rig up a new kind of cure--call it phageotherapy--oh, it
takes Uncle Clif to invent the names that claw in the bounteous dollars!
Patients sit in a steam cabinet and eat tablets made of phage, with just
a little strychnin to jazz up their hearts! Bran-new! Million in it!
What-cha-think?”
Martin was almost feeble. “No, I’m afraid I’m against it.”
“Why?”
“Well, I-- Honestly, Clif, if you don’t understand it, I don’t know how
I can explain the scientific attitude to you. You know--that’s what
Gottlieb used to call it--scientific attitude. And as I’m a
scientist--least I hope I am-- I couldn’t-- Well, to be associated with
a thing like that--”
“But, you poor louse, don’t you suppose I understand the scientific
attitude? Gosh, I’ve seen a dissecting-room myself! Why, you poor crab,
of course I wouldn’t expect you to have your name associated with it!
You’d keep in the background and slip us all the dope, and get a lot of
publicity for phage in general so the Dee-ah People would fall easier,
and we’d pull all the strong-arm work.”
“But-- I hope you’re joking, Clif. If you weren’t joking, I’d tell you
that if anybody tried to pull a thing like that, I’d expose ’em and get
’em sent to jail, no matter who they were!”
“Well, gosh, if you feel that way about it--!”
Clif was peering over the fatty pads beneath his eyes. He sounded
doubtful:
“I suppose you have the right to keep other guys from grabbing your own
stuff. Well, all right, Mart. Got to be teloddeling. Tell you what you
_might_ do, though, if that don’t hurt your tender conscience, too: you
might invite old Clif up t’ the house for dinner, to meet the new lil
wifey that I read about in the sassiety journals. You might happen to
remember, old bean, that there have been times when you were glad enough
to let poor fat old Clif slip you a feed and a place to sleep!”
“Oh, I know. You bet there have! Nobody was ever decenter to me; nobody.
Look. Where you staying? I’ll find out from my wife what dates we have
ahead, and telephone you to-morrow morning.”
“So you let the Old Woman keep the work-sheet for you, huh? Well, I
never butt into anybody’s business. I’m staying at the Berrington Hotel,
room 617--’member that, 617--and you might try and ’phone me before ten
to-morrow. Say, that’s one grand sweet song of a cutie you got on the
door here. What-cha-think? How’s chances on dragging her out to feed and
shake a hoof with Uncle Clif?”
As primly as the oldest, most staid scientist in the Institute, Martin
protested, “Oh, she belongs to a very nice family. I don’t think I
should try it. Really, I’d rather you didn’t.”
Clif’s gaze was sharp, for all its fattiness.
With excessive cordiality, with excessive applause when Clif remarked,
“You better go back to work and put some salt on a coupla bacteria’s
tails,” Martin guided him to the reception-room, safely past the girl
clerk, and to the elevator.
For a long time he sat in his office and was thoroughly wretched.
He had for years pictured Clif Clawson as another Terry Wickett. He saw
that Clif was as different from Terry as from Rippleton Holabird. Terry
was rough, he was surly, he was colloquial, he despised many fine and
gracious things, he offended many fine and gracious people, but these
acerbities made up the haircloth robe wherewith he defended a devotion
to such holy work as no cowled monk ever knew. But Clif--
“I’d do the world a service by killing that man!” Martin fretted.
“Phageotherapy at a yegg sanitarium! I stand him only because I’m too
much of a coward to risk his going around saying that ‘in the days of my
Success, I’ve gone back on my old friends.’ (Success! Puddling at work!
Dinners! Talking to idiotic women! Being furious because you weren’t
invited to the dinner to the Portuguese minister!) No. I’ll ’phone Clif
we can’t have him at the house.”
Over him came remembrance of Clif’s loyalty in the old barren days, and
Clif’s joy to share with him every pathetic gain.
“Why _should_ he understand my feeling about phage? Was his scheme any
worse than plenty of reputable drug-firms? How much was I righteously
offended, and how much was I sore because he didn’t recognize the high
social position of the rich Dr. Arrowsmith?”
He gave up the question, went home, explained almost frankly to Joyce
what her probable opinion of Clif would be, and contrived that Clif
should be invited to dinner with only the two of them.
“My dear Mart,” said Joyce, “why do you insult me by hinting that I’m
such a snob that I’ll be offended by racy slang, and by business ethics
very much like those of dear Roger’s grandpapa? Do you think I’ve never
ventured out of the drawing-room? I thought you’d seen me outside it! I
shall probably like your Clawson person very much indeed.”
The day after Martin had invited him to dinner, Clif telephoned to
Joyce:
“This Mrs. Arrowsmith? Well, say, this is old Clif.”
“I’m afraid I didn’t quite catch it.”
“Clif! Old Clif!”
“I’m frightfully sorry but-- Perhaps there’s a bad connection.”
“Why, it’s Mr. _Clawson_, that’s going to feed with you on--”
“Oh, of course. I _am_ so sorry.”
“Well, look: What I wanted to know is: Is this going to be just a homey
grub-grabbing or a real soirée? In other words, honey, shall I dress
natural or do I put on the soup-and-fish? Oh, I got ’em--swallow-tail
and the whole darn’ outfit!”
“I-- Do you mean-- Oh. Shall you dress for dinner? I think perhaps I
would.”
“Attaboy! I’ll be there, dolled up like a new saloon. I’ll show you
folks the cutest lil line of jeweled studs you ever laid eyes on. Well,
it’s been a great pleezhure to meet Mart’s Missus, and we will now close
with singing ‘Till We Meet Again’ or ‘Au Reservoir.’”
