Title: Arrowsmith (1925)
Author: Sinclair Lewis
* A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook *
eBook No.:  0200131.txt
Language:   English
Date first posted: February 2002
Date most recently updated: February 2002

This eBook was produced by: Don Lainson dlainson@sympatico.ca

Project Gutenberg of Australia eBooks are created from printed editions
which are in the public domain in Australia, unless a copyright notice
is included. We do NOT keep any eBooks in compliance with a particular
paper edition.

Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the
copyright laws for your country before downloading or redistributing this
file.

This eBook is made available at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg of Australia License which may be viewed online at
http://gutenberg.net.au/licence.html

To contact Project Gutenberg of Australia go to http://gutenberg.net.au

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Title:      Arrowsmith (1925)
Author:     Sinclair Lewis




Chapter 1



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 Briton, Celt, Phoenician, 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
zoological 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 fishhook, 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 gallstones 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 chrysorrhoea.  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 2



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,
Provencal 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, tonight.  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 everyone 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 tonight, 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 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!  Drugstore
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 installment 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 cliche 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 practiced 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 3



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 effects 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 practicing 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'mmercialism
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!  Tonight 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 coeds, 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 practice 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 formulae.  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 4



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
Korpsbruder 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, iss 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 Dummkopfe?  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 iss 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 thumbtacks.  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 ticklish 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 in 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 5



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 wallpaper,
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 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
practice 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
eyeglasses 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
everyone 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 tomorrow 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
Provencal."  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, tonight.  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, tonight.  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
afterwards--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 6



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 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 cant 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 the 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 sack 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 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?  Tonight?"

"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 bed-ridden 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 "Provencal 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 Dummkopfe?  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 complaini