When Martin came home, Joyce faced him with, “Sweet, I can’t do it! The
man must be mad. Really, dear, you just take care of him and let me go
to bed. Besides: you two won’t want me--you’ll want to talk over old
times, and I’d only interfere. And with baby coming in two months now, I
ought to go to bed early.”
“Oh, Joy, Clif’d be awfully offended, and he’s always been so decent to
me and-- And you’ve often asked me about my cub days. Don’t you _want_,”
plaintively, “to hear about ’em?”
“Very well, dear. I’ll try to be a little sunbeam to him, but I warn you
I sha’n’t be a success.”
They worked themselves up to a belief that Clif would be raucous, would
drink too much, and slap Joyce on the back. But when he appeared for
dinner he was agonizingly polite and flowery--till he became slightly
drunk. When Martin said “damn,” Clif reproved him with, “Of course I’m
only a hick, but I don’t think a lady like the Princess here would like
you to cuss.”
And, “Well, I never expected a rube like young Mart to marry the real
bon-ton article.”
And, “Oh, maybe it didn’t cost something to furnish this dining-room,
oh, not a-tall!”
And, “Champagne, heh? Well, you’re certainly doing poor old Clif proud.
Your Majesty, just tell your High Dingbat to tell his valay to tell my
secretary the address of your bootlegger, will you?”
In his cups, though he severely retained his moral and elegant
vocabulary, Clif chronicled the jest of selling oil-wells unprovided
with oil and of escaping before the law closed in; the cleverness of
joining churches for the purpose of selling stock to the members; and
the edifying experience of assisting Dr. Benoni Carr to capture a rich
and senile widow for his sanitarium by promising to provide medical
consultation from the spirit-world.
Joyce was silent through it all, and so superbly polite that every one
was wretched.
Martin struggled to make a liaison between them, and he had no elevating
remarks about the strangeness of a man’s boasting of his own
crookedness, but he was coldly furious when Clif blundered:
“You said old Gottlieb was sort of down on his luck now.”
“Yes, he’s not very well.”
“Poor old coot. But I guess you’ve realized by now how foolish you were
when you used to fall for him like seven and a half brick. Honestly,
Lady Arrowsmith, this kid used to think Pa Gottlieb was the cat’s
pajamas--begging your pardon for the slanguageness.”
“What do you mean?” said Martin.
“Oh, I’m onto Gottlieb! Of course you know as well as I do that he
always was a self-advertiser, getting himself talked about by confidin’
to the whole _ops terrara_ what a strict scientist he was, and putting
on a lot of dog and emitting these wise cracks about philosophy and what
fierce guys the regular docs were. But what’s worse than-- Out in San
Diego I ran onto a fellow that used to be an instructor in botany in
Winnemac, and he told me that with all this antibody stuff of his,
Gottlieb never gave any credit to--well, he was some Russian that did
most of it before and Pa Gottlieb stole all his stuff.”
That in this charge against Gottlieb there was a hint of truth, that he
knew the great god to have been at times ungenerous, merely increased
the rage which was clenching Martin’s fist in his lap.
Three years before, he would have thrown something, but he was an
adaptable person. He had yielded to Joyce’s training in being quietly
instead of noisily disagreeable; and his only comment was “No, I think
you’re wrong, Clif. Gottlieb has carried the antibody work ’way beyond
all the others.”
Before the coffee and liqueurs had come into the drawing-room, Joyce
begged, at her prettiest, “Mr. Clawson, do you mind awfully if I slip up
to bed? I’m so frightfully glad to have had the opportunity of meeting
one of my husband’s oldest friends, but I’m not feeling very well, and I
do think I’d be wise to have some rest.”
“Madam the Princess, I noticed you were looking peeked.”
“Oh! Well-- Good night!”
Martin and Clif settled in large chairs in the drawing-room, and tried
to play at being old friends happy in meeting. They did not look at each
other.
After Clif had cursed a little and told three sound smutty stories, to
show that he had not been spoiled and that he had been elegant only to
delight Joyce, he flung:
“Huh! So that is that, as the Englishers remark. Well, I could see your
Old Lady didn’t cotton to me. She was just as chummy as an iceberg. But
gosh, I don’t mind. She’s going to have a kid, and of course women, all
of ’em, get cranky when they’re that way. But--”
He hiccuped, looked sage, and bolted his fifth cognac.
“But what I never could figure out-- Mind you, I’m not criticizing the
Old Lady. She’s as swell as they make ’em. But what I can’t understand
is how after living with Leora, who was the real thing, you can stand a
hoity-toity skirt like Joycey!”
Then Martin broke.
The misery of not being able to work, these months since Terry had gone,
had gnawed at him.
“Look here, Clif. I won’t have you discuss my wife. I’m sorry she
doesn’t please you, but I’m afraid that in this particular matter--”
Clif had risen, not too steadily, though his voice and his eyes were
resolute.
“All right. I figured out you were going to high-hat me. Of course I
haven’t got a rich wife to slip me money. I’m just a plain old hobo. I
don’t belong in a place like this. Not smooth enough to be a butler. You
are. All right. I wish you luck. And meanwhile you can go plumb to hell,
my young friend!”
Martin did not pursue him into the hall.
As he sat alone he groaned, “Thank Heaven, that operation’s over!”
He told himself that Clif was a crook, a fool, and a fat waster; he told
himself that Clif was a cynic without wisdom, a drunkard without charm,
and a philanthropist who was generous only because it larded his vanity.
But these admirable truths did not keep the operation from hurting any
more than it would have eased the removal of an appendix to be told
that it was a bad appendix, an appendix without delicacy or value.
He had loved Clif--did love him and always would. But he would never see
him again. Never!
The impertinence of that flabby blackguard to sneer at Gottlieb! His
boorishness! Life was too short for--
“But hang it--yes, Clif is a tough, but so am I. He’s a crook, but
wasn’t I a crook to fake my plague figures in St. Hubert--and the worse
crook because I got praise for it?”
He bobbed up to Joyce’s room. She was lying in her immense four-poster,
reading “Peter Whiffle.”
“Darling, it was all rather dreadful, wasn’t it!” she said. “He’s gone?”
“Yes.... He’s gone.... I’ve driven out the best friend I ever
had--practically. I let him go, let him go off feeling that he was a
rotter and a failure. It would have been decenter to have killed him.
Oh, why couldn’t you have been simple and jolly with him? You were so
confoundedly polite! He was uneasy and unnatural, and showed up worse
than he really is. He’s no tougher than--he’s a lot better than the
financiers who cover up their stuff by being suave.... Poor devil! I’ll
bet right now Clif’s tramping in the rain, saying, ‘The one man I ever
loved and tried to do things for has turned against me, now he’s--now he
has a lovely wife. What’s the use of ever being decent?’ he’s saying....
Why couldn’t you be simple, and chuck your highfalutin’ manners for
once?”
“See here! You disliked him quite as much as I did, and I will not have
you blame it on me! You’ve grown beyond him. You that are always blaring
about Facts--can’t you face the fact? For once, at least, it’s not my
fault. You may perhaps remember, my king of men, that I had the good
sense to suggest that I shouldn’t appear to-night; not meet him at all.”
“Oh--well--yes--gosh--but-- Oh, I suppose so. Well, anyway-- It’s over,
and that’s all there is to it.”
“Darling, I do understand how you feel. But isn’t it good it is over!
Kiss me good-night.”
“_But_”-- Martin said to himself, as he sat feeling naked and lost and
homeless, in the dressing-gown of gold dragon-flies on black silk which
she had bought for him in Paris--“but if it’d been Leora instead of
Joyce-- Leora would’ve known Clif was a crook, and she’d’ve accepted it
as a fact. (Talk about your facing facts!) She wouldn’t’ve insisted on
sitting as a judge. She wouldn’t’ve said, ‘This is different from me, so
it’s wrong.’ She’d’ve said, ‘This is different from me, so it’s
interesting.’ Leora--”
He had a sharp, terrifying vision of her, lying there coffinless, below
the mold in a garden on the Penrith Hills.
He came out of it to growl, “What was it Clif said? ‘You’re not her
husband--you’re her butler--you’re too smooth.’ He was right! The whole
point is: I’m not allowed to see who I want to. I’ve been so clever that
I’ve made myself the slave of Joyce and Holy Holabird.”
He was always going to, but he never did see Clif Clawson again.
II
It happened that both Joyce’s and Martin’s paternal grandfathers had
been named John, and John Arrowsmith they called their son. They did not
know it, but a certain John Arrowsmith, mariner of Devonport, had died
in the matter of the Spanish Armada, taking with him five valorous Dons.
Joyce suffered horribly, and renewed all of Martin’s love for her (he
did love pitifully this slim, brilliant girl).
“Death’s a better game than bridge--you have no partner to help you!”
she said, when she was grotesquely stretched on a chair of torture and
indignity; when before they would give her the anesthetic, her face was
green with agony.
John Arrowsmith was straight of back and straight of limb--ten good
pounds he weighed at birth--and he was gay of eye when he had ceased to
be a raw wrinkled grub and become a man-child. Joyce worshiped him, and
Martin was afraid of him, because he saw that this miniscule aristocrat,
this child born to the self-approval of riches, would some day
condescend to him.
Three months after child-bearing, Joyce was more brisk than ever about
putting and back-hand service and hats and Russian emigrés.
III
For science Joyce had great respect and no understanding. Often she
asked Martin to explain his work, but when he was glowing, making
diagrams with his thumb-nail on the tablecloth, she would interrupt him
with a gracious “Darling--do you mind--just a second-- Plinder, isn’t
there any more of the sherry?”
When she turned back to him, though her eyes were kind his enthusiasm
was gone.
She came to his laboratory, asked to see his flasks and tubes, and
begged him to bully her into understanding, but she never sat back
watching for silent hours.
Suddenly, in his bogged floundering in the laboratory, he touched solid
earth. He blundered into the effect of phage on the mutation of
bacterial species--very beautiful, very delicate--and after plodding
months when he had been a sane citizen, an almost good husband, an
excellent bridge-player, and a rotten workman, he knew again the
happiness of high taut insanity.
He wanted to work nights, every night. During his uninspired fumbling,
there had been nothing to hold him at the Institute after five, and
Joyce had become used to having him flee to her. Now he showed an
inconvenient ability to ignore engagements, to snap at delightful guests
who asked him to explain all about science, to forget even her and the
baby.
“I’ve _got_ to work evenings!” he said. “I can’t be regular and easy
about it when I’m caught by a big experiment, any more than you could be
regular and easy and polite when you were gestating the baby.”
“I know but-- Darling, you get so nervous when you’re working like this.
Heavens, I don’t care how much you offend people by missing
engagements--well, after all, I wish you wouldn’t, but I do know it may
be unavoidable. But when you make yourself so drawn and trembly, are you
gaining time in the long run? It’s just for your own sake. Oh, I have
it! Wait! You’ll see what a scientist I am! No, I won’t explain--not
yet!”
Joyce had wealth and energy. A week later, flushed, slim, gallant,
joyous, she said to him after dinner, “I’ve got a surprise for you!”
She led him to the unoccupied rooms over the garage, behind their house.
In that week, using a score of workmen from the most immaculate and
elaborate scientific supply-house in the country, she had created for
him the best bacteriological laboratory he had ever seen--white-tile
floor and enameled brick walls, ice-box and incubator, glassware and
stains and microscope, a perfect constant-temperature bath--and a
technician, trained in Lister and Rockefeller, who had his bedroom
behind the laboratory and who announced his readiness to serve Dr.
Arrowsmith day or night.
“There!” sang Joyce. “Now when you simply must work evenings, you won’t
have to go clear down to Liberty Street. You can duplicate your
cultures, or whatever you call ’em. If you’re bored at dinner--all
right! You can slip out here afterward, and work as late as ever you
want. Is-- Sweet, is it all right? Have I done it right? I tried so
hard-- I got the best men I could--”
While his lips were against hers he brooded, “To have done this for me!
And to be so humble!... And now, curse it, I’ll _never_ be able to get
away by myself!”
She so joyfully demanded his finding some fault that, to give her the
novel pleasure of being meek, he suggested that the centrifuge was
inadequate.
“You wait, my man!” she crowed.
Two evenings after, when they had returned from the opera, she led him
to the cement-floored garage beneath his new laboratory, and in a
corner, ready to be set up, was a second-hand but adequate centrifuge, a
most adequate centrifuge, the masterpiece of the great firm of
Berkeley-Saunders--in fact none other than Gladys, whose dismissal from
McGurk for her sluttish ways had stirred Martin and Terry to go out and
get bountifully drunk.
It was less easy for him, this time, to be grateful, but he worked at
it.
IV
Through both the economico-literary and the Rolls-Royce sections of
Joyce’s set the rumor panted that there was a new diversion in an
exhausted world--going out to Martin’s laboratory and watching him work,
and being ever so silent and reverent, except perhaps when Joyce
murmured, “Isn’t he adorable the way he teaches his darling bacteria to
say ‘Pretty Polly’!” or when Latham Ireland convulsed them by arguing
that scientists had no sense of humor, or Sammy de Lembre burst out in
his marvelous burlesque of jazz:
Oh, Mistah Back-sil-lil-us, don’t you gri-in at me;
You mi-cro-bi-o-log-ic cuss, I’m o-on-to thee.
When Mr. Dr. Arrowsmith’s done looked at de clues,
You’ll sit in jail a-singin’ dem Bac-ter-i-uh Blues.
Joyce’s cousin from Georgia sparkled, “Mart is so cute with all those
lil vases of his. But Ah can always get him so mad by tellin’ him the
trouble with _him_ is, he don’t go to church often enough!”
While Martin sought to concentrate.
They flocked from the house to his laboratory only once a week, which
was certainly not enough to disturb a resolute man--merely enough to
keep him constantly waiting for them.
When he sedately tried to explain this and that to Joyce, she said, “Did
we bother you this evening? But they do admire you so.”
He remarked, “Well,” and went to bed.
V
R. A. Hopburn, the eminent patent-lawyer, as he drove away from the
Arrowsmith-Lanyon mansion grunted at his wife:
“I don’t mind a host throwing the port at you, if he thinks you’re a
chump, but I do mind his being bored at your daring to express any
opinion whatever.... Didn’t he look silly, out in his idiotic
laboratory!... How the deuce do you suppose Joyce ever came to marry
him?”
“I can’t imagine.”
“I can only think of one reason. Of course she may--”
“Now please don’t be filthy!”
“Well, anyway-- She who might have picked any number of well-bred,
agreeable, intelligent chaps--and I _mean_ intelligent, because this
Arrowsmith person may know all about germs, but he doesn’t know a
symphony from a savory.... I don’t think I’m too fussy, but I don’t
quite see why we should go to a house where the host apparently enjoys
flatly contradicting you.... Poor devil, I’m really sorry for him;
probably he doesn’t even know when he’s being rude.”
“No. Perhaps. What hurts is to think of old Roger--so gay, so strong,
real Skull and Bones--and to have this abrupt Outsider from the tall
grass sitting in his chair, failing to appreciate his Pol Roger-- What
Joyce ever saw in him! Though he does have nice eyes and such funny
strong hands--”
VI
Joyce’s busyness was on his nerves. Why she was so busy it was hard to
ascertain; she had an excellent housekeeper, a noble butler, and two
nurses for the baby. But she often said that she was never allowed to
attain her one ambition: to sit and read.
Terry had once called her The Arranger, and though Martin resented it,
when he heard the telephone bell he groaned, “Oh, Lord, there’s The
Arranger--wants me to come to tea with some high-minded hen.”
When he sought to explain that he must be free from entanglements, she
suggested, “Are you such a weak, irresolute, _little_ man that the only
way you can keep concentrated is by running away? Are you afraid of the
big men who can do big work, and still stop and play?”
He was likely to turn abusive, particularly as to her definition of Big
Men, and when he became hot and vulgar, she turned _grande dame_, so
that he felt like an impertinent servant and was the more vulgar.
He was afraid of her then. He imagined fleeing to Leora, and the two of
them, frightened little people, comforting each other and hiding from
her in snug corners.
But often enough Joyce was his companion, seeking new amusements as
surprises for him, and in their son they had a binding pride. He sat
watching little John, rejoicing in his strength.
It was in early winter, after she had royally taken the baby South for a
fortnight, that Martin escaped for a week with Terry at Birdies’ Rest.
He found Terry tired and a little surly, after months of working
absolutely alone. He had constructed beside the home cabin a shanty for
laboratory, and a rough stable for the horses which he used in the
preparation of his sera. Terry did not, as once he would have, flare
into the details of his research, and not till evening, when they smoked
before the rough fireplace of the cabin, loafing in chairs made of
barrels cushioned with elk skin, could Martin coax him into confidences.
He had been compelled to give up much of his time to mere housework and
the production of the sera which paid his expenses. “If you’d only been
with me, I could have accomplished something.” But his quinine
derivative research had gone on solidly, and he did not regret leaving
McGurk. He had found it impossible to work with monkeys; they were too
expensive, and too fragile to stand the Vermont winter; but he had
contrived a method of using mice infected with pneumococcus and--
“Oh, what’s the use of my telling you this, Slim? You’re not interested,
or you’d have been up here at work with me, months ago. You’ve chosen
between Joyce and me. All right, but you can’t have both.”
Martin snarled, “I’m very sorry I intruded on you, Wickett,” and slammed
out of the cabin. Stumbling through the snow, blundering in darkness
against stumps, he knew the agony of his last hour, the hour of failure.
“I’ve lost Terry, now (though I won’t stand his impertinence!). I’ve
lost everybody, and I’ve never really had Joyce. I’m completely alone.
And I can only half work! I’m through! They’ll never let me get to work
again!”
Suddenly, without arguing it out, he knew that he was not going to give
up.
He floundered back to the cabin and burst in, crying, “You old grouch,
we got to stick together!”
Terry was as much moved as he; neither of them was far from tears; and
as they roughly patted each other’s shoulders they growled, “Fine pair
of fools, scrapping just because we’re tired!”
“I will come and work with you, somehow!” Martin swore. “I’ll get a
six-months’ leave from the Institute, and have Joyce stay at some hotel
near here, or do _some_thing. Gee! Back to real work.... _Work!_ ... Now
tell me: When I come up here, what d’you say we--”
They talked till dawn.
CHAPTER XL
I
Dr. and Mrs. Rippleton Holabird had invited only Joyce and Martin to
dinner. Holabird was his most charming self. He admired Joyce’s pearls,
and when the squabs had been served he turned on Martin with friendly
intensity:
“Now will Joyce and you listen to me most particularly? Things are
happening, Martin, and I want you--no, Science wants you!--to take your
proper part in them. I needn’t, by the way, hint that this is absolutely
confidential. Dr. Tubbs and his League of Cultural Agencies are
beginning to accomplish marvels, and Colonel Minnigen has been
extraordinarily liberal.
“They’ve gone at the League with exactly the sort of thoroughness and
taking-it-slow that you and dear old Gottlieb have always insisted on.
For four years now they’ve stuck to making plans. I happen to know that
Dr. Tubbs and the council of the League have had the most wonderful
conferences with college-presidents and editors and clubwomen and
labor-leaders (the sound, sensible ones, of course) and
efficiency-experts and the more advanced advertising-men and ministers,
and all the other leaders of public thought.
“They’ve worked out elaborate charts classifying all intellectual
occupations and interests, with the methods and materials and tools, and
especially the goals--the aims, the ideals, the moral purposes--that are
suited to each of them. Really tremendous! Why, a musician or an
engineer, for example, could look at his chart and tell accurately
whether he was progressing fast enough, at his age, and if not, just
what his trouble was, and the remedy. With this basis, the League is
ready to go to work and encourage all brain-workers to affiliate.
“McGurk Institute simply must get in on this coördination, which I
regard as one of the greatest advances in thinking that has ever been
made. We are at last going to make all the erstwhile chaotic spiritual
activities of America really conform to the American ideal; we’re going
to make them as practical and supreme as the manufacture of
cash-registers! I have certain reasons for supposing I can bring Ross
McGurk and Minnigen together, now that the McGurk and Minnigen lumber
interests have stopped warring, and if so I shall probably quit the
Institute and help Tubbs guide the League of Cultural Agencies. Then
we’ll need a new Director of McGurk who will work with us and help us
bring Science out of the monastery to serve Mankind.”
By this time Martin understood everything about the League except what
the League was trying to do.
Holabird went on:
“Now I know, Martin, that you’ve always rather sneered at Practicalness,
but I have faith in you! I believe you’ve been too much under the
influence of Wickett, and now that he’s gone and you’ve seen more of
life and of Joyce’s set and mine, I believe I can coax you to take (oh!
without in any way neglecting the severities of your lab work!) a
broader view.
“I am authorized to appoint an Assistant Director, and I think I’m safe
in saying he would succeed me as full Director. Sholtheis wants the
place, and Dr. Smith and Yeo would leap at it, but I haven’t yet found
any of them that are quite Our Own Sort, and I offer it to you! I
daresay in a year or two, you will be Director of McGurk Institute!”
Holabird was uplifted, as one giving royal favor. Mrs. Holabird was
intense, as one present on an historical occasion, and Joyce was
ecstatic over the honor to her Man.
Martin stammered, “W-why, I’ll have to think it over. Sort of
unexpected--”
The rest of the evening Holabird so brimmingly enjoyed himself picturing
an era in which Tubbs and Martin and he would rule, coördinate,
standardize, and make useful the whole world of intelligence, from
trousers-designing to poetry, that he did not resent Martin’s silence.
At parting he chanted, “Talk it over with Joyce, and let me have your
decision to-morrow. By the way, I think we’ll get rid of Pearl Robbins;
she’s been useful but now she considers herself indispensable. But
that’s a detail.... Oh, I do have faith in you, Martin, dear old boy!
You’ve grown and calmed down, and you’ve widened your interests so much,
this past year!”
In their car, in that moving curtained room under the crystal
dome-light, Joyce beamed at him.
“Isn’t it too wonderful, Mart! And I do feel Rippleton can bring it off.
Think of your being Director, head of that whole great Institute, when
just a few years ago you were only a cub there! But haven’t I perhaps
helped, just a little?”
Suddenly Martin hated the blue-and-gold velvet of the car, the cunningly
hid gold box of cigarettes, all this soft and smothering prison. He
wanted to be out beside the unseen chauffeur-- His Own Sort!--facing the
winter. He tried to look as though he were meditating, in an awed,
appreciative manner, but he was merely being cowardly, reluctant to
begin the slaughter. Slowly:
“Would you really like to see me Director?”
“Of course! All that-- Oh, you know; I don’t just mean the prominence
and respect, but the power to accomplish good.”
“Would you like to see me dictating letters, giving out interviews,
buying linoleum, having lunch with distinguished fools, advising men
about whose work I don’t know a blame’ thing?”
“Oh, don’t be so superior! Some one has to do these things. And that’d
be only a small part of it. Think of the opportunity of encouraging some
youngster who wanted a chance to do splendid science!”
“And give up my own chance?”
“Why need you? You’d be head of your own department just the same. And
even if you did give up-- You are so stubborn! It’s lack of imagination.
You think that because you’ve started in on one tiny branch of mental
activity, there’s nothing else in the world. It’s just as when I
persuaded you that if you got out of your stinking laboratory once a
week or so, and actually bent your powerful intellect to a game of golf,
the world of science wouldn’t immediately stop! No imagination! You’re
precisely like these business men you’re always cursing because they
can’t see anything in life beyond their soap-factories or their banks!”
“And you really would have me give up my work--”
He saw that with all her eager complaisances she had never understood
what he was up to, had not comprehended one word about the murderous
effect of the directorship on Gottlieb.
He was silent again, and before they reached home she said only, “You
know I’m the last person to speak of money, but really, it’s you who
have so often brought up the matter of hating to be dependent on me, and
you know as Director you would make so much more that-- Forgive me!”
She fled before him into her palace, into the automatic elevator.
He plodded up the stairs, grumbling, “Yes, it is the first chance I’ve
had to really contribute to the expenses here. Sure! Willing to take her
money, but not to do anything in return, and then call it ‘devotion to
science!’ Well, I’ve got to decide right now--”
He did not go through the turmoil of deciding; he leaped to decision
without it. He marched into Joyce’s room, irritated by its snobbishness
of discreet color. He was checked by the miserable way in which she sat
brooding on the edge of her day couch, but he flung:
“I’m not going to do it, even if I have to leave the Institute--and
Holabird will just about make me quit. I will not get buried in this
pompous fakery of giving orders and--”
“Mart! Listen! Don’t you want your son to be proud of you?”
“Um. Well--_No_, not if he’s to be proud of me for being a stuffed
shirt, a sideshow barker--”
“Please don’t be vulgar.”
“Why not? Matter of fact, I haven’t been vulgar enough lately. What I
ought to do is to go to Birdies’ Rest right now, and work with Terry.”
“I wish I had some way of showing you-- Oh, for a ‘scientist’ you do
have the most incredible blind-spots! I wish I could make you see just
how weak and futile that is. The wilds! The simple life! The old
argument. It’s just the absurd, cowardly sort of thing these tired
highbrows do that sneak off to some Esoteric Colony and think they’re
getting strength to conquer life, when they’re merely running away from
it.”
“No. Terry has his place in the country only because he can live cheaper
there. If we--if he could afford it, he’d probably be right here in
town, with garçons and everything, like McGurk, but with no Director
Holabird by God--and no Director Arrowsmith!”
“Merely a cursing, ill-bred, intensely selfish Director Terry Wickett!”
“Now by God let me tell you--”
“Martin, do you need to emphasize your arguments by a ‘by God’ in every
sentence, or have you a few other expressions in your highly scientific
vocabulary?”
“Well, I have enough vocabulary to express the idea that I’m thinking of
joining Terry.”
“Look here, Mart. You feel so virtuous about wanting to go off and wear
a flannel shirt, and be peculiar and very, very pure. Suppose everybody
argued that way. Suppose every father deserted his children whenever his
nice little soul ached? Just what would become of the world? Suppose I
were poor, and you left me, and I had to support John by taking in
washing--”
“It’d probably be fine for you but fierce on the washing! No! I beg your
pardon. That was an obvious answer. But-- I imagine it’s just that
argument that’s kept almost everybody, all these centuries, from being
anything but a machine for digestion and propagation and obedience. The
answer is that very few ever do, under any condition, willingly leave a
soft bed for a shanty bunk in order to be pure, as you very properly
call it, and those of us that are pioneers-- Oh, this debate could go on
forever! We could prove that I’m a hero or a fool or a deserter or
anything you like, but the fact is I’ve suddenly seen I must go! I want
my freedom to work, and I herewith quit whining about it and grab it.
You’ve been generous to me. I’m grateful. But you’ve never been mine.
Good-by.”
“Darling, darling-- We’ll talk it over again in the morning, when you
aren’t so excited.... And an hour ago I was so proud of you!”
“All right. Good-night.”
But before morning, taking two suit-cases and a bag of his roughest
clothes, leaving for her a tender note which was the hardest thing he
had ever written, kissing his son and muttering, “Come to me when you
grow up, old man,” he went to a cheap side-street hotel. As he stretched
on the rickety iron bed, he grieved for their love. Before noon he had
gone to the Institute, resigned, taken certain of his own apparatus and
notes and books and materials, refused to answer a telephone call from
Joyce, and caught a train for Vermont.
Cramped on the red-plush seat of the day-coach (he who of late had
ridden in silken private cars), he grinned with the joy of no longer
having to toil at dinner-parties.
He drove up to Birdies’ Rest in a bob-sled. Terry was chopping wood, in
a mess of chip-littered snow.
“Hello, Terry. Come for keeps.”
“Fine, Slim. Say, there’s a lot of dishes in the shack need washing.”
II
He had become soft. To dress in the cold shanty and to wash in icy water
was agony; to tramp for three hours through fluffy snow exhausted him.
But the rapture of being allowed to work twenty-four hours a day without
leaving an experiment at its juiciest moment to creep home for dinner,
of plunging with Terry into arguments as cryptic as theology and furious
as the indignation of a drunken man, carried him along, and he felt
himself growing sinewy. Often he meditated on yielding to Joyce so far
as to allow her to build a better laboratory for them, and more
civilized quarters.
With only one servant, though, or two at the very most, and just a
simple decent bathroom--
She had written, “You have been thoroughly beastly, and any attempt at
reconciliation, if that is possible now, which I rather doubt, must come
from you.”
He answered, describing the ringing winter woods and not mentioning the
platform word Reconciliation.
III
They wanted to study further the exact mechanism of the action of their
quinine derivatives. This was difficult with the mice which Terry had
contrived to use instead of monkeys, because of their size. Martin had
brought with him strains of _Bacillus lepisepticus_, which causes a
pleuro-pneumonia in rabbits, and their first labor was to discover
whether their original compound was effective against this bacillus as
well as against pneumococcus. Profanely they found that it was not;
profanely and patiently they trudged into an infinitely complicated
search for a compound that should be.
They earned their living by preparing sera which rather grudgingly they
sold to physicians of whose honesty they were certain, abruptly refusing
the popular drug-vendors. They thus received surprisingly large sums,
and among all clever people it was believed that they were too coyly
shrewd to be sincere.
Martin worried as much over what he considered his treachery to Clif
Clawson as over his desertion of Joyce and John, but this worrying he
did only when he could not sleep. Regularly, at three in the morning, he
brought both Joyce and honest Clif to Birdies’ Rest; and regularly, at
six, when he was frying bacon, he forgot them.
Terry the barbarian, once he was free of the tittering and
success-pawing of Holabird, was an easy campmate. Upper berth or lower
was the same to him, and till Martin was hardened to cold and fatigue,
Terry did more than his share of wood-cutting and supply-toting, and
with great melody and skill he washed their clothes.
He had the genius to see that they two alone, shut up together season on
season, would quarrel. He planned with Martin that the laboratory scheme
should be extended to include eight (but never more!) maverick and
undomestic researchers like themselves, who should contribute to the
expenses of the camp by manufacturing sera, but otherwise do their own
independent work--whether it should be the structure of the atom, or a
disproof of the results of Drs. Wickett and Arrowsmith. Two rebels, a
chemist now caught in a drug-firm and a university professor, were
coming next autumn.
“It’s kind of a mis’able return to monasteries,” grumbled Terry, “except
that we’re not trying to solve anything for anybody but our own fool
selves. Mind you! When this place becomes a shrine, and a lot of cranks
begin to creep in here, then you and I got to beat it, Slim. We’ll move
farther back in the woods, or if we feel too old for that, we’ll take
another shot at professorships or Dawson Hunziker or even the Rev. Dr.
Holabird.”
For the first time Martin’s work began definitely to draw ahead of
Terry’s.
His mathematics and physical chemistry were now as sound as Terry’s, his
indifference to publicity and to flowery hangings as great, his industry
as fanatical, his ingenuity in devising new apparatus at least
comparable, and his imagination far more swift. He had less ease but
more passion. He hurled out hypotheses like sparks. He began,
incredulously, to comprehend his freedom. He would yet determine the
essential nature of phage; and as he became stronger and surer--and no
doubt less human--he saw ahead of him innumerous inquiries into
chemotherapy and immunity; enough adventures to keep him busy for
decades.
It seemed to him that this was the first spring he had ever seen and
tasted. He learned to dive into the lake, though the first plunge was an
agony of fiery cold. They fished before breakfast, they supped at a
table under the oaks, they tramped twenty miles on end, they had
bluejays and squirrels for interested neighbors; and when they had
worked all night, they came out to find serene dawn lifting across the
sleeping lake.
Martin felt sun-soaked and deep of chest, and always he hummed.
And one day he peeped out, beneath his new horn-rimmed
almost-middle-aged glasses, to see a gigantic motor crawling up their
woods road. From the car, jolly and competent in tweeds, stepped Joyce.
He wanted to flee through the back door of the laboratory shanty.
Reluctantly he edged out to meet her.
“It’s a sweet place, really!” she said, and amiably kissed him. “Let’s
walk down by the lake.”
In a stilly place of ripples and birch boughs, he was moved to grip her
shoulders.
She cried, “Darling, I _have_ missed you! You’re wrong about lots of
things, but you’re right about this--you must work, and not be disturbed
by a lot of silly people. Do you like my tweeds? Don’t they look
wildernessy? You see, I’ve come to stay! I’ll build a house near here;
perhaps right across the lake. Yes. That will make a sweet place, over
there on that sort of little plateau, if I can get the land--probably
some horrid tight-fisted old farmer owns it. Can’t you just _see_ it: a
wide low house, with enormous verandas and red awnings--”
“And visitors coming?”
“I suppose so. Sometimes. Why?”
Desperately, “Joyce, I do love you. I want awfully, just now, to kiss
you properly. But I will not have you bringing a lot of people--and
there’d probably be a rotten noisy motor launch. Make our lab a joke.
Roadhouse. New sensation. Why, Terry would go crazy! You _are_ lovely!
But you want a playmate, and I want to work. I’m afraid you can’t stay.
No.”
“And our son is to be left without your care?”
“He-- Would he have my care if I died?... He is a nice kid, too! I hope
he won’t be a Rich Man!... Perhaps ten years from now he’ll come to me
here.”
“And live like _this_?”
“Sure--unless I’m broke. Then he won’t live so well. We have meat
practically every day now!”
“I see. And suppose your Terry Wickett should marry some waitress or
some incredibly stupid rustic? From what you’ve told me, he rather
fancies that sort of girl!”
“Well, either he and I would beat her, together, or it would be the one
thing that could break me.”
“Martin, aren’t you perhaps a little insane?”
“Oh, absolutely! And how I enjoy it! Though you-- You look here now,
Joy! We’re insane but we’re not cranks! Yesterday an ‘esoteric healer’
came here because he thought this was a free colony, and Terry walked
him twenty miles, and then I think he threw him in the lake. No. Gosh.
Let me think.” He scratched his chin. “I don’t believe we’re insane.
We’re farmers.”
“Martin, it’s too infinitely diverting to find you becoming a fanatic,
and all the while trying to wriggle out of being a fanatic. You’ve left
common sense. I _am_ common sense. I believe in bathing! Good-by!”
“Now you look here. By golly--”
She was gone, reasonable and triumphant.
As the chauffeur manœuvered among the stumps of the clearing, for a
moment Joyce looked out from her car, and they stared at each other,
through tears. They had never been so frank, so pitiful, as in this one
unarmored look which recalled every jest, every tenderness, every
twilight they had known together. But the car rolled on unhalted, and he
remembered that he had been doing an experiment--
IV
On a certain evening of May, Congressman Almus Pickerbaugh was dining
with the President of the United States.
“When the campaign is over, Doctor,” said the President, “I hope we
shall see you a cabinet-member--the first Secretary of Health and
Eugenics in the country!”
That evening, Dr. Rippleton Holabird was addressing a meeting of
celebrated thinkers, assembled by the League of Cultural Agencies.
Among the men of measured merriment on the platform were Dr. Aaron
Sholtheis, the new Director of McGurk Institute, and Dr. Angus Duer,
head of the Duer Clinic and professor of surgery in Fort Dearborn
Medical College.
Dr. Holabird’s epochal address was being broadcast by radio to a million
ardently listening lovers of science.
That evening, Bert Tozer of Wheatsylvania, North Dakota, was attending
mid-week prayer-meeting. His new Buick sedan awaited him outside, and
with modest satisfaction he heard the minister gloat:
“The righteous, even the Children of Light, they shall be rewarded with
a great reward and their feet shall walk in gladness, saith the Lord of
Hosts; but the mockers, the Sons of Belial, they shall be slain betimes
and cast down into darkness and failure, and in the busy marts shall
they be forgot.”
That evening, Max Gottlieb sat unmoving and alone, in a dark small room
above the banging city street. Only his eyes were alive.
That evening, the hot breeze languished along the palm-waving ridge
where the ashes of Gustaf Sondelius were lost among cinders, and a
depression in a garden marked the grave of Leora.
That evening, after an unusually gay dinner with Latham Ireland, Joyce
admitted, “Yes, if I do divorce him, I may marry you. I know! He’s never
going to see how egotistical it is to think he’s the only man living
who’s always right!”
That evening, Martin Arrowsmith and Terry Wickett lolled in a clumsy
boat, an extraordinarily uncomfortable boat, far out on the water.
“I feel as if I were really beginning to work now,” said Martin. “This
new quinine stuff may prove pretty good. We’ll plug along on it for two
or three years, and maybe we’ll get something permanent--and probably
we’ll fail!”
THE END
Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber:
your interneship=> your internship {pg 100}
Old Andew Jackson cried=> Old Andrew Jackson cried {pg 109}
obxiously mixed up=> obviously mixed up {pg 127}
for Arrenhius or Jacques Loeb=> for Arrhenhius or Jacques Loeb {pg 132}
a few shooks hands=> a few shook hands {pg 182}
agree that Martin is too agressive=> agree that Martin is too aggressive
{pg 411}
